She began to cry, not unlike Phillip Deighton had. "I'm scared of the lights! They're ghosts. Page growls at them."
I drew Jessica close to me. I felt her tears soak through my shirt. Christine must've heard the commotion and was standing in the entrance, eyebrows raised and leaning against the doorframe. I rocked Jessica gently, knowing that there'd be no battling her impenetrable fear, that for now it would remain obstinate until her maturity grew with time, and with that would come an erosion of her respect for the unknown. At this moment I realized that all people, children and adults alike, had a wonderful yet ruinous knack to render unexplored frontiers into conclusive issues that might very well be somber and offensive. Ghosts in the woods? A fitting deduction for floating firefly lights and a dog's aggressive response to them—at least to a young child.
What about the Isolates, Michael? Those lights might be little malformed people seeking out a sacrifice from the new kid in town. Certainly that would get Page all riled up.
Jessica pulled away from me, sobbing and looking awfully adorable with her big wet eyes—a timid expression thankfully shattering the black thoughts racing through my mind.
Isolates? Bullshit. The idea of their existence was ridiculous, pure folklore. Wait...I stand corrected. Not folklore. Legend. There's always a bit of truth in legends, right? Phillip had said that. And here, my child was feeling out the presence in its ancient golden impressions.
"Jess," I said, "There's no ghosts out there. Those lights are fireflies. They're small glowing bugs that come out only at night. We didn't have them in the city, but there's tons of them out here in the country. Page never saw them before either, and that's why he got all excited."
I wanted to scold myself for making up this little story, after all, I really didn't know for certain that those small golden lights were indeed fireflies. I'd promised myself in the past that as a father to my child I would never make up a lie to preserve the sanctity of a situation. Yet here I was, for the sake of protecting my daughter's rationality, creating excuses for an unknown glow in the woods: the golden lights I'd seen a month ago when I first moved in. The same lights my now distant neighbor claimed were the eyes of an ancient race of wood-dwellers called Isolates. The same lights my daughter thinks are ghosts from the Scooby Doo show.
"Fireflies?" she sobbed, sounding a bit relieved.
I nodded and hugged her once more until her tears stopped. I glanced at Christine, who, unacquainted with Phillip's clinging tale and the golden glows, smiled in a purely innocent and loving way, her beaming eyes pleading for another child that we might someday dissuade from fear.
I smiled back, then peered out the study window into the growing darkness, seeing nothing at all but feeling that something might be out there.
Watching us.
O
ne hour and two short stories later Jessica was asleep in bed (Page alongside her). Christine was in the kitchen brewing a pot of decaf. She forced a weak smile in my direction while digging out two mugs from the cabinet.
"Looks like our daughter inherited a bit of her father's anxiety," she said curtly, as if the entire scene tonight was all my doing. Christine, being serious again. Great.
I ignored the cutting remark. "I take it you got the gist of our conversation."
"Yeah...I heard most of it. You know," she said, sounding suddenly congenial, "I did hear Page growling in the middle of the night last night."
"Really?" I smiled, half amused, half unnerved.
"Yes, really. It woke me up and I thought it odd that Page would rile up like that in the middle of the night. I heard Jess moving the sheets around a bit and thought about getting up to check in on her but I fell right back asleep."
"Well, apparently she's all spooked out because she thinks there's ghosts in her room. When I asked her where she got such a silly idea from she said she learned it from the Scooby Doo show. That doesn't make sense, does it? A kid frightened by cartoons?"
"She's beginning to show some signs of stress," Christine decided. "The move from the city to this small town with no other kids nearby, it's a bit testing on the mind. We've been here a month and she still has no friends. And then in September she's going to start kindergarten. That alone is a lot for a five year-old to handle. Wouldn't you agree?"
"You don't have to tell me. I know."
"So then help your daughter."
There we go again. She's
my
daughter.
"I think I did a fairly good job of cooling her spirits tonight."
She nodded but didn't look at me, which meant I did a
fair
job in her eyes. Not a great job, but passable nonetheless. Nothing she really wanted to give me credit for. "I don't want you taking her into the woods," Christine demanded after pouring two cups of coffee in silence. "There's animals and bugs and poison ivy and who else knows what kinds of things. It's dangerous, even unhealthy."
I shuddered for a moment, wondering if perhaps Christine may have heard Phillip's tall
legend
from Rosy. She peered out the kitchen window along the side of the house, into the woods. "Chris...I never took her—"
"I didn't say you did. I just don't want you to, that's all. For all we know the dog that got Dr Farris might still be out there."
My mind said,
Oh, it's out there all right. But it ain't no mad mutt
. My common sense disagreed with my mind however, and my words followed suit. "Not to worry. I won't."
There were moments in a marriage—if that's what you wanted to call it, after all the going rate for divorce hovers around fifty-two percent these days; so it might be better off referred to as an 'associational coinflip'—when you might have trouble knowing exactly which part of the ballpark your partner feels like playing in, despite how well you think you know her. Here Christine had decided to change positions, and instead of tapping soft easy grounders in my direction, she elected to smack a couple of line-drives at my head. Of course, this left me no margin for error lest I walk away with a fat lump of shame on my face. And there ain't no erasing
that
injury.
"I don't like those woods," she repeated. Tears started rolling down her cheeks.
"Christine...what's wrong?" For a moment I had a crazy impression, something like déjà vu only with a heaping spoonful of reality thrown in. An hour ago I had to console my weeping daughter. Now my wife was sinking into her own unwarranted depression. That made two meltdowns in one night for this family man. Yeah!
