The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  We drove from the airport to the hotel. I stared out the window and tried to lose myself in the endless variety of the desert. Sometimes New Mexico looks like the moon; sometimes it looks like Mars. I was thinking that maybe somewhere on Earth resembles every rocky planet, every moonscape, when one of the boys announced that he needed, very badly, to use the toilet. We were on an empty highway in the middle of nowhere. The rust-brown horizon was broken only by parched bushes and the occasional strong-armed cactus. He was shy without the usual trees to hide behind, so I led him away from the road and started stamping the tall grass around a bush, hoping to show him that the desert was safe. A fat rattlesnake popped out, hissing in protest. We bolted back to the car. “Mom,” he said. “I don’t have to go anymore.”

  We arrived at the hotel. It had a small pool, and all of us were soon playing with the boys in the water. Vlada threw them so high into the air that it was hard to tell whether their laughter or their splashing made the louder noise.

  Suddenly Max and Alex jumped out of the pool and pulled me aside, each speaking in an urgent whisper: “There’s something wrong with Vlada.”

  “What?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Why does he have hair coming out of his chest?” Max asked.

  For all the comfort the three of us had found in our family of helpers at home, in the Widows and their children, I realized with a thud that Max and Alex needed more male figures in their lives.

  I had asked a local club of amateur astronomers where the best place to test our camera might be. That night they invited us to their star-viewing party, a celebration of the new moon. We arrived at dusk at the old missile site. I looked up at the stars and felt my childlike wonder return. I think the boys felt it, too.

  We set up the camera. We would have to wait until we were back at MIT to analyze our data, but our new type of detector, one not yet used for astronomy, seemed to do the trick. We knew at least that our experiment wasn’t a total failure. In the company of my boys, my students, my camera, and the stars, I felt the flicker of an emotion in me that was so unfamiliar, I almost couldn’t find the name for it. I felt hope.

  The desert grew colder, and, beyond the concrete, snakes and scorpions were no doubt coming out. The amateur astronomy club left us. Max, Alex, and I stayed put, on the edge of the New Mexican desert and the Milky Way. We might have pictured fearful things, rattlers and worse. We didn’t. The three of us stood out there, together on that moonless night, and none of us made a move to leave. We wanted to stay out there with the stars until the sun began its rise, washing them out one by one until even the brightest had disappeared.

  We would know they were still up there. People talk about the sun and its reliability, how even on the darkest days we know it will come out again. A kind of opposite is also true. Even on the brightest days, beyond blue skies, there are countless stars shining over our heads.

  * * *

  ●

  At our next coffee, I told the Widows about New Mexico: how pretty the stars were, and how much closer we were to reaching them. I normally talked about ASTERIA with fellow astronomers or aerospace engineers, and they would ask me technical questions about the camera lens and projected orbits and the software that we would use. The Widows didn’t care about those things.

  “It sounds like you are traveling a lot with your kids,” Micah said. She didn’t say it meanly. She was making an observation, a point of order. I still thought I heard a hint of judgment in her voice.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s getting expensive. I’m really blowing through my cash.”

  Almost in a chorus, the Widows sang away my financial concerns. “None of that matters,” one said.

  “Just do what makes you happy,” someone else said.

  Micah decided to offer a dissenting opinion. “Are you going to take them everywhere with you? That sounds exhausting.”

  I took a deep breath. I confessed my worst nightmare: that something would happen to me while I was away from them. Almost in the way that I imagine someone who is blind in one eye lives in constant fear of losing the other, I had visions that I would die and turn the boys into orphans. For some reason I was most worried that I would die in a plane crash. I knew how unlikely that was, but it seemed like a real possibility to me. (I had again met with my lawyer, Freya, and she’d helped me make an airtight estate plan.) I still struggled to leave Max and Alex at home when there was even the faintest possibility that it might mean leaving them forever.

  “Oh, Sara,” Micah said. “You have to move on.”

  There are moments when someone can say the simplest thing and it just hits you in a particular way. This was one of those times. I had heard those words often enough for them to become meaningless, but for some reason Micah’s observation became a statement of fact. The Earth is round. The sky is blue. I have to move on. It was so basic and elemental—the meaning of life is movement, constant transformation—but it could not have sounded more profound to me. Her words found their way to a welcoming part of my brain. That part must not have been open when I’d heard them before.

  Maybe that night under the stars had something to do with it. At the end of our trip, Mary, the boys, and I had arrived at the airport for the first leg of our flight home. Mary was carrying the ASTERIA camera in a hard-sided black Pelican case. The plane was surprisingly small, and when we walked out on the tarmac into a blinding sun, the baggage handlers insisted that Mary check the satellite into the cargo hold. She tried to explain that the case contained more than underwear and socks. It held more than a million dollars in parts and labor. I couldn’t hear what she said over the sound of the engines, but her body language was out of character. By nature, Mary was calm and quick to smile. Now she was feverish, her eyes wide, her hands waving in the air. Our understanding of our place in the universe might be locked inside her battered plastic case.

