The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  What I’ve always loved about numbers had become something for me to resent about them. Numbers are black and white, binary. Numbers don’t lie. Now they were a reminder of my family’s new, permanent incompleteness, condemned to be odd.

  * * *

  ●

  Traveling for work, which I now did again for short trips, made me feel most alone: I ate far too many dinners for one. For a couple of days, while Jessica looked after the boys, I headed down to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, home of Hubble’s science operations. I was on the advisory committee for the James Webb Space Telescope, the more powerful version of Hubble that would operate in the infrared.

  On that occasion, at least, I didn’t have to eat alone. I went for dinner with Bob Williams, the same Bob Williams who had defied so many of his peers to explore the Hubble Deep Field. I needed the same inspiration I had found in him before. We met in a wood-paneled room in what he called the best brewpub in the city, the after-work crowd just starting to build around us. We sat at a little square table and ordered drinks, then dinner. I asked him to tell me the story of the Hubble Deep Field again, those ten days of dissent and discovery. Bob sat back and smiled. He’s lean and confident, a natural athlete and raconteur, and he didn’t need a lot of convincing to narrate his greatest triumph. In his soft Southern accent, he recounted how he had decided that it didn’t matter to him what anybody else thought. He had earned his rights to Hubble. “I was going to look where I wanted to look,” he said. Hubble turned at his direction toward that pitch-black patch of sky. And Bob found those three thousand new galaxies. He’d found those billions of new lights.

  This time, the story of the Hubble Deep Field did not have the desired effect. I don’t think I’d ever felt lower. I sat across the table from one of history’s great explorers, while he regaled me with an astrophysical epic, and all I could do was fight not to cry the wrong kind of tears.

  Poor Bob. This kind, wise man, who was helping to solve so many mysteries—he had no idea what to do with a weeping widow. The depths of the universe didn’t flummox him; the depths of my depression did. He tried to engage. He knew, I think, that I looked at him as another of my father figures, and he did his best to give me what I needed. But our dinner was like a torturous game of tennis. He’d come up with a suggestion, something that I could do to make myself feel better—therapy, meditation, some time away—and I’d shake my head, knowing that I’d already tried it or that it wouldn’t work.

  “Sara,” Bob said finally. “Do you know what I do when I need clarity? I run across the Grand Canyon. In a single day.”

  He knew that I loved the outdoors, loved movement, loved physical accomplishment, loved tangible goals. He didn’t know that Mike and I had gone to the Grand Canyon together all those years before, in a different life. The Grand Canyon? I remembered us on the water that magical day, when Mike had basked in the cheering of strangers. It was a world away from where I was, but thinking about it seemed like the right kind of expansion.

  I stopped crying.

  * * *

  ●

  Max, Alex, and I initially skipped holidays, ignoring their existence and whatever memories, good or bad, they might bring to the surface. They had never been important to Mike and me, and we weren’t close enough to our families to feel pressure to celebrate arbitrary days on the calendar. Now they seemed more risk than the little reward I thought they were worth. I had begun inviting over groups of students and postdocs—Alex orchestrating an egg-eating contest that got a little Cool Hand Luke—and once I had attempted an imitation of Thanksgiving for them between actual Thanksgiving and Christmas. That was a mistake. I couldn’t get the turkey cooked properly, the legs defying me, and then I remembered that whenever we had eaten turkey as a family of four, Mike would eat one leg and Max would eat the other. I lost it.

  I decided to take the boys and Jessica to Hawaii for our non-Christmas. Jessica’s family celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve, so we would leave on Christmas Day. An airplane over the ocean was the best isolation chamber I could imagine. It wouldn’t feel like Christmas up in the air.

  Alex hadn’t lost his love of hiking. I had mixed feelings about it, honestly—for paddlers, a hike feels like a portage without water at the end of it—but I wanted to have a shared adventure and to help him do whatever it was he decided to do. I told him that there was a mountain in Hawaii that we could climb: Mount Haleakala. It’s a massive shield volcano, the beating heart of Maui, and it would be a long, 10,000-foot hike to its crater.

