The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  I stared out the plane window at the clouds below us. In a couple of weeks, it would be the two-year anniversary of Mike’s death. The Widows had made no plans for it. One year removed from tragedy called for fistfuls of sparklers, but two years didn’t call for much beyond a few sad hours of self-reflection. I had read somewhere that widows either meet someone new and remarry within two years or they never do. I couldn’t help thinking that on that front, at least, I had run out of time.

  There was a reception before my speech, the kickoff to the weekend-long event. We were at a small university emptied for break, where big windows looked out over rocks and trees. Thunder Bay presumably has that name for a reason, but it was sunny and warm that week, light until ten o’clock. Canada’s long summer days always made up for its short winter ones, I thought. The resignation I’d felt on the plane fell away. There were nearly one hundred amateur astronomers in the room, excited to revel in their shared passions, and I felt the addictive spark of belief. Most of them knew that I was a guest speaker, and I was in constant conversation, talking mostly about the relative merits of one telescope over another.

  I remember the instant I first saw him. I could actually feel my head turn toward him the way a sunflower follows the light. He was very tall, so he stood out even in the crowd, across the room. He had long hair gelled back away from his face, dark-rimmed glasses, and a wide smile. He was tan, as though he’d spent his life in the sun. He wore a crisp white shirt that made him look darker than he already was. Wow, I thought. Who’s that man? I decided that I had to meet him. I didn’t know how. I tried not to stare.

  He stared back for a moment. Then he turned and glanced back over his shoulder, as though he thought I must have been looking at someone or something else behind him. Then he looked back at me, and our eyes connected. That look was all we shared. It felt like plenty.

  When I got up on stage later that night, the tall man was sitting near the back of the auditorium. I was still trying not to stare. I pretended to concentrate on my notes, though I had my entire talk memorized. I had lost count of how many times I had given it. I talked about my search for the first Earth-like twin, my lifelong quest to see the smallest lights in the universe.

  I was relieved when I was finished. My presentation had gone well enough, and now I would get to sit back and enjoy the rest of the lectures, picking up again the next day. Since astronomy conferences aren’t exactly high-end, I was billeted at the home of a spunky amateur astronomer with bright silver hair. She was a widow. We talked a little bit about that, about dating again. She told me that she had been asked out several times but had always said no. I tried to give her some advice about men (she should go ahead and date when she was ready) and money (she should go ahead and renovate her bathroom). Then we turned to astronomy, my real area of expertise.

  My hostess was a devout Catholic, but she also loved the stars. She knew that many in her religious community would have trouble navigating the discovery of other life in the universe and what that might say about their faith. Their fear was understandable. The history of their (and every) church includes its scientific challengers—Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin—and they would soon have to decide, again, what one of their belief systems meant for the other. It wouldn’t be long before religion couldn’t provide people with every answer anymore. We stayed up well past midnight discussing what we came to call the Awakening.

  I probably slept more deeply than she did that night. The next day, I headed to lunch in the university cafeteria, a little later than almost everybody else. It was mostly empty—except for the tall man. We found ourselves standing together at the salad bar. I turned to him. I didn’t know what to say, so I waited to see if he would say something.

  He cleared his throat. Then he reached out his hand.

  “Dr. Seager, my name is Charles Darrow,” he said. There was a pause. Charles Darrow seemed nervous, but he also seemed resolved to say what he said next. “Would you like to have lunch with me?”

  We took our trays to a quiet table on the far side of the cafeteria, next to the floor-to-ceiling windows, overlooking all of those rocks and trees. It felt like a kind of victory to have found my way to the same table: I finally get to meet him. I had never had such an instant attraction to a man. I looked right at Charles, wearing a giant smile. We told each other a little about ourselves, bare bones, first impressions. I needed to focus to listen to him. Charles was from Toronto, the president of my old branch of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Ours really is a small world. He had been spending a lot of time up at his cottage in a place called Tiny, on the shores of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. He sat on the beach during the day and looked through his telescope at night. I wondered why he was spending so much time in a place named Tiny, but I didn’t ask, and Charles didn’t say.

  That night we met again at another talk, and Charles asked if he could sit next to me. We sat in the dark and listened to the speech and the sound of each other’s breathing. I liked being next to him. He was so much bigger than me, I felt in some ways as though I were sitting next to a source of gravity.

  The following morning, I waited at the airport for my early-morning flight home, a quick turnaround before I headed to the Starshade meeting at Goddard. Charles had given me his business card. I pulled it out and held it between my fingers for a little while. I wrote Charles an email, saying that it had been nice to meet him. If I’m being honest, I didn’t think we’d cross paths again. He had his life, and I had mine. I looked up the distance from Toronto to Concord: There were 549 miles between us. We might as well have been living on different worlds.

