Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

  Dad calls Mom’s soup habit soup meditation. No matter how stressed Mom is about whatever is making her pull out the soup pot in the first place, by the end she’s calm. Relaxed, even. Able to see the problem clearly and know what to do about it. Nah calls it Mom’s cauldron, like the soup pot is for divination and spells.

  I say she’s just found another way to work the problem.

  When you’re making soup, all you need to think about is chopping and pouring and slicing and stirring. And you can’t mess it up, not really. It’s not like baking, where you have to consider thermodynamics and its effect on various chemical compounds. Baking is science. Soup—maybe soup is art. To make it, you have to engage the right side of your brain. Your imagination. And you need to use all five senses, not just sight. You give the left side of your brain a break—the logic part of it. Wait. WAIT.

  MY MOTHER IS A GENIUS.

  I am just now realizing: The reason we make soup when there is a crisis is because soup is a creative act that engages your imagination, allowing you to work through the tangles of a problem and connect new, heretofore unseen dots. MAKING SOUP IS LIKE EINSTEIN PLAYING THE VIOLIN.

  He was always carrying around “Lina,” as he called all his violins, and Dad wrote a whole paper once on the connection between musical theory and quantum theory and showed that part of why Einstein’s mathematical equations are so elegant is because, when he was stumped, he’d play music, which would open up new channels in his brain. New pathways to work the problem. Dad joked that we should give partial credit of E=mc2 to Bach and Mozart.

  Maybe because none of us play instruments, Mom found another way to open up all those channels in our brains. And how sneaky of her, as usual, not to tell us she’s doing it.

  I miss her.

  It’s the middle of the night on what is now technically day five, and I left Hannah asleep on Mom’s side of the bed, her head resting on Micah’s chest. His arms are around her like he can shield her from the world, and maybe he can. Maybe love can do that sometimes. Hide you. I wonder if Riley would be here if he hadn’t had to move a million miles away. Then again, he returns seventeen percent of my emails, so I suspect he would not, in fact, be here.

  The kitchen is chilly, but I open the window anyway to let in the salty smell of the air and Mom’s garden scents: basil, rosemary, lemon. I pull the big soup pot out of the cabinet. It’s after two in the morning, but that never stopped Mom. I press PLAY on the old stereo Dad installed on top of the wine rack, and suddenly I am back in the only church I ever liked being in. The Tallis Scholars, singing in Latin, a cappella. I remember Dad putting the CD in here just a few days before they left for Malaysia. He’d been making his famous egg bake, a breakfast casserole that Mom says will give all of us heart disease. There’s half a tray of it still in the freezer. He’d made extra so we could eat it while they were gone. Knowing that egg bake is here when he’s not scoops something out of my insides.

  I close my eyes and hug the soup pot against my chest as dozens of voices swoop around me, high then low.

  I time travel: back to the Cloisters, back to New York City last fall. Just Dad and me, walking through a medieval museum on a hill after doing a tour of Columbia, even though we both knew my heart was set on Annapolis.

  It’s like that scene in Interstellar: I’m in my wormhole, looking through time and space into the past, into my life, with my dad. I’m pushing books out of my own bookshelf, trying to get my past self’s attention. But the me in the Cloisters doesn’t see the me in the wormhole, the one who is on the other side of the wave, who knows it’s coming, who’s begging Past Me to warn them.

  I watch as Dad and I walk into the cathedral-like space, drawn by the Latin chorus that had been floating down the hall. The music reminds me of the one time I went to Midnight Mass at Saint Cecilia’s with my grandmother, when the choir sang just like this and the hair on my arms stood at attention. But in this chapel, there are no singers or pews. It is an empty stone room with slightly vaulted ceilings. Raised speakers form a huge circle in the center, as though they are participants in an ancient rite. Dad silently points to a small placard, and we read how each speaker represents a different choral member’s voice. The voices of the invisible singers reach up into the ceiling, mournful and reverent, and I wish I could put this feeling into numbers, into an algorithm, because words will never explain what these notes do to me on a cellular level.

