A Frenzy of Sparks: A Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR A LILY IN THE LIGHT

  “Anyone who loves a study of human behavior under catastrophic circumstances will be swept away by Fields’s dynamic prose and intense psychological suspense.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “What makes this debut novel so engrossing is that it focuses on those left behind to deal with the trauma of such a tragedy.”

  —Red Hook Star-Revue

  “A Lily in the Light draws you in immediately . . . the storytelling is sharp.”

  —MarieClaire.com

  “A deftly scripted and reader-engaging story told with a distinctive narrative style, A Lily in the Light, by Kristin Fields, is a compelling and entertaining read from beginning to end. An impressively crafted psychological suspense novel by a master of the genre.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Fields brings new light and language to the relentlessly terrifying and ever-present subject of lost children and the horrifying fallout that, here, grips the reader from start to finish.”

  —Martha McPhee, author of Bright Angel Time and Dear Money

  “Heartbreaking and compelling, A Lily in the Light is a revelation of what it is to lose yourself and come home again.”

  —Kimberly Brock, award-winning author of The River Witch

  “Honest, heartfelt, and at times wrenching, Fields’s novel exposes every heartache and raw nerve of her compellingly flawed characters, touching on the many ways we punish ourselves and those we love when life leaves us feeling powerless—and how we must ultimately learn to forgive.”

  —Barbara Davis, bestselling author of When Never Comes

  “A Lily in the Light captures family in the throes of chaos. A journey through guilt and suffering and the world of ballet, culminating in the miracles achieved through both. Fields is an emerging literary talent, and her debut, deftly written, uncovers the heart of family and forgiveness.”

  —Rochelle B. Weinstein, USA Today bestselling author

  “Poignant and gripping, Fields’s writing will break your heart and put it back together again.”

  —Kaela Coble, author of Friends and Other Liars

  “A haunting and beautifully rendered tale of survival and the careful tending to a wild and desperately needed hope. Highly recommended.”

  —Therese Walsh, critically acclaimed author of The Moon Sisters

  “Magical and gritty by turns, Esme’s story—of family and the search for self—is as radiant as it is unforgettable.”

  —Sophie McManus, critically acclaimed author of The Unfortunates

  ALSO BY KRISTIN FIELDS

  A Lily in the Light

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Kristin Fields

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542022446

  ISBN-10: 1542022444

  Cover design by Philip Pascuzzo

  Dad, this one’s for you.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chapter One

  Queens, 1965

  The bolt slid back from the latch easily, but the doors were rusted shut. Oxidation from water on metal. The canal flooded when the moon was full and the tide was high or when rain came on suddenly enough to flip leaves to their underbellies; that was when the water lapped over bulkheads and rolled up the street, gobbling concrete and lawns, sometimes getting as high as the front porch, where the bunny hutch sat next to her mother’s tomato plants.

  Today the sun was a hazy ball in the sky. There weren’t any airplanes. The tarps on the new houses across the swimming canal flapped in the breeze. There were only a few minutes until her mother would ask for help before everyone came over for coffee and cake after church, as they did every Sunday. The metal door was hot beneath her foot as she tugged at the other until it sprang open, jarring her shoulder, stale musk rising as strong as when she lifted a lid off a saucepot on the stove. Gia flicked on her flashlight and took the first few steps into the cool basement air, where she’d certainly find chemicals.

  The basement dripped. Weathered posts cut into the earth every few feet to hold the house up. The flashlight made a fuzzy circle on the ground, on the old kitchen cabinets where her father stored junk tools, empty paint cans, wood varnish, sprays with faded labels. Holding her breath, she flipped a can; a skull and crossbones warned against touching, the ingredients unpronounceable, even for Gia. She was thirteen, the best reader in her class, but couldn’t be bothered with Nancy Drew or Tiger Beat, not when Silent Spring claimed people were poisoning the world. Even the author had died of cancer, which proved chemicals built up in living things until they killed them.

  It was happening here, right at Mr. Angliotti’s house. His wife had died a few years ago, and his three grown kids lived on Long Island. Mass was said for his wife at Our Lady of Grace every month, and he always sat in the first pew when her name was read. He watered her rosebushes and had planted a fig tree, which didn’t fruit because it was too sad. Gia couldn’t remember what his wife had looked like, only that she’d thrown steaming buckets of pasta water into the garden instead of down the drain. Gia’s family wasn’t related to the Angliottis, but they had lived on the same block for so long they might as well be.

  Last week, when Mr. Angliotti had been reading his newspaper on the stoop, Gia had ridden by on her bike, streamers flapping lazily in the heat, when the birds had suddenly gone quiet, and then they’d spiraled onto the lawn. Birds didn’t fall. It was wrong and had stuck to Gia’s bones, so she’d dusted off the book Sister Gregory had given her before summer vacation, rereading the parts about orange groves where people fell down dead or bees making poisonous honey, the places in the book no longer far away and fairy-tale-like but right here.

