Fire Works in the Hamptons : A Willow Tate Novel (9781101547649) (5 page)

“Not until dark,” Martin shouted across the sand. “Eight minutes, by my calculations.”

“Isn't he wonderful?” Ellen leaned over to whisper to me, a hot dog in one hand, a plastic wineglass in the other. Her second glass, but who was counting?

Yeah, if you wanted a Boy Scout leader. I smiled as best I could. She couldn't see in the near dark anyway.

My supposed date was checking his watch by the firelight, as impatient as the kid next door. I could have told him the real show never started on time, but people up and down the shoreline had campfires and sparklers and small rockets. Some of the big houses along the shore had impressive, expensive, noisy fireworks we could see, hear, and smell from the beach. So there was plenty to watch if Barry bothered to look around. Kids had those glow stick things around their necks so that their parents could find them, and an armada of boats cruised out past the breakers, their running lights brightening the distance, their flares streaking across the sky. Stars started to show up, and the moon left silver ribbons on the ocean. Scenes like that could steal your breath.

Barry had another glass of wine and complained he should have brought a six-pack. Martin and Ellen shared a burnt marshmallow, more wine, and a sticky kiss. Oh, boy. I made mental notes of the background for my story and how I'd draw it. I took some experimental pictures with my digital camera for future reference, but the private firecrackers didn't stay up long enough for me to get what I needed. The official ones would, I knew. I wasn't sure how I'd work the scene into my new book, but how could I have a fire wizard with no blazing stars in the dusky night? No dueling flamethrowers? No skyrockets?

“Damn, we could have come an hour later,” Barry bitched. I was expecting him to start kvetching about needing a bathroom like the overtired, sugared-up kid at the next blanket. Instead, he wanted more information about how Paumanok Harbor's fireworks never got rained out when Montauk's did, eight miles away.

“Luck of the draw,” I improvised. “And they're on the ocean side. We're on the Sound side, Block Island Sound, which meets up with the Long Island one that everyone knows. Sometimes there's fog on one shore, bright sun on the other. Martin can explain it better.”

And at great length. I tuned them all out and walked away to photograph the Coast Guard cruiser and its roving searchlight. They patrolled the water so no boat wandered into the marked-off area near the fireworks barge or where sparks could land, the same way the police drove three-wheeled beach buggies through the crowds. As it got darker, I wondered how they avoided all the children and dogs and entwined couples.

I turned fast, but forgot to raise the camera. A brilliant red cluster rose high into the night.

White squiggles spun around the red with a high-pitched whistle.

Finally, blue sparks shot through the falling screamers higher still.

Everyone cheered. It was like the Fourth of July after all.

After that, the show picked up speed, with one dazzling array of colors and shapes and heights after another. The smoke barely cleared from one cascading giant chrysanthemum than another erupted with a shimmering waterfall of multiple rockets. The burning colors swirled, circled, bled into each other time and again while the crowd clapped and cheered. I didn't know if we were watching Catherine wheels, Roman candles, gi-randoles, or pinwheels. I'd have to look up technical names later. My favorites were the offshoot sizzlers that whistled as they raced around. My father used to say they were scurrying mice, chasing their tails.

There was stuff I'd never seen before, and I'd seen some of the best. Give East Hampton credit; they did things up right when they did it.

Barry thought Macy's put on a better show. I wanted to tell him to shut up. Instead, I moved away, taking pictures, getting lost in the entirety of the night: the ground-shaking detonations, the acrid smell, the wispy smoke that drifted back across the moon, the happy chorus of oohs and aahs every time another rocket went up. I marveled at the different colors, different patterns, different durations before the embers burned out or fell safely to the ocean.

I could almost see my hero stepping out of a ball of fire. He could make the stars spin, set the waves aflame, make day out of the darkest night.

He could . . . make a bright yellow smiley face high overhead? With a glowing garden of iridescent flowers hung beneath it?

The crowds roared their approval. I had to laugh. I guess he could, if he wanted. If the Gruccis could work this magic, think what a fire wizard could do.

The next image was a multicolored peace sign. Not a great one because it listed to one side, but it was recognizable, as were the scores of white doves circling around it. The thousands of watchers along the shore were almost hoarse by now, their hands sore from clapping.

They found the strength to cheer East Hampton's emblem, a flaming windmill with its vanes spinning in different colors.

More clusters soared up and opened out, with more squealing mice-rockets, vast flower shapes blooming across the sky, turning the night bright enough to see Barry tipping the wine bottle up to his lips to drain the last of it.

“Isn't it wonderful?” I asked.

He shrugged.

Ellen was sitting in Martin's lap, making out. Couldn't they have waited ten minutes? There were kids nearby, maybe Martin's students. And they were missing the explosions of vibrant, moving colors. I snapped pictures, of them, of the watchers, of the amazing starbursts the technicians had created.

Then came the finale, a red, white, and blue flag surrounded by a crescendo of shooting stars in every direction, noise that drowned out the crowd's appreciation. Boomer after boomer roared as the flag winked out, filling the sky with every color of the rainbow from straight overhead to the horizon. New images appearing, a school of leaping, glowing fish, a flock of birds winging across the night, another meadow of living flowers that seemed so close you could reach out and pick one, as a gift, an offering.

And then silence. The crowd was as awed as I was, with no words to describe what we'd all seen. “Wow” didn't half express the feeling, but I heard wows from every side as the last glowing flowers drifted away, except one.

“Holy shit,” Barry yelled. “Those are sparks, and they're headed here!”

