by Sara Seager
That’s how Charles said it. There was no preamble, no foot- or endnotes, none of his usual jokes, no hesitation. He was direct and clear and certain. He had no time to waste.
Neither did I.
“Yes.”
The next day I got home and told Max and Alex the happy news that I’d been struck by lightning: “Charles proposed to me last night, and I said yes!” It sounded strange coming out of my mouth. To me it sounded too good to be true. That’s not how it sounded to Alex. “What?” he said. He said it with a surprising anger, as though I’d told him something that he refused to believe. “You should have consulted us first!” I had been so careful in how I handled Mike’s death with them, in deciding what they had needed to know and when, and what they could go without knowing. Now I felt as though I had threatened all of that delicacy in an instant of abandon. That was the first time love had made me careless, not careful.
The next evening, I got home late from work. Veronica had provided that night’s cover. I went upstairs to check on the boys. I could hear Alex whimpering in his bed. He was sharing a room with a sleeping Max, and Alex was being considerate in his sorrow. His attempts to stifle the sounds he was making left me only more heartbroken.
I sat on his bed and spoke in a whisper. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
“My whole life is going to change,” Alex said. “I don’t want it to change. I like my life.” He had been doing some very adult math. He was worried that we wouldn’t be friends with the Widows anymore; we wouldn’t go on trips anymore; Jessica and Mary and Vlada and the rest of our gang wouldn’t live and travel with us anymore. Our friends had filled the empty spaces. Adding Charles meant that there wouldn’t be the same kind of room.
I told Alex that our lives would change, but they wouldn’t change quickly, and they wouldn’t change for the worse. Nobody he loved was leaving. Somebody he would come to love was arriving. Life was good. Life with Charles would be even better.
I didn’t believe everything I was saying. I felt as though I’d made a huge mistake. If the boys didn’t see in Charles what I saw in him, I would be in an impossible place. There was no way for me to choose between them. I had to hope that everything would correct itself, that the planets would align. That’s where I put my faith: in Charles, and in my boys, and in each of their capacities to love and be loved.
“Just you wait and see,” I said.
* * *
●
We published our interim report on the Starshade that April. We had done good work. The Starshade wasn’t seen as an impossibility anymore—even some of the harshest former skeptics now believed. NASA officials who had expressed an almost physical discomfort around me during our early meetings now beamed when they saw me. I wasn’t a propagator of lunacy; I was an ambassador from a miraculous future.
We still had a long way to go. I had made some of my six mandated trips to work on the science and technology of our beautiful machine. The engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory came up with our final design: a flower with a circular center about twelve meters across, with petals that were seven meters from base to tip. The Starshade’s hardware needed to be manufactured to tolerances measured in hundreds of microns, which meant that a large part of the challenge lay in our physically constructing it. I felt as though we could manage. Model petals made of aluminum and composite had been built, and they seemed to work well. It was a thrill for me to watch them release themselves as though from a bud. They were something special to reach out and touch. We folded them back up and unfurled them again, eventually deciding to add a system of mechanical shims to find the perfect balance between fragility and strength. Once the Starshade was in space, we’d have one chance to get things right. Fingers crossed wouldn’t cut it. We needed to know.
There were still problems. One of them was the brightness of our own sun. Its light, too, would bathe the Starshade, and, at certain angles, what we were calling “solar glint” would reflect off the petal edges, interfering with our images. Another massive design challenge would be figuring out how to keep the Starshade flying in formation with its distant space telescope. They would be orbiting tens of thousands of kilometers apart and yet would need to line up with mathematical precision, our shield slipping between the telescope and its target star. It would have to be able to move, too, and to repeat that ballet. We had reduced the number of star systems we might examine to perhaps two dozen in its lifetime, and maybe in mine, because moving requires fuel, and fuel means mass. But the Starshade would still demand some of the most complex choreography in human history.
I liked our chances. Despite our initial friction, our committee had found an undeniable chemistry and purposeful rhythm. I could almost see the connections building between us.
My life at home, through its own kind of alchemy, was feeling more and more whole. Charles was coming down to Concord every other weekend. We might have known what we wanted from each other quickly, but we took our time in completing the transaction. Thinking back, those probing weeks and months make me think about how we might approach aliens after we make first contact. We were cautious when we first sent astronauts to the moon. When they came back to Earth, we put them in quarantine, on the deck of a ship in the middle of the ocean, in case something sinister had been hiding in the dust. After we find proof of another life in the universe, I imagine we will take our time to decide whether it’s a life that we want to know.
That’s how it was with Charles and me. We knew we loved each other. Our connection was obvious. But we were careful in the finishing of our fit. Most important, I wanted to know that Max and Alex were as happy as I was.
Because I was really happy. Charles was smart and curious and funny. Even when I was feeling stressed and overdrawn, he always found a way to make me laugh. He was supportive about my work without being intrusive about it. He never asked me a question that started with “Why?” He knew why I cared about the stars, and what that love of mine might mean. He knew the feeling that comes with looking through a telescope, the bigness and smallness, the knowledge and the mystery. He knew how demanding our shared love could be, too. He didn’t ask questions, because he knew that I would never have all the answers. He knew how endless the universe is.
