* * *
Later in the week, when Lucy came home from soccer practice, early evening had turned the sky dark purple, with an overlay of clouds like the silvery wax bloom on a plum. Stiff-legged in her armor of plastic shin guards encased in tube socks, Lucy went to her room and saw that the lamp on her nightstand had been turned on. Alice was standing there, holding something.
Lucy scowled. Alice had been told more than once that she wasn’t allowed to go into her room without permission. But the fact that Lucy’s room was off-limits seemed to have made it the one place Alice most wanted to be. Lucy had suspected that her sister had sneaked in there before, when she’d discovered that her stuffed animals and dolls weren’t in their usual places.
At Lucy’s wordless exclamation, Alice turned with a start, something dropping from her hands to the floor. The resulting shatter caused them both to jump. A flush of guilt swept over Alice’s small face.
Lucy stared dumbly at the glittering mess on the wood floor. It was the blown-glass ornament that her father had bought for her. “Why are you in here?” she demanded with incredulous rage. “This is my room. That was mine. Get out!”
Alice burst into tears, standing with the broken glass shards around her.
Alerted by the noise, their mother dashed into the room. “Alice!” She rushed forward and plucked her off the floor, away from the glass. “Baby, are you hurt? What happened?”
“Lucy scared me,” Alice sobbed.
“She broke my glass ornament,” Lucy said furiously. “She came into my room without asking and broke it.”
Her mother was holding Alice, smoothing her hair. “The important thing is that no one was hurt.”
“The important thing is that she broke something that was mine!”
Her mother looked exasperated and distressed. “She was just curious. It was an accident, Lucy.”
Lucy glared at her little sister. “I hate you. Don’t ever come in here again, or I’ll knock your head off.”
The threat elicited a fresh storm of tears from Alice, while their mother’s face darkened. “That’s enough, Lucy. I expect you to be nice to your sister, especially after she’s been so sick.”
“She’s not sick anymore,” Lucy said, but the words were lost in the sound of Alice’s vehement sobbing.
“I’m going to take care of your sister,” her mother said, “and then I’ll come back and clean up that glass. Don’t touch any of it, those pieces are razor-sharp. For heaven’s sake, Lucy, I’ll get you another ornament.”
“It won’t be the same,” Lucy said sullenly, but her mother had already carried Alice out of the room.
Lucy knelt in front of the shattered glass, glinting with the delicate iridescence of soap bubbles on the wood floor. She huddled and sniffled, and stared at the broken ornament until her vision blurred. Emotion filled her until it seemed to rise from her skin and pour into the air … fury, grief, and a craving, nagging, desperate wish for love.
In the dim smear of lamplight, little points of light awakened. Swallowing back tears, Lucy wrapped her arms around herself and took a shivering breath. She blinked as the glimmers rose from the floor and swirled around her. Astonished, she wiped her eyes with her fingers and watched the lights circle and dance. Finally she understood what she was seeing.
Fireflies.
Magic meant just for her.
Every shard of glass had transformed into living sparks. Slowly the dancing procession of fireflies made their way to the open window and slipped into the night.
When her mother returned a few minutes later, Lucy had gone to sit on the edge of her bed, staring at the window.
“What happened to the glass?” her mother asked.
“It’s gone,” Lucy said absently.
It was her secret, this magic. Lucy didn’t know where it had come from. She only knew that it would find the spaces it needed, take life in them, like flowers growing in the cracks of broken pavement.
“I told you not to touch it. You could have cut your fingers.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy.” Lucy reached for a book on her nightstand. She opened the volume to a random page, staring at it blindly.
She heard her mother sigh. “Lucy, you have to be more patient with your little sister.”
“I know.”
“She’s still fragile after what she went through.”
Lucy kept her gaze fixed on the book in her hands, and waited in dogged silence until her mother had left the room.
After a desultory dinner, with only Alice’s chatter to relieve the quietness, Lucy helped to clear the table. Her mind was filled with thoughts. It had seemed as if her emotions had been so strong, they had changed the glass into a new shape. She thought the glass might have been trying to tell her something.
She went to her father’s home office, where he was in the act of dialing the phone. He didn’t like to be disturbed when he was working, but she needed to ask him something. “Daddy,” she said hesitantly.
She could tell the interruption had annoyed him by the way his shoulders tensed. But his voice was mild as he set down the phone and said, “Yes, Lucy?”
“What does it mean when you see a firefly?”
“You won’t see any fireflies in Washington State, I’m afraid. They don’t appear this far north.”
“But what do they mean?”
“Symbolically, you’re asking?” He thought for a moment. “The firefly is an unassuming insect in the daytime. If you didn’t know what it was, you’d think it was nothing special. But at night, the firefly glows with its own light source. The darkness brings out its most beautiful gift.” He smiled at Lucy’s rapt expression. “That’s an extraordinary talent for an ordinary-looking creature, isn’t it?”
From then on, magic had come to Lucy when she most needed it. And sometimes when she least wanted it.
Two
“I have trust issues,” Lucy had once told Kevin, not long after they had met.
He had put his arms around her and whispered, “Not with me, you don’t.”
