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Three in the morning, and he’s got the window open in the bedroom, just cracked enough to let the curl of smoke drift out and up into the air. He knows you don’t like the smell, but you like him anyway, and he swears he’s trying to quit.
And he tells himself it’s not because of you, or that for once, he thinks he’s got a hold of something real.
Speaking it out loud would break the spell, unravel all the careful construction that he’s made, both in his mind and his physical world to keep you just close enough that you don’t leave.
He’s not sure he can handle anything else.
You haven’t said, and he hasn’t asked, but he’s fallen into a rhythm with you, the welcoming presence of acceptance that comes with someone who isn’t out to prove anything. The two of you fit, and it’s easy. Easy in a way that he’s heard people say, like when Steve told him how he knew Connie was the one for him when she gave him her real phone number instead of blowing him off. Steve always told him he’d know when it happened.
Now that he knows, it scares the shit out of him.
You aren’t easy in the way that you are low-maintenance or give in to his moods. He loves that you challenge him, and expect more of him. But it’s the way you do it that throws him for a loop. It’s a quiet and steely determination that seems to come from some endless source. And it’s the easy way you let him warm up to you that makes you impossible to shake.
The first time you meet, it’s in a budget meeting of all places. You have a go at him, but in a way that makes him feel like even when he gives up five percent of his budget in Medellín, he truly believes you’ve cut him a good deal. The second time, you sit down at the bar next to him. You don’t ask, but you just sit there and drink in companionable silence, pretending to watch the telenovela that’s on mute over the bar.
When Javier gets up to leave, you smile at him and ask him to stay a while longer.
He does.
The third time, he’s gotten bold enough to think he might try to be a regular person and ask you out on a date. It’s a tiny little place that has cold beer and arepas. The waiter dumps a hot arepa right into your cleavage, and you laugh so hard you cry. Javi isn’t sure if he should laugh with you, but the fact that you don’t immediately remove the bread from your chest makes him laugh so hard that he can’t remember the last time he let his body just enjoy itself.
When he walks you home, you’re still picking pieces of bread out from between your breasts.
By the fourth time, it’s a long walk and ice cream and he’s holding your hand and taking you home. And he’s realizing that he’s probably a goner, and he’s not sure how to get out of it.
He’s lost count of all the times between then and now. You are here, as you always are now, sleeping peacefully. You don’t live with him in theory, but your clothes hang next to his, and he discovers he likes your shampoo more than his own, and some days, he uses it. It should feel confining, but it doesn’t. He still feels like he has space to breathe, and you never give him more than he can handle.
And even though you help him sleep a little better, he can’t escape the past completely, and the cover of night gives him a little space to breathe life into things he’d rather forget to try to make sense of it all.
Tonight is unusually dark; a late summer storm’s veil of clouds hang low as he watches a drunk stumble across the road. The air feels clean and charged, the low rumbles of weakening thunder a comforting and familiar sound.
Colombia is changing in ways that make Javi wonder if there will be a place for him in its future. Retirement holds no interest, and he hopes he can find something before the DEA wrings out the last of him and hangs him out to dry.
His eyes catch the light before his brain registers what he’s seeing. A lone firefly, its bioluminescence almost like sense memory as it weaves and bobs around the lit end of Javi’s cigarette.
Fireflies mean hope, Javier. See how the light moves? That’s the path out of the darkness.
“Cici…” He whispers as he looks up to the darkened sky, his eyes glassy and far away, his resolve breaking as memories force themselves to a reckoning.
--
She died in June, the week before school ended. He remembers because he never got to go to the class party, and when he came back for school in the Fall, everyone was talking about how cool it was that Mrs. Jensen had given all the boys comic books.
And Javi remembers how at the time, it felt like the worst thing in the world, even worse than being the kid at school with no mom.
He’d been carted off to his grandmother’s for the summer, his father too bereft to deal with the ranch, his dead wife, and his son all at once.
It had been his first trip on a plane. His father had watched him walk down and out to the tarmac. The weak wave Chucho had managed and the slump of his shoulders was the first time he’d seen a wrecked man, and he didn’t know how to fix all the brokenness that had shattered their lives.
The roar of the engines and the tremor of the plane had scared him, but he had kept his eyes firmly ahead, staring at the orange fabric of the seat in front of him until he felt nauseous. Even when the flight attendant had offered him a chance to see the cockpit, he shook his head and sat on his hands, the shimmy of the plane too much to even think of getting up.