  The baggage handlers were unmoved: the case had to go in the hold. Mary refused. Being something of an expert in meltdowns, I went over to help the situation. Mary and I tried everything—we bartered, we cajoled, we begged, we demanded, we smiled, we admonished, we reasoned until we ran out of verbs to describe our shared efforts and time before the flight. I’m not sure how, but we finally claimed victory. The camera would be coming with us.

  The only problem was that in the distraction my boys had vanished, and the plane was about to leave without either us or them. Mary and I looked around frantically until we raced onto the plane, the only place we hadn’t searched. Max and Alex were sitting in their assigned seats, strapped in and ready for takeoff. I was relieved and a little embarrassed. I was also impressed.

  “They’re going to survive without you,” Micah said, snapping me back to the present. “They’re going to thrive without you. You have to get to where you can see that.”

  She was right. My boys were still young, only nine and seven. Puberty was years away. But they were well on their way to growing up. Just when I was really getting to know them, they were changing like my science, traveling at the speed of light. They were becoming capable. They were becoming responsible. They’re going to survive. They’re going to thrive. After all that Max and Alex had endured, my beautiful boys were still going to become good adults. They were going to forge the future.

  * * *

  ●

  One Friday morning we began confessing our shared Widow superpower: our ability to cataclysmically dissolve in public. I can’t remember which failure to keep ourselves together was the most cathartic. I could have told the story about the library and the book I’d needed, or that time in the grocery store line, or when the Wheelers had taken offense at my leaves and my children’s toys, or that visit to the hardware store, or that other visit to the hardware store, or that visit to the hardware store that came after that other visit to the hardware store. But I decided to tell one that involved William Bains, my
imaginative British research partner.

  William and I were invested so intensely in biosignature gases, we’d sometimes work on a Saturday or Sunday at my house, cramming as much as we could into each of his now quarterly visits from the United Kingdom. William had four adult children, and his experience with fatherhood helped him tolerate my boys, at least. One weekend, I asked him if he could spend some time with Alex. I wanted to take a break and play tennis with Max. One-on-one time was important. Attention of all kinds was important. We all went to the same park, but it was massive, and the tennis courts were at one end. The last I saw William and Alex, they were headed for a playground.

  “Follow me,” Alex said, and they disappeared.

  When Max and I finished our game, we made our way back to the playground. William was flat on his back in the sand, his skin the color of milk. Alex was kneeling beside him.

  “William! What’s wrong?”

  His response didn’t quite land—I thought that he might have been joking, in the middle of playing a game. But then I realized he was in serious pain. He was fairly certain that he’d dislocated his shoulder. “Hang on, William!” I said, and I ran off to get the car. The four of us climbed in, William sweating oceans out of his forehead, and we raced across town to the local hospital. It was the same hospital where Mike had gone when he had first fallen sick. The hospital that had ignored his bad back and destroyed his ankle. The hospital from which he had been delivered home for hospice.

  All those recollections surged back, carried to my frontal lobes by the smell of sickness and the beeping of unhelpful machines. The triage nurse asked William inane admissions questions. His eyes watered. He was in obvious pain, and all he needed was for a doctor to come out and put his shoulder back in. William, British and polite, did his best to answer her through his clenched teeth. I wanted so badly to grab her and scream in her face: Just get him a doctor! Then she pressed the wrong key on her computer and erased everything she had written.

  “Oh dear, I’ll have to start again,” she said.

  Her carelessness, her uncaring, and the ghost of Mike reflected in the floor tiles…Everything combined into the fuse of a bomb. I detonated spectacularly. William later said that he’d never seen anything like it. I ended up having to leave, apologizing to him and asking him to call me when he was done. I couldn’t bear to be in that place with those people for a second longer. The next time he visited, I asked him to look after Alex again, “but be safe!” They settled on a staring contest.

  I told the Widows about that day, laughing a little, crying a little more. Stories began pouring out of the rest of them. I laughed and cried some more. Someone had thrown down with another parent in a school hallway after an accidental violation of parking lot etiquette. A vacation for Melissa and her son in Puerto Rico had culminated in a collapse so complete that it sounded as though she might have made the news. (She’d had a breakdown at the hotel pool and, due to the language barrier, her explanation that her husband had died led to a brief murder investigation.) Chris told an agonizing story about losing her car keys in a grocery store—grocery stores are apparently the seventh circle of hell for widows—when she was already running late to pick up her kids. A store manager tried and failed to console her, and together they searched cart after cart. At last they found them, but not before, as Chris would have us believe, she had cried so hard for so long that other shoppers must have thought she’d lost her children, not her keys.

