Smack beside their own front door, wooden and painted red, was another door made all of glass, and beside it a glass storefront. That was why they didn’t have a first floor (except for the vestibule stuffed with umbrellas and boots and knapsacks and everything): They lived above a shop. When they were little, it had been a hardware store. Then it became a hair salon, then a dog salon, then a French bakery, and now it was a shop that sold nothing but lights. Danny missed the dog salon because he liked seeing the different sorts of dogs and how they got their fur shaped like, he said, the bushes in rich-people parks. Their mother missed the bakery, because in warm weather the smell of sugar and vanilla would climb right up into their open windows like, she said, the prince in Rapunzel. But Annamae loved the lighting shop, spangled floor to ceiling with different colors and shapes and sizes of lightbulbs and table lamps and floor lamps and pendants and chandeliers and track lights and string lights.
During the cold and dark part of the year especially, she loved rounding the corner from the avenue onto their street and seeing it, the shop beneath their home, lit like a ship on a dark sea. She felt safe whenever she saw that ship—or rather, that shop. She felt safe and at the same time she felt a kind of frantic ecstasy. That shop of lights, that storefront glowing in the gloom, in some strange, definite way sent her signals. As if the lights were a kind of language.
“Actually, lights can be used as language.” So said her mother when Annamae shyly communicated her feeling. It was both thrilling and deflating, the matter-of-factness of her mother’s response. “For Morse code. Signal lights are still used, I think, by ships and airplanes.”
“And trains,” said Danny. “Even the subway—haven’t you ever noticed?”
“Right,” said their mother. “Not Morse code, but still a kind of language. For that matter—” She stopped in her tracks and pointed toward the intersection. They’d been to the park and were walking home. It was a blustery day, and the traffic light suspended high on its pole dangled like a leaf on its stem. They stood and watched as the big lit circle switched from yellow to red and the cars on the avenue stopped, and the cars on the street went forward, and all the people on the corners exchanged places with one another. Everyone fluent in light language, everyone in too much of a rush to notice.
The only ones not in a rush were Annamae and Danny and their mother. For them, time had slowed. A little island with their own tempo, they waited a full cycle for the signal to change again.
Somebody impatient to get somewhere brushed by them with a tsk as loud as a popped cork, then called back as if issuing a grand proclamation, “You’re not the only ones in the world!”