Moth Music by Kathy Stevenson

     Three months had passed since my wife died, and the children and I still tiptoed around the house like we did when she was sick. She died at home, in May, near the end of the school year, so I turned over the last few weeks of my classes to a colleague in the Biology Department. Our son and daughter, in sixth grade and third grade respectively, were told they could make up any missed work during the summer. These thick packets of work still sat in bright red folders on a shelf in the kitchen where all miscellaneous papers, coupons, and restaurant menus ended up.

     My wife’s parents left last week. They had stayed on to help shuttle the kids around to their summer activities, and also because neither they nor I wanted to move on, like they say you are supposed to. We had decided it would be best for the kids to stay in their usual sports camps. We had also decided that cocktail hour was best not faced alone at this point. But now those camps were over and there were two more weeks before school began. It seemed remarkable that we had passed through a season when an hour could sometimes be interminable, when even a minute – with its sixty measured ticks – was a thing to be reckoned with.

     We had taken to watching television while eating dinner, something my wife never would have allowed. I watched the “real news” while I got dinner ready and had two beers, and then the kids and I would watch the re-play of last night’s Daily Show and Colbert Report. We would laugh like idiots for an hour, even Maddie, who would watch Sean and me to see if we laughed first. My son was at the age where the irony of everything was dawning on him.

     Then after the shows the two of them would usually go outside and see if any of the neighborhood kids were still out, or they would play in our back yard or disappear into the detached garage. Mary had relegated all science projects to the garage after one too many incidents involving mice, garter snakes, stained carpets, and foul smells. I would stand where Mary used to stand – at the kitchen sink – and peer out into the gathering twilight, trying to keep attuned to what was happening with the kids while I did the dishes. I scraped our plates and then rinsed them good – something Mary and I had disagreed on. I had always maintained that the dishes should go into the dishwasher unscrubbed – that was the whole point of a dishwasher. I had even clipped an article on this topic out of the newspaper, a habit I had when I wanted to prove my point. She used to roll her eyes at these well-intentioned newspaper clippings. Now I found myself doing certain things the way she would have, little things like the dishes, that I had been unwilling to concede the point on.

     I thought I would have been more prepared. The cancer took its time so we were able to have our good-byes. Wouldn’t an accident have been so much worse; a sudden snatching away, with no preparation? She would not stay in the hospital at the end. We hired hospice nurses to help us – a procession of blandly cheerful and capable people we depended upon, even loved while they were here, but then never had the urge to see again. I had folded up the legs of the dining room table and stored it and the six maple chairs in the basement so that the rented hospital bed could go in there. The china cabinet was still there stacked with our wedding china and crystal. I had not put the table back yet.

     Make sure you don’t use that crystal, she had said. I read somewhere that lead crystal can give you lead poisoning. I guess you’ll have to smash it or something. Don’t even give it to the thrift shop. She kept writing down notes for us. She had a notebook for each of us – she had sent her mother to buy her a dozen beautiful journals, where she wrote things she wanted us to know and remember. In mine she had written family birthdays, and also remembrances of events in our lives – things she thought I might have forgotten. Like how she had cried so hard the night before Maddie was born, terrified that she would never be able to love her as much as she loved Sean. Like how funny she had always thought it was that there was a painting of a giant banana in the background of nearly all our wedding photos. Like the first time I told her I loved her. I had not forgotten. I had only known her a month, but already I knew.

     The year before she got sick, my wife had seemed restless to me in a way I couldn’t discern. So many of our friends were separating, in shattering, unimaginable scenarios, and I became unreasonably fearful this would happen to us. Is everything okay? I kept asking her. Are you happy? Stop, she would say. Just stop asking me that. She had something feral in her eyes, like I’d observed in animals that were trapped or protecting something.

     Laying next to her while the children slept upstairs, cupping my hand over her hipbone, running my thumb over her ribs, her breasts. In the dark her sickness seemed a trick, hidden in the night’s shadows. Her restlessness now seemed to have a new focus. She had come back to me, only to leave.

     Sometimes I found myself standing at the sink motionless, looking out the window over the sink like I was waiting for the next thing. This was something I had seen Mary do as well. She claimed it was a good place to think. Think about what, I had wondered, but not asked.

     Listening for the kids’ voices outside, I heard noises in the house I had never noticed before. A creaking in the wooden planks of the floor above me, then another in response. A window shade upstairs might snap shut; the air conditioner unit might click on or off. There seemed to be various taps, drips, rasps.

