Lovely Wild Read online

  Besides, Sammy’s parents usually seem to leave her money for pizza.

  “Just you and Sammy?”

  Kendra looks faintly scornful. “Of course. Who else would come over?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe that boy...what’s his name? Logan?”

  Kendra bites her lip gently. But then she shakes her head, her hand going unconsciously to the pocket of her jeans where her phone buzzes. Ah, Mari thinks. She does like him. But something has gone wrong.

  “Sammy’s parents don’t let her have anyone over when they’re gone. Just me.”

  “I know what they allow and don’t allow, Kendra. But I also know they’re not home and it can be tempting....” Mari trails off before she can spout more daytime drama admonitions. Aware more than ever that Kendra is living a life completely different than Mari’s teenage years. “I just want you to be safe. That’s all.”

  “Mom. C’mon. We’re going to watch TV and stuff. Her mom said when she got home from work she’d take us to the mall and see a movie. I can sleep over. Is that okay?”

  “What time is her mom supposed to be home?”

  A shrug. “Dunno. Seven?”

  It’s a Friday night. School’s out for the summer. Sammy lives just down the street. Mari thinks she ought to protest more, but without the allure of pizza, a trip to the mall and a movie, what does she have to hold her daughter here? Ryan has already said he’d be home late again. It’ll just be her and Ethan.

  “Call me when you get back to Sammy’s house tonight.”

  Kendra’s grin lights up her face. Mari sees herself in that grin and is relieved to feel that connection. For a moment, she remembers the weight of a sleeping infant in her arms, the sweet smell of Kendra’s fuzzy baby head. Time is passing too fast. But isn’t that what time does?

  Mari makes pizza, anyway. She and Ethan eat it on the back deck. The cut on his foot left a scar, but he’s healed fast enough that he barely limps. She watches him build with Lego blocks as she flips through a parenting magazine she bought from the school fund-raising campaign. Nothing in it seems relevant to her, but she tries hard to pay attention to it, anyway. She pages past glossy photos of mothers and children posed around platters of decorated cupcakes, modeling hand-printed T-shirts. She skims the articles, skipping the words and phrases that give her trouble. She can read competently enough. It’s the lack of context that confuses her.

  When the fireflies come out to dot their tiny yellow brightness against the backdrop of night, Mari calls Ethan away from his toys and hands him an empty canning jar. Together they stalk the lightning bugs and capture them until the jar is full.

  “Hold it up,” she tells him. “Aren’t they lovely?”

  “We can’t keep them,” Ethan says solemnly. “Wild things deserve to be free. Don’t they, Mama?”

  “They do. But we can hold them for just a little while, right?”

  He laughs and holds up the jar. “Yep. Then we’ll let them go.”

  “Let’s have some ice cream.”

  “Hooray!” Ethan dances, forgetting that lovely wild things also don’t like to be shaken around in their glass houses. The bugs swirl and dip, falling off the jar’s slick insides.

  Mari takes it from him as he runs ahead of her into the house. She sets the jar on the deck railing as she goes inside to scoop large bowls of ice cream for them both. Whipped cream. Fudge sauce. She loves sweets, even if her teeth ache in memory of past indulgences. She should limit herself and, she supposes, Ethan, too, to one scoop. But she can’t help it. Even with the memory of thousands of dollars and dozens of hours of dental work to repair the damage done to her teeth through childhood neglect, Mari can’t resist.

  Ryan comes home as she and Ethan have settled into chairs on the deck. The sweep of headlights illuminate the backyard for a second as he pulls into the drive, then it’s all dark again except for the jar of tiny living lights. A square of light appears as he opens the door from the garage into the laundry room.

  “Hello?”

  “Out here!” Mari turns in her chair to greet him with a smile. “Want some ice cream?”

  “No, thanks.” He kisses her briefly and ruffles Ethan’s hair.

  “Dad, look at the fireflies.”

  “I see. Where’s Kiki?”

  “She went to Sammy’s. Her mom’s taking them to a movie. Then she’s sleeping over.”

  This is a normal conversation. Mother, father, son. Ice cream on a new summer night, fireflies in a jar. It could’ve come right out of the pages of a magazine. It’s everything she was taught to believe and want, right there in front of her. And she deserves this, doesn’t she? This normal life?

  “She’ll never be right, Leon. She’ll never be normal. You have to realize that. I know you want to keep working with her, but—” The woman in the sorrow suit shook her head.

  No, not sorrow. The color of her suit was called navy, and the skirt Mari wore was the same. She didn’t like this skirt. Too tight at the knees. It meant she couldn’t run. Couldn’t jump. Couldn’t crawl. Had to sit up straight like a good girl, a nice girl.

  Normal girl.

  * * *

  “Is it time for us to let them go, Mama?” Ethan, mouth smeared with chocolate, hair standing on end, holds up the jar.

  Inside it, fireflies wiggle and flash. They’re so pretty, all gathered there. Mari looks out to the yard, then beyond that to the fields just past the tree line. There, in the knee-high crop are thousands—no, millions, if it’s possible, of fireflies blinking out their mating signals.

  She stands. “Oh, look at how many there are.”

  Ryan’s already gone inside the house, turning on the lights. Ruining the view. Ethan oohs and aahs with her, though. Together she and her son run through the grass toward the trees, hand-in-hand.

  “Let them go now,” Mari says.

  Ethan unscrews the lid. He shakes the jar until the bugs inside realize their freedom and drift upward. Out of the glass, into the night. Into the field, where they blend in with the others, until at last the jar in her son’s hand is empty. His hand slips back into hers as they stare out at the field.

  This, she thinks, is her real life. Her normal life. Short minutes tick-tocking out in the darkness, watching fireflies. These moments of small beauty, shared with her boy. This is where she was always meant to be.

  EIGHT

  IT WAS A FARCE, and Ryan knew it. As soon as Annette Somers’s husband brought the case against him, every doctor in the practice knew it would probably ruin him. They’d pretended they were behind him, of course. Putting him on leave from seeing patients, giving him the shit work to do, dictating notes and culling files. They couldn’t outright fire him, not without proof he’d done what Gerry Somers said he’d done. Most of them had faced malpractice suits in their careers, it seemed to be the way medicine was going, everyone entitled to believe they deserved something they didn’t, that doctors weren’t allowed to make mistakes, not ever. But this was different. This was a matter of ethics, and while his partners might cluck and shake their heads, Ryan knew not a one of them was going to risk being pulled down along with him.

  Not that he blamed them. If it had been one of them, he’d feel the same way. It still royally sucked, though. Walking into the office with a smile for the secretary, even though he had no patients to see. Holing up in his office to stare at the walls or sift through old case files. Taking calls from his lawyer who assured him this would all be resolved without too much hassle.

  Mari had packed him a lunch this morning. Sandwich, chips, a pear, a juice box, for god’s sake. One of those snack cakes she loved so much. That stopped him for just a second. She hoarded those snack cakes as if they were gold. The fact she’d put one in his lunch—the fact she’d made him a lunch at all, when she knew he always ate lunch out—told him a lot about what she’d noticed about the situation he’d so carefully tried to keep from describing in full detail.

  It was too much to sit in this office any