Chapter 23 - The Light We Lost

Sometimes I’m told things that I don’t realize are important until much later. That’s how it always seems to be when I talk to my brother—whenever we have any kind of serious discussion, anything more than the everyday How are you and How’s work, it takes me years to understand what he was trying to tell me. A few weeks after you left, Jason called. He was twenty-eight at the time and had been dating Vanessa for about a year. They’d met at the lab—she was working in communications for the pharmaceutical company, and he was trying to develop some kind of targeted cancer therapy that I still only half understand.

“Hey, Lulu,” he said, when I picked up my cell. “I—uh—I wanted to see how you were doing. Mom said things have been pretty rough.”

“Yeah,” I said, my eyes already filling with tears at his concern. “I miss him so much, Jay. I love him and I hate him and it’s just . . . it’s awful.” My voice wobbled on the phone. I wasn’t questioning my decision not to go with you, I felt secure in that, but I’d been replaying the conversations we had over and over in my head, trying to figure out if there was anything I could’ve said that would’ve made you stay. And what it was about me that made you keep secrets. I wondered if you would have acted differently if you were dating someone else. Kate said you probably would have left sooner. I didn’t believe her then, but now I wonder if she was right.

“Oh, Lu,” Jason said, “I didn’t mean to make you cry. I just . . . well . . . I know we haven’t talked about relationships before, but remember when Jocelyn and I broke up for the last time?”

I don’t know if you and I ever talked about Jocelyn, but she was Jay’s girlfriend in college and right afterward. They met their sophomore year at Princeton and kept getting together and breaking up over and over for five years—until finally she decided to go to medical school at Stanford, and after a brief attempt at long distance they broke up for good. I guess their five years has nothing on our . . . how should I calculate it now . . . thirteen? Eleven?

“I remember,” I said to Jay, even though I only half did. I was in college at the time and so wrapped up in my own world that I hadn’t really been all that involved in my brother’s.

“The reason I was able to end things for good is that I realized that we were like the gummy bear experiment. Do you remember that one? I think I showed it to you in the lab when you came to visit me at college my freshman year. You put potassium chlorate in a test tube and then add a gummy bear, and these two items that are perfectly fine on their own explode. Every single time. Jocelyn and I were like that experiment. Every time we were together we would explode, and it was exciting and wonderful in some ways, but who wants to live with constant explosions?”

“Mm-hm,” I answered, thinking of you and me. We didn’t break up and get back together over and over, but our relationship back then did feel exciting and wonderful. We were better together than each of us was on our own.

“Anyway, when I met Vanessa, it was different. It was like . . . it was like the Old Nassau experiment. Do you remember that one? It starts out with three clear solutions, but you mix two together first, so I imagine I’m those two mixed solutions, and then when you add the third, nothing happens at first, but then the solution turns orange because of the potassium iodate and then a little while later, it turns color again, this time to black, which you know is my favorite color, because it’s the one that contains all the pigment there is, and then it stays that way.”

He stopped. I was silent. I had no clue how to respond.

“Basically, what I’m saying, Lu, is that the relationship got better the longer it lasted. Instead of that gummy bear explosion, it’s a clock reaction. Do you understand what I mean?”

I didn’t understand then, though I do now. Darren showed me that. Though he’d probably say love is like a fine wine, where flavors deepen and change over time. All I said to Jason then was, “But I love him so much, Jay.”

“I know,” he said. “I loved Jocelyn too. I still do. Probably I always will a little bit. But I love Vanessa—differently. What I wanted to tell you is that there are lots of ways to love people and I know that you’ll love someone else again. Even if it’s not the same, some of it might be better.”

“I don’t want to,” I whispered. I wanted to love only you. And I couldn’t imagine anything could be better than that.

Jason was quiet for a moment. “Maybe it was too soon for me to say that,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m not that good at this sort of thing. But maybe . . . what I said will make its way into your neurons and you’ll remember it when you need it most.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Thanks for calling.”

“I love you, Lucy, like hydrogen loves oxygen. A totally different kind of love. An elemental kind.”

And when he said that, I laughed through my tears because only my brother could explain love using the periodic table.