The Love Proof

by Madeleine Henry

  * * *

  Isabel opened Sophie’s first real report card three years later on their library’s chaise. The books lining the shelves beside her were fairy tales, section 398.2 in the decimal system. Isabel had a pendant necklace in her jewelry box that read I STILL BELIEVE IN 398.2 in a storybook-like font with spiraling ends. Until then, she had been going through the mail and enjoying the fiery view of changing leaves outside.

  She and Ronald had wanted to raise Sophie in a natural place, so they’d settled on Katonah, New York. She tried to get Sophie outside as much as possible. On a family trip to Colorado last year, they’d hiked through the Maroon Bells—godly, sky-high mountains covered with aspen trees—because Isabel had wanted Sophie to meet things bigger than she had ever seen. There was a silencing quality to enormity, which reset the perspective, took her out of the egotistical loop of I and me, and widened her concerns beyond her next meal, her next weekend, and the protective shell of her routine. The Maroon Bells were magnificent, enormous shoulder blades of earth. The aspens painted them with screen saver–vibrant foliage. Aspens shared roots, and connected ones were considered a single organism, making a grove of aspen trees in nearby Utah the largest organism on planet Earth. They were all connected.

  On hikes around Westchester, when she could lure Sophie into them, Isabel pointed out that they were all made of the same stuff: cells converting matter to energy. She wanted Sophie to remember that she was part of nature and to trust her feelings as messengers for the greater order of the universe, from her intuition to her appetite.

  Isabel’s deference to intuition was radical, boundless. She trusted hers with every question, all the way down to what she should eat. She wanted Sophie to judge for herself, through intimate self-awareness, what foods made her body feel good. If Sophie wanted waffles for dinner, Isabel urged her to eat them with whipped cream piled decadently high, spray-swirled out of the can. Sophie was encouraged to savor warm chocolate cookies straight out of the oven, especially the bittersweet slivers of melted chocolate in there between larger chocolate chunks, the way Isabel made them. Ideally, Sophie would grow up with a healthy sweet tooth and no food anxieties, unlike the other girls in her school who already claimed to be on diets. Isabel wanted Sophie to love food as an extension of herself and to believe that dessert, egg yolks, and the croutons in her salads were all fundamentally okay.

  That afternoon, Isabel wore an ankle-length skirt and ballet wrap top that flowered into a bow at the ribs. Her wavy hair was barely tamed in a long side braid. As she opened Sophie’s report card, she braced herself. Third grade marked Sophie’s first semester with letter grades and comments. Carleton Country Day School’s crest stamped the upper right-hand corner, complex enough to pair with the $30,000 price tag. Carleton accepted 15 percent of applicants and attracted the most competitive stay-at-home moms Isabel had ever seen. She imagined they did all their kids’ homework and conferred with their husbands about starting early to earn their children spots at Ivy Leagues. She knew women who timed their pregnancies to give birth before Carleton’s August 15 cutoff each year.

  Isabel scanned the column of A’s and flipped to the teachers’ comments stapled behind. The first page was written by Sophie’s math teacher.

  …an honor to teach her…

  …a prodigy, as I’ve already mentioned…

  …exceptionally polite…

  We’d all benefit from hearing her voice more…

  Isabel turned the page. The comments from Sophie’s other teachers—in English, science, and history—were just as superlative. Everyone singled Sophie out.

  Isabel laid the packet on her chest. Of course she had wanted Sophie to be smart. She’d read to Sophie every night since she was born. The words were supposed to bring her mind to life, give her tools to build her own thoughts, and stir her soul with stories of love and adventure. Isabel would sit with Sophie in bed under her skylight, a stamp of changing constellations, and read from the stack of fairy tales on her nightstand. When Sophie was just a year old, though, she repeated the fairy tale from the night before—verbatim. She didn’t miss a word, from the opening line of “Beauty and the Beast”: Once upon a time, in a far-off country, there lived a merchant who had been so fortunate in all his undertakings that he was enormously rich… to the end, And so she did, and the marriage was celebrated the very next day with the utmost splendor, and Beauty and the prince lived happily ever after. The next night, Sophie recited the fairy tale from the night before. She did the same thing the following night.