No one told him why his grandmother lived so far away; he’d never met the man who was her husband, and when his grandfather died in a farm accident, she left town and never remarried.
Dolores had been his grandmother’s name, but he always called her Cici. Her square shoulders and determined gaze had greeted his weariness the minute he stepped off the plane into the humidity-soaked Virginia summer.
“Have you eaten?”
“Too sick on the plane.”
“You have to eat, Javier. If I send you back home all flaco, your father will kill me.”
It had not been the best choice of words, but Javier learned that Cici didn’t really mute herself for anyone.
And she had tried to fill the hollow space that his mother’s death created in him. Not just with food, but with the love his shaken father had forgotten how to give and tried to allow his grief to expand and exist. As an adult, Javier realized she tried to indulge him in a way that only a woman who’d been denied her own loss can do.
And so Javi ate whatever Cici gave him. Fresh turkey sandwiches, simple but rich with homemade mayonnaise, and as much salt as his mouth could bear. Tortillas lovingly pressed each morning with corn and cheese, sizzled in a cast-iron pan that never seemed to stop cooking throughout the day, the sing and hiss of bacon grease meeting the next meal to be served. Steamed crab and fresh oysters, spoils of her summer business.
Years later, Javi found out that it hadn’t been an accident that killed his grandfather. After many months of failed crops and no money, the sheriff had come to repossess their farm, and Alexander had stood his ground.
Until it had been swept under him by a twelve gauge. Cici had left rather than live with the ghosts that were bound to follow her around Laredo.
She had let him sit for hours on her dock while she worked, his legs dangling precariously over the edge, the murky brown water of the inlet enticing in a way that only a child who had lost everything could find comfort in. Sometimes she would let him swim when the currents weren’t too rough, and he would dive down into the coolest spots and try to stay there as long as his breath would allow.
That’s where he had tried to talk to his mother, the water mixing with tears so he’d never have to tell anyone he’d cried.
Cici would let him stay up late, the warm summer weather and the lack of air conditioning meant long nights out on the open porch, half-reading the books he had lugged from Texas, but mostly listening to the radio. She loved music, and she’d tried to teach him the Mashed Potato, much to his embarrassment. But Cici had reminded him it was just the two of them and who cared anyway? Your body was meant to move.
Somewhere around Mid-July, Javier had felt better. Lighter. They had driven into town and he’d gone to the library to get new books, and Cici had stopped at the dairy bar where they both had hot fudge sundaes. She had finally let him look at her records, and he fell in love with Patsy Cline.
And that’s when the fireflies came.
“Why are there so many?” Cici had turned off the porch light so that he could get a better look. They seemed to be everywhere; their lights created a pleasant hum as they danced across the darkened sky.
“They’re just trying to find each other. See how their little butts blink? That’s their signal.”
“But why do they glow?”
Cici had shrugged, her face a bit distant. “I don’t know Javier. But fireflies are a bellwether of hope. Anytime you see them, just remember - they are helping you to see the path to your own light.”
“What’s a bellwether?” Javier felt guilty for not knowing the word. His father would make him go to the dictionary and look things up when he asked.
“Like a prediction?” Her face held encouragement that he’d get what she had been saying.
“Oh, yeah. I get it.”
He hadn’t really gotten it at the time, but the conversation stuck around in his memory, like a fragmented movie.
The fireflies came every night in July, but by August, it was too hot, and Cici had told him they had done their jobs and moved on.
And Javi knew that Cici had meant more with her words than she let on.
He had hugged her tightly when she brought him to the airport, burying his face in her warm skin. The smell of her rose soap had become the comfort he craved on the days when it was too much and he missed his mom more than he thought he could handle.
“I’ll come to Texas, Javier. The fireflies come in June and so will I.” She had held his hand, and he hadn’t been embarrassed at all, because he had wanted just one more moment of peace.
When he returned to Texas, he was better, but his father wasn’t. Chucho’s grief was too wide to allow him any room, so he learned to move quietly and keep his head down. He studied harder and let his father spend his days far out on the ranch, breaking the earth and his body until he came back so tired he’d often skip dinner and go straight to sleep.
Cici had gotten sick the summer after he stayed with her and she couldn’t come visit. The fireflies didn’t come to Texas that year. And then Javier stopped noticing if they ever came back.
She didn’t get any better.
