The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  The officer walked up to my car and leaned into the frame of my still-open window. I made a quick decision not to fight the familiar hot rush of oncoming tears. Tears might not hurt me here. The Widows called it “playing the Widow Card.” It was an accepted strategy.

  “My husband died,” I said, crying.

  He took my license and went back to his car. I sat in my seat and waited, my black spot blooming like an oddly sinister flower.

  The officer walked back up to my car. He had a piece of paper in his hands. He passed it to me along with my license.

  “No ticket today,” he said. He had just given me a written warning. “Please drive a little more carefully. Good luck with everything.”

  Now I was crying for a different reason.

  Another night, I called Melissa, barely able to summon words. I was crying so hard that her son heard me through the phone. I could hear him in the background: “Did someone else die?”

  Melissa dropped everything to come over, supplying me with another version of that beautiful dress. This time she brought me a picture book of shells. She had noticed I had a shell collection, gifts from my father and grandfather. It was her way of showing me that the world is still beautiful, if only we remember to look. She also gave me a large stone that had been smoothed by a river to the point where its rounded edges were almost soft. She told me to put it in my purse, which I did. Whenever I’d rummage around in it, I’d feel that stone between my fingers and be reminded that time can wear the edges off everything.

  CHAPTER 15

  Rocks in the Water

  The last line of my Guide to Life on Earth was an explicit instruction: Scatter my ashes on the Petawawa River. A few weeks after the anniversary of Mike’s death, after the sparklers in the driveway, I finally prepared to complete my last assignment. The mouth of the river was near his childhood home in Ottawa. The upper stretches were more remote, deep in Algonquin Provincial Park, and in the spring they became violent and churning. We had spent a week up there back in the summer of 1995, early in our relationship. I could still remember a fox I had seen dart through the trees. I knew I was ready to say goodbye to Mike when I began making plans to go back.

  The Algonquin Radio Observatory rises near the Petawawa, built in a place of total silence. When Mike and I paddled the river, swollen and heavy with rapids, we had stopped there and found a space camp for children. The observatory had since closed. I learned that a young family had taken it over on a government lease and started fixing it up. When they arrived on the site, the front door was open and snow drifted in from the outside. Now they offered the telescope for rent. They also had beds for overnight guests. I booked most of their available rooms. As was my new custom, I approached the woods with a traveling circus: Max, Alex, and me; Mike’s mother; Pete, Mike’s best friend and his companion on that last trip to the Galapagos; and Vlada, by then less a postdoc and more a trusted friend.

  Before we left, I went to see Dave at the funeral home one last time. I told him that I was ready. He nodded and went to retrieve Mike. He returned with the most perfect box, made of wood that had been joined so well, it looked to be without seams. It was exactly what I wanted but had been unable to describe; I would never be able to thank him enough. Inside, he had separated the ashes into two plastic bags. There was a small one for Mike’s mother and brother to scatter closer to the mouth of the Petawawa, where it meets the Ottawa. The larger bag was for me to take into the woods.

  As one last service to me, Dave told a story. Human ashes, he said, aren’t fine. Some are sharp-edged, with tiny fragments of bone that haven’t yet been ground to dust. I needed to be careful when and how I scattered them. He said that he knew of a woman who had scattered her husband’s ashes in their yard, and some of them blew over the fence and into her elderly neighbor’s eye. Dave was laughing by the time he got to the part of the story where that man’s eye had been infected by the remains of his dead neighbor. “Watch the wind,” Dave said, almost pink with joy. I have no idea if his story was true, but it served its purpose. I didn’t want Mike’s final resting place to be inside me or anyone else. I would watch the wind.

  We set out on the ten-hour drive north. I was not doing well. I radiated anxiety, and the children felt it and fed off it. They acted out from the beginning, complaining about the ride and each other. We pulled off the road for a snack, and Vlada became the teacher, not the student. “Sara, you have to stop stressing,” he said. “The kids are reading you. Stop it.” I took a few minutes to make the mental switch to calm, or at least the projection of it, and it worked. The boys leveled off for the rest of the drive.

