BEFORE

It's amazing how you can speak right to my heart

Without saying a word

You can light up the dark

Try as I may, I can never explain

What I hear when you don't say a thing

The smile on your face lets me

Know that you need me

There's a truth in your eyes saying

You'll never leave me

The touch of your hand says you'll

Catch me wherever I fall

You say it best

When you say nothing at all

"When You Say Nothing At All"

Ronan Keating

June 29, 1942

Worcester, Massachusetts

For the second time in the same day, Chuck let Sarah lead him through the woods behind his home. Earlier, she had insisted on taking him to the pond, a tiny body of water nestled between the trees that separated Chuck's house from his nearest neighbor. The pond was a glorified puddle, using Casey's vernacular, but it was deep enough that unless the summer was exceptionally rainless, the pond never fully dried up. Sarah had seen tadpoles earlier in the week, and had been eager to search for the baby frogs in their various bizarre stages of development. Now, in the faint blue haze of twilight, ridiculously late in the evening due to their nearness to the summer solstice, they were searching for fireflies.

The world–which started back at his front door and reached all the way around the globe and back again–was burning. On fire. They were safe here, in America, in Massachusetts, but almost everywhere else he could point to on the faded beige globe in his bedroom, war was raging. Every country in Europe, Russia and China, Northern Africa, and all of the land and sea between the eastern coast of Asia and the western coast of the United States.

They were physically safe. Safety was relative. Casey was gone, had been gone since late January, after he had enlisted in the Marines immediately after the December 7th Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He was serving in the Pacific Theater, as Gertrude had explained. It was difficult to determine specific facts. The information Casey was allowed to tell her in his letters was minimal, for security's sake; what she chose to share with Chuck was filtered a second time. She never said so, but he knew. The letters would be pages long, but she would explain in a sentence or two. Casey was at such-and-such base, in such-and-such country, doing whatever, but almost nothing else.

Every night Chuck and Gertrude huddled together and listened to the radio. That news was filtered too, and biased, if he was honest with himself. The press had the responsibility of upholding public morale, which was difficult, for not a single bit of positive news had been available for a long time. Japan's power and control seemed to spread like a disease, unstoppable, delivering death and destruction. The Battle of Midway, just a few weeks ago, had been the first solid, celebratable victory for the Allies since Casey had left. The news announcer rattled off names of islands, ships and fleets. Chuck tried to match them to familiar things, based on what he had heard from Gertrude.

Was Casey at the Battle of Midway? He was a Marine, and he was in the Pacific. So were thousands of other men, so there was no way to know. It was such a small comfort, but Chuck liked to think that maybe that was true. Casey was tough, like Gertrude had always said. Chuck wanted to think that battle had made such a difference, because Casey, and thousands of other men just like him, had been there, tough and unstoppable, brave enough to push back against Japan successfully for the first time.

This evening was the pure joy of summer, and Chuck and Sarah had immersed themselves in it. The simple pleasure of chasing fireflies and hunting frogs seemed precious now, and he savored it. Not just as a respite from the daily deluge of bad news, but a respite from responsibility. A chance to hold on a little bit longer to the fleeting carelessness of childhood.

Chuck was 13, ready to start high school in the fall; Sarah was nine, two months away from turning ten. He had grown inches from last year, Gertrude barely able to keep him in clothing long enough to wash and mend before they no longer fit him. Sometimes with a wistful smile, Gertrude would tell him Casey was the same when he was 13, that Chuck could very well grow to be as tall as Casey, which was taller than average for a man. Chuck had been taller than his peers his entire life, and whenever she mentioned it, it made him think none of those other boys would ever "catch up" as some of them liked to say. All of the awkwardness of puberty was upon him now–his deeper voice, frequent acne, and clumsy gait. Sometimes it was difficult, because of his height, often adults expected him to be older than he actually was.

Despite the fact that Sarah was four years younger, she had blossomed around the same time. He smiled secretly to himself, knowing Sarah hated that kind of euphemistic talk about the changes in her own body. Sarah was blunt with him, perhaps even a bit inappropriate if he thought about it objectively, using language borrowed from Carina. Sarah only spoke that way, only acted that way, when she was with him, alone.

None of the awkwardness he faced ever seemed to touch her, at least not that he ever noticed. Sarah was tall, impossibly tall for a girl of only nine, but never clumsy or gangly. She had the grace and muscle tone of a dancer, after years of running and climbing on adventures like this. She was beautiful, or on her way to being beautiful. It was as if he could see her in her transparent chrysalis, each day observing a bit more of the transformation. She still braided her hair, but in one long braid, sometimes French braided, sometimes standard, as he had taught her. The baby softness of her face and eyes had changed, now more angular, her cheekbones more pronounced. Her body was shaped like a woman's body, curvy for her age.

Her blunt, frank talk, sometimes humorous, always took him by surprise. To her sharing each and everything with him was automatic and she did it without embarrassment or fear. That was where their age difference was most apparent, her not understanding that a boy of 13 could be hopelessly flummoxed when she spoke so nonchalantly about her breasts, or sometimes things even more private. Sarah did have Carina, who was the same age; Carina was less physically developed than Sarah, but also far more developed when it came to adult themes, even at nine years old. Carina disturbed Chuck more than Sarah was aware.

