It’s not that Natasha wants to let Daniel go; it’s that she has to. It isn’t possible for her to live in two worlds simultaneously, heart in one place, body in another. She lets go of Daniel to avoid being ripped apart.
For his part, Daniel finishes high school but declines Yale. He moves out of his parents’ house, works two jobs, and attends Hunter College part-time. He majors in English and writes small, sad poems. And even the ones that are not about her are still about her.
It’s not that Daniel wants to let Natasha go. He holds on for as long as he can. But he hears the strain in her voice across the distance. In her new accent, he hears the cadence of her slipping away from him.
More years pass. Natasha and Daniel enter the adult world of practicalities and responsibilities.
Natasha’s mother gets sick five years after their move. She dies before the sixth. A few months after the funeral, Natasha thinks about calling Daniel, but it has been far too long. She doesn’t trust her memory of him.
Peter, her brother, thrives in Jamaica. He makes friends and finally finds a place where he fits. Sometime in the future, long after his mom has died, he’ll fall in love with a Jamaican woman and marry her. They’ll have one daughter and he’ll name her Patricia Marley Kingsley.
Samuel Kingsley moves from Kingston to Montego Bay. He acts in a local community theater. After Patricia’s death, he finally understands that he chose correctly that day in the store.
Daniel’s mom and dad sell the store to an African American couple. They buy an apartment in South Korea and spend half the year there and the other half in New York City. Eventually they stop expecting their sons to be solely Korean. After all, they were born in America.
Charlie pulls his grades up and graduates summa cum laude from Harvard. After graduation, he barely ever speaks to any member of his family again. Daniel fills the void in his parents’ hearts in the ways that he’s able. He doesn’t miss Charlie very much at all.
Still more years pass, and Natasha no longer knows what that day in New York City means. She comes to believe that she imagined the magic of being with Daniel. When she thinks of that day, she’s certain she has romanticized it in the way of first loves.
One good thing did come from her time with Daniel. She looks for a passion and finds it in the study of physics. Some nights, in the soft, helpless moments before sleep comes, she recalls their conversation on the roof about love and dark matter. He said that love and dark matter were the same—the only thing that kept the universe from flying apart. Her heart speeds up every time she thinks of it. Then she smiles in the darkness and puts the memory up on a shelf in the place for old, sentimental, impossible things.
And even Daniel no longer knows what that day means, that day that once meant everything. He remembers all the little coincidences it took to get them to meet and fall in love. The religious conductor. Natasha communing with her music. The DEUS EX MACHINA jacket. The shoplifting ex-boyfriend. The errant BMW driver. The security guard smoking on the roof.
Of course, if Natasha could hear his memories, she would point out the fact that they didn’t end up together, and that the same things that went right also went wrong.
He remembers another moment: They’d just found each other again after their fight. She’d talked about the number of events that had to go exactly right to form their universe. She’d said falling in love couldn’t compete.
He’s always thought she was wrong about that.
Because everything looks like chaos up close. Daniel thinks it’s a matter of scale. If you pull back far enough and wait for long enough, then order emerges.
Maybe their universe is just taking longer to form.
IT’S BEEN TEN YEARS, but Irene’s never forgotten the moment—or the girl—that saved her life. She was working as a security guard at the USCIS building in New York City. One of the case officers—Lester Barnes—stopped by her station. He told her that a girl left a message on his voice mail for her. The girl had said thank you. Irene never knew what she was being thanked for, but the thank-you came just in time. Because at the end of the day, Irene had planned to commit suicide.
She’d written her suicide note at lunch. She’d mentally charted her route to the roof of her apartment building.
But for that thank-you.
The fact that someone saw her was the beginning.
That night she listened to the Nirvana album again. In Kurt Cobain’s voice, Irene heard a perfect and beautiful misery, a voice stretched so thin with loneliness and wanting that it should break. But his voice didn’t break, and there was a kind of joy in it too.
She thought about that girl making the effort to call and leave a message just for her. It shifted something inside Irene. Not enough to heal her, but enough to make her call a suicide prevention hotline. The hotline led to therapy. Therapy led to medication that saves her life every day.
Two years after that night, Irene quit her job at USCIS. She remembered that as a child she dreamt of being a flight attendant. Now her life is simple and happy, and she lives it on planes. And because she knows airplanes can be lonely places and because she knows how desperate loneliness can be, she pays extra attention to her passengers. She takes care of them with an earnestness that no other attendant does. She comforts those flying home alone for funerals, sadness seeping from every pore. She holds hands with the acrophobic and the agoraphobic. Irene thinks of herself as a guardian angel with metallic wings.
And so it is now that she’s making her final checks before takeoff, looking for passengers who are going to need a little extra help. The young man in 7A is writing in a little black notebook. He’s Asian, with short black hair and kind but serious eyes. He chews the top of his pen, thinks, writes, and then chews some more. Irene admires his unselfconsciousness. He acts like he’s alone in the world.