The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  There is an atmospheric phenomenon that is so rare, some people think it’s a myth. I had never seen it myself, but not being able to see something doesn’t mean it’s not real. It’s called the Green Flash. When the conditions are exactly right at sunset—a dead-flat horizon, a pollution-free sky, a sun that appears white-hot rather than red—the last of the sunlight, refracted through the atmosphere and around the curve of the Earth, will appear, for the briefest of moments, unmistakably green.

  It’s hard to see the Green Flash for the first time on your own, which helps explain why I never had. It’s elusive in part because people want so badly to see it, but don’t know what they’re looking for. If you stare at the sun, even in its setting, your eyes will go blind to the sight. You need a partner, someone who is willing to sacrifice their own chance of seeing it on your behalf. You need to turn your back to the sun and have someone watch its descent for you, and then, at just the right moment, the instant before the sun disappears, your sacrificial someone has to tell you: Now. Open your eyes.

  I was determined to see the Green Flash in Hawaii with Charles. I had announced my intentions to him long before. On our first night there, we drove to the Mauna Kea summit with a clear view of the ocean and the uninterrupted horizon beyond. The sun was white. Charles was almost visibly wilting under the pressure; he, too, wanted me to see it. But there is no forcing the Green Flash. You have to wait for it to come to you.

  We stood on the mountain. It was unusually cold, and we were bundled up against the wind. I turned my back and closed my eyes to one of the most gorgeous sunsets of my life. Charles faced the sun. I waited for him to give me the word. It felt like a very long wait, and I struggled to keep my eyes shut. I could feel him beside me, waiting, waiting, waiting.

  “Now,” he said. I turned around and opened my eyes.

  And there it was: The Green Flash filled my watering eyes—an emerald green, perfect and pure. I smiled at Charles and he smiled at me, each of us overcome with something like relief. I felt as though in a moment I had been given a new horizon.

  * * *

  ●

  November. Every year in Concord, the bright blue skies and brilliant fall leaves give way to cold and rain and a thousand shades of gray. It’s when I’m at my most melancholic, dark-eyed and prone to brooding. I finally acknowledged that I had given my heart to Charles and would never be satisfied with his friendship alone. Even though I wasn’t privy to the thornier details of his separation, I was worried that I was expecting too much, too soon. He had been going to Tiny nearly every weekend between spring and fall since the day he was born. He had worked at the family business since he was a teenager. His presidency at the RASC was meaningful to him, and his best friends were part of the same club. If he was going to be with me, he would have to leave the rest of his life behind.

  I looked at the low clouds and empty branches and realized that I had made a terrible mistake: I had fallen in love with a man who was out of my reach. It wasn’t my fault, really—love is one of the only blameless things we do—but I had spent enough of my professional life on roads to nowhere. I should have recognized when I was hurtling toward another dead end. One rainy November morning, Charles and I talked via Skype. We couldn’t be friends anymore. Whatever our relationship was, we agreed to call it off.

  I was devastated. I had been working from home that morning, but now I had to drive to the Boston NPR studio for a radio interview. I called Melissa from the car. Life had conspired against me again. I was a mess. I could barely see the traffic lights. I’m sure that she wanted to remind me of her Fourth of July warning not to take men so seriously, and to take Charles even less seriously than most, but she didn’t. She took my side like a best friend should. “Life is messy,” she said. “Things take time.” She told me that even though life hadn’t worked out with Charles, everything would still be okay. I told her that, to make things worse, I was driving to an interview on NPR. In the studio. How would I get through it? “At least it’s not on TV,” Melissa said. I showed up still crying, my eyes swollen and red. The host and technicians looked aghast. “Don’t worry,” I said. “No one’s dying.”

  I still felt a terrible burden on my shoulders. Why was I so upset? I couldn’t understand my own feelings. Why? We hadn’t even kissed. Really, for once, no one was dying.

  Later that month, I was asked out on a couple of dates by other men and went on them. One was with someone who had gone to the same Montessori school in Toronto that I had. He was coming to a conference near Boston, and he drove through a lashing rainstorm to take me out for dinner. It was more of a reunion than a date. It was still me and a man eating together in a restaurant, so it was an evening of statistical significance. He was cute, smart, and incredibly sweet, with two daughters about the same ages as Max and Alex. We had a lot in common, including our childhoods. We must have passed each other in school hallways many times. I liked that about us, and I really liked him.

  It didn’t matter. Despite all of his excellent qualities—I’m surprised that the Widows didn’t show up behind me and start screaming, “What are you waiting for?!”—the same thought kept tripping me up like an uneven step: He’s not Charles.

  * * *

  ●

  In early December, I had to testify before Congress about the search for life in the universe. I would join two other experts in front of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology: Dr. Mary Voytek of NASA and Dr. Steven Dick from the Library of Congress. We would present our case on behalf of aliens and then take questions. Somehow I needed to make the case for hope.

