The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  I have memories that left more lasting damage. My stepfather was a monster, the kind of beast who normally lives at the dark heart of a fairy tale. He didn’t physically abuse me, but he could be unbelievably cruel, and his mood swings were vicious. I lived in constant fear of setting him off.

  He and my mother were both still in bed when we left for school, having scratched together our own breakfast, our own lunch. He didn’t work, and my mother’s writing career wasn’t exactly lucrative, either. My father told me he suspected our entire family survived on his child support payments. When my mother and stepfather had a child together, my half sister, money was so tight that I wondered whether six of us were living off child support meant for three. Julia and I had to share our already cluttered room with the baby. She cried all night for months with colic, and she would wake up at dawn for a long time after, my mother ignoring my pleas to cover our east-facing windows. I was forever getting up to take care of the baby.

  When I was nine years old, I decided not to walk with Julia to school one morning. (We had left the Montessori at that point, but our new school was still a mile-long walk away.) She would have been seven. I wanted to walk with one of my few semi-friends and didn’t want my little sister tagging along, so I told her to find her own way. Instead of taking the safer, quieter side streets, she took the main roads. At one especially busy corner, she was confronted by an unstable woman who howled in her face and tried to hit her with her bags. Julia froze and screamed for help. It took a long time for anyone to answer her cries. A real estate agent finally surfaced from a nearby office to rescue her. For days after, teachers at our school would ask me what had happened. “Not sweet Julia!” They were in shock.

  “You are in so much trouble,” my stepfather screamed at me when I got home. I can’t remember exactly what he said after that, but these are the words I hear when I close my eyes: You are a bad person. What were you thinking? You are so irresponsible. You are an ungrateful child, and I am furious with you.

  I should have looked after my sister. But I was also nine years old. That night I was the one who woke up crying.

  * * *

  ●

  We spent weekends with my father, at first in his apartment by the wide-open highways. Those two days felt like vacations from fear. My father took afternoon naps to catch up on the sleep he missed during the workweek, while my brother, sister, and I hung around his apartment playing games, often of our own invention. One afternoon, we went out onto the apartment balcony. He lived on the eighteenth floor. It was the farthest off the ground we had been in our lives, and, pretty naturally I thought, we decided to drop all sorts of objects over the railing to watch them fall. Nothing heavy: a comb, a doll. But gravity is gravity, and everything picks up velocity when it’s dropped eighteen stories. We watched our chosen projectiles land and strained to hear their moments of impact, learning a little about acceleration physics and the speed of sound. Then we rode down the elevator, gathered them up, and tried again.

  When my father woke up and learned what we were doing, he was apoplectic. We could have hurt somebody, and we weren’t supposed to leave the building on our own. I didn’t even understand that such rules might exist, let alone that I was expected to follow them. I’ve since learned that a lot of scientists have mischief in their pasts, and their particular strain of mischief can be a good predictor of their future chosen field. Chemists, for instance, usually experience a period of childhood pyromania. Biologists might get a little too curious about what’s inside frogs. Physicists, somewhere along the way, drop objects from heights.

  Though he didn’t like that experiment, my father was big on example, a teacher by illustration. His first apartment wasn’t built for a family, and we slept in makeshift beds, at least free from the worry that strange-eyed white cats named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would spray our clothes. One morning I was putting away the pullout I shared with my sister when I accidentally ripped the orange polyester blanket we’d been using. I had been conditioned by my stepfather to expect consequences for such carelessness, and I started crying hysterically.

  My father couldn’t understand why I was upset: My reaction was so out of scale with the event. Unfortunately, he didn’t connect one dot to the other. He had heard us complain about our stepfather, but I think he thought we were the typical children of divorce, angry at our surrogates out of instinct. In the moment, he couldn’t see anything beyond his scared little girl, devastated by a tear in a cheap blanket.

  I’ve never forgotten what he did next. He held the blanket on either side of the tear, and then he ripped it in half in front of my bloodshot eyes. He was trying to teach me that there are things that matter and things that don’t. But at the time I took a different meaning: Where you are changes everything.

  * * *

  ●

  As we grew up, I became closer and closer to my father. With him I felt understood. He was a family doctor for years, his bustling practice a cornerstone in the small town of Markham, north of the city. Markham grew into a city all on its own, and my father remained at the center of things. It was a slow build, but he made it, and he moved into a bungalow in the northern suburbs that seemed like paradise to me. My time with him had always felt like a reprieve; now every weekend felt like an escape.

  My father saw that I was atypical, that my brain wasn’t like other kid brains. He sometimes worried aloud that I was too serious and unsmiling; once, while looking at some photographs, he showed me what he meant—that my eyes were sad and unfocused, as though I were staring at something that no one else could see. He confessed that he’d wondered whether I was developmentally challenged. Decades later I would find a label for my wayward gaze, a diagnosis that puts me on the autism spectrum. For now, and for the rest of my father’s life, I was just his daughter who was wired a little differently. I would spend a long time wondering—and agonizing—about my feelings of otherness, but my father gave me the gift of accepting me without explanation.

