Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

  “Mama,” I whisper into the blackness. Into the void.

  It occurs to me that this is what I do all the time. I stare into the dark.

  Dark matter. Dark energy. Darkest, deepest space.

  There’s so little light.

  So little I know.

  I keep replaying that conversation with Aunt Nora in my head. Thinking about my new baby sister or brother. And how quickly Nora was able to cut them out of our life. And now I’m in a whirlpool of thoughts I don’t usually indulge in because they hurt and because there’s nothing I can do about the past. But it’s my birthday, and I can’t help it.

  I remember when Nah found out about her conception. Mom had gotten tipsy on too many margaritas one Cinco de Mayo and it came out: Dad had been telling her he wasn’t ready, but it was Mom’s birthday, and he said, Okay, fine, we won’t use a condom tonight, and if it’s meant to be, then this is the only damn birthday present you’re getting this year. And then she laughed about how when she showed him the stick, he burst into tears and hugged her so hard she couldn’t breathe. “Your father,” she’d say, “truly contains multitudes.”

  I don’t have a story like that.

  I don’t know the circumstances of how I came to be, but I doubt they involved a mom desperate to get pregnant, where I’m seen as a gift, and a dad so happy he cries. Maybe the circumstances were horrible. Maybe my bio dad is a rapist or a drunk or a total deadbeat. Or my bio mom doesn’t know who he is. Maybe my conception is a sad one-night-stand story of barely remembered bad sex and Jell-O shots. Maybe my bio mom was broke or too young or scared or not ready. And when she found out, when she saw the stick that said I was coming, she hated me a little.

  But the other thing I don’t know is why she had me. Was she thinking about keeping me, or did she always know she’d give me up? Maybe I was a bad baby. Sickly or crying too much. Annoying. Not cute. I don’t know what kind of baby I was, because I have no baby pictures. No home videos of me crawling. I do not know what I looked like until the first foster home, when I was one. And the only picture I have from that time, the state took so they could put it on their website. I’ve looked at those sites—it’s like an animal shelter, kids being advertised for adoption, hoping for their “forever home.” There are few things sadder on this planet than looking at the pictures of the older kids that no one wants. You can see it, in their eyes, you can see how much they want a family.

  What exactly made my bio mom decide I wasn’t worth the effort? What made her sign me over to the State of California? A state that can’t even balance its own checkbook half the time. She gave me to a system where statistics show upward of twenty-eight percent of kids are abused—and those are just the ones who fess up. I’m not the only drug orphan, I know. In fact, in all my research about Hannah, I’ve learned that the opiate crisis in America has created a swell of orphans, of kids whose parents do to them what my bio mom did to me—because they love the drugs more.

  My bio mom didn’t know I’d get to be a Winters, with smart parents who loved me and took care of me. This wasn’t a case where some girl got pregnant and then got to choose the perfect family for her baby girl and it was all Hallmark beautiful. That wasn’t my story. My story was seven houses in three years. Maybe some people just took me in for the money—you get real money for fostering kids. Or maybe they were just nice and good, but couldn’t keep me. Or maybe they weren’t. I DON’T KNOW. It keeps me up nights, all the things I don’t know.

  A short list:

  Why the universe is expanding

  What dark energy and dark matter actually are

  If life is possible on Mars

  If Dad’s quintessence theory is correct

  How the first particle came to be

  My parents’ last words

  How I will die

  If Nah will ever forgive me

  If Dad was really going to leave us

  What it’s like to be in zero gravity, on a space walk, looking down at Earth

  Why Ben Tamura feels like home

  If it’s me, something about me, that makes people go

  There are no answers in the darkness. Just more questions.

  I think about what River said, at Dharma Bums. About feeling everything no matter how bad it is. About waking up from the trance.

  I sit up, lean my pillow against the wall. Cross my legs and close my eyes.

  “Okay,” I whisper. “Let’s ride.”

  I ride the breath like a wave, not the wave, just one that brings me to the shore of myself, again and again.

  In.

  And out.

  In.

  And out.

  I sit and sit, the thoughts sometimes racing, other waves that crash against my mind, never ending, but I let them go, let them crash.

  H20 and NaCl—water and sodium chloride. That’s all a wave is. Elemental. Shifting. Changing.

  Not permanent.

  Not me.

  The more I fall into the breath, the more I realize that the thoughts are just on the surface of me. I dive deeper. Sink. Beneath the waves—beneath the wave.

  Stillness.

  Quiet and deep.

  Like all of space is inside me.

  They say that the ocean is the closest environment to space we have on Earth, and more than half the human body is made up of water, so maybe our bodies know the language of the dark, of the deep, already. We just need to listen.

  I listen.

  And then: I feel.

  Without the distraction of the thoughts, I can feel … everything.

  * * *

  What Dad did—to Mom, to us, to that little baby in Rebecca Chen’s belly far away in Los Angeles, and what Micah did to Nah, and what Nah and I did to each other, the lying.

  I feel the weight of the ocean in my chest.

  I don’t push it away.

  I don’t work the problem.

  I ride the wave.

  In order for an object to float, it must contain some trapped air. That is the only way it can rise above the surface.

