After the adults dispersed, I turned to Ethan. “You okay?”
“Sure.” He looked dazed. “Why not. I love the added pressure of my parents coming to my talk.”
“At least it means they want to support you.”
“Or they’re so baffled by the idea of me doing anything intellectual they need to see it to believe it.”
I gave him a little nudge with my shoulder. “You’re gonna kill it.”
He still looked stressed.
“Wanna do some yoga?” I offered, my go-to stress killer.
He perked up. “Is that code?”
“It’s code for ‘doing some yoga.’ Come on, there’s some extra yoga mats in one of the closets.”
“Fine,” Ethan said with a sigh, following me upstairs.
For the next hour, Ethan mangled sun salutations and downward dog, fell over during tree pose and tickled me until I lost my balance. We laughed so hard my stomach ached. We stayed there until the white ghost of moon rose high in the blue sky, the smell of roses still clinging to our skin from the afternoon, and I wished for a moment that we could stay there forever.
Fourteen
Dad came over the next day to cook dinner. While Dad cooked at home—soups and stews and tofu bakes—I knew he didn’t like impinging on the Barbanels’ hospitality to use their kitchen, so it meant a lot that he’d come to cook dinner with me. We made gazpacho, enough for us and the half dozen fastest Barbanels (truly, a force of nature and of consumption), and a peach and arugula side salad.
“Come on,” Dad said after we put everything away. “I have a surprise for you.”
“A surprise?” I echoed. “What, here?”
“Follow me.”
I did, confused, and also a little surprised he knew where he was going. After half the summer here, Golden Doors felt very distinctly mine. I recognized the route he was taking through the large, rambling house and was surprised he knew to take it.
“Just another minute,” he said. “It should be right—aha!”
Dad opened the door to the roof walk. “How did you know about this?” I asked. It was nine fifteen, an hour past sunset.
“I asked,” Dad said, pausing as I did.
Because I had stopped in astonishment. Usually, the roof walk was just me and my yoga mat (and sometimes Ethan). Now a telescope stood before us, its squat body perched on a tripod, pointing hungrily toward the sky.
“It’s supposed to have sharp, high-contrast views,” Dad said happily. He moved closer, adjusting an arm and a knob.
I stared at the telescope, baffled. “Is this—did you get this?”
“The Barbanels did, for their comet-viewing party at the end of the summer,” Dad said. “It just arrived. We won’t be able to see the comet by naked eye until September, so this way all the guests will be able to take turns looking at it.”
“Cool.” I remembered a few times, lying in starry fields, when Dad had produced a pair of binoculars for viewing the night sky. How fast the night spun when I moved even the smallest bit, like I was falling through the stars. Now I realized it’d probably been the unsteadiness of my child-hand, the impatience of wanting to find whatever Dad pointed out. I hadn’t used binoculars in years, and I didn’t think I’d ever looked through a telescope.
“Since you were interested in Maria Mitchell, I thought we’d try a little bit of what she did,” Dad said.
He wanted to do for me what he liked to do himself, and it warmed me to my toes. “Like how you try to re-create nineteenth-century marine mapping. This would be nineteenth-century—sky mapping?”
“Sky sweeping,” Dad said. “Which is pretty similar. In Maria Mitchell’s day, astronomers used to sweep the skies daily, looking for anything out of the ordinary.”
“Like what?”
“Like comets,” he said. “She’d look at segments of the sky every night and note what was in each, and if she saw anything different, she knew it was out of place. I thought we’d give it a try.”
