One Last Thing Before I Go

steps out of the water and trudges up the knoll, his feet sloshing in his sneakers, to where Denise and Casey are standing, looking on in horror. Denise runs past him and down into the water to where Rich is standing. Silver stands beside Casey and they watch from a distance as Denise talks to him.
    “Your nose is bleeding,” Casey says to him without a trace of sympathy.
    “That’s OK.”
    “Does it hurt?”
    “Not yet. But it will.”
    Denise is crying now, wringing her hands as she pleads her case to Rich. Watching them, Silver understands that they will not come apart over this, and he is both glad and, on some level, moderately insulted.
    “We should probably leave them alone,” Silver says.
    “Yeah,” Casey says. “You should probably leave us all alone.”
    “You’re still mad at me.”
    “What gave it away?”
    She won’t look at him, and that hurts. Her tone hurts. His bleeding nose hurts. He searches his fuzzy mind for a route to navigate through her anger, but he comes up empty. Lately he has no problem saying all the things he should keep to himself, but when it comes to saying the things that matter, he falls infuriatingly silent.
    “Thing is,” he says, indicating Denise, “she was my ride. You think Rich will lend me his car?”
    She shakes her head. “Jesus, Silver. I can’t believe what a douche you can be sometimes.”
    “I’d think you would be used to it by now.”
    She looks down at the lake, then back at him, and sighs wearily. “I’ll get my keys.”
    He follows behind her as she heads up the knoll, stopping to pull off his drenched sneakers. He turns to look back at Denise and Rich, still standing knee-deep in the lake, and forces himself to say a mental good-bye to Denise. Whatever happens from here on out, he knows that he can no longer think of her as his anymore. Which you would think should have been obvious all along, but Silver has a long and storied history, has in fact made something of a religion out of ignoring the obvious until it’s far too late.

CHAPTER 41
    D enise sits on the porch deck slapping at mosquitoes on her arms and neck as she watches Rich fish from his boat. He has been out there all evening, and seems in no rush to come back in. She can’t actually see him anymore; the sun has long since disappeared and a thick curtain of darkness hangs over the lake. What she’s watching is the small red fishing light of his boat bobbing up and down a hundred yards out in the black nothingness of the lake. The neon bulbs of fireflies periodically ignite, tracing quick, psychotic flight paths that you’d have to be an insect to understand. Lightning bugs. Rich calls them lightning bugs, not fireflies. Rich, who built the dock below by himself, who takes pleasure in catching, filleting, and cooking his own dinner, and who is a man in almost all of the ways Silver isn’t, calls them lightning bugs. And sitting there in the darkness, Denise promises herself that from now on she will call them that too. Lightning bugs. It’s the least she can do.
    She slaps at another mosquito, even though she knows it’s pointless. They have the darkness and numbers on their side, and they will have their blood. She should go inside; she knows that, too, but doesn’t feel entitled to sit in the warm lights of his home without his blessing. So she sits on the porch deck, drowning the sting of the mosquito bites with the sting of her own slaps, self-flagellating as she berates herself mercilessly for sleeping with Silver. Admittedly, she had drunk a lot of Ruben’s kiddush wine, and as the night wore on, Silver had seemed younger to her, more like the man she had lost all those years ago, and the tragic notion that he couldn’t land on a single reason to save his own life suddenly seemed unbearably tragic to her. Had she been trying to save him? To trick him into thinking there was hope? Or maybe she was just saying good-bye? She keeps going back to the moment of that first kiss, trying to isolate what it was that had been in her head, but whatever she was thinking then, she can’t access it now. Which will make it pretty hard to explain things to Rich when he finally brings the boat in.
    When she got back up from the lake earlier, her feet soaked and frigid, her shoes ruined, she was relieved to see that Silver and Casey were gone. Let him sort things out with her. It won’t be easy; she knows that from years of doing battle with Casey, who isn’t above fighting