Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(135)

Miles looks over at Chi, who catches his glance. He nods, points to her—that’s you she’s talking about. She pats her heart, curls her fingers into a fist, which she raises to her chest. Then she pushes that same fist toward him: No, that’s us.

“Thank you for coming out tonight despite the circumstances. Thank you for following all of the safety protocols—I know this isn’t the usual. You’re used to champagne and cheese.”

There’s polite, relieved laughter.

Mama D puts down her notecards. “Nevertheless, I hope the show moves you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being.”

The guests in their fancy clothes and face masks mill about, moving from photograph to photograph. For the livestream, Chi stands in front of the protest photo while a friend of Mama D’s interviews her.

Chloe sidles up to Miles. “This is really cool.”

He’s not sure if she means the exhibit or the two of them inhabiting the same space at last. “Yeah, it is,” he says.

Chloe and Miles wander until they are alone in a corner before a 1985 photograph of college students in anti-apartheid T-shirts chained to an administration building. At his sides, Miles’s hands jiggle like out-of-water fish. He has never wanted to hug Chloe more than he does right now. If there’s anything this year of separation and loneliness has taught Miles, it’s that online is no substitute for in-person. Being together, really together, he decides, is a small miracle.

Miles gestures to the gallery. “You ready?”

Chloe nods. A few seconds and satellites later, she has Mormor on FaceTime.

“Hi, Mormor,” Chloe says.

Mormor’s speech comes slowly but her voice is steady. “Hello, ?lskling. You look beautiful. Hello, Miles.”

“Hello, Mormor,” Miles says. “It’s very nice to see you.”

“Nice to see you, too, Miles,” Mormor says, her words still clipped with traces of her native German and adopted Swedish.

“Ready?” Chloe says to her grandmother.

Mormor nods. “Yes. I think so.”

Chloe flips the phone so that her grandmother can see the exhibit with them. She and Miles take turns reading the exhibition cards to her. There are photographs from Rwanda. Syria. Bosnia. Soweto. From San Francisco and New York, university campuses. There are some of the punks and squatters from Mama D’s time in Berlin, including one of Lena. There is one of the Berlin Wall coming down. As they make their way through the exhibit, what strikes Miles most is not how much there is to resist but how often it happens. How, despite the cruelty and apathy and the overwhelming odds against them, people still manage to come together and fight toward justice even knowing that they, themselves, may not live to see the fruits of it. They fight for the future; they fight forward. It is a form of forgiveness, he thinks, to believe so fervently in the promise of that future. That is a definition he can live with for now. Hope, sudden and violent, rises up inside him, making him feel as if he is connected to some vast subterranean network of roots with no beginning and no end, a forest that stretches far into the horizon, beyond what he can see.

They have come at last to the photograph of Hanna and Sophie at the Bridegroom’s Oak.

“Look, Mormor—there you are!”

Chloe flips the phone’s view for her. Miles and Chloe watch Mormor in her room in New Jersey looking at a photograph of herself hanging in a loft in Tribeca, a photograph taken in Germany nearly eighty years ago. Time and space, memory and meaning, collide.

“I remember,” she says. “I am … so young. Plump cheeks, like a squirrel!”

Chloe laughs. “Mormor! You were beautiful. You’re still beautiful.”

Mormor squints hard. “Liebchen. Will you read it to me?”

“It says ‘Dodauer Forest, Germany, 1941. Sophie Muller and Hanna Schmidt. Resistance fighters of Die Eichel. They provided false papers that saved more than a thousand people from the concentration camps.’”

Mormor has gone very quiet. Chloe flips her phone around. There are tears on Mormor’s downy, wrinkled cheeks.

“You saved people’s lives, Mormor.”

“And they saved mine.”

Chloe steps around a corner and speaks softly with her grandmother in private. Miles waits. Chi wanders over. “Your mom’s exhibit is great.”

“Yeah. She’s pretty awesome. Both of my moms are.”

“You do your phone banking for the Georgia runoff?”

“Yup. All two hundred. There were some noes but also some yeses. I’ll keep going. Danny and Chloe are gonna help out while they’re home during break.”

Chloe returns. Her eyes are red and still wet.

“Catch you later,” Chi says quietly, and walks back toward the bright lights of the livestream where she’s being beckoned.

“Hey,” Miles says. “You wanna get out of here?”





* * *



“So. How’s the college life?” Miles asks.

Chloe shrugs. “It’s okay. Weird. We’re just in our rooms on our computers. And, like, twice a week, some stranger shoves the world’s longest Q-tip all the way up my nose and I’m like, ‘Whoa, you didn’t even buy me a drink first, pal!’”

Miles’s laugh is muffled behind his mask.