Chapter 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.”

“Think we’ll find a comet?”

He laughed. “If we’re lucky.”

We did not find a comet; we didn’t even sweep the skies for very long, only long enough to get a taste of the slow pace Maria Mitchell and other early astronomers must have lived. I imagined coming out in the evenings to the roof walk of her family’s home in the center of Nantucket, studying each quadrant of the sky and noting each familiar star. Organizing the entire dome of the heavens into an orderly space, and getting to know each one.

Waiting for a comet.

“Do you think Gibson did this? Or would he have calculated the orbit without seeing it?” I asked Dad. From reading Andrea Darrel’s diaries and researching the Harvard Computers, I’d learned some comets had been identified from photographic plates. A huge part of discovering comets also included calculating their trajectories; while all comets were parabolic, comets like Gibson’s—and Halley’s, and any other returning comets—were elliptical, periodically bringing them back through the inner solar system.

“He might have. It’s a naked-eye comet, so he would have seen it at some point—but he caught it earlier than most people, either by photography or by telescope, as the first discoverer.”

We carried the telescope back inside, to a little room across the hall from the roof walk where it would be safe from the elements, then headed downstairs. Dad slid his sandals back over his socks at the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow for dinner.”

“Pizza?”

Dad rolled his eyes, but only because it was his job to pretend he wasn’t as excited about pizza as I was. “Why am I not surprised?” He smiled. “Yes, I think I can handle pizza.”

The next day, I told Cora about the telescope and the sky sweeping over lunch. “Cool,” she said. “Have you been to the observatory yet?”

I hadn’t, though I knew two existed: the downtown Vestal Street Observatory, where the Maria Mitchell offices were, and the Loines Observatory a bit outside of town. “I keep meaning to go to one of the Open Nights but I haven’t quite made it.”

“I could take you over some time,” Cora said. “Give you a tour.”

“Really?” My eyes widened. “I’d love to.”

“Ask your dad if he wants to come,” Cora said, eminently casual. “Sounds like he’d also enjoy it.”

“Sure.” I tried to match her tone while inwardly wanting to scream in excitement. “Sounds great.”

A few days later, Dad and Ethan and I headed to the Loines Observatory at nine o’clock. I’d enlisted Ethan because if there was even the slightest chance Cora wanted to hang around my dad, I would make that happen. With Ethan around, I’d have an excuse to leave Dad and Cora to their own devices.

“We could play romantic music, too,” Ethan had teased, waving his phone back and forth like at a concert. “Serenade them.”

“You mock. But wait until you see how effective my methods are.”

The observatory was a few blocks north of town, across from a graveyard. I peered into the cemetery as the three of us walked along the sidewalk. One of the things I’d learned from night excursions was Nantucket did not invest in streetlamps as regularly as I’d like. Maybe rich people drove everywhere? Or maybe I was used to pollution warmly lighting the night sky?

“I think that’s it.” Dad looked from his phone to a steep driveway hidden in the trees across the street. A chain blocked the entrance, but at the top we could make out two domes peeking out from the forest.

“Very welcoming,” I said.

We jogged across the street and up the drive. It ended in a small area with two round buildings covered in cedar shingles, their domed roofs metallic. A large deck connected the two, and more endless woods surrounded them.

“Hey, guys.” Cora popped out of one of the buildings, its door propped open. “You found it!”

Inside, a massive telescope took up the majority of the space. It towered above us, pointed toward an open panel of sky.

“This is amazing.” Dad walked a loop around the telescope. “Thanks for letting us in.”

“For sure.” Cora patted the base of the telescope fondly. “This is a twenty-four-inch Ritchey-Chrétian. There’s Maria Mitchell’s historic seven-point-five-inch Alvan Clark refractor, too—it’s used for public stargazing.”

“What’s a refractor?” Ethan asked, hands in his pockets. I’d noticed that about him—he never pretended he knew something if he didn’t. He’d always ask for more info, unafraid—as I was—of looking foolish.

“It’s a type of telescope,” she said. “Popular in the eighteen hundreds. This one’s a reflecting telescope, we got it in 2006. Reflecting means it uses mirrors.”

“A Cassegrain reflector, right?” Dad peered closer.

Cora grinned. “That’s right.”

“Ethan, I want some photos on the deck outside,” I said, despite it being pitch black. To Dad and Cora, I said, “We’ll be right back.”

Ethan heaved a sigh. “My work is never done.”

It was halfway through July; even late at night, the summer warmth lay like a blanket over us. We could hear the hum of cicadas, the low hoot of an owl. Above us the waning moon shone brightly in a cloudless sky. We’d be lucky with the Arborids this year; it’d be a new moon in two weeks, when they peaked.

“Now what?” Ethan asked. “Do you actually want me to take pictures?”

“Sure.” I hopped up on the railing of the wooden deck. Ethan snapped a photo, then brought it over for me to see.

“I wonder if Gibson looked through the older telescope,” Ethan mused, hopping up on the railing next to me. “He took an astronomy class here, so if the telescope was around then, he probably did.”

I swiveled toward him. “Are you serious?”

Ethan blinked. “Yeah, why?”

“When did he take an astronomy class?”

“I think…1906? Seven? Eight?”

“Annie Cannon taught those classes.”

“Who?”

“Andrea Darrel’s—the astronomer I’m researching—boss. Harvard sent Cannon over to help launch the Maria Mitchell Association. Do you think—what if Andrea Darrel and Frederick Gibson met?”

“Maybe they did. I can’t imagine the astronomy community was that big.”

“How old do you think he would have been?”

“Midthirties?”

In 1906, Andrea would have been thirty-three. “Interesting.”

