The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  “So, Sara, what do you do?”

  “I teach at MIT.”

  “What do you teach?”

  “Planetary physics.”

  “Wow. Um…What?”

  “I’m looking for planets outside our solar system. Other stars presumably have planets. I’m looking for them.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I’d like to find other life in the universe.”

  “You mean aliens? You’re looking for aliens?”

  “Scientists don’t call them aliens. Other life.”

  “Right. So…Aliens?”

  At least for now, it was better that the Widows knew me only as a fellow luckless one. In that fundamental aspect we were identical. At their previous, first meeting, the Widows must have stopped short of true revelation, sticking with the usual chatter about kids and schools and hometowns. Now they began sharing the details of their lives that everybody really wanted to know.

  “How did your husband die?” someone asked. “When?”

  “Cancer,” I said.

  Two of the others had lost their husbands to cancer, too. Melissa’s had died bicycling. Riding down a big hill, he had struck a mouse skittering across the road, gone over the handlebars, hit his head, and died on the spot. Instantly. Another had died hiking. One had committed suicide.

  Next we did the dates. “Death Days,” we would call them.

  “July twenty-third,” I said. Mike had died nearly seven months before. In a little more than five months, I’d wake up on the first anniversary. I was lost in my own thoughts again. I saw someone writing down our names and the dates, but I couldn’t imagine why.

  We retreated to the dining room for dinner, each taking our place around a huge, formally set table. Gail sat at the head of it, and the rest of us buzzed around her, excited about the possibilities of knowing one another, and about the night’s escape, however brief, from our usual slogs. Suddenly, Micah looked at Gail and blurted: “So, Gail, are you dating?” The rest of the conversation stopped. We all looked to Gail.

  “No,” she said. “I went on one date. It didn’t go very well.” I felt as awkward as I had at the start of the night. I wondered if we were going to start prying into each other’s private lives, if I’d have to take my turn sharing fears and secrets. I wasn’t ready for that.

  “We signed a ketubah, a Jewish marriage contract,” Gail said. She pointed to a beautiful framed print that was hanging on the wall, small illustrations decorated with the most delicate calligraphy. “The ketubah ends with from now until forever.” I recalled my own vows: I had agreed to be married to Mike till death do us part. I was just beginning to process the difference between them when Gail’s wineglass shattered. It exploded in her hand. There was a round of nervous laughter, and the conversation changed.

  We talked into the evening, tying invisible strings to one another with every shared experience, with each new admission. Gail’s father was there—he had been made a widower recently, if more expectedly—and he took a shaky picture of us standing shoulder to shoulder and already a little braver for the connection. MIT had given me a sense of belonging, that feeling of finally being around some people sort of like me, but this was different. Widowhood had made it seem impossible that I would feel anything more than a partial affinity with anyone again. But in Gail’s house, I wasn’t alone, one of one. I wasn’t her or them. I was Sara. I was nice to meet you. I was us.

  It felt really good to be able to use that word again: Us. It felt like a warm, bright light.

  * * *

  ●

  The Widows decided that we would get together for coffee every other Friday morning, moving from house to house like emotional squatters, filling someone else’s too-quiet home for a little while before moving on to the next proxy for our own grief. Most of our children were old enough to be in school. We could share our feelings knowing that only the right sets of ears were hearing them.

  Only a few weeks after Valentine’s Day, it was my turn to host. It was a shining March morning. Light streamed through the big bay window in my living room. I sat and waited for everyone and reminded myself how important it was to listen. Three or four of the Widows arrived, and Gail, always generous, brought me flowers. Remarkably, a new widow would be joining us. There was a large potted plant awaiting the newest member of our club. We would all be listening, it turned out.

  Her name was Chris. She was from the neighboring town of Lexington. We’d heard that her husband had died only a month before, in February, skiing. He’d hit a tree. That winter had been warm, and there hadn’t been a lot of snow. I was surprised they had been skiing at all.

