Lost and Wanted(92)

I couldn’t look back, because I was turning, but I could tell from the silence in the backseat that Jack wasn’t buying it. I had an inspiration. “If you want, we could make up a safety word.”

Jack was interested immediately. “What’s that?”

“It’s something only the parent and the kid know. If someone other than the parent is supposed to pick up the kid, the kid can say, ‘Do you know the safety word?’ And if the person knows it, then the kid knows it’s okay to go with them.”

“Because the parent told them the safety word?”

“Right. It’s like a code.”

Jack didn’t hesitate. “I want to do it.”

“Okay,” I said. “You choose. It can be any word.”

“?‘Jack,’?” Jack said.

“Maybe something harder to guess than that.”

“?‘Ninja’?” he suggested.

“?‘Ninja’ is fine.”

“Okay!”

“Then we’re all set.”

    Jack was quiet for a few minutes. I thought I’d handled the situation well, and that he was just processing the conversation. When we stopped at the light, I glanced back at him: he was staring out the window, holding his backpack on his lap. He was thinking hard, but he waited until we were moving again, perhaps intentionally, to ask his next question: “Do donors ever kidnap kids?”

“No, never.”

“Why not?”

“Our donor doesn’t have any information about us. He couldn’t find us, even if he wanted to.”

I pulled up in front of Miles’s family’s large, Colonial house in Somerville. Miles’s three siblings would be there in addition to the guests, and you could hear the noise inside already. Another child was getting out of the car in front of us.

“There’s Graham,” Jack said excitedly.

“Jack,” I said. “Do you have any more questions before we go in?”

He hesitated. I could see his desire for information warring with his eagerness to get to the party.

“Do the kids who get kidnapped ever want to be kidnapped?” His eyes darted to mine, then away again. “I mean the ones whose other parent kidnaps them. Who isn’t a stranger.”

There was an expression on his face I’d never seen before, a more mature kind of empathy than he’d so far demonstrated. I realized that he was concerned about my feelings.

The other boy bounded up the front walk, where a bunch of red and gold balloons were tied to the porch railing. He was followed more slowly by his father, a balding man in his forties, encumbered by a sleeping bag and a wrapped gift. Jack watched them expectantly, one hand on the door.

“I don’t know,” I said.





4.


On my way home I realized that I had the evening free, and could’ve made plans to meet a friend. Instead I picked up a burrito and ate it standing at the kitchen counter, which reminded me of being a student in a pleasurable way. I decided I would use the opportunity to do some work.

    This was the Saturday night before Neel’s team was slated to make their big announcement. The press conference would happen on Thursday, the same day the paper would finally be published in Physical Review Letters and go up on the open-access server. In four pages, the paper would announce the first detection of a gravitational wave and the first direct observation of a pair of black holes merging. Neel had sent it to me under strict confidence in January, and I had to admit it was beautiful: revelatory, concise, and comprehensible. It would make history, but as the LIGO scientists (who would have to continue justifying their funding) were quick to point out, it was only a beginning. Now that LIGO’s interferometers had detected two black holes merging, they would start to look for other cosmic events powerful enough to create gravitational waves they could measure. Most of all, they would want to see a kilonova, a collision of two neutron stars.

Binaries of living stars were known to astronomers by the beginning of the nineteenth century; it was William Herschel who first understood the relationship between Mizar and a companion in Ursa Major. Objects that were more difficult or impossible to observe directly took longer, but even before John Wheeler coined the term “black hole,” in the late sixties, the Soviet physicists Zel’dovich and Novikov had proposed a search for these mysterious objects in binary relationships with stars. LIGO’s scientists had expected that the first detection would be a gravitational wave produced by a black hole–black hole binary, simply because the colossal mass of such objects allowed them to collide with more force than anything since the Big Bang.

Black holes merge in absolute darkness; when an especially big star dies, the resulting supernova explosion produces light across the electromagnetic spectrum. Neutron stars are somewhere in between: they are dead stars that flicker like embers until they spiral into each other in a brilliant burst of color. What would be so exciting about detecting a kilonova with LIGO’s interferometers is that traditional astronomers could immediately point their telescopes in the same direction; it would be the first time we could hear the “chirp” of the gravitational wave and see the burst of light at the same time.

    There are two windows in my office, but the desk faces a wall, a strategy for concentration Arty once suggested to me. Nothing else about my setup at home is very considered. Mostly the desk is full of paperwork: bills, school forms, second-grade artwork, a large number of Post-it notes reminding me to pick up Jack’s allergy medication, email Vincenzo, buy toothpaste, and finish Bence’s recommendation letter by February 12. I was adding a note about the connection between primordial black holes and LIGO’s new findings—about the possibility of using the interferometers to search for dark matter—when it occurred to me that I had the ringer off and that Miles’s parents had no way to reach me if Jack were to get homesick or need something. I went downstairs and found the phone in my jacket pocket. At first I thought the message on the home screen was from Amy, since she often sends me pictures of my nieces.