“Yeah.” Ethan looked distracted. He ran his forefinger over the lace strap of my black romper. “This is also interesting. What is this?”

“It’s a romper.” I tried to ignore the flush of desire running through me. “I refuse to believe you don’t know what a romper is.”

“Whatever it is, it’s wicked sexy.”

It was, in fact, a very sexy romper. “Thanks.”

He traced a line along the netting as the waist. “Bet you could get an interesting tan here.”

Wouldn’t you like to see?I almost replied, which didn’t even make sense as a tease because Ethan saw me three-quarters naked almost every day at the beach. But the sensation of his finger running back and forth made it harder for me to think, and I couldn’t manage any other words, so we sat locked in place, my breath coming harder and faster.

“Kids!” Dad called. “Come look!”

Ethan gave me a rueful look. “I guess they’re not making out.”

Neither were we, which was good. Right.

We stepped back inside the domed building, where Dad and Cora stood close to the eyepiece of the telescope. Dad gestured at it. “Come on, we want to show you something.”

“What’s it pointed at?” I asked, but Dad grinned and didn’t answer, just gestured me closer while Cora made an adjustment. I stepped into place so my field of vision was filled with first darkness, then space.

At first, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing—not a star, nor a planet, which I’d been expecting. No, this was distinctly human in make, modules connected by tubes, two long wings flaring out. It flashed across the field so quickly I barely understood what I was seeing.

“Was that the space station?” I felt a little stunned. People had done that, had created something capable of soaring through space. There were people up there, living and breathing and going about their lives, and we could look directly at them from thousands of miles away.

Cora readjusted the telescope. “Fast, right? It orbits Earth every ninety minutes.” She motioned Ethan up.

“Pretty fucking cool,” he murmured, and neither of the adults said anything about language, just smiled.

“Here.” Cora tweaked the view again. “Now look.”

I looked back through the eyepiece and sucked in a breath.

Now came a very different kind of awe, the kind created by witnessing something in nature so much larger than yourself. Jupiter. Dusty brown, the color of sand both pale and dark, striations circling the planet. A whole planet, something I could see simply by the effects of curved glass and mirrors. It made my breath shorten, even as my chest felt overwhelmed by air.

I could have stared at it forever, but I moved aside so Ethan could look, and Dad. Then Cora adjusted the telescope again so we could see Saturn, an even more foreign planet with its great rings.

“It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?” Dad said. There was a soft yearning in his voice, an earnestness that came when he talked about the vastness of space or history. Like he was an explorer who knew he would never reach the other side of his journey.

I leaned my shoulder into his. “It really is.”

An hour later, Ethan and I dropped Dad off at his apartment, then returned to Golden Doors. We parked in Ethan’s usual spot, but instead of heading up the porch stairs, I tilted my gaze toward the stars, toward all those far-off balls of gas and plasma. Energy whirled inside me, a galaxy of motion, like I too hurtled through space on an unending mission. I turned to Ethan. “Wanna go swimming?”

Ethan looked at me for a long moment, then a smile burst out of him. “Heck yeah, I do.”

We went down to the beach. The surf was rough and loud, waves taller and more forceful than usual. I drank it in, the way the night was unending here, the way we were two minuscule specks in a world of blue, the way anyone in any time could have stood on an empty shore and been overwhelmed by the crash of the waves and the diamond sprinkle of stars.

“Can you recognize the planets?” Ethan leaned back his head.

“Sometimes,” I said. “There’s not so many during summer nights, though. More in the mornings, and more in the winter. But I know some constellations. There’s the Tree, see? Those three bright stars in a row, with the fan of faint stars at the top? That’s what the Arborids are named after, because it looks like the meteors are coming from the Arbor constellation.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.” He looked out at the rippling black water, at the pinpricks of light hanging above. “I’ve always thought the sea and sky are similar. They’re both so wild. Dark and vast and cold and amazing.” He nodded into the distance. “When I’m at sea, I can…I don’t know, feel how connected the two of them are.”

I nodded. “Cora told me when NASA looks for life on other worlds, they talk to marine scientists. Since the likeliest place for life would be a water world, and who best knows how to look for life in water? And Dad told me one of the space shuttles was named after a famous British explorer’s ship.”

“The Challenger?”

“Oh! The Endeavour, actually. James Cook?”

He laughed. “I guess there’s a few. The Challenger did the first global marine research expedition.”

“I like it.” My gaze drifted to the ocean, the white-edged waves, the streak of moonlight. “The synchronicity of the two. Even the articles I’ve been reading use nautical references for space. ‘The cosmic sea’ and so on.”

“They go together,” Ethan said. “And even though they’re wildly different, they’re also wildly alike.” Ethan gazed at the sky, the water, then me. “Jordan…”

“Yes?”

“Can I kiss you?”

He’d never asked before; asking made it feel more serious, intentional rather than accidental. A contract we’d agreed to. I couldn’t tell myself, Whoops, just slipped up, overcome by hormonal longing. This made it 100 percent my fault. I’d looked at the choppy waters, said fuck it, and dived in.

But oh, I wanted to kiss him. Desire slid over me like a silken web, trailing shivers over my shoulder and down my back. Like a whisper at the ear, a kiss on the neck. Ethan looked at me with his sure, strong gaze, not hiding how much he wanted this, his desire and intent clear.

And I had never been very good at saying no to things I wanted. “Yes.”

He slid his hand up my neck, his fingers finding their way through my hair, tugging my head gently back as he touched his lips to mine. I pushed myself closer, my hands over his shoulders, rising on tiptoe, holding him tight.

Oh no.

I had fallen head over heels for Ethan Barbanel.