Oisín remembered now that there was an almost invisible entrance, narrow as a cupboard door, on the other side of the rock. He led Rebecca there, feeling dizzy and anxious. For decades he had tried to protect himself from seeing certain things, terrible things that could not be unseen, but he had seen so many, too many, scenes of collapse, failure, villainy. But he had seen great beauty, too. Chiefly in his life, he acknowledged, he had seen beauty. It really was almost all beauty.

“Follow me,” Rebecca said. She ducked into the shadows and Oisín followed.

It was glorious, immediately glorious. There were lights. Someone had strung lights throughout and it was as bright as Christmas. Fourteen children were aglow and were examining a multitude of wonders. Hung from every branch there were jars of rain, each of them marked carefully with their provenance and date of capture. San Luis Obispo, 12/28/08. Bend, Oregon, 2/7/12. Maui, 8/8/15. Buenos Aires, 10/16/05. There were a hundred, maybe more, with the light refracted through each, creating the illusion of a vast living chandelier of water and glass.

“Look!”

One of the boys had a book of some kind, wrapped in plastic. He’d pulled it from a gap in the tree’s trunk.

“Open it!” Caitlin said.

The boy looked to Oisín for his say-so. Oisín shrugged. No one needed his permission. None of this was his. When he’d last seen this place, it was a dozen jars sitting against the rocks under a tree. He’d hung a sign from the branches, the words MUSEUM OF RAIN burned into a piece of plywood. His creation was little more than that. But now this! Someone, or many people, had grown his humble notion into something gorgeous and delicate and grand.

“Hey!” Another child had found a disposable camera. It, too, was inside a plastic bag. More children gathered around it. They took it out and found a note.

Visitors! it said. Take a picture of yourselves and please return the camera to the plastic bag. We will develop the film and next time you come to the Museum of Rain, look for your photo among your predecessors. Thx, the Mgmt.

Oisín looked for a place to sit. He was short of breath. Who had done all this?

“Check it out,” a voice said. It sounded like Rebecca. She sat next to him, a stack of photos in her hand. “I think these are people who have been here.” The stack was four inches thick.

She flipped through the pictures. There were at least two hundred. People in tanktops—sometime in the ’90s? The colors were so bright then. Three young women, hikers, their smiles big, almost overlapping as they squeezed into the frame. A man and his dog. An older couple. A pair of couples. Two teenagers. A rattlesnake!

“Are there snakes here?” Rebecca asked.