Light and Time

Light and time form a recurring way of thinking about distance, memory, and loss. In astronomy, light carries an image of an earlier world toward the present; in photographs, it preserves a moment that can be revisited but not recovered. For Aza Holmes, this connection joins Davis Pickett’s fascination with distant stars to her own attachment to the photographs on Aza’s father’s phone. The motif makes remembrance neither a simple return nor a cure for grief: the past remains visible, but time keeps moving.

Light as a View into the Past

Davis explains the idea through Tau Ceti, the star he likes best. Its light takes twelve years to reach Earth, so anyone observing the solar system there sees Earth as it was twelve years earlier. In that delayed image, Davis’s mother has three years left to live, the family house has just been built, his parents are still arguing about the kitchen layout, and he and Aza are children with both the best and the worst of life ahead of them. The star is not merely distant; it makes the past present somewhere else.

The scale of the delay gives Davis a way to look toward earlier versions of his life without pretending that they still exist here and now. He hopes the worst is behind him, while Aza answers that the best and worst may both still lie ahead. Their exchange holds two temporal outlooks side by side: his desire for painful history to stay behind him, and her recognition that the future cannot be separated so neatly from it. The light from Tau Ceti makes their disagreement concrete, because it shows a version of their shared past continuing to arrive long after its moment has passed.

Aza understands why Davis seeks comfort in old light. She imagines that, three years later, he will find another favorite star whose light is older; when the present catches up with that view, he will look to a more distant star, and then a more distant one. The sequence suggests a desire to keep the past at a distance that makes it bearable—to see it, but not let it become the present. Aza recognizes the same impulse in herself, although her instrument is not a telescope but a phone.

Photographs and Continuing Memory

Aza keeps Aza’s father’s phone and its charging cord hidden in Harold’s trunk beside the spare tire. Its photographs often show leafless branches dividing the sky, a pattern she recognizes when she looks up through a dead tree’s fractured branches while floating on the river. She wonders what her father saw in those divided skies. The photographs therefore preserve more than recognizable faces: they preserve his attention, the things he chose to notice.

Years earlier, Aza’s mother backed up the pictures and emails onto a computer and several hard drives. Aza nevertheless prefers to swipe through them on the phone, partly because that is how she always looked at them and partly because the device still works eight years after her father’s body stopped working. Its continued physical presence gives the archive a closeness that copied files do not. The phone is both a functioning object and a remaining link to someone who has died.

At Applebee’s, Aza reaches into Harold’s trunk through the fold-down center of the backseat and retrieves a tote containing money, her father’s phone, and its charger. She plugs in the phone and waits for it to power on. The home screen shows a photograph from Juan Solomon Park: Aza at seven, leaning far back on a playground swing, her upside-down face turned toward the camera. Her mother says that Aza remembers the pictures rather than what was happening when they were taken, but Aza feels she can remember her father pushing her, his hand against her back, and the certainty of swinging away from him and back again. The image gives memory a shape while also exposing its uncertainty: what she can see and what she can actually recall are not quite the same.

Aza then chooses one of the few photographs in which her father appears, out of focus at a Pacers game with a friend. That blur matters to her because people themselves are not fixed, perfectly clear images. She tells him that she has come into some money, that she will try to do right by it, and that she misses him. The phone allows her to address him, even though it cannot answer. When she later takes it from Harold’s trunk after a date with Davis, she sits for a long time scrolling through the pictures of the sky split by branches. Her mother gently reminds her that the same images are on the computer; Aza unplugs the phone and turns it off. The exchange distinguishes access to an image from the feeling of being near the person whose phone once held it.

Astronomy, Grief, and Scale

The motif returns when Aza and Davis look through his telescope. Later, beneath a moonless sky, Aza considers the age of the light from Polaris—425 years—and contrasts it with Jupiter, less than an hour of light-travel away. The differences make the sky feel at once immense and measurable: every point of light belongs to a different temporal distance. As a witness to that light, Aza feels relief in the recognition of her own smallness and understands some of what draws Davis to astronomy.

That change in scale also reshapes the novel’s spiral image. Aza reflects that spirals become infinitely small when followed inward and infinitely large when followed outward. The image does not resolve grief; instead, it places personal experience inside a pattern that can expand beyond any one person’s view. Under the same sky, the two characters can feel a moment’s intimacy while knowing that time will carry them toward different futures.

What Remains in the Present

Aza names the connection between the two forms of remembrance directly: photographs, too, are light and time. The phrase binds Davis’s distant stars to her father’s images without equating the experiences. Starlight arrives from a place Aza cannot enter; a photograph can be handled and swiped through, but it cannot restore the event it records. Both make an earlier moment perceptible in the present, and both make the distance from that moment impossible to ignore.

The book’s later-looking narration extends this tension beyond the scene beneath the sky. Aza imagines a future in which the spiral painting will travel with her from apartment to apartment and eventually to a house, while her friendship with Daisy Ramirez continues through changing lives. She cannot know those outcomes in the moment she describes; the passage marks them as future possibilities rather than memories already possessed. Its movement between present feeling and an unknown future echoes the difference between receiving old light and living in the time it depicts.

The final exchange of good-byes preserves that uncertainty rather than closing it. Aza and Davis hold hands beneath the sky, and the narration links farewell with the possibility of meeting again. Like the light arriving from the past, the moment remains available to memory without becoming permanent. The motif’s force lies in that double truth: what has passed can still reach the living, but no image, star, or remembered instant can stop time from carrying it farther away.