  Sophie could read by three years old in multiple languages. She taught herself all about the brain, a gateway to her interest in the rest of the body. The previous year, when she was seven, at a dinner party hosted at their home, she’d drawn an ophthalmologist into conversation about “tooth-in-eye” surgery, which entailed that a tooth be removed, a plastic lens inserted, and the whole structure implanted into a patient’s cheek, where it grew new blood vessels. The tooth was chosen as a capsule because it was relatively easy to remove and would not be rejected by the body. The lens was then inserted into the eye to restore vision. Sophie asked the ophthalmologist if he had ever performed this surgery—he said he hadn’t, something he was barely able to admit given his shock that a child was intimately familiar with a procedure so complex, handling the anatomical terms in her mouth as easily as if they were pink bubble gum.

  “How did she learn about this?” he’d asked Isabel.

  “Books.” Isabel told the truth.

  Sophie’s teachers had long suggested moving her up in school so that she’d be challenged by her classes. Those nudges began the day Sophie squared a twelve-digit number in her mind toward the end of first grade. Isabel and Ronald refused. They weren’t as focused on Sophie’s IQ and weren’t interested in sending her up to the highest stratum of human computation. Instead, they had their own values and their own lessons to teach Sophie at home.

  * * *

  That afternoon, Isabel waited for Sophie at the top of their driveway. Bright orange oaks looked like fireworks paused at the peak of their explosions. Her cashmere dress swished around her ankles. The school bus came into view and stuttered exhaust as it braked in line with their mailbox. Sophie appeared and skipped across the street, smiling, her French braids whipping every which way. She threw her arms around Isabel in a squeezy, happy hug.

  As they walked down the driveway, looking like the same woman separated by three decades, Isabel asked Sophie about school. Did she talk to anyone today? Sophie avoided the question by burrowing her head into Isabel’s side. Of course, Sophie didn’t like any spotlight on her—which was going to make this discussion about her report card difficult.

  “I just want to make sure you aren’t taking school too seriously.”

  “I’m not, Mom.”

  She gave her daughter a knowing look.

  “I just try,” Sophie said. “Most people don’t try.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m supposed to try, right?” Sophie asked.

  Isabel nodded.

  “School only trains your mind, and that’s such a small part of who you are.” Isabel squeezed a half-inch of air in front of her. “You’re so much more. Your heart and soul, Sophie. We need to nourish the whole you as much as your brain.” They walked around the elbow in the driveway. Their house came into view. “I just hope you’re making the friends you want. Having fun. Getting outside. The best parts of life come from being connected.”

  Pavement became gravel.

  Prodigy, the report card had said. The trouble, Isabel thought, was the reinforcement. Shiny prizes, praise, and other rewards for intellect could be so intoxicating that they tore prodigies away from other people. Isabel had seen it happen to geniuses at her own high school, at Yale, and at NASA. Their talent for problem-solving brought them attention, and to some, that felt like love. So they threw themselves into their careers, leading more and more solitary lives, and taking on bigger and bigger pro
fessional challenges until—on the other side of that breakthrough—there was no one waiting for them to come home. The love they had poured into their work, expecting it to boomerang back, never came.

  “I can do better,” Sophie said.

  “I want you to do worse!” Isabel laughed.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “Darling,” Isabel said. She bent in front of Sophie, suburban wilderness behind her.

  “I love you,” Sophie said.

  The truth of it oozed through her eyes. Sophie was so full of love. When she did venture onto the lawn, it was to leave peeled carrots under juniper bushes for rabbits to eat. She teared up at commercials for the ASPCA. She still hugged Isabel in public. But Isabel was convinced that giving love was only half the way to happiness. The other half was to receive it. Sophie could give her love away to books and ideas, but those would never love her back. Sophie would be left with solitary epiphanies and profound insights that few—if any—understood.

