IN MARCH OF 1986, Mano Reichert climbed onto the roof of her childhood home in an effort to see Halley's Comet. Though the comet was supposed to be brighter from the southern hemisphere, Mano had a set of binoculars and a positive outlook. She'd been stargazing from the roof of her house since she was ten years old, the same year her then teenage sisters, Teresa and Ruth, left home within months of each other. For Mano, their especially little sister, suddenly alone, lonely, bereft, the roof was a tiny rebellion. Her parents, who loved her best when she entertained herself, were rarely curious about her location, and her sisters, who would certainly have told her it was too dangerous, had taken their opinions and their protection with them when they left.

Mano had always struggled to see the constellations by tracking stars. Instead, she could focus on the negative space and find the silhouettes that were outlined in the sky, the light of the stars a bright outline of inky blue-black beauty—her sisters in profile, the trailing seed pods of a catalpa tree, a crisscrossed map of the interstate highway system. She knew the sky shifted with the earth's orbit and rotation, but slowly, nearly imperceptibly. Mano loved anything—airplanes, satellites, comets—that flashed fast and bright across her familiar skies, helped her see them differently. In art school, Mano had learned that vision was a layered thing, something beyond physical sight. Vision required clarity. You could paint the world exactly as you saw it, but without a coherent sense of context, without intentional meaning-making, you wouldn't end up with art. For years, Mano had made half a living painting portraiture and landscapes for tourists outside Rocky Mountain National Park, an application of her talent from which she had been unable to make any meaning at all.

“I heard it's years of luck if we see it.” Ruth, Mano's oldest sister, joined her on the roof as often as she could these days. Ruth worked the night shift as a labor and delivery nurse, and when she wasn't working, she slept, her snores as rhythmic and patterned as a washing machine cycle. Ruth's enthusiasm for stargazing hinted that the romantic Ruth, the wild teenage dreamer Mano had idolized as a girl, still lived somewhere underneath the increasingly harsh practicality of Ruth's middle-aged-working-single-mother-of-four persona. “Once-in-a-lifetime sighting, once-in-a-lifetime luck.”