  Dad and I join the visitors who stand in the middle of the circle of speakers, and we all listen together, silent. An old woman is smiling, her eyes closed as she sways along with the voices, one hand gripping her cane. A guy not much older than me is sitting on the ground, hands folded in his lap. Others stand with heads bowed as though the music is a prayer. And it is, I think. It doesn’t matter, not really, that there is no one who can answer it.

  I think the asking is what matters.

  Because of the music, we are no longer strangers. The words weave us all into the same tapestry, cream and brown and black and gold. Somehow, we are in four dimensions in spacetime, past and present and future all together, all at once. We are on the event horizon. I decide to add this music to my Golden Record, my own imaginary collection of things I would launch into space for life-forms forty thousand years away to find so they could learn about humanity, just like Carl Sagan did with Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in the seventies. There is a voice recording on his Golden Record of a child saying, “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”

  This music, it’s a kind of a hello, too. If human souls existed, they might sound like this. Or like David Bowie, maybe.

  Dad takes my hand and closes his eyes. When I look over, tears are sliding down his cheeks. I have never loved him more than in this moment, this man who chose me to be his daughter. Who fought the system for me. He could have picked any other unwanted kid, but he chose me.

  We let the sound waves sweep us up, up, up, toward the ceiling, gathering speed past the sky, then cresting across the atmosphere, until we’re nothing but foam among a beach of scattered stars.

  Hand in hand we slide to the shore, into the silence.

  Something in me breaks, and the tears finally come, a slow, thick stream. What kind of a daughter takes SEVENTY-EIGHT hours to cry after finding out her parents might be dead?

  I stand there sobbing for two full songs and it is only after the second one ends and I see the title displayed that I realize I’d been listening to a requiem. A song for the dead.

  I want to go back to the Cloisters and whisper in Dad’s ear to not ever go to Malaysia because if he goes I will be alone in the kitchen in the middle of the night listening to the Tallis Scholars sing his life goodbye.

  Aunt Nora, Mom’s sister, flew from Boston to Malaysia yesterday. She says she’s looking for them, but I know she’s really just going to look at the pictures. Polaroids of the dead. The internet is down all along the coast and no one in the hospitals can upload them, if they’d even be allowed to. We wanted to go, too, but Nora said no and I was upset because there is finally something to do and we’re almost eighteen and have every right to go ourselves, but Nah was relieved, I think, so I let it go. I called Nora before I came into the kitchen because it’s day there. And she told me what I had already figured out for myself, when one considers the effects of exposure, infection, lack of clean water, and all the other things that might make it impossible to stay alive long enough for a rescue crew to find you:

  They are not finding any more people that are alive.

  There are no pictures with my parents’ faces, and no one who is in a coma matches my parents’ descriptions. They are not stuck in a tree or wearing a life vest in the middle of the ocean or waiting in the hills because they’re too hurt to walk down.

  Aunt Nora began to cry and I knew, I knew.

  My parents are dead.

  I set down the pot and run the back of my hands across my eyes.

  “I’m making soup, Mom,” I say.

  S
he can’t hear me. I know that. I know what happens when an organism dies. I can’t help it, though. I want to talk to my mom. I want her to walk down the stairs in her old man’s plaid bathrobe that she stole from Pappoús before he died. I want her to start putting things on the counter.

  But there’s just me.

  I open the fridge and scan the contents. It’s still pretty full, since Mom and Dad only left a week ago. There are veggies in the drawer. Broth in the cupboard. Cans of beans and tomatoes.

  What is a soup for the dead?

  Mom made avgolemono—Greek chicken soup—when Yia-yia died, back in the old country, where she bought a house surrounded by olive trees. Mom cried the whole time, her tears falling into the pot as she stirred. As I juiced lemons, she’d told me how her mother had taught her to make soup when she was a little girl, just like she had taught Nah and me. Our religion: the Gospel of Soup, the salvation of the spoon. It’d be nice to make avgolemono for her, but we don’t have chicken. Dad hates lentil and Mom only likes vegetable when she’s just come back from the farmers’ market. Besides, I should use these serrano chiles. Mom hates when things go to waste.

