fireflies

I hadn’t seen a firefly in two summers. I couldn’t remember much at all from the past two years in general, but I especially noticed the absence of the fireflies. Luke would collect them in jars on our windowsills where they’d sit for months, basking in the moonlight and calling out to each other with their own glow without making a single sound. Summer was made soft by their presence, like a washed out painting in a picture book. Everything made sense.

Lately, my life had been a whole lot of white. White floors, white hallways, white blankets. I’d started wearing more color just to have it on my body. The nurses looked at me like I was crazy every time I visited the hospital – I never was good at color matching – but that didn’t matter to me. Besides, some homemade goods shut them right up.

I don’t even remember seeing fireflies when I was younger. I must have, probably held them in the palms of my hands like every other sticky five year old, but the memory evades me. There’s an old picture of me somewhere kneeling down on the sidewalk to observe an ant with a magnifying glass. Maybe that’s where Luke got it from, his little love for bugs. It started before he could even walk.

It was terrifying, at first, to me as a young mom just trying to keep her son alive. That’s all motherhood is sometimes. As he grew older, I became tougher. Learned not to freak out when he let something or another crawl all over him. As long as he didn’t put it in his mouth, I could live with it.

He caught his first firefly at four.

“Mama, mama! Look! A star!”

He’d been so excited to show me, he’d tripped over his chubby legs and fallen right over in the dirt. Immediately, fat tears started flowing down his face. I started frantically checking his knees for scratches, blood, but all along he’d been worried about the firefly – the star – flying out of his hands.

It became routine after that. Winter, spring, summer, or fall, he’d keep his eyes out for fireflies, and out of habit, I started to too. And every time, it was like he was four years old all over again, catching a star with his own two hands.

Once, we’d been laying on the back porch after a long day on the beach when he pointed to our miniscule vegetable garden.

“There! Another one.”

“Hmm? Oh, you’re right! You’ve got such an eye for them Luke, don’t you?”

He hummed in response.

“You know Alicia? From the pool?” he asked after a beat.

Sometimes, I took him to the community center pool to play with other kids, but he always preferred it outside.

“Yeah, of course, what about her?” I sat up a little straighter.

“She said that she calls fireflies lightning bugs. Isn’t that cool?”

I laughed. I wished something as simple as a name could awe me the way it did him.

“That’s awesome, buddy.”

He yawned. I watched him in the softly fading moonlight, realizing we hadn’t taken a single picture together at the beach because we’d been having too much fun. That one moment though, watching as he slowly fell asleep after a long day in the sun, happy and home, stuck in my mind more than the entire rest of the day.

--

I leaned forward in the chair and brushed soft strands of hair away from Luke’s face. Everyone used to say he looked exactly like his father, but I think that was just to try and make it seem like he was still there. No, those brown curls were mine, and that sweeping nose, and those soft freckles, and those unopened green eyes. He was mine.

It was the latter half of visiting hours, about the time my back started to ache from the uncomfortable chair and my heart started to ache from the silence. Luke’s bedside table was cluttered with knick knacks. A bouquet here, a rubber duck there. Like just the right number of toys would be enough to entice him to wake up. If only that were true.

In the bed, Luke was tiny. All I could see was his pale, sallow face, obscured by the breathing and feeding machines connected to his body. The thing they don’t tell you about your son being in a coma is that every day hurts exactly the same. It never gets easier or better or less terrible. The hospital does not become comfortable, and the doctors do not get any more hopeful.

After the first year, I stopped trying to talk to him out loud. I couldn’t bear to hear my own broken voice echo throughout the hospital room without even a semblance of a response from him. Internally though, I was in a constant conversation with him.

Luke, today I ate lasagna. Your favorite, remember? Luke’s lasagna?

Today, I started crying at work. I said it was allergies but I don’t think anyone believed me.

I saw your old friend Alicia from the pool. She asked about you. Everyone misses you, Luke.