  Mike’s mother and Pete met us at the observatory. We were the only visitors that weekend. It was a quiet place. After a fitful sleep, I put Mike’s ashes in my backpack, and Pete and I set out for the river. I didn’t take the boys. I wasn’t sure how I was going to react when I finally released Mike, and I didn’t want to expose them to the depths of my grief. I left them in Vlada’s care. It was sunny when Pete and I left, with huge white clouds casting giant moving shadows—another perfect day when the script called for rain.

  But something was amiss. When we reached the river, the water wasn’t running at its usual levels. One side of the river was impossibly low, low enough that Pete and I could walk down the riverbed. Islands had turned into peninsulas. We walked over the granite shelves where the water should have been, our feet now finding the same rocks that Mike and I had fought to avoid with the bottom of our boat all those years ago.

  At last we reached what should have been a waterfall. It wasn’t hard to imagine that when the water ran high again, the place we were standing would be lost under rapids and foam. Pete and I agreed that we had found the right spot. We looked at each other, and I lifted the plastic bag out of my backpack. There was Mike in my hands. I almost couldn’t believe it. For once I couldn’t understand the math: all of his spirit, his strength, and his energy reduced nearly into nothingness. I checked the wind, and Pete and I took turns tossing Mike’s ashes into the river. We reached the last handful: the last time I would hold him. The clouds drifted over our heads. The trees rustled. The river found its way. I let go. I scattered the last of Mike into the water.

  Pete left the next morning. Vlada, the boys, and I went for a hike. I didn’t mean for us to return to that spot, but we did, as though the river had funneled us there and now back again. We sat together on the rocks. Vlada could see the tears welling in my eyes and knew what I was about to say next. “Max, Alex. Guess what this spot is?”

  The boys knew, too.

  We sat in the sun and the silence and our own private thoughts. I don’t know what the boys were thinking. I wondered whether the water would ever be so low again; I wondered whether anyone would ever stand in the same spot, or whether this place would only ever be a river. I wondered whether Mike would be part of the rapids that we had paddled together, forever in a place where the rocks were worn smooth, like the stone in my purse that I held in my hands and knew had spent time in the water.

  * * *

  ●

  Melissa was on me about dating again. I approached Max and Alex about it, trying to be transparent without going into the messy details. Max responded a little harshly even in the abstract. “No getting married!” he said with a shout. “We can’t leave the Widows club!” He had come to love our little gang.

  I wondered whether Melissa might be right. Jessica’s older sister, Veronica, had taken her place in the lavender bedroom—now painted light blue for her—so I had a couple of free evenings each week. I decided to be open to what the universe might deliver me. The father of one of Max’s friends dropped him off one afternoon. He was a divorced dad and kind of cute; maybe it was time to practice flirting again. I asked him for help with a stuck drawer in a wooden table. I played the damsel in very minor distress. We spoke while he wrestled with it. I tried to remember how
you make small talk. I asked him questions and pretended to care about his answers. Eventually he opened the drawer, which was useful. A little while later I had him over for dinner. Despite having had a lot more practice cooking, I was still far from being at home in my kitchen, and though I managed not to scare him away, we opted to go out for dinner the next time around. We went to Walden Pond and looked at the water. It was time to kiss a new man for the first time since I’d met Mike.

  The pieces did not fit.

  I kissed him and thought: This must be what it’s like to kiss your brother. He was and is a nice guy, and a good dad, and he has a great smile. He was a kind and gentle reintroduction for me to the company of men. We ran into each other again later, when we both picked up our kids at camp. We smiled at each other and meant it. We just weren’t a romantic match. I decided that if I was going to date, I was going to hold out for something I wanted more.