Charles was also helpful in practical ways, good with his hands, familiar with tools. In an hour he would cross off a job that had been on my to-do list for years. He spun delicious meals out of the same kitchen in which I’d struggled. “I want to make you the happiest woman in the multiverse,” he told me, and I wanted to let him try. It took me a while to accept that he might. In the beginning I wondered whether the men at Rocky’s Ace Hardware might miss me. I had enjoyed my budding self-reliance, the satisfaction of a small job well done. I didn’t necessarily enjoy housework, but I had liked the feeling that the work had given me. I think I’d found in those jobs a kind of security: I could survive anything; I could survive being alone. But every time Charles put dinner in front of me and smiled at my smile, every time I came home and the fridge was full or the snow had been shoveled or the battery in a smoke alarm had been replaced, I learned to accept a little more of what Charles wanted to give me. He wanted to give me a different kind of peace. There is more than one way to feel complete.
Max and Alex eventually fell in love with Charles nearly as deeply as I did. They saw how much happier I was with him around, which meant they were happy when he was around, too. After his second or third weekend with us, Alex took me aside: “How soon can Charles move in?” Not long after that, Alex asked me what he did for a living, and I told Alex about his family business. He took careful note. Apparently, kids at school sometimes talked about their parents, and Alex had learned to hate the silence that followed questions about his father. By that spring, Alex couldn’t help pressing: “How soon can you and Charles get married?” His birthday sleepover was coming up. He wanted to introduce Charles as his dad.
Home and away, I was in the middle of two jobs that were something like the same, each with its own pressing deadline: With an improbable collection of parts, I was seeking to build machines of grace. I knew all of our needs—my Starshade colleagues’, my family’s. Now I had to help supply the most elegant solutions that I could find to meet them. At the center of both of my assignments were unlikely unions. The only difference was that one of them would come together to destroy light. The object of the other was to deliver it.
* * *
●
That December, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory made me a fantastical interplanetary travel poster. I thought it was magical. Later a whole series was made. They look vintage, like old posters for extinct airlines and train trips across the “mysterious Orient,” but we’ve since set different sights, and their destinations are fully forward-looking. They were such a hit that the lab made them available for download; the site soon crashed from the demand.
Some of the posters advertise visits to planets within our solar system. There’s one for Venus, with an observatory floating above the endless clouds, and one for Jupiter, where hot-air balloon rides take you closer to the mighty auroras. There’s one for Ceres, the Queen of the Asteroid Belt—and the last stop for water before Jupiter—and one for Europa, where maybe life waits for us under the ice. (We might never be able to see more distant moons, but if you start counting moons as possible homes, the odds tilt even more in favor of other life.) Importantly, I think, there’s also a poster for Earth, featuring a pair of astronauts sitting on a log, looking out over lakes and mountains and trees. Imagine an alien seeing Earth for the first time.
But my favorite posters fall under the guise of the Exoplanet Travel Bureau. They are the ones that trumpet visits to worlds that we are just beginning to understand. There is one for Kepler-16b and its magical twin suns, “where your shadow always has company.” A future explorer stands between rock faces, his pair of shadows stretching out behind him. There is one for Kepler-186f, with a white picket fence strung across a scarlet landscape, “where the grass is always redder on the other side.” Trappist-1e, part of a tight knot of seven rocky exoplanets, is imagined as a stepping-stone, an interplanetary way station. HD 40307 g is portrayed as a place for skydivers to try their luck against the gravity of a super-Earth. There’s even a poster for PSO J318.5-22, the rogue planet, trapped in its permanent midnight, swept by its molten-iron storms. It depicts a glamorous couple, dressed for a gala, posed arm in arm. They’ve come to the place “where the nightlife never ends.”
I had the exoplanet posters printed and mounted in frames, and I hung them in the halls outside my office. I loved walking by them every day on my way in and out of work. I do today. I look at them and see Charles and me.
* * *
●
One Wednesday afternoon, Chris came to see me at MIT. We did what we usually did during her visits: We talked about our kids and work and summer plans as I tried on dress after fashionable dress. I usually bought one or two, but she never forgot to tell me that I still wore too much black and needed to burn my hiking boots. I protested that black goes with everything, and I hardly ever wore my hiking boots anymore. I could hear her wry remonstrations whenever I even thought of putting them on.
Afterward, walking her back to her van—it’s black, by the way—she grabbed me by the arm and looked at me with far more serious eyes than she usually did.
“Does finding love again mean the pain is gone?” she asked.
I didn’t know how to answer her with words. I shook my head.
That night, I had my usual dream about Mike: He showed up back in my life after a long time away. This time, he’d been in a coma. The difference now was that I had found Charles. I told Mike that I was engaged to a man I loved. Mike told me that he understood—he was calm, even reasonable—but that I had to end it with Charles. We had to go back to the way things were.
I woke up with a start. I realized that I had to say goodbye to Mike, with the finality of a door slammed shut, before Charles and I got married. I would force myself to imagine Mike’s coming back to me, as he did in that dream, and I would do what I had to do: I would tell him that I chose Charles. I had to break up with Mike in my imagination again and again. I broke up with him when I was staring out the windows on the train. I broke up with him in my office. I broke up with him when I was the last one up at night. Every time, I said the same four words: “Mike, I choose Charles.”
