blinkies

stephen policoff

We bought the house in Ulster County because Kate yearned for a place where we could get away from the city, where she could garden and grill and take walks in the leafy expanse of upstate New York, not far from where we both grew up.

The hapless real estate guy first showed us many unappealing options. One house in Hurley featured several bats sleeping upside down in the windows. Another, near Woodstock, had the pungent odor of unrestrained mildew. We saw tumbledown mansions in Pine Hill, and a glorified ski hut in Boiceville. The last place he showed us was a fading green house on a little cul-de-sac outside the village of Phoenicia, with amazing pine paneling in the dining room and a vast, somewhat raggedy lawn where lovely lilac bushes bobbed; this house made Kate smile. 

It was 1992, years before Phoenicia was written up in the New York Times as the next happening place. The turbulent beauty of the Esopus Creek was down the street, but the town—where now galleries and gourmet restaurants flourish—was kind of run-down, inhabited by an odd mix of old hippies, exiled New Yorkers, and mountain men who would not be out of place in Appalachia. But looming above the dusty main street were the lustrous peaks of the Catskill Mountains; red-wing blackbirds skittered on the side of the road.

We spent most weekends there, and many holidays too, except when the bitter winters froze the pipes under the street and replaced the friendly aura with icy darkness. After we adopted Anna from China in 1995, we spent whole weeks up there during the summer, laughing at the news reports of grotesque humidity back home in Manhattan. 

“That’s why the Catskills were invented,” Kate liked to say.

Anna loved the house—my housie, she called it. We spent hours sitting in the hammock, pushing her on the swing set we built for her, watching the blue jays and squirrels fight over peanuts we lovingly placed all around the yard. Most of all, Anna loved being carried—and later loved traipsing—down to the creek, where we sat on flat rocks, dangled feet in the water, skipped stones, and bobbed in tubes on the edge of the torrent.  

“We’re going to the keek!  We’re going to the keek!”  she would chant.

We did not yet know that Anna was born with the terrible genetic disorder, Niemann-Pick Type C, which would take her from us before she reached adulthood. We knew only that she was not a typical child, that her speech and movement were a little strange. She did not say much at all till she was almost three, but when she did speak, she had a strangely poetic turn of phrase—halting, not quite the way you would say things, but oddly evocative.

One Saturday evening in late June, when Anna was about 4, Kate and I were sitting on the Adirondack chairs in our yard; Anna was scrambling back and forth between our laps, as she liked to do. We were watching hummingbirds hover above the patch of tiger lilies which appeared every summer, and just as the sun set, a bloom of fireflies arose from the greenery around the orange flowers, as if conjured by some idle magician for our amusement. There must have been fifty of them, and Anna’s eyes widened with amazement.

“See!” she said, “Blinkies!”

I laughed. “They’re called fireflies.”

“Blinkies!” she said.

“Like flashlights, right?” Kate said. “Because they blink off and on?”

Anna opened and closed her eyes rapidly, as if in demonstration. “Blinkies,” she repeated, then laughed her glorious, raucous laugh.

Every summer after that, we looked for blinkies—in Washington Square Park near our apartment, in the fields upstate, and later, with her little sister Jane; we collected them in jars, then let them flutter back out.

In 2012, Kate died suddenly. Anna’s illness overcame her three years later, leaving only  Jane and me and a house still haunted by the absence of the two who loved it best.

I held onto the house, thinking maybe I would be able to go up there again at some point without plummeting into sadness. But in 2016, I finally recognized what a futile thought that was. Houses need to be lived in, and I could not envision ever living in the green house without Kate and Anna.

Jane and I went up there that summer to gather a few beloved possessions and sigh loudly in every room. Right before we left, we walked through the overgrown garden where Kate planted impatiens each May, where morning glories used to snake up the swing set. As dusk descended, we saw little darts of light. I bit back the word “Blinkies!” and when I looked over at Jane, I saw her eyes welling, maybe thinking the same wan thought, that comical word gleefully echoed each summer by her sweet sister.

Recently, I was sitting in the garden near my apartment with a new-ish friend, someone who knew only vaguely the story of my truncated family. As we chatted, little pinpoints of light began flitting through the purple summer evening.  

“Blinkies!” I blurted out.

She laughed. “Fireflies? Or lightning bugs, right?”

It’s a recurring conundrum: do I always need to tell my tale? Does my desire not to eliminate Kate and Anna from the discourse of my life outweigh the clumsiness of having to explain the fraught fragments?  

Once, not so long ago, a neighbor approached me, someone I had not seen for a while, and asked where Anna was, and why she never saw her beautiful smile any more in the halls of our building. When I told her, she burst into tears, and, weirdly, I found myself having to comfort her for my own loss.

So, this time, I just shrugged.

“In my family, we always called them blinkies.”