     It struck me that the children were up to something. There was a furtive busyness about them, especially my son, that I recognized – a preoccupation with some kind of project. I peered out into the yard. Fireflies flickered here and there and a perfect crescent moon (a man-in-the-moon moon Mary had called it) hung curved in the sky over the giant oak in the north corner of our yard. The garage lights were on. Sean would most likely be with his butterflies and frogs and worms and crickets and whatever else he had collected in the row of glass aquariums and wire mesh cages he and I had set up last fall when he’d started showing an interest in such things.

     As I watched out the window, Maddie came flying out of the garage with her special bug net and jar. She twirled in the near dark, did a few balletic leaps, then swooped down on a firefly with her net. She held the net up in the air for a moment, as if inspecting its contents, and then she unceremoniously dumped the firefly into her jar. She repeated this a few more times and then hopped on one foot back to the garage.

     I felt like I was wearing one of those lead aprons they drape over you when you’re getting an x-ray. Do not drink another beer. I walked out the kitchen door toward the garage. Thick, humid air and the lazy whirring of the sprinkler next door on the Feinbergs’ front lawn.

     My kids looked up at me, startled. I hadn’t been out to the garage in weeks. Mary’s father had taken over the yard work while he was here, and her sister had come last month for Mary’s station wagon for her son who was starting college this fall.

     “Is it time to go in, Daddy?” my little girl asked me. Her mouth and teeth were purple from a grape popsicle and she wore the pink cowgirl boots that I had to forcibly remove from her feet every night before bed. She made me put them on Bear-Bear while she slept.

     My son held a microphone in one hand and in the other he held the mini disc recorder he had asked for, for his birthday in June. Actually, he hadn’t asked for anything. Mary had written it down for me just in case she didn’t make it until his birthday.

     “Look, Daddy, we’re collecting sounds!” Maddie went up on her toes into a swanlike pose. Her brother eyed me warily.

     I looked down into one of the glass aquariums and saw dusty brown flutters of movement. The top of the aquarium was covered with a loose wire mesh and Sean had rigged up a small, dim heat lamp just under it.

     “What have you got there?”

     “Wax moths,” he said, coming up next to me. He had just turned thirteen and had all manner of bad smells radiating off him. Unwashed hair, armpit sweat, dirty t-shirt, and wet tennis shoes.

     “It looks like you’ve got a lot of them in there.” I peered into the dusky mass again, and it seemed to undulate. I could pick out wings here and there, and a sweet smell like honey.

     “They’re singing to us,” said Maddie, executing a wobbly cartwheel on the oily concrete floor. “Ta da!” she said as she landed and struck a dramatic pose.

     Sean shot her a look, and then stuck the microphone in one of the droopy pockets of his baggy cargo pants.

     “What do you mean, singing?” I asked.

     “It’s nothing,” he said. “Really, it’s nothing.”

     He then shone his flashlight into two other terrariums. I saw beetles in one and crickets in another, and foliage probably foraged from our yard or the nearby park. A science project then. No harm; actually it was a good sign. He could be out here smoking pot with his buddies like I did when I was his age, but he’s not. He’s out here with his little sister collecting insects. Something like relief flooded through me.

     Maddie’s bug jar sat blinking as the fireflies weakly protested their imprisonment. “We’re waiting for Mommy,” she said. “When she comes, we’re going to record her on the microphone.”

     Sean picked up Maddie’s jar. He unscrewed the lid, and turned it upside down, shaking the fireflies violently out into the air. The fireflies, soporific from their captivity, hung low to the ground for a moment, then started to loop lazily into the air around us.

     “You are such an idiot sometimes,” Sean said to Maddie. “I knew I never should have told you.” He loped out of the garage and disappeared into the darkness of the yard.

     Maddie would not tell me anything else. She took her bath and got ready for bed, and when I went into her room she had already put her cowgirl boots on Bear-Bear.

     “Do you think Sean will come back home, or did he run away?” She was intrigued by the idea of children running away from home and by the whole idea of orphan children in general. I had discovered that children’s literature was full of this sort of thing.

     “I’m sure he’ll be back soon,” I said, noticing she still had purple teeth and lips. “Did you brush your teeth good?”

     “I did, Daddy, but it’s stuck.”

     I kissed her and kissed Bear-Bear, and backed out of her room.