  Eventually, the breath pushes me

  up

  up

  up.

  The wave recedes. For now.

  I open my eyes.

  Somehow, the darkness is a little lighter.

  There’s a tap on my window. Then another one.

  I turn.

  Ben is framed by yellow curtains, flakes of snow swirling all around him, as though just by meditating I’ve summoned him.

  He spreads a gloved hand on the frosted pane and rests his forehead against the window and I can feel him through the glass.

  The cold in me turns warm. Like soup.

  I crawl out of bed and pull the window open. He is covered in snow. There is a storm behind him that must have started after Nate brought me home from the orchard. That long, silent car ride.

  The wind is a knife, and it cuts through my thin T-shirt.

  My moon lamp catches in Ben’s eyes so that the night sky is now inches from my face. I don’t feel the cold anymore.

  “I wanted to kiss you good night,” he says. “It’s your birthday. And no birthday girl should go to sleep without a good-night kiss.”

  Did Dad knock on Mom’s window late at night? Did he send her into zero gravity? And when she found out about him and Rebecca—was it like falling, or another kind of floating?

  The wind is a knife. Serrated. Death by a thousand cuts, that’s what this is. Caring about someone and knowing it will end.

  “This is very romantic,” I say, carefully. “And you came all this way in the cold, and I wish I could be the girlfriend you want, Ben, but—”

  “You are the girlfriend I want,” he says, leaning in a little, his hair dusted with snow. “And the one I have. How convenient.”

  “It’s ANYTHING but convenient! I don’t have time for this! For girlfriend things. I don’t have space inside me for it.”

  “I love you.”

  Sometimes … sometime
s you can actually hear Earth rotate.

  I look at this boy who climbed to my window in a snowstorm. Who clings to the flimsy wood, patient. My quantum boy that I found in the chaos. And I want to grab him and never let him go.

  But I can already feel what it will be like when he leaves.

  I shake my head. I wish he hadn’t said it. Everyone who has ever said that to me goes away for good.

  “Yes. I do. I love you,” he murmurs. “Right here, right now. The wave and your dad and your sister and Micah—no one, nothing, can take this moment from us. It’s ours and I love you and if you don’t have time, that’s okay, because I’m not asking you for anything more than this minute. I’m not even asking you for it—I want to give it to you. A minute can be a gift.”

  His breath comes out in a puff, and I breathe him in, his heat melting me, melting that ice that built up so quickly inside. The physicist Carlo Rovelli says that time and heat are linked, that the only way you can see a detectable difference between the past and the future is when there is a flow of heat.

  This heat I feel—does it mean that Ben and I have a future? Can thermodynamics keep two people from leaving each other? Maybe things got cold between Mom and Dad, and so there could be no future. No more time. No more minutes.

  A minute can be a gift.

  “I didn’t open any birthday gifts.”

  Ben’s eyes are sad. And hopeful. “I know.”

  Time is a gift.

  I am learning this the hard way.

  Sixty seconds. This minute, one minute with Ben. A gift.

  His lips are a little blue, but he doesn’t complain.

  I kiss them.

  Then I drag him inside.

  As soon as Ben is here, in my room, I don’t want him to be anywhere else. I want more gifts. More minutes.

  “The universe is expanding,” I say. “Maybe I am, too. Maybe there’s more space in me than I thought.”

  He kisses me like we’re in the final scene of a movie and the music is swelling and there’s a sunrise behind us. It’s a pretty good kiss.

  Ben pulls away, looks around. “You failed to mention that this room is a wormhole.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. You tricked me, you minx.” Ben is grinning, and it takes me a second, but then I see where he is going with this. Never fall for an MIT boy. “A minute in here is actually a whole night out there. Spacetime, man. Total mindfuck.” He shuts the window, pulls off his scarf. “Well played, you. You’ve got me for the whole night.”

  I bite my lip, thinking. Micah would do something like this for Nah.

  Ben leans close, his lips brushing my ear. “For science, Mae.”

  My eyes fly to his, and he’s grinning, my person, and I almost say it, those three words, but I can’t, I can’t, so I just kiss them to him. He tastes like coffee and cinnamon.

  “I feel like I’m living my entire life in the quantum realm now,” I say.

  Nothing makes sense. Reality isn’t playing by the rules anymore. I have no idea what is going to happen next, no way to prepare. My parents are dead, my sister’s on drugs, and I’m in the arms of a boy I’m already afraid of losing.

  “We found each other there,” he murmurs. “Remember?”

  I nod. Colliding by the Charles. An experiment for science. His heart in the palm of my hand.

  “No matter how much we discover,” he says, “how many laws of physics we hold to be tried and true—none of this will ever make actual sense. Even if you discovered the origin of the universe, would it explain you? Or your parents, and what happened to them? Or this?”

  He leans close, brushing the tip of his nose against mine.

  “I … I don’t know.”

  “Good answer.”

  Ben is melting, snow everywhere, and I help him pull off hat and gloves and coat, and as he kicks off his boots, my hands won’t stop: sweatshirt and shirt and pants.

