Chapter 1

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Reza Farahani was ten years old, and he knew three important things about the sky.

The first was that it was the same sky everywhere. The sun that rose over his small green house on Maple Street in Millbrook, Ohio, was the same sun that rose over the apricot tree his grandmother had once tended in a city called Shiraz, a city Reza could barely remember. The moon that pressed its pale face against his bedroom window at night was the same moon that had watched over his mother when she was a little girl, walking home from school with a blue satchel on her shoulder and a book of Persian poems inside it.

The second thing Reza knew was that the stars did not care about borders. They did not know which country was which. They did not know that some people had to leave their homes and cross oceans and learn new words for bread and rain and goodbye. The stars simply shone, the same way they had shone for thousands of years, and they would keep shining long after everyone Reza had ever known was gone.

The third thing was the most important. The third thing was that stars were how you found your way home, even if home was not a place anymore.

It was the last week of June. School had been out for eight days. Reza lay on his back in the small patch of grass behind his house, looking up at the darkening sky. The first stars were just beginning to show themselves, one by one, like shy children peeking out from behind a curtain. His mother was inside washing the dinner dishes. He could hear the soft clink of ceramic and the low hum of the radio she always played, a station that sometimes played Persian songs very late at night when most of Ohio was already asleep.

"Reza-jan," she called through the kitchen window. "You will get bitten by mosquitoes."

"I have bug spray, Maman," Reza said, without taking his eyes off the sky.

"You put bug spray on your arms, but not your legs, azizam."

Reza laughed, because she was right. She was always right about things like that. He reached down and rubbed his bare ankles, and a mosquito, as if summoned, landed on his knee. He slapped it, and it was gone.

"See?" his mother said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. He did not have to turn around.

The sky was getting deeper now. He watched the color change slowly, the way it always did — first the blue-gray of a pigeon's wing, then the color of ink spilled on a page, then, at last, something that was not quite black but very close to it. This was the color he waited for. This was the color that let the stars speak.

Vega was already up, bright and white in the east. Reza had known Vega's name since he was seven. Deneb would come next, then Altair, and together they would make the Summer Triangle, which was not actually a constellation but a pattern that astronomers called an asterism. Reza liked the word asterism. He liked that there were special names for things, names that most people did not know.

Most people did not look up. Reza had noticed this. Most people walked with their heads down, looking at their phones, or looking at their shoes, or looking at nothing at all. But if you looked up — really looked up — there was a whole other world. A bigger world. A world that had been there the whole time, waiting.

Behind him, the screen door creaked open. His father stepped out onto the little wooden porch with a mug of tea. The steam curled up into the summer night like the tail of a slow comet.

"You are still out here, star-boy?" his father said.

"Yes, Baba."

"Your mother says the mosquitoes are having you for dessert."

"I am not very sweet."

"Oh, you are sweet," his father said, and he smiled. His father had a quiet kind of smile. It did not take up much space in his face, but it was warm. "You are very sweet. Do not argue with your baba about your own sweetness."

*The heart is a country no visa can enter.*

But here, in Ohio, Reza's father did not write poems anymore. Or, if he did, he did not show them to anyone. He came home from the paint store. He ate dinner. He washed his hands very carefully. He read the newspaper. Sometimes he played chess with Reza on the old wooden set that had come with them from Iran, packed in a suitcase between two sweaters. The queen had a chip in her crown. The black bishop's hat was slightly bent.

"What are you looking at tonight?" his father asked.

"The Summer Triangle. It will be up in about twenty minutes."

"Ah."

"So late?"

"It is summer, Baba. Everything rises late in summer because the sun takes so long to go down."

His father nodded slowly. He sipped his tea. For a moment they did not say anything, and the silence between them was comfortable, the way silence can be when two people are looking at the same thing.

"In Shiraz," Reza's father said quietly, "the sky was so bright with stars, you could see the Milky Way almost every night. Like a river of milk spilled across the darkness."

Reza turned his head. "Really?"

"Really. My own father — your jadd — took me to the mountains once when I was a boy. Very far from the city. The sky there was so full of stars that I thought it must be a mistake. I thought someone had poured too many into the bowl."

Reza laughed.

"There are still stars here," his father said. "But fewer. The lights of the city eat them up. In a small town like ours, it is better than Cleveland or Columbus. But it is not like the mountains of Fars. Not like it was."

Reza wanted to ask his father a question. He had been wanting to ask it for a long time. But he did not know exactly how to shape the question, and he was afraid that if he asked it badly, his father's face would do the thing it sometimes did — the thing where it closed up, like a book snapping shut.

So he only said, "Do you miss it?"

His father took a long sip of tea. When he spoke, his voice was very even, the way it got when he was holding something carefully.

"Every day, Reza-jan. I miss it every day. But missing a place is not the same as being unhappy. Do you understand?"

"I think so."

"You can miss a thing and still love the thing you have. Those are two feelings. They can live in the same house."

Reza thought about this. He thought about it for a long time, even after his father went back inside to help his mother finish the dishes. He lay on the grass and watched the stars come out, one by one, and he tried to imagine the mountains of Fars with so many stars that someone had spilled the bowl.

He tried, but he could not quite see it. He was only four when they left. He remembered almost nothing. Sometimes he thought he remembered the color of a wall — a pale peach, or maybe it was a pale yellow. Sometimes he remembered a song his grandmother used to sing. Sometimes he remembered the smell of a certain kind of bread — flatbread with sesame seeds, torn steaming from a hot stone — but he could not be sure the memory was his. It might have been a memory he had borrowed from his parents, the way you sometimes borrow a coat.

They had come to America. They had come to this small green house on Maple Street, which had two bedrooms and one bathroom and a crooked mailbox and a lilac bush by the fence. His older sister Shirin was fourteen. She remembered more than he did. Sometimes, when Shirin was in a dark mood, she would sit on her bed with her knees pulled up and stare at the wall, and Reza knew she was remembering something she did not want to share.

But Reza — Reza had the sky. The sky was the part of home that had traveled with him.

He lay on his back and waited for Jupiter to rise.

---

The next morning was a Tuesday. Reza woke up to the sound of his sister's music coming through the thin wall between their bedrooms. It was a song he did not recognize. Shirin listened to a lot of songs he did not recognize. She said he was too young to understand most of them.

He pulled on a T-shirt and went downstairs. His mother was at the kitchen table, drinking tea from a small glass cup with a gold rim. She worked part-time at the town library, five blocks away, shelving books and reading storytime on Thursdays. She was not working today. Today was her day off.

"Good morning, Reza-jan."

"Good morning, Maman."

She kissed the top of his head. She smelled like jasmine. She always smelled like jasmine, even when she had been working in the garden and her hands were full of dirt.

"What would you like for breakfast?"

"Egg and bread."

"There is no more of the good bread. I will get some at the bakery this afternoon. For now, there is toast."

"Toast is fine."

His father had already gone to work. He left at seven-thirty every morning. He walked to the bus stop at the end of the street, and the bus took him across town to the paint store. He came home at six.

Reza sat at the table and ate his toast with butter and jam, and then his mother set a small plate of cucumbers and feta cheese beside him, because she always set a small plate of cucumbers and feta cheese beside him, and she would not let him leave the table until he had eaten at least a little.

"Baba told me you were looking at the stars last night," his mother said.

"Jupiter was up. I could see its moons with the binoculars. Three of them. The fourth must have been hidden behind the planet."

"Ah."

"Maman, do you think I could have a telescope someday?"

His mother set down her tea cup.

She did not answer right away. Reza knew this was because telescopes were expensive, and his family was not rich, and his mother did not like to say no when she could not say yes.

"We will see, azizam," she said finally. "These things, they are not so easy. A good telescope costs very much."

"I know."

"Maybe when you are older. Maybe for your bar mitzvah."

Reza laughed. "Maman, we are not Jewish."

"Oh. Yes." His mother laughed too, a small embarrassed laugh. "I always forget the word. For your — what is it — your graduation. Your high school."

"That is very far away."

"Eight years is not far. Eight years is nothing. Your father and I, we moved to this country nearly six years ago, and it feels to me like last Tuesday."

She said this lightly, but Reza saw, just for a second, the thing he saw sometimes — a shadow passing across his mother's face. It was there and then it was gone, like a cloud crossing the sun.

"Why don't you go outside and play?" she said. "It is a beautiful day."

"Okay."

He put his plate in the sink. He went out the back door. The morning was warm and smelled like mowed grass and honeysuckle. The sun was high and white.

Their yard was small. It was a rectangle of grass with a single oak tree in the corner and a lilac bush by the fence. Beyond the fence was Mrs. Henderson's yard. Reza had never really looked at Mrs. Henderson's yard before. He knew she was there — the old lady in the big white house, the one who walked her little gray dog around the block every evening and never said hello to anyone. He knew his mother had taken her a plate of cookies once, two Christmases ago, and Mrs. Henderson had accepted them politely but had not invited her in.

"She is a private woman," his mother had said. "We should respect that."

But today, as Reza was standing in the yard scratching his mosquito bite, he looked through the gaps in the wooden fence, and he saw something on Mrs. Henderson's back porch that he had never noticed before.

It was covered in a white canvas bag, but the shape of it was unmistakable. A long cylinder on a tripod. A little arm sticking out the side.

A telescope.

It was a telescope.

Reza's heart did a small flip in his chest, the way it did when he solved a hard math problem or when his mother made the rice with the crispy bottom that he loved.

Mrs. Henderson had a telescope.

Mrs. Henderson, the private woman who never said hello, had a telescope on her back porch.

He stood very still, looking at it through the fence. He could not see it very well — the canvas cover hid most of it — but he could see the tripod legs and the bulk of the tube beneath the cloth. It looked big. Bigger than any telescope he had seen in a store. It looked real.

For the rest of that morning, and most of that afternoon, Reza could not think of anything else.

---

That night at dinner, Reza said, "Maman, did you know Mrs. Henderson has a telescope?"

His mother looked up from her plate. "No. Does she?"

"I saw it today. On her back porch. Under a cover. It is a big one."

"How interesting."

"Maybe she would let me look through it."

His mother's eyebrows went up slightly. "Reza-jan, Mrs. Henderson keeps to herself. I do not think we should disturb her."

"But Maman —"

"No buts. We respect our neighbors. If she wishes to speak with us, she will speak with us. She has not spoken with us in five years."

"Six," said Shirin, without looking up from her plate. It was the first thing she had said all dinner. She was wearing her headphones around her neck, the way she always did, so she could snap them over her ears the moment dinner was finished.

"Six," said Reza's mother. "Thank you, Shirin-jan."

Reza pushed the rice around on his plate. He felt a stubborn thing rising inside him, the thing that always rose when someone told him he could not have something he wanted.

"Father," Reza said. "What do you think?"

Reza's father put down his fork slowly. "I think," he said, "that your mother is wise, Reza-jan. I think that some people do not want visitors, and we should not push them. But I also think there is no harm in saying hello. Perhaps one day you could say hello over the fence."

"Farhad," said Reza's mother warningly.

"Only hello, Mahnaz. Only hello."

Reza said nothing. He ate his dinner. He helped his mother clear the dishes. He went upstairs to his room.

But that night, lying in bed with the window open and the curtains fluttering in the soft summer air, Reza could not sleep. He kept thinking about the telescope. He kept thinking about what it must look like under that canvas cover — the long tube pointed at the sky, the eyepiece where you could press your eye and see worlds.

He thought about Jupiter.

He thought about the Great Red Spot, a storm bigger than the Earth that had been blowing on Jupiter for at least three hundred and fifty years.

He thought about the rings of Saturn.

He thought about how, if you had a telescope big enough, you could see the dusty plains of the Moon — the seas, the mountains, the lonely dark craters where no one had ever walked.

Outside his window, a single firefly blinked, then blinked again.

Reza made a decision. He did not know, yet, exactly what the decision was. He only knew that something inside him had shifted, the way a door shifts when someone on the other side has just turned the key.

He closed his eyes. He slept.

He wished she would just give it to him.

The book had color photographs of the planets and the nebulae and a foldout map of the whole night sky, which he had to unfold very carefully because the paper was soft from so many openings. He liked the picture of the Orion Nebula best. It was a place where new stars were being born, right now, fifteen hundred light years away. Stars being born. He loved that. He loved that stars had a life, too — that they were born and they burned and eventually they died, either quietly, or in huge explosions that scattered their insides across space.

All the iron in the world, the book said, came from inside stars that had died billions of years ago. All the iron. Including the iron in Reza's own blood. Including the iron in the hinges of the back door. He was made of star dust, and so was everyone else.

He thought about mentioning this to Shirin, but he knew she would only roll her eyes.

Shirin was upstairs in her room, as usual. Shirin was often in her room. She came down for meals, and sometimes to help in the kitchen, but mostly she stayed upstairs with her music and her books and her phone. She was four years older than Reza, which meant that until very recently she had been a kind of second mother to him, someone who played cards with him and braided her doll's hair and made up silly songs about cats. But in the last year, something had changed. Shirin had gotten tall. Her face had become more serious. She wore black a lot. She said mean things sometimes, and then she said sorry, and then an hour later she said more mean things.

Their mother said it was her age.

"Fourteen is hard," their mother told Reza once. "She is trying to figure out who she is. Be patient with her, Reza-jan."

So Reza was patient. Mostly.

Today, though, he needed someone to talk to. His mother was out at the library helping with a summer reading program. His father was at work. There was only Shirin.

He knocked on her door.

"What," she said.

"It's me."

"I know who you are. What do you want."

"Can I come in?"

He pushed the door open. Shirin was sitting cross-legged on her bed with a thick book on her lap. The book had a black cover and small silver writing. She was chewing gum. She had her hair in a long braid down her back, the way their grandmother had taught her.

"I need to tell you something," Reza said.

"Quickly."

"Mrs. Henderson has a telescope."

Shirin looked up. For the first time in days, Reza saw her look almost interested.

"The old lady next door?"

"Yes."

"The one with the ugly dog?"

"He is not ugly. He is just old."

"He has a cataract in one eye, Reza. He is ugly."

"Anyway. She has a telescope on her back porch. I saw it through the fence."

Shirin tilted her head. "And?"

"And I want to look through it."

"So ask her."

"Maman said no. She said we should not disturb her."

