Chapter Thirteen

June 18, 1896

Arrived in Cambridge! I’ve become so used to New York that Boston seems small and quaint, though its academic air is unrivaled. I’ve been here less than a day and have already heard a number of academic complaints, chief among them grumbling about the city’s lack of interest in implementing Dr. Pickering’s lamp screens, which would prevent light from polluting the skies. Hopefully I have not arrived in Cambridge only to have it become too difficult to see the stars.

I’ve taken a room in a boardinghouse filled with several other women who work at the observatory, and today I met my new colleagues. The group is run by Mrs. Fleming, a no-nonsense Scottish woman who has been here for over a decade. She began her career as the Pickerings’ housemaid, a job she took after being abandoned, while enceinte, by her husband. Mrs. Pickering noticed her talent and recommended her to Dr. Pickering, who brought her to work as a computer. Mrs. Fleming spoke at the Chicago World’s Fair when I was a sophomore, about hiring female assistants in astronomy, and she discovered the Horsehead Nebula in Orion’s Belt. (Though she rarely gets credited.) She’s also published a catalogue of the stars based on the photos the Drapers donated (Dr. Pickering gets credited there).

Most of the other women are older than me. There are a few graduates from the women’s colleges, the youngest six years my senior, Miss Henrietta Swan Leavitt. She will turn 28 on the Fourth of July, which is festive. She is very musical, and studied at Oberlin Conservatory before coming to Cambridge, though she is losing her hearing slowly. Still, she loves to sing. She is a quiet, gentle soul, which I appreciate, though I do love a rowdy one as well.

There is also Miss Annie Jump Cannon, 32, from Wellesley. She is deaf, and strikes me as a little sad—one of the other girls told me her mother died two years ago. Before starting as Dr. Pickering’s assistant this year, she taught physics at Wellesley, and already knows how to handle the telescopes, of which I admit I am jealous. (Mostly only the men are allowed to handle to telescopes.) I like her immensely. I feel very lucky to be assisting her at work: she is classifying the spectra of the brightest stars in the southern section of the photographed sky.

The group of computers makes about forty, half men and half women. I am loath to report such facts to Mama in case she suggests I marry one of them, but at least if I did, there would be intelligent conversation to be had in my marriage.

January 17, 1897

Miss Maury’s work, the “Spectra of Bright Stars,” on the northern stars, was published in the Observatory’s Annals, and for the first time a woman’s name was ABOVE any of the men! It is so exciting, I fear I might burst into tears. Sometimes it feels like we work so hard for so little credit, and for once, we have gotten it.

Andrea wrote about using a magnifying glass to study glass plates and call out measurements, and her life, playing board games and drinking hot cocoa with friends. She documented the people she met, and the obstacles she faced (often her mother and sister). She wrote about the gardens maintained by Pickering’s wife and the gatherings of astronomers held in the Pickerings’ mansion. In 1898, Andrea—along with the whole astronomical community—was fascinated by the discovery of a comet. (Comets: So hot at the turn of the twentieth century.) Two separate astronomers noticed it when developing their photography plates, but since Gustav Witt of Berlin filed before Auguste Charlois of Nice, it became known as Witt’s planet. I feel some sympathy for Charlois, Andrea wrote in August. How must it feel to independently discover something, to feel such a rush, only to have someone else win the credit?

November 4, 1898

A new discovery—Witt’s planet first came close to Earth four years ago and no one even noticed! Chandler calculated the orbit, and now of course he wants glass plates from us to corroborate his theory.

How MADDENING we had proof of a comet and we didn’t even know! It’s enough to make me want to go through all our plates and see if we have missed any.

November 12, 1898

Witt’s planet is returning in 1900–01. Almost too excited to write such news! This means we’ll be able to measure the distance between the earth and the sun. Of course Halley closed it down to 90 to 100 million miles in the 1700s, but now we’ll be able to get a more exact measurement. It’s to be a huge undertaking of the international astronomical community—observatories in Africa, Europe, and the Americas will be involved. We’re the only one in the United States.

