“That’s what your parents wanted,” Tony says, his voice gentle. “In their will. They said they wanted the house and yoga studio sold and the money saved for you two in a small trust. College tuition, whatever you need. Fifty-fifty.”

I wonder if they had protections in place for me, before Mae. Or if they only thought about it after. Sometimes it’s hard, knowing that they picked her. That they chose Mae to be their daughter. I was the oops baby, the mistake. I wasn’t wanted at first. Probably a worst-nightmare scenario. The way Mom tells it, they saw Mae and Dad said, “That’s her. That’s our daughter.” I once overheard Mom telling Aunt Nora that getting Mae was one of the best decisions she’d ever made, that it would have been lonely if it were “just Hannah.”

That’s me: Just Hannah.

I shake my head a little because everything in me is getting bad, really dark, and I can’t go there, not unless I can pop this pill in my mouth without anyone noticing.

An acorn comes to me, the sort of one Yoko would write, not like my one-liners:

Get a cardboard box

Open it

Stare at it until your heart stops

I curl into a fetal position, my eyes on the wall. Mae starts rubbing my back again. Nora and Tony keep talking: “… Thanksgiving at the Cape, ice-skating on Boston Common, Red Sox games…”

And I think: I want a wave to swallow me up, too.

10

Mae

ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit

Earth Date: 22 September

Earth Time (PST): 13:45

Nobody likes a sad astronaut.

Most people didn’t know that when Neil Armstrong went up to the moon, he was still grieving the death of his little kid. It didn’t fit the hopeful narrative, so they cut it out.

Before today, the day of my parents’ funeral, I would have said for certain that death is the end of a human’s existence, at least as this life-form. I know that this wanting there to be an afterlife is a cultural response to grief: It’s anthropology—not physics. And yet.

I can feel them.

Almost as if they were standing right behind me.

How would I be able to feel them if they were really gone?

Maybe it’s what Stephen Hawking was talking about in his last paper, on memory and black holes. About the possibility that the “hairs” of light surrounding black holes can actually encode information before things pass into the black hole. Before, we always assumed that whatever falls into a black hole would be swallowed up, all data erased so that it’s nothing more than pure energy. But if it’s true that these beams of light are actually encoding the information of the matter that passes through, saving the data for all time, the same thing might happen when we die.

Death is the ultimate black hole.