Signal Fires

by Dani Shapiro

Had he ever been this patient with his own son? In the years before Theo became inaccessible, in those precious years when he would still have allowed himself to be seen, to be known—had Ben taken the time? The answer isn’t a simple yes or no—but even so, the lost opportunities are too painful to contemplate. He cannot have that time back. He doesn’t get a do-over.

Silence didn’t make it go away but instead drove the events of that night more deeply into each of them.

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.