Shirin rolled her eyes. "Maman always says that. Maman thinks everyone in America is made of glass. You can say hello to a neighbor. You can ring a doorbell. It is not a crime."

"Will you come with me?"

"What? No. I'm reading."

"Please."

"Reza, I'm not going to be your bodyguard while you bother a crazy old lady."

"She is not crazy."

"Fine. Cranky old lady."

"She is not —"

"She has never said three words to us. Not three. In six years."

"Maybe she is shy."

Shirin looked at him, and for a second her face softened. She had dark brown eyes with long lashes, and when she softened her eyes, she looked very much like their mother.

"You really want to see through this telescope," she said.

"Yes."

"More than anything."

"More than almost anything."

"What is the thing you want more?"

Reza thought about it. "I don't know. To go back to Iran someday, maybe. Just to see it."

Shirin's face changed again. The softness was gone. Something tighter took its place.

"You don't remember Iran, Reza."

"I know. That's why I want to see it."

"You don't miss what you don't remember."

"Yes, I do. I miss it because everyone else misses it."

Shirin put down her book. She looked at him for a long moment, and Reza could not tell what she was thinking, but he suddenly felt very small, the way he did sometimes when adults said things he did not fully understand.

"Go bother your telescope lady," Shirin said. "Leave me alone."

"Shirin —"

"Go, Reza."

He went.

But back in his own room, he lay on his bed and thought about what Shirin had said. You don't miss what you don't remember. Was that true? He was not sure. It did not feel true. It felt like there was a hole in him, a small round hole, and the hole was shaped like a place he had never really known.

He turned his face to the window. The sky was a flat white summer sky. You could not see any stars at all. You had to wait.

Everything, he thought, was about waiting.

---

That night he tried to talk about Iran with his mother.

She was in the kitchen, kneading dough for bread. Her hands were white with flour up to the wrists. She looked happy when she was making bread, the way she had looked happy in the old pictures from before, the pictures in the photo album with the red cover that his father kept on the top shelf in the living room. In those pictures, his mother had long hair and wore a yellow dress, and she was smiling in a garden that was not this garden.

"Maman?"

"Yes, azizam."

"What do you remember most about Iran?"

She did not stop kneading. Her hands went on, push and fold, push and fold, the way hands do when they know a thing so well that the hands do not need the mind.

"Many things," she said.

"Tell me one."

"A kettle with two notes."

"Yes."

"What else?"

"The way my father read the newspaper. Out loud. Every morning. He would sit at the kitchen table and read me the headlines like they were poems. He was not a poet, your grandfather, but he had the habit of reading everything like poetry. Even the weather."

Reza smiled.

"And you, Reza-jan, what do you remember?"

He considered. "A wall. A yellow wall. Or maybe peach. With a spot on it where the paint was chipping."

"That was the kitchen wall of our apartment in Shiraz. Near the window. You used to sit there and pick at it with your fingernail when you were little. It drove your father crazy."

"I remember that?"

"Apparently."

She kept kneading.

"Maman."

"Yes."

"Why did we leave?"

She stopped kneading. She lifted her hands from the dough and wiped them on the towel tucked into her apron. Her hands were pink underneath the flour.

"Come here," she said.

He went to her. She put her arm around his shoulder. She smelled like yeast and jasmine.

"We left," she said, "because we could not stay. Do you know what that means?"

"I think so."

"In the country where we were born, Reza, there are many good people. Most people. Most people are good everywhere. But there was a time — and there still is, in some ways — when some people in our country decided that Bahá'ís were not allowed to be free. Not allowed to go to university. Not allowed to work in many jobs. Not allowed to worship the way we worship. Your baba's brother went to prison for nothing. For being a Bahá'í. Nothing else."

"Uncle Kamran."

"Yes. Uncle Kamran. He is out now, thanks be to God. But for two years, we could not even know if he was alive. Your baba was a professor. He lost his job. I was a lecturer. I lost mine. We had a cousin killed, many years ago, long before you were born. His name was Mansur. We left because if we had stayed, we were afraid more bad things would happen. To your father. To your sister. To you."

Reza leaned against her.

"We came to America, Reza-jan, so that you could be free. So that you could read any book, and go to any school, and look at the stars and not be afraid."

"I'm not afraid."

"That is the gift," she said softly. "That is the whole gift."

She kissed the top of his head. Flour fell into his hair.

"Maman," Reza said, "do we still say prayers? At dinner?"

"We say them every day, azizam. Quietly. In our hearts. And out loud sometimes, when we remember. The Bahá'í way is not to wear the prayers on the outside. It is to keep them like a candle inside the house. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Good. Now go set the table. Your father will be home soon."

He set the table. Four plates, four glasses, four sets of silverware. His mother's old salt shaker with the tiny blue flower on it, which had come with them in a suitcase and had a chip at the very top.

He thought about the candle inside the house. He thought about the telescope next door.

The days went by. June turned into July. The cicadas began to sing in the oak tree behind the house, a slow, sleepy sound that filled the afternoons. Reza helped his mother weed the garden. He read three more library books. He played catch with his father on Saturday mornings in the driveway. He walked down to the Dairy Queen on the corner with two dollars in his pocket and bought a small vanilla cone.

He saw Mrs. Henderson only twice.

Once, she was walking her little gray dog — a schnauzer, he thought, with tufty eyebrows and a stiff gait. Mrs. Henderson was a thin woman, not very tall, with short white hair and a face that had a lot of small lines in it, like a map that had been folded and unfolded many times. She wore a faded blue sundress and carried a small plastic bag for the dog. Reza was sitting on the front step tying his shoe. He looked up.

"Hello," he said, because his father had told him there was no harm in saying hello.

Mrs. Henderson looked at him. Her eyes were blue. Not sky blue, but a colder blue, like winter ice.

"Hello," she said. Just the one word. Then she kept walking.

The second time, she was in her own front yard. She was kneeling in front of a rose bush with a pair of small pruning shears, clipping off dead blooms. Her back was to Reza. He was walking home from the library with a new book tucked under his arm. He slowed down as he passed her yard, hoping she would turn around, hoping she might say hello first this time.

She did not turn around. She kept clipping.

Reza kept walking.

He thought about her a lot. He wondered what she had been like when she was young. He wondered if she had any children. He wondered why she had a telescope. A telescope was not the kind of thing a person just had. A telescope meant a story. Someone had bought it, or been given it, or saved up for it. Someone had carried it home. Someone had set it up on the porch and pointed it at the sky.

Someone had looked through it.

He decided, in the second week of July, that he was going to see the telescope up close.

He did not plan it as a crime. He thought of it more like an expedition. He would wait until it was dark. He would go into his own backyard, as usual, with his binoculars. He would look at the sky for a little while. Then, when no one was watching, he would slip through the loose board in the back fence — a board he had noticed last summer, one that swung sideways if you pushed it just right — and he would go into Mrs. Henderson's yard, and he would walk very quietly up to her back porch, and he would lift the corner of the canvas cover, and he would see.

That was all. Just see. Just for a minute. He would not touch anything. He would not break anything. He would not even breathe loudly. Then he would go back through the fence and no one would ever know.

He picked a Tuesday. Tuesday was good because his parents always went to bed early on Tuesday; his father had to be at the paint store by seven. Tuesday was also good because the moon was only a small crescent that week, which meant the sky would be dark, and Mrs. Henderson's back porch would also be dark.

On Tuesday night, at ten-thirty, Reza climbed out of bed.

He was already dressed. He had gone to bed in his jeans and T-shirt, with his shoes on the floor beside him. He picked up the shoes. He tiptoed down the stairs — avoiding the third step, which creaked — and out the back door.

His heart was beating very fast.

The backyard was cool and dark. There were fireflies in the lilac bush. The oak tree made a big shadow on the grass. Reza put his shoes on by the back step and took his binoculars from where he had hidden them in the old wooden planter.

He walked slowly to the back fence.

He pushed on the loose board.

It swung open. Just enough.

He slipped through.

Mrs. Henderson's backyard was nothing like Reza had imagined.

He had imagined it would be neat and stern, like Mrs. Henderson herself. He had imagined rows of clipped roses and a lawn so flat you could play checkers on it. But the yard on the other side of the fence was wild, in a careful sort of way. There were bushy hydrangeas as tall as Reza. There was a birdbath with a little stone frog on the edge. There was a pebbled path that went in a curve from the side gate around to the back porch, and along the path, white flowers were blooming — tall stalks of them, as tall as his waist, with a sweet heavy smell.

Nicotiana, he learned later. Evening-blooming. They open at dusk.

He followed the path slowly, one step at a time. The pebbles made small sounds under his shoes. He tried to walk on the grass beside the path instead.

The back porch was a wooden deck, slightly raised, with two wooden chairs and a small table with a coffee mug on it. And there, at the far end of the deck, was the thing he had come to see.

The telescope.

The canvas cover was still on it, but up close he could see the shape much better. It was big. Really big. The tripod legs were metal, painted black. The tube was almost as long as Reza was tall. Attached to the side was a smaller tube — a finderscope, he knew, for lining up on targets.

Reza crept up onto the deck. The wood creaked softly.

He stopped.

He listened.

No sound from inside the house. The kitchen window was dark. The whole house was dark, actually. Mrs. Henderson was probably in bed. Old people went to bed early. That was what his mother always said.

He took two more steps.

He was standing beside the telescope now. He reached out his hand. He touched the canvas cover. It was slightly damp from the evening dew. He took a breath and very slowly lifted one corner.

Beneath the canvas, the telescope was beautiful.

It was white — not exactly white, but a creamy off-white, with black trim. The tube was not a simple cylinder but a more complicated shape, squared off at the back end. An eight-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain, he would later learn. The kind serious amateur astronomers used. On the side of the tube, in silver letters, was the word CELESTRON.

Reza's breath caught in his throat.

He lifted the canvas a little more. He wanted to see the eyepiece. He wanted to see the finderscope. He wanted —

A light came on in the kitchen.

Reza froze.

His whole body went stiff. His hand was still on the canvas.

A shape moved in the kitchen window. A small, thin shape, in a bathrobe.

The back door opened.

"Who's there," said a voice.

Reza could not move.

"I said," said the voice, "who is there."

A flashlight clicked on. The beam swept across the deck and landed on Reza's chest, then his face. Reza squinted.

"Good lord," said Mrs. Henderson.

She was standing in the doorway in a pale blue bathrobe. Her hair was sticking up in the back. The little gray dog was at her ankles, growling.

"Hush, Pip," she said to the dog. The dog hushed.

Reza's heart was beating so hard he thought she must be able to hear it.

"I'm — I'm sorry, ma'am," he whispered.

"You are the boy from next door."

"Yes."

"It is after ten-thirty at night."

"Yes."

"You are on my back porch."

"Yes."

"You are touching my telescope."

"Yes."

There was a silence. A long silence. Reza could hear his own pulse thumping in his ears. He thought about running — about turning and sprinting back through the loose board in the fence, back into his own yard, back into his own bed, never coming out again — but his feet would not move.

"Boy," said Mrs. Henderson. "What is your name."

"Reza."

"Reza what."

"Reza Farahani."

"Farahani. Persian?"

"Yes, ma'am. My family is from Iran."

She was quiet for another moment. The flashlight beam lowered to his shoes and stayed there.

"Reza Farahani," she said slowly, "would you please explain to me what you are doing on my porch in the middle of the night with your hand on a twelve-hundred-dollar telescope."

"I —"

"Because if you are a thief, you are the worst-dressed thief I have ever seen."

"I'm not a thief, ma'am."

"Well, then what are you."

Reza swallowed. He thought about lying. He was suddenly very tired of lying, even of the small lies of avoidance, the you-are-not-supposed-to-be-here lies. He decided to tell the truth. It was the only thing he had.

"I saw it," he said. "Through the fence. I saw it a couple of weeks ago. I — I have wanted a telescope my whole life. I just wanted to see it. I didn't touch anything except the cover. I was going to put the cover back. I was going to go home. I wasn't going to bother you."

"You are, in fact, bothering me."

"I know, ma'am. I'm sorry."

Mrs. Henderson looked at him for a long time. He could not quite see her face, because the porch light was behind her, but he could feel her eyes on him. The dog sat down on her foot and yawned.

"My whole life," she said dryly. "You are how old?"

"Ten."

"Your whole life is ten years?"

"Yes."

"Do you know anything at all about astronomy, Reza Farahani, or is this a whim?"

"I know some things."

"Oh? Such as?"

Reza's brain was jittering with fear, but somewhere behind the fear, a small, stubborn part of him rose up and answered her.

"Jupiter has four big moons. Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. They are called the Galilean moons because Galileo discovered them in 1610. The Great Red Spot is a storm that has been going on for at least three hundred and fifty years. Saturn has rings made of ice and rock. The closest star other than the Sun is Proxima Centauri. It is four point two four light years away. The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest big galaxy to our own and it is two point five million light years away and in about four billion years it is going to collide with the Milky Way."

He stopped. He was out of breath.

There was another silence.

And then Mrs. Henderson did something strange. She laughed. Not a big laugh. A small, dry, surprised laugh. Like a cough that had changed its mind.

"Good lord," she said again.

She stepped back from the doorway. The flashlight beam moved off him.

"Reza Farahani," she said, "it is late, and I am old, and I am not going to have this conversation on a porch in my bathrobe. Go home."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Tomorrow morning, you will come to my front door with one or both of your parents. You will ring the bell. I will open the door. We will have a conversation like civilized people about what it is that you want. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"If you come alone, the conversation will go very differently. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good. Now go home before the mosquitoes eat you."

Reza went.

He almost ran. He did not remember going through the loose board. He did not remember crossing his own yard. The next thing he knew he was in the back mudroom of his own house, panting, with the door closed behind him, his hand on the doorknob.

He had been caught.

He had been caught, and tomorrow he was going to have to tell his parents.

And somehow, standing there in the dark mudroom with his heart hammering, Reza realized he was smiling.

---

He did not sleep. He could not. He lay on his back in his bed with his eyes open and watched the shadow of the curtain move across the ceiling, and he rehearsed, a thousand different ways, what he was going to say in the morning.

When the first gray light came into his room, he got up. He went downstairs. His mother was already in the kitchen, because his mother was always in the kitchen first. She was boiling water for tea.

"Good morning, azizam. You are up early."

"Maman," he said. "I have to tell you something."