  They’d put the dead sparrows in a garbage bag, and three days later, men in white suits had taken the tree down with a chain saw, carting away branches, leaves, and trunk until all that was left was a stump.

  They were probably Soviets testing a new radioactive signal or something, a Cold War weapon, dissecting those birds in an underground bunker. Her brother, Leo, said it was a stupid idea. Her cousin Ray said sparrowcide was a thing, and yes, he’d heard of it, and the cats were next—but Ray was usually full of it.

  The scariest thing Gia could imagine was sucking in poison all day. It was everywhere: in the hose bulbs that watered lawns; in the wax on supermarket fruit; soaked into thin berry
skin; in the trails planes left behind when they took off over her house from John F. Kennedy, so close kids playing in the street jumped for the underbellies of the metal birds, hoping to touch them if they timed it right; or in the oily rainbow slicks in the canal. She’d found these in one week. Chemicals were everywhere.

  “Gia!” Her mother’s voice was muffled from above. Plates clattered. The lawn mower revved outside; a shadow passed in the square of light through the basement door. It was time. These buttoned-up chemicals couldn’t have killed the sparrows. She should have known there wouldn’t be anything important down here, not where the floodwater could get it. She did a quick search for fish bones, but only pebbles crunched under her Keds. That was another thing her mother wouldn’t be happy about, dirtying her Keds.

  The lawn mower passed again, closer. Gia shut the cabinets as the lawn mower stopped, spinning a blade over the same patch of grass, opening up its insides. How did grass bounce back week after week? Like hair or fingernails.

  The basement door slammed shut. The bolt latched. Gia had to blink back the darkness, even with her flashlight. Trapped, she found the things in the cabinets scarier now, leaking stuff that would soak into Gia’s spongy lungs until she suffocated.

  “Shit.” Gia pulled her T-shirt over her mouth, banged on the door with the butt of the flashlight, rattling the battery until the light sputtered out. Not even a line of light came through the basement doors. The mower was on the other side of the lawn now, near the garage. If it was her father, he wouldn’t hear her. If it was her brother, he’d probably done it on purpose.

  She sat on the dark steps, damp seeping into her shorts. At least she’d changed out of her church clothes. Her mother couldn’t be mad about that too.

  She closed her eyes, waiting for the mower to cut out so someone would hear her. If it didn’t, she’d dig a tunnel. Solving problems without adults was good practice for taking the boat out alone. She imagined the bay now, saltwater air filling her nose, waves lapping over the sides of the boat. There were probably a thousand centipedes down here. And spiders. They could see her in the dark, but she could not see them. Her breath left a hot, wet spot on her shirt. Just a few more minutes. She was bigger than everything down here, top dog in the basement animal kingdom.

  The lawn mower stopped. Please, Gia prayed, let it be Dad. She banged on the door until her fist buzzed. Yelling meant breathing the air down here. No. The soft thud the sparrows had made when they’d hit the grass was enough to keep her hand over her mouth. She banged harder.

  The door sprang open, the sudden sun blinding.

  “What’d you expect from playing in the basement?” Her father, Eddie, smirked, rubbing his hand through his hair, spiky with sweat. “Playing” was for kids in miniature plastic houses with food that snapped together. Gia was not “playing.”

  “Promise me you were not looking for chemicals.”

  The blue ink anchor on her father’s arm came into focus, done on a navy cruiser. He always knew. It was the most annoying thing about having a cop for a father. Even off duty, he still angled to the side, never baring his full chest, one hand ready where his holster would be, and he listened to what people weren’t saying instead of the words coming out of their mouths. She couldn’t lie, so she said nothing.

  “Your mother’s looking for you.”

  “Did she actually leave the kitchen?” The words shot out. Too far. Gia braced. She wasn’t too old to get smacked.

  He held up one warning finger. Thankfully, it was the first one today.

  “Your rabbits are back.” Her father threw the oily lawn-mowing towel over his shoulder. “Whoever took ’em didn’t want any part of the babies.”

  Gia darted off, the flashlight swinging against her thigh. A cardboard box had her stolen black rabbit and red-eyed white one, plus five pinkish babies, too small to open their eyes yet. They’d been gone one morning, the latch swinging, maybe a joke, but now she picked them up, nestling them in her hands. All five fit together as snug as a single breathing thing. She’d never seen anything so small except mice or fiddler crabs, but this was different. Their backs were warm under her fingertips, new hearts beating inside paper-thin skin.

  “Don’t get too attached,” her mother, Agnes, said from the doorway. “They won’t all make it.”

  And some would be dinner one day.

  Gia nodded. She understood; you cleared your plate even if it turned your stomach, but she could feed them lettuce or strawberries sometimes, let them hop on the grass, keep them safe from chemicals. Animals with eyes on the sides of their heads were designed to detect danger instead of pursuing it. That was where Gia could help them. They were otherwise helpless in their box.