  The Widows held a photo shoot. Melissa hosted. She told us to bring some nice clothes and makeup; Chris, the most fashionable member of our troop, loaned me a pair of beautiful shoes. Melissa had hired her famous friend Gigi—she’d photographed Chelsea Clinton’s wedding—to take our pictures. Some of them were group shots, all of us together on the couch, laughing at Chris’s dirty jokes. It was bawdy fun. A few of them were headshots, meant for our online dating profiles. Gigi was very good at her job. I had a lot of first dates.

  I didn’t have many second dates. Third dates were as rare as comets. I told my boys that things weren’t really working out. “Why not?” they would ask. Sometimes I was the problem. I was too awkward or too smart or too sad or too abrupt or too something. Sometimes it wasn’t me. “Well,” I said to Max and Alex when they asked about another failed date. “He wasn’t quite smart enough and he was kind of out of shape.”

  The boys tried to be helpful, offering suggestions. “What about the man at the rock-climbing gym?” Alex asked.

  “He’s twenty-five years old.”

  “What about that guy you were dating before?”

  “The dad from camp?”

  “No, that other guy.” Then he paused. “Oh yeah, I remember. He was fat and dumb.”

  * * *

  ●

  That autumn my house needed a new roof. I understood the purpose of a roof. It keeps all of the things that fall out of the sky out of your rooms. I did not understand the function of a roof—how a roof actually completes the demands of its purpose. I had never given it a second’s thought. The woman who owned the house before me, another single mother, didn’t seem to have given much thought to it, either. Over thirty years of however many owners and storms, the roof had done its roof things and been ignored by everyone underneath it. But apparently shingles don’t last forever.

  Mike hadn’t addressed roof repair in my Guide to Life on Earth, so I called Melissa. And she did what she usually did when I called her: She swooped in like an angel.

  She called a bunch of roofers and, having narrowed it down to a chosen few, continued her interrogations via email. She finally sent me a long written report. (She knew better than anyone how my brain worked.) Together we chose someone. Then she took me on a walk around the neighborhood, and we looked at every roof along the way for inspiration. I was struck by the variety of roofs, the shapes and colors and patterns and materials. Melissa and I settled on beautiful little tiles, laid out in a pattern that I thought was suitably historic without being fussy. She called the roofer and let him know.

  He seemed confused when he saw me with Melissa the day he arrived to start work. He had never spoken to me and had no clue who I was. He was also obviously taken with Melissa, gorgeous in a pair of tight jeans. He was carefully but seriously checking her out. That was one of the first times that I realized women our age could still be objects of sexual attention—that we weren’t doomed to live in the shadows of younger women, begging for their leftovers. I was a bit grossed out by the man’s gaze, but I also saw it as hopeful.

  The roofer soon stopped sharing my optimism. Like a lot of strangers, he made up his mind that Melissa and I were partners, and that his odds of landing her, already long, now approached infinite. Alex, in one of his purer moments of observation and honesty, had once said: “Mom, you should be gay with Melissa.”

  Two of the Widows were successfully dating widowers. That made sense to me, and I joined a dating site for people who had lost their first husbands or wives. It might be the saddest place on the Internet. Eventually, I met a great guy: successful, smart, athletic, funny. I liked him a lot. We had a good time together. If something went wrong, he’d joke: “It’s not like anyone’s dying.” But going out with me did something powerful to his own grief. It overflowed its banks, and it risked drowning me, too. One time I came home crying from one of our dates and my boys said, “If it’s so upsetting, why are you doing this?” I didn’t have a good answer. I asked Melissa how to break up with someone. She texted me long, detailed instructions.

  Step by step, I broke up with the widower. After nearly a year of trying, dating began to feel like an unnecessary drama to me. My life was dramatic enough on its own. I told myself that I had enough love. My children and my growing circles of friends—the helpers, the students, the father figures, the Widows—gave me all the support I needed. I sat Max down. “You don’t have to worry anymore,” I said. “I’m going to be in the Widows club forever.”