  * * *

  ●

  I was home for a single afternoon, long enough to unpack and repack my suitcase, take the boys for a quick swim, and thank Jessica for looking after them. Back to the airport. Back on a plane. I read over the notes for my next talk, this one to an audience of professional astronomers rather than amateurs. It’s always been interesting to me how different the same ideas can sound, depending on the audience.

  “So, I hear you’re an expert on the Starshade,” I heard someone say, a little snidely, not long after I arrived. Someone else repeated the same refrain almost word for word. He, too, meant it sarcastically, not sincerely. He was an engineer, and I was a scientist, so I could see where he was coming from: He knew better how to build things. Still, I was upset that my supposed colleagues would be so rude. I knew that they wouldn’t dare do that to a man in my position, with my qualifications, but I tried my best not to look stung.

  I sat down with my STDT for the first time: There were ten of us on the committee, including a couple of emissaries from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. That’s where the Mars rovers and other fantastic machines are built. We also had an invaluable design team working alongside us. There was no point in dreaming up something that couldn’t be made, and they would remind us of the limits of turning blueprints into physical objects.

  That first day passed in a blur, but I liked our odds more and more as each hour raced by. Despite our wobbly start, I began to feel like we were part of a team. It was a well-assembled group, with complementary skills. By the time we sat down for dinner that night at a local Thai place, I was tired but happy. We were going to make something amazing.

  On the second day of meetings, I woke up early to give an interview to the BBC for World UFO Day. Some people celebrate it on June 24, when an aviator named Kenneth Arnold made the first widely reported sighting of a UFO. While flying near Mount Rainier in Washington State in 1947, he claimed to have seen nine objects traveling in formation. He said that they were shaped like pie plates—which is why we refer to “flying saucers,” and why fictional alien vessels are so often portrayed as disks. (I’ve always thought that was strange, because we’ve never built a flying disk ourselves.) July 2, when I was being interviewed, is an equally recognized World UFO Day. That’s when aliens suppo
sedly crashed into the New Mexican desert near Roswell, only a few days after Arnold’s sighting. That was some summer.

  I don’t believe we were visited by aliens in 1947, or any other year. I don’t think anyone or anything can travel that far. But I still wanted the global audience of the BBC to imagine the possibilities. I put on my favorite brown leather jacket—I could hear the whispers of fashionable Chris, reminding me not to dress like a dork on TV—and sat in the early-morning light in my hotel room, waiting for a video call from a very proper-sounding British broadcaster named Tim Willcox. I prepared to make my standard argument.

  “What is your hunch?” Willcox asked, and he laughed a little. “It’s not very scientific, but what is your hunch: Do you think there is life out there?”

  “Here’s the thing,” I said, smiling. “Scientists never like to say yes or no to something without any evidence whatsoever, especially on the BBC. I have to tell you, though, statistically speaking…If you just do the math and ask how many stars are out there, and how many planets are out there, it really seems inevitable that there is life elsewhere in our universe.”

  “Well, I’m hoping you find Krypton,” Willcox said, “and find a new Superman as well. Sara Seager, best of luck, and talk to you when you’ve found them, perhaps.”

  I wanted so badly to give that follow-up interview. Can you imagine? The day that we find proof of other life in the universe? The day that we know someone else is out there will be one of those days that stands like a sentinel between the before and the after. I pictured the silver-haired widow in Thunder Bay turning on her radio and hearing that news, her hand to her mouth, tears in her eyes: the Awakening.

  I returned to Goddard possessed. I gave my talk and listened to several others, about the best exoplanet candidates for life and the evolution of celestial giants. The room was soon crackling with creative energy. We used the word “targets” a lot. We were setting our sights.

  I was at the airport waiting to fly home from Goddard when I had my first chance to check my email. I saw a return message from Charles. I nearly fell out of my chair.

  There’s something I forgot to tell you, he wrote. Can we talk?

  * * *

  ●

  On the Fourth of July, I got together with Melissa, our kids, and some of her non-widowed friends. I knew I was doing better because I could stand their giggly company without welling with contempt: Oh, I don’t want to murder them, that’s good. We took the Red Line to Cambridge, to the MIT campus, bound for the roof of the Green Building, twenty-one stories up. It was the perfect place to watch the Independence Day fireworks over the river. I showed Melissa my email exchange with Charles. By then I’d recovered my composure enough to reply to him as casually as I could: “Sure.” Now I was waiting for my phone to ring.

  “Fun!” Melissa said above the noise of the train, and she let out a peel of laughter. I knew what she was trying to tell me. Just have a good time with this one. Don’t take him too seriously. For once I thought Melissa didn’t have all the answers. I was shaken to the core, as though I’d found some new knowledge, left reeling by my own version of the Awakening. Charles and I had met over the course of one weekend in Thunder Bay and hadn’t spoken since. I was a scientist with no evidence whatsoever. But I knew that there was something about him; he wasn’t like the others. He wasn’t like anyone else.

