Page 1 of Little Pieces of Light

Prologue

Xander, Age Ten

It was the Fourth of July, and my mother was walking out on us.

“I’m leaving you.”

She said it to my dad, but it was a plural you that included me too.

The words traveled from Mom’s mouth to my heart at the speed of sound ( v = 343 meters per second).

I thought it must have been faster than that given how hard they punched me in the chest. Faster than the speed of light, even.

Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity states that nothing in the universe travels faster than light ( c = 186,282 miles per second), but surely this was an exception—a bullet in my heart, shattering my insides.

My mind turned the chaotic pain into a manageable equation:

F—M(Pd) = e^∞ (D + C)

Whereas, after she had an affair with a Parisian diplomat ( Pd ), our family (F ) had now lost one mother ( M ), resulting in emotional devastation raised to an infinite power (e^∞) for both dad ( D ) and child ( C ).

In plain English, it meant my mother didn’t think her only son was worth sticking around for.

People had told me I’d inherited my genius from my father. But that morning, he was slow to catch on when I’d already done the math.

“Oh, come on, Sharon,” Dad said wearily. “Not this again. It’s just one week.”

Every summer, we’d drive the six hours from our little home in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to Dad’s family house in Castle Hill, Rhode Island.

Mom hated these trips. The Rhode Island house was too small, too dark, too full of Dad’s books and papers, and crammed with my grandparents’ antique furniture Dad inherited after they passed away.

Mom would always try to talk Dad out of these trips, then threaten to stay home, then finally give in and complain the entire time.

That morning, my father believed she was keeping to tradition, until he finally analyzed the situation: He and I were packed and ready to go, the Buick loaded with our luggage for the week.

A sleek black sedan idled next to said Buick.

Mom’s luggage was in the front entry. She was dressed up in a dark skirt suit, pink blouse, and heels with her makeup done.

Then there were all those hushed phone calls and late nights with her “colleague” at the State Department that past month, hanging over us like a black cloud.

Mom bent and touched her fingertips to my cheek. “It won’t be forever.”

I stared at her from behind my black, square-framed glasses.

What did that mean? She was coming back?

When? At some future date between today and forever?

It was a statement made of inconclusive data, which was worthless.

It was her walking out the door but leaving it cracked behind her, trapping me in a perpetual state of mystery as to when (or if) she’d ever walk back through it.

I sort of hated her for that.

Then she turned to Dad. “I can’t do this anymore.” Mom shouldered her big bag and took the handle of her rolling suitcase.

Whatever “this” was remained an unknown too; I wouldn’t ask, and my father couldn’t.

He stared at my mother’s retreating back as she stepped out the front door and slipped—long-legged and elegant—into the diplomat’s waiting sedan and drove away.

Then Dad turned to me with a fixed, shell-shocked smile.

“We’d better hit the road if we want to beat traffic.”

***

I hardly felt a minute of the six-hour drive to Castle Hill.

Philadelphia flew past me in the west, then New York City in the east, without notice.

Next came the green of Connecticut, which gave way to the endless bridges and shorelines of Rhode Island.

All those miles slipped out from under me as the shock of my mother’s abandonment jolted around my brain, animating thoughts like Frankenstein’s monster:

I did this.

It’s all my fault.

She doesn’t want me.

These were the facts as I saw them, since moms don’t leave—but mine did.

“Look, there.” Dad pointed out the windshield to a park straight ahead of us where several families were having a Fourth of July party. We’d arrived in Castle Hill. It was the first time he’d spoken in more than an hour. “There’re a bunch of kids. How about you go play with them for a while?”

“What…?” My heart that had been thudding with a dull, heavy clang, sped up. “ Now ? Aren’t we going to the house?”

“Sure, sure. But I need to go alone for a bit first.”

I stared at him. “You’re going to leave me here? Dad, I don’t know those kids. I can’t just walk up and invite myself…”

But he was already pulling the Buick into a parking spot.

He rested his pale, long-fingered hands on the top of the steering wheel, his gaze on the party in front of us but not really seeing it.

“I need to get some numbers on paper before I lose them. You understand that, right? If I don’t write the figures down, they might—whoop!

” He made a fluttering motion. “Fly straight out of my head, never to return.”