She turned around. She looked at his face, and whatever she saw there made her turn off the stove. She came over to the table. She sat down across from him.

"What is it," she said.

He told her. The whole thing. The fence board. The porch. The canvas cover. Mrs. Henderson in her bathrobe with her flashlight. The way she had laughed. The thing she had said about coming to the door with his parents.

He expected his mother to be furious. He expected her to cry, or to shout, or to clutch her head and say something in Persian about how he had shamed the family, which was a thing she sometimes said when Shirin got a bad grade or when he left his shoes in the middle of the living room.

Instead his mother did something he had not expected at all.

She put her hand over her mouth.

Her shoulders began to shake.

For a terrible second, Reza thought she was crying.

Then he realized she was laughing.

"Reza," she said, through her fingers. "Reza-jan."

"Maman, I'm sorry."

"You — you climbed the fence."

"Yes."

"To see her telescope."

"Yes."

"At eleven o'clock at night."

"Ten-thirty."

"Oh, my son. My son the burglar."

"I am not a burglar."

"No," she said, wiping her eyes. "No, azizam, you are not. You are a boy who loves the stars too much to have sense."

"Am I in trouble?"

"You are in very big trouble. But also — " she paused, and for a moment her face went still, thinking. "Also, you have been invited to return in the morning. That is a very strange kind of trouble."

"Yes."

"Your father will be angry, you know. He is traditional about these things."

"I know."

"Go upstairs. Put on a clean shirt. Comb your hair. After breakfast, I will call Mrs. Henderson, and we will see if today is a convenient day. If it is, you and I will go next door, and you will apologize to her properly, and then — well. We will see what we will see."

"Yes, Maman."

"And Reza-jan."

"Yes?"

"Never. Climb. A fence. Again. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, Maman."

She put her hand on top of his. It was warm.

"But also," she said more quietly, "in my heart, azizam, I am a little bit proud of you. Only a little. Do not tell your father."

Mrs. Henderson's living room smelled like lemon furniture polish and old paper.

Reza sat on a green velvet sofa with his hands folded in his lap. His mother sat beside him, very straight, with her purse on her knees. The purse was the one she used only for important occasions — the black one with the gold clasp, the one she had brought from Iran.

Mrs. Henderson sat in a wingback chair across from them. She was fully dressed this time, in khaki trousers and a white button-up blouse, with a silver chain around her neck. Her white hair was combed neatly. Her hands, resting on the arms of the chair, were very thin and dotted with age spots. She wore a narrow gold wedding ring.

The little gray dog, Pip, was asleep on the rug.

"Mrs. Henderson," said Reza's mother, "I wish to say, first of all, how very sorry I am that my son entered your property without permission. It was a serious wrong. I have spoken to him about it, and his father has spoken to him about it, and he understands that this was not a proper thing to do."

"I understand," Reza said quickly.

Mrs. Henderson nodded once.

"Mrs. Farahani," she said, "your son was out of bed last night and in my yard in the dark. This is a thing that should not happen again."

"It will not happen again," said Reza's mother.

"Good."

There was a pause. A clock on the mantel ticked.

"However," said Mrs. Henderson, "I will also say this. In forty-one years of teaching high school astronomy, I met exactly seven students who could have named me all four Galilean moons in order. And none of them climbed a fence to do it."

Reza felt his face get hot.

"You — you taught astronomy?" he said.

"I did. For a long time. Before I retired. I was a science teacher at Lincoln High School, and in the last twenty years of my career I taught mostly physics and astronomy. I have had that telescope on the porch for eighteen years. I do not use it as much as I used to." She paused. "My husband used to use it. He passed away six years ago."

"I'm very sorry," said Reza's mother softly.

"Thank you."

Another pause.

"Mrs. Farahani," said Mrs. Henderson. "May I speak to your son for a moment?"

"Of course."

Mrs. Henderson turned her blue eyes on Reza.

"Boy," she said. "What do you want."

Reza swallowed. "I — I want to look through the telescope. Just once. That's all I want. I won't ask for anything else."

"Why."

"Because I love the stars, ma'am."

"Why."

He had not been asked that before, not in that way. He had to think.

"Because," he said slowly, "they are the same everywhere. No matter where you go. They are the same."

Mrs. Henderson did not answer for a moment. Something in her face moved — something that, if Reza had been older, he would have recognized as the moment when a person who has been alone for a long time realizes they have been seen.

"Hmm," she said.

"I am from Iran, ma'am. My family is. And I — I don't remember it very much. But the stars I could see there are the same stars I can see here. That's what I like about them. They don't care who you are. They just — they just are."

"That is a rather philosophical answer, for ten."

"I have thought about it a lot."

"I can see that." She leaned back in her chair. "Mrs. Farahani, I would like to make a proposal."

"Yes."

"Your son has committed a trespass. A small one, but still. In my opinion, the appropriate punishment is not further scolding but education. I propose that, with your permission and your husband's, Reza be permitted to come to my porch on clear evenings, when I am observing, and I will show him how to use the telescope. Properly. In exchange, he will assist me with certain small tasks around the house and yard that I am no longer as spry as I once was to manage. Weeding. Sweeping the porch. Carrying the bag of bird seed. Nothing difficult."

Reza's mother looked at Reza. She looked at Mrs. Henderson. She looked back at Reza.

Reza tried very hard not to jump off the sofa.

"That is very kind, Mrs. Henderson," his mother said carefully. "I would like to speak with my husband first. And with Reza. I must be sure that this is a — a proper arrangement."

"Of course."

"May I give you my answer this evening?"

"You may."

"Thank you. Truly. Thank you."

"You are welcome."

Reza's mother stood. Reza stood. They were almost at the door when Mrs. Henderson spoke again.

"Mrs. Farahani."

"Yes."

"I have lived on this street twenty-eight years. My husband and I moved here the year our son was born. I have not — I have not been a very neighborly person since my husband died. I am sorry for it."

"There is nothing to be sorry for."

"There is, actually. But thank you."

They walked home along the sidewalk. Reza's mother did not say anything for most of the way. At the front walk of their own house, she stopped.

"Reza-jan."

"Yes."

"I want you to understand something. This woman has given you a gift today. Many people would have called the police. Some would have yelled. She did not."

"I know."

"If your father and I agree to this, you will behave with perfect manners. You will say please and thank you. You will never, ever, ever go into her yard without being invited. You will do whatever small chores she asks you to do without complaining. You will be on time. You will be polite. You will treat that woman with the respect she deserves. Is that clear?"

"Yes, Maman."

"And if I see you wiggle your toes out of line even a little —"

"You will take me away."

"Yes."

"I promise."

She looked at him a long moment. Then she nodded.

"Come inside," she said. "We will call your father at the paint store."

---

Reza's father said yes, with conditions. The conditions were many and specific. No going over after nine p.m. No staying past ten. No eating anything unless Mrs. Henderson specifically offered. Always, always, tell Maman or Baba where he was going and when he would be back.

"Do we understand each other, Reza?" his father said into the kitchen phone, which Reza had been passed so that he could hear the rules in his father's own voice.

"Yes, Baba."

"This woman is doing something generous. I do not take it lightly."

"I know, Baba."

"Your mother and I did not come to this country so that our son could behave like a thief in the night."

"I know, Baba. I'm sorry."

"It is done. Make it good from this day."

"Yes, Baba."

"I love you, my son."

"I love you, Baba."

Reza's mother called Mrs. Henderson. Reza's mother reported, when she hung up, that the first visit was to be this very evening, at eight-thirty, and that Reza should eat his dinner quickly and wash his face.

Reza ate his dinner so quickly that his mother told him to slow down before he choked.

---

At eight twenty-seven, Reza rang Mrs. Henderson's doorbell.

She opened the door.

"On time," she said. "Good. Come in."

He came in. She was wearing a gray cardigan over her white blouse now, because the evenings were cool. She led him through the house — past the living room, past a small dining room with a big table that looked like it had not been used in a long time, past a hallway with black-and-white photographs on the walls. Reza tried not to stare at the photographs, but one of them was a picture of a young woman with short dark hair and glasses, standing in front of a mountain. The young woman was smiling. It took Reza a moment to realize the young woman was Mrs. Henderson.

The back porch was exactly as he remembered, but now the canvas cover was off the telescope, and the tube was pointed up at the southern sky. There was a small folding table beside it with a red-filtered flashlight and a spiral notebook and a pair of eyeglasses.

"Sit down, Reza Farahani," said Mrs. Henderson. "We are going to do a few things before you look through anything. First, you are going to listen."

"Yes, ma'am."

"This telescope belonged to my husband. His name was Walter. He bought it in 2007, after a great deal of agonizing and a great deal of comparison-shopping. He paid for it in installments over six months. He loved it more than he loved most of his relatives. Do you understand how I am asking you to treat it?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good. Do not ever touch it unless I am here. Do not ever move it unless I tell you. Do not ever, under any circumstances, point it at the Sun. Are we clear?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Second. This is a Celestron 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain on a fork mount. The mount is motorized. It tracks the stars. We will use it in altazimuth mode tonight, which means it moves up and down and side to side. Follow?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"This is the finderscope." She tapped a smaller tube attached to the main tube. "It shows a wide view with crosshairs. We use it to line up on a target. Once the target is in the finderscope, it will be in the big eyepiece too — more or less. Follow?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"This is the eyepiece. It is where you put your eye. Not your hand. Not your nose. Your eye. Understand?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"You will not breathe on the glass. Warm breath fogs the optics."

"I won't."

"All right. Now. Jupiter rises in about twenty minutes. That is what you came to see, isn't it?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then we will wait. While we wait, I am going to show you the sky."

She sat down in one of the wooden chairs. She pointed at the eastern sky.

"There," she said. "See that bright white star?"

"Vega."

"Good. And that one?"

"Deneb."

"And that one?"

"Altair."

"Together?"

"The Summer Triangle."

"Good boy."

"You have been studying," she said at last.

"For a long time."

"How long."

"Three years. Since I was seven."

"Huh."

They sat in silence for a while. The sky grew darker. The first bats came out and flickered across the yard, little black shapes against the still-blue west. Far away, Reza could hear a train whistle.

"Reza Farahani," said Mrs. Henderson after a long time.

"Yes, ma'am."

"When you said, this morning, that you love the stars because they are the same everywhere — what did you mean by that."

He thought. He wanted to give a good answer. He wanted to give the right answer.

"I meant," he said slowly, "that my parents — they had to leave their country. Before I was born, almost. Well, when I was very little. And the stars — the stars were still there. The stars came with us. Nothing else came with us. Only what they could fit in the suitcases. But the stars were already here. They were waiting."

Mrs. Henderson did not say anything.

"It is like — it is like the stars are a kind of home that nobody can take away. Because they don't belong to anybody. They belong to everybody."

"Yes," said Mrs. Henderson. Just that.

She looked at her watch.

"Jupiter is up," she said. "Come here."

He came.

She bent down to the eyepiece, adjusted something, then stepped back.

"Your eye," she said. "Don't touch the scope. Just your eye."

Reza stepped forward. He put his eye to the eyepiece.

And there it was.

Jupiter.

It was a small bright disc, banded with soft horizontal stripes — reddish-brown and cream. Even at this low magnification, Reza could see the bands. And beside Jupiter, in a nearly straight line, were three tiny points of light. Three of the Galilean moons. One on one side, two on the other.

He could not breathe.

"Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto," Mrs. Henderson said quietly, behind him. "Which one is missing tonight?"

He tried to think. He tried to remember the chart he had made in his head.

"Io," he whispered. "Io is in front of Jupiter right now. It's a transit. You can't see it because it's against the bright disc of the planet."

"Very good."

He kept looking. He did not want to stop looking. The bands of Jupiter were more beautiful than any picture he had ever seen in any book, because they were real. They were actually there. This light had left Jupiter thirty-five minutes ago and had traveled across the dark of space, and some of it, a tiny fraction, was now going through the glass of Mrs. Henderson's telescope and into Reza's eye.

"Mrs. Henderson," he said.

"Yes."

"I can see it."

"I know."

"I can see it. I can actually see it."

"I know, Reza-jan."

She had not meant to use the Persian word. He heard her catch herself afterward, as if surprised at her own mouth. He did not say anything about it. He only stood there, with his eye to the glass, and looked, and looked, and looked.

Behind him, somewhere in the warm summer night, a firefly blinked.

His whole life had a before and an after, and the line between them was this moment.

He was ten years old.

He was looking at another world.

Over the rest of July, Reza went to Mrs. Henderson's back porch seven times.

He did not go every night. The sky did not cooperate every night. Some evenings there were thunderstorms rolling in from the west, great bruised clouds that piled up over the oak trees and let loose rain that rattled the roof like handfuls of pebbles. Some evenings were hazy, the kind of summer haze where you could see the moon but the dimmer stars gave up and hid. Mrs. Henderson would call the house and say, very briefly, "Not tonight. Too murky." And she would hang up. She did not waste words on the telephone.

But when the sky was clear, Reza would eat his dinner as early as his mother would allow, do the dishes (which was his regular chore), and walk around the block to Mrs. Henderson's front door at eight-thirty. He would ring the bell. She would open it. Sometimes she said "Good evening, Reza." Sometimes she only nodded and turned around, expecting him to follow.

They looked at Saturn. It was like nothing he had ever imagined. Saturn was small in the eyepiece — a tiny golden ball with a tiny golden ring — but the ring was sharp and perfect, and Reza could see the small gap called the Cassini Division, a dark thread separating the outer ring from the inner ring. He thought his heart might fall out of his chest.

They looked at double stars. Mrs. Henderson showed him Albireo, in the constellation Cygnus, which was actually two stars — one bright gold, one bright blue, side by side. She said some people thought it was the most beautiful double star in the sky.

"Walter used to say it was because it was a small piece of sunrise and a small piece of night, fixed together in glass," she said.

They looked at the double cluster in Perseus. They looked at the Ring Nebula, a tiny smoke ring hanging in the constellation Lyra, which was actually the exhaled breath of a dying star, thousands of light years away. They looked at the Moon when it was up — which was harder, Mrs. Henderson said, because the Moon was almost too bright through the telescope. She showed him how to put a gray filter in to cut down the glare. They studied craters. Copernicus. Tycho. Plato. She told him the names and made him repeat them. She quizzed him the next night.

"What is the largest crater near the terminator tonight?" she would say.

