from Genealogy, a novel

Firefly Flash

It becomes one of those family stories, the kind the family is so good at telling, a story more real than the event itself. See, look, this explains everything.

That night, the family still trembles with an adrenaline rush that comes from dodging death, death who has stepped out of the shadows where it's been lurking all along, foolishly forgotten. In honor of the event, Sam institutes mandatory family dinner. She announces this in what Bernard calls her inimitable Midwestern way (he calls it this because it annoys her but also because it makes her feel known) – Let's fix an existential crisis, but quick, with something practical, he drawls until she throws something substantial but not dangerous, a spoon, a breadbasket, tonight a flip-flop.

"No more drifting in and out. No more eating in front of the television. No more blah, blah, blah, fuzzy around the edges," Sam says from where she leans into a stuck window with her shoulder. The sleeves of the loose blouse she put back on after the accident flutter in the breeze coming in the window on the other side of the room, the one she has succeeded in opening. Through the window, stony Rhode Island fields and fields and more fields filled with mountain laurel, Hollow Joe Pye Weed, jeweled forget-me-nots, eggs-and-butter, Queen Anne's lace, mullein, goldenrod. The gray bark on the trees, trunks entwined with the vines of wild grapes, turns rose with the setting sun, and in the distance, the ocean is a quivering blue line. This new place is paradise; before they went to the beach this afternoon, Sam took the children to pick blackberries from the bushes just outside the front door, and the children stained their hands purple despite her best efforts to keep them from eating all of the berries so there would be enough for a pie. There's not, but she doesn't care. They can do whatever they want. The life preserver snagged on the rocks, held their daughter aloft. They are a lucky, lucky family. She is a lucky, lucky woman, and she will do whatever it takes to prove she never wanted to be anything else, that there never was a moment, a flash, a blink, a not-even-a-second, when she didn't want her children to be alive and well, when a tragedy might have suited her.

"Why does it have to sound like a punishment?" Bernard teases. He's in a great mood. "Mandatory family dinner." He leans over what used to be the train depot's ticket counter, now serving as the entrance to the kitchen, hands in the lobster-claw pot holders Marguerite loves, and twirls a fork around his ear: cuckoo, cuckoo.

"Where is your italicist?" Sam asks, grunting as she still tries to open the window. "You know that little man who jumps up and down behind you whenever you make a really important point?" This is a new family joke, one Sam is especially proud of because the first time she made it, Bernard spit the water he was drinking onto his plate. "By the way," Sam says, laughing despite herself at her own joke, "if I ever get this window open, I'm throwing myself out of it."

Bernard sticks his head out over the ticket counter again, this time with a spice bottle in each lobster-claw hand. "Don't throw yourself out of the window yet. Wait until we've had dinner."

And suddenly the window flies open and there is the smell of the blooming flowers of late spring, and the warm, salty breeze off the ocean, and the underlying rich odor of cow manure. The original giant clock from the train depot hangs in between the bay windows over Sam's head; its second hand sweeping through time as if dismissing it: out of my way!

"We'll eat together like those families we've only heard about and we'll enjoy it!" Sam shouts. She collapses in an armchair stuffed with dolls bought at a thrift store, a...