  “Hey.” He stops me. “I know I just made this grand gesture and found a nifty loophole to stay, but I heard you—when you said you don’t have space. I can go. You can think about it.”

  I rest my hands on his bare chest, which is warm and soft. “I wouldn’t have let you in if I didn’t want to. And I think I’ve had enough space for one day.” I shrug. “Besides, it’s technically only a minute.”

  His answer to that is a slow, roguish smile that gives me no choice but to pull him to the bed and under the covers. I climb on top of him and whisper, “Say it again.”

  He pulls my face close to his, eyes on mine. “I love you, Mae.”

  As the words fall from Ben’s lips, again and again, as he says them against my skin and into my mouth and as he fills me with them and with himself, I am safe, this moment and this boy a capsule speeding through space.

  But.

  The thing about wormholes—you reach the other side of the tunnel eventually.

  After so many minutes, so many gifts, Ben’s eyelids begin to drop: a sunset. I watch him sleep. Watch our night fade into day, our minute in the wormhole burning up as it hits the atmosphere, as the sun peeks into the room, spreads across the bedroom floor toward the bed. A wave of light. But still: a wave.

  And I think: I am going to lose you.

  i didn’t want to walk away from him.

  Train Seat

  C Line

  Boston

  28

  Hannah

  Snow isn’t so bad when you have diamonds in your pockets and whiskey in your blood.

  I turn to Drew. “I’ve never been kissed in the snow.”

  He leans toward me, and I turn my head up, waiting. I thought it would have come so much sooner. The orchard was hours and hours ago. The night is long gone—the sun is already starting to peek into the sky.

  But it doesn’t matter because here it comes, our first kiss, finally, finally—

  Drew fixes my scarf, then rests his hands on my shoulders. I slide my arms around his neck, but he removes them, his fingers tangling with mine before he lets go.

  “Not like this,” Drew says, quiet.

  I blink. “What?”

  “Let’s get some food. Coffee. Get warm.” He’s already walking toward the diner. “It’s been a long night. Aren’t you cold?”

  He’s walking away from me, toward the steamed-up windows, the neon OPEN sign, the turkey and Pilgrim decorations.

  “What the fuck, Drew?”

  He stops. Sighs. That tired sigh of everyone around me. That I-wish-she-weren’t-her sigh.

  “Hannah.”

  Snow swirls around him, and he is a poem. Does he know? Does he know how beautiful he is?

  I wish I deserved him.

  “I thought we…” I shake my head. “I broke up with him. I chose you. I stood there in front of him, holding your hand. Did I, like, read this all wrong or—”

  “Hannah, you’re high. And drunk.” He throws up his hands. “I’m sorry if I’d like you to remember the first kiss I give you.”

  I stare at him. “Are you seriously fucking judging me right now? Because fuck you for that, Drew. You’re the goddamn drug dealer, not me.”

  The party had been an accident, since of course we were supposed to be with Mae, eating cake and opening presents. But Mae and Nate and Ben had gone off, and Micah, too—with them or on his own, I don’t know. They left me in the orchard because Nate said there was no way in fucking hell he’d play chauffeur to my dealer. Drew and I got a bus back to the city. Then we ran into someone. I needed the distraction. A few drinks, a joint. I haven’t even had a pill. I’ve been so good. After today? So good.

  “I don’t deal anymore,” he says, quiet.

  “So you want some straight-edge girl now. Fine. Go back to your soccer-playing Christian girlfriend. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled. Wish you had told me I wasn’t your type before I broke up with my boyfriend of three years.”

  I can’t even think about that now. What he did to me. And how breaking his heart still hurt so much. I turned off m
y phone. He’d been calling and texting and I just turned it off.

  “What the hell, Hannah? I don’t want—”

  “Me.”

  He pulls off his hat, runs a hand through his hair. “That’s not what I’m saying. Don’t do that.”

  “Don’t do what? Say the truth?”

  Stupid. I was so stupid to think that he would want me. Why would he? Micah certainly doesn’t. Cathy. Her name is Cathy.

  Maybe it’s because she’s going to college. Not a C student like me. D student, actually. All those jokes with my dad I didn’t get. All the references. The books he’d read to impress Dad, letting Mom smudge him even though sage makes him sneeze. I’m Just Hannah. A going-nowhere, average girl who just wants to have kids and make soup and read tarot cards. Just a basic bitch. I asked Micah what he saw in me, not too long before we left for Boston, and he said, “The future.” And, at the time, I’d thought that was romantic—like we’d be together forever and he sees his whole future with me. But now I realize he didn’t see me. He saw a life with me. But those are not the same thing.

  My sister’s birthday, and what did I do? Spent it getting fucked up with a guy who doesn’t even want to kiss me. What an idiot I was, to think he’d kiss the hurt and the guilt away.

  Drew must have been watching me all night, trying to figure out how to get rid of me. Now that I think about it, he didn’t have a drink. Or take a hit of that joint. So it’s been me, looking like a drunk junkie whore loser all night.

  Drew steps closer. His lips part. A puff of breath floats through them, toward me.

  “The truth is that I want you, Hannah. More than anything I’ve wanted in my entire life.”