  I was a little worried that Alex wouldn’t be able to manage it. Before the trip, I was at a conference where I bumped into a colleague from the University of Hawaii in Oahu, and asked him about the hike. He scolded me: “Haleakala is no place for a child!” I told him that I was on a mission, that I was trying to empower my kids, to make them feel as though the world and their places in it could still be beautiful, even if I didn’t always feel that way myself. I told him that Alex had climbed mountains before and that he was special when it came to determination. “Everybody’s child is special,” he said with a scoff.

  I was undeterred, but I decided we should hire a guide, someone who knew the route, just to be safe. In the back of my mind I thought that if worse came to worst, a guide could help me carry Alex out of trouble. I found a company online and called to see if they would help me and a six-year-old boy climb the mountain. The man had owned the company for decades. I explained the situation. I had spent a lot of time outdoors and knew my way around long journeys, and Alex wanted to set world records. I was sure the man was going to say no, but he agreed to help.

  We woke up at four-thirty in the morning to begin our quest. I couldn’t find a coffee to save my life, which might have set me off, but I held it together. Jessica and Max drove us, along with our guide, Dylan, to the start of the trail. I told them to enjoy their day and meet us at the top at six that night—a road wound up the other side of the mountain—but they should bring some books and blankets in case we were late. We said our goodbyes, and Alex, Dylan, and I started our hike in the chill of the dawn, under the forest canopy. We would follow the Kaupo Gap all the way to the summit.

  It was a long, long climb. We were lucky in a lot of ways. The morning stayed cool while we climbed the first 7,000 feet of elevation. When we walked into the expanse of the crater floor, a cloud blocked the burning sun like an eclipse. Later, a mist of rain came and cooled us off. We saw a rare, stunning plant unique to Haleakala: the silversword, a succulent covered in silver hairs. But we still had to cover a lot of ground. After fifteen miles, we reached the last switchback to the summit—another three miles up what was essentially a steep dirt road. Alex was tired, and his shins had started to hurt. I told him that Dylan could carry him if he needed to be carried. It was up to him. He said that he wanted to finish the climb.

  Night fell. Orion, Alex’s namesake constellation, came out. On we climbed. We were a little late reaching the top—it had taken us more than thirteen hours of solid effort in the end—but we made it. Jessica and Max were waiting in the car. We fell into it and drove back down the mountain, back to our hotel. Alex made a little sleeping nest with blankets on the floor, and he lay down and fell asleep. The rest of us went to get dinner at the hotel restaurant, and when we came back, Alex still hadn’t moved. I shook him gently. “Just say your name,” I said. He didn’t make a sound.

  I fell asleep, too. When I woke up the next morning, Alex was sitting beside me with a huge smile on his face. In a small but triumphant voice, he said: “Mom, you said if I made it up, you’d take me to climb a 14,000-footer. I made it up.”

  I felt a moment of buoyancy, an almost forgotten rush of good feeling. I didn’t know how we had made it, but we did.

  By the time we had packed and driven back to our rental apartment on the other side of the island, the feeling had mostly evaporated. I had
gone dark again, tired and sullen. My food felt and tasted like sand in my mouth. I realized that whatever happiness I might feel anymore was like an island rising out of an ocean: My elation was Maui, my despair the Pacific. My joy was Orion, surrounded by the night sky.

  We flew back to Concord, back to all the reminders and memories, back to the depths of literal winter. The cold and the dark and the routines of a snowbound life. I felt worse than I did before our trip, the way I imagine someone who escapes from prison must feel after they’ve been captured and returned to their cell. I had seen a sliver of a different, better world, but I wasn’t allowed to stay there.

