But it wasn’t really that. It wasn’t that the lights could be used as signals. It was more that they held messages.
One time they had been driving home from visiting Nana, who lived across the river in what was called a Dutch Colonial. After supper they had sat at the table playing Liverpool and smoking pretzel-rod cigars for a long time, so it was well after dark when they started home. Danny and their mother were talking up front and Annamae, lying on the backseat with her coat folded under her head, knew they assumed she had fallen asleep. She had not. She was looking, full of awakeness and curiosity, out the car window at a star, a single star that kept following them.
She usually did fall asleep on the drive home from Nana’s, and, in fact, had changed into pajamas before they left, but for some reason this time the motion of the car hurtling through space, together with the vibration of the engine beneath her body, together with the lullaby concoction of familiar voices and indistinguishable words drifting from the front seat—these things did not ease her into sleep but instead seemed to be spinning a kind of bright pinwheel inside her chest.
The thought struck Annamae, watching that teeny diamond spur in the sky, keeping sight of it as it kept sight of her, that they were in conversation. She and the star. She didn’t know exactly what they were saying to each other. It had the feeling of a promise, a vow. But it didn’t matter—the content of the exchange was less important than her recognition of it. That, and understanding that it wasn’t the first time she had found herself having such a dialogue. It wasn’t new. If anything, it was a renewal.
She must have slept at some point. She didn’t remember the moment she lost sight of the star, although she would have been parted from it in any case when they went through the tunnel. But once she was roused from the backseat by her mother’s hand, once she let herself be coaxed grumpily back into her coat, once she’d shoved her feet back into her unlaced sneakers and was trudging sleepily toward home alongside her mother and Danny down the block from where they’d gotten a parking space, once she saw across the street the lighting shop radiating its good, indifferent welcome, she remembered the star. And looked for it in the narrow band of sky above the rooftops.
“Keep walking, honey. It’s chilly and we’re all tired.”
The sky was so much busier here in the city than it was at Nana’s. Its puffy glow got in the way. It was making the star—what was the word Rav Harriett taught them?—obscure.
“Come, please.”
She went on tiptoe and swayed this way and that, trying to see beyond the zigzag of rooftops and the crowns of trees. There! Beyond the branches of a honey locust, she spotted it. Her diamond chip.
“Annamae.”
She was almost sure it was the one.