  Lamar Smith, the head of the committee, called the hearing to order. Mary wisely opened the meeting with an inspiring update. As of that late-fall afternoon, we had found more than three thousand likely exoplanets. The day before, Hubble had reported traces of water vapor in five giant exoplanet atmospheres. Water in the skies of giants isn’t a sign of life, but it was its own kind of progress. There was possibility everywhere we looked.

  One of the congressional members was Ralph Hall, a ninety-year-old Texan who had started his political life as a Democrat before coming to call himself a Republican. He was charming in his old-southerner kind of way. He looked at the three of us behind the witness table and said that we might represent the largest concentration of brainpower he had seen. “I just don’t know how I’m going to tell my barber, or folks from my hometown, about your testimony here,” he said.

  We tried to keep our message simple. We needed continued support. We needed to make sure that children who wanted to become scientists were given every opportunity to see their aspirations come true. Most of my message was about the need to invest in more and better space telescopes, and about the value of the Starshade.

  Ralph Hall stopped me. “Do you think there’s life out there?”

  “Do the math,” I said.

  Hall said that he couldn’t do the math. That was the problem.

  He asked us again: “Do you think there’s life out there?”

  “Yes,” Mary said.

  “Yes,” Steven said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  * * *

  ●

  A few weeks later, I was headed to Guatemala to teach a weeklong workshop for astronomy students from across Central America. Jessica and Veronica would look after the boys. Alex had once said happily, while he, Veronica, and I were watching the Red Sox in the World Series on TV, “It’s like we have four moms.” (He was also including Diana.) I was a little taken aback at the time, because no mother wants to be one of many mothers. But I was grateful that my boys felt love from so many sources. More love was never bad.

  I was still scared to leave them. My fear of flying remained unshakable. Charles and I had been engaged in complete radio silence, but before my flight to Guatemala took off, I decided to write him our old text. If my plane crashes and I don’t make
it, I always wanted to tell you…

  I looked at it for a few seconds before I hit send.

  I was shocked when I came home from Guatemala to find that Charles had written me a long email. He knew what I had known: He knew that if he pursued me, that if we pursued us, that he would have an old life, and he would have a new one. He had agreed that we shouldn’t be friends, or anything more than friends, because he’d been overwhelmed by the prospect of leaping the canyon between those lives. Now he had made up his mind to try. Turning fifty didn’t mean that it was too late for him; it meant that he didn’t have any more time to waste. He had finished separating from his wife and moved into a basement apartment at his brother’s house. He had started talking to his father about leaving the business. (“Congratulations,” his father would say later, and he meant it.) The astronomical society could always find a new president. Somebody else could take every last one of his places. He had a new one to occupy.

  I don’t want to die unhappy, he said.

  Many widows and widowers learn to protect their heart from more damage. They know that they can’t take another blow, so they keep their love in an iron box, locked away inside their chests. Some significant percentage of them never date again, or if they do date, they date casually, without expectation or commitment. Maybe that’s how their subconscious protects them from anything that resembles further loss. If they never love again, their hearts will never again be returned to them in pieces. One of Melissa’s boyfriends had called her “guarded,” and she was surprised enough to call me to talk about it. She rarely came to me for advice, and I thought carefully about what I should say. I told her that “guarded” isn’t a word I would use to describe her. She’s open and available, loving and committed. She’s a source of light and heat.

  I thought more about Melissa after I hung up the phone. As much as I loved her, we were different in fundamental ways. All the Widows were; all widows are. We respond differently to the same traumas. Nobody is wrong. One of the few traits the Widows shared was our honesty with the world, and we were all honest in our emotions. They just weren’t always the same emotions, and we didn’t always express them the same way.

  I had decided once that I was going to be alone forever. My boys and I would never be kicked out of our Widows club. I could never judge anyone for thinking the same thing. But I didn’t want to think that way anymore. I had always believed that great reward demanded great risk. My father had taught me that. Mike and the wild rivers and lakes of Northern Canada had taught me that. My boys had taught me that. Mount Washington and the Grand Canyon had taught me that.

  More than anything else, space had taught me that. The stars had. Miracles don’t happen in a vacuum. They are willed into existence by willful people. My losses had sometimes clouded my belief, in myself in particular, but now my eyes were clear and my lungs were full. For the rest of my life, I would rather suffer than experience nothing. My father had told me, so many years ago, not to rely on any man. He had told me that only a father’s love is limitless. But how would I know how big romantic love could be if I never gave it another chance? I would choose for my heart to be broken rather than never feel a change in its beat. That’s what Charles was teaching me.

  He asked if I would join him on a trip to London early in the new year. “Yes,” I heard myself say.

  Yes, yes, yes.

  * * *

  ●

  That Christmas Eve, after Max and Alex had gone to bed, I sat down at my kitchen table and pulled out a sheet of my family stationery, cardstock in cream. In the top right corner, it reads The Seagers, embossed in blue cursive. I found a pen and wrote the date in the top left: 12/24/2013. I addressed it to Dr. D., Mike’s cancer doctor. Although I was nearly through with my meltdowns, holidays were still hard. There was still something triggering about seeing, even imagining, the unburnished joy of others. I took a moment to gather my thoughts and began to write.

