Signal Fires

by Dani Shapiro

Each Sunday afternoon, Mimi would take the eraser and make small, efficient circles around the chalkboard. There was something satisfying about watching their weeks evaporate into dust, the future yet to be filled in.

She is on the verge of saying more than she wants to. Words she’ll regret tomorrow.

The rules he has lived by, eat all your green beans, say please and thank you, look grown ups in the eye, all these and more have vanished, vaporized like each breath, here one moment, visible, tangible, then gone.

Like he might lift off the ground and disappear, up, up, up, until he’s part of the great blanket above him. He’ll break apart into thousands of pieces and become Constellation Waldo.

They seem to be everywhere, all at once.

It isn’t misery that loves company—no, no. Happiness loves company, and misery—misery just wants to be left alone.

He doesn’t yet have to hide from his father. To fold into himself again and again like an origami puzzle until he’s small enough to be overlooked.

This too, he will carry. He will move through his life, as we all do, without knowing what has preceded him or what lies ahead.

But maybe, just maybe—a thought so selfish she will barely acknowledge it—this terrible night will be the bullet that grazes them and then moves on.

Guilt and silence have hardened over the years into something intractable. Leaving was his one attempt to save himself, but he would have had to stay gone forever for that to have worked.

It turns out there are some things you can’t outrun.

For a second he wonders if he’s having one of those nightmares so real that you wake panting, disoriented, the world tilted and strange.

The sounds, voices, slivers of memory don’t cohere but rather become kaleidoscopic.

The stars, rather than appearing distant and implacable, seemed to be signal fires in the dark, mysterious fellow travelers lighting a path; one hundred thousand million luminous presences beckoning from worlds away. See us. We are here. We have always been here. We will always be here.

He is a practical man, but still in a wordless place within him, Ben Wilf has come to believe that we live in loops rather than one straight line; that the air itself is made not only of molecules but of memory; that these loops form an invisible pattern; that past, present, and future are a part of this pattern; that our lives intersect for fractions of seconds that are years, centuries, millennia; that nothing ever vanishes.

The Mimi he has loved for more than forty years is still alive in the patient who now sits being spoon-fed oatmeal in the memory unit, staring into a different kind of space.

There have been other golden children before her and there will be golden children after, just as there have always been the duller siblings of these golden ones, who bear the scars of being compared too early in life and found wanting.

There are very few lines, once crossed, that come to define you forever. If you have children, you are a mother. If you kill someone, you are a murderer. If you aid and abet, you are an accomplice. If you fuck someone other than your husband, you are an adulterer. She is all these things. Remember we took pictures.

There should be a word for the moment just before heartbreak, when the very air quivers with all that is about to come.

her vision broke apart into what seemed like hundreds of colorful prisms, like sunlight hitting cut crystal. It would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so terrifying.

There is so much he doesn’t know how to say, so he makes lists. He doesn’t show anyone these lists. Who would he show? Sophie is gone, back to her parents in Minneapolis, and besides, Listen to me Waldo, I can’t, I just can’t anymore. The lists help him to order his insides. Maybe they’ll become a record, a map for future explorers.

a home in which a word, a gesture, could set the air on fire at any moment.

The strange gentleness that has come over his father has a name: defeat. He has fought and fought, and now he is done fighting. He wants to retire to Sarasota and find a nice lady on one of those dating apps for people over fifty. There is freedom in surrender. Maybe this is what life does to some people.

His mom became his advocate and his savior. And maybe—here he squeezes his eyes shut—maybe it cost her too much.

quickly thumbs a text without giving it a moment’s thought. A moment’s thought would stop him, and he doesn’t want to be stopped.

He remembers the blade falling, the moment he realized she had Alzheimer’s. But his wife has still been here, even if only a fractional part of her. He’s still had his Mimi. A line from an Emily Dickinson poem drifts like a lyric through his head: My life closed twice before its close. Is this it? The second time?

