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Gary tells his mother he's going for a drive. He doesn't tell her where, because he doesn't know exactly where he'll end up. He tells Dr. Rosen not to call him. He doesn't tell Dr. Rosen where he's going either, but he thinks Dr. Rosen might know anyway.
Today is Anna's birthday, the first since the fight at Grand Central Station, and Gary can only think of one thing to do. He drives as far as it takes for all the artificial signals to fade away, finds an out-of-the-way clearing, and looks up.
At first he doesn't see much, but he waits for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, and the stars begin to show themselves. They're little points of light, blue and red and white and yellow, all sorts of different colors and patterns, and for the first time Gary thinks, really thinks, about how old their light is. The light he's seeing now-- not just the stars, but every bit of light, even the faint red cloud that's bigger than the moon would be-- was emitted years ago. Centuries, for some of it. Some of the stars he's seeing right now are nebulas themselves now, but they're still alive for as long as it takes their light to get to the last place it gets to.
A flash at the edge of his vision distracts him. A pulsar? No. It's not a GPS satellite or anything else artificial, either. It's not actively transmitting, nothing stronger than the faint crackle of starshine.
Gary focuses his senses as well as he can, and waits, and another flash comes from the same direction.
Before right now, he had never understood why people called meteorites "falling stars" when they aren't stars at all. They're the bits of rock and ice that comets leave behind. But before, he had never actually seen one. And now he has, and he understands the term perfectly.
They're all the same thing.
They all come from the same place. Everything. Himself, Anna, every other person, the whole planet. Every other planet and star and speck of dust, everywhere. Everything.
And he realizes, as yet another meteorite burns bright above him, that maybe the rabbi at the tombstone unveiling had been right. (Not entirely right, of course, but close.) Maybe they just had different ways of looking at the same thing. Because Gary thinks he understands, now.
The stars are still alive as long as their light is still shining.
Anna does still exist as long as he keeps spreading her message.
It isn't just the Twitter account, either. It's in how he lives. In how he helps others live.
The Anna he had talked to in the hospital had been the real Anna, because she'd been created by what he'd learned from her.
Another light streaks across the sky, flashes bright and fades.
Gary smiles and walks to his car to fetch the blanket from his trunk. He's going to be here until the sun rises.