  Chili. Chili nights are always fun. I don’t know why—maybe it’s the spiciness. The last time we had chili, Dad did his impression of the dean of the physics department and Nah got video of him pretending to fall asleep halfway through a lecture on quantum mechanics. Why didn’t we take more pictures? Why didn’t we take video of everything? Dad drinking his morning coffee, Mom watering the basil plant on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. She always insisted on talking to the plants when she watered them. Said it made them grow better, which is actually true. I pull out my phone and add watering plants to the list of things to do—keeping things alive is a way to work the problem of death. I haven’t told Nah about this list because she lives in an alternate reality pretty much all the time. For example, she still doesn’t know which clothes aren’t supposed to go in the dryer.

  She thinks they are coming back to water plants and get oil changes and pay the electricity bill. I don’t know how long it’s okay to let her keep thinking that.

  I take out the green peppers, the cilantro, the onions, and the chiles, which add lots of heat. Mom’s mason jar of seasoning is in the pantry, and I grab that, too. I run my fingers along the antique spice jars lined up on a small shelf to the left of the stove. Little white ceramic pots with the name of the seasoning written on them in blue paint. Coriander. Paprika. Oregano. They’d been passed down from my grandmother to my mom. The jars were a present from my pappoús to my yia-yia after he got his first paycheck in America.

  I have a horrible thought, one I try to get rid of as soon as it comes into my head: If Mom is gone, really gone, Hannah will get the jars. Because she is connected to the line of Karalis women in a way I will never be. Mom would say that’s ridiculous, that I am as much a Karalis as Hannah, but I’m not. Put my blood under a microscope and you’ll see that we’re the same species, and that’s where our similarities end. I don’t have those telltale Greek purple circles under my eyes and black-as-deep-space hair like Hannah does. I don’t have ouzo in my blood.

  My hair is haystack blond, and my hips are just two bony protrusions, and when we’re on the beach, I burn instantly while they just lie there, turning bronze, like perfect plates of saganaki.

  “Stop,” I say to myself, out loud, because out loud feels four-dimensional.

  I scrub the peppers clean, then set them on the cutting board. I turn off the Tallis Scholars, too. I begin to chop, and the sound of the knife against the wood is a lullaby. It’s Einstein’s bow on the strings.

  For so long it didn’t matter, not a ton, that I didn’t come from my mother’s womb. Now it does. I can’t shake it, this little voice that keeps whispering they don’t belong to you—they never did. If I had one wish, it would be to have the same genes as the rest of my family, to share the same blood. To look at old black-and-white photos in the green leather album in the living room and see myself in all the faces. Hannah and I have been treated like twins for as long as I can remember, because my parents got me when we were both three. We have always been the girls. Lila, can you pick the girls up from school today? Greg, the girls need some lunch money—do you have any cash?

  When I was little, I tried to color my hair black with a marker. It didn’t work. The good thing about Dad being a direct descendant of a Puritan on the Mayflower is that people assume I just take after him. So we never get the confused looks from strangers that Lisa, my friend who’s also adopted, gets. Her family is white as cream, and she’s got skin the color of the cello she plays. So they get lots of questions. One time she snapped at a lady in a grocery store, “No, I’m not my parents’ starving African charity case—I was born in Riverside, but thanks for filling my ignorance quota for the day.”

  I was very impressed with her for producing such an articulate zinger on the fly.

  I only have one memory from before becoming a Winters. It’s just a shard: I’m being put in a car—a red car. I think maybe someone was smoking—something about the scent of cigarettes always brings this memory right to the surface of my mind. Was this my birth mother? A foster family? I don’t know, and I’m glad for that. I don’t want to remember being left.

  Hannah is all I’ve got now.

