Firefly Island Read online

  It crossed my mind that whenever I did finally work up the guts to confess to my mother that I was seriously dating a divorced guy with a three-and-a-half-year-old son—at which time she would frown gravely and remind me that I was recently out of a two-year relationship—she would not be impressed if Daniel’s preschool-aged child was calling me by my first name.

  “How about Tante M? It’s French for aunt. It’s sort of a weird handle my mother made up. She hates it when the nieces call me by my first name.”

  “Tante M.” Daniel licked his lips, tasting the word.

  I watched his lips, felt myself swoon. Everything about him lit me up like a Christmas tree. He hadn’t even tried to put the moves on me, which, considering that this was DC, was shocking. Daniel was a perfect gentleman, old-fashioned in his view of things. I found that as charming as everything else about him. I’d almost lost faith that there were guys like that around anymore, but deep inside me, there was that image of my parents romancing in the pool. I’d always known that casual relationships were no substitute for true love and lifetime commitment. Aside from that, Great-grandma Louisa had avidly assured us girls that a man does not buy the cow if he can get the milk for free. You don’t forget a mental image like that one. Ever.

  “But we can pick something else if you don’t think that seems good.” Maybe he thought the whole foreign language thing was dorky.

  He shifted, bracing a hand on the sofa arm and leaning toward me. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I want some other man talking to you in French.” His voice was throaty and rich. “You might like him better than you like me.”

  “Not possible,” I whispered, and he kissed me, and the storm of worry in my mind whirled off into a corner, growing smaller and smaller, until it was just a little swirl, like water spinning down the drain after a hot bath.

  Not possible that I could like someone better than you. In some hidden part of my soul, I knew that like wasn’t the word I meant. I didn’t just like Daniel. I was in love in every way a girl could be. If two weeks was too soon to be using that word, I couldn’t help it. This was it. The Amy Ashley romance novel kind of love. I wanted to be his Irish bride.

  No other man I would ever meet could possibly make me feel like this, I was certain.

  But as it turned out, little Nick took a pretty good stab at it the very next day. I liked him the minute we met, over a picnic of fried chicken and soggy potato wedges. I’d been burning the midnight oil at work, and the best I could do was a quick brown-bag dinner in Bartholdi Park. I was, at least, newly out of the walking cast, so the stroll over was no problem.

  Nick was not only adorable, he was funny, articulate, and—perhaps because he felt the absence of a mom in his life—surprisingly attuned to women. Moments after we met, he told me he liked my hair. I’d let it dry wavy that day, and he said it was princess hair. I fell in love. While Nick explored the softly trickling water feature nearby, I told his father he had competition for my affections.

  “Figures.” Daniel let his head droop forward, his shoulders rounding in a display of surrender. “Nick always gets the girls. You should see him at day care.”

  “I think you’re doing all right yourself.” I stretched onto my tiptoes for a kiss while Nick wasn’t looking. The next thing I knew, something was pushing on my knee, trying to force me away from Daniel. An instant later, I realized that it was Nick, and that we’d been caught. Guilt sledgehammered me. I’d watched the talk shows. I knew that this first meeting should have been about getting acquainted in a nonthreatening way that was easy for Nick to adjust to. Less than a half hour together, and I’d blown it already. He hated me. Step away from my daddy, the pressure of that little hand said. Who do you think you are, strange-princess-hair-woman?

  Daniel and I yielded to the push in unison. There was a hand pressing on his leg, too. When we looked down, Nick was poised between us like a tiny Atlas, trying to hold two worlds apart. Daniel cleared his throat, obviously uncomfortable. He gave me a worried look. I was sorry that we hadn’t waited for a less rushed time to begin introductions with Nick—maybe allowed him a few days to reacclimate to DC.

  “Sorry, buddy,” Daniel said, and Nick just rolled a look at him—the kind of honest scorn that comes from a little psyche not yet attuned to hiding feelings in order to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy.

  We’d really screwed up.

  Daniel extended a hand to take Nick’s. “C’mon, bud. Let’s go see the water.”