In my mind, he would answer. I knew him so well I could almost guarantee exactly what he would say. But I would’ve given anything just to hear his voice again.

The door to Luke’s room opened with an insufferable creak and I teared my eyes away from Luke to see who it was.

“Ah, Ms. Williams. A pleasure to see you, as always. Are you well?” Dr. Johnson stepped in and shut the door behind him, keeping his distance from both me and my son’s all but lifeless body.

“Dr. Johnson.” I flicked my eyes towards Luke and back to him before forcing a smile. “Yes, thank you. And yourself?”

“I am just fine, thank you. Do you mind if we have a quick chat about…about your son?”

I looked back at Luke, my gaze catching on the crease between his eyebrows. He looked focused, the same way he used to look when he was trying to catch something – a ball, a yo-yo, a firefly. Dr. Johnson cleared his throat. “Ma’am?”

“Right. Of course. Shall we step into the hallway so as to not disturb Luke?” I pulled myself up from the chair, my whole body aching with the effort. Dr. Johnson smiled the smile of a man humoring a crazy woman.

I let him open the door for me as we stepped into the even more depressing hallway.

“I understand these past few years have been extremely difficult for you, and I assure you that we have been doing everything we can here to take care of your son.”

I nodded, bracing myself for the inevitable but in his sentence. I focused on the far off clicking of some secretary’s keyboard and tried to time my breathing to her even strokes.

“However, there is some concern that the resources the hospital is spending in order to keep Luke alive might be better utilized elsewhere. We sympathize deeply with the difficult position you are in,” he said, putting a hand on his heart, “but it’s been over six months since we’ve declared it medically futile to continue treating him. If Luke feels anything at this point, we believe it is only pain. It is in both his and our best interests to cut treatment. Is that an option you’re open to considering?”

I inhaled deeply, feeling the burn of all the different chemicals coursing through the hospital. I wondered about that phrase – his best interest. Luke’s best interest. Was there such a thing anymore? Dr. Johnson’s words stung, even though I knew he wasn’t trying to be cruel. It was a miracle I had been able to keep paying for treatments as long as I had. The insurance companies had, of course, refused to pay anything after the doctors declared the possibility of Luke waking up to be “negligible.” Like it was the same as the possibility of rain the next day.

“Ms. Williams…? Do you need a moment?” Dr. Johnson stepped closer to me, and I saw that he was holding out a tissue towards me. I took it and wiped the tears that had escaped my eyes.

In the days after the accident, still fresh with hope, I would watch Luke in his hospital bed and imagine all the things we would do together when he was discharged. I’d read him the Bernstein Bears books while he recovered, and we would cuddle on the couch and watch Despicable Me a million times, and I would make him lasagna until he was sick of it, and I would never let him out of my sight again.

Now, instead, I’d started thinking about what it’d say on his gravestone.

Luke Williams, gone too soon.

Luke Williams, son and friend.

Luke Williams, bringer of light.

“How would we start with…removing the life support?”

“If you need a few days to think it over, we understand. It’s a big decision.”

I crumpled the tissue and held it firm in my palm.

“It’s time.”

--

The sun was just starting to set, and the world was awash in deep orange and red. I adjusted my seating in the grass, hugging my knees close to my body. In front of me, Luke’s small gravestone seemed to glow. I read and reread the inscription, the numbers dictating how long he’d lived. They could measure his life by how many days it had lasted, but they could never measure the impact he had left.

A small flying bug landed on the gravestone. Before I could move to shoo it away, it lit up from the inside out.

A firefly. The first one I’d seen since the accident. Here, of all places.

It crawled over the stone, still lit, settling on the L of Luke.

Even released from the woes of this world, he had the love of its creatures. The firefly flew away, leaving me alone once more. I would have to relearn how to live my life without Luke’s constant presence, changing and growing while he remained forever the same. Here though, there were no four walls trapping him inside. Here, the fireflies could keep him company when I could not.

The sun fully set, and the summer night began.