  While you celebrate Xmas with your happy family, the boys and I mark our third without Mike.

  And then I vented. I vented about what he had done to Mike—not his failure to save him, but the damage to him that he had done in his attempts. Three years ago you insisted on a third type of chemo, one with a known chance of success of 0.000000000%. I was shocked to later learn you only cared about covering your own ass, if after death the family were to complain you hadn’t done everything you could. I had wanted to end my time with Mike the way we had started our time together. I had wanted Mike to die feeling strong. All I wanted was one chemo-free month before cancer took over—just one more great month with Mike. I wanted him to feel that he had beaten cancer, not because he had survived it, but because it had never dictated how he might live. That’s not what happened. You ruined Mike and my precious time left together. Part of me was still angry about it. Part of me might always be angry about it, but I wanted to try not to be angry anymore. I dug my pen into that sheet of paper and told the doctor that I was in charge now. I was in control. Not him. Not cancer. Not the universe. Me.

  You owe me an apology, and I am still waiting.

  I looked at that piece of paper on the table for a long time. I had rid myself of the poison inside me. All the pain, all the hurt, all the regret, every trace of bitterness and rage, I had spilled onto that single page.

  I never sent the letter.

  CHAPTER 20

  Final Report

  Charles and I met in the polished halls of Heathrow on the first day of 2014. I hadn’t even thought to cry at midnight. I had arrived first and waited for him. We found each other at Arrivals. There was no turning back. We went out for dinner that night. I asked him, the way two kids new to love might ask each other: “Are we boyfriend and girlfriend?” I needed to be clear about what we were and what we were going to be.

  “Yes,” Charles said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  We had booked separate rooms again, because—well, I don’t really know why. Habit. Nerves. A sense of propriety. We were both anxious and hazy from more than the jet lag. Early in our trip, I caught Charles looking at me. “You’re really very beautiful,” he said, and he raved about my figure, too. He said it as though he had never realized it before, my body a surprise discovery. We had fallen in love mostly in two dimensions. Only now did it occur to him that I wasn’t an apparition. I was a real, physical object. We might also touch each other, and it might be nice to touch.

  We embarked on a grand tour of London together. Charles took me to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, split in half by the Prime Meridian Line. We lingered in the Clock Room, looking at the evolution of timekeeping and the charting of stars. It was a little on the nose, the two of us standing together, unsure of how or where our future together might finally begin, watching countless ticking clocks.

  London was very London that first week of January: cold, damp, thick with fog. Charles felt like a fire next to me. Despite the chaos of a great world capital swirling around us, my eyes were nearly always on him. But there remained an uncertainty between us, a tentativeness born of disbelief.

  One night we went out for dinner, one of those extraordinary experiences—the food, the wine, the ambience—that you know you will remember as long as you live. Afterward, Charles led us on a walk through the empty streets of late-night London. There was only the sound of our boots on the cobblestones. We turned a corner and came out of the mist. I still have no idea how we came to be standing in front of Buckingham Palace.

  “You are my princess,” Charles said.

  We kissed.

  It was worth the wait.

  We flew home without making plans for what we might do next. Charles called me and left the sweetest voicemail. It was also endearingly awkward: “We should have made plans,” he said. “Let’s make some plans. I…Well, I was wondering…If you’d like to come to Toronto. Or maybe I could come
visit you?”

  We did both. First I went to Toronto to see him and meet his parents. Next I invited him to come see me in Concord. I wanted him to meet the boys. Max had turned ten; Alex was eight. Charles knew that we were a package deal. He wanted to make the right kind of impression on them. I have a photograph of him with the boys from that night; I can still feel the weight of that meeting in every pixel, the expectation and desire of it. Even Alex could sense it. He pulled out an enormous book of M. C. Escher illustrations that he thought Charles might like, and opened it across both of their laps.

  I had used some of my mountain of air miles to book us a February night at the Boston Harbor Hotel, a luxurious stay in the city while Jessica looked after the boys at home. We were out at dinner when Charles began talking about the future in a way that puzzled me. His thinking seemed long-term and specific, the way I might talk about the stages of future space exploration: this, then this, then this. He talked about how the boys and I could come up to Tiny that summer to stay at his cottage, roasting hot dogs around the fire. Maybe he could show them the Green Flash over the bay. He had made other plans for us in the fall, and the following winter, and the spring that would come after the spring that hadn’t yet arrived.

  “Charles, we’ve just started dating. People don’t normally talk like this. Not so soon. Not so early.”

  Charles looked down at the table. I worried that I had upset him the way I so often upset people, saying things that were better left unsaid. He was, in fact, finding the courage to do the bravest thing he had ever done.

  He looked up: “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” he said. “Sara, will you marry me?”