  I took a step back. Now would probably be a good time to exit, since this hadn’t gone so well. “I should … ummm …” I thumbed over my shoulder, wincing apologetically. “Go back to …”

  I never finished the sentence. The most amazing thing happened, and in that moment, I felt certain that angels must have been swirling overhead. They smiled down on us as Nick turned to me, his face rising into the light, his blue eyes framed with his father’s thick lashes. He reached upward, fingers extended, all ten of them, as far as they would go, and in the space of a heartbeat, I understood that he wanted me to pick him up.

  Daniel and I glanced at each other, and he just shrugged. “Well, I can see I’m second-rate.”

  I picked Nick up, swinging him onto my hip somewhat awkwardly, but he didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he flashed an over-the-shoulder smirk at his dad, a pleased look with perhaps a hint of gloat in it. Daniel grinned wider and shook his head, a dark curl toying near his eyebrow. “I think someone’s after my best g-i-r-l.” He spelled the last word, and Nick squinted at him, trying to discern the meaning.

  I felt like a queen, like a rock star, like a supermodel with adoring fans crowding in at the edges of the catwalk, fighting over me. Nick wasn’t pushing me away from his dad. He was pushing his dad away from me.

  Nick wrapped his little arms around my shoulders, and from that moment on, we were friends. He quickly discovered that although I didn’t know how to properly cut up a hot dog into toddler bites and I could not even begin to name the characters on Thomas the Tank Engine, I could keep a balloon in the air for a long time without reusing any part of my body, I was pretty good with a soccer ball, and I had a poor short-term memory that made me easy to beat at the memory match card game. Time after time, it was a mystery to me which card had the purple dinosaur under it and which had the rubber ducky, and so on. Nick loved that about me. He also knew more farm animal sounds than I did, and he loved that, too. I had no idea what a goat might say, and I didn’t know whether a bull would moo like a cow or snort like a fire-breathing dragon. Nick knew because his grandparents lived in a rural neighborhood with farms just down the road. I didn’t mind losing parlor games to a kid who had yet to graduate from day care to official preschool. I was just happy that the three of us were bonding so well.

  We made dinners together. We played games. We did things on the weekends. We watched the last of the spring blossoms fall and new leaves come in. The Gymies, fearing that I’d been kidnapped by some underground government agency, began reconnoitering, sniffing out the situation, asking concerned questions.

  “Don’t you think things are moving a little … fast, though?” Kaylyn wanted to know when I called to ask Josh if I could borrow a few of his Disney DVDs for a couple days. Daniel had to go out of town to some sort of symposium about fertilizers and genetically modified super crops, and due to a snafu with the baby-sitting he’d arranged, I’d agreed to stay with Nick through the weekend.

  “I mean, it sounds like you’re practically moving in over there.” Kaylyn’s romantic notions of St. Patrick’s Day magic and Irish destiny seemed to have faded away. “It’s only been, like, a month, y’know.”

  A month? Had it really been only a month? “I’m just watching Nick for the weekend while Daniel’s gone. I’m not moving in.” But in the pit of my stomach there was a giddy little domestic feeling that I hadn’t told anyone about. I was looking forward to spending the weekend with Nick—boiling hot dogs, working on my ability to make boxed convenience
foods, watching Disney movies, and reading favorite storybooks before tucking him into his little race car bed.

  “What’s your mom think about all this?” Kaylyn had been dragged along on enough of my mother’s DC shopping visits to fully understand the undertows between Mom and me.

  “I haven’t … exactly … said anything to them,” I admitted.

  “You haven’t told your parents?” Kaylyn’s shock caused me to hold the cell phone away from my ear.

  “I will. I will,” I ground out, the pressure pinching like a hermit crab nested under the mop of hair at the back of my neck. “I’m just waiting until I go home for Easter next week. That way, I can tell them in person—sort of ease Mom into it, so she doesn’t go berserk. The whole thing about Daniel being divorced-with-kid might throw her a little. She thinks divorced guys are damaged goods. She’s prehistoric that way.”

  “You haven’t told your parents anything?” Kaylyn reiterated, then she covered the phone and shared the news with Josh, who was probably hard at work on the other side of their cubicle, creating fantasy characters and pixel-based swords for some new video game. “Mallory hasn’t told her family anything about Mr. Wonderful or Little Mr. Wonderful.”

