Out in the field, the telescope is in the same spot where I left it and so is the tent. I should probably bring both of them inside in case it rains. But I can’t.
I keep thinking she’s going to come back. She’s going to traipse up the hill with her black bag and her white wig. Ginger will bark until I let her out, and she’ll dash under the willows and across the creek to bury her fat head under Priya’s hand.
So I have to leave it there, trained on the night sky, deep into the constellation Libra where a small planet near Gliese 581c orbits its sun twenty light-years from Earth.
I close my eyes and put myself back in Priya’s room, locking eyes with her and listening to her mom talk to Emily.
Astrocytoma. Dr. Shah said she’d had the tumors since she was a girl. Surgery. Radiation. Hard to remove.
Back at Dad’s apartment, while he dozed after pizza and Star Trek, I opened his tablet and threw some words into a search engine. Astrocytoma means brain tumor. Called “astro” because they’re shaped like stars.
I scanned the page for signs and symptoms and found:
Poor hand-eye coordination.
I recalled how she cried when she accidentally grabbed Ginger’s tail instead of petting her.
Difficulty standing or walking.
“I am not used to your gravity,” Priya had said when her knees collapsed under her.
Memory lapses.
Her notebook. Red means stop, my name is Priya, and on and on in her “data collection” book. She’d forgotten how to swim. She didn’t know what a dog was. She sometimes didn’t recognize me. She forgot her own parents.
I’d assumed the struggles she had to find words were due to a language barrier, but that was just one more symptom of her deteriorating condition.
Another medical website told me that tumors often press on different parts of the brain, causing reactions that no one can predict. Not everything is mapped out.
Does reading another person’s mind count as an unpredictable reaction? We were connected, Priya and me. She knew what I was thinking, what I wanted, what I was feeling.
She got me.
But the field . . .
I feel a sudden anger burning inside me, claiming space in my chest, sucking all the air out of my lungs. “Why be an alien? Why not just be a girl who likes space?”
But that’s not what it was about.
Like my dad, Priya found something to believe in in the field. She found solace in the knowledge that we are not alone in the Universe.
Astrocytoma. I roll the word around in my head. For a girl who loves space, who loves science, it was fate perhaps that she had an entire constellation in her body and soul.
A girl who doesn’t want to die . . . maybe she finds a way to not be a girl.
Ginger, patient at my heels, whines as if she knows Priya’s really gone. I reach a hand down to pet her and she responds with a nuzzle for more.
With my eye to the telescope, I search the skies. Is that a shooting star? The tail of a comet? Or the flare from the back of a rocket? I imagine Priya on her ship back to her home planet, whooshing through the wormhole that somehow reminds her of eating a pizza.
A grin spreads across my face.
Stars scatter the sky like jewels and for a moment, I think I really can see Priya’s home planet. It’s the one that shines the brightest, glows the longest.
I’m not ready to go back to the house, to my normal life. Not yet. I want to feel the Universe around me, surround me, blanket me.
I tap the screen on my phone to get the flashlight app, but in the low light I can’t see what I’m touching and manage to open the camera roll instead.
There’s a video on it that I didn’t take.
The hair on the back of my neck is electrified and my heart beats faster. Just like the night I met Priya in this very field. The night leaves swirled around her and her laugh teased the air. She was the one who made this field magical.
It’s Priya on my phone.
“Hello, Matthew,” she says to the camera. “Thank you for the use of your phone.”
She took my cell that night, swiped it from my kitchen while I slept.
“I have no need to call anyone, of course. They are on their way very soon. As I speak these words, they are on their way to me. They want me back and I want to be back.”
I touch the screen, pausing it for a moment so I can study her face. Did I miss something in the words she said, the way she said them?
I press play.
“Please take care of your dog. I sense that she needs much more affection than you give her.”
I glance over at Ginger. That’s not hard to figure out.
“Thank you for taking care of this field, Matthew. I sense that you will miss me when I’m gone but you should not. I have collected all the data that I need.” Her gaze flits away from the camera and I hear her sigh before she looks back at the camera—at me—again. “I have enjoyed my time on Earth.”
The video ends abruptly. Just fifteen seconds long. I play it again and again and again. It doesn’t get any longer. It doesn’t say anything more than that.
I feel a fresh wave of tears wash over me. I thought I was done at the hospital. Or on the bus ride home from Philly. Or in my mom’s arms earlier tonight.
My time on Earth. Our brief blip of time. A sliver of incandescence in the vast, dark field of space.
When my dad and Carol left, I flippantly told my mom that the ones left behind need to get on with their lives. How can we? How can I?
I don’t know what the future holds. For me. For my mom. For my dad. Priya taught me in just a few days that even if you can’t see something, you can believe in it. Whether that’s life on another planet, faith in a god we can’t see, or simply love, it doesn’t need to be proved to exist in order for your heart to know that it does.
We are part of this Universe; we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us.
—Neil deGrasse Tyson