Page 5 of Little Pieces of Light

Xander, Age Seventeen

Present Day

“Hey, Dad, we’re here,” I said, pulling the Buick onto the driveway that led to the little house. What was once smooth cement was now bursting at the seams with weeds. I grimaced as our car—already overburdened by the U-Haul container attached to the roof—hit a pothole.

But neither my words nor the jolt shook my dad out of his thoughts.

Or stupor. Or wherever he’d gone—deeper into the intricate, twisting tunnels of his own mind.

The entire drive up from Maryland, he’d stared out the passenger window, muttering to himself.

Figures, mostly, for an equation that had no end.

He’s not getting better.

I faced forward, observing the house through the grimy, insect-splattered windshield. It looked smaller and more run-down than it had seven years ago. The area was pretty, at least.

Our house was tucked into a corner of forest along the bend in the land that created the Bend.

The Bend was an entire neighborhood, but you wouldn’t know it.

The forest, the road, the silence…it felt as if no one were around for miles.

Which was good. There was no one to see how the house was falling apart.

Our only house now. The last stop.

I glanced over at Dad, who had yet to realize the car was no longer moving and sighed.

Mom’s leaving wasn’t a Big Bang that created a brand-new reality. Instead, it had opened a wormhole to an altered version of the same universe. The same reality on the surface, saturated with all the same painful memories. But if you dug just a little deeper, you’d find an alien landscape.

Dad and I’d become reluctant explorers, discovering little artifacts of Mom’s absence every day.

Here is the first breakfast she’s not here to make.

Here is my first day at Langdon School with no one to kiss my cheek in the morning.

Here is an empty house after the bus drops me off in the afternoon.

Here is Dad, alone in his bedroom, alone in his study, alone at the dinner table while I cleaned up remnants of TV dinners or takeout. Alone, alone, alone.

Mom said it wouldn’t be forever, but it’d been seven years. My childhood was all but finished. So was Dad’s career. She wasn’t going to come back, and if she did, it’d be too late.

Dad was still waiting.

He talked frequently about himself and Mom in their early days. “We were in grad school when I first laid eyes on her,” he’d tell me, his eyes distant. “I fell helplessly in love with her in that first moment, but she left me anyway.”

I knew exactly how he felt.

Seven years after Mom left, things fell apart.

Without her salary, Dad had to work full time with no breaks.

We were no longer able to spend summers in Rhode Island, and all that sadness had taken its toll.

I’d witnessed the slow erosion of his mind long before a pair of his supervisors from the NIST paid a visit a few weeks ago.

“He’s had a breakdown, son,” one of the suits had told me in our house in Gaithersburg. “He’s increasingly forgetful. Long stretches of blankness…” He cleared his throat. “It’s necessary that he retire and begin collecting his pension.”

The other suit had been more direct. “We think he might benefit from a therapeutic setting.”

I read between the lines.

“Don’t let them put me away,” Dad had pleaded that night. “I’m onto something. Something big, and they’re jealous. They’ve always been jealous.”

“They want to help, Dad.”

“I don’t need help.” He offered a small, heartbreaking chuckle. “Don’t put your old man out to pasture just yet. I’m not that far gone. Quite the contrary. My mind has never been sharper. Never have I felt this clarity.” He clutched my shoulders. “I’m close, Xander. I’m so close.”

Dad insisted he was on the brink of accomplishing what every physicist on the planet was striving to accomplish: to reconcile quantum theory with general relativity and arrive at a unified Theory of Everything.

“I just need to work alone, without all the noise and interference. We could go back to Rhode Island!” Dad cried, hope flaring in his eyes.

“You can go to school in Castle Hill and be a regular kid for a change. Go to a normal high school and do all the things normal kids do. Trust me, Xander, you want that. Stay safe a little while longer, because once you get into the field, they’ll try to tear you apart. ”

I wanted to be in the field, to keep my brain occupied with practical facts instead of impractical feelings. But Dad needed to be in the Rhode Island house more.

It was decided I’d do a senior year of high school at Castle Hill Academy.

A gap year, in which my father would either recover or fall into the cracks of his own mind.

He’d spend his days working on his equations and I’d play pretend at the high school.

CHA had a robust program of academics, STEM classes, arts, and “elite” sports: gymnastics, lacrosse, water polo, and row.

They were even magnanimous enough to allow poor Bend kids to attend.

I already had three degrees from the University of Maryland; the last thing I needed—or wanted—was more high school, but the rowing team was a selling point. I’d been on the Langdon crew, and the physical exertion saved me from drowning in my mother’s abandonment and all those empty mailboxes.

The downside to this grand plan was the high probability that Emery Wallace would also be attending the Academy. Unless she’d moved away. That might explain her silence, but I doubted it.

For years, I’d written to Emery. A humiliating and pathetic number of letters, considering that every single one went unanswered.

Like my mother, it seemed Emery had changed her mind about wanting to know me.

Two years ago, I’d sent the final letter.

A confession straight from the heart that left no mystery as to how I felt about her.

No answer.

I’d given up on whatever we might have been. But even so…

Even so, sitting in the drive of our ramshackle house seven years later, my heart thudded at the idea of seeing Emery again. How beautiful she must be now that she’d grown up…

I cleared my mind that wanted to populate with images of Emery.

Years of pouring my thoughts and feelings into letters she never bothered to answer had carved the wound in my heart even deeper.

A canyon now, a canyon that echoed with emptiness because there was zero probability I’d ever let anyone in again.

“Come on, Dad,” I said, gently nudging him back to reality. “We’re home.”