"Clavius," he would say.

"Good."

One evening — it was a Thursday, the last Thursday in July — she did not set up the telescope. It was a clear night, but she did not bring him out to the back porch. Instead she brought him into her living room, and she made them each a cup of tea, and she handed him a stack of books.

The books were old. They had soft cloth covers and the kind of smell old books have, a smell like vanilla and dust and summer attics. Reza held the top one with both hands. It was called Burnham's Celestial Handbook, Volume One.

"This was Walter's," said Mrs. Henderson. "These four were his. There are three volumes of Burnham. And this one —" she pointed to a slimmer book with a pale blue cover "— is Norton's Star Atlas, which is the finest star atlas ever made for amateurs. And this little paperback here, this is H. A. Rey, which is where you probably ought to start, actually, because it is the one I use with my beginners even when they are old."

"Mrs. Henderson, I can't — I can't take these."

"You are not taking them. You are borrowing them. Borrowing for the summer. When the summer is over, you can give them back or you can keep borrowing them or we can decide later. You will treat them with care. You will not write in them. You will not leave them in the rain. You will not use them as coasters or plates or frisbees. Yes?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"All right. Off you go."

He carried the books home. They weighed more than he had expected. The weight was the weight of a small library, and he walked very slowly and carefully, the way his mother had walked once carrying his baby cousin across a crowded room.

At the kitchen table, under the yellow lamp, he spread them out.

His mother came in from the living room to see.

"Oh," she said, when she saw the books. "Reza-jan."

She touched the cover of the Burnham's softly, the way she touched a loaf of fresh bread.

"That woman," she said. "That woman is made of some very good stuff."

"Maman, look at this." He opened the Burnham's to a random page. "Every star. Every galaxy. Every nebula. All of it. With the data. With the history. With the — the Greek stories, the mythology. Everything."

"You will read all this?"

"All of it."

"You will not understand everything."

"I will try."

"You will wear out your eyes."

"Maman —"

"I know, I know." She kissed his forehead. "You have your books. You have your stars. Go. Go, my son. Your baba and I will bring you food through the door when it is dinnertime."

That night Reza stayed up until his father came in and gently closed the Burnham's.

"Bed, star-boy."

"Just one more page, Baba."

"Bed. The stars will be there tomorrow."

"Yes, Baba."

He went to bed. He slept with one book on his chest. He slept deeply.

In the morning, his father said nothing, only smiled at him from across the table with an expression Reza could not quite read — something proud, something sad, the way his father had looked once when they listened together to a record of an old Persian singer whom Reza's grandfather had loved.

---

Samir called that Sunday.

Samir was Reza's cousin — not a first cousin, but a second cousin through his father's side. He was eleven. He lived outside Sacramento, in California, and he and Reza talked on the phone every other Sunday afternoon because their parents thought it was important that the two Persian boys in the family know each other. The phone was a landline because Reza's mother did not like phones that children could walk around with. The phone was in the kitchen, and you had to stand in the kitchen to use it.

"Reza-jan!"

"Samir-jan."

"What's up, man."

"I've been looking at Saturn."

"No way."

"Yes way. Through a real telescope. Next door neighbor."

"Shut up."

"Really."

Samir whistled through the phone line.

"You are so lucky. I have asked for a telescope every birthday since I was six and my parents said they would cost too much."

"I know. They do. This is — she is giving me time on hers. It is an 8-inch Celestron."

"Eight inches. That is big."

"Big enough."

"So what does Saturn look like."

Reza tried to explain. He tried to explain the ring, and the Cassini Division, and the small moons. Samir listened with his whole body; Reza could feel it through the phone.

"Reza."

"Yes."

"I am so jealous of you right now."

"Come visit."

"I wish."

"I mean it. Come visit. The sky is darker here than in California cities. Eleanor says."

"Who is Eleanor."

"The neighbor. Mrs. Henderson. I am starting to call her Eleanor in my head. I don't call her that out loud."

Samir laughed. Samir had a loud laugh that made the telephone crackle.

"Dude," he said. "You have an old lady friend."

"Shut up."

"I think that is the coolest thing."

"Shut up, Samir."

"No, really. I mean it. I do not have — anyone in our neighborhood that is — nobody here really knows my family. I mean, the kids at school, sure. But — I do not have anyone old. I do not have anyone who has, like, a thing she is excited to tell me about. Does that make sense."

"Yes."

"You have got a real thing, man. Hold on to it."

"Okay."

"Keep telling me about Saturn."

"Okay."

They talked for forty-five minutes, which was longer than they ever talked, and when Reza hung up, his hand was sweaty from the receiver.

His mother walked by with a laundry basket. She smiled.

"Samir is well?"

"Yes, Maman. He says he is jealous."

"That is the natural condition of cousins. Tell him we love him. Tell his parents we will call next week."

"Okay."

He went back outside.

---

In the second week of August, something small happened that did not feel small.

Reza was helping Mrs. Henderson pull weeds from the edge of her vegetable bed. She had a small raised bed near the garage where she grew a few tomatoes, a cucumber vine, some basil. The basil was going to seed. The tomatoes were the fat yellow kind, just starting to blush into red. Reza was on his knees pulling crabgrass, because crabgrass was the only weed he could identify reliably, and Mrs. Henderson was sitting on a small wooden stool beside him, pulling other things.

"Reza," she said.

"Yes."

"Tell me about your parents."

It was the first time she had asked.

"My baba works at the paint store on Maple Street. He used to be a poet. In Iran. My maman works at the library, Mrs. Peterson's library. She used to be a lecturer in Persian literature."

"Lecturer. Meaning a professor?"

"Yes. Well — almost. She was in the lower rank. She was trying to be promoted. Before we left."

"Ah."

"My sister Shirin is fourteen. She is moody."

"All fourteen-year-old girls are moody. That is the job."

"She was not always moody."

"No. Probably not."

Mrs. Henderson pulled a long stringy weed out of the ground with a small sigh.

"Why did your family leave Iran, Reza."

"We had to. We are Bahá'ís."

"Bahá'ís. Meaning your religion."

"Yes. The Bahá'í Faith. It started in Iran in the 1800s. But the government has always been — it has been hard for Bahá'ís. Sometimes very hard. My uncle was in prison for two years. My baba lost his job. So we came here."

"I see."

"Mrs. Henderson, have you heard of the Bahá'í Faith?"

"A little. Very little. I had a student once, many years ago, who was Bahá'í. A very quiet boy. He won the physics prize. Ramin something. I have never forgotten him."

"Ramin is a nice name."

"It is. Do you — do you follow the faith. Actively. You and your family."

"Yes. Not — we do not have a big temple here. There are Bahá'í communities in the bigger cities. My parents drive sometimes to Cleveland for gatherings. There is also an online community, online classes, for the children. I have a cousin Samir, he lives in California, and we talk on the phone about our studies. We say prayers. Not out loud, always. Quietly. In our hearts, my maman says."

"A candle inside the house."

Reza looked up, startled. "That is exactly what my maman says."

"It is a good way to say it. She is a poet, your mother, whether she writes poems or not."

He did not know what to say to that. He went back to pulling weeds.

"Reza."

"Yes."

"I would like, sometime, for you to tell me more. About your family. About where you come from. Is that all right."

"Yes, Mrs. Henderson. That is all right."

"Thank you."

They worked in silence for a while. The sun was hot on the back of Reza's neck. A bee landed on a tomato leaf and rubbed its face with its front legs.

"Mrs. Henderson," Reza said.

"Yes."

"Can you tell me something too? About your family?"

"I had a husband. His name was Walter. He was a high school math teacher. We met in graduate school in 1968. He proposed to me at the Perseid meteor shower in August of 1969. He was a very kind man. We were married for fifty-one years. He died of cancer six years ago.

"We have a son. His name is Mark. He is forty-six. He lives in California. He works in what they call tech, which I do not very much understand. He is married. No children. He visits when he can. Which is not often."

"Oh."

"That is my family. That is all of it."

She said these things as if they were items on a list — the way a person reports on the weather. But Reza saw that her hands had gone still on her lap. The weed between her fingers was forgotten.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"What for?"

"I don't know. About your husband. About your son living far away."

"Oh. Well. Thank you."

A car went by on the street. A bird called from the oak tree.

"Reza Farahani," Mrs. Henderson said.

"Yes."

"Would you like a glass of lemonade."

"Yes, please."

"Let's go inside."

They went inside. She poured him a glass of lemonade, from a glass pitcher that sweated on the counter. She poured herself one too. They sat at her kitchen table, which was made of yellow wood and had a woven green placemat in the center with a chipped pottery bowl of lemons on it.

They did not say anything more about families that day.

But Reza thought, riding home on the inside of himself, that a friendship is a kind of slow telescope. You point it at something you cannot quite see. You adjust. You wait for your eyes to adapt. And then, piece by piece, the thing comes into focus.

That night at dinner, he told his family that Mrs. Henderson had been married for fifty-one years.

"Fifty-one years," said his mother softly. "Oh, my."

"She said her husband's name was Walter. He was a math teacher. And they had a son but the son lives far away."

"She is lonely," said his father.

"Yes, Baba."

"It is good that you go to her, Reza-jan."

"She goes to me, too. She is not — she is not doing me a favor only. It is both of us, I think."

Shirin, across the table, said, "That is what friendship is, Reza."

He looked at her. It was a thing she had not said in months. A plain kind thing. She was chewing a bite of rice. She did not look at him when she said it. But she meant it.

"Yeah," he said. "Okay."

---

By the end of August, Reza had read the first volume of Burnham's. Most of it. He had skipped the parts that were too technical — the long lists of photometric data with columns of numbers — but he had read every entry about every constellation, every nebula, every double star. He had memorized things. He had copied drawings into his own notebook, which was now almost full.

On the last Saturday of August, Eleanor said, "We need to get you a notebook of your own, Reza. A proper observing notebook. Not a school notebook. Something you can keep for your whole life."

"Okay."

"Do you have one in mind?"

"No."

"I have one I can give you."

She went inside. She came back with a small black hardcover notebook, unused. It had no lines, only blank pages.

"Walter bought a case of these once. Twenty-four of them. He filled four of them before he got sick. The rest have been in a drawer. I would like you to use one. I would also like you to — when you fill it — come back for the next. I have nineteen of them. If you are very thorough, that is many years of observing."

"Thank you, Eleanor."

"Write your name on the first page. Write the date. Write what you saw tonight."

That night — a clear August night, the Milky Way visible overhead for the first time all summer because the moon was new and the haze had finally broken — Reza and Eleanor sat on her back porch for three hours. They looked at the Lagoon Nebula. They looked at the Omega Nebula. They looked at the globular cluster M13 in Hercules, which is a ball of hundreds of thousands of old stars orbiting the center of our galaxy, bound together by gravity into a shape like a diamond dropped in dust.

Reza wrote his first entry in the black notebook.

August 27. - M8 (Lagoon) — big fuzzy cloud, can see the dark lane through it - M17 (Omega/Swan) — really does look like a swan - M13 — sparkles. Edge stars resolved. Looks like a silver sneeze.

He showed Eleanor the last line. She read it. She snorted — actually snorted.

"A silver sneeze."

"Sorry."

"No. That is exactly right. A silver sneeze. I will never see M13 the same way again. I am stealing that."

"You can have it."

"I am stealing it and I am not paying you."

"Okay."

He closed the notebook. He felt, writing in it, that he was becoming a real astronomer. Not a pretend one. Not a dreaming-in-his-bedroom one. A real one.

That, too, was Eleanor's gift.

Fourth grade started on the Tuesday after Labor Day.

Reza was assigned to Room 12, Ms. Patel's class. He had had her in third grade too, for a reading specialist session twice a week, and he liked her. She wore colorful dresses with flowers on them and small round glasses that she often pushed up her nose with one finger. She was from somewhere in India — Reza was not quite sure where, and he did not want to ask in case it was rude. Her voice was musical. She sometimes broke into song while reading a story aloud, doing the voices of different characters, and the whole class would fall silent and listen.

On the first day, she sat the class in a circle on the carpet.

"Welcome, friends," she said. "We are going to have a wonderful year. We will read many books. We will do many experiments. We will learn many things that are difficult, and we will help each other with them. Yes?"

The class mumbled yes.

"Yes?" she said, louder.

"Yes!" the class shouted.

"Better. Now. Around the circle. Your name, and one thing you did this summer."

Reza was fifth to go. He said, "I am Reza. This summer I learned how to use a telescope."

A few of the kids nodded. One boy, Jason, said, "Cool." A girl with a blond ponytail — Brooke Ellis — did not say anything. She was looking at her sneakers.

Brooke Ellis was new. She had moved to Millbrook over the summer from somewhere down south, Reza had heard. She had a faint accent that came out on certain words. She was thin, with pale skin, and she kept to herself. In the two weeks of recess so far, Reza had not seen her talk to anyone.

For the first month of school, he did not think about her much. He had his own life. He had school, and chores, and his books from Mrs. Henderson's, and the back porch when the evenings were clear.

Then came the astronomy project.

"We are starting a new unit," Ms. Patel announced one Friday. "It is called Space, and It Is My Favorite. You will do a project in pairs. Pairs of your choice? No, no, I will assign the pairs. No groaning, please."

The class groaned.

"Your projects will be due on Friday, October tenth. Your project will be a large poster, neatly done, about a subject in space of your choosing. You may choose a planet. You may choose a constellation. You may choose a space mission. You may choose something from the history of astronomy. Partners, please do not fight. You will get along. You will share. Now — the pairs."

She read from her list. Reza waited. He hoped very much that he would be paired with Jason, who was his best friend at school. Jason was not particularly interested in science, but he was funny and easy to work with, and they would have had a good time.

"Reza Farahani," said Ms. Patel, "with Brooke Ellis."

Reza's heart sank.

He looked across the room. Brooke was looking at her hands. She did not look up.

That night, walking home from school, Reza complained to his mother.

"She never talks, Maman. How are we going to do a project if she never talks."

"Perhaps she will talk to you, Reza-jan. Perhaps she just needs a little time."

"She doesn't like me. She didn't even look at me when Ms. Patel said our names."

"That is not dislike. That is shyness. They are very different, azizam."

"Hmph."

"What is the project to be about."

"I haven't decided. We haven't decided."

"Well, that is a good start. Decide together. Ask her what she cares about. You will see."