  But the strange weather, the lack of snow…It wasn’t hard for us to imagine what had gone wrong. We all knew how little it took for lives to change. Maybe the conditions weren’t great. Maybe there had been some freezing and thawing. That would have left exposed earth in the wells around the trees, and patches on the hill with more ice than snow. Chris’s husband no doubt threaded his way down his chosen slope the way he had thousands of times. He probably reached his usual speed, but maybe he couldn’t find his usual control. He lost an edge and sailed into the trees, flying headlong into a trunk, crashing into a heap at its base. He had been filled with life, and then he had taken the wrong path down the wrong slope on the wrong weekend, and just like that, he was gone. His wife would spend the rest of her life hearing that at least her husband died doing what he loved. I knew it would never give her comfort.

  When Chris joined us, she made seven. She was about my age, and her children, a boy and a girl, were about the same ages as Max and Alex; they made thirteen. Chris stood for a long time before she sat with us in the living room. When I first took her in, I thought she was doing really well. She had taken grief leave from her job as a data analyst. She was dressed head to toe in black, but her hair and makeup looked great. Then she began crying the instant she tried to speak. She sat in a soggy pile on my couch, her tears falling into her coffee. She asked us to excuse her sadness; such apologies were always needless. She managed to tell us the date of her husband’s death and not much else. The when. That’s all, really. But her exorcism had begun.

  There were patterns in how we shared our stories. Information came in rushes, with weeks- or months-long doldrums of private calculations in between. I was never sure whether the breaks were for the benefit of the teller or the listeners—whether that time was for the teller to recover her strength or the listeners to digest the facts and figures of some new agony. It felt as though we shared a burden whose combined sum never changed; only its distribution did, and we kept a sense of unspoken balance between us. If one of us talked, if one of us unloaded some of our pain, then next we had to help carry someone else’s terrible weight. We were a kind of mule train, walking in our crooked line over impossible terrain, each taking our turn in the lead, each giving the others a spell from the heaviest packs. We knew Chris’s story, like all of our stories, would come out later, maybe in pieces, maybe in a burst. We would nod knowingly whenever it did. None of our stories was any worse than any of the others, nor were any of the impact craters. They all had the same end. Seven dead husbands had left behind a single mourning wife.

  Chris recovered enough to stop crying for a moment. Her red eyes took in each of us, my living room filled with light, fresh flowers, and plants in their tidy pots.

  I hoped she could manage to care for hers. I kept my thoughts to myself, but I wondered whether Chris was ready for us. I wouldn’t have been when I was where she was. A month after Mike’s death, I was still in the middle of my feelings of liberation. I hadn’t yet lost my way trying to get a haircut. I hadn’t yet learned from Freya about the fall that comes after the fall, or begun meeting the agonizing demands of wills and the world, or found the complicated company of men in hardware stores and butcher shops. Chris was still taking her kids skiing e
very weekend. Packing them into the car and driving to the mountains of Vermont. It was exhausting, but it was what they had always done, and she hadn’t yet learned what else to do. Five or six months removed—that was the best time to join our makeshift group therapy sessions, I thought: after a few introductory lessons in the hardest truths. But it wasn’t like we would excommunicate Chris. We couldn’t tell her that it was too soon. She had become one of us the day her husband had taken his last chairlift ride up the hill.

  “Oh God, I’m such a mess,” she said, “and you’re all so put-together. Sara, your house is so clean.”

  I caught my laughter before it rushed out of my throat. Chris was looking at us the way I’d looked at Melissa that morning on the hill. It was with a kind of envy, the sufferer facing the survivors, the newly stricken looking across the gulf at those who had made it to the other side. She had no idea that I’d spent the last several weeks trying and failing to find the strength to pick up Mike’s remains from the funeral home. Dave, the funeral director, had told me time and again not to worry about it. “Mike doesn’t care how long it takes,” he said.