  He called the next day. I found out later that he had picked up his phone five times before he finally found the courage to finish dialing my number. My heart beat faster when I saw Toronto’s familiar area code on my screen.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Sara. It’s Charles.”

  We didn’t really talk about anything. Just small talk. How are things? Good. Busy, but good. We still didn’t know each other very well, an accident of our shared awkwardness. I had told him that I was stressed about spending enough time with the boys, torn between them and my passion for the stars. Charles told me that he thought my work was important. He also told me that his father had been a traveling salesman before he started his own demanding business, and he grew to regret the time that he had spent away from his kids. Charles wanted me to know that he thought I was a good person and a good mother for worrying that I hadn’t found the right balance. If I hadn’t found it, I would.

  There were glimpses of himself in what he had to say, but I felt as though there were important things about him that he wasn’t telling me.

  I didn’t tell him some things, too.

  We hung up, but I kept thinking about him, and not in my usual way. I wasn’t analytical. I performed no dissections. I knew only that I wanted to talk to him some more.

  The day after our call, the boys and I flew to Switzerland to visit Brice again. There was no work involved—a true summer vacation. On one rainy hotel-bound day, I decided to send Charles a short email, the gentlest of nudges. Hi from Switzerland, I wrote. We’re trapped in a thunderstorm. What’s new with you?

  I was a little surprised when he soon wrote back.

  Have some rösti for me.

  I lay on my bed and laughed. Such an unexpected response. We wrote back and forth a couple more times, and Charles always wrote something that made me smile. He asked whether we could speak again when I got back home. Of course, I wrote. This time, though, I told him that I wanted to talk via Skype. I wanted to see his face. I wanted to see his eyes.

  Okay, he wrote. Let me get a camera for my ugly mug.

  Ugly mug? Whenever Charles looked in the mirror, he must not have seen what I saw. I thought he was beautiful. He looked at himself like his own worst audience. I looked at him and saw life itself.

  * * *

  ●

  Part of me wanted to tell him everything, but Charles and I didn’t talk like that to each other. There was no urgency in our confessions. There was no race to the next step in our relationship, because there was no next step. We were becoming friends, and true friendships take time. We gave each other only thin clues about who we were and what we had gone through. I told myself that I was leaving the universe to its own devices, but that wasn’t entirely true. It was more that I knew what I wanted the universe to do, and I didn’t want to do anything to get in its way. I was certain that something bigger was coming for us. I was determined to let the inevitable happen.

  I had told Charles that I had children, but he didn’t know who their father was. He didn’t know whether I was still married or divorced or any of the other possible options. He knew that I was an astronomer, and he knew that I taught at MIT, but he didn’t know exactly what my life was like, or just how famous I had become in my field. He knew I liked him, I think, but I don’t think he knew how much.

  Charles told me that he worked at the family business in Toronto. I found it online. It was a wholesaler of specialized machine parts. He knew how tools worked. He didn’t just know that ball bearings existed; he knew why ball bearings existed, and he knew that there were different ball bearings for different jobs. I admired that about him, the control that his work seemed to afford him over the world. He worked regular hours, had his weekends off, took vacations when he needed them. There seemed to be an order to his life. He had the measure of things.

  Then Charles said something else. “My wife,” I heard.

  His wife. Present tense. No adjectives.

  He was married.

  That’s okay, I thought in a self-protective rush. I’m not ready for a relationship anyway. We’re friends who flirt a little. Just a little crushing on someone from afar. No harm done. But inside, I had sprung a leak and felt myself deflating. I told myself that I was being silly. Five hundred and forty-nine miles? We never stood a chance. I knew that. I knew that. Still. I had let my heart drift a little. I had allowed myself to feel a little hope.

  Charles and I kept talking. We never ran out of things to say. Even if we talked about something
ordinary, my attention never wavered. It didn’t hurt that he was quick with his jokes. A lot of them were self-deprecating. He had a sardonic way of looking at himself, and he made me laugh more than I had laughed in years. I could be myself with him, and he seemed drawn to me, not repelled. Conversation with Charles felt so different from most of the time I’d tried to get to know someone. It felt as though he and I could talk forever.

  I told Charles that Riccardo, the MIT alumnus who had kept his promise to be alongside me for the rest of my life, sometimes wrote to tell me good night and to wish me a good morning. He took the hint.

  Charles wrote me that night: Good night, Sara.

  I woke up the next morning: Good morning, Sara.

  It was time to tell Charles my own secret. It was a few days before the second anniversary of Mike’s death. I told him what the next week would bring.

  He didn’t apologize on cancer’s behalf or try to find the silver lining in the death of someone you loved. He said that he hoped I would be okay. That he would be thinking of me.

  I told him that it was going to be my birthday that weekend, too. How depressing.

  I woke up on Saturday. Good morning, Sara. Happy Birthday. I wrote Charles back: My birthday’s tomorrow. Sunday.

  You just said “this weekend,” he wrote. I had a fifty-fifty chance.