And now there’s Pearl.
I turn to the dedication: For my girls: May you always find light in the darkness.
My eyes fall back to the picture of Ben and me. Maybe that’s what we all are for each other. Little lamps, lighting the way home.
I hold the book against my chest and curl up on Ben’s neatly made bed, with its plaid comforter and very fluffy pillows that smell like him. I open to a part Ben has highlighted and put exclamation signs beside:
My colleague, physicist Carlo Rovelli, says, we live in “a world of happenings, not of things,” likening his observations to the happenings of the sixties, when people would gather on a whim to do something crazy and unexpected—for no particular reason other than that they could and they wanted to. Though quantum mechanics is a very specific set of rules that provides an excellent description of the behavior of subatomic particles, I like to think of particle theory and quantum mechanics as the hippies of physics. The work scientists are doing in these realms show us how dynamic and ever-shifting the universe is, how it’s constantly engaged in such happenings. This is high-vibe science, where everything is in relationship, jumping from one interaction to the next, connecting, over and over. We could say that the very essence of the universe is connection: this particle with that particle, this atom with that atom. Particles move in swarms, like birds or bees, together, unpredictable, but together. In relationship. Continually. It is restless and searching and expanding and curious. The universe is so damn curious! The particles go here, there, then here again. Like my daughters, searching for shells on the beach.
My dad is saying that the universe doesn’t want us to be alone. It won’t let us be alone. Any of us.
I wish I could ask him why. Why did he fall out of love with Mom? Why did he do what he did? Maybe it’s just particle theory. Love jumping from one person to the next. He loved Mom, then he loved Rebecca. Without malice or intent. Love exists in the quantum realm. Predictably unpredictable.
I read and the darkness gathers, the sun goes down. My eyes grow heavy.
I wake to the sound of a key in the lock, the soft thud of a heavy backpack hitting the floor. A sharp intake of breath.
The door shuts, and then there is the click of the desk lamp, the mattress sagging, a warm hand on my shoulder.
I open my eyes. Ben’s wearing the thick, black-rimmed glasses he only puts on late at night, and his hair is a mess, and all I want to do is run my hands through it. He has the most awestruck expression on his face, looking at me. Like me being here is a scientific discovery.
“You’re going to die,” I blurt out.
He blinks. “Yes…”
I sit up. “I think … I think I’m okay with that.”
River’s right: Nothing—no one—is for keeps. Not Mom or Dad or Nah. Not Ben. Not even me.
“Someday you will leave me,” I say. “Or I will leave you. In this current collection of atoms or sooner. And it will hurt. But it will hurt more to not have this—to have you—while I can. I want to be here. I want to be now.”
Ben doesn’t say anything. He just holds out his arms and everything in me sags in relief, and then I’m in his lap and he’s kissing my head, his arms tight around me.
I let myself fall into him, for him. Every single one of us is in free fall all the time—me, Ben, Earth itself, the stars. We fall and fall, without end, together.
That’s just physics. The falling. The always falling. Nothing ever lands, not really.
I look up at him, and I fall a little faster, and harder. I touch the tip of my nose against his. I’m okay with having nowhere to land, as long as I get to keep falling with him.
I take one last leap on my own:
“I love you.”
Did you know that the sun isn’t actually 149.6 million kilometers from Earth? It’s smack-dab inside Benjamin Tamura.
“I know,” he says, grinning. This boy is too smart for his own good.
“I have to explain some things I realized, but it might sound very weird because I was having an existential psychotic break in Boston Common earlier today. Which, by the way, was Yuri Gagarin’s fault. I haven’t had time to fully process it because I wanted to make soup for you.”
He laughs. “I am in so much trouble.”
I wrap my arms around his neck. “Me, too.”
“You made me soup?”
“It’s on your desk. Hannah helped. Italian wedding.”
“My favorite.”
“I know.”
Ben rests his forehead against mine. “Tell me what Yuri Gagarin did this time.”
“I thought it was personal,” I say, straightening up. “That the universe somehow had it in for me. Taking away everyone I love. I was trying to outsmart it. I thought if I could stay two steps ahead, I would have more control over the outcomes. But trying to have control was just my version of being a hungry ghost. Hannah wanted pills, I wanted control, but it’s the same thing—we’ve both been trying to outsmart the universe. But you can’t! Mostly because the universe doesn’t have a hit list. It’s just doing its thing, and it’s not personal—or, it is because I’m a part of it. Creation, destruction. Over and over. Me, you, my parents, Nah. My dad was a human, and now he’s the ocean. BUT HE’S THE SAME THING HE WAS BEFORE. He was always the ocean, and the ocean was always him. JUST IN DIFFERENT FORMS. I can’t fight that process. I can’t be mad at the wave for being a wave, because I realized I am the wave. We share the same cosmic encoding.” I stare at him, one final thing clicking into place. “I WAS NEVER AN ORPHAN BECAUSE WE ARE ALL COSMICALLY RELATED.”
Ben blinks. “Yuri Gagarin told you all of that.”
“He looked and looked. But I don’t think he looked hard enough.”
“What was he looking for?”
“God.”
Ben watches me for a long moment.
“Um.” He tucks my hair behind my ear. “Are you—and I will love you no matter what your answer is—but are you saying you believe in God now? Because it sounds like that’s what—”
“Keep up, geophysicist! I’m saying I found MYSELF.”
He just looks at me. Honestly, sometimes I question the level of instruction at MIT.
“Because I AM GOD. YOU ARE GOD. EVERYTHING IS GOD! Quintessence!”
Ben’s face clears, and my wonderful atheist boy looks very relieved.
I think I feel just like Chuck Yeager did in 1947 when he became the fastest man alive by being the first pilot to break the sound barrier, flying faster than the speed of sound at level flight. In The Right Stuff, the flying aces are always talking about chasing a demon in the sky, like the sound barrier itself was a demon—and I think I just did the same. I beat that hungry ghost by a mile.
“Just so you know,” he says, “that quote of Yuri’s has been disputed.”
“Really?”
He nods, very serious, his lips twitching. “Apparently, he was a believer.”
I stare at him. “Now he’s fucking with my serenity EVEN MORE.”
Ben is trying hard not to laugh, I can tell. “Does that change your conclusions?”
“Of course not. Gagarin is irrelevant to the logic of my argument, which is sound.”