Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

There is a little universe inside each of us. We are filled with planets and stars, light and gravity, dark matter and a million other mysteries we may never understand. And the greatest mystery of all is that we are immortal. We will be reshaped, again and again, by the universe itself. And we will never die.

  My parents aren’t dead.

  The wave didn’t take them.

  They never left.

  Their atoms are just dancing to a different tune.

  They’re not ghosts.

  I’m not a ghost.

  I am alive. Here and now and ALIVE.

  And I’m not hungry. Not anymore. Not even a little.

  I’m full.

  are you a mother if you lose a daughter?

  are you a daughter if you lose a mother?

  Ice Cream Cone Wrapper

  Boston Common

  Boston

  40

  Hannah

  My sister is walking through Boston Common in a daze, a rock clutched in her hand.

  I glance at Nate. “Should we be worried?”

  “I don’t think so. When’s the last time Mae suggested crossing the Charles?”

  Ever since she and Ben broke up, Mae has refused to get on any train that goes over the Charles River, into the north of the city, where Castaways and MIT are. Now she says she’s getting on the Red Line—the train that would take her closest to a certain rock nerd. Just as soon as she makes a pot of soup.

  My fingers immediately go to the necklace I haven’t taken off since Drew put it around my neck.

  I miss him so much.

  But I know Jo is right. If I’m going to figure out who I am outside of the pills, outside of Micah and Mom and Dad and all of it, then I need to be on my own. And the way I miss Drew, the way I crave him—that’s my addiction looking for a hit. And he deserves to be more than that.

  That’s what I tell everyone, including Drew. It helps, us not being at the same school anymore. But only a little.

  Every time I think about running to him, I think about how it would kill me, it would fucking kill me, if he ever looked at me the way Micah did and said, I can’t carry you. And he would. Because I’m a burden. On everyone who cares about me. I can see the way I exhaust them, the worry and stress. My sister almost gave up everything for me. I ruin people’s lives. It’s the only thing I’m good at.

  Jo would say that’s the depression talking. “Stop drinking your haterade,” she’d say.

  But it’s true.

  I do what I’m supposed to. Call Jo when I’m two seconds away from giving my “jeweler,” my dealer in Harvard Square, a call. I go to meetings. Sometimes I talk at them, but usually I just listen and drink too much coffee.

  My day looks like this: school and group therapy—at school since we’re all addicts—an extra meeting at NA on hard nights, coffee with Jo or my new sober friends or making soup with Aunt Nora or taking a walk with Mae. TV. Bed. Where I lie awake and count my fingers.

  I hate my life.

  But at least I have one. Use it or lose it, right?

  C’est la goddamn vie.

  “Must have been some gift,” I say to my sister as we near Park Street station.

  She turns to me, eyes bright. “It helped me figure some stuff out.”

  “Including Ben?”

  Mae’s phone buzzes before she can answer. She glances at it, frowning. Then her fingers fly across the screen and she stares at it, openmouthed. She blinks. Smiles.

  “What?” I say.

  Her expression turns uneasy. Guilty.

  “Don’t be mad,” she says.

  “And the day was going so well,” Nate mutters.

  I take off my sunglasses. Stare her down. “What did you do, Mae?”

  Count your fingers. Count your fingers.

  How bad can it be?

  “When you were in detox over Thanksgiving, I emailed Rebecca Chen.”

  The sunshine and happy of the day falls away so suddenly it’s like tumbling into a well.

  “Why the hell would you do that?” I say.

  “I wanted to know about the baby,” she says softly. “Our brother or sister. It’s not their fault.”

  “That kid’s not our—”

  I stop. Realize. They are. That baby my dad and Rebecca have—technically, they’re related to me.

  I shove my glasses back on. “Stay out of it, Mae. Just. Leave that whore alone.”

  My sister’s tropical-sea eyes turn as dark as the Atlantic. “I’m sure there are people in my bio family who wanted to forget me just as easily.”

  “Mae. Jesus. I wasn’t saying—”

  She steps closer to me. “It’s not her fault.”