  I heard Josh’s response. “Whoa. That’s radical.”

  The conversation went on from there, Kaylyn’s admonishments heaping guilt and trepidation on me until I almost gave up my quest to wrestle away some of Josh’s prized Disney DVDs.

  But I wanted those movies, so I persevered, and an hour later, I was picking them up on my way to grab Nick from day care. Kaylyn was concerned about my ability to handle over forty-eight hours of parental responsibility. She dredged up the issue of the little window-hanging finch feeder she’d given me for Christmas. The one that sat empty while disenfranchised birds cast wistful looks from nearby electrical lines.

  “I’m not going to forget to feed the kid,” I insisted as Josh caressed the stack of Disney movies, appearing to have second thoughts. “I’m not. Seriously, I’ve got it all planned out. He’s just one little boy, and he’s adorable, and we have a blast together. What could possibly go wrong?”

  I should have known that such questions only tempt fate.

  Nick picked that weekend to get the stomach flu.

  I learned about thermometers and wet wipes, sensitive skin and Desitin, sponge baths, dehydration, throw up, washing sheets, washing sheets again, scrubbing stains out of carpet, and calling the emergency hotline in the middle of the night.

  I also learned what fully qualified caretakers already know. The stomach flu is contagious.

  By the time Daniel came home, Nick and I were a couple of washed-out rag dolls, strung across the recliner, nibbling soda crackers and blearily watching Bambi for the umpteenth time. Daniel went down to the Chinese restaurant on the corner and bought soup for us. When he came back, he fixed trays and then got to work cleaning up the offal of towels, clothes, DVDs, toys, and empty Pedialite bottles that had overtaken the apartment during our quest to survive. The phone rang while he was carrying an armload of stuff to Nick’s toy box. He took the call in the bedroom. When he came out, he was as pale as Nick and me.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. He looked like someone had died. I immediately thought of his family in Ohio. I only knew what Daniel had told me. He had a mom, dad, grandparents, and various cousins, aunts, and uncles all living within a thirty-mile radius, and a brother who lived in Boston with his wife and kids. Like my parents, Daniel’s parents still owned the house he’d grown up in. I hoped the call hadn’t brought bad news—a car accident or something.

  “I think I just got offered a job,” he said, his jaw hanging slack after the words, a hint of five o’clock shadow testifying to the fact that, in his rush to return home to Nick and me, he hadn’t even shaved this morning.

  “A job?” That didn’t sound like bad news. Why the horrified expression?

  He nodded slowly, his eyes shifting toward the bedroom doorway, as if the spirit of something large and life-altering were hovering there, and he expected it to come storming up the hallway any moment.

  His next two words explained everything. “In Texas.”

  The course of true love never did run smooth.

  —William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  (Left by Brent, who spent the night outside the tent)

  Chapter 3

  A job.

  In.

  Texas.

  I heard it that way, as if it were several sentences rather than one. My life flashed before my eyes—two lives, actually. Two completely different possibilities. In one, I was sitting at a table with the Gymies again, a week from now or maybe a month, eating round-robin pie, engaged in yet another conversation about video game characters, Disney animation, and fascinating computer-related topics like bits, bytes, and black-hole servers. Meanwhile, Daniel and Nick were far, far away in Texas. Pretty close to the other side of the world.

  In the opposing scenario, I was packing my pumps and my black suit, those knockoff designer purses I loved so much, and the rest of my worldly belongings. Outside the window, a moving man with a dolly was pushing my life up the ramp a few boxes at a time. I was headed for Texas, to some big city or other. They did have big cities in Texas—commerce, corporations, skyscraper office buildings, shopping malls … I’d watched an entire season of Dallas reruns on DVD during a girl trip with my sisters. I could live in the world of the Ewings. Find out who shot J.R. for real.

  Once again, I’d be moving far, far away from my family… .

  My mother would have a coronary… .

  You’ve only been dating the man a month. What are you thinking?