With this knowledge, we’ll triangulate the distance between Earth and the sun and find the solar parallax. What an undertaking. What a discovery.

She wrote about how in 1899, forty-two-year-old Mrs. Fleming finally received a title from Harvard: Curator of Astronomical Photographs. She wrote of Pickering discovering a new moon orbiting Saturn and of traveling to Georgia in 1900 to see a total solar eclipse (it sounded like a party). In 1901, she celebrated the publication of Annie Cannon’s new classification system (and mentioned, briefly, the assassination of the president; his vice president, who Andrea liked for distributing ice chips during a horrible heat wave, was sworn in—Teddy Roosevelt).

Every summer she visited her parents and her sister’s growing brood on Nantucket. I knew from the first time I’d come across her name in the newspaper clipping that in 1906, Andrea Darrel and Annie Cannon would teach astronomy classes on the island. This batch of diaries didn’t make it there; they ended in 1903. After I’d read the last entry, I finally fell asleep.

In the morning, it took me a moment to recover from dreams of blazing comets and telescopes and women traipsing across Boston in long dresses. Then yesterday came back: the dunk tank and fireworks and not kissing Ethan Barbanel but coming home instead.

The sky outside showed a perfect square of blue, so I rolled out of bed and resolved to act like normal, as though I couldn’t care less how Ethan’s night had gone with pigtailed Kylie. Still, a devilish part of me decided it was time to try out a scandalously cut white bikini I’d brought, which should be perfect against my new golden tan.

I knocked on Ethan’s door. “Good morning!” I chirped when he answered, then winced, because I never chirped.

Ethan grinned, a slow unrolling of a smile, his towel already slung over his shoulder. “Morning.”

Don’t ask him about last night, I told myself as we left the house. I was far too proud to let on how bothered I was by the idea of him hooking up with someone else. “I’ve been reading these old diaries about a woman from Nantucket,” I said. “They triangulated the distance between the sun and the earth, did you know that? I didn’t really realize how much science people did a hundred years ago. Or how many women were involved.”

“That’s cool,” Ethan said. “This is for your job?”

“Kind of. I’m also curious now. And, I don’t know—you’re doing a speech on the Gibson comet guy, right? I feel like she might have potential for something like that. How’s the speech going, by the way? You said it’s about his non-comet stuff? What’d he do?”

We picked our way through the gardens, passing tall pines speckled with sunlight, roses and junipers, their perfume thick in the air. It was the kind of summer day out of a dream, the sun hot on our skin, air moist. “Your dad has a chapter on this guy, Nicholas Heck, right?” Ethan said. “He was a geophysicist for the US Coast Survey, and he perfected wire-dragging, which Gibson helped him on a bit.”

“Wire-dragging?”

“It mapped rocks and wrecks beneath the ocean’s surface—to make sure your own boat didn’t crash into them. They’d string a wire between two ships and weigh it down to a certain depth, and when the wire encountered an obstruction, they could use the wires to map its location.” He grinned at me. “More triangulation. Anyway, Gibson did some wire-dragging here on local shipwrecks, along with some other hydrography work for the Coast Survey.”

We reached the staircase to the beach, falling silent as we descended, the wind whipping away any words we attempted. On the beach, I let my cover-up fall off my shoulders and puddle at my feet. I glanced over and saw Ethan’s eyes widen as he took in the white bikini.

“New bathing suit?” he asked casually.

“Like it?”

His gaze flicked up to mine, and a smile spread, as blindingly bright as the sun across the water. “Yes, Jordan,” he said. “Yes, I like it.”

I had to turn away to hide the strength of my smile.

With the sun blazing today, the water felt cold against our baked skin, and I shivered at each sensitive point. Usually, I made it in before Ethan, but this time he ran before me, submerging in a clean, quick dive. He stayed low, only his head above the water. “Scared?” he asked.

I took another step forward, the sea level rising against my rib cage. “I’ll get in when I get in.”

“Red junglefowl,” he taunted. “Infant human being.”