  “What the hell do you mean? It totally is her fault.”

  Pot, kettle—I know. I fell in love with Drew while still with Micah. So maybe I understand Dad more than I want to. But I didn’t break up a family.

  I see the look on Micah’s face, though, when he thought Mae had betrayed him in that orchard, brought him there just to hurt him. He’d been like her big brother. And how sorry he was, how sad. I believe him, a little, that the grief had made him do something so crazy. But I chose Drew. So maybe I broke up a family, too.

  Mae holds up her phone. “No. It’s not her fault.”

  And.

  There.

  Curled up in a little pile of blankets, is a baby girl. Rosy, puffy cheeks. A little pink bow around her tiny head. Bitty hands covered in mittens. Her eyes are open—bright green, just like Dad’s. Just like mine. She has his nose. That same all-knowing expression.

  “What … what’s her name?” I hear myself whisper.

  “Pearl,” Mae says. “After the Three Sisters.”

  “Orion’s Belt.” Nate lays a hand on my arm. “A constellation. Also known as the Three Sisters. The Arabic name translates to ‘string of pearls.’” He sighs. “That was … nice of her. Rebecca.”

  “Fuck Rebecca,” Mae surprises me by saying. “If this little girl, if Pearl, stands a chance of doing right by the miracle, she’s going to need us. Her sisters. Her mother obviously has no moral compass.”

  Nate whistles. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”

  Mae crosses her arms. “I want to meet her. As soon as possible.”

  I stare at her. “What? You mean, get on a plane and … No. No. We’d have to see that woman.”

  Mae gives me a strange, fleeting smile, and I swear for a second it’s Mom looking out at me through her eyes, or maybe even Yia-yia. Someone older and wiser. “Don’t you want to hold her?”

  I look at the picture again. My heart burns.

  I nod.

  I do. I want to hold my baby sister.

  “Then we have a trip to plan,” Mae says.

  * * *

  I wonder if it’s disloyal to Mom to want to hold Pearl.

  I think about this as Mae and Nate plot about how and when we’ll go to LA, what we should do about Rebecca. Aunt Nora won’t like it. Because of Mom.

  But I’m already wondering what she smells like. What she’ll feel like in my arms. I don’t know if that makes me a bad daughter, a good sister, or both.

  We go home, and I help Mae make Italian wedding soup. Ben’s favorite, she says. It has been so long since we made soup just the two of us, but here we are, side by side, chopping and sautéing and stirring.

  This isn’t crisis soup. This is happy soup. But I can’t help thinking about the last time someone in our family made it. That was my-husband-is-cheating-on-me soup. Now it’s I-love-you soup. At least, I think it is.

  “You have to tell him,” I say, ladling Dad’s favorite food into the large glass mason jar Mae is taking on the train with her.

  “I know.” She looks into the pot, wistful. “I wish I’d worked the problem sooner. Four whole months.”

  I rest a hand on her arm. “All you have is now. Go get your boy, Mae.”

  “You really are the genius of the family. I have to work so hard to know the things t
hat are so obvious to you.” She brightens. “Have you considered theological studies? Or psychology? I think you’d be a great—”

  “Okay, now you’ve lost it. Go! Grand romantic gesture, remember?”

  She kisses me on the cheek, grabs her mason jar of soup, and skips—actually skips—out of the kitchen.

  When Mae crosses the Charles with Nate, I go upstairs.

  This house used to be the place we sometimes stopped by on our way to the Cape for Christmas or Thanksgiving or summer vacation. Now it’s this other thing. Not my home. But also not just a place to crash for the night after a long flight across the country.

  This idea of home has been getting to me a lot lately.

  This past week, to be exact.

  I’m so proud of my sister. So proud. And happy for her. It makes me smile to imagine her one step closer to space.

  But I don’t know where that leaves me.