  I can remember he had a friend over for dinner who said that my insides belonged to someone much older, and my father beamed at the idea that my body didn’t match my soul. He believed in reincarnation, and he wondered aloud whether we had known each other in a past life and that explained our connection. He was sure that we would find each other again in the future.

  By the time I was eleven, books had become my principal means of connecting to the world, and when the subject of reincarnation came up, I did what I usually did and went to the library to read about the prospect of life after death. I came away from my research understanding that death was final, but my father had exposed me to other possibilities. That’s what fatherhood was to him: His job was to serve as a tour guide to the marvels of human existence. He decided that I was going to be a doctor like him, and he began grooming me for his particular brand of success. He played me soaring classical music and gave me books that were far beyond my reach. I remember he handed me a George Gamow book called One, Two, Three…Infinity. I read it, as instructed. It made zero sense to me.

  Another book, a thin red paperback called The Magic of Believing, did make an impression. My father bought a carton of that book and would hand them out to any taker. It was a historical survey of the power of positive thought. I read it over and over again. My favorite part was a story about a girl named Opal, the daughter of a logger in Oregon, who believed that she was French royalty. Most dismissed her as a lunatic, but by her twenties she had become part of a royal family, albeit in India, where she was spotted by a journalist in a magnificent carriage drawn by a team of horses. That book made me believe in a kind of practical magic: that vision begat planning, which begat opportunity. I could will my way to a better life.

  My reality remained resistant to change. When I was twelve, my father enrolled me in a private school: St. Clement’s School, for Anglican girls. We were Jewish, in theory if not practice, so I was onl
y a half-fit. It was the only private school that would take me. The entrance exams for all the others had been easy, but the interviews were a different matter. Maybe the schools thought I was too socially unprepared to belong. Looking back, I think the problem was more likely my silence during what was meant to be a conversation. I never knew what to say, so I mostly said nothing.

  I entered St. Clement’s in the seventh grade. We were forbidden from leaving school property, but I had been walking the streets of Toronto on my own since I was six. There was a bakery across the street that called out to me, and I wasn’t going to let some stupid rule stop me from going. A few weeks after my arrival, I crossed the street.

  That was the equivalent of arson at a school like St. Clement’s, and in a way I did start a fire. Other girls began to question a curriculum that was designed to make us obey. They began cheating in study hall and writing scandalous things on blackboards. (One girl wrote Jesus Loves You, which was considered offensive for reasons I never understood.) The principal saw me as the catalyst for the rebellion, probably because I was. She summoned me to her office more than once. “Sara,” she began each time, “you are very smart, good-looking, and the other students follow your lead. You could put those traits to better use.” Something had changed in me, and I bristled at her judgments. Why should I be the person she thought I should be?

  When other parents began forbidding their daughters from talking to me, I realized it was time to change schools. I went back to the public system; within a year or two, I had fully embraced my fate. I fell in with a band of rootless teenagers from schools across the city. Word would go around, and we’d meet up later that night on a random subway platform. None of the kids was my friend, exactly, but two older girls took pity on me and made sure that I came along to parties. They teased me about how I dressed before lending me better clothes, and I trailed behind them like a mascot, trying to figure out how to feel what they felt for each other. (Their teasing was better than the purer tormenting I could suffer at school.) We would pour into sockets of the city like mercury. There was a lot of alcohol. There were a lot of drugs. I might have been my father’s daughter, but only on the weekends. During the week I still lived with my mother and stepfather, and on those five nights I tried to stay far out of sight.

  * * *

  ●

  In the late winter and spring of 1987, when I was fifteen years old, a new star appeared in the southern sky. A blue supergiant named Sanduleak -69° 202 had exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a small satellite galaxy next to the Milky Way. It was the closest supernova in nearly four hundred years, the first opportunity for modern astronomers to witness firsthand the death of one star and the birth of another. It was 168,000 light-years from Earth, but you didn’t need a telescope to see it: From its February discovery through the peak of its brightness in May, the last of its light hung in the sky. It was only after the light disappeared that astronomers were able to confirm that Sanduleak -69° 202 was the lost star.

  One Sunday afternoon, I was supposed to go skating with some girls from my school. I bailed and went instead to a presentation about the new supernova at the University of Toronto. Among a panel of men in suits, one man was conspicuously in jeans. He turned out to be the astronomer who had discovered Supernova 1987A and its halo-like light. Two thousand people, seated in rows radiating out from the stage, listened to him speak. I sat enthralled in the pin-drop quiet, ravished by an amazing tale of discovery. The sense of wonder that had overwhelmed me in Bon Echo was reignited. All it took was the self-destruction of a star.

