Chapter Sixteen
Diagram of continental drift: Pictures of Earth
God, it was cold up there. I wore my puffy parka and hat with the pom-pom. Also my gloves, and a scarf wrapped around my neck and half my face. But I could still feel the frigid night through my pant legs.
“Brr, brr.” I couldn’t help it. I said it again.
I tucked my chin way down into my scarf.
But you were ignoring me. You weren’t perfect, of course not.
I’m sorry to say. You could be entirely self-focused, like right then.
Also, though—I’d agreed to go, and that meant agreeing to what going involved, all of it, cold, too.
A person didn’t get to say yes, then complain the whole time.
“Look,” you said. You stepped back from your telescope so I could see.
“Is this Rasalhaggle?” I bent down, peered in. “It’s superbright tonight.”
Chester snort-laughed.
“Rasalhague,” you said. I could never remember the name.
It was the brightest star in the Ophiuchus constellation, the head of the snake-holder guy, the spot where you usually pointed your scope all the times we’d been there before.
It was the spot where Voyager was still speeding away from us at thirty-eight thousand miles per hour.
It’s what we always gazed at—its increasing distance, that explorer traveling farther and farther away.
“But no. That’s not what we’re looking at. ”
“You can’t see it this time of year.” Sandrine always cut to the chase, thankfully. Made things simple for me to understand.
“It’s in the southern hemisphere now,” Maurice said.
“Since when did you become the big expert,” I said, and he made a face at me.
“That’s Sirius,” Norton said. He was five, his tone said, and even he knew this.
“Serious?” I removed all humor from my face.
“SIRIUS,” Norton basically shouted. “The star.”
“Be nice,” Santiago reminded him. “Everyone is learning, all the time.”
“The brightest star in Canis Major, aka the Greater Dog,” you explained.
No one else spoke. It was Astronomy 101.
No—it was elementary-school astronomy that I’d somehow missed out on.
I was absent that day, my dad would say about any lapses in basic knowledge.
“Bigger than the sun and almost twenty-five times as bright.”
“But not as bright as Venus, right, Dad?”
“Right. Or Jupiter.”
“Totally wild that we can see planets,” I said.
“Sirius means ‘glowing’ or ‘lit.’ ” Sandrine always liked the name origins.
“Lit,” Chester chuckled. The word inspired him to take a long swallow of his beer.
“Wait. So, we can’t see where Voyager is? Even the general area?” I asked.
“Only from May to October. But best in July and August,” you said.
“Then why—” I stopped myself. There were plenty of reasons to be there, besides looking at the piece of sky where the Golden Records were speeding rapidly away from us.
Not just all the stars and planets and constellations, but those people.
Chester, handing over a box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers for us to share; Ben, announcing the news that he’d finished his twelve weeks of the Firefighter Recruit Academy; Santiago, asking Sandrine and Maurice to sign the Solar Flare poster he’d gotten at their last concert.
And Lily, just being Lily. “Guys!” She pointed.
I saw it, streaking from the sky—the bright flash, and then another, right after it.
“It never gets old,” she said. “Unlike me, unfortunately.”
Another flash. Another!
“Mars!” I cried. It was sky magic. This was what you wanted me to see.
This was why we were out there on a mountain on the tenth of December, freezing our butts off.
You didn’t tell me. You let it be a surprise.
The cold was worth it; of course it was.
Some people wouldn’t go the distance to see the sky, but you always would.
“The Geminid meteor shower.” You smiled. “Every December.” I kissed you, right there in front of everyone. It was such a present, to witness it. That month was seeming more incredible all the time, more than I ever knew, that’s for sure.
“You missed one,” Lily said as we kissed. “Oh! Another one.” I wished I could get a photo of those, but they zoomed by too fast, and then they were gone.
We watched until everyone was freezing, and until Norty started to whine a little.
It was getting so late. We packed up. There were always a few moments at the end of the meetup where everyone gathered in a small huddle by the cars, just BSing until next time, prolonging the goodbye.