  For a minute there, I thought I was okay. That everything would be okay. Going to meetings, counting my fingers. Jo is cool. I missed Drew, but I was really okay. Now I’m beginning to feel what it will be like when she’s gone and it’s just me and Aunt Nora and Uncle Tony. Nate will be around, but only on weekends, and only until he graduates. And I can’t bear it. I really can’t.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life. I have no plan. Nowhere to go. No dorm to move into. No apartment with Micah. No best friend that I’m getting a place with.

  I have money. My parents made sure of that. I know I’m lucky in that regard. Drew has to make his own money to help chip in for rent, to buy tea tree soap and deodorant. But what good does the money do me when I have nothing to spend it on but pills?

  Everyone keeps telling me they’re proud of me. For what? Not getting high? Not killing myself?

  Seeing what Mae’s accomplished just underscores how much I have utterly failed at life. We had the same parents, the same schooling, the same chances. I even had a leg up, since she didn’t even become a part of our family until she was three. But she never lets being adopted bring her down. Didn’t let Mom and Dad’s death ruin her life. And now she’s going to Annapolis, and she’s about to figure things out with Ben. And I am here in a big, empty house. Alone.

  My head is starting to hurt, and I reach up to pull the rubber band out of my hair, but it gets tangled, and I can’t get it out, I can’t even get a fucking rubber band out of my hair, and suddenly it’s too much, too fucking much.

  I remember throwing up all over this hair in the snow after they woke me up under the angel, and Mae trying to hold it back, and I was so disgusting that night.

  And I decide, right now: One of us has to go. Me or the hair.

  A haircut is easier.

  I go to the kitchen and grab the shears. For a while, they were hiding all the knives and such, but it’s been four months since I overdosed, and everyone thinks I’m okay now.

  I’m not.

  But if you tell people that, they never stop watching you and asking you stupid questions and using that pity-grief voice, so I don’t tell them. I mean, my aunt and uncle took off my bedroom door when I got back from rehab to make sure they could check on me all the time. And there are random drug tests each week, sometimes more than once, here and at school. I don’t know what else the adults in my life could do to me, but I don’t want to find out.

  I sit in front of the mirror in my room, and I see my mother’s face. This is the thing no one thinks about. When you look like your dead mother, you stop wanting to see yourself. It hurts to look at you. It hurts everyone to look at you.

  Aunt Nora calls me Lila sometimes, by accident. She doesn’t always realize it. One time she did, and her face got so sad. Because just looking at me reminded her of Mom.

  I am tired of looking like my dead mother.

  I am tired of seeing her when I brush my teeth, when I walk by clean windows.

  I grab a chunk of my hair, but just as I’m about to cut, I remember Mom running her fingers through this hair. Braiding it. Helping me dye strips of it in funky Venice Beach colors: blue, pink, green. Putting those pink foam curlers in it when I was little. Bows, rubber bands, scarves. Twisting it idly around her finger when we had our long talks. I haven’t cut it since before the wave. It goes all the way to the middle of my back.

  The scissors fall from my hands. I scratch at my arms, the monster inside me that wants more diamonds clawing at me from the inside out.

  “I hate you.”

  I don’t know who I’m talking to: myself, the monster inside, or Mom, for leaving me.

  I pick up the scissors and I start chopping. Chopping and chopping, waves and waves of my mother’s black hair falling off my head and the tears pour out of me so fast and hard that I can’t see what I’m doing but I still keep cutting until there is no more hair to grab, there is nothing left, just little stubs. As if the wave has come by and torn me up by the roots.

  When I’m done, I feel lighter.

  So light I could fly away.

  41

  Mae

  ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit

  Earth Date: 16 April

  Earth Time (EST): 22:23

  Nate lets me into the dorm room he shares with Ben, grabs a duffel bag, and says he’ll see me in the morning. He adds an exaggerated wink and hip shake because he can’t resist.

  Ben won’t be back until late, it turns out. Lab, class, study group. Nate doesn’t tell him I’m here. A little surprise, like a bit of outer space in a gift bag.