I sluiced my arm along the top of the water, sending a wave in his direction.

He dove under and grabbed my legs, pulling me off balance.

“Noo!” My cry ended quickly as I dropped beneath the waves. I sputtered to the surface, wiping salt water out of my eyes. “Ethan!”

He grinned. “Wanted to make sure you were awake.”

If he wanted war, I’d give him war. I tried to kick him, but the water slowed me, so I settled for throwing my body at his, tackling him underwater. I sank too, but it was worth it.

We were a tangle of wet limbs and false innocence, as though the act of wrestling absolved us from agency, as though it wasn’t our intention for our slick arms to rub against each other, for our hands to glance off each other’s waists and legs.

“Uncle,” I finally cried, “Mercy,” but more because I didn’t think I could keep myself from grabbing his face and pulling it to mine if we went on like this. We caught our breath, floating under the morning sun, the water lapping in my ears and muffling the world into a cocoon of sky and sea and thoughts of Ethan Barbanel.

We unfurled our towels and dropped onto them. I traced a circle in the sand with my forefinger, and then the question burst out of me, much as I tried to suppress it. “How was the rest of the party?”

“Good.”

“Did you stay long?”

He gave me an amused look. “Not very.”

Great, I’d showed my hand. “Hmph,” I said, lying down on my towel. I could see him smiling out of the corner of my eye.

He let it go, thank god. “What’s next in Operation Get Your Dad and Your Boss to Fall in Love?”

“That’s a terrible name,” I said. “The acronym would be like…”

We slowly worked it out: OGYDYBFL, which I pronounced “oh-guy-dye-biffle.” “I can’t even say it.”

“O-gy-dy-bi-fel,” Ethan said carefully, and then we were saying it, stumbling over the syllables and laughing.

“I was thinking,” I said, “isn’t your grandmother doing one of those garden tours?”

Nantucket had a garden festival, which sounded like it dropped out of a quaint village on a British TV show. One weekend every July, the island celebrated its gardens and gardeners. Talks were given by horticulturalists, and—more importantly, in my mind—tours were given of gardens, including the one at Golden Doors.

“Oh, yeah.” Ethan looked surprised, like I’d surfaced something previously buried in his brain. “You gonna invite them both?”

“Seems like a good next step. Right now I’m not trying to create a romantic vibe or anything, I just want them in the same space so they can see if they like each other. I read this article about how friendships are most easily formed by repeated, unplanned occurrences, and I figure romance is the same.”

His lips twitched. “But this isn’t unplanned.”

“But they think it is.”

“Manipulative.”

“Everyone’s manipulative. At least I’m honest about it.”

“With me.”

I arched my brows. “Yeah, well, you can’t have everything.”

“Hm.”

For a moment we lay on our towels, listening to the surf. I heard the opening of a cap, the distinctive squeeze of a bottle, then Ethan: “Sunscreen my back?”

My eyes whipped open. “Are you kidding me? Speak of manipulative!”

He gave me an innocent look. “My hands don’t reach.”

“You’ve managed okay so far.”

He pulled a sad moue. “I got burned the other day, and the sun’s really bright right now.”

“Then put your shirt back on.”

He held out the yellow bottle pleadingly. “Skin cancer is serious business.”

“Again! Shirt back on!” My gaze dropped to the gleaming expanse of his golden skin, as though I’d ever not been excruciatingly aware of it, before managing to focus on the glittering ocean.

He spoke in a falsely sympathetic tone. “What’s wrong?”

He was baiting me, and it worked. Glaring, I grabbed the sunscreen from his hand and squirted the lotion into mine. “Turn around.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

I smoothed the lotion onto his back, moving my hands in slow circles across his shoulder blades and down the length of his spine. “You’re a menace.”

“You love it,” he teased. He craned his neck to see me. “What about you? You probably washed away your first round.”

“I actually didn’t put on a first round.”

“Then you definitely need more.” He pivoted so he faced me.

“Sounds like you’re looking for an excuse.”

“For what?” he asked, eyes wide. “I just want to help you, too, escape skin cancer.”