  It wasn’t long before I had another dream about Mike. He came back to me again. He always started the dreams standing outside the house. He stepped into the foyer. This time he didn’t look as rugged, but he still looked good. He wasn’t returning from a trip. He’d been sick; he’d been in a coma. If he had been awake, he told me, he would have let me know, but he’d been asleep.

  In my dream, I felt ecstatic at his return but also bewildered by it. His coma story made some sense, or at least dream sense, but it also seemed unreal, like the storyline of a soap opera. I looked at him and smiled before I remembered that I had to deliver the same blow that I had given him in my first dream: “Mike,” I said, in my sweetest voice. “I didn’t know you were coming back. I got rid of all your stuff.”

  This time, he didn’t say that he understood. This time, he was mad. “What?” he said, his voice lined with a rising anger. How could I have been so cold? I woke up with a start. I woke up in tears. I woke up alone in my bed, adrift in the middle of the ocean.

  * * *

  ●

  A week or two later, I began having serious pain in my lower abdomen, cramps that could make it hard for me to function. I had spent more than enough time in the company of doctors, diagnosing stomachaches, but I made an appointment. Widows often experience physical pain, and too many doctors are quick to dismiss their aches as psychological. I remembered Mike’s ruined ankle and pushed my doctor to authorize tests. She sent me for a uterine ultrasound.

  I sat in the waiting room with a dozen expectant mothers and their nervous, happy husbands. Their full bellies, their anticipation, their blessings and happy news…Being surrounded by so much life nearly killed me. I staggered into the ultrasound room and flinched at the cold of the jelly and the pressure of the wand on my skin. I lay there and remembered what my life used to be. The last time I’d felt that wand, I was watching Alex’s heart beat. This time, the ultrasound didn’t find anything unusual for a woman over forty. I went home afterward, barely made it through the numbing evening routine, and collapsed into bed.

  The next morning, it was only the distant laughter of my boys that persuaded me to push back the covers. After a quick breakfast, Max and Alex began putting on their snowsuits. With their plastic sleds stuffed into the car, we made the short drive to the top of Nashawtuc Hill.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Widows of Concord

  Minnie May died not long before Valentine’s Day. She had outlived Mike after all, by more than six months. It wasn’t that close of a race in the end. I have no idea how she lived for as long as she did; she looked like a bag of bones near the finish. People gasped when they saw her. For more than a decade, she’d had medication to ward off epileptic seizures and bladder stones, and was even on Prozac for anxiety. She’d had more than her nine lives. But her heart still beat, a tiny engine custom-built to resist the finality of death.

  One day Minnie May’s back legs stopped working. Some invisible internal switch had been flipped. She didn’t seem to be in pain. She didn’t seem to feel much of anything. I carried her up to my room and wrapped her in blankets. That night I woke up every hour to put my hands on her and feel her shallow breathing. I woke up one last time and reached out to find her in the dark. Minnie May had always been still something: still breathing, still living. Now she was only still.

  She had been there for eighteen years, for every significant moment of my adult life, good and bad. She was my most faithful observer, and she could make me feel as though a chosen few of us might live forever. Her death felt like the hardest scientific proof that none of us do. If Minnie May could die, then everything will.

  The hole that Mike had dug for her in the yard was full of snow; the pile of waiting earth was hardened into clumps. Despite his best efforts, I had to put Minnie May in the basement freezer, my makeshift kitty morgue, just as I’d stored Molly until the thaw. I came back upstairs and sat down at the kitchen table in the quiet of my once full-to-bursting home. There was a time in my life when I had my father, my husband, my dog, and my cats. I was surrounded by life and love. So much had fallen away, like parts coming off a machine. Even Jessica had decided to move out in early 2012, amicably but completely, leaving behind only my boys and me. My world was stripped down to its glowing core.

  A few days later it was Valentine’s Day. Melissa, the widow from the hill, had told me on the phone that the boys were also invited. Max, Alex, and I were going to a party.