  Before I became a widow, I had always imagined stoicism among the prematurely bereaved: thin-faced women wrapped in black shawls, standing on beaches, looking out at the sea that had swallowed their men without remorse. The periods of quiet sadness, I understood. I understood opening a drawer and crying into a husband’s socks, or being bent over double by a picture in a yearbook. Our public freakouts, our constant charges against the ramparts of polite society, seemed less logical to me. We must have needed other people to know how much we were hurting. Or maybe we wanted the world to know that we weren’t scared of being hurt anymore. Maybe we were like veterans saluting each other when they marched together in parades, through streets lined with the incompletely appreciative: We know things that you never will, and don’t you ever forget it.

  * * *

  ●

  In June 2012, it was time for me to go to Tel Aviv to receive the Sackler Prize. I was still paralyzed with anxiety about leaving the boys, but I’d called their doting, witty aunt Rachel, Mike’s sister in Alberta, and she had agreed to fly to Boston to look after them. At least they would be with family. Now a second dilemma arose, almost equal in my hurricane mind: I had nothing to wear. My work clothes consisted of casual outfits for the office and buttoned-up suits for everything else. I rarely had much call to wear a dress. I wanted to wear a dress.

  I did what I had grown used to doing when the material world threatened to submerge me: I phoned Melissa. We talked through everything, which was now mostly my fear of leaving the boys, but also my fashion woes. The next day when I came downstairs, a garment bag had magically appeared in my front hall closet. It was stuffed to overflowing with beautiful dresses from Melissa’s wardrobe. Going through that bag felt like shopping. I tried on dress after dress and imagined a different life for myself. I imagined a different me.

  I chose a navy-blue one with short sleeves and three pearls sewn into its front. With Rachel taking care of my boys and Melissa taking care of my wardrobe, I felt as though I had been twice rescued. I flew to Israel and basked in the heat and attention a little bit. It wasn’t an elaborate ceremony. I shared that year’s prize with Dave Charbonneau; time had done its good work after all. We each gave a presentation, and I received a certificate that would go in my office. That was it. But I had put on Melissa’s dress and known, if only for a single evening, how it felt to look at myself from the outside and see someone pretty.

  I came home exhilarated, and also exhausted. I’d picked up some germs somewhere along the way and immediately fell sick. The boys demanded more than their usual attention after my time away. The house needed cleaning; the garden wanted to be readied for summer. It would be a long time before I wore heels again. I pulled my hiking boots back on.

  Melissa had said that I could keep the blue dress. For months after, when I opened my closet and the light and my mood caught things right, that dress looked like a cape.

  CHAPTER 14

  Sparks

  Father’s Day was a gorgeous day, bright with fluffy white clouds. It’s weird, looking back, how often the sun shone on the Widows’ gatherings. In the movies, there would have always been rain, but in reality, my memories of that time are filled with blue skies.

  All of our children had become friends. They didn’t gather because their fathers had died; they gathered because it was fun. There is a reason every children’s book is written from the perspective of the child. Children don’t care about adult concerns. We think of children as helpless when they are the embodiment of resilience, more impervious to outside forces than we could ever be again. Despite their suffering, our kids still knew pure joy.

  Max went through a phase for about a year after Mike had died. I was never sure if he was offering an innocent observation of his world or trying to deliver a message to me. Maybe it was both. It usually surfaced on the drive to school. He’d say in one breath: “Families have one mom, one dad, one boy, one girl, one cat, one dog.” He repeated it daily, the way I told myself that I was going to be happy. I explained to him that our family was a different family, but it was a great family, and we had a great life together. One day he just stopped saying it, and he never said it again.

  On Father’s Day we put out a huge lunch with a particularly impressive selection of sweets. “The Widows really like dessert!” Alex shouted. It always cracked me up when they called us “the Widows” rather than “the mothers” or something like that. There was a big tray of cupcakes w
ith fortunes inside them. I can’t remember which one of us opened the particular fortune—and thought it was a good idea to read it aloud—but someone read: Treat each day as though it will be your last, because one day it will be.

  The words hung in the air for a moment. Jeez, cupcake fortune. That’s a little heavy. But then we began smiling at each other. Someone started to giggle. Someone else started to laugh. Before we knew it, we had all dissolved into hysterics, following the trail blazed by our kids. Our collective sense of humor had verged on macabre from the beginning. Now it was getting really dark. We joked like coroners, like homicide detectives. Our lightest moments came in the face of death.

  The kids ran off after lunch, and we all leaned back in our chairs in the sun. Our adult concerns resurfaced, like blood finding its way out of a torn-open scab. Every time we got together, it seemed our losses had become more tragic, not less. We had all become widows at different times, but we were all still in the endless middle of our grief. In strange ways, our husbands’ deaths weren’t the saddest parts of any of our stories anymore. (In my case, it was the little reverberations and ripples that came after, the triggering effects of Eastern Orthodox weddings or seeing a river rise in the spring, a canoe tied down to the top of someone else’s car.) It wasn’t the torrents that did it; our worst spells became less severe with time, and their arrival became more predictable. The greatest threat lay in the countless, constant trickles.