The Big Dark Sky (28)
The big dark sky.
Sometimes, when he stands here in Zipporah’s only street, his gaze turned to the vault of the night, he thrills to the inevitable advent of nothingness. The stars inspire nihilists to a greater purpose than they inspire lovers.
20
The Navajo rugs, the Pueblo pottery, a collection of copper cowboy-hat ashtrays, ornately painted Mexican chairs, a bedroom furnished entirely with antique twig-work furniture, the sofas draped with colorful Pendleton blankets: All this had been here through two previous owners, and Liam O’Hara wanted to live with it and add to it. For a city boy like Wyatt Rider, the decor was undeniably warm and beautiful, but it also felt alien, almost otherworldly, and insistent. Enough was enough.
Liam O’Hara intended to double the size of the existing house from seven thousand to fourteen thousand square feet, not because the current size of the residence provided too few rooms to display the entire spectrum of this type of decor, but maybe because making everything bigger was what multibillionaires did. Liam’s enthusiasm for what he called the “Santa Fe and True West style” was such that he needed not extra living space in a getaway like this, but space to accommodate what he wished to collect.
Well, the guy worked hard, built a thriving company, employed thousands, created more wealth for others than for himself, so he had earned the right to do what he wanted with his money. Wyatt envied the man, not because of his fortune, but because of the family with which he shared all this. Liam’s wife, Lyndsey, was lovely, intelligent, warm, with a great sense of humor; the kids, Laura and Tavis, were lively but polite, smart but not smart-ass.
Wyatt had not yet married. He had not yet been engaged. Hell, he hadn’t yet enjoyed a relationship with a woman that didn’t end in dire suspicion, recriminations, and regret. His love life was about as romantic as an arm-wrestling contest. He was self-aware enough to know that he—not the women—was the problem, but he didn’t know how to fix himself.
As he passed through the large, dimly lighted living room again, sipping the last of his second mug of coffee, he was thinking not about why he’d come to Rustling Willows, but about Sandra Chan, the lawyer who’d been his most recent companion. He truly cherished her, but nevertheless he lost her. Actually, he’d driven her away by doubting her when he’d had no reason to doubt, offending her with his distrust.
If the living room had not featured one wall of nine-foot-tall windows, he might have been too distracted by thoughts of Sandra Chan to notice the eerie luminosity on the front yard. In this rural immensity, the only significant nighttime light was either man-made or moonglow, although neither of those sources explained the display beyond the veranda. This radiance was diffuse, a soft cloud of yellowish light that seemed both to swirl lazily and pulse as it moved back and forth, five or six feet above the lawn. Wyatt stood watching it for a minute or longer, trying to make sense of it, but he needed to have a closer look.
When he stepped onto the veranda, the August night proved to be mild, even somewhat warm for Montana. As during the day, a stillness lay upon the land, every trace of wind locked in the vault of the distant mountains.
Stepping onto the grass, he realized what phenomenon floated before him, a work of nature that seemed profoundly unnatural. The cloud was a swarm of hundreds of fireflies—perhaps a thousand or more—their soft abdomens pulsing incandescently, each a tiny lamp, but in aggregate producing enough light by which to read a book.
He had seen fireflies before, most often in his youth, on summer suburban evenings. But on those occasions, the insects had numbered far fewer than this, each a beacon signaling along a route that it patrolled alone.
If the idea of fireflies had occurred to Wyatt independent of this unexpected display, he might have thought they didn’t exist in Montana, and he would never have entertained the notion that they swarmed in such numbers. Liam O’Hara hadn’t spoken of this when he had described either the magical or the frightening events that caused him and his family to cut short their first vacation at the ranch. Although mysterious, this spectacle was enchanting rather than fearsome, and the longer he studied it, the more wondrous it became.
The traceries of throbbing light suggested that these tiny insects were aligned in numerous skeins, rather than each traveling a random route. The skeins wove complex integrated patterns with fantastic precision, without the slightest interference of one with another. He thought of the convolutions of a brain, each firefly like a neuron firing.
A score of fireflies were able to sail through the night with such effortless grace that they were as soundless as the movement of light itself. However, these much greater numbers produced a low susurration, as though in their flight they must be whispering some secret that, if understood, would draw back the veils that obscured the truth behind the world.
The beauty of the manifestation was such that, much like a spellbound child, he reached toward the swarm with his right hand, hoping one of them would alight on a finger and allow him to study it more closely.
Instead, the communal pattern they created abruptly morphed into a throbbing stream of light, like a comet with a tail, swooped three times around him, and glimmered away from the house. Crazy as it seemed, he felt certain that the triple spiral was an invitation, and he followed the swarm across the lawn, toward the lake in which the moon admired its reflection, the moment having turned somewhat Disneyesque.