He was looking forward to writing this obit more than he’d looked forward to writing anything in his life. Alma Vonn was a door to the world, and he could push through it with questions and words. He would be closer to understanding. Closer to wisdom. The power and strangeness of this made his heart flutter, then gallop.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Meredith.

“I don’t like it when you ask me that.”

“I know you don’t. But if we’re together I have a right to know.”

Andy wondered why thoughts weren’t private. Weren’t you just a prisoner if you had to surrender your thoughts on demand? “Alma Vonn killed herself today.”

Meredith pushed up on one elbow. “That’s so terrible! Absolutely terrible, Andy. I feel so bad for those little girls.”

He watched two meteors fall side by side like sparks from the same firework. She settled one arm across his stomach and her head on his chest. She began crying.

Andy watched the meteors race and fall. Eighteen. Nineteen. He listened to Meredith’s sobs and wondered at her capacity for joy and sorrow and empathy. He wasn’t sure if it was larger than his or if she just had more noticeable ways of expression. He felt the wholeness of her. Thirty-five. Thirty-six. So what if he’d written most of her paper on Les Misérables? Meredith had labored through every word of the novel in French, and language didn’t come easy to her. Like it did to him. Or his brother Clay. Fifty. Fifty-one. But she had understood it. Her emotions had been genuine and exactly what the author had intended her to feel, in his opinion.

A dry cool breeze picked up from the east and the meteors were everywhere now, crisscrossing the darkness in sudden arcs, boring into the sky.