Sarah held his hand, guiding him. Each step they took brought them further into the woods. Each time Chuck turned back, the sky was darker, and his eyes would have to readjust. He didn't know how much longer he could expect these types of interactions. High school would be a drastic change for him. He thought, too, that as she matured, the things she liked when she was younger might not remain the same. The thought made him sad, made him worry. Change was always hard, and it was something he would have to deal with. Time could not be stopped from its march.

All he could do was savor that summer evening, as he was doing, as he promised himself he would do each day of this entire summer. The time passed, in the end, would be the same. However, he wanted to look back and know that he had known exactly what he had when he'd had it. This now, the present, was the happiest he could remember being. Life was full of tragedies, some he knew as memories, some others were now only worries about the future; the best he could hope for was to be able to say he savored his own happiness, rather than look back someday and wonder when the happiest time in his life had actually been.

"Look!" Sarah said, stopping suddenly. He bumped into her at the abrupt stop in forward motion. She raised a finger and he followed it with his eyes. Tiny flecks of greenish light, speckling the air above the water, blinking. "There they are," she added triumphantly.

She released his hand, then grasped the washed pickle jar she had been holding in her other hand and unscrewed the lid. Expertly, she crept forward, watching for the tiny flashes of light. It happened so fast Chuck missed it, but she suddenly had one, captured in the jar. She screwed the lid on, then turned to present it to him, balancing it carefully on her palm. Inside the jar, the little luminescent bug fluttered, lightly bumping against the sides, confused by its confinement.

"I won't keep him long, I promise," she told Chuck as she moved away to examine her catch. "He'll die in the jar with no air. I just like looking at them up close." She sat on the ground, crossing her legs into a pretzel in front of her.

Chuck knelt beside her, following the bug in the jar with his eyes. "He?" he asked with a smile that lifted one corner of his mouth. "How do you know it's a he?"

"I'm just guessing," she told him. "They glow like that to attract females, even though the females glow too."

"Why is that, do you suppose?" he asked curiously.

"They also communicate that way, by glowing," she explained. Her eyes followed the bug. Sarah sighed softly, biting on her lower lip. "Wouldn't that be nice if there was something like that for humans? Like we turned a certain color when we felt a certain way, so everyone would just know? It would be easier than talking sometimes, I think."

He knew she was just rambling off the top of her head, but she sounded…sad. Disappointed. "Why would I need that?" he asked innocently, smiling at her over the top of the jar.

"I don't mean you," she said, bumping her shoulder into his. "You always know how I feel, sometimes before I even do. I mean everybody else."

"Like your father?" Chuck asked softly. The disappointments he sensed in her almost always were a direct result of her interacting with Jack.

"That might make him notice, but it wouldn't make him care," she said with finality. Her feelings were hurt. Chuck wondered what had happened since yesterday, why it was bothering her now.

"What's wrong?" he asked. The firefly settled on the bottom of the jar, no longer flying around, though the pale green light still blinked.

She kept her eyes on the jar, and waited a long time to answer him. "I'm changing my last name to Walker when I'm 18."

There was a finality in her tone again. Chuck had heard her debating about this for over a year, heard both sides of the argument she always seemed to have with her father, as she told him in her own words.

An overheard insult hurled by Roxanne Miller had created a cascade. Chuck had asked Casey about it, who said he didn't know why Roxanne would say such a thing. Casey relayed a story of meeting Emma for the first time, in 1933, sent by Stephen to Jack's home to offer assistance with a tree that had fallen in their yard. Jack had introduced Emma as his wife.

But Sarah had been born in 1932. So, the eight-year-old girl confronted her father, demanding to know why that had been spoken about. In typical Jack fashion, without filters or consideration for her age, he told Sarah everything. Jack had met Emma on a business trip in California, had a "whirlwind" romance as he'd called it, and then left to come back to Massachusetts, not aware that Emma was expecting his child. She told him in a letter, sent to his place of work, the only way she knew to contact Jack. Chuck's father had been the one to convince Jack to "do the right thing" and marry her. The fact that she was in California and Jack in Massachusetts complicated everything, however. By the time arrangements were made, Emma looked pregnant.

She stayed in California and gave birth to Sarah, then traveled to Massachusetts to marry Jack. A master at deception, even back then when no one was suspicious, Jack had been able to maneuver everything so no questions were asked, and those who knew the truth were still in California. Jack had met Sarah, his own daughter, when she was almost one month old. Apparently, Jack had said it to Sarah like the fact was comic. His only mistake, he believed, was telling Roxanne.

Not the fact that he had told his eight-year-old daughter that he had left her mother, alone and pregnant in California, to then give birth to his daughter alone.

Walker was her mother's maiden name. Once Sarah knew the whole truth, she had been toying with the idea. At first, Chuck thought it was just an act of defiance, a way to backhandedly hurt her father, as a payback for the pain he had caused her. The finality now was different. She was determined, with her mind made up.

"Ok," he said, a little unsurely, waiting for her to elaborate.

