Off toward the tree line, a sudden shimmer. It travels the arms of the oak the way lightning re-creates the sky. To get a closer look, I walk out onto the porch, where Simon’s voice is only intermittent, a signal drowned by distance. The faraway light appears at first to consume only our garden, but the beams spread until the entire wood is illuminated before me, into an unearthly, faultless blue. The reflection glimmers in the rain puddles, pregnant with fireflies, fallen stars.
“Where have you gone to now, Elle?” I didn’t hear Simon’s eavesdropping footsteps. I suppose he has grown used to the light all around us. To him, it must be as common as the moon. I have only forgotten how to name such a wonder.
“I’m right here,” I reply with little confidence. “Looking at the stars.”
“Stars?” Simon asks. “The fog is thick as a pig.”
“That one,” I say timidly, pointing to the stilled firework, a waterfall of light pouring through the largest and most gravity-ridden oak in the yard.
“The stars.” Simon laughs. It is all very funny to him, his little old wife pointing to nothing in the dark. What, then, explains this shining—bright and pretty as the galaxies fallen to Earth? I understand my brain is rotting, that my memories are disappearing beneath the cover of time, like shells being ripped off the shore and rolled back into the ocean. But no doctor ever mentioned this. A voice emerges from the dark. As always with dreams . . .
“You can’t take a photograph of this,” I recite, though I cannot place where I’ve heard the words before.
“A photograph of what?” Simon asks.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Let’s go in, Elle. I can play something for you. Whatever you would like to hear.” The day’s persistent rain returns in big fat drops. “Tomorrow, if the road isn’t flooded, perhaps we can go into town.”
“Oh, that would be very nice. I can get some tea at Tilly’s,” I say, hardly aware I am responding. I have said the same words a thousand times before: To Tilly’s, maybe stop by the florist.
“Tilly’s is gone, Elle,” Simon says, reaching for me. “As is the florist.” Liver spots have sprouted all over his knuckles. His hands are pale, papery, withered. These are not my husband’s hands. I look at his face for some confirmation, and there are his eyes, the color of the Atlantic. Simon is still here.
“Ah, yes, yes.” I nod my head. “Of course.” But how is Tilly’s closed? I have been there every Tuesday for all time. A faintness arises, like an Impressionist’s painting, a blur. The building where Tilly’s was, its sign taken down. And then one day there was a new sign. But nothing ever opened there again. The past is all shuttered. My old paths are darkening. The lights in the windows have long since burned out.
“Simon,” I say matter-of-factly. “Everything on the island is closing, isn’t it?”
“The rain’s begun,” he replies, as though I can no longer perceive even the weather.
I follow him inside. I am his wife: all these years spent following him back inside our house. Simon sits down at the piano and taps the bench beside him. “Come sit, my belle.”
“What’s happened to the business, Simon?” I ask.
His hands crawl across the piano. He is already living in his music, far away. “You know what tomorrow is, right?”
I yearn to know the answer. I hunt every aching corner of my brain. If only he will quit that bombastic melody, I can concentrate enough to find it. But moments begin to pass. My gaze wanders again toward the window on the garden, where the shimmer still haunts the trees, a new life form subsuming all the tired, mortal leaves in the universe. Those aren’t lightning bugs, Elle, they’re fairies.
“Tomorrow’s your birthday, Elle.” Simon sighs and closes the piano’s fallboard. “It’s the Fourth of July.”