He did not, right away. For two days they sat next to each other in class during the reading hour, and neither of them said anything about the project. On the third day, Ms. Patel came over to their table and said quietly, "Reza. Brooke. You two need a topic by Monday. Have you talked?"

"We're going to," Reza said.

"Talk now. Go on. Quietly."

She walked away. Reza looked at Brooke. Brooke was drawing small squares in the margin of her spelling notebook.

"Brooke," he said.

"Yeah."

"What do you want to do for the project."

"I don't know. Whatever."

"We have to pick."

"Okay."

"Do you like space."

She shrugged. "Sure. I guess."

Reza was beginning to feel frustrated. "Do you have something you like more? A planet? A thing?"

She looked up at him for the first time. She had gray-green eyes.

"You really like space, don't you," she said.

"Yes."

"I could tell. You said it on the first day."

"Yeah."

She was quiet for a second.

"I used to like Mars," she said.

"Used to?"

"My brother had a poster of Mars in his room. He was really into it. He wanted to be one of the people who goes there someday."

"That's cool. Where is your brother?"

She looked back at her notebook.

"He died last year," she said.

The whole room seemed to get very quiet, even though it was not quiet, even though Ms. Patel was across the room reading a poem aloud to two other students.

"I'm sorry," Reza said.

"It's okay. I mean, it's not okay. But it's — you don't have to say anything."

"We can do Mars," Reza said.

"You don't have to —"

"We can do Mars. I like Mars. I like Mars a lot."

She looked at him. Her eyes were very careful.

"Okay," she said. "Okay."

---

They started meeting at recess in the library corner. Brooke, it turned out, had a sketchbook. She was a good artist — not fancy good, just careful good, the way some kids just know how to draw shapes that look like the thing. She could draw the shape of Mars with one pen stroke. Reza could not.

"You do the writing," Brooke said. "I'll do the pictures."

"Okay."

"What should the pictures be."

"Olympus Mons. It is the largest volcano in the whole solar system. Three times taller than Mount Everest."

"Whoa."

"And Valles Marineris. It is a canyon that would reach all the way from New York to Los Angeles."

"Why does Mars get all the crazy stuff?"

"Because it is smaller. And has less gravity. And no plate tectonics. So volcanoes can build up big over time and never get chopped up and moved around."

"Wait. Really?"

"Yeah."

"How do you know all this, Reza."

"I have been reading about it. My — my friend, Mrs. Henderson, she lent me a book about the planets."

"Mrs. Henderson. The old lady who lives next door to you?"

"Yes. She is an astronomer."

"An astronomer."

"A retired one. She used to teach astronomy in high school."

"That is the coolest thing I have ever heard."

Reza felt a small warm thing rise up in his chest. It was pride, maybe. Or gladness that somebody else understood.

"She has a telescope," he said. "Eight inches. On her back porch. Sometimes I go over and we look at things."

"Like what things."

"Jupiter. Saturn. Last week we saw the Ring Nebula. It's like a smoke ring. It's actually a star that died and puffed off its outer layer, and the layer is still glowing."

Brooke was looking at him with her mouth a little bit open.

"Reza."

"Yeah."

"Could I — would she let me — could I come over sometime. And see."

Reza had not thought about this possibility. It sat in his mind for a second, looking back at him.

"I would have to ask," he said.

"Okay."

"But — I think she would say yes. She likes people who care."

"Okay."

They went back to Mars. Reza wrote the text. Brooke drew the pictures. She drew Olympus Mons as a low wide cone with a caldera on top. She drew the rovers, little wheeled boxes with solar panels. She drew Mars itself, hanging in space, with a tiny red dot beside it that was supposed to be a person.

"Who is that," Reza asked.

"My brother. I drew him small. For Mars."

Reza did not say anything for a moment.

"He would have been the first one there," Brooke said quietly, to the paper.

"Yes," Reza said. "He would have."

They finished the project two nights before it was due. It was the best poster in the class. Ms. Patel held it up for the class to see, and she told the whole fourth grade that this, this, was what a good project looked like — researched, drawn carefully, and presented with love.

Brooke turned pink. Reza turned pink. They did not look at each other, but Reza could feel her pride and his pride touching each other in the air, the way the pink and gold of Albireo touched each other in the eyepiece.

On the way out of class that day, Brooke stopped him at the door.

"Thank you," she said. "For the Mars thing."

"You did half of it."

"Yeah. But. You know."

"Yeah."

"Reza."

"Yeah."

"What does it mean. Your name. Does it mean something in — in your language."

"It means 'contentment.' In Persian. My parents picked it because — they said they wanted me to grow up content. Even if we had to leave. Even if things were hard."

"Contentment."

"Yeah."

"That is a really good name."

"Thanks. What does yours mean?"

"I don't know. I'll ask my mom."

---

The next afternoon, Reza asked Eleanor.

They were on her back porch. The evening was warm but with a cooler edge to it, the edge of autumn. Orange light lay across the yard.

"Eleanor."

"Yes."

"I have a friend from school. Her name is Brooke. She is new. Her brother died last year. We did a project together on Mars."

"And."

"And she asked if she could come look through the telescope."

Eleanor was not quick to answer. She did not say yes and she did not say no.

"What kind of girl is she," Eleanor said.

"Quiet. Thoughtful. A good drawer. She likes Mars because her brother liked Mars."

"Is she the sort of girl who will listen to instructions?"

"I think so."

"Is she respectful."

"I think so."

Eleanor was quiet another moment.

"All right, Reza-jan. You may bring her. One time. We will see if she is a porch friend or not."

"Thank you."

"I do not take in all the lost things in the world. I am only one old woman. But I will take in one more, for a night. Bring her Friday. I will bake something."

---

Brooke came that Friday with her mother. Her mother, it turned out, was tall and freckled and had a soft Kentucky accent. She and Eleanor talked in the kitchen while Reza and Brooke went out to the telescope. Reza showed Brooke how to focus. He showed her Venus, which was bright and crescent in the west. He showed her the first-quarter moon, because the Moon was up early that night, and he let her linger over the craters along the terminator for a long time.

"Reza."

"Yeah."

"This is amazing."

"I know."

"I — I don't — " she stopped. She stood back from the telescope. She was looking up at the sky without the telescope. "He would have loved this."

"Yes."

"He was only fourteen."

"I'm sorry."

"It wasn't — it wasn't anything anybody did. He had a — a heart thing. Nobody knew. He went to sleep and did not wake up."

Reza did not know what to say. So he said nothing, and he stood next to her, and he looked up at the same stars she was looking at.

"Reza."

"Yeah."

"I hadn't — I hadn't cried about it in — I don't know, months. Almost."

"It's okay."

"It just — when I saw — "

"It's okay, Brooke."

He handed her a handkerchief. It was the one his mother made him carry every day, a small cloth square. She took it. She wiped her eyes.

When they went back into the kitchen, Eleanor handed Brooke a small piece of shortbread.

"I baked too much, as usual," she said. "Put a few in a napkin for the ride home."

"Thank you, Mrs. Henderson," Brooke said.

"Brooke-jan," Eleanor said — and Reza's ears perked up at the jan, the Persian ending of endearment, which Eleanor must have picked up from him and his mother — "come back. You are welcome here. Both of you. Our porch is big enough."

Brooke nodded. She did not trust herself to speak.

It was how small a world could be when it was good.

Mrs. Henderson's son Mark came to visit on the second Saturday of October.

Reza did not know he was coming until he saw the unfamiliar silver car in Mrs. Henderson's driveway. It was a rental car, with a small barcode sticker on the rear window. Reza was walking home from the library carrying a book called The Planets by Dava Sobel, which Mrs. Peterson had recommended. He slowed down in front of Mrs. Henderson's house.

He could see, through the front window, two figures in the living room. Mrs. Henderson was one of them. The other was a tall man with graying hair, wearing a dark blue sweater. He was talking. Mrs. Henderson was sitting with her hands folded in her lap, not talking.

Reza went home.

That night, at the dinner table, he told his mother.

"Her son is visiting."

"Is he? That is nice."

"I don't think she likes it."

"Reza, you do not know this. Maybe she is happy to see him. They are family."

"He was talking and she was just sitting. Her hands were folded like this." Reza imitated Mrs. Henderson's hands in her lap. "When she is happy, her hands are doing things. When she is angry, her hands are still."

His mother looked at him over her teacup.

"You have become a very careful observer, my son."

"I don't know. I just noticed."

"That is what a careful observer is."

---

Mark stayed at his mother's house for two days. Reza saw him once in the front yard on Sunday morning, carrying a cardboard box from the house to the rental car. He did not look like Mrs. Henderson. He was taller, broader, with a square jaw. His hair was mostly silver but had black streaks in it. He looked, Reza thought, tired. Not sleepy tired. The other kind. The kind where the tiredness is in the shoulders.

Mrs. Henderson called Reza on Monday afternoon.

"Reza."

"Yes, Mrs. Henderson."

"Would you come over for a little while this evening. The sky will be clear. Uranus is well placed. We might try for it. It is a faint dot but it is a dot."

"Yes, Mrs. Henderson."

"Tell your mother."

"Yes, Mrs. Henderson."

When he got to her house at eight-thirty, the front door was already open a crack. He pushed it gently.

"Mrs. Henderson?"

"In the kitchen, Reza."

She was sitting at the kitchen table. She had a cup of tea in front of her, but she did not seem to be drinking it. The little gray dog, Pip, was on the floor beside her chair.

"Come sit for a minute," she said.

He sat.

She looked at him. Her face was different tonight. It was a little tighter around the mouth. Her eyes were tired.

"My son was here this weekend," she said.

"I saw his car."

"Oh. Yes. Of course you did. You see everything."

"Not everything."

"Most things."

She smiled at her tea. It was not a happy smile.

"Mark is very worried about me, Reza. He thinks I should not be living alone. He thinks I should sell this house and move to a facility. An assisted-living facility, they are called. There is one in Dayton he has been looking at. He brought brochures."

Reza's throat went tight. He did not know what to say.

"I did not — " she stopped. Her voice was steady but her hands, he noticed, were folded again. Perfectly still.

"I did not leave the house, Reza. I did not agree to anything. I said I would think about it. And then he was disappointed, as he always is, and then we did not talk very much, and then he went to the airport."

"Oh."

"I am seventy-nine years old, Reza. I have lived in this house for twenty-eight years. I have pruned the roses in this yard with my own hands for twenty-eight years. I have looked at the stars from that back porch for twenty-eight years. I do not wish to leave."

"Then you shouldn't."

"Ha. Well. It is not quite that simple. My son is not wrong about everything. The yard is getting away from me. The steps up to the back porch, I — I do not climb them as easily as I used to. The roof needs work. I had a small fall last spring. Not serious, but. Not nothing."

She took a sip of her tea.

"Still. Not yet. Not yet."

They sat in silence.

"Mrs. Henderson."

"Yes."

"Can I make you another cup of tea? This one must be cold by now."

She looked at him. For one short second, she looked as if she might cry. Then she did not.

"Yes, Reza Farahani. I would like another cup of tea. The kettle is still warm. The tea is in the cupboard above the stove. Please and thank you."

He got up. He found the kettle. He found the tea — a box of Irish Breakfast. He warmed the cup with hot water first, the way she had taught him, and then poured out the warming water and steeped the tea for four minutes with a small saucer over the top. He brought it to her. He set it down.

"Thank you, Reza-jan," she said.

He sat down again.

"Should we skip the telescope tonight?" he asked.

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Uranus will not be well placed again this year, Reza. The sky does not wait for our feelings. Come. We will go outside."

They went outside. They did not find Uranus on the first try. On the second try, Mrs. Henderson let Reza do the star-hopping himself, from a bright guide star to the dim blue-green dot of the planet, and when he finally saw it — a tiny fuzzy disc, not a point, proving that it was a world and not a star — he whispered "I got it" and Mrs. Henderson said, very quietly, "Well done."

She put a hand on his shoulder.

Her hand was very light, like a small bird that had landed for just a moment.

She left it there while he kept looking.

After, inside, she said — almost to herself, while boiling fresh water —

"There is a poem, Reza. Do you know Edna St. Vincent Millay."

"No."

"She wrote many poems. One of them has a line I have carried around for sixty years. Listen."

*Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.* *Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,* *And lay them prone upon the earth and cease* *To ponder on themselves.*

She opened her eyes.

"Do you understand that?"

"Mostly."

"She is saying — only the geometer, the mathematician, the one who studies real structures, has really seen what beauty is. Because beauty is not in the feeling. Beauty is in the thing itself. The way the thing works."

"Like the rings of Saturn."

"Yes. Like the rings of Saturn. Good boy."

"Eleanor."

"Yes."

"Your son. When he comes back next time. Maybe you can show him Saturn."

She paused. She looked at Reza for a long moment.

"Reza-jan. Mark was not always like this. He was a boy once. A small boy. He used to come out and help Walter set up the scope. He used to call the craters by name. And then he grew up, and he — he went one way, and we went another. It is no one's fault. It is just that sometimes the magnetic field of the family shifts and some of us end up facing a different pole. Do you follow?"

"I think so."

"Maybe. Someday. I will show him Saturn again. If he ever sits still long enough."

"I hope so."

"Thank you, Reza. That is a kind hope."

November came. The leaves went red, then yellow, then brown. The oak tree in the backyard dropped its acorns all at once, as if it had been holding them all year and had finally decided to let go. Reza's father raked and raked. Shirin was fifteen now — her birthday had been in October — and she listened to louder music.

Reza's father finished a poem.

Reza did not know his father had been writing a poem. He did not know anyone in the house knew. It had been happening in the mornings, apparently — before work, before anyone was up, in the kitchen with the radio turned low. For months.

On a Saturday night in the middle of November, the porch light was on. Reza's father was sitting on the porch step in his old brown cardigan, a notebook in his lap. He had a pen in his hand. When Reza came out, his father looked up.

"Baba. Are you writing?"

"Yes, my son."

"You haven't — " Reza stopped. He did not want to say a rude thing.

"I have not written in a long time. Yes. You are right."

"Is it a poem?"

"It is."

"Is it finished?"

"As finished as a poem ever gets."

"Can I read it?"

His father tilted his head at him. The porch light fell on half his face. His father was a handsome man, even in his tiredness. His beard had come in more gray this autumn.

