On what seems to be an innocuous summer night sometime in 1985, a tight-knit group of teenagers get together and start to drink together. They drink copious amounts of alcohol, have fun with each other, and behave as teenagers normally do. They are irresponsible and they are foolish.
Each of the teen's lives are changed, however, when one of them foolishly decides to drunkenly get into a car and drive away from their meetup. At the drop of a dime, the party turns from fun to tragic. The lives of everyone in the group, as well as the lives of everyone on Division Street, changes suddenly, drastically, and for the worse. Very shortly after the crash happens, a young doctor named Ben Wilf arrives on the scene. He goes there so that he can and offer any survivors medical attention. His help, however, isn't needed, as everyone involved in the crash has died. Witnessing the crash and seeing its fallout shattered Ben and shaped his entire life.
Eventually, the accident is forgotten by most people on Division Street. In the Wilf (and in the other families who were in one way or another involved in the accident) family, the accident becomes an unspoken secret. They vow to never speak of it again. The Wilf family fears that, if they bring it up, their life will again be irreparably harmed and damaged even further. But for those not involved in the accident on Division Street, their lives start to move on. A family, the Shenkmans, give birth to a baby boy.
Signal Fires jumps forward in time and the Shenkmans' son, named Waldo, grows up and befriends Dr. Wilf, who is struggling with his wife's illness and her rapid decline. Waldo has the ability to interact with anyone and everyone; he gets to Dr. Wilf to unexpectedly talk about the teen's death all of those years ago, opening up the floodgates of emotion and grief and regret in Dr. Wilf and in the community at large. And finally, people in the community are finally forced to contend with the difficult emotions of the teen's death.