  As though I’ve summoned her, my sister shuffles in, those dark circles under her eyes the color of the fried eggplant she loves so much, Mom’s melitzanes tiganites. Her hair is a tangle of waves, and she looks so much like Mom it hurts. She’s wearing one of the UCLA shirts Dad bought both of us, the same one, but hers is a size bigger because she’s five-eleven. I get a crick in my neck just looking her in the eye. She got Dad’s height. Mom thinks I’m so short because I wasn’t held enough as a baby, which has been proven to affect growth.

  “What are we making?”

  “Chili.”

  She nods, then crosses to the pantry to get out the stewed tomatoes and beans: kidney, pinto, cannellini. She grabs a can of sweet corn, then another. Dad likes it with extra corn.

  Hannah opens cans while I keep chopping. It feels good to be in here, to be doing something so familiar. We can control at least this one thing.

  I throw the onions into the pot with some olive oil and let them sting my eyes as I stir them. What are the odds, I wonder, of being orphaned twice?

  The last time a parent left me, child protective services came and took me away. Could they do it again?

  And what happens to Hannah? Based on my extensive research, a traumatic event can trigger a relapse into addictive behavior. No one in the family knows about Nah’s addiction—Mom said that was my sister’s story to tell, when she was ready. She said it wouldn’t be fair to Nah, for her to be seen as this one thing. And that’s true, but now I am the only Winters who knows how to check her pupils.

  What if the end of my parents’ lives is also, in a way, the end of ours?

  When the onions are soft, I add the garlic, and the sizzle sounds like hope. We wait until the kitchen fills with its meaty scent, and then we pour all the other stuff into the pot, plus Mom’s bell jar mix of cumin, chili powder, garlic salt, pepper, oregano. Hannah reaches up and grabs Mom’s secret ingredient—coffee. She sprinkles it over the top. Then she looks over at me, holding the open jar.

  “You want a cup?” she asks.

  “Okay.”

  I stir the chili while Nah takes down the French press, Mom’s favorite way of drinking it. When the coffee’s ready, we pull ourselves onto the counter and watch the chili simmer. There’s a draft in the window behind us and cold ocean air slips up my spine.

  “They’re dead, aren’t they?” Hannah says.

  I take her hand in mine. Her nails are covered in chipped blue polish.

  “Yeah,” I say, soft.

  I keep my hand in hers as silent sobs roll through the body beside mine, the one my parents made.

  i will never see them again.

  Windows
ill in Bedroom

  4302 Seaview Lane

  Venice, CA

  8

  Hannah

  The universe didn’t uphold its end of the bargain, so I’m not upholding mine.

  That’s why I’ve been in my room all day, floating on the hooked rug that Mom found at a garage sale in the Valley.

  There’s a crack in my ceiling. I never knew that.

  Outside my door, there are voices. Mae, Papa, Gram. Doors open and shut. A phone rings. On the street, cars drive by. A skateboard rolls. A dog barks. Somewhere at UCLA, Micah is riding his bike to class. He has texted me ten times, all variations on: I love you. I’ll be there soon.

  That is all in the world. I am not in the world. I am somewhere else. I think I’ll stay here for a while.

  It’s time for another pill. I know this because I can feel my body again. I can feel the knife in my heart and the hollowness in my belly. I know it’s time for another pill because I can remember.

  Everything.

  If I close my eyes, I can hear Mom reading us The Little Prince. It was always Mae’s favorite because it’s about space and planets and stars. It was always my favorite because it’s a love story.

  It’s about this boy, the Little Prince, who lives on an asteroid. He’s got itchy feet. He wants to see the world. And there’s this rose on his planet and she’s kind of high-maintenance, so he ditches her and goes exploring the universe. But it’s not all it was cracked up to be. The universe. It’s full of all these funky planets that he’s not into, with the kind of people you meet on the boardwalk every day—dropouts and weirdos. Then he lands on Earth and meets a downed pilot—which to me feels like stranger danger, but it ends up being all good—and the Little Prince is sad because he realizes he does love his thorny rose, even though she’s needy as fuck. He wants to go back to his asteroid and be with her, only now he’s stuck on Earth.