After two years of living with Kevin Pearson, Lucy still couldn’t believe her luck. He was everything she could have wished for, a man who understood the value of small gestures, such as planting Lucy’s favorite flower in the front yard of the house they shared, or calling her in the middle of the day for no reason at all. He was a sociable man, frequently pulling Lucy out of her studio to go to a party or have dinner with friends.
Her obsessive work habits had caused trouble in her previous relationships. Although she made a variety of pieces such as mosaics, lighting fixtures, and even small pieces of furniture, what she loved most was to make stained-glass windows. Lucy had never found a man who had fascinated her half as much as her work did, with the result that she had been a much better artist than a girlfriend. Kevin had broken the pattern. He had taught Lucy about sensuality, and trust, and they had shared moments in which Lucy had felt closer to him than any other person she had ever known. But even now there was still a small but untraversable distance between them, preventing them from knowing the essential truths of each other.
A cool April breeze slid through a half-open window into the converted garage. Lucy’s art studio was filled with the tools of her trade: a cutting and layout table with a built-in light box, a soldering station, sheet glass storage racks, a kiln. A cheerful glass mosaic sign hung outside, featuring the silhouette of a woman on an old-fashioned plank swing against a celestial background. Beneath it, the words SWING ON A STAR had been etched in a swirly gilded font.
Sounds drifted in from nearby Friday Harbor: the cheerful squabble of seagulls, the blare of an arriving ferry. Even though San Juan Island was part of Washington State, it seemed like another world entirely. It was protected by the rainshadow of the Olympic Mountains, so that even when Seattle was shrouded in grayness and drizzle, sunlight fell on the island. The coast was rimmed with beaches, the inland lush with forests of fir and pine. In spring and autumn, puffs of wa
ter vapor broke the horizon as pods of orca whales chased after salmon runs.
Carefully Lucy arranged and rearranged pieces before pressing them into a tabletop covered with thin-set bonding mortar. The mosaic mix was a jumble of beach glass, broken china, Murano, and millefiori, all of it arranged around a cut-glass swirl. She was making a birthday gift for Kevin, a table with a swirl design he had admired in one of her sketches.
Intent on her work, Lucy forgot all about lunch. Some time in mid-afternoon, Kevin knocked at the door and came in.
“Hey,” Lucy said with a grin, drawing a cloth over her mosaic to keep him from seeing it. “What are you doing here? Want to take me out for a sandwich? I’m starving.”
But Kevin didn’t answer. His face was stiff, and he had trouble meeting her gaze. “We have to talk,” he said.
“About what?”
He let out an unsteady breath. “This isn’t working for me.”
Understanding from his expression that something was seriously wrong, Lucy went cold all over. “What … what isn’t working for you?”
“Us. Our relationship.”
A rush of bewildered panic caused her mind to go blank. It took several moments for her to gather her wits. “It’s not about you,” Kevin was saying. “I mean, you’re great. I hope you believe that. But lately it hasn’t been enough for me. No … ‘enough’ isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s that you’re too much for me. It’s like there’s not room in this for me, like I’m being crowded. Does any of this make sense?”
Lucy’s stunned gaze fell to the shards of scrap glass on the worktable. If she focused on something else, anything but Kevin, maybe he wouldn’t go on.
“… need to be really, really clear about this, so I don’t end up being the bad guy. Nobody has to be the bad guy. It’s just exhausting, Luce, always having to reassure you that I’m in this relationship just as much as you are. If you could put yourself in my shoes for just a minute, you’d realize why I need to take some time off from this. From us.”
“You’re not taking time off.” Lucy fumbled for a glass cutter and dabbed the tip of it in oil. “You’re breaking up with me.” She couldn’t believe it. Even as she heard herself saying the words, she couldn’t believe it. Using an L-shaped ruler as a guide, she scored a piece of glass, barely aware of what she was doing.
“See, this is what I’m talking about. That tone in your voice. I know what you’re thinking. You’ve always been worried that I’d break up with you, and now I’m doing it, so you think you were right all along. But that’s not what this is.” Kevin paused, watching her grip the scored glass with a pair of running pliers. An expert clamp, and the sheet of glass split neatly along the scored line. “I’m not saying it’s your fault. What I’m saying is, it’s not my fault.”
Lucy set the glass and pliers down with excessive care. She had the sensation of falling, even though she was sitting still. Was she a fool, to be so astonished? What signs had she missed? Why had she just been blindsided?
“You said you loved me,” she said, and cringed at the pathetic sound of those words.
“I did love you. I still do. That’s why this is so tough for me. I’m hurting as much as you are. I hope you get that.”
“Is there someone else?”
“If there was, that would have nothing to do with why I’m taking a break from us.”
She heard her own voice, like the edge of something torn. “You’re saying ‘take a break’ like you’re going out for coffee and a bagel. But it’s not a break. It’s permanent.”
“I knew you’d be pissed. I knew this would be a lose-lose situation.”