“Hmph,” I said, but I turned, because I also rather desperately wanted an excuse for his hands to be on my body.

He massaged the sunscreen into my back. My head dropped forward.

He stopped.

“Wait, no,” I cried. “You can’t start a massage and then stop.”

He laughed, low in his throat. “I thought I was putting sunscreen on you. Not giving you a massage.”

“Pleeease.” Sometimes I had strength of mind, but not when massages were involved. I wiggled my shoulders and looked back hopefully.

“Fine.” He sounded more amused than anything else. “Since you asked so nicely.”

I dropped my chin down to my chest. Victory. Luxury. “Thank you.”

His hands roamed over my back, pressing deep in the small of it, thumbs drawing along my spine. One hand came up to massage the knots at the base of my neck, and I let out an involuntary groan.

“Lie down,” he said softly, and I knew it was a bad idea, a very bad idea. But the responsible corner of my brain was far away and not very loud and so I ignored it and lay on my stomach. Ethan’s knees settled on either side of me, and he leaned into the massage. I felt like I was melting into the sand.

And I knew it was just a massage. It was supposed to relax me. But the longer it went, the less relaxed I was. Instead, a hunger grew deep inside, a craving I was unable to ignore.

I twisted over onto my back.

Ethan hovered above me for a moment before I took hold of his shoulder and tugged him down. Then there was no space between us, just his lips on mine and sun-warmed skin on skin, with barely any clothing between us, only the thin strips of my bikini and the fabric of his swim trunks. It was easy to get lost in him, lost in sensation and warmth and touch. And I wanted to be lost because it felt so wonderfully good. It was intoxicating. I didn’t want it to end.

Which meant it wouldn’t end, if one of us didn’t do something. I put my hands on his shoulders. “Wait.”

He stilled. “Okay.”

Easy to say wait; harder to mean it when my body very much wanted to keep going. But I knew what happened afterward, I knew I felt shitty and sad and small. “We should stop.”

Ethan inhaled deeply, then rolled off me. He sat up, draping his arms over his knees. “Okay.”

I was afraid if we kept staring at each other with heavy-lidded eyes, I’d jump him again. “I’m gonna go for another swim.”

“Good idea.”

We both ran toward the water and plunged ourselves almost desperately in, Ethan screaming like a small child at the cold. The cold was probably good, distracting and draining us of our heat and energy. By the time we returned to the beach, I felt almost normal again.

Almost.

As we gathered our things, we glanced at each other once or twice, and I could feel the unspoken words bubbling between us. What are we doing? Should we talk about this?

But neither of us said anything.

Instead, we climbed the steep, treacherous stairs to the top of the bluff. “So that was fun,” Ethan said as we wound our way through the garden. From the leafy tree branches, a choir of songbirds serenaded us, while sunlight wicked the remaining water from our skin.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was fun.”

We reached the house and climbed in silence to our hall. “See you later,” Ethan said from his doorway.

“See you,” I said from mine. I watched him shut his door.

In the bathroom, I sank into the tub, the showerhead raining hot water down. What the hell was I doing? I’d been so proud of myself the night before for choosing the right thing, for not grabbing hold of Ethan when Kylie approached him. Yet here I’d made out with Ethan Barbanel a third time. I’d initiated it. I’d poured myself gleefully down a slippery slope leading to a cliff.

The problem was—I liked Ethan.

I wanted to drop my walls; I wanted to let Ethan in, to say full steam ahead, to believe this time it would work. Even if all signs pointed to the contrary. I even thought it might be worth it. So what if I fell for him and had my heart shattered into a million pieces? I’d done it before and survived.

But I couldn’t watch my dad go through my messy sorrow again, looking helpless and as heartbroken as me. And I definitely couldn’t make him watch me be heartbroken over his protégé. What if, god forbid, he felt caught between us? Nantucket made him happy. Ethan made him proud.

So this couldn’t happen. Even if a large part of me wanted it to, it couldn’t.

I just had to keep reminding myself of that.