She shook her head then peered up at me with wet soulful eyes, holding out a plastic pregnancy test strip she plucked from her front pocket. "I'm pregnant."
I immediately sulked, not because I was unhappy with this revelation...but because I'd missed it, the weeks of obsessive-compulsive behavior, that commingled with the on-again, off-again crying. It had been thrust before me like a great big vista and I, Michael Cayle, educated physician who's paid the big bucks to catch these kinds of things, never saw it. I might as well have been sleepwalking all along, thumbs in my ears, pinkies up my nose. I took the pregnancy strip from her and eyed the positive result.
"Christine...that's wonderful news." I put my best smile on, despite the confusion of the moment.
She stared at me resentfully. "Depends on how you look at it."
Silence filled the room. "I don't understand."
She broke down crying. "We weren't even trying. I know we talked about it, but I don't remember us actually
trying
. I mean, how many times have we been together since we moved here? Three? Four times? So how did this happen?"
"You don't need a doctor to tell you that. Apparently we weren't being so overly protective."
"Apparently? This doesn't just happen
apparently!
" she shouted, banging her fist against the kitchen counter. "We tried for five months with Jessica before I got pregnant. And damn it Michael, you were wearing a friggin' rubber."
I nodded. Indeed I was.
"So how, Michael? How?"
"I don't know...any number of reasons. It may have torn, or leaked at the edges. It doesn't make a difference. What difference does it make? We're going to be parents again. That's what you wanted, right?" I tried to place a reassuring hand on her shoulder but she pulled away, quick and hard.
"Forget it, Michael," she said contemptuously, burying her face in her hands. "You'll never understand." Her sobs sounded just like Jessica's.
"I'm a doctor. I do understand. Not only what your body is going through, but what's happening in your mind as well. At least,
now
I do." I gave her my best wounded look—brow furrowed, eyes narrowed—which she didn't bother looking at.
She shook her head, clearly frustrated. "Don't placate me, Michael. Until your body goes through the same changes I'm going through..." She took her mug and slammed it on the counter. Coffee spilled out. She walked away and sat at the kitchen table, sobbing.
"Christine..."
"I don't want to discuss this anymore."
Now it was my turn to get pissed, changes or no changes. She'd dropped the bat and put on a totally different uniform. Something totally psychotic. Like Rollerball. I needed to defend myself. "This
discussion
, as you call it, has been totally one-sided. It's my turn to take some swings now." It was only at this moment did I realize that the pregnancy tester was still in my hand. I pointed it at her, reminding myself at that instant to put on the kid gloves.
Trod softly and carry a pregnancy stick.
"We have a smart, well-behaved, beautiful child in Jessica. And now we have another on the way. Jesus Christ, Christine, we had a talk about this a few weeks ago, about how you were getting older and that now was the time to have a baby. Consider yourself blessed." This time I was the one doing the slamming, tester on counter.
"Fuck you, Michael!"
she screamed, and I cowered back. My arm struck the counter and one of the mugs toppled off and shattered on the floor. Coffee spilled everywhere.
"Shit," I said bleakly, avoiding Christine's penetrating gaze. I kneeled down to gather the pieces, realizing that in our six years of marriage she'd never used such a tone of voice towards me. And I hadn't done anything wrong either. I think.
From upstairs, Jessica began to cry. Page soon followed with a series of frantic yips.
"Fucking wonderful," Christine said. "Wake the whole damn neighborhood, why don't you." She stood from the table and started storming away.
I grabbed her right arm. We locked eyes, mine tearing with ire, hers ablaze with pain: mental, physical, hormonal. A triple combo. "What's gotten into you?" I asked, despite the fact she showed no intention of listening. "And what's with the foul language, Chris? You gonna start talking like that in front of Jessica now? For sure she'll need a counselor. A real one who can do the job correctly, not someone like
this
doctor who's only good at Band-Aids and boogers."
She yanked her arm away. "Don't you touch me," she spat. There was a great deal of anger in her eyes, but also a glaze of confusion that stated she had no idea why she was behaving this way toward the man she presumably loved. The man whose baby she was carrying. "I'm going to take care of my daughter." Wouldn't you know it. Jessica was
her
daughter now.
Women's emotions. They astound me.
"Christine!"
"This conversation is over, Michael," she said, running upstairs and leaving me alone in the kitchen with porcelain chips and hot coffee circling my feet, the echoes of our voices still resonating in the air. Silence resumed upstairs, and Christine never came back down. I cleaned up the mess, all the while thinking about how arguments as alien as this one grow right out of thin air; how simple differences of opinion or emotional fluxes can create a tremendous and unavoidable banging of heads. It works that way between married couples and with entire nations of people. But in the end a resolution must be made, good, bad, or ugly. All things must come to pass. And I was confident, as I've been in the past, that the dust would eventually settle on the floors at 17 Harlan Road, lying quietly in wait until some unseen variance sent it all flying once again.
I
watched television for an hour after cleaning up the mess. It was still early and sleep seemed as foreign to me as the woods had been the day I stepped in to explore them for the first time. In between harried thoughts of Christine's tirade (and revelation of pregnancy), Jessica's sudden fear of ghosts, and me being a father once again, I found myself getting up to peek out the kitchen window into the side woods, looking for the lights. I saw them, but these lights were greener, smaller, floating lazily alongside the house. Dangling from the rear-ends of insects.
Fireflies.
Perhaps it had been denial, me thinking that the golden lights had been fireflies all along. I'd only seen them twice, but I remembered them being bigger, perhaps the size of golf balls, drifting far back in the darkness of the woods for only a brief moment before blinking out.
Not fireflies.
Then what?