  One day later that spring, I genuinely thought I was ready. The warmth in the air hit me as soon as I stepped off the train. I walked across the street and was already on the verge of tears when I walked through the door. Dave greeted me in his usual, practiced way: cheery, but not unacceptably so. He invited me into his office. I couldn’t really speak. “I’m going to cry,” I said, and then I did. Dave smiled. He had the most disarming way about him. Funeral directors might be the best readers of human need on the planet. Dave knew that I didn’t want his pity, and his smile wasn’t a pitiable one. He looked almost amused. “I knew you weren’t ready, Sara,” he said. “He can stay with us for as long as you need.” Dave smiled again. “Mike has plenty of company.”

  * * *

  ●

  Our Friday-morning coffees got steadily lighter in tone. They became less about the deaths of our husbands and more about the new lives we were learning to lead. There were only so many times and so many ways you could rail at the same fate. I found the pooling of practical information hugely valuable. I was still learning how the world worked, and the Widows were so wise. They each wrote more lines in my Guide to Life on Earth.

  I had never cared about money, and after Mike’s death I cared about it even less. I had always lived beneath my means, so I never really worried about it. Besides, it had always struck me as such a strange, arbitrary invention. I don’t remember agreeing to subscribe to the idea that the same paper is worth different amounts because it was stamped with a different number. It’s ridiculous. It’s like how we decided—or someone decided—that diamonds are worth something. They’re shiny rocks. Quartz is a shiny rock. So is coal. Why should I accept that diamonds are worth more than them? Mike’s frugality had made its impression on me, as had my mother’s deprivations. I understood that it was better to have money than not. But that was the extent of my thinking. I had no idea how much was enough, or how to acquire more of it, or what to do when I had it.

  The other Widows thought harder about money. They talked about it frequently. I realized that I had better try to understand its intricacies, especially how to make it last. We talked about the fair wage for a babysitter and what we could claim on our taxes. We talked about Social Security benefits from the deceased, and how much we could set aside for each of our fatherless children.

  We talked about men only slightly less than we talked about money. Maybe half of the Widows had started dating, and each Friday we received a fresh roundup of that week’s horror stories. One week Micah reported that her last date had been so bad, she wished she had stayed home and sorted out her kitchen cupboards instead. I didn’t really participate in those conversations. I didn’t like talking about men or how badly I did or did not need one. I was far from even thinking about finding another love.

  I did feel comfortable enough to start sharing a little more about my work. My department head had given me the spring semester off from teaching, although I went into the office most days for meetings and research. The stars were such a fundamental part of my existence that not talking about them felt somehow dishonest. Still, I was careful not to get too far into the weeds. My most recent work focused mostly on biosignature gases and ASTERIA, slightly esoteric subjects for chitchat; but my students and postdocs worked on broader, more relatable research, including Kepler’s frequent news-making finds.

  The search for alien life was feeling less and less like science fiction—or, worse, like the purview of conspiracy theorists and homebound weirdos—and more like science. I had sometimes felt stung by the mocking dismissal of skeptics, by people who ignored my credentials and the odds against our being alone in the universe. I cringed when people, usually politicians looking to cut budgets, made jokes about Area 51 or anal probes or the latest rendering of a bug-eyed alien in The National Enquirer. I tried to help people see that it’s stranger to think we’re the only blue light in the sky. There are billions and billions of planets out there, I’d point out. Statistically speaking, what are the chances that ours is the only one that sustains life?

  That previous December, NASA announced with great fanfare that Kepler had found its first small planet orbiting in the Goldilocks zone of a sun-like star: Kepler-22b. We still didn’t know much about our distant neighbor. All we had was its size and its orbit, but that was enough to garner a lot of attention. Kepler-22b is only a little more than twice the size of Earth, and at the time it was the smallest planet ever found inside another star’s Goldilocks zone.

  Some things got lost in translation between the scientific community and the mainstream press. There were too many headlines trumpeting the discovery of ANOTHER EARTH, when Kepler-22b is not nearly as hospitably constructed as our planet. A planet its size most likely has an atmosphere much thicker than ours, which probably means that it is surrounded by a suffocating envelope of greenhouse gases. Or perhaps Kepler-22b’s atmosphere is so deep that the planet doesn’t have a solid surface in the way we think of a solid surface. Either way, it almost certainly doesn’t sustain life.