  “Put more straw for the babies; then I need you inside.”

  Her father set up folding tables next to Nonna’s old statue of the Virgin Mother and the peony bushes she’d planted when Gia had been born. The green parakeets on the phone wire hopscotched over each other, someone’s pets set free. Her brother was riding a bike in the street in lazy circles, one of the castoffs Uncle Frank had brought home from the dump, with her cousin Tommy on the back. At fifteen, Leo was already too tall for it. His knees stuck out like open car doors on either side. He slowed down long enough for Tommy to kick over an empty garbage can.

  A window popped open across the street as Leo circled back toward the house, and Joseph Salerno’s mother stuck her head out, still in rollers at noon.

  “Leo!” she called. “Hey, Leo!”

  Leo slowed to a stop. Her father rested the folding table against his leg and turned to watch.

  “Next time you fight my son, don’t hit him in the face. He couldn’t see right for a week.”

  Leo smiled and waved. The window slammed shut. He was the best fighter in the neighborhood. Everyone wanted to fight him in the lot behind the rectory, even scrawny Joseph Salerno. Instead of worry lines creasing her mother’s forehead, she was smiling, shaking her head. Even her father smirked as Leo threw the bike down on the lawn. He earned straight Cs to Gia’s As and broke more things than he fixed, but their parents called him old stock, a leftover of their life on the Lower East Side, where men did pull-ups off fire escapes and got into scraps over crooked looks. Leo had been born with it even though he’d never lived there, even though they’d moved here to get away from all that. It made for good war heroes, cops, firemen, people who could stomach danger.

  “How come he never has to help? He didn’t even go to church.” Neither did her father, not even on Christmas or Easter, because he’d heard too many unanswered prayers in the South Pacific. He studied instead, his GED books spread around him on the kitchen table.

  “Women pray.” Her mother stepped aside in the doorway, handing Gia a peach apron. “Men move heavy things. Now come on.”

  Her mother could type eighty words per minute and moved like a typewriter ribbon, light on her feet, mousy curls springing around her head. She scheduled jurors for court in Queens, but on weekends, she was always barefoot, carried cigarettes in her apron pocket, stripped the beds on Sunday morning before church and hung them to dry on the line afterward, thumbing through Reader’s Digest with a glass of milk and a cigarette for recipes she would never make. She had the same wiry build as Leo, the same blue eyes and slightly disheveled look, as if the wind had blown them around for a few minutes and suddenly stopped. That was probably why she favored Leo more and her father favored Gia. They were mirrors of each other.

  Gia tucked the last rabbit into the hutch. It wavered on its gummy legs, sniffing her fingers, eyes dark under the pink lids. Gia moved him closer to his mother, nestling him in beside the others. Food rabbits shouldn’t have names, but this one was Buster.

  Inside, Gia didn’t complain about pouring milk from the big container to a small one or putting sugar cubes in a bowl with a tiny spoon, even though it was ridiculous, just like ironing shirts or polishing spoons or wiping down the kitchen wallpaper after cooking fish. Women’s work
stank. Polished silver wasn’t necessary for survival, not like fishing or chopping wood. But at thirteen, it was expected of her. She hated it.

  “When you’re done, change into one of Lorraine’s old dresses and brush your hair. A nice dress, please. No more shorts for today.”

  Gia groaned, wishing she could sit on the dock with her feet in the water and watch leaves float until she forgot about chemicals and becoming a young lady, but said nothing. One warning was enough, and she wanted to ask her father, again, if she could take the boat out by herself, so she wore the apron, poured milk, transferred sugar, and swept the kitchen without being asked before Aunt Ida and Uncle Frank pulled up in their convertible, top down, Aunt Ida’s hair tied in a yellow scarf even though they lived only two blocks away.

  When it was time to change, Gia dabbed her mother’s day cream on until she looked like a wet shell, brushed her hair, bobby pinned the wisps behind each ear. Lorraine’s old seafoam frock with the white collar was tolerable even though it came down past her knees and the seam itched, but it had pockets in front. When no one was looking, she’d carry Buster around like a baby kangaroo.

  Outside, Uncle Frank was going on about the new houses across the canal having Westinghouse air conditioners, washer/dryer units, and dishwashing machines so the ladies could kick their heels up all day. In the kitchen, Agnes and Aunt Ida were talking about fertilizer for African violets, clanging plates. Her father lit the barbecue, making everything smell like charcoal and lighter fluid.

  It was painfully boring. Uncle Frank and Aunt Ida stirred up a kind of disgust in Gia with the way they watched everything and stored it up to gossip about later. Did you notice how the paint chips off the shutters? Or the grease on the stove? Where’s their pride? It made Gia miss the uncles she’d never met, her father’s three brothers lost at war, who used to sit on the stoop in the Lower East Side and knew everyone in the neighborhood, playing cards with real bets, letting the kids see their hands. Getting stuck with Uncle Frank and Aunt Ida instead wasn’t fair.