I have developed a fondness for rain, even though it sometimes brings with it visitations from the specters of the dead.

Other times, when the light is exactly right, and there is precisely the proper concentration of moisture in the air, a nearly alchemical reaction takes place when the atmosphere begins to glow with other-earthly hues of amber, gold and ochre. I have never witnessed this phenomenon anywhere other than here, in the tropics, and in all the years that I have called these islands my home, I have experienced it only twice. It never lasts long. Mere minutes.

This morning marks the third.

I believe in the portent contained in certain moments.

“What happened to the girl?”

“What girl?” I asked.

“The young girl at the bar. The one who started that whole thing with your brother.”

“You focus on unusual details, Randall.”

“You promised you would tell me everything.”

“That’s one I don’t have an answer for. I was never able to find her. Never even knew her name.”

He looked off toward the ocean, through the gently falling rain. His eyes were glassy with fatigue, yet indefinably alive with something else. We had talked all night.

“Maybe she quit that life,” he said. “Maybe she finally found someone.”

I was happy to know that this young man possessed that kind of hope. I both admired and envied it.

“He would never talk about it,” Randall said. “My father.”

“I know.”

“He wanted you to tell me.”

“I know that, too. But you needed to wait until you were old enough to hear it. You understand that now.”

Randall Lennox pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, pressed his eyes shut and leaned back in his chair.

“He always said you saved my life,” he breathed.

“He was wrong.”

He opened his eyes, rested his elbows on his knees and studied my face.

“In what way?”

“Your father saved your life, not me. He could have gone along with whatever plan his father had in mind, but your father refused. He loved you very much, Randall. So he called me. I was a virtual stranger at the time. But he knew he had to do something to help you, and he did.”

“The whole thing changed him. My dad. Broke him in a way, I think.”

“It changed a lot of people.”

A gust of wind disturbed the leaves overhead and scattered droplets across the planks beneath our feet.

“I miss him,” Randall said.

“You should. He was a good man.”

I heard the kitchen door slide open. She moved softly toward us, as though she might disturb the gilded rainfall.

“Look out there,” Lani whispered, her eyes reflecting the sunrise.

She carried a tray in her hands, three cups of hot tea trailing diaphanous ribbons of steam. She offered one to Randall, one to me, then took the last one for herself, then sat cross-legged on the lanai and tipped her face skyward.

“You’ve been up all night,” she said finally.

“Eavesdropping?” I asked.

“A little. I hope you don’t mind.”

“It’s Randall’s story,” I said. “Ask him.”

Lani turned toward him and inquired with her eyes.

Randall smiled. “I don’t mind.”

The golden light had begun to turn to amber morning and was already beginning to fade away.

“You’re welcome to stay another day with us, Randall,” I said.

“I’ve imposed enough as it is. Besides, I have to get back to school.”

“Northwestern, isn’t it?”

He nodded his head.

“You like it there?”

“Cold in the winter.”

“Stay for breakfast, at least,” Lani said.

She stood and so did Randall. She wrapped an arm around his shoulder, pulled him close and led him back into the kitchen.

“Don’t be long,” Lani called to me as they stepped inside the house.

“I’ll just be a minute.” I needed the silence.

The sunrise came softly then, like the skin of a ripened peach; the day did not so much break as awaken. The last remnant of the golden glow was disappearing, like a watermark, before my eyes.

I stared eastward, through the pale light and mist, breathing deeply the scents of loam and wet soil and stone, of leaves that had fallen to the ground and begun to rust. I leaned on the koa railing of Lani’s and my lanai and sent up a prayer that had no words.

Then I prayed I might somehow capture the image of this morning in my mind, to preserve it, uncertain as to when, if ever, I might witness it again—perhaps in the work of Renaissance painters and their representations of archangels descending from clouds. In the meantime I would continue to remind myself that this was no illusion, and to learn to be content inside the light of a lesser heaven.