  I put the soup on Ben’s desk, then wander around his side of the room, which is much tidier than Nate’s. I am not surprised by the rock collection on the windowsill, or the meditation cushion. There’s a picture of us pinned to the corkboard above his desk, one Nate took when we were at Castaways. I stare at the girl in the picture, at her huge smile, at the way she looks at the boy. And I think, once again, that I am the dumbest smart person I know.

  Ben has a copy of Dad’s book—Dark Diving—on his shelf, and I pull it down. It’s filled with underlining and highlighting, sticky notes. For me. He read this for me. I turn to the back, to Dad’s picture. I remember when Mom took it, how she had him lean into the sunlight just so, how she’d brushed back a lock of his hair and he’d caught her hand and kissed it.

  And now there’s Pearl.

  I turn to the dedication: For my girls: May you always find light in the darkness.

  My eyes fall back to the picture of Ben and me. Maybe that’s what we all are for each other. Little lamps, lighting the way home.

  I hold the book against my chest and curl up on Ben’s neatly made bed, with its plaid comforter and very fluffy pillows that smell like him. I open to a part Ben has highlighted and put exclamation signs beside:

  My colleague, physicist Carlo Rovelli, says, we live in “a world of happenings, not of things,” likening his observations to the happenings of the sixties, when people would gather on a whim to do something crazy and unexpected—for no particular reason other than that they could and they wanted to. Though quantum mechanics is a very specific set of rules that provides an excellent description of the behavior of subatomic particles, I like to think of particle theory and quantum mechanics as the hippies of physics. The work scientists are doing in these realms show us how dynamic and ever-shifting the universe is, how it’s constantly engaged in such happenings. This is high-vibe science, where everything is in relationship, jumping from one interaction to the next, connecting, over and over. We could say that the very essence of the universe is connection: this particle with that particle, this atom with that atom. Particles move in swarms, like birds or bees, together, unpredictable, but together. In relationship. Continually. It is restless and searching and expanding and curious. The universe is so damn curious! The particles go here, there, then here again. Like my daughters, searching for shells on the beach.

  My dad is saying that the universe doesn’t want us to be alone. It won’t let us be alone. Any of us.

&
nbsp; I wish I could ask him why. Why did he fall out of love with Mom? Why did he do what he did? Maybe it’s just particle theory. Love jumping from one person to the next. He loved Mom, then he loved Rebecca. Without malice or intent. Love exists in the quantum realm. Predictably unpredictable.

  I read and the darkness gathers, the sun goes down. My eyes grow heavy.

  I wake to the sound of a key in the lock, the soft thud of a heavy backpack hitting the floor. A sharp intake of breath.

  The door shuts, and then there is the click of the desk lamp, the mattress sagging, a warm hand on my shoulder.

  I open my eyes. Ben’s wearing the thick, black-rimmed glasses he only puts on late at night, and his hair is a mess, and all I want to do is run my hands through it. He has the most awestruck expression on his face, looking at me. Like me being here is a scientific discovery.

  “You’re going to die,” I blurt out.

  He blinks. “Yes…”

  I sit up. “I think … I think I’m okay with that.”

  River’s right: Nothing—no one—is for keeps. Not Mom or Dad or Nah. Not Ben. Not even me.

  “Someday you will leave me,” I say. “Or I will leave you. In this current collection of atoms or sooner. And it will hurt. But it will hurt more to not have this—to have you—while I can. I want to be here. I want to be now.”

  Ben doesn’t say anything. He just holds out his arms and everything in me sags in relief, and then I’m in his lap and he’s kissing my head, his arms tight around me.

  I let myself fall into him, for him. Every single one of us is in free fall all the time—me, Ben, Earth itself, the stars. We fall and fall, without end, together.

  That’s just physics. The falling. The always falling. Nothing ever lands, not really.

  I look up at him, and I fall a little faster, and harder. I touch the tip of my nose against his. I’m okay with having nowhere to land, as long as I get to keep falling with him.

  I take one last leap on my own:

  “I love you.”

  Did you know that the sun isn’t actually 149.6 million kilometers from Earth? It’s smack-dab inside Benjamin Tamura.