Signal Fires

by Dani Shapiro

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

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.

Once Mrs. Wilf was dead, she was no longer in her body. Her body was just a thing, like the discarded carapace of an insect. But she wasn’t gone. She had escaped. Within the walls of the playhouse, there was a field of energy he could almost reach out and touch. No, more than that. 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.