Catching Fireflies
He is 21, and she is 19. Her face is buried into the fur of his dog, Haley. Haley is 85 pounds of Alaskan Malamute, always fluffy, always smiling. He can hear her voice muffled in Haley’s chest, “I missed you, oh my goodness, Snoop, I missed you.” They stopped calling Haley by her actual name in sixth grade.
They’re in his yard, the same one from when he was a kid, and she was a kid.
She jumps up, and hugs him. She buries her face into his chest. He takes a second, but wraps his arms, like leaves of a flower, around her small form. The wind has that chill they’re so used to. It’s knocking the hanging door of the barn in dull thuds against the frame.
He runs his hand down her hair. It’s blue, and tapers down to purple on her back. He’s never seen it like that. He lets it fall between his fingers to make sure it’s made of the same stuff it used to be. She is still holding tight. He rubs her forearms the way she likes, and he sees that she has a tattoo on each one now.
“Do you like them?” she asks, and she pulls away, and flips her arms for him to see. It is a heart, one half a deer antler, the other half a fishing hook.
“This one is for Grandma,” she says, and he rubs his thumb on that one, a thick black band twisted into another heart, with a pink bow on top. He wonders how much that must have hurt.
The path from his house to her house, through the field with the wildflowers, jutting into the air in blots of orange and purple, is not cut, but flattened.
***
She is sitting 203 feet in the air on the Leo Frigo Bridge in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He is 20, she is 18.
He wasn’t there for this. He hasn’t seen her in months. She breaks their silence with a blip on his cellphone. It’s a link to a news article online. He follows it.
The headline reads:
“Man Saves Woman on Leo Frigo Bridge.”
The way she’s sitting in the video is the same way she sat when he had to leave for college. Her legs are crossed at the shin, her hands are flat against each other, resting in her lap. Her head is down. It is too dark for him to see what her hair looks like, but it’s draped over her eyes.
The article states:
“When Howard found her, she was clutching a teddy bear and crying.”
When he looks closer, he sees the bear, nestled against her chest. He doesn’t know who gave her the bear. That kind of thing used to make a vein in his neck tic, but now, all he’s doing is pushing tears up his face like he can put them back in his eyes.
The “he” in the video is an older guy. He parks his truck in front of her ruby red Pontiac. He steps out, and peers over at her. He is wearing a flannel. He is classically Midwestern, swinging one leg over the railing of the bridge, then the other, then walking a thin plane of balance as he walks to her, and grabs her, and carries her back to her car, and saves her life.
His name is Howard Turner. Howard Turner is God that night, hopping back in his truck, turning his key, and driving down Highway I-43 like there isn’t a boy, head pressed into his desk, shaking for his love of him, while the hum of the computer whispers in his ear.
***
They’re in his bedroom. She is curled in a ball on the corner of his mattress. He is lying flat, hands crossed over his stomach, eyes on the ceiling. It is full of fake stars that she stuck there. They glow in the dark.
“I just don’t love you like that anymore,” she says, sniffling.
He shrugs.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand.”
He rubs his hands over his eyes, and runs his hand through his hair, like he understood that he would understand someday, maybe. The bed creaks as he sits up. He stares vacantly at the door now.
“I want to die,” he says.
She sniffles and bows her head between her knees.
“That’s crazy,” she says.
***
He is 18, and she is 16, and they are chasing chickens through her grandma’s yard.
Her hair is brown. It plays on the small of her back.
Her eyes are brown, and she thinks that’s boring.
He always tells her how exciting it is when ordinary acts incredible, and how being rare is a cop-out, anyways.
He always asks her, “have you ever seen butterflies at night?”
He wants to write down everything he knows, and he wants her to kiss every line.
***
The path from his house to her house is cut, and they are catching fireflies in the field. They dance in the dark, cold from the night’s dew settling in their hair. They are grabbing clumsily, sometimes at the flies, sometimes at nothing, and they can’t stop laughing.
“Are we really doing this?” she asks, laughing, out of breath.
“Yes,” he says, panting as he runs towards the little lights sparking in the field, “We are movie children.”
***
He is 16, and she is 14.
His first kiss is with her, in his grandpa’s barn. The door is shut snug. His grandpa’s favorite thing, his life sized Hamm’s Bear, holding a foam pitcher of beer, shields their small bodies from the windows. On the walls are bowsaws and license plates and fishing poles, all muted brown with dust. He leans in, and their lips brush, and press into each other, and release.
They are silent a moment. The wind whistles through a crack between the window and its frame.
She looks down and giggles, and says, “my knees are weak.”
He smiles, knocks his forehead into hers and says, “tell me about it.”
***
He is 14 and she is 12, and her Grandpa Jim has died.
She’s wearing a black dress, with white polka dots. He’s wearing a crumpled collared shirt, and khakis that are too big. He is sitting next to her in her family section. The small church is in a state of standing room only. Grandpa Jim was a nice guy.
Somewhere between the frill of her dress and the crinkles of his pants, they hold hands, pinned to the pew.
***
He is 12, and she is 10, when on the school bus, between the crack of the seat and the window, she whispers for him to listen to the song “If You Get There Before I Do.”
He listens that night, his thin shoulders stacked up on the computer desk, his eyes on the desktop screen. The song is sappy. He is smiling so hard it aches.
The next morning, on the bus, he presses his head into the chilled window and whispers, “Are we getting married some day?” She twists around and presses her face to the window, too. Through the crack of the seat he sees one of her eyes. He watches her eyelashes as she blinks.
***
He is nothing, and she is even less, when he attends her fourth birthday party. He sees her for the first time as a flash in his vision.
They don’t know what will happen with Howard Turner. They don’t know about Haley, how she smiles, or the chickens, or the fireflies, or the kiss in the barn, or the stars on the ceiling. They don’t know how many CDs they will burn. They don’t know about the goose at the petting zoo that will bite him. They don’t know about the keys on the flip phones, smeared away from their conversations. They don’t know about the pound of jellybeans or the hours painting her nails or how good he will get at foosball or how bad it will ache when they are apart.
They don’t know about the time she’ll tell him to go look for the note under the rock by the outlet. It is their favorite spot, where the water from the lake rushes under the bridge and turns into a river and twists down the state. She doesn’t know how many hundreds of rocks he will overturn in the dust there until he finds it, tiny and dirty, folded seven times, reading:
I love you.
-Girl.