  The discovery was still critical. In only a decade or two, we had made giant leaps in our planet-finding abilities. Our instruments were allowing us to see smaller objects closer to their stars, and smaller is good. Smaller probably means thinner atmospheres, and cooler temperatures, and rocky surfaces. Planets like Earth must be out there—perhaps millions of them. One day, I told the Widows, I felt certain that “we’ll know we’re not alone.” They looked at me and nodded politely, supportive as always. And then we began talking again about how to survive the absence of our men.

  CHAPTER 13

  Stars Like Pearls

  We huddled together on a big patch of concrete at an old missile site. Night fell, desert-hard and blacker than black. It was a little unnerving, being out there. Without a sliver of moon, the stars were unchallenged and bright, making a canopy of the purest white light. We looked at them as though seeing them for the first time.

  I was in the middle of New Mexico, to test out a new component for ASTERIA. I was more and more certain of its value. It wasn’t Hubble or Spitzer or Kepler, and it might never be something so magnificent. But not every painting should or could be Starry Night. There is room in the universe for smaller work, a different kind of art. Kepler might find thousands of new worlds, but it wouldn’t reveal enough of any single one of them for us to know whether it was somebody’s home. It was sweeping its eye across star fields that were too far away for astronomers to make anything more than assumptions about places like Kepler-22b.

  But if I could just make ASTERIA work, and then find a way to send up a fleet of satellites…It would combine the best outcomes of Kepler, capable of finding smaller planets around sun-like stars, and the nascent TESS, with its more proximate search and sensitivity to red dwarf stars. I had dropped out of the TESS wo
rking group when Mike was sick, and REXIS had been shipped out of our design-and-build class. Now ASTERIA was my favorite machine.

  My team built a prototype for a possible camera, one that was both promisingly stable and could operate at a warmer temperature than the detectors used in most satellites. (Most detectors have to be cooled, which taxes the machine.) I just wasn’t sure that it would see what we needed it to see. I had a particularly bright and enthusiastic grad student at the time, named Mary Knapp; she had been an undergraduate student in the first design-and-build class I taught. She encouraged us to test the camera outside, using it to look at real stars. Mary proposed the deserts of New Mexico as our proving ground. That April, there would be a new moon, casting the already clear desert sky an even pitcher black. That new moon also coincided with Max and Alex’s school break, which meant that I could take them along. As much as I wanted to see the stars, I wanted to see them, too.

  We rounded out our team. Along with Mary, we’d be joined by Becky, a research assistant who had also been in the ASTERIA design-and-build class; Brice, the Swiss postdoc; and another postdoc named Vlada. (Vlada also happened to be magnetic, dark, and gorgeous, another Swiss, of Serbian descent. The Widows would have been all over him.) I thought of the trip as a vacation as much as work. I’d be doing something hopeful with a group of young, energetic people, in a place far removed from the trials of New England. It was another possible taste of my new, next life.

  I was given a quick lesson in how pessimistic my default view of the world was. The gang met Max, Alex, and me at the airport in Roswell, picking us up in an enormous SUV, and they erupted in congratulations the instant we entered Arrivals: Word had gone out that I’d been awarded the Sackler International Prize in Physics. (It’s an award given to young scientists who have made some significant, original contribution to their field. I received it for my work on exoplanet atmospheres.) I was honored, of course, and the award came with $50,000, which I was more than happy to accept. The catch—because my life could sometimes feel like a long series of catches—was that I would have to go to Tel Aviv University to receive it. It would be an eleven-hour flight each way for a two-day stay, so taking the boys with me was out of the question. I would be forced to leave them at home, something I normally did only for short trips, close to Concord. I would be farther away from them than I had ever been, and the distance scared me. I panicked thinking about leaving them without an immediate family member. What if they got sick? What if one of them broke his leg? Instead of being excited about New Mexico, I fixated on what was, to my mind, a serious problem.