Before and Afterlives (40 page)

Soon after they’re finished eating, Dawn gets up from her seat and wanders away from the fire. But not so far that her mother and father can’t see where she has gone. Finally, when the fir
eflies have come to life, filling the night air with an apple green glow, Eliot spots it, his father’s moth, pinwheeling through the air around Dawn, surrounded by an orangey-pink halo.

“Dad,” he says, “Dad, look.” And Dr. Carroll turns to see where Eliot is pointing. A strange little noise comes out of his mouth. Almost a squeak. He heaves himself off the log he’s crouched on, and stumbles towards Dawn and the moth.

There it is, thinks Eliot. Why now? Why has it decided to make an appearance after all this time, after all this pain? Why now? he wonders, wanting answers that perhaps don’t exist. He suspects Dawn has something to do with it, the same way Dawn made the grasshoppers line up together and do synchronized leaps.

Dr. Carroll shouts, “Keep an eye on it, don’t let it get away!” and he rushes to the car to dig through the back for a net or a box. He comes jogging back with a clear plastic box that has a screen fitted into the lid and vents on the sides. A few twigs and leafs wait inside of it. He opens the lid, scoops up the moth, and snaps the box shut.

But then Dawn is squealing. She runs over to her father and tries to pry the box out of his hands. What is she doing? Eliot can’t understand why she’d do a thing like that. She’s beating at her father’s chest, saying—what?—saying, “No! No! No! You can’t lock it up like that!”

What? Eliot’s thinking. He’s thinking, What’s happening here?

His mother steps between Dawn and Dr. Carroll, grabbing Dawn around her shoulders to pull her in for a hug. Dawn is sobbing now, her shoulders heaving, and she leans into her mother for the hug, and doesn’t let go for fifteen minutes at least. Eliot stays by the fire, afraid of what’s going on in front of him. He doesn’t know what to do or say.

Dr. Carroll says, “What’s wrong with her? I can’t believe she tried to do that.”

Eliot’s mother says, “Leave her alone. Just leave her alone, why don’t you? Can’t you see she’s upset?”

Dr. Carroll walks away from them, holding his box with the moth inside it close to his chest. It glows still. The box lights up like a faery lantern. The smile on his father’s face tells E
liot exactly what he is holding. This box, says Eliot’s father’s smile, contains my youth.

15. The Message

It is late now, so late that Eliot has fallen asleep for several hours and then, inexplicably, woke in the night. He doesn’t have to pee, and he doesn’t feel too hot, or sick. But som
ething is wrong, and it makes him sit up and look around the cabin. His parents are asleep on their cots. The cabin is quiet except for their breathing. He gets out of bed, and once again, the coils of the cot squeal as he removes his weight from them. He pulls back a corner of the sheet separating his room from Dawn’s and finds that she is not in her bed. She’s not in the cabin at all.

Eliot runs out of the cabin in his bare feet. The grass is dewy, wetting his feet. He doesn’t look behind the cabin, or by the fire, or in the nearby field. He runs down the trail to the ravine where he hit Roy, and finds Dawn there, standing by the creek. Mist and fog hover over the water. Dawn stands in the mist surrounded by a swarm of fireflies. She looks like a human Christmas tree with all of those lights blinking around her. She looks like a magic creature. Like a woodland spirit, Eliot thinks.

“Dawn,” he says when he reaches her. But Dawn holds out her hand and raises one of her fingers. Wait, she is asking. One moment. Wait.

Eliot stands before her, and suddenly the fireflies drop from the air as if they have all had sudden heart attacks, their lights extinguished. They lay at his feet, crawling around in the grasses. Then, all at the same time, their lights flicker on again, and Eliot finds they have arranged themselves into le
tters. Spelled out in the grass, glowing green, are the word
s
Love You, Eliot.

Eliot looks up to find Dawn’s face shining with tears, and he feels his own eyes filling. He steps around the fireflies and hugs Dawn, and whispers that he loves her, too. They stay there for a while, hugging, until Eliot takes Dawn’s hand and leads her back to the cabin before their parents wake up.

16. Now

When the Carrolls return home from Pennsylvania, they do their best to return to their lives as they once knew them. Eliot’s father, uncanny specimen in hand, sets to work on his new research. His mother resumes classes in the Fall and publishes an essay called “Woman, Nature, Words” in a feminist philosophy journal.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Dawn attends school—she has learned how to say “My name is Dawn Ca
rroll, I am seventeen years old, Thank you, You’re Welcome, Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye.” Goodbye is her favorite new word. She sometimes shouts it at the top of her lungs, and Goodbye floats up to the vaulted ceilings at home, spinning this direction and that, searching for an escape route, a way out of the confines of walls and floors and ceilings. Eventually it bursts, and bits of Goodbye, wet and soapy, fall back down onto her face.

Eliot returns to school as well, to high school, where he learns to slouch and to not look up from his feet, and how to evade tal
king to other people as much as possible. He begins to dress in black clothes and to listen to depressing music—“Is that what they mean by Gothic?” his mother asks him—but he doesn’t dignify her question with an answer. His grades flag and falter. “Needs to work harder,” his teachers report. Mr. and Mrs. Carroll send him to a psychologist, a Dr. Emery, who sits behind her desk and doesn’t say much of anything. She waits in the long silences for Eliot to begin speaking, and once he starts talking, it’s difficult to stop.

Eliot tells her everything that happened over the summer, and Dr. Emery nods a lot and continues to offer little in the way of conversation. Dr. Emery advises Eliot to tell his pa
rents whatever he feels he needs to, and that she will try to help them understand. But Eliot isn’t ready, not yet at least, and now that he’s told someone else what happened, he wants to think about other things for a while. Video games, music, television, even his schoolwork. Things that are comforting and easy. For now it’s enough to have Dr. Emery to talk to, someone safe and understanding. For now.

This is the first in a series of people that Eliot finds he can actually talk to. The others will come to him, friends and lo
vers, scattered throughout the rest of his life. In a few years he won’t even be thinking that no one can understand him. He will be leaning back on his pillows and staring at the neon plastic stars he’s pasted to his ceiling, in his own apartment a few blocks from where he attends college, and he will be thinking about that night in the ravine, by the creek. He’ll remember Dawn lit up by fireflies, and how they arranged themselves into glowing green letters, like the constellation of glowing stars above him, like the stars he watched through the roof of the rusted-out corvette with Roy. He’ll think about his sister and how she learned to speak the language of moths, the language of fireflies and crickets. How he had learned the language of love and betrayal, the language of self-hate and mistrust. How much more his sister knew, he realizes later, than he ever did.

When he thinks about Dawn’s message, Eliot will be in love with someone who loves him back. This boy that he’ll love will be asleep beside him while Eliot stays awake, sta
ring at the stars above, thinking about Dawn’s message.

Love You, Eliot
,
she had instructed the fireflies to spell out.

At the time, Eliot had interpreted Dawn’s message to mean she loved him, and of course there’s that, too. But when he thinks about it now, in the future, he’s not so sure. The “I” of her me
ssage was mysteriously missing, but its absence might only have been an informal gesture on Dawn’s part. He wonders now if Dawn was saying something entirely different that night. Has he misunderstood her message, or only understood half of it? Meaning is always lost, at least partially, in translation, he thinks.

Love You, Eliot
,
she had told him, the letters glowing like green embers in the grass.

Now, in the future, this future that he imagined so many years ago, the future in which he lived in his own apartment, with his own television and his own books, the future in which he goes to college and finds himself not as wrong or as weird as he once thought he was, in this future he wonders if Dawn was also giving him a piece of advice.

Love You, Eliot
,
she had told him.

And he does that. He knows how to do that.

Now.

“What We Know About the Lost Families of – House,
”
Interfiction
s
, 2007

“The Drowned Mermaid,
”
Realms of Fantas
y
, 2003

“Dead Boy Found,
”
Trampolin
e
, 2003

“A Mad Tea Party,
”
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristle
t
, 1999

“Born on the Edge of an Adjective,
”
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristle
t
, 2002

“The Other Angelas,
”
Pindeldybo
z
, 2004

“A Resurrection Artist,
”
The Third Alternativ
e
, 2004

“The Boy Who Was Born Wrapped in Barbed Wire,
”
The Journal of Mythic Art
s
, 2005

“Map of Seventeen,
”
The Beastly Brid
e
, 2010

“Dead Letters,
”
Realms of Fantas
y
, 2006

“Plenty,
”
Strange Horizon
s
, 2001

“The Ghost Hunter’s Beautiful Daughter,
”
Asimov’s Science Fictio
n
, 2009

“Caryatids,
”
Nerv
e
, 2001

“A Beginner’s Guide to Survival Before, During, and After the
Apocalypse,” original to the book

“Smoke City,
”
Asimov’s Science Fictio
n
, 2011

“Vanishing Point,
”
Descan
t
, 2003

“The Language of Moths,
”
Realms of Fantas
y
, 2005

My heartfelt thanks goes out to the editors who first brought many of these stories to readers of their magazines and anthologies:  Delia Sherman, Theodora Goss, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, Sheila Williams, Scott Westerfeld, Andy Cox, Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Susan Marie Groppi, Jed Hartman, Karen Meisner, Lynne Thomas, and Shawna McCarthy. Thank you also to Richard Bowes, Mary Rickert, Alan DeNiro, Kristin Livdahl, and Barth Anderson, who served as first readers for many of these stories. The publisher of this collection, Steve Berman, deserves more gratitude than words can possibly convey. And more than anyone, thank you, Tony Romandetti, for everything you do to help me keep telling stories.