"It is in Persian, Reza."

"Oh."

"But I will translate. Come. Sit."

Reza sat beside him on the step. The night was cold enough that his breath made small ghosts in the air.

His father cleared his throat.

"The poem," he said, "is called Nameh beh Dokhtaram — Letter to My Daughter. It is for your sister."

"For Shirin?"

"Yes. But also for you. And for your maman. But mostly for Shirin."

"Why Shirin?"

"Because Shirin is the one who is the angriest, Reza-jan. Your mother has her work. She has her library and her bread. She has found a small way to be at peace. You have your stars. You have your Mrs. Henderson. You have chosen, already, to make this place your place. But Shirin — Shirin lost a world. She remembers it. She has not yet found her own way to put it down and pick up a new one. It is harder for her. Much harder."

"Oh."

"So I wrote her a letter. In the form of a poem. It is what I know how to do."

He began to read. He read first in Persian, in a voice low and even. Reza did not understand most of the words, but he understood the sound, which was like slow rain, and the rise and fall of it, which was like waves. Reza's father had a good voice. A voice that knew where each word should rest.

When he finished the Persian, he read the English. Reza listened carefully.

The poem was not what Reza had expected. It was not angry. It was not sad, exactly. It was a letter, as promised — a letter from a father to a daughter who was hurting. It told her that it was right for her to hurt, that the losing of a country was a real thing and not to be argued away. It told her that grief could be carried for a long time without becoming poison, if it was set down sometimes, like a heavy basket. It told her that the word "home" was larger than one house. That memory was a long lantern. That love was not a place.

At the end, the poem said — and Reza would remember the lines in English for the rest of his life —

*The stars we see are the same stars.* *Whichever sky we stand beneath,* *The light reaching us now* *Left its source long before we were born.* *We are always, my daughter,* *Looking at a thing we have already lost,* *And finding that we love it still.*

When his father finished reading, he closed the notebook.

Reza did not say anything.

His father did not say anything either.

The porch light flickered. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked twice and then stopped.

"Baba," Reza said.

"Yes."

"Will you give the poem to Shirin."

"Yes. Tomorrow. I will put it under her door."

"Will she like it?"

"She will not say so. Not for a long time. Maybe never. But she will read it. And she will keep it. And somewhere inside her, Reza-jan, she will hear it."

"Baba."

"Yes."

"The thing you said — the stars we see are the same stars —"

"Yes?"

"That is exactly what I have been trying to say all year. I have not said it so well. But that is — that is what I think."

His father looked at him.

His father, who did not often hug him — who, like many men of his generation from his country, was more comfortable with the hand on the shoulder and the kiss on the forehead than with the full embrace — his father put his arm around Reza's shoulders and pulled him close. Reza leaned against his father's old brown cardigan. It smelled like paint and pipe tobacco and a little bit of tea.

"Then we are looking at the same thing, my son."

"Yes, Baba."

"That is a good thing to learn."

They sat a long time. The stars moved in their slow careful way above the rooftops of Maple Street. After a while, Reza's mother came to the door.

"Are you two going to catch your deaths out there?"

"One more minute, Mahnaz-jan."

"One minute."

She closed the door.

One minute became many minutes. They did not count.

---

Shirin read the poem the next day. Reza did not see her read it. He only saw, at dinner, the way she kept looking at their father, and then looking down, and then looking at their father again. She did not speak much at dinner. But she helped clear the dishes, which she had not been doing lately. She did not put her headphones on.

That night, very late, Reza heard — through the thin wall between their rooms — the sound of his sister crying. Not sad crying. Not loud crying. The kind of crying that is a letting go. A slow emptying.

He did not get up. He did not go to her. He only listened, and let her cry, and knew, knew in a way he had not known before, that his father had done a thing with words that no telescope could do. Words could reach into places that light could not.

In late November, a thing happened that Reza had been afraid of without knowing he was afraid.

Mrs. Henderson got sick.

It was not a terrible sickness. It was pneumonia, or the start of pneumonia, or what her doctor called "a bad chest cold that is behaving badly in an old woman." She called Reza on a Tuesday night — her voice small and scratched — to say she would not be observing for a while. Probably a couple of weeks. She apologized. She said she would telephone him when she was better.

Then she did not telephone for four days.

Reza began to worry. He did not want to be rude. He did not want to bother a sick person. But on the fifth day, he asked his mother.

"Maman. Do you think Mrs. Henderson is all right?"

"I have wondered the same thing, azizam. I will call her this afternoon."

She called. Mrs. Henderson answered on the sixth ring. Reza heard his mother's half of the conversation from the kitchen table.

"Mrs. Henderson? This is Mahnaz Farahani… Yes… Yes… Oh, I am sorry to hear… No, not at all. I would be happy to. May I bring you something? Some soup, perhaps. I make a — I make a chicken soup. With noodles. My own mother's recipe… Yes… No, it is no trouble. Reza will come with me. We will leave it at the door if you prefer… Yes… Yes, of course. This evening. I will see you then. Please rest. Yes. Goodbye."

She hung up.

She turned to Reza.

"She sounds very tired, Reza-jan. She has not eaten very well. The doctor has given her medicine. She is improving but slowly. We will go at seven."

They went at seven. Reza's mother carried a large glass container of soup, still warm, wrapped in a dish towel. Reza carried a paper bag with a small loaf of the flatbread his mother baked on Tuesdays — barbari, slightly charred along the edges, sprinkled with black and white sesame seeds.

They rang the bell.

Mrs. Henderson answered in her blue bathrobe. She looked small inside it. Her hair was not brushed. Her eyes were tired. But she smiled to see them.

"Come in," she said. "Forgive me. I am not dressed."

"There is nothing to forgive," said Reza's mother.

They went to the kitchen. Reza's mother heated the soup on the stove. She cut a piece of the bread and put it on a plate beside the bowl. Reza watched Mrs. Henderson sit down at the table. She put her hands around the warm bowl, not to eat yet, but just to feel the warmth.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that is lovely."

"Eat, Mrs. Henderson. It will do you good."

"I will. Thank you. Thank you both."

Reza's mother sat down across from her. She folded her hands on the table, the same way Mrs. Henderson folded hers. The two women looked at each other.

"I understand from my son," his mother said, "that you have been very kind to him this summer. And into the autumn. I have wanted to tell you, for some months, how much your kindness has meant. I have not known quite how. I am — it is a little hard for me, sometimes, to speak of important things quickly. So I have waited. And now you are sick, and I am sorry for it, but I am also — here we are. And I would like to thank you."

Mrs. Henderson was looking at the soup. She did not lift her eyes. Her spoon was still in her hand.

"Mrs. Farahani," she said quietly, "your son has been the best thing to happen to me in a number of years. Ahead of even my own son. Which is a complicated thing to say about one's own son. But there it is."

"Ah."

"I have not been a good neighbor to you in the past. I have wanted to say that as well. When you moved in, six years ago — or is it seven — I was still — Walter was still sick then. I did not have it in me to — to open the door to anyone. And then after he died I did not have it in me either. And then I got into the habit of not opening the door. And habits, as you know, are hard to break."

"They are."

"I am glad the door is open now."

"So am I."

"Your son told me you were a lecturer. In Iran. A professor."

"Yes. In Persian literature."

"That is an extraordinary field."

"It is. It was."

"Was?"

"Mrs. Henderson — may I call you Eleanor?"

"Please do. And may I call you — forgive me, I have been rude, I know your son's name but I do not know —"

"Mahnaz."

"Mahnaz. Thank you."

"Eleanor. I — I was a lecturer in Iran. I loved the work. I loved my students. When we had to leave, I could not do the same kind of work here. My English was not good enough, at first. And then even when my English got better, the — the system of getting a job, the accreditation, the — the permissions — it was a mountain I did not have time to climb. I had two small children. My husband was working at the paint store. We had to eat. So I took a job at the library. Shelving books. Reading to children. Helping people find the book they want. And it is a — it is a good job. I am grateful for it."

"But it is not your work."

Mahnaz was quiet for a long time.

"No," she said at last. "It is not my work. It is a job. A good one. But not my work. My work was — my work was walking into a room of twenty young people and showing them a line of Hafez, and watching one of them understand it. My work was the face of the one student who understood. That face — that is what I have lost."

Eleanor was still looking at her soup. A single tear went down her nose. She did not try to hide it. She only nodded.

"I understand," she said. "My work was — was much like yours. For forty-one years. The face of the student who understood. When I retired, Walter was sick, and I thought the retiring would be easy because I had him. And then he died, and I was not — I was not a teacher anymore, and I was not a wife anymore, and I was — I was not sure what I was. For a long time."

"Yes."

"And then a ten-year-old Persian boy hopped my fence."

Mahnaz laughed, despite herself. It was a watery laugh.

"He is sometimes a great deal of trouble, my son."

"He is. I have made him pull many weeds."

"Good."

"Mahnaz."

"Yes."

"I have wanted to ask — you are Bahá'í."

"Yes."

"I do not know much about it. Reza has told me a little. But I would like to know more, if you would ever like to tell me."

Mahnaz looked at her for a long moment.

"Perhaps, Eleanor, when you are well, you will come to our house one evening for dinner. I will make rice. I will make tahdig — the crispy rice from the bottom of the pot, which is the part my son fights his sister for. My husband will tell you about our faith if you wish to hear. He is better at speaking of it than I am. Or my son will tell you — he has his own way of thinking about these things. Or we will not speak of faith at all. We will just eat, and be warm. Whatever you like."

"I would like that very much."

"Good. Eat your soup, azizam."

The word slipped out. Reza saw his mother catch it in her mouth a second too late — she had called Mrs. Henderson 'my dear,' the word she used for her own family. But the word was out. It could not be taken back.

Eleanor only smiled. She took a spoon of soup.

"This is wonderful," she said.

"Thank you."

"What is the broth made with."

"Turmeric. A little cinnamon. Lemon. A lot of dill at the end, after the cooking."

"There is nothing like this where I grew up. I grew up in Iowa. The soup there was — less interesting."

Mahnaz laughed again.

Reza sat quietly and listened. He listened to the sound of two women, from two countries, in their fifties and seventies, finding one another in a small kitchen. He listened to the sound of his mother's accent laughing. He listened to the sound of Mrs. Henderson — Eleanor — giving up a little of the high stiff thing she had carried inside her for a long time.

When they left, Eleanor was standing at the door wrapped in her bathrobe.

"Mahnaz," she said.

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"You are welcome."

"Come back."

"I will."

They walked home under a sky that was too cloudy for stars that night. Reza's mother had her hand on his shoulder.

"Reza-jan," she said.

"Yes."

"You have opened more than a fence this summer."

He did not know what to say to that. So he only leaned against her as they walked.

In December, a small comet appeared.

It was not a great comet. It was not one of the bright ones that show up every few decades and make the newspapers. It was a modest comet, called Comet Ashford, named after the amateur astronomer who had spotted it four months earlier. Through a telescope, it was a small fuzzy ball with a short straight tail, about the brightness of a faint star, easy to miss if you did not know where to look.

Mrs. Henderson knew where to look.

She had been out of bed for two weeks by then. She was not all the way back to herself — she got tired faster, she coughed sometimes at the end of a sentence — but she was up, and she was in her chair, and when the sky was clear and the wind was low, she wanted to be on the back porch.

"We will try for it tonight," she told Reza on the phone. "Put on long underwear."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Thick socks. Two pairs. A hat over your ears. A coat and a scarf. The comet will not be easy. You will be cold."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Bring a thermos. Tell your mother I said so."

He told his mother. His mother filled a thermos with hot tea — sweetened with honey, plus a small piece of cardamom pod, the way she made it — and she packed a second one with hot water for Mrs. Henderson. She tucked a small plastic container of date cookies into Reza's pocket.

He walked over. The night was cold. His breath made ghosts.

Eleanor was already set up. She was wearing a long puffy coat over her trousers, and a knit hat pulled low, and fingerless gloves so she could still work the knobs. The telescope was pointed at a place low in the southeast. A star chart lay on the small table, held open by a rock.

"Take a minute to let your eyes adapt," she said. "Sit. Drink something warm. Don't look at any lights."

He sat. He poured tea from his thermos into the little screw-top cap, and he drank, and he looked at nothing but the grass in the dark. His eyes slowly widened.

When he turned back to the sky, there were more stars than there had been. Always that small magic, he thought. Just by waiting, by letting the pupils open, you could summon more stars into being.

"Are we ready," she said.

"Yes."

"Come."

They found the comet by star-hopping — by using the star chart, and the finderscope, and a little patience, to work their way across a patch of sky from a brighter guide star to a fainter one to the comet itself.

It was small. A soft round smudge, fuzzy at the edges, with a hint of a tail going up and to the left.

"I got it," Reza said.

"Good boy."

"It's beautiful."

"It is a ball of dirty ice from the outer solar system, Reza. It has been falling toward the sun for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions. And we are the first people on this block, possibly in this county, to see it tonight. It will come no closer. It will round the sun next month and swing out again and we will not see it for another ten thousand years."

"Ten thousand years."

"Yes."

"I won't be here in ten thousand years."

"No."

"You won't either."

"No. I will be gone much sooner than ten thousand years, Reza."

He had not meant it that way. He turned to apologize.

"Oh, hush, I am not offended. I am seventy-nine. I know what seventy-nine is. I am only telling you the truth. Come. Look again. Memorize it. This is your comet now. No one else who looks at it after you will be exactly the same you. Every time the comet comes back, there will be a new you, or no you at all. The comet will not care. But you — you will remember tonight the rest of your life."

He looked again. He tried to memorize it. The soft round fuzz. The feather of tail.

They did not speak for a while.

"Reza."

"Yes."

"I want to give you something."

"Oh."

"Come inside. It is too cold to hand over small objects with gloves on."

They went inside. In the kitchen, she went to a drawer and took out a small wooden box. It was the size of a loaf of bread. She set it on the table.

"This was Walter's," she said.

"Mrs. Henderson — Eleanor — you don't have to —"

"Hush. I am going to explain. Sit."

He sat.

She opened the box. Inside, nestled in small felt beds, were five eyepieces — little dark cylinders with lenses at either end, each one labeled with a number in white paint. Some were short and stubby. One was long and elegant. They looked like miniature telescopes themselves.

