DANIEL SETS HIS PHONE TIMER for four minutes and takes both Natasha’s hands in his. Are they supposed to hold hands during this part of the experiment? He’s not sure. According to the study, this is the final step for falling in love. What happens if you’re already in love?
At first they both feel pretty silly. Natasha wants to say aloud that this is too goofy. Helpless, almost embarrassed smiles overtake their faces. Natasha looks away, but Daniel squeezes her hands. Stay with me is what he means.
By the second minute, they’re less self-conscious. Their smiles drift away and they catalog each other’s face.
Natasha thinks of her AP Biology class and what she knows of eyes and how they work. An optical image of his face is being sent to her retina. Her retina is converting those images to electronic signals. Her optic nerve is transmitting those signals to her visual cortex. She knows now that she’ll never forget this image of his face. She’ll know exactly when clear brown eyes became her favorite kind.
For his part, Daniel is trying to find the right words to describe her eyes. They’re light and dark at the same time. Like someone draped a heavy black cloth over a bright star.
By the third minute, Natasha’s reliving the day and all the moments that led them here. She sees the USCIS building, that strange security guard caressing her phone case, Lester Barnes’s kindness, Rob and Kelly shoplifting, meeting Daniel, Daniel saving her life, meeting Daniel’s dad and brother, norebang, kissing, the museum, the rooftop, more kissing, Daniel’s face when he told her she couldn’t stay, her dad’s crying face filled with regret, this moment right now in the cab.
Daniel is thinking not about past events, but future ones. Is there something else that could lead them back to each other?
During the final minute, hurt settles into their bones. It colonizes their bodies, spreads to their tissue and muscles and blood and cells.
The phone timer buzzes. They whisper promises they suspect they won’t be able to keep—phone calls, emails, text messages, and even international flights, expenses be damned.
“This day can’t be all there is,” Daniel says once, and then twice.
Natasha doesn’t say what she suspects. That meant to be doesn’t have to mean forever.
They kiss, and kiss again. When they do finally pull apart, it’s with a new knowledge. They have a sense that the length of a day is mutable, and you can never see the end from the beginning. They have a sense that love changes all things all the time.
That’s what love is for.
MY MOM HOLDS MY HAND as I stare out the window. Everything will be all right, Tasha, she says. We both know that’s more a hope than a guarantee, but I’ll take it nevertheless.
The plane ascends, and the world I’ve known fades. The city lights recede to pinpricks, until they look like earthbound stars. One of those stars is Daniel. I remind myself that stars are more than just poetic.
If you need to, you can navigate your way by them.
MY PHONE RINGS. It’s my parents calling for the millionth time. They’ll be pissed when I get home, and that’s fine.
This time next year, I’ll be someplace else. I don’t know where, but not here. I’m not sure college is for me. At least not Yale. At least not yet.
Am I making a mistake? Maybe. But it’s mine to make.
I look up to the sky and imagine I can see Natasha’s plane there.
New York City has too much light pollution. It blinds us to the stars, the satellites, the asteroids. Sometimes when we look up, we don’t see anything at all.
But here is a true thing: Almost everything in the night sky gives off light. Even if we can’t see it, the light is still there.
NATASHA AND DANIEL try to stay in touch, and for a time they do. There are emails and phone calls and text messages.
But time and distance are love’s natural enemies.
And the days get full.
Natasha enrolls in school in Kingston. Her class is called Sixth Form instead of senior year. In order to attend university, she has to study for the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exams and her A-level exams. Money is scarce, so she waitresses to help her family. She fakes a Jamaican accent until it becomes real. She finds a family of friends. She learns to like and then to love the country of her birth.
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.