Two days later, I stepped onto Golden Doors’ lawn to find it transformed into a botanical wonderland. Flowers were arranged in colorful bouquets: green myrtle and white gardenias and pink peonies and blue hydrangeas. Helen Barbanel stood at one end, directing two people to move vases around to the desired perfection.

I’d rarely interacted with Ethan’s grandmother this summer. I saw her plenty—she presided over dinners and Shabbats and the occasional birthday, and every afternoon she and her husband sat on the deck and drank two fingers of amber liquor. But I mostly stayed out of the way of the Barbanel adults, except for Ethan’s mom, who seemed determined to have genuine conversations about my day at least three times a week.

Now, however, Mrs. Barbanel and I were essentially alone together. I’d arrived early for the tour she’d be giving of her gardens, partially because I’d told Cora to come directly here instead of to the public meeting spot downtown. But I’d beat both her and my dad and now had to face the immaculately groomed consequences.

Mrs. Barbanel regarded me like I might regard a sea urchin—briefly interesting, but none too intelligent. “Ethan tells me you’re playing matchmaker.”

“He does?” I tried not to audibly gulp. “Uh…”

She raised her brows. “?‘Uh’ is not a sentence.”

In my defense, she hadn’t asked a question, though I bet she thought she had. “I thought my dad and my boss might like each other.”

Mrs. Barbanel looked thoughtful. “The young lady who studies astrophysics?”

“Right.”

“I assume they’ll both be here today.”

I nodded.

“Hm. And what about you? And beaux?” She frowned. “Or ladyfriends? My grandchildren tell me everyone likes everyone these days.”

Oh, wow, okay, not sure I wanted to explain being queer to the Barbanel matriarch. “Uh, no, none of the above. Just—me.”

“What about Ethan?”

What had I done to deserve this conversation? “Er—Ethan?”

“He seems to like you.”

Hoo-boy. How did I tell someone’s grandmother their grandson liked to hook up with me, not date me?

Actually, easy solution, I didn’t have to talk about this. “Ethan and I are just friends.”

Mrs. Barbanel gave me a skeptical look. “Why?”

“Why…are we just friends?”

“Young lady,” Mrs. Barbanel said, “you should not spend an entire conversation repeating what the other person said.”

Wow, love this talk for me.It seemed truly unfair old people could be rude and young people could do nothing in return. “I don’t think Ethan and I see each other that way.”

“My dear.” Helen Barbanel sounded pitying. “You stare after him like a moonstruck calf.”

Cool!

As though our conversation had summoned him, Ethan bounded onto the lawn. “Grandma! Jordan!” He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and gave me a hard side hug, knuckling my head as though I was a Little League player. I wanted to shove him away and also press my lips to his. “What’s up?”

Mrs. Barbanel raised her thread-thin brows at me.

I smiled weakly. “Let’s get ready for this garden tour, huh?”

“I’m pumped,” Ethan said. “So ready. Grandma, can’t wait to learn about flowers.”

“I’m so glad after eighteen years you deign to come on a tour,” Mrs. Barbanel said, but even she succumbed in the face of Ethan’s good humor, a smile twitching at her lips.

Dad and Cora soon arrived, followed by the official tour of thirty people, both locals and tourists. A professional facilitated the tour, though Mrs. Barbanel did most of the talking, leading the group though the carefully tended groves and gardens created by generations of the women in her husband’s family. By dint of not knowing anyone else, Cora and Dad gravitated together, though first I had to summon Ethan away so Dad couldn’t use him as a crutch. “Pst,” I said to get his attention while Mrs. Barbanel explained about beach grasses and other native plants she’d introduced to help fight dune erosion. When he glanced at me, I flapped my hand. “Psst!”

“You would make a terrible spy,” Ethan said after finally coming over to my side.

“How can you say that? I would make an excellent spy.” I gestured at my outfit, a black shirtdress. “I always blend with the shadows.”

“A good spy blends with the crowd, not the shadows. If you really wanted to succeed at espionage, you’d be wearing Nantucket red.”