Sparks? That was impossible. He put his hand out, though, to swat at a flicker with the empty wine bottle. He missed and cursed louder, grabbing at his hand. “Damn, I got burned.”

More tiny embers were falling near us.

“Run,” the people closest to us started yelling. “Fire!”

I stared up. “No, they're just lightning bugs.”

“They're too big for fireflies,” Martin declared. “Furthermore, fireflies do not bite.”

It didn't matter. People were running toward the nearest beach paths to get away. Then they ran right over the dunes in a panic, picking up more ticks and chiggers that caused far more damage than fireflies ever did. The frightened hordes left their fires, their garbage, their blankets and chairs, and maybe their children for all I knew.

The burning flowers had all dissipated, leaving the beach in total darkness and disarray except for Martin's D-cell lantern, the occasional flashlight, and the beach patrol buggies' headlights as they tore around, urging caution, an orderly exit.

“No need to panic, folks. There was one gust of wind that carried a couple of sparks. Clean up, put out all fires.”

No one in our immediate vicinity stayed to listen, even though the emergency had passed. So Martin and Ellen and I carried buckets of water to put out fires, using the shovel to spread the coals and kindling. We filled our garbage bag and took our own trash, but that was all we could do in the dark.

Barry was still nursing his fingers, so Ellen and I carried the garbage to the nearest cleared path where cleanup crews could find it in the morning. Then we went back to lug the slightly less heavy cooler to the paved parking lot that was almost empty by now. Martin and his lantern led the way with the chairs. Barry carried my blanket.

I left them there to go get the car, still half a mile away. I had my little dog-walking flashlight clipped to my belt, so I didn't mind. And I could swear I saw fireflies lighting my way.

When I got back with the car, Martin and Ellen were locked together on the cooler, heating it up like teenagers. Barry paced around, muttering about small-town bozos who shouldn't be allowed near explosives, and how there'd be lawsuits in the morning.

“But didn't you love the fireworks? I thought whoever they hired did an amazing job, and everyone else had a great time until you scared them.”

“Me? I was the one who got burned.”

“You got stung, or maybe you got an allergic reaction. No one else felt a spark.”

He muttered something I couldn't hear, thankfully, or I might have stopped the car to throw him out. Instead I tried to lighten the mood for Ellen's sake.

“Didn't you adore those peace doves, and the flying fish?”

“What doves is she talking about?” Martin asked her.

Barry grumbled, “I never saw any fish, just those really annoying screaming meemies.”

“What about the flowers? They were incredible.”

No one said anything until Ellen laughed. “That's why we teach science and you write books. You always did have the best imagination of anyone I ever knew. You'd look at a cloud and see a rhinoceros with a butterfly on its ear.”

No birds, no fish, no flowers? I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the ride home.

I dropped my passengers off at Martin's house. He invited us all in for drinks and dessert, but I said I needed to check on the dogs. And my sanity. I'd print out the camera pictures to prove I wasn't crazy or delusional. Martin could bring Ellen home later, unless she spent the night at his place. Her choice.

Ten minutes later I drove up Garland Drive, the dirt path that passed my mother's and Aunt Jasmine's houses on the way to Grandmother Eve's house, fields, and farm stand. The road had no lights, but it was well lit by the moon tonight, I thought. Until I got to my own front yard.

Flowers were blooming. That was nothing unusual for late August, but these were incandescent roses seven feet off the ground, on the lawn, where no rosebushes were planted. They waved and bobbed, as if welcoming me home. Then they separated into individual flames that danced close enough for me to see they were the same oversized fireflies that stung Barry. I kept my hands at my sides. My heart was in my throat.

“Hello. You don't really belong here, do you?”

They didn't answer. They didn't show up on my digital camera, either.

Uh-oh. I'd done it again.

CHAPTER 5

N
O, NO, AND NO. I did not call up any kind of firefly. If—and I am only saying if—I could conjure up an enchanted being from another world, an airborne match wouldn't be my first choice.

Yes, I'd been thinking of a hero who used fire in the fight of good versus evil. I did not wish for, pray for, or cast incantations for some bugs that could burn up Paumanok Harbor. I had a story in my head, not a gatecrashing insect invasion of Earth in my front yard. When I was fantasizing about a new story, I never, ever thought about another world that was supposedly a parallel universe, filled with magical, telepathic creatures and separated from us by spells and glamour. Last spring, I'd never heard of a world called Unity. Half the time I didn't believe it existed, until one of its residents landed on my doorstep. But I never called them, I swear!

I went back outside, leaving the dogs indoors, to their displeasure. The sparks of light still twinkled here and there, just like on an ordinary summer night filled with the scent of honeysuckle and the sounds of peepers and crickets. Not so ordinarily, the brightest sparkles quickly flew into formation as a tree. No, a burning bush. Holy hell, had they read the Bible? Had they posed for the Bible?

I shook my head, and the bush dissolved into a ball of fire at the level of my head. I didn't feel threatened, not when the ball bounced and swayed playfully. The bugs seemed to be dancing to a merry tune only they could hear. I couldn't hear their voices, out loud or in my head, but I sensed the hundreds of flies packed close together were happy to see me.

I was not happy to see them. “Shoo,” I said. “Go home.” I was careful to keep my voice low and my hands at my sides, mindful of the blister—a tiny one, for all his complaining—on Barry's finger. It wouldn't do to antagonize small visitors with big powers.

Gentle verbal commands didn't work, so I visualized a different place, one with big red trolls and snow-white horses where the language was half vocal, half mental. “Go home,” I said, and thought it as hard as I could.