When Cici died a few years later, he and his father went back to her house. Javi had been almost sixteen. She had left him her record collection and her only piece of jewelry - a firefly necklace.
Give it to someone who sees your light. The note had been written in her large, looping handwriting. He had hidden it away from his father out of teenage embarrassment. What girl would want some stupid necklace? But he had kept it, mostly because it had been Cici’s, but also because those nights with her and the fireflies had been the happiest after his mother had died.
The last night, before the auctioneer came to sell the house, Javier sat on the old porch. A little saggier than he had remembered, the wet summer doing a number on the wood. His father had let him have a beer after all the work they’d done clearing things out, and he looked out across the craggy lawn to the water, its glassiness cut by the silver of the moon.
He had sworn he had seen a single firefly skimming the dark water, its glow brighter than any he’d seen in the summer of ‘62.
Javier didn’t believe in God anymore, and he didn’t believe in signs. But for a moment, he had believed that Cici had come to say her final goodbye in the best way she knew how.
--
The firefly buzzes around him still. It’s the first time he’s seen one in all his time in Colombia and the reasons he’s never stopped a moment to look into the sky above his eyes, his gaze always firmly set on something else - Escobar, Helena, Stechner, Gabriela, Judy, Berna -- the list of rotating characters that truly kept his attention until you eclipsed them all.
He thinks about Cici and about all her words, and he swears he’s not going to take it as a sign. But Javi knows that he is the best at lying to himself out of everyone he knows.
He’s not going to let a firefly break him.
The cigarette dangles, its usefulness exhausted, and he stubs it out on the makeshift ashtray you’ve given him. He’s going to really try not to smoke the rest of the day.
The bed dips as he sits, and he looks back to see if you stir. When you roll slightly, your arms open, he knows you’ve been awake for a while, and he marvels that you allow him to just be.
He turns around and lays his head on your chest, your hands sleepily carding into his hair, and Javi can feel the perfect press of your nails gently scratching his scalp. It’s soothing to feel the tug, reminding him that he is in fact, alive, underneath all the pain, rage, and bureaucracy.
Your heartbeat is sure and strong, and each bit of puffed air exhale in the quiet reminds him that you know so much of him, mapped through hours of determined resolution to get to know him.
You are almost like home, but of course, he can’t tell you that.
“It’s about time you came back.” Your voice is soft, perfect, and he can see the hit of a smile at the corners of your lips.
Javi realizes that you know exactly where he’s been. Maybe not exactly, but he knows that you know when he indulges in trips to past mistakes, past failings, running over all the worst moments in his head until they make some sense.
It’s at that moment he decides that he loves you. Not in that hopeful, youthful way, but in the way that his bones ache to not hear your voice or know your touch. The way he allows you to hold him in silence after everything that had to go right doesn't, and he doesn’t have to pretend to be anything but himself, which he still feels isn’t much.
But it’s enough for you.
“I’m here.” And he is because he turns his face slightly to kiss your night-cooled skin, and he feels the goosebumps rise as he scrapes his stubbled-roughened cheek against you, your hands holding his head as he lifts his body up until he’s facing you, your sleepy eyes still gazing at him with the same benevolence and patience you’ve had since the very first day you met.
And when he leans down to kiss you, he tries his best to touch you with all the love he can give, even in his broken state, and he hopes that it’s enough. Because if he isn’t, and you leave, it may permanently scar him.
“You should get some sleep.” You nudge your nose against his, an affection that has grown over time until it’s become your own special thing, something no one else has done to him, and Javier knows that you are letting him be with his thoughts for just a while longer.
“I will. Promise.”
You touch his face, and gently cup his cheek, your fingers playing with the strands that have been met with neglect from too much work and not enough personal care. He knows you love the way they curl, even if you think they are a nuisance.
“Javi, you know, you are beautiful,” you murmur as your eyes close, and your arm wraps around him, secure and sure in its grip.
Javier knows that there is no way back from this. He’s scared in a way that he hasn’t been in a long time. This isn’t running down narcos or hanging on for dear life in a helicopter. It’s admitting that someone was finally able to break inside and wrest his emotion from the bone and make it whole flesh.
Tomorrow, he’ll tell you. About Cici, the fireflies, his mother, and how he never was the same after that summer. And how he never wanted to get close to anyone because death followed love.
And he’ll unburden himself of the tiny box he’s carried with him from Virginia to Texas to Colombia, fulfilling Cici’s last wish.
He’s ready to let someone see his light.