This was not a horrible point. “True, but only if I was a daytime spy, not if I was a nighttime stealthy spy.”

He glanced pointedly at the garden party. “Are you a nighttime stealthy spy?”

“No. But I’m not trying to be a spy, I’m trying to be—” I belatedly remembered the origin of this conversation. “Are you trying to say I’m not subtle?”

Ethan ruffled my hair and grinned. “There we go.”

I pulled my head away and scowled, smoothing my hair back into place. “I am too subtle. You’re oblivious. You were gonna spend the entire day hanging out with those two.”

Helen Barbanel shot us a look, and I realized we weren’t behaving like the captive audience she expected for her tour. I elbowed Ethan. “Shh.”

“You shh,” he whispered back.

For the final leg of the tour, Mrs. Barbanel led us to the small rose garden encircled by a tall hedge. We moved to the back of the crowd, and Ethan whispered in my ear. “Your boss is smiling.”

“I’m a genius,” I whispered back.

The rose garden had a gazebo in the center, and everyone wanted a picture as the tour ended. Cora glanced at it wistfully. “Dad, take a picture of Cora.”

“Oh no, I’m fine,” she protested, but I’d seen her Instagram. I knew her aesthetic.

“Dad,” I insisted.

He turned his palms up. “I don’t mind.”

Smiling a little sheepishly, Cora went up the gazebo steps. At work, she was usually no-nonsense and when she joked, her humor was faintly dry. But now she laughed brightly, loosening up as she struck a few poses. And maybe she was just grinning for the camera, but her easy smile was still directed at my father. Dad grinned too.

Afterward, everyone returned to the lawn for a small selection of tiny quiches and miniature pound cakes, the cream fresh-whipped and the strawberries glistening with beads of juice. Mrs. Barbanel had also made a few treats specifically from her garden: rose-hip tea and a cake soaked in rose syrup.

Dad beckoned me and Ethan to join him at the table where he and Cora had taken a seat. He was, unfortunately, talking around a mouthful of food, but with great animation, pulling up images on his phone. “They’re amazing. Did you see the latest ones?”

“Yeah.” Cora nodded enthusiastically. “The third one? Wild.”

“You kids see this?” Dad turned his phone toward me and Ethan. Red-orange wisps—the color of candle flames—spread across the black of space, pinned down by a smattering of orange-white pinpoints.

“What are we looking at?” Ethan asked.

“The Large Magellanic Cloud. It’s a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way,” Cora said.

“New pics from the James Webb telescope,” Dad said, proud as though he’d taken them himself.

The James Webb Space Telescope was NASA’s flagship infrared observatory. As the Harvard Computers had studied glass plates, modern astrophysicists could use images from the telescope to observe the formation and evolution of stars, planets, and galaxies.

Dad and Cora were talking up a storm about the images. Dad seemed thrilled to have an expert to talk to. Usually he was the passionate amateur expounding to his audience, but now he drank up everything Cora had to say.

“We have a framed photograph of the Pillars of Creation on our living room wall,” I told Ethan, watching Cora out of the corner of my eye. She had a postcard of the Hubble photo pinned to one of her corkboards. It showed interstellar gas and dust in the process of forming stars.

“You do?” she said.

The tips of Dad’s ears reddened. “Kind of dorky, I know, but I think it’s beautiful.”

“No, I love it,” Cora said. “I have it in my office.”

Ethan kicked me under the table. I kicked him back, happily.

Everything was going well until Ethan’s parents wandered into the backyard. I hadn’t seen his father much over the summer; he popped on and off the island, mostly over the weekends. Now, the two came straight over, introducing themselves to Cora and making Ethan’s back straighten.

“Just here for the weekend,” Dan Barbanel said cheerfully when Dad asked. “But I’ll be back for the conference and the comet party in August, of course.”

Ethan’s head whipped toward his parents. “You’re coming to the conference?”

“Of course.” His mom smiled. “We wouldn’t miss your talk.”

Ethan blinked several times, looking horrified.

“Wonderful,” Dad said.

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.