  “I love you the most. I just want you to be happy.” She kissed Sophie’s knuckles. “And that starts with talking to other people.”

  * * *

  That afternoon, Sophie wandered their lawn where the grass met its hairline of trees. She threw branches into the forest until twilight turned their windows yellow. She knew how her mom wanted her to act. Isabel would’ve welcomed playdates, birthday parties at the ice rink with delivery pizza, and more hikes together outside. But it was too hard to be around other people. Everyone else was so casual. She felt more. Her insides were so loud. The smaller her world was, the happier she felt, and she was never safer than when she was reading.

  Besides, the world desperately wanted to be known.

  Sophie thought she’d been on the right track—our brains built our world—until this week, when she’d picked up a new book in their library. The tall red cover was thin, a bright scratch on the shelf. Inside, a glossy dinosaur picture filled every two-page spread. Sophie studied the feathered, four-pound microraptors that didn’t fly at all. On the next gorgeous spread, a 40,000-ton brontosaurus stood on sand dunes rippled by wind. The sun set over an orange desert by the annotation “Back then, the day was twenty-three hours long.” Sophie paused, still standing, her gaze on the final period. She hadn’t known a day could be anything but twenty-four hours.

  She walked to the laptop, googled, and clicked through blue hyperlinks to Scientific American, where she learned Earth didn’t rotate at one speed. It was slowing down. The length of one day—the amount of time Earth took to orbit the sun—increased by three milliseconds a century. Sophie sat back, thinking about time, now aware of it passing invisibly by and transforming the morning tick by tick into an afternoon. She leaned forward, into Google, until the next fact that surprised her: until the 1800s, every town in America had its own time zone. This wasn’t a problem until railroads connected people from different ones, leading the country to adopt standardized time zones in 1883. Sophie checked the clock on her laptop: 11:23 a.m.—deceptively steady, but those numbers weren’t steady at all. Time wasn’t absolute.

  Sophie lobbed another branch into the dark forest. It was too deep into fall to smell much of the grass, mossy bark, or dry leaves under her sneakers. Back at her house, the kitchen windows were bright, as if the last foliage had moved inside. Isabel, light on her feet, was taking a stack of three plates out of the cupboard. Would her mom be sad if she read more tonight? She’d spent time outside. Besides, she had a hunch now: she’d thought the brain created the world, but now, she saw space and time as master controllers of the universe.

  In the kitchen, Isabel moved a crusty round of sourdough from oven to table in the toasty air. Ronald would be home soon. She checked on Sophie fifty yards away, still clearing sticks. Sophie had been pacing the same line for over an hour, back and forth, with such repetition that she must’ve been deep in thought. It didn’t look like fun. The yard was too dark. Sophie was too alone. Maybe Isabel had been too harsh that afternoon. Maybe she shouldn’t force Sophie outside so often. After all, no matter where Sophie was, she was always in her own head.

  * * *

  Isabel sat at the head of the table between Ronald and Sophie, watching her daughter cut a chicken breast into diamonds. Wax thickened the bottoms of their candlesticks. Ronald lifted a forkful of pumpkin lasagna, thinning a string of mozzarella up to his mouth. Sophie was describing her latest book, a biography of Albert Einstein. She explained that Einstein had been handling patents having to do with coordinating clocks across railway stations in Switzerland when he’d come up with his famous theory of relativity.

  “People were trying to make clocks match,” Sophie said.

  “When did you read all this?” Isabel asked.

  “Lunch.”

  Ronald swallowed.

  “You read all during lunch?” Isabel asked.

  Sophie nodded.

  Isabel and her husband exchanged glances.

  “It was barbecue day outside.”