A prolonged goodbye—that’s love. Love you want to stay in for a while.
Norty was getting buckled into his car seat, and Chester was giving his congratulations to Ben again, and Rainey and Sandrine were chatting about some film Rainey recently saw, and Maurice was helping Lily load up her truck, when you fished in your pack and brought out an envelope.
“Before you guys go?” you said loudly, gathering everyone’s attention.
You waved the envelope, and I saw what it was.
We’d been waiting. Mine came the week before, and when it did, I revealed to you and only you a tiny new dream.
That maybe I wanted to study photography.
You grabbed my hands, your eyes all glittery.
A dream should be respected, you said, as if it were a solemn yet exciting oath, and not a terrifying unknown.
We were starting to get worried about your dream, though.
You hadn’t gotten a letter yet. But here it was, oh my God.
Sandrine let out a little squeal.
“I got in. Early acceptance. Double major, astronomy and physics, and then onward to the graduate program, and then—”
“On to the Oort!” Lily shouted, waving her fist in the air.
“On to the Oort,” you shouted back.
Lily wasn’t normally all that demonstrative, but she went right over to you and held her palms against your cheeks, staring at you hard with her decisive blue eyes. She just shook her head with that cap of white hair. “Wonderful,” she said. “Wonderful.”
“Was there any doubt?” Chester clapped you on the back. I could feel your narrow shoulder blades rattling from the force.
“Some doubt,” you said. Not really, from my viewpoint, but you’d been worried about your physics grade.
You’d gotten a 3.8, not a 4.0. You were a great student.
Smart, obviously. But you worked hard. Man, you expected a lot from yourself.
It was funny—my parents expected a lot from us, so we did, too.
But Janite didn’t expect a lot from you, so you did that job, double.
“Way to go, bro.” Maurice gave a fist bump, and then Sandrine kissed you on the cheek.
“I told you, you’re home now,” she said.
When we were driving back, the dark lumps of the mountains on either side of us, the heater blasting, you turned down the volume of the music and said, “I hope it’s okay, that I didn’t tell you first?”
It had crossed my mind, if I’m being honest. I mean, on the way over, I’d asked if you’d heard anything yet, and you shook your head.
It was a half shake, come to think of it.
But since we broke up, I was being careful, you know, not to do anything to make it happen again.
I was keeping a little more quiet about what I really thought and felt.
It’s a wrong and disastrous thing to do, to make yourself disappear so someone else won’t, but that’s where I was.
“Of course,” I said. “They’re your family.”
“The main thing is, we’re doing it!” you said.
“We’re doing it,” I agreed.
“ ‘Husky fe-ver! I think it’s going around!’ ” you sang, doing a bebop car dance in your seat. It was some oldie fight song or something that your aunt Gwen always sang whenever we talked about the University of Washington.
“Watch where you’re going,” I said. We were on I-90, and the traffic was picking up, and the road looked icy from where I sat.
“We’re fine,” you said. “We’re perfectly safe.”
We weren’t. Who is? That’s the big trick, going forward with the truth that we mostly are, but not all the way. We have to be okay with that sliver of a chance that things might go disastrously wrong, because the sliver will wreck the good parts if we don’t.
I decided to believe you. I turned the volume back up.
The next song played. It was Sandrine singing “Infinity.” Solar Flare had pooled their resources and recorded a few songs to stream online and to send to demo drop spots at a few labels.
But, of all their songs, it was our song.
You had thousands of songs on your phone, but that’s the one that came up right then.
Okay, it was probably on Recently Played or something, but we locked eyes, like, Look!
Here’s us, being all fate-and-meaning again!
But that night…What struck me most was Sandrine saying, You’re home now.
It was obviously something you and she had talked about, probably a lot.
And you’d talked about it a lot with me, too, how much you wanted to be there, in that city, with those people, including me.
How you didn’t want to move around anymore.
That’s why I got so mad, is what I’m saying. That’s why I wrecked things in the end. And why I’ll never forgive myself. Never. Not entirely.