“Of course.” She kissed my dad’s cheek. “I’ll get coffee.”
I sat down in the chair she vacated. “Hey, Dad, I need to ask you something. It’s pretty important.”
His blue eyes—blue like one of mine—stared into the garden, seeing it but not taking it in.
“We’re going to move to California. The three of us. Emery, me, and you. Emery is going to go to UCLA and I’m going to Caltech. They gave me quite a nice package. She and I are leaving in a few days, and once we’re there, I’m going to find you a home close to us so we can see you all the time.”
He said nothing, didn’t react, and maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed like my words might have filtered in because he turned his head slightly to me.
“Einstein,” he whispered, the name mangled but clear.
I smiled, tears pricking my eyes. “That’s right. I’m going to take you to the Athenaeum at Caltech, where Einstein stayed in the 1930s. We’re going to see where he worked and gave lectures. How does that sound?”
Dad’s gaze went back to the garden, but I could have sworn he smiled at that.
I hadn’t told him that I’d seen my mother at the Wallace house allthose weeks ago. I didn’t know how much—if anything—he could understand, but I knew she wasn’t coming back. And part of what fueled my taking Dad to California was so he wouldn’t have to sit and wait for someone who pretended he’d never been part of her life. He deserved more than that, and maybe I did too.
Emery came back. “Everything okay?”
I nodded. “It’s just…a lot.”
“I know.”
She put her arms around me, and I let her love and light seep into me, comfort me. “I need a minute.”
“Of course.”
I went to the adjoining bathroom and set my glasses on the sink, then splashed cold water on my face. In the mirror’s reflection, under the harsh fluorescent lighting, the color differentials in my eyes were stark. The blue very blue, and the brown very brown. One from him, one from her. Mom was part of my life, my history, and I’d hated seeing that fact staring at me in the face every time I looked in a mirror.
Emery had once told me it was conflicting forces inside me, which I’d dismissed with my usual scientific disdain. But as usual, she was right. Emery’s explanations of life, the variability of it, added so much richness to my world. She was destiny, hope, and love to my science and skepticism. Without her generous heart, I’d have remained trapped behind my rigid walls of math and science, trying to keep myself safe from the unpredictability of life. I may have helped her escape her prison, but she unlocked the door to mine.
I stepped back into the room. Emery was in the chair beside my dad again, holding his hand and chatting with him about the light falling over the trees and giving names to the different colors of the sunset.
She had once jokingly said she’d solved the unified Theory of Everything, but I think she had. Like light, everyone was made up of both particles and waves. We thought ourselves to be individual pieces,bumping into each other, creating causes and effects in our own little spheres. But it was also true we belonged to a greater, infinite wave. Connected. Vital. The cosmos was so vast we couldn’t comprehend it, but each one of us was integral to the whole at the same time.
And that idea, more than anything else, made me feel like I wasn’t alone.
She gave that to me.
I gazed at Emery, thinking I had never loved anything more in my life.
She turned and smiled back at me. “I love you too.”
Epilogue
Emery, Five Years Later
The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.?
—Carl Sagan
“We made it,” I thought, smiling to myself. I tugged my silky robe tighter and sipped from my flute of champagne.
Not that I had any doubts, but our five-year plan had run its course, and now we were having a real wedding to replace the sad little ceremony we’d had in Providence. But we’d already been living in a real marriage for the past five years; there was no point in pretending this wasn’t forever.
Harper, my maid of honor, sat beside me in the elegant, sun-filled bridal suite at the Storrier Sterns Japanese Garden in Pasadena, not far from our little apartment. Xander had wanted the venue.
“Because it reminds me of your room in your house in Castle Hill, with the cherry blossom tree you painted with your own hand,” he’d said. “You made an oasis for yourself out of your artistry. I know the memories there weren’t worth keeping, but I think it’s important to honor that part of you, Emery. The part that never gave up.”