Maybe if he keeps talking to her, he can reverse time. Maybe dying isn’t real. Maybe his words can breathe life into her. Maybe this is a dream. He’s still crying, he can’t stop. This is his fault. The lady came because of him. She thought he was somebody else. Somebody named Theo.

He is in the presence of something so much bigger than he is—as big as the whole sky—he can feel it. To even try to understand is to explode something inside his head, so he doesn’t try.

She’s at a threshold—hovering, diaphanous, all the selves she has ever been. In the playhouse there is a small child, smaller than Waldo. A teenage girl walks down a city street. A young woman falls in love. A wife becomes a mother. A bright, loving presence. The whole crowd encircles them. It isn’t scary. It isn’t anything at all. Maybe every person has an uncrushable heart a hundred billion times stronger than steel. He watches the dance of light and shadow on the walls. Someday, this will be helpful to him.

“It’s okay,” Shenkman says almost against his will. He’s being carried along by something he doesn’t understand, but he knows this is an opportunity to do the right thing.

He sounds almost as if he were reciting something from a textbook by memory. Like he’s trying to say something bigger, deeper: private thoughts for which he doesn’t have language. Everything is connected.

Benjamin Wilf kneeled beside her once, long ago. Give it all you’ve got, Alice. Waldo kept Mimi Wilf warm and made her feel safe at the end of her life. Maybe all of them are simply a chorus of souls, light touching light.

Here she has been so afraid, so busy trying to shore up and protect their lives that she has forgotten how to live.

For the briefest of moments, Ben will feel he can hold it all—past, present, future—in his hands. But now he has no such portal. No window through which to see the lives that will unfold for the three people he loves most.

He’ll send Theo an email with a typed-out poem by Marie Howe or W. S. Merwin. Sometimes he leaves long messages that begin: Theo, darling, listen to this. Theo saves these messages. They’re a map of his father’s inner world. He knows he will want them someday.

Why is it that some kids can weather the storms of their childhood whereas others—himself, Sarah—spend their lives running from the damage? Never mind. He knows the answer to this. He and Sarah made the damage.

He has a thought so fully formed that he must have dreamt it. It has the quality of déjà vu.

Mimi used to be fond of the phrase with any luck. He thinks of it now. With any luck, his nieces will continue to grow strong and hardy, like the trees that cast their canopies over Malcolm X Boulevard. With any luck, he will be around for a long time to watch over them.

If there’s one thing Ben has known since he held his wife’s lifeless body in his arms, it’s that he refuses to spend whatever time he has left consumed by a desire for recompense. There will be no recompense.

The hard-core among the runners gather at the top of a long and steep set of stairs. Some do uphill sprints with what appear to be their personal trainers. It’s a culture devoted to a kind of gluttony of health, or what they now call wellness.

It couldn’t have been easy for them, with Sarah’s tremendous success in the same industry that has been indifferent to her husband. It might not have mattered as much if their roles had been reversed. Blatantly sexist, to be sure, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

The most sense he can make of it is that they’d shared a terror that if they spoke of what happened that night, their words would form a complete narrative more terrible than the shattered part each of them carried alone.

he wears his success like an ill-fitting suit.

He once heard it said it’s possible to have bonds with people, even complete strangers, that are soul-to-soul.

All is somehow connected, traceable if only he knew how to look.

Angry people don’t tend to grow less angry when life throws them a curveball like this one. The poor woman. The poor kid.

He imagines Waldo alone in his room, searching the sky for answers written in the stars.

He tells his story in excruciating, necessary detail. It’s something beyond confession. It’s testimony. Telling the story won’t bring Joey back. Telling the story won’t take away his pain. But telling the story in these rooms filled with broken souls is what saves his life again and again.

“You’re only as sick as your secrets,”

It was as if the two of them—he and Mrs. Wilf—were enveloped by that field of energy. It wasn’t exactly like time stopped; more that time had seemed to expand so that they were a part of everything that had ever happened or ever would happen. She would never really be gone.