I kept my imaginary dialogue private. I didn’t tell even the Widows about it, because I knew that some of them would disagree with what I was doing, strongly. Some of them believed that you stay married to your dead husband forever, no matter if someone new comes along. But I knew that I couldn’t commit to Charles until I was no longer committed to Mike. When someone you love dies, you don’t leave them. They leave you. Your love gets stuck, lost in translation between this world and the next: You’re constantly giving your heart to someone who isn’t there to receive it, and at the expense of someone who is.
A few months later, I had another dream about Mike. He was coming to me less and less. This time he was in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. He’d been in an accident, and it had taken him years to recover. He looked good, though. His hair was red again, not chemo-gray. I think I heard him before I saw him, digging through the house looking for some piece of gear, but he seemed more than distracted when I found him. He was hiding something from me.
Then I saw her. A new woman. Younger, with red hair like his. She was pretty but not too pretty. She was helping him with a contraption that would allow him to still use his kayak, which made sense to me: You don’t use your legs in the boat. In my waking life, I had continued to slowly get rid of our boats. I’d donated my Dagger Rival and the family Swift Yukon to the MIT Outing Club; I wanted to keep those two within reach, just in case I ever felt the urge to paddle again. Most of the rest of them were gone. But in my dream, I could see why Mike still wanted to be on the water. In the boat, Mike could be who he had always been. I felt the smallest blush of surprise—Oh, okay, you’ve moved on—but mostly I was happy for him. Nobody was hurt or hurting. Nobody was alone anymore.
I woke up. That was it. That was the last dream. I never saw Mike again.
* * *
●
The Widows celebrated one final Father’s Day in the summer of 2014. Chris hosted us in Lexington. Not everyone came, and there were hardly any kids. Max and one of the other sons ganged up on Alex, and he ended up in tears. I brought Charles to meet everyone, but we were in our own rush, headed for the airport for his trip back to Toronto. It was all strained. That marked the end of our formal gatherings. If I see the Widows anymore, it’s mostly by accident, at the park or the grocery store. There was one month not long ago when I ran into all but one of them, an unexpected burst of electricity through dormant circuits. I’m always happy when I do see them, but there’s something a little wistful about our chance encounters. They feel like they should be more purposeful.
Melissa is the only Widow I still see regularly, nearly every week. She’s still my best friend, even though I know she has other best friends. I see Chris, too, but not as much. I run into Melissa on the train into Boston; we meet for morning dog walks; once in a while we get our nails done. She tells me about her life and I press her for details about her latest men. I tell her about my latest planets. She still solves my problems for me, but they are so much smaller than they once were. I smile all the time I am with her.
The rest of us have grown apart. I suspect it’s because our lives became even more divergent than they already were. We all reached different versions of normal; time brought our differences closer to the surface than our similarities. We’re all busy with whatever we did before we became widows. Melissa went back to work with Fidelity in Boston’s financial district; Chris has built a thriving inter
ior decorating business. Sometimes, someone tries to set up a dinner. Sometimes I reach out. A few of us might show up, but the full membership of the Widows never seems to manage it. If you had pulled me aside the last time we were all in the same room and told me that we were spending our last hours together, I would have assumed that something else terrible was about to happen. Which one of us was going to die? But our end wasn’t like that. There was no trauma, no cataclysm. We called a little less. We emailed a little less. Nobody brought anybody plants anymore. We all had enough plants. Some of us found new men; some of us didn’t; some of us never tried. Bit by bit, we drifted apart. Our initial connection had been born of our losses. Our subsequent victories didn’t seem to have the same effect.
One day Charles made a suggestion. Or maybe it was a request. He didn’t like that I still referred to the Widows of Concord as “the Widows.”
“You should just call them your friends,” he said. That’s what I called the other people who had been there for me. I called my students my friends. I called my helpers my friends. It would be evidence of my recovery, using the nomenclature of survival. It was also a matter of accuracy. But I still think of myself and my friends as widows.
Maybe one day the Widows—my friends—will all get together again. I know in my heart that they are still out there for me, and I will always be here for them. At first I wondered whether they were like most of the other relationships in my life up to that point: utilitarian and transactional, means to an end. The Widows were there to help me share my grief and my pain. My postdocs and students, like Brice and Vlada and Mary, were there to make me feel hopeful. Jessica, Veronica, Diana, Christine—I had found them to lighten my load. That’s what they were at first. They each had a specific purpose. But all of them became something more to me, as I became something more to them. Our relationships became less about need and more about want: I wanted to spend time with them; I wanted to help them; I wanted to listen to them. If the Widows were still a kind of instrument, they were more beautiful and precise than I ever imagined they might seem to me, a shimmering collection of sextants and compasses to help me navigate my way through not only Mike’s death, but the rest of my life. We’ve moved on from each other in a lot of ways. But sometimes I still look at them, waiting in their places in my mind, and I think about how good they feel to have around me, the warmth of their shine, the comfort of their weight in my hands.