My father was a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This was supposed to be his summer vacation. But I was in the front seat where Mom should have been, so it wasn’t a vacation at all.

“What do you say, buddy?” Dad turned to me, almost pleading. “Looks like a fun party. I see some kids your age. Some girls, even. It’ll be good for you to practice your social skills in that department before Langdon.”

The Langdon School was a private academy for gifted boys that I’d be starting in the fall.

It was in Bethesda, a twenty-minute drive from our home and Dad’s work at the NIST. But I already knew I’d be taking the bus: With Mom gone, the chances that Dad would pick me up from school every afternoon were infinitesimally small.

I faced forward, swallowing hard. I recognized Brenton Park from past summers.

Parents sat at picnic tables while kids, ranging from toddlers to preteens, threw Frisbees, played tag, or ran along the banks of a small pond.

I knew there were fish in that pond—catfish, carp, and fathead minnows—and even a few turtles.

“We just got here,” I protested weakly. “We’ve been in the car for more than six hours. I want to go to the house and—”

“Oh, look. Those boys are playing ball.” Dad mustered a weak smile. “Doesn’t that look fun?”

It did not. How could anything be “fun” ever again?

“They don’t know me, Dad,” I said. “They’re not going to want to play with me.”

“You never know until you ask. You could make some new friends.”

I doubted that. I had no friends back home. Why would it be different here? I was “a major nerd” and “a freak from another planet.” Those would remain constants no matter how many state lines we crossed.

I chewed my bottom lip. Brenton Park was at least a six-mile walk from our house, and there was no bus. “When are you going to come back and get me?”

“I’ll be back soon. Before dusk,” Dad said. “A few hours, son. That’s all I ask.”

My father’s eyes—blue, like one of mine—were glassy. His lip quavered, reminding me of the neighbor kids back home when they scraped their knees. Dad didn’t need to work; he needed to cry about Mom. Fine for him. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction, even if she never knew it.

I looked straight ahead, jaw clenched. “You’ll come and get me at dusk? You won’t forget?”

“I won’t forget.”

“Okay.” I climbed out of the car. Dad gave me a little wave, like he was sorry but that he couldn’t help it, and drove away.

I put the odds of his coming back on time at sixty-to-one against. It wasn’t that he was a bad parent; his mind just didn’t work like everyone else’s.

Mine didn’t either, but where I was sharp, organized, and remembered everything, Dad was scattered.

Nervous. He could calculate hundreds of probabilities for quantum interactions but couldn’t remember to close the garage door.

It’s part of why Mom left, I knew. I’d heard the fighting.

“If your head wasn’t screwed on, Russell, it’d roll right off!”

She didn’t say it in a funny way but in an angry way. Over this last year, she’d been angry a lot. I guessed she’d done her own calculations and concluded it wasn’t worth it to stay.

It won’t be forever.

My mind wouldn’t leave her cryptic words alone, turning them over and over, round and round, like a Rubik’s Cube but with missing color squares. An equation I couldn’t solve, and there was nothing worse than that.

Dusk was coming fast—light’s longer wavelengths dominated the sky in shades of red and orange as the sun sank toward the ocean. I figured I had less than an hour to kill until I’d know for sure if Dad forgot me.

Standing alone in the parking lot, I observed the party from a safe distance.

In the clearing by the pond, kids were laughing, chasing each other, and throwing bread at the ducks and minnows.

From the grill, the humid air trapped the scents of barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs.

The grown-up men wore khaki pants and polos (like the uniform I’d wear at Langdon) and the women were in blouses and jeans with designer sandals. Richies of Castle Hill.

Castle Hill was south of Newport on a peninsula shaped like a shoe, where the Atlantic Ocean poured into Narragansett Bay. It was filled with Richies who lived in big houses on the water. They all had luxury cars and yachts, and they all belonged to the Castle Hill Country Club.

Not us.

At the top of the shoe, the land jutted up, then curved back down, like an elbow.

The elbow was called the Bend, which was code for “poor.” Dad’s little house was on the Bend.

He may have been a genius—a little famous even, for his work in particle physics and electromagnetic spectroscopy—but Mom was always complaining he didn’t publish enough papers in the right journals, so we were always on the “edge of ruin.”