"These are Walter's eyepieces. He bought them over many years. Each one — " she picked one up, the long elegant one — "each one is for a different magnification. This one is a 25-millimeter Plössl. Very good general-purpose eyepiece. Good for finding things. Good for wide views. Good for teaching children."

She held it out.

"I want you to have this one."

"Eleanor, no. I can't —"

"Reza Farahani. I am seventy-nine. My son, as you know, lives in California. My son is not interested in astronomy. My son will not open this box when I am gone. He will donate the whole lot to Goodwill, or sell it on the internet. I love my son. I do not judge him for this. But I love this eyepiece more than my son loves this eyepiece. Do you follow?"

"Yes."

"Walter bought it in 1995. He used it more than any of the others. It is the one he used the night we saw Hale-Bopp together. The comet of the century. In March of 1997. Sitting on the back porch of our old house, before we moved here. He used this eyepiece that night."

"Oh."

"I want it to keep looking at the sky, Reza. I do not want it to end up in a box in a garage. I want it to see Jupiter again. And Saturn. And whatever new comets come along. And I want it to belong to a person who loves what Walter loved. Do you understand what I am asking?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Say yes."

"Yes. I would be — I would be honored."

"Good."

She closed his hand around the eyepiece. Her hand was thin and cold.

"Honored is a very big word, Reza-jan. I will tell you that Walter would have liked you. He would have been very pleased to have an honored star-boy inheriting his favorite piece of glass. He was not solemn about his things, but he loved them. Like a boy loves his marbles."

"Thank you, Eleanor."

"You are welcome. Now. Drink your tea before it is ice."

He drank his tea.

He held the eyepiece in one hand the whole time.

Later, walking home with it zipped inside his coat against his chest, he realized he had been entrusted with something even bigger than the eyepiece. He had been entrusted with a piece of a stranger's life — a stranger he had never met, a man named Walter who had loved his wife and his glass and his sky. He did not know quite how to carry that. But he would learn. He would try.

The stars were bright that night. Very bright. And the eyepiece was warm against his chest.

---

That Naw-Rúz — the Bahá'í new year, which falls on the first day of spring — would not come until March. But Reza's mother had begun to speak of it as December ended, the way she always did. Naw-Rúz was the one celebration in the calendar that felt, to Reza, most like home. His mother set out a Haft-Sîn table — seven things whose Persian names began with the letter S, arranged on a white cloth. A bowl of sprouted wheatgrass. A small dish of senjed berries. A silver coin. A painted egg. A mirror. A candle. A goldfish swimming in a clear bowl.

Reza had told Eleanor about the Haft-Sîn once, in passing, in November, and she had asked him many questions. What do the seven things mean? Why a mirror? Why a goldfish? When he did not know the answers, he had asked his mother. His mother had written them down on a piece of paper for Eleanor. The mirror reflected heaven. The candle was life. The coin was wealth. The sprouted wheat was new life in spring. The goldfish was — well, the goldfish, his mother said, was the goldfish. Sometimes things simply were themselves.

"I would like to see this," Eleanor had said. "When the time comes."

"We will have you."

"Good. I will bring — what should I bring."

"Yourself."

"Besides myself."

"Nothing. You are our guest."

"Mahnaz."

"Yes."

"I have not been a guest at an Iranian dinner in my entire life."

"Then it is time, Eleanor-jan. Naw-Rúz is in March. You will come."

But Naw-Rúz was still many weeks away. December turned into January. The snows came.

Winter deepened. January brought snow. The telescope stayed mostly in its case because the temperatures were too low to leave the optics uncovered for long. Reza and Eleanor met instead in her living room, where she started teaching him how to read star charts properly, and how to use the software on her old laptop to plan observing sessions, and how to keep a simple log of what he had seen — a spiral notebook with dates and times and names and drawings.

He drew Jupiter from memory. His drawings were not good. Eleanor did not care.

"It is the looking, not the drawing," she told him. "The drawing is only to make sure you actually looked."

February brought a long stretch of gray.

March brought the first hint of warmth. One morning in the second week of March, Reza opened the back door and smelled, for the first time in months, the smell of wet earth. Not snow-earth, which smells like metal. Spring-earth, which smells like life about to begin.

And it brought Naw-Rúz.

Eleanor came for dinner on the evening of the first day of spring. She arrived in a pale green blouse and gray trousers, carrying a bouquet of daffodils. Reza's mother kissed her on both cheeks. His father bowed slightly. Shirin was on her best behavior, which meant she did not slouch and did not check her phone. The Haft-Sîn table was set up in the corner of the living room, and the goldfish — whose name was Jupiter, Reza had insisted on naming him Jupiter — was swimming slowly in circles.

Eleanor studied the table. She studied every object. She asked questions. Reza's mother answered.

"And the mirror, Mahnaz."

"The mirror is for — for reflection. For thinking. For looking at oneself. Naw-Rúz is also a time to begin again. So the mirror is for beginning."

"Hm."

Eleanor looked at herself in the mirror. Her face in the mirror was faint and a little tired but not unhappy.

"I am — I am beginning again too, Mahnaz."

"Eleanor?"

"I will be moving in May. I have decided. I did not tell you yet. I am telling you now. To Bremen. The assisted-living place. I had not fully decided. Yesterday I decided. I will tell Reza later. I did not want to spoil the evening."

Reza's mother put a hand on her arm.

"It is not spoiled," she said. "It is deepened."

Dinner was enormous. Reza had not seen his mother cook so much in years. There was the saffron rice with tahdig. There was a huge platter of grilled fish with herbs. There was a khoresh — a stew of chicken and barberries and saffron — that was the color of a sunset. There was fresh bread, pickled things, a cool bowl of mast-o-khiar — cucumber yogurt. There was a small mountain of pomegranate seeds glittering in a bowl. Eleanor ate slowly, carefully, asking the name of each thing.

Reza's father, at the head of the table, said a short Bahá'í prayer before the meal. He said it first in Arabic, which was the language many Bahá'í prayers were first written in, and then in English. It was a prayer of thanks for food. It was not a long prayer. Eleanor closed her eyes while he said it. When he finished, he said, "Thank you for being our guest, Eleanor."

"Thank you for having me."

"Our house is your house, Eleanor-jan. For this meal. For all meals. As long as there is a Farahani on this earth."

Eleanor's eyes were very bright.

"Farhad," she said, "you — you Persians — there is a generosity in your speech that is unusual."

"It is the custom."

"It is a good custom."

After dinner, they had tea and small pastries. Shirin played a recording of old Persian music on her phone — the first time Reza had seen her offer music to the family in over a year. An old woman's voice sang a slow song of love and loss. Eleanor listened.

"What is she singing."

"She is singing a poem by Rumi," Reza's mother said. "She is singing — 'Listen to the reed, how it tells its tale, complaining of separation.' It is a famous opening. The reed has been cut from the reed bed, and now it makes music, because it is grieving for the place it came from."

"Oh."

"Every Persian child learns this poem. The first lines of the Masnavi."

Eleanor closed her eyes. She listened to the singer for a long time.

"We are all cut reeds, then."

"Yes. That is what Rumi says."

"That is — that is a very good way to say it."

When Eleanor prepared to leave, Reza's mother handed her a small dish covered with plastic wrap — leftovers. And a small folded piece of paper.

"What is this, Mahnaz."

"It is the Haft-Sîn explanation. The seven things. I wrote it down for you. So you can remember."

"Thank you."

"Eleanor."

"Yes."

"When you move to Bremen. We will come. It is not far. We will come often."

"I know."

"I mean it."

"I know you do."

They embraced.

Reza's father laughed. "She is a good one, yes."

"I mean it, Baba."

"I know you mean it."

Shirin dried her hands. She turned around. "Reza. Do you think — do you think she would let me bring a friend over to the telescope sometime? In the spring. When it is warmer. I have a friend from school, her name is Maya, she — she likes science."

"Yes," Reza said immediately. "Yes, she would let you. She loves when people are interested."

"Okay."

"Really, Shirin. She would."

"Okay."

Reza looked at his sister. It was not the angry Shirin of autumn. It was not quite the small Shirin of the old Iran pictures either. It was something new. Some in-between Shirin. A Shirin who was beginning.

---

Two weeks later, on the first truly warm Saturday night of the year, Shirin brought Maya over. Maya was a tall Black girl with twists in her hair and a loud easy laugh. She came to Eleanor's door with Shirin, and when Eleanor opened it, Maya said, "Ma'am, thank you so much for having me. Shirin has been talking about you for a month."

"She has?"

"She has. Me too, now. She said you have — I mean. I am sorry. She said you have an attitude, ma'am, and a telescope, and I was hoping both were true."

Eleanor laughed — a real laugh.

"Maya. I am going to like you very much. Come in."

Reza was there too. They stood on the back porch in the warm dark and Reza set up the scope. Shirin took the lead in explaining things. She had learned a lot that winter, without making a great show of it. She pointed out the spring constellations to Maya. She showed her how to find Arcturus. She let Reza do the tricky things — finding the fainter galaxies of the Virgo Cluster, focusing on the tiny oval smudge of M104, the Sombrero Galaxy — but Shirin did the talking.

Eleanor watched from her chair. She did not speak except to correct Shirin gently twice — once to say that Arcturus was closer than 36 light years, actually; Shirin said "thirty-six" and Eleanor said "closer to thirty-seven, Shirin" and Shirin said "thirty-seven, sorry" and Maya giggled.

When Maya was leaving, at the door, she said to Eleanor, "Mrs. Henderson. Thank you. I mean it. I — I have never been to a place that was like this."

"You are very welcome, Maya. Come back."

"I will."

"Bring your mother if she would like."

"She would like. She loves this kind of thing. She cried at Cosmos. The show."

"Bring her."

Reza, walking home between his sister and her friend, felt something that he did not have a word for yet. It was a feeling like being part of something bigger than his own room. Bigger than his own yard. Bigger than his family, even. It was the feeling that what Eleanor had given him was going to keep going. That the lesson was not going to stop when Eleanor moved to Bremen. That the telescope was not the thing being passed. The thing being passed was the looking.

April came, gray and green.

Eleanor called on a Saturday afternoon. Reza picked up.

"Reza. It is Eleanor. Is your mother home."

"Yes."

"Would you ask her to come to my house. This afternoon. Whenever is convenient. Your father also, if he is home. And you."

"Is something wrong, Eleanor?"

"Nothing is wrong, Reza-jan. I have some news. That is all. Please. Come."

His mother was worried. His father was worried. Reza was worried. They walked over together at three o'clock. It was the first time all three of them had been to Eleanor's front door at once. Reza rang the bell.

Eleanor opened it. She was dressed nicely — a lavender cardigan, trousers, her hair brushed. But her face was tired. Reza saw it right away.

"Come in. Please."

She led them to the living room. She had set out tea on the low table — a real tea service, with small plates and small silver spoons. There was a plate of date cookies that Reza's mother had brought over last week, returned with fresh butter cookies on top.

"Sit, please. Everyone. Farhad, thank you for coming. I do not know that we have met properly, though I have seen you in your yard."

"We have only waved," said Reza's father, who was wearing his good sweater. "It is my great pleasure, Mrs. Henderson."

"Eleanor, please."

"Eleanor."

They sat. Eleanor poured tea. Her hands were steady but slower than usual.

"I will not take much of your afternoon. I have news, which I wanted you to hear from me, not through a for-sale sign on the lawn. I have decided to sell this house. I told Mahnaz some of this on Naw-Rúz but it was not yet firm. It is firm now."

Reza's stomach dropped.

"I am going," Eleanor continued, "to move, at the end of May, to an assisted-living facility in a town called Bremen, about forty minutes from here. My son has been encouraging this move for some time. I have been resisting. I resist now. But I am also, at the end of winter, being honest with myself. The house is too much for me. The yard is too much. I had a — a small incident on the back porch steps in February. A slip. Nothing serious. But I am seventy-nine, and the next slip may be more serious. And Mark is right that at some point one has to make the choice before the choice makes itself."

Reza's mother set down her teacup. She did not speak.

"The facility," Eleanor said, "is not a bad place. I have visited twice. It has gardens. It has a small library. It has — well, it has other people, which is a mixed blessing at best, but. Eh. It is not a bad place. I will have a small apartment with a little balcony and my own kitchen. I will not be able to have Pip there, I am afraid. But a friend of mine will take Pip. An old colleague from the school. He lives in Cleveland. It is arranged."

She paused. She looked at Reza.

"I cannot," she said, "take my telescope with me."

Reza's throat did a strange thing. He did not look up.

"The apartment does not allow things on the common balconies," she said. "And the — the grounds are not dark. Too many pathway lights. So the telescope would have nowhere to go. I had thought for some weeks about what to do with it. About whether to give it to my son — who would not know how to use it, who does not have a clear sky where he lives, who would put it in a garage. I have thought about selling it. Many people would buy it. It is worth some money."

She paused again.

"But I would like, with your permission, Farhad and Mahnaz, to give it to Reza. It is an eight-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain and it is very good. It is not a toy. It is also not an object of great financial value — these things lose their resale value over time, like cars, though they last much longer than cars. What it is, is a working scientific instrument that Reza has already learned to use. He knows it as well as I do, now. Walter would have wanted it to go to someone who would love it the way Walter did. And that is Reza."

No one said anything for a moment. Reza was looking at his hands.

Reza's father spoke first.

"Eleanor," he said, "this is — this is not a small thing. Are you certain."

"I am certain."

"The cost —"

"Has been paid long ago. The thing belongs to me, not to Walter's estate, and I may do with it as I wish. I wish to give it to your son."

"It is — it is very generous."

"It is, a little. But also, it is selfish. It is selfish because I would like to think of it here, on this street, continuing to be used. I would like to think of it used to teach a third person, one day, and a fourth. I would like to think of it as — as continuing."

"Eleanor," Mahnaz said quietly.

"Yes."

"We accept. With gratitude. With — with many kinds of gratitude. If this is what you wish."

"It is."

"Then we accept."

Reza finally looked up. His eyes were wet.

"I — " he started. "Eleanor. Mrs. — "

"Eleanor, Reza."

"Eleanor. I don't — I don't know how to thank you."

"You already have, Reza-jan. Many times. All year."

She reached for his hand. He let her take it.

