Chapter Twenty-Five #2
We edged our way in there, found a spot near the stage where Sandrine wouldn’t miss us.
It was hard to pay attention to the other band.
I was getting nervous, really nervous, for Sandrine.
For Maurice, too, all of Solar Flare, but Sandrine mostly.
It made me think of Priya and Maddie, the way you could hold the people you love right in the center of your chest. Anxiety, well, okay, it wasn’t just a personal tormentor.
It was sometimes an expression of how deeply you cared, how essential someone was to you.
The crowd applauded, and there were a few whistles, and then there was Xavier, plugging mysterious cords into mysterious places. I had no idea about any of that. I could feel the anticipation in the crowd, the restlessness of waiting plus readiness, on the verge of too ready.
And then Maurice took his seat behind the drums, and Dre stood and walked toward the keyboard, as the audience clapped and yelled. But when Sandrine appeared, they went wild. Shrieks, whistles, a hooting yell of We love you, Sandrine!
She smiled. They quieted down. Maurice held his drumsticks on his lap. Dre took a step away from the keyboard. I took out my phone, got it ready. Sandrine stood in front of the microphone, then gripped it with one hand. She shut her eyes briefly.
I pressed the red record button.
“This is for you, Mars,” she said, and began to sing “Infinity.”
Her voice…Tears just flowed down my face.
I wasn’t sure I was even breathing. I wasn’t sure when exactly we linked arms, either, Aunt Gwen and me.
Her face was aglow as she watched her daughter, more history, more, hers and her sister’s, too, their babies, grown, gone, still here, her daughter holding this crowd in the palm of her hand as she sang to one beloved boy on the day he was born.
Your birthday, Mars. Your fucking eighteenth birthday, you cherished, loved light.
The audience was so still, but my eye was caught, a flash of recognition in my peripheral vision, and I saw him, Chester.
Chester! Chester was there, too? And wait, wait!
He was with Lily. Lily was at Neumos? Lily was at Neumos!
A giddiness rose in me, emotion and joy, Lily in that all-ages club, and then it rose again, because I saw Norty there, as well, up way too late.
Santiago was holding him up so he could see, and Ben, and Rainey, everyone—they were all in the front where Sandrine would spot them; they were all her tiny audience, the ones Sandrine could see and trust in, her loving support amidst the strangers.
Their faces were tipped up to Sandrine, and Chester’s face was streaming with tears, and Ben was wiping his eyes.
Wait—Bao and Amelia were also there, I saw, on Chester’s other side.
Mars’s friends from the Center for Wooden Boats.
And I saw you, of course. You were there, looking in my eyes as we danced.
You were there, and you were in your bed, and in the forest, and swimming in the lake, and at my house, and looking through your telescope, up toward the brightest star in the Ophiuchus constellation, the spot where Voyager was still speeding away from us at thirty-eight thousand miles per hour.
You were on the mountain. You’re home now, Sandrine was telling you.
The song ended. The crowd was silent for one brief moment, and then, well, there’s no other way to put it—they lost their shit. She had offered it, what had come from inside her, and they felt it, and were giving it back to her.
The astronomy meetup group, plus friends, were pushing their way through the crowd, and we were pushing our way to them.
“My God, she’s incredible!” Lily said, Chester said, Santiago said, everyone said.
We hugged, all of us; I even hugged Bao and Amelia, who I didn’t know very well.
Lily was wearing a T-shirt that said The Doors, which must have been some old rock band, and I could imagine her in front of her closet, deciding on it, you know, pushing aside her flannel and quick-dry hiking pants, because what did you wear to an all-ages club, and Ben was blowing his nose from crying, and Amelia’s mascara had gone a bit raccoon-eyes from the same.
It was beautiful, you know, so beautiful, because you hadn’t had a funeral, but maybe this was it.
A funeral and birthday, a celebration of a life.
Something had been released, not you, never you, but maybe a sorrow that had gotten lodged, and might have lodged permanently.
It shifted, ever so slightly. Sandrine had done it, sending her love out there like that.
The band moved on to their next song, “Seeing You, Seeing Me,” and then Maurice’s “Speed of Light,” and then “Radio Signals.” We danced our butts off, getting smooshed by the crowd around us, Ben dancing with Lily, Rainey dancing with Aunt Gwen, me dancing with Chester and then Santiago and Bao, and everyone dancing with everyone, a total Mars-love extravaganza, until they did their last number, “Greetings in Fifty-Five Languages.”
We straggled to the parking lot to wait for Sandrine and Maurice and Dre and Xavier to appear. When they exited out the stage door, we all cheered.
“I haven’t stayed out this late in thirty years,” Lily said. She didn’t look in the least bit tired. Her blue eyes were jazzed, alight.
“Me neither, in at least twenty,” Chester said.
“I’ve never been out this late,” Amelia said.
What was time, anyway, in all this love?
You were eighteen today, and would never be eighteen; you were forever years old.
Voyager was supposed to last five years, and it was still going on and on after fifty.
The Golden Record could survive for billions.
On this night, looking up there at those stars, looking right there, at the people around me, love could outlast them both, I was sure.
Going out in the world—yeah, it was just dangerous. There were punishments everywhere, the things that might sink you. But there were offerings everywhere, too, the things that might save you.
It was late, so late. I’d reached the point Amelia had, where I had never been up this late before. I was wired, electric. It was hard to come down from all the emotion, from being overcome with connection, to you, to each other.
I was so wired that I hadn’t even taken my coat off yet. I held my phone and turned down the volume so I could barely hear it, not wanting to wake my mother or father. I played the glug, and the rain, and Frank barking. I played, This is for you, Mars.
Sandrine had been so brave, with her art and what was inside her.
She gave you her love, in spite of her guilt, and questions, and grief.
I put my hand in my pocket, and my fingers detected something unfamiliar.
I pulled it out. It had been jammed in there with some old Kleenex and a crumpled candy wrapper, that sticker the guy in the marine supply shop had given me.
Seas the day!
I smiled like it was a sign. One from you, even. But maybe even more, it was connection doing its magical work again, a small kindness, an outreach, and you could never know necessarily what one of those might mean to someone, how rightly timed they could be.
Okay, then! Okay, I would do just that—seize the day, connect, be inspired by Sandrine and her art and her love. I would spread it, you know. I’d be part of the grand scheme of loving, and moving us all forward when it so often seemed impossible.
I would send you my love letter. In spite of my guilt and the awful mystery of not knowing, I would.
I opened my photo album of connection, and then I made a new profile on Snapshot.
Social media, God, how it scared me, the word social right there.
But I seized and was brave, and I called it My Voyager, a Golden Record for a golden human being we’d lost. It felt like leaping, because, all at once, I did it.
Post. The sounds, and the photos. You, me, us.
It didn’t matter if anyone saw it. It was my offering.
“This is for you, Mars,” I said, too.