***

Dad rushed into the living room like a little kid on Christmas morning. The house was too small for a proper office, so years ago he’d made a workstation out of an old rollaway desk in one corner of the living room, now almost entirely buried under books and papers.

“Yesss,” he sighed, sinking happily into the creaky chair. “I’ll finally be able to do some real work.”

I let the duffel bags—mine and his—drop to the shag carpet and glanced around.

The house was 1,500 square feet of clutter, only now all that clutter was covered in seven years’ worth of dust and cobwebs and sprinkled with rat droppings.

The front door faced a set of stairs that went up one floor, a ratty maroon couch and chipped wooden coffee table were positioned in front of a stone fireplace, and under the front window sat an old piano.

Dad had been pretty good back in the day, and I’d taken lessons.

We used to play duets—the one thing that Mom seemed to enjoy—but I couldn’t imagine either of us playing again.

Every inch of it—except for my loft—was cluttered with mess. Not filth, just stuff. Too much stuff, and now I could see it through my mother’s eyes. A claustrophobia-inducing wreck of a house presided over by a wreck of a man and his bitter son.

No wonder she left.

I dismissed the excuse. She had her reasons—maybe a hundred of them, big and small, but all of them had been more important than me.

When the first day of school arrived two weeks later, I rode my bike—it was less embarrassing than the Buick—into the student parking lot of Castle Hill Academy.

True to its name, the school sat like an ultramodern castle on a hill—all white planes, sharp angles, and glass.

The lot was filled with Mercedes, Teslas, and BMWs with a few junkers sprinkled in. Other Bend kids.

I didn’t see any of my people, but plenty of Richies, sitting on hoods or gathered in groups, talking and laughing.

Everyone was dressed for the humidity: the girls in short skirts or cut-off shorts and tight, revealing tops.

The boys wore jeans that didn’t have holes in them like mine did.

Their shirts were designer label polos, while mine was a thinning T-shirt bearing a faded image of a Radiohead—my favorite band—logo.

I locked my bike and shouldered my backpack. I felt the stares as I walked past a clutch of students leaning against a Range Rover. Its back window was soaped with the words Bow down to your SENIORS!!!

“What’s up, Bender?” someone called.

I rolled my eyes behind my glasses and kept walking. “Bender.” How original, not that “Richies” was the paragon of creativity. I wondered—not for the first time—why I was subjecting myself to this experiment.

Tell the truth, a voice whispered. You’re here for her.

I couldn’t help it. I had a masochistic urge to see Emery Wallace, to reopen every single scar on my heart by confirming that she was alive and well and had chosen to ignore me.

As I crossed the green expanse of grass that fronted the enormous school, every blond head of hair, every girlish laugh, drew my eye and made my heart jump. I’d nearly made it across the lawn, wondering with equal parts dismay and relief, if Emery had moved away.

And then there she was.

Statues of lions—the school mascot—sat regally on short pillars on either side of a white staircase that led up to the school’s front doors.

Emery Wallace was perched on one of the pillars, next to a lion’s paw, surrounded by a group of Richies.

She swung her legs like she had when she was a little girl, beside me on our rock. But she was no longer a little girl.

God help me…

Her legs were tanned and muscled like a dancer’s or gymnast’s. She wore fashionable, chunky white sneakers, ankle socks, and short shorts. So short, they revealed the flawless expanse of her thighs. A tight-fitting top strained to contain the… evidence of her maturity.

I dragged my thoughts away from primal, objectifying observations and studied her face.

Emery’s blue-green eyes were framed by long, dark lashes under a fringe of bangs.

Thick, golden hair poured down her back in loose curls.

My knees literally weakened. In seven years, she’d gone from beautiful to breathtaking.

Any second, she’d see me. I wanted the light of her recognition and dreaded it. A rejection in the flesh instead of in the silence of unanswered letters.

I was still yards away when a tall, blond hulk of a guy hooked an arm around her waist. He effortlessly lifted her off the pillar and spun her around. When he set her on her feet, I calculated Emery’s height to be hardly over five feet. Her boyfriend, by comparison, was a giant.

Then recognition hit.

Tucker.

The bully who’d thrown water balloons at us with his friend while our backs were turned. What more did I need to know about Emery if this guy was now her boyfriend?

Tucker bent to kiss her, and his hand went straight to her ass, grabbing a handful of flesh through her shorts. She broke the kiss and shoved at his chest, laughing. But when he turned away, her smile collapsed like a wave function once it’s been observed.

Observed by me and no one else.

But maybe I was only imagining— hoping for —her annoyance, because in the next instant, she was smiling again. Haughty. Imperious. No trace of the warmth I’d known. None of her innate, luminous magic that had erased my loneliness for a few, fleeting moments.

Because there was no such thing as magic. Only facts. Logic. Science.

And these were the observable facts: Emery Wallace was queen of the school, surrounded by adoring drones, with a Prom King of a boyfriend, while I was a poor, pathetic Bend kid who’d clung to a single afternoon long after she’d let it go.

I ducked my head and trudged toward the stairs.

I was nearly past Emery’s group when she brushed a lock of hair from her eyes and her gaze found me.

I felt it in my chest, where it struck me like an electric jolt.

Emery’s eyes widened in shock, and I could have sworn she lit up, her mouth wanting to smile…

But it must’ve been my imagination, because her full lips formed a grim line—almost a sneer—and she looked away.

It was no more than I expected yet it hurt. We’d shared only a short, golden collection of minutes seven years ago, and it still fucking hurt.