  Later that summer I turned sixteen. I stopped running with my crowd of teenagers. We were on a ferry to the Toronto Islands, trying to kill another boring, endless night, when I saw the lights of a boat going the other way and realized that I wanted to be on it, not the one I was on. I got a job working a carnival game at the Canadian National Exhibition, the game with the impossible-to-catch plastic fish. After three weeks in the crowds and the heat, I’d made the vast sum of $400. I spent every penny of it on a four-inch reflecting telescope.

  I kept the telescope at my father’s place. I spent chilly weekends the following winter standing in a sprawling parking lot, looking up at the stars. My father often stood shivering beside me, our breath turning into a single cloud in the cold.

  I can remember with perfect clarity the night we found Jupiter.

  * * *

  ●

  Back on Earth, my father decided to embark on a second career: He began offering hair transplants. Despite his success in internal medicine, he enjoyed the feeling of starting again, pouring the foundation for another slow build. I thought there was something bittersweet about his new work. He wasn’t saving anybody’s life by giving them hair again, but his new patients became some of his most faithful admirers. They had endured years of stress and insecurity, the pain of an inevitable, undesired conclusion, and here was a man who promised to restore everything that they had lost along with their hair.

  Early hair restoration was barbaric. Desperate men submitted to having hundreds of plugs cut out of sections of their scalps. The surgeries could leave them more damaged and vulnerable than they were before, the cure worse than the disease. Something called “shotgun scarring” was a common side effect. My father wanted better, and he was obsessive about improving his technique, making his trademark thousands of more realistic-looking, single-follicle grafts. He experimented with every promised advance—he was among the first to use lasers before he rejected them for scorching what they were meant to sow—and he never seemed satisfied with even the best labors of his practiced hands. A reasonable-seeming hairline doesn’t seem like it should be the most elusive goal in the world, but nothing defies mimicry like nature, and my father’s devotion to his practice and patients had its impact on me. It was the most accidental yet meaningful of his illustrations. There was something inspiring about his refusal to accept the present as a forever reality.

  After brief stops at other schools, I finally landed at Jarvis Collegiate Institute, a public high school near the heart of the city with an excellent reputation for math and science. It was diverse in every sense, filled with immigrants from all over the world, a dizzying collection of sophisticates and loiterers, geniuses and stragglers. Jarvis Collegiate was the perfect school in which to be a loner. There was no pressure to belong, because nobody there could agree on what it meant to be cool. I didn’t feel the relief of connection. I felt the relief that comes with not having to worry about finding connection anymore.

  I was walking to school one day, by myself as usual—cutting across the divided campus of the University of Toronto, the old half made of stone, the new half made of glass—when I saw a sign for a school-wide open house that weekend. On Saturday, I returned and found the elevator in the tallest building on campus and pressed the button for one of the upper floors. I stepped out into the astronomy department. There was a table staffed by professors and students handing out small piles of paper, and it struck me in an instant: Astronomy could be more than a passion; it could be a career. I made up my mind to commit myself to my schoolwork. Good grades would get me into university, which would allow me to look at the stars for the rest of my life. Magic.

  Most subjects proved easy for me—with the notable exception, initially, of physics. It was hard for me to apply its equations to the real world; life seemed more random and chaotic than that. My life did, at least. Then one day my physics teacher gave us each a small coiled spring. On the other side of the classroom, he set up a board with a hole cut into it. The object of the exercise was for us to calculate the spring’s force constant, and to use Hooke’s law and the equations of motion to find the perfect angle at which to launch the spring across the room and through the hole.

  One by one, we made our attempts. Maybe a third of the students found the mark. (I have my suspicions about how many of them had followed Hooke�
��s law and how many were just lucky.) I did the math, checking and double-checking it before it was finally my turn. I angled my spring and fired. My mouth fell open while I watched the spring arc perfectly across the room, straight through the hole.

  * * *

  ●

  At the start of my last year of high school, I was surprised to be handed three envelopes along with my class schedule. I opened the first to find a letter that said I’d earned the top marks in my entire grade the previous year, finishing first out of three hundred or so students. The other two were subject awards. I didn’t even know our school gave out academic awards—I’d never received one, and I’d always skipped the assembly when they were presented. A couple of days later we gathered in the school auditorium. I was in the school band and we played before the awards were presented. Each time my name was called, I had to put down my flute and walk across the stage. I felt awkward, maybe even embarrassed, as a small pile of certificates soon joined my sheet music.

  One of my former party friends, now a stranger to me, came up to me afterward in the hall.

  “I didn’t know you were so smart,” he said. I can still hear the way he said it, with a weird mix of anger and smugness and confusion. He had wanted to be my boyfriend at some point, but I didn’t feel that way about him. Maybe he saw his chance to reject me back.

  “Neither did I.”

  I suppose I should have been happy or proud of my achievement, but I wasn’t especially. I looked at it with logic: In the subjects in which I had achieved the highest grades, I won the awards. That made sense. What made less sense to me was that I had made the highest grades the first time I tried to earn them. I hadn’t been relentless or anything like single-minded. I had simply decided to work harder. The math didn’t add up. It should have been tougher to be the best.