  * * *

  ●

  Equal parts nervous and hopeful—maybe more nervous than hopeful—I left work early to plan what to wear. I wore a black shirt, but I didn’t want to wear only black to the party. I wasn’t in the mood for romance, but I didn’t want it to feel like a funeral either. I wanted to dress for a celebration, even if I wasn’t sure of what, exactly. I pulled on a calf-length, fawn-colored cardigan and a bright pink scarf. I had gone for a manicure earlier in the week, and my pink nail polish completed the outfit. The flashes of color made a surprising psychological difference to me. They were something new in my black-and-gray world.

  I’d bought some heart-shaped pasta to bring. I was delighted when I’d found it in the butcher shop. There was an older man doing his shopping not far from me. He worked at MIT. At the time, the government classified all satellites as weapons—in the wrong hands, they could be—and there were rules about how and when foreigners could work on them. This man’s job was to make sure we didn’t break those rules with international students and visitors. I’d met with him to discuss ASTERIA a number of times, and we shared the same train. I thought of him as a friendly face.

  “I’m so happy about this pasta,” I told him. “I’m going to this Valentine’s Day party for widows…” He looked aghast, as though I’d let slip my plans to launch an actual weapon into space. He must not have known I was a widow, even though I figured everyone did. He took a step back as though he were afraid of me. I had always unsettled some people, but even when I was a little girl, people weren’t usually so obvious about their discomfort. That man looked at me and seemed to see someone in violation of the rules.

  Melissa told me that there would be all six of us, including me, and eleven tragically united children. We all lived within a couple of miles of each other, which still struck me as an unlikely coincidence. Our otherwise quaint little town was under a terrible jinx. The boys were a little nervous, since we didn’t often go to social events that weren’t related to my work, but I had done the math. “You will probably know at least one of the kids,” I said. Between soccer and camp, the chances were good.

  The house was giant, with a bright and cheery kitchen. It belonged to Gail. She was a little older than me and a commanding presence in the room, maybe because she was the only one of us in familiar surroundings. The other Widows had met as a group only once before, and now they were becoming reacquainted. We gathered around Gail like students drawn to the teacher on the first day of school, leaning against the counter, keeping our hands busy with our drinks when we weren’t extending them to one another. When dinner was ready, we worked together to help serve the meal, another plate of food for another Widow.

  There was Pam, the youngest of us, fashionably dressed and in tremendous shape. I was struck by how perfectly straight her hair and teeth b
oth were. It took me a second to place Micah, but we had met once before: We had talked to each other in the park after she’d asked me about my jade necklace, a gift from my father. I remembered, too, that her husband had been with her that day. I couldn’t help wondering what awful fate had befallen them after that. A short dark blonde named Diane stood quiet in a corner, looking as shy as I felt. And then there was Melissa, smiling and radiant, even more beautiful than I remembered her at the top of Nashawtuc Hill. Her red hair and perfect pale skin made her look like a flame.

  The boys disappeared. I felt a bit lost, standing there without them, trying to make small talk with people I knew only because something had happened to each of our husbands. I listened more than I spoke. I watched more than I performed. The Widows all looked healthy. They all gave off a similar glow. I wondered what they thought when they looked at me, whether they saw a star or a shadow. I didn’t usually wonder what people thought of me; I assumed a measure of distance, though I was still years from the diagnosis that would help me understand why. But now I was at a party for women who were, in at least one towering respect, just like me. After about ten minutes, Max and Alex reappeared in the kitchen, practically floating. They wanted me to know that I had been right after all: One of the kids was a boy their age they knew from camp. Then they were off again. Their happiness was infectious, and I felt my guard begin to drop. I could be something like myself.

  One of the weird things about meeting the Widows: None of the other women was working outside the home—their husbands had been professionals, or they had run businesses together that had been sold after their deaths—so nobody asked me about my work. I was relieved in a way. I had felt anxious and tentative enough, being new to the group. Before I’d walked through the door, I had tried to rehearse how I would talk about my work with them, and in my mind the conversations had never ended well: