Rainshadow Road(5)
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 water vapor broke the horizon as pods of orca whales chased after salmon runs.