Dr. Trowbridge was already there, a woman in her sixties with short salt-and-pepper hair, thick-framed glasses, and a cozy-looking lavender sweater.
“Hi,” I said. Panic immediately seized me. Who did I think I was, talking to actual adults?
“Hi,” she said, then immediately shouted at someone off-screen, “Put the spatula down.” She turned back. “Sorry, I have my grandchildren with me today.”
“Oh, no worries. Thanks so much for talking to us. I’m Jordan, this is Ethan, and we’re researching Andrea Darrel—your great-grandmother, right?”
“Yeah,” she said vaguely, attention off-screen again. She snapped it forward. “What about her?”
“Do you know much about her?”
“Mm. She was an astronomer.”
“Yes. And. Um.” I took a deep breath. “Did you know she was connected to Frederick Gibson?”
“I didn’t know they were engaged,” she said. “I knew they were involved for a while, yes.”
Better out with it all at once. “We think she discovered thecomet. The one returning later this summer. Known as Gibson’s comet.”
For a moment, the woman stared at us. Her dark eyes pierced across screens and oceans into my own. Then she turned. “Samir! Get over here!”
A man’s torso showed up in the screen: a buttoned-down cardigan with a mug held in front of his belly. “Yes, dear?”
“Sit down. These two think Grammy’s mom found Gibson’s comet.”
The man lowered into the frame. He was the woman’s age, with matching thick-rimmed glasses and frizzy hair haloing his bald spot. “Do they?”
The woman turned back to us. “And why do you think so?”
“Well,” I said, a little nervously. I didn’t quite understand the energy between the couple, their air of almost amused curiosity. “I was reading her old diaries, and she talks a lot about wanting to contribute to astronomy. And then she fell for Frederick Gibson.”
A clatter sounded on the other end of the call, and a disembodied voice floated through. “I’m here! Sorry I’m late, Mom, the T was—oh sorry, I didn’t realize you were on a call.”
Dr. Trowbridge looked up. “Come in, dear. Dad and I are talking to some students who think Andrea Darrel discovered Gibson’s comet.”
“Really?” the woman said with relish before coming on-screen, squeezing her face in above her parents. She looked around Cora’s age, and a friendly smile tweaked her lips. “How come?”
“Um.” I cleared my throat.
“I’m sorry,” Ethan said, leaning forward. “Are you guys—not surprised?”
“It’d be very strange if we were.” Dr. Trowbridge’s smile invited us to join her in the joke. “We’ve been celebrating her discovery since I was a baby.”
***
This is what they told us.
Andrea Darrel had always told her family about her discovery. She’d told her husband before they married; he’d believed her. When the comet came back almost forty years later, on its first rotation since Andrea identified it, their children had been grown and with their own kids; Andrea Darrel and her husband had thrown a giant party in the yard of their Cambridge home. Dr. Trowbridge sent me a few sepia-toned pictures, pointing out her own mother, a baby with a cowlick.
Andrea Darrel beamed in the photos. In the late 1940s, in her seventies, her face and body had filled out. But there was still something youthful about her, the headband in her hair, the way she’d been caught laughing.
“But why haven’t you said anything?” I cried when Dr. Trowbridge told us. “Didn’t you want her to get credit?”
“Said anything? To who? It’s just a family story,” she said. “We don’t have proof.”
“Do you, though?” her daughter pressed. “You have proof?”
“We have some things.” I walked them through what we’d discovered: the diaries, the timing, the bulletin with the same numbers as in Andrea’s diary, the engagement party, the letter from Frederick to his brother. “Was she bitter?” I asked. “Never getting credit for her discovery?”