  * * *

  ●

  On top of the Green Building, where I work at MIT, a satellite dish points at the sky. It looks impressive, but it hasn’t been used much since the 1980s, its former function as a Doppler weather radar now obsolete. The MIT Radio Society, a 100-year-old club, occasionally bounced a signal off the moon with it. The rest of the time, it sat silent. That bothered me. Here was this instrument of connection, a means to turn satellites into allies, and it was incapable of collecting anything more than rust. I wanted to bring that unmoving dish back to life. I had the idea that I could use it to send commanding signals to my ASTERIA prototype once it was in orbit, and receive data from it in return. Later, I might even be able to direct the entire ASTERIA constellation from my office.

  I went to go see the dean of the School of Science, a physicist named Marc Kastner, to ask if we could find the funds to fix the dish. We met in his office in one of the older buildings on campus, its warm wood paneling polished in stark contrast to MIT’s cluttered labs. I knew Marc, but we weren’t especially close, and we were both more comfortable with our work than with people. That’s why I was so surprised when he asked me, the way Melissa had during our first fateful phone call, the easiest, hardest question: “How are you doing, Sara?”

  I couldn’t tell how much he wanted to know. But Marc has a friendly face, with a bushy mustache and genuine smile. I decided that I could be honest with him. I forgot all about the satellite dish on the roof and told him that I was still struggling under the weight of everything. I loved MIT, but the fall semester was demanding. Summer had meant that I could breathe a little; I had room to maneuver. If something didn’t go quite right, I had time to recover. Idle minutes could be used to find remedies and make corrections.

  Now I didn’t have any margin for error. Every day felt like the subject of a mad science experiment: How much can I squeeze into twenty minutes? Can I get out of my bed and back to it without falling apart somewhere in between? I had mastered some of Mike’s former responsibilities; others still eluded me. In between the jobs that I could do and the jobs that I paid others to do were the jobs that I half did. Even with help, every day was a kind of mountain. By the time I’d made the boys breakfast and lunch, driven them to school, put myself together for work, and taken the train into the city, I was already drained. I just couldn’t keep up. “Something has to give, Marc,” I said. “It might have to be my work.”

  I meant it when I said it. That wasn’t the first time I’d thought out loud abo
ut quitting. It was a fairly constant refrain in my head. This contemplation had a different quality than my ennui at Harvard, when I had thought about becoming a veterinarian instead. I loved my work. I felt as though I was getting closer to achieving something that would bend forever how we regarded ourselves. But Mike’s death had made me realize the mistakes I’d made in allocating my time. I was still mindful of the promise to him that I had broken; I felt a flash of shame whenever it came to mind. I had vowed not to make the same mistake with Max and Alex. They needed me more than I needed to be a few sentences in the long history of the world.

  A few months earlier, four of the Widows had come to see me at work for one of our Friday-morning coffees: Gail, Micah, Melissa, and Chris. Only Chris swung by my office with any regularity. She took business classes at a college in the city, and on Wednesday afternoons she had a break in her day. She’d decided never to return to work as a data analyst, determined instead to strike out on her own, begin a new career perhaps in fashion or design after she graduated. I was so proud of her, and I always told her so. She was dabbling as a personal shopper at the time, and I became one of her first customers, a cheerleader as much as a client. She showed up with armloads of clothes for me to try, and I marveled at her ability to find the right things for me to wear—clothes I never would have dreamed of buying on my own.

  Now I was the one who needed help with my career, and I turned to my four friends. I felt as low as the winter sun. Boston looked icebound from my window, the Charles River like frosted glass. I had my back to my blackboard. It was covered, as usual, with equations and diagrams, the mess I made and still make whenever I’m trying to translate my imagination into something real. The Widows were sitting across from me, almost like a hiring committee. Not one of them looked over my shoulders at the blackboard, the way visitors almost always did. The Widows never wandered. Their eyes looked only at mine.