     Back downstairs I resisted a drink. I didn’t know if I should go out and look for Sean or just let him come home on his own. In the end, I couldn’t leave Maddie alone in the house, and instinct told me he would be back. I sat in my usual chair in the living room and tried to read the newspaper. I thought of my own father waiting for me to come home at various times of my life, and how odd it seemed that I was now doing many of the same things he had done. Parents always tell you, just wait until you have your own, but you never really think that anything that happened to them will happen the same way to you.

     During the year before her illness, the time when my wife had been restless, I started to observe her in a way I never had during our marriage, looking for signs of disquiet. When I came home and saw her drinking white wine with the wife of one of our newly separated friends, I imagined Mary confiding in her my failings. If you were in charge of the world, she would say sometimes, when I became exasperated with the chaos of the house and of life, everything would be perfect. But you’re not, and it’s not. We sometimes eyed one another like adversaries in a battle being fought for reasons that were no longer remembered. Petty grievances became annoyances, which, if left unchecked became shortcomings. “It’s just marriage,” she would say, finally. “This is normal. We’re okay. It’s just hard sometimes.”

     After our battle became the cancer I sometimes would go through the house as she slept, looking through her pockets and her purse, and the file folders in her office looking for proof of something. Now I couldn’t even remember what that something might have been. By the time she died she weighed so little that it took no muscle at all to lift her coffin.

     I got up several times to look outside. I had turned off the garage light and shut the door when Maddie and I came in earlier, so I turned the light back on. I debated whether it was too late to call the parents of a few of his friends. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to hear their clucks and sighs of sympathy and concern. I reasoned that they would call me if there was a problem, or if Sean was there and going to stay over.

     In an effort to stay awake, I walked around the living room and kitchen and looked outside again. After Mary died, I had all the time in the world to go through her things, but I found that after she was gone the need to do so left me. Her mother and I tackled the pitiless task of packing her belongings away over the summer when one or the other of us felt up to it. She will never wear this sweater again, this shoe will never go on her foot. It was hard to separate the mundanity of these items – raincoats, hairbrushes, hidden chocolate bars, a hat she wore to summer weddings – from the weight they suddenly acquired with her death.

     Out in the back yard a familiar shape sitting on the grass, and a pinprick of light flashing on and off. Sean. I went back out into the yard.

     “Sean, buddy, what are you up to?” I sat down on the damp grass next to him, but he ignored me and kept shooting the light from his flashlight up into the sky, clicking it on and off. I saw that his face was wet and I wondered if I should say anything.

     “I know it’s hard,” I finally managed. Then I realized that because he had his headphones on he probably hadn’t heard me. I popped one side of the headphones off an ear and said, “Can I listen?”

     He paused a moment, and then said, “I guess.”

     I put the headphones on and adjusted them. They were damp from sweat. I closed my eyes and lay down on the grass next to my son. It wasn’t music, as I’d thought it would be, but something else. A low thrum, a faint primal rhythm, silence punctuated by an otherworldly scree, scree. Then the unmistakable sound of crickets, pure summer sound in my ears. Then a sensation of fluttering, of dusk, a faint pulse of a hundred gossamer wings. “What is it?” I asked him, slipping the earphones down around my neck.

     “It’s moth music,” he said. “I’ve been recording the wax moths. And other insects. They communicate. Well, I don’t know if they really do. I haven’t proved it or anything. But they make a sort of music, if you put it all together. Normally the human ear can’t hear them. But Grandpa ordered me a sound detector – they use it to detect bats because their sound is too high-pitched for the human ear.”

     He pulled the bat detector and another little handheld device out of one of the many voluminous zippered pockets of his pants. I smiled to think of all the times Mary had threatened never to do his laundry again because of all the weird squishy things that turned up in those pockets.

     “It’s really cool,” he said. “With this stuff you can pick up noises the human ear can’t hear. Like right now. What do you hear?”

     He handed me one of the devices, and we both lay down side-by-side on the cool summer grass and listened. He held up the bat detector in one hand while I held the microphone. We held them in our hands, held them pointed toward the stars, and listened as hard as we could.

Kathy Stevenson’s essays, feature articles, and short stories have appeared in such publications as Newsweek, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, The Writer, The Christian Science Monitor, Redbook, American Way, American Book Review, and many others. She is a contributing essayist at Newsworks.org, the online news presence for NPR in Philadelphia. She is also the author of The Lake Poet, a historical novel published in December 2001 and two essay collections. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College.