"I know you think I was just lashing out, that I wasn't serious. Maybe at first, I was. But it makes sense to me. I belonged to her. I don't think I ever belonged to him. I've never felt like I do, once I understood everything," she finished sadly.

"He does love you, Sarah," Chuck said gently. "Maybe not the way you wished he did, or the way you want him to, but he does."

Still looking down, the words one deep monotone, she added, "I feel like I belong to you, too."

"You do," he said, instinctively, automatically, unsure he had uttered the words until they were there, hanging in the warm summer air between them. Her eyes fluttered, shifting up to look at him, sapphire blue in the lavender twilight.

Her intense, captivated gaze did something to him, something he couldn't explain in the moment. He was flushed but shivering, burning but numb. She was beautiful. Not a realization with a lightning bolt, rather, something he had known all along but could never state in words before. How was it possible that she was so beautiful seeing her could feel like pain inside him?

"Will I always?" she asked, like the words burned, like she choked on them before she said them.

"Yes," he said, again, without thinking about it, the word out before he thought to speak it. He touched her hand as it sat on the top of the jar.

She leaned against him, her head on his shoulder, the comfort she needed corresponding to the words he had just said. "I don't know if we'll see each other the way we do now, once you're in high school. It's different. No high school boy has a fifth grader around them, unless they're baby-sitting," she fretted. "You'll go to dances and parties."

Was she jealous? he thought. The way she had been when he had divided his attention between her and Carina? Or was this coming from somewhere else?

With a flash of insight, he saw Jack's hand in this once again. "Did your father tell you that? That I won't have time for you or I won't want to spend time with you once I go to high school?" he asked pointedly.

"He's right, though," she insisted, answering Chuck without answering him.

Inside, he seethed. At every opportunity, Jack failed, over and over. With his own heart so full, so open, Chuck just couldn't comprehend how Jack could be the way he was. Chuck tried to be sympathetic, like Gertrude always told him he should be, reminding him he had no idea what another person's life was like, or had been like, and that everyone, really, was doing the best that they could at the moment in question. If that was the best Jack could do, Chuck felt sorry for him, for his deficiencies. But he was still angry, indignant over the simple but deep ways he hurt Sarah.

"No, he isn't," Chuck told her. "He doesn't know a thing about me, or what I think, or what I want, or what I would do."

"Chuck–"

"No, Sarah, listen. You're my family. That's how I think of you. You're my friend, but also my family. Please, don't ever forget that," he implored her.

He felt her shift closer, eliminating the gap between them, until he felt her hair tickling his neck. She smelled like witch hazel, invisible armor against the mosquitos; the scent mixed with lavender and something flowery, probably her shampoo. It was the smell of summer for him. As much a part of the joy of summer as the twilight. The season was essentially his impressions of it, of his days spent with her, full of her.

"Oh, no," she gasped, fumbling with the jar lid. While they had been talking, the captive firefly had turned upside down in the jar, slowly suffocating. "Oh, no, please tell me I didn't kill it," she pleaded.

She flipped the jar upside down, the beetle landing on her bare forearm. They watched it together. It wasn't dead, but it was failing. Right side up, its tiny legs twitched on Sarah's arm. Its wings pulsated, like the tiny thing was breathing, although Chuck knew the creature didn't breathe the way humans did, with lungs. It breathed through its skin.

Expectantly, they waited. Its wings vibrated, fluttered. If it was breathing through its skin, it was breathing in Sarah, Chuck thought suddenly. Like life in his own nostrils, he felt the beetle a kindred spirit. When he was half dead, Sarah had nursed Chuck back to life in her own way. Without conscious effort, just by being, existing, as herself.

The pale green glow from the body of the beetle seemed impossibly bright in the near dark that had crept around them. Sarah gasped, elated, sighing in relief as the bug fluttered one last time, then flew from her arm.

"Oh, I'm so glad he's ok," she said, resting her head back on his shoulder, like it was where her head belonged.

"I am, too," he told her. He watched the beetle disappear into the woods, glowing happily, looking for its mate. Communicating without words, without a sound, but communicating, just as she'd said.

He stayed quiet, leaning his head against hers, knowing the darkness meant it was time to go back to his house. Words were woefully inadequate, and he believed if he had even tried to use words, it would have spoiled the moment.

But he found he wished what Sarah had wished before. That somehow she could see how she made him glow on the inside, where no one could see, but he could feel it.

A/N: Thanks to Zettel once again. Historical notes: Casey enlisting ensured he could choose the Marines, rather than the Army, where draftees were sent. He is 33 by this point, but the Marine Corps took men over 18 until late in 1942. With the loss of much of the Navy's fleet at Pearl Harbor, Japan rapidly advanced in the Pacific in early 1942. The Phillipines fell, and the U.S. was forced to retreat, leaving 24,000 men behind. Country after country fell, island after island in the Pacific. The Battle of Midway in early June 1942 was a decisive victory for the U.S., despite the loss of the USS Yorktown. It is considered the turning point of World War II. Another side note, we know Sarah was an awkward teenager (vs Cougars) however, braces for orthodontics were not routinely implemented until the 1970s. Thanks for reading. Love to hear what you think. :)