  Isabel imagined Sophie reading the three-inch-thick biography of Einstein—she knew the exact edition from their library—alone at one of the picnic tables by Carleton’s soccer field. Sophie resumed sculpting her lemon rosemary chicken. Each diamond was a perfect replica of the one before, straight-edged and bite-size.

  “Did you know there’s a planet made of diamonds?” Sophie asked.

  Isabel’s face was tender.

  “Where’s that, sweetie?”

  “Four thousand light-years away.”

  Sophie etched another diamond.

  “It’s only a little bigger than Jupiter, but it’s twenty times as dense.”

  Was it really the right choice, holding Sophie back? Her daughter loved to think. Isabel imagined Sophie taking the SATs in a gym full of high school seniors twice her size, hopping from one ellipse to the next, shading each with inside-the-lines care.

  Sophie laid her knife and fork at four o’clock.

  “Meet you in your room?” Isabel asked.

  Sophie stood up.

  “You know who’s the best?” she asked. Isabel smiled, recognizing her daughter’s end-of-dinner routine. Sophie kissed her mom three smacky times on the cheek, then walked to her dad, hugged him around the neck, and kissed him the same.

  “You are!” Ronald said.

  “No, you.” Sophie turned to Isabel. “And you.”

  Sophie put her clean plate in the dishwasher before prancing upstairs. Isabel and Ronald swallowed their final bites and then tidied the kitchen, dividing cleanup down the middle. Once done, Ronald stood behind Isabel and massaged the slopes between her shoulders and neck.

  “Love you,” he said.

  She turned around. They kissed.

  “Love you.”

  As they walked upstairs, Ronald kept one hand on Isabel’s shoulder. He was an inch shorter than she, balding slightly, and by all accounts a reliable, predictable man. He’d worked at Pfizer since graduating from Williams. At his twentieth college reunion last year, he’d spent most of the time talking to Isabel. They’d gotten cheese slices in Williamstown before driving home ahead of the main “Dinner Buffet, Dancing, and Surprise” event to beat the traffic. He’d fallen in love with Isabel for her luminous mind, matched by a depth of heart, and she made him feel interesting. He saw their relationship and magical daughter as the proudest accomplishments of his life. They parted left and right at the top of the stairs.

  Knock. Knock.

  “Come in!”

  Sophie was already in bed, smiling. Isabel sat next to Sophie, their backs to the plush yellow headboard studded with fabric buttons. The books on Sophie’s nightstand were stamped with Carleton Library stickers on the spines. Isabel scanned the titles: all mentioned time travel except for the one on Einstein and The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, a biography of the surrealist famous for painting melting clocks. Sophie reached over Isabel to tug her floor lamp’s string, clicking the room into darkness. The skylight framed a dazzling patch of stars.
This area gave some of the best views that Isabel had ever seen, and she had visited observatories in Europe—at high altitudes with premium telescopes—as a special guest.

  Here, Isabel had spent years teaching Sophie about the constellations above them. Just yesterday, she’d pointed up and explained that the colors of stars ranged from red to white to blue depending on their temperature. Red was the coolest color, white was warmer, and blue was the hottest, at over 12,000 Kelvin. She finished the night by quoting some Oscar Wilde, reciting from memory, “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul,” which she thought were gorgeous words urging people to trust themselves and value the body’s intelligence. We were as natural as the stars. Tonight, as usual, she drew from the day in choosing a lesson. She searched the back of her mind for something about connection.

  “Do you know what supersymmetry is?” Isabel asked.

  Sophie shook her head.

  “It’s the idea that every particle has a partner,” Isabel said. “Particles, as you know, are the smallest bits of the universe. Supersymmetry says that every particle has its own ‘superpartner,’ as they’re called, even though none of these have been observed.” She stroked Sophie’s warm head. “There’s still so much we don’t understand. Our best theories about how everything works would predict that particles don’t have mass.” She paused for emphasis. “But obviously, this isn’t true. You look around and see everything has mass. You. Me. Adding superpartners to some important equations gives us results that match what we actually see…”