"I will need you and your father," she said, "to come over one afternoon in May and move the telescope. It is heavier than it looks. There is a soft case. The case is already in the garage. The tripod folds. The tube comes off. I will show you how to pack it. All the eyepieces, including Walter's, will go with it. The box I showed you in December. And the star charts. And Walter's old Burnham's, and the Norton's Atlas. All of it. I am giving you the whole kit, Reza. The whole astronomy room."

"Eleanor — "

"Do not protest. It is rude to argue with an old woman about a gift. I have made up my mind. Your mother may bring me her soup one more time as payment, and we will call it even."

Mahnaz laughed. It was a wet laugh.

"More than one more time, Eleanor."

"Yes. All right. Many more times."

"Will you — will you let us come visit you? In Bremen."

"I would like that very much. I would like that very much indeed. The facility has a garden. We will sit in it."

"We will come."

"Yes."

The tea had gone a little cold. Nobody minded. They drank it anyway.

When Reza's family left, Eleanor stood in the doorway with her hand on Pip's head. Pip was old now too. He was going gray on top of gray.

"Thank you," she said to them.

"Thank you," said Mahnaz.

"No," said Eleanor. "Thank you."

They walked home slowly. Reza walked between his parents. His father's hand was on his shoulder. His mother's hand was on his other shoulder.

"Maman," Reza said, when they were in the middle of the block.

"Yes, azizam."

"I don't want her to go."

"I know."

"Bremen is far."

"Forty minutes is not far, Reza-jan. Forty minutes is a visit on a Saturday."

"But she is moving because she is getting — she is getting — "

"Older, Reza-jan. We all are."

"But she —"

"She is not going to die tomorrow, my son. She is going to live in a small apartment with a little balcony. She is going to have her friends visit. We will visit her. She will come here for Naw-Rúz next spring, if her health is good. She is not gone. She is only moving."

"Okay."

"And she is giving you the sky, azizam. She is giving you the way to keep seeing her."

"How is the sky the way to keep seeing her?"

"Because every time you look through the telescope, my son, you will be looking through her eyes a little. You will see what she saw. That is how people stay with us."

Reza turned this over.

He had always known the stars were a kind of home. Now they would be a kind of friend, too. That was good. That was a good thing. He had not known the stars could do that. But they could.

The last Saturday in May was warm.

Reza and his father walked over to Eleanor's house at two in the afternoon. They brought the soft case from her garage. They unscrewed the tube from the mount. They folded the tripod. They wrapped the tube in the padded foam Eleanor had kept in its original box for eighteen years. They loaded the case into a red wagon Reza had borrowed from a neighbor down the street — Mr. Levinson, who had no children anymore but had kept the wagon for the grandchildren who visited — and they wheeled the whole thing around the block, slowly, carefully. The neighbor kids on Maple Street stopped to watch. Reza felt very famous.

They set up the telescope in the small square of yard behind the house. His father had cleared a flat spot near the lilac bush. His mother had put a small plastic chair beside it for Eleanor to sit on, if she ever came over — which she had promised to do. "One last summer observation before I am settled," she had said. "I will come. Yes. I will bring date cookies."

Inside the house, Mahnaz was cooking. She was making a feast. Chicken with rice and dill. Saffron rice, the good kind, with the bright yellow crust on the bottom. Cucumber-and-yogurt salad with mint and walnuts. Pickled things in little glass dishes. A platter of fruit — a small mountain of oranges and apples and the first strawberries of the year.

It was Eleanor's goodbye dinner.

She arrived at five. Mark, her son, had already come and gone the weekend before — he had flown in to help her pack, and had flown out. The moving men were coming on Tuesday. But tonight, this last Saturday, was theirs.

She rang the doorbell. She was wearing the same lavender cardigan she had worn on the afternoon of her announcement. Her hair was neatly set. She held a small wrapped package in her hands.

"Come in, come in," said Mahnaz, and she kissed Eleanor on both cheeks — a familiar thing now, no longer startling. Eleanor returned the kisses. She had learned.

"Eleanor-jan," said Farhad, taking her coat. "Welcome to our home."

Shirin came down the stairs. Shirin had dressed up a little. She had on a soft blue sweater that Reza had not seen before.

"Hi, Mrs. Henderson."

"Hello, Shirin. How is the history paper."

"It is done. I got an A-minus."

"Next time you will get an A. You are not finished."

"Ha. Okay."

They sat down to dinner.

It was the best dinner Reza had ever eaten. His mother had outdone herself. The rice was perfect — the tahdig came off the pot in one beautiful golden disc and was cracked with a spoon into shining pieces on a shared plate. Eleanor had seconds. Then thirds.

"I am afraid," she said, "that if I had eaten Persian food thirty years ago, I would have learned to cook it, and my husband's waistline would have suffered."

Reza's father laughed. He laughed with his whole face, which he almost never did.

"Next time you come," Mahnaz said, "I will give you the recipe. I will teach you."

"Next time I come, yes."

After dinner, when the plates were cleared, Eleanor handed the small wrapped package to Reza.

"This," she said, "is for you."

"Eleanor, you already —"

"Open it."

He opened it.

Inside was a framed photograph.

The photograph was of Eleanor and Walter, maybe fifteen years ago. They were standing in their backyard — the very backyard Reza had hopped a fence into — beside the same telescope. The sun was setting behind them. Walter had his arm around Eleanor's shoulders. Eleanor was smiling, the biggest smile Reza had ever seen on her face. She was holding a star chart. Walter was holding a cup of tea.

"Walter and me," said Eleanor. "The summer we bought the scope. Right after we set it up the first time. I want you to have it."

"Eleanor —"

"Put it by the telescope. In your house. So that whenever you use it, we will be there too. Watching. Approving."

"I will."

"Good."

"Eleanor —" his voice cracked. "Thank you."

"You are welcome, Reza-jan."

Shirin was at the kitchen sink. Reza saw, from the corner of his eye, his sister wiping her face with a paper towel. He pretended not to see.

"Now," said Eleanor. "It is getting dark. We should go outside. I understand someone has a new telescope."

They went outside.

The backyard was full of fireflies already. The sky was clear. The lilac was just past blooming, but it still smelled of lilac, faintly, the way old perfume smells from an emptied bottle. Reza set up the telescope. His father watched. His mother watched. Shirin watched. Eleanor sat in the little plastic chair by the lilac bush, and she held Mahnaz's hand, and she watched too.

The first thing Reza pointed the telescope at was Jupiter.

He put in Walter's eyepiece. He lined up on the planet with the finderscope. He turned the focus knob. Jupiter came into view, sharp and small and beautiful, with its bands and its moons — four of them tonight, lined up in a neat row like a little solar system on its side.

He stepped back.

"Shirin. You first."

She came. She looked. She did not say anything for a long time. Then she said, softly, "Wow."

"Yeah."

"It is brighter here than at Mrs. Henderson's."

"A little. Same scope, though. Same Jupiter."

"Yeah."

She stepped back. "Baba," she said. "Baba, come."

Farhad came. Farhad had looked through Eleanor's scope only once before. He bent to the eyepiece. He looked for a long time. When he straightened up, he was blinking, and his eyes looked wet in the dim porch light.

"Allah-u-Abha," he said, very quietly. It was the Bahá'í greeting. It meant something like God is Most Glorious. Reza had heard his father say it sometimes, in his deepest moments. It was not a thing his father said lightly.

"Maman," Reza said. "Your turn."

Mahnaz came. Mahnaz had never looked through a telescope in her life — not this one, not any. She had, somehow, in all of Reza's telescoping, never been pulled into the act herself. She bent down stiffly, her back complaining, and she pressed her eye to the lens, and she looked.

"Oh," she said.

"Maman."

"Oh, Reza-jan. Oh."

"Do you see the moons?"

"Yes. Yes, I see the moons. They are like — they are like tiny pearls."

"Four of them."

"Yes. Four."

She stood up. Her eyes were wet. She put her hand on Reza's cheek.

"Pesaram," she said. My son. "You have been looking at this all year and I never looked."

"You looked at what I was looking at, Maman. That counts."

"Ah."

She turned. Eleanor was still in the plastic chair, watching all of them.

"Eleanor," Mahnaz said. "Your turn."

"Oh, I have seen Jupiter many times, Mahnaz-jan."

"One more time. In this yard. With us."

Eleanor got up slowly. Reza held her elbow, the way he had seen her help herself up from her own chair a hundred times. She came to the telescope. She bent. She looked.

She looked for a long time.

"Walter," she whispered, once, so quietly that maybe only Reza heard.

She straightened.

She turned to Reza.

"A fine first light, Reza Farahani," she said, in her teacher voice. "A fine first light indeed. You have done well."

"Thank you, Eleanor."

"Now," she said. "I believe your sister would like a lesson in the constellations. As I recall."

"Yes."

"Well. Go on. Teach her. I will supervise."

Shirin rolled her eyes. But she was smiling. She came to stand beside him.

Reza pointed up at the spring sky. He told her about the Big Dipper, how if you drew a line through its pointer stars you would arrive at Polaris, the North Star, which did not move — which, in all the turning of the world, was the one thing that stayed still. He showed her Arcturus, the orange-gold star high in the east, and how if you followed the curve of the Dipper's handle you would reach it ("Arc to Arcturus," he said, "that is what Eleanor taught me.") He showed her Spica, the blue-white star farther down the line, and the constellation Virgo where Spica sat. He showed her Leo the Lion, its backward question mark and its triangle, all rising in the early evening. He showed her the faint misty star cluster the Coma Berenices, Berenice's Hair, which was actually a group of galaxies lensed by the real star cluster nearby, a double truth hidden in a single patch of sky.

Shirin listened. She asked questions. Once or twice, Eleanor quietly corrected something Reza said, the way she always had, the way she always would.

Reza's mother and father stood by the back door, watching. They did not interrupt. His mother's hand was on his father's arm. His father was looking at his children the way he looked at a poem he had not quite finished — with a thoughtfulness, with a gladness, with a small quiet awe.

Through the kitchen window, the light was warm and yellow. The photograph of Eleanor and Walter had been propped on the windowsill, facing out. It was watching them.

Hours passed. They did not feel like hours. They felt like a single long clear moment, the way the best nights always do.

When it was time to go, Eleanor stopped at the gate.

"Reza."

"Yes."

"Write me letters. I will write back."

"Yes, Eleanor."

"Bring your notebook to Bremen sometimes. We will go over your drawings. I will not be too far away to keep teaching."

"Yes."

"And come on Wednesdays, if your mother drives you. Wednesdays are soup day at the facility. The soup is mediocre. But I will be glad of the company."

"I will come."

"Good boy."

She turned to Mahnaz. "Mahnaz-jan, you are — you are a very great gift in my life. I did not expect — I did not know I would have, at seventy-nine, a new friend. That is not — it is not a thing one plans. I am grateful to you."

"Eleanor-jan. You are the one who has given. I accept it. I also give. These things go in both directions."

"Yes. They do."

"I will bring soup to Bremen."

"Please."

Mahnaz kissed Eleanor on both cheeks. Farhad bowed, slightly, and shook her hand. Shirin surprised Reza — surprised even herself, maybe — by stepping forward and giving Eleanor a careful hug.

"Goodbye, Mrs. Henderson."

"Goodbye, Shirin-jan. Study hard. Write your own book someday. I expect to receive a copy in Bremen."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Reza."

"Yes."

"Come here."

He came. She put her hands on his shoulders, one on each. She looked at him very seriously.

"Remember what I told you about Jupiter."

"Which part?"

"That you saw something in the eyepiece that had taken thirty-five minutes to reach you. Across all that empty space. Straight to you."

"Yes."

"You have reached me, Reza Farahani. Across all that empty space. Do not forget it."

"I won't."

She kissed his forehead. It was a quick dry kiss, formal as a handshake and as warm as a hearth.

She walked slowly out the gate, down the sidewalk, to her own house — her last night in it. Mahnaz walked beside her, to see her to the door, her arm linked through Eleanor's.

Reza stood in the yard. He looked up.

The stars were there. The same stars as a year ago. The same stars as ten thousand years ago. The same stars as Shiraz and Ohio and Bremen and any sky that had ever been.

He was ten years old, turning eleven in two weeks.

He would never, never, be the same.

His sister came to stand beside him.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

"Teach me one more thing."

"Okay. What."

"The one you love best. Not the easiest one. The one you love best."

He thought.

"The Pleiades," he said. "But we can't see them tonight. They're not up in spring. We'll have to wait for winter."

"Then I'll wait for winter."

"Okay."

"That's a long time."

"Not that long."

They stood together in the yard, looking up. Above them, the whole enormous patient sky kept turning, turning, turning, the way it always had, the way it always would, for every sister and every brother and every old woman and every young boy who had ever pressed their eye to the glass and learned to see.

Inside the kitchen window, the photograph of Eleanor and Walter smiled at them. A comet far away — Comet Ashford, long since rounded the sun and heading out for ten thousand years — was threading back out into the dark. A telescope stood on its tripod in the grass, still warm from use.

Reza's mother came out of Eleanor's house. She crossed the lawn, under the stars. She came home.

All of them were home.

THE END

---

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Astronomy belongs to no one country and no one century. When you look up tonight, you are looking at the same sky that a shepherd in ancient Persia looked at, that a sailor off the coast of West Africa looked at, that a girl in Iowa in 1952 looked at before she grew up to become a science teacher. The stars do not choose sides. They do not ask for your passport. Wherever human beings have walked, they have looked up, and they have told stories about what they saw.

This is a book about a refugee family — a family that, like many Bahá'í families from Iran, was forced to leave because of religious persecution that continues to this day. It is also a book about an unlikely friendship across seventy years, across two continents of memory, across grief and hope. Reza and Eleanor are invented. But families like Reza's are real, and there are people like Eleanor on many quiet streets, holding their own griefs and their own telescopes.

The Bahá'í Faith teaches that humanity is one family. That we all came from the same source, and we are all going, one way or another, to the same home. The stars remind us of this more quickly than any lecture can. When you stand in your own backyard and look up, you are looking at the same light that is reaching a child in Iran, or a child in Mexico, or a child in Ghana, at that same moment. That light is old and patient and generous. It arrives whether or not we are ready.

If you have a neighbor you have not met, consider saying hello. If you have a telescope, consider offering it. And if you do not have a telescope — look up anyway. The sky is free. It is waiting. It has always been waiting.

— Crimson Ark Publishing