  Maybe we could do the long-distance thing. I could fly down on weekends. Daniel and Nick could visit for the holidays …

  Flying with a three-and-a-half-year-old would be a hassle …

  Those thoughts and a dozen others raced through my mind, rapid-fire, but all I managed to say was “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” Daniel breathed, then pressed his lips together and swallowed hard. Behind those gorgeous eyes, I could see the wheels turning, full speed like mine. I wondered where they were headed.

  “Umm … where in Texas?” Inside me a voice was wailing, Say something. Tell me what you’re thinking. I mentally cycled through the possibilities, calling up scattered shreds of Texology gleaned from pop culture references and office chitchat. One of the cosponsors of the Clean Energy Bill was a congressman from Texas—someplace out in the sparsely populated part, where cowboys and oil wells dotted the lone prairie.

  City names swirled through my mind, potential backdrops for my potential new life. Dallas, Houston, Austin … uhhhh … San … something … San Antonio. Abilene, like in the old song about cattle drives. Or was that in Kansas? Abilene, Kansas, or Texas?

  “Moses Lake.” Daniel’s answer broke through the clatter in my mind, silencing it momentarily.

  Moses Lake. Never heard of that one. The word Lake implied something pleasant—water, sun, surf. Texas did have coastal areas and large inland bodies of water. The Clean Energy Bill’s Texas cosponsor had tucked something in there to provide financial incentives for hydroelectric power generation on Texas rivers.

  Moses Lake could be good.

  Keeping an open mind here.

  “Where is that?” I inched into new territory, since I had no idea what Daniel was thinking and how this job offer might affect the two of us.

  A baffled headshake answered my question. “I’m not exactly sure. Somewhere in the middle. There’s an island involved. Firefly Island.”

  “But what’s it near?” Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio. Give me a reference point. Someplace to anchor my fantasy future.

  Daniel shook his head again, his gaze analyzing the room, as if he were already considering the size and number of moving boxes needed. “Don’t know. I didn’t want to look like an idiot, asking the man a million questions. He was in a limo on his way from the airport, so he did
n’t tell me a lot, except that he maintains research crop plots there, as well as a state-of-the-art lab, and then he mentioned something about Firefly Island. I’m sure, being Jack West, he just assumes that people know all about him. He wants me there in a month.”

  Jack West … Why was that name familiar?

  Nick tapped my hand with a cracker package, and I opened it without thinking, then handed it back to him. “There you go, peapod.” Over the past couple days, I’d adopted my mother’s usual endearment for anyone under the age of twenty-five, peapod.

  “I need a map,” Daniel muttered and headed for the door. “A real paper map I can look at all at once.” He didn’t even ask if I would stay and watch Nick. He just left. Somehow, I liked that. It implied that I belonged here.

  By the time Daniel came back, he’d already looked at the map and folded it to two panels surrounding the mystery job location. Moses Lake was a tiny dot in a crease, the letters so small it practically blended into the background. Surrounding it, although not too closely, lay other little map-dot towns with names like Cleburne, Blum, Aquilla, and Walnut Springs. There was nothing of major metropolitan size nearby. Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and even smaller cities like Waco seemed disturbingly far away, reachable only via pencil-thin strips of highway printed in an unpromising light gray.

  I felt myself going queasy, my bound-for-Texas version of the future warping like an image in a funhouse mirror. Clearly, I wouldn’t be following Daniel and Nick to Texas, applying for jobs nearby, setting myself up in a little apartment around the corner until such time as we’d come far enough in the relationship to merge our lives, so to speak. This place in the fold, this Moses Lake, was a life without me in it.

  I could see in Daniel’s eyes that he was seriously considering the trade-offs. I could hear it in his voice as he talked about the offer from Jack West, the owner of tiny, but well-funded, West Research. Daniel was more excited than I’d ever seen him. He’d heard Jack West speak at the symposium. Apparently Mr. West had heard Daniel, as well, and he was impressed. He felt that Daniel’s work with genetically modified grains would fit nicely into West’s master plan to develop super crops and super growth environments designed to produce food in the increasingly harsh conditions of a world plagued with erratic weather. By some standards, Daniel admitted, Jack West was a flake, or at the very least, eccentric and anti-establishment. He’d found fame in the sixties as an actor, then had a short political career before marrying into Texas oil money. He’d inherited an unfathomable fortune when his first wife died.