“How could it be anything but lose-lose?”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. How many times do you want me to say it? I can’t be any sorrier than I am right now. I did the best I could, and I’m sorry that wasn’t good enough for you. No, I know you never said it wasn’t good enough, but I could tell. Because nothing I ever did could make it over your insecurity. And I finally had to face the fact that the relationship wasn’t working for me. Which was not fun, believe me. If it makes you feel any better, I feel like shit.” Faced with Lucy’s uncomprehending stare, Kevin let out a short sigh. “Look, there’s something you need to hear from me before you find out from someone else. When I realized our relationship was in crisis, I had to talk about it with someone. I turned to … a friend. And the more time we spent together, the closer we got. Neither of us had any control over it. It just happened.”
“You started going out with someone else? Before you broke up with me?”
“I’d already broken up with you emotionally. I just hadn’t talked to you about it yet. I know, I should have handled it differently. The thing is, I have to go in this new direction. It’s the best thing for both of us. But the part that makes it tough for everyone, including me, is that the person I’m with now is … close to you.”
“Close to me? You mean one of my friends?”
“Actually … it’s Alice.”
All her skin tightened, the way it did when you had just saved yourself from a fall but still felt the sting of adrenaline. Lucy couldn’t say a word.
“She didn’t mean for it to happen any more than I did,” Kevin said.
Lucy blinked and swallowed. “For what to happen? You … you’re going out with my sister? You’re in love with her?”
“I didn’t plan on it.”
“Have you slept with her?”
His shamed silence was her answer.
“Get out,” she said.
“Okay. But I don’t want you to blame her for—”
“Get out, get out!” Lucy had had enough. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was going to do next, but she didn’t want Kevin to be there when she did it.
He went to the doorway of the studio. “We’ll talk more later when you’ve had a chance to think about this, okay? Because I want us to stay friends. But the thing is, Luce … Alice is going to be moving in pretty soon. So you’ll need to find a place.”
Lucy was silent. She waited in shattered stillness for minutes after he left.
Bitterly she wondered why she was surprised. The pattern had never changed. Alice had always gotten what she wanted, took whatever she needed, without ever sparing a thought as to the consequences. Every member of the Marinn family put Alice first, including Alice. It would have been easy to hate her, except that at certain times Alice possessed a mixture of vulnerability and melancholy that had seemed like an echo of their mother’s quiet sadness. Lucy had always found herself in the position of taking care of Alice; paying for dinner when they went out, loaning her money that was never repaid, letting her borrow clothes and shoes that were never returned.
Alice was smart and articulate, but it had always been difficult for her to finish anything she started. She changed jobs frequently, left projects unfinished, broke off relationships before they went anywhere. She made a dazzling first impression—charismatic and sexy and fun—but she ran through people quickly, apparently unable to last through the mundane day-to-day interactions that cemented a relationship.
For the past year and half, Alice had been a junior scriptwriter for a long-running daytime soap. It was the longest time she had ever stayed in a job. She lived in Seattle, occasionally traveling to New York to meet with the head writers about overall story arcs. Lucy had introduced her to Kevin, and they had hung out on a few occasions, but Alice had never shown any interest in him. Foolishly Lucy had never suspected that the borrowing of her possessions would extend to stealing her boyfriend.
How had Alice and Kevin’s relationship started? Who had made the first move? Had Lucy been so needy that she had driven Kevin away? If it wasn’t his fault, as he had claimed, then it had to be her fault, didn’t it? It had to be someone’s fault.
She crinkled her eyes shut against the hot pressure of tears.
How did you think about something that hurt this much? What did you do with memories, feelings, needs, that didn’t be
long anywhere?
Lurching to her feet, Lucy went to her vintage three-speed bike, which was propped near the doorway. It was a turquoise vintage Schwinn, with a flowered basket on the handlebars. She reached for the helmet that hung on a hook beside the door and took the bike outside.
Mist had settled on the cool spring afternoon, stands of Douglas fir puncturing a layer of clouds as light as soap foam. Gooseflesh rose on her bare arms as a breeze pressed a damp chill into her T-shirt. Lucy rode with no direction or destination, until her legs burned and her chest ached. She stopped at a roadside turnout, recognizing a trail that led to a bay on the west side of the island. Walking the bike along the rough trail, she came to a line of steep cliffs made of weathered red basalt and pods of pure limestone. Ravens and seagulls picked over the leavings of low tide on the beach below.
The island’s native population, a tribe of the Coast Salish, had once harvested clams, oysters, and salmon in their reef nets. They had believed that the abundance of food in the strait had been a gift from a woman who had long ago married the sea. She had gone swimming one day, and the sea had assumed the form of a handsome young man who had fallen in love with her. After her father had reluctantly given his permission for them to marry, the woman had disappeared with her lover into the sea. Ever since then the sea had offered, in gratitude, rich harvests for the islanders.
Lucy had always liked the story, intrigued by the idea of such encompassing love that you didn’t mind losing yourself in it. Giving up everything for it. But it was a romantic notion that existed only in art, literature, or music. It had nothing to do with real life.
At least not hers.
After lowering the kickstand on her bike, Lucy took off her helmet and made her way down to the underslung beach. The terrain was pebbled and rough, patches of gray sand bristling with driftwood. She walked slowly, trying to figure out what to do. Kevin wanted her to leave the house. She had lost her home, her boyfriend, and her sister in one afternoon.