Eleanor wasn’t done being angry at Cam. But she admired what he was trying to do with Toby. More than any of the other things they’d tried, it was the yoga that seemed to get through to him.
“Don’t you want to see the Challenger go up, Dad?” Ursula asked Cam as he headed out.
“You can tell me all about it tonight,” he said.
“This is the best day of my life,” Ursula said as she headed out to the school bus. “I’m going to remember this forever.”
Eleanor thought about the moon walk then. Neil Armstrong planting the flag. Matt Hallinan on top of her in the front seat of his car, after, whispering in her ear as he thrust his body into hers. One small step for man.
She stood in the doorway, watching her husband head to his truck. She wished she could make her heart open up.
“Cam!” she called out to him. She was thinking how good it would feel to put her arms around him, the way she’d done with Timmy Pouliot when she rode on the back of his motorcycle. She had almost forgotten what it felt like to have her husband put his arms around her. She wanted to say something—something loving, even; it had been so long—but she couldn’t think what. They had drifted so far apart from each other. She didn’t know how to get back.
Cam didn’t turn around. Maybe he didn’t hear Eleanor calling out to him. He drove away.
After the kids were gone—the girls to their regular school, Toby to his special one, Ursula hugging to her chest that morning’s newspaper clipping with a giant picture of the Challenger and the words “Up, Up and Away!”—Eleanor took her coffee and bagel and headed to her office.
She put on a Joni Mitchell CD she loved, Hejira. It was her habit, when at her desk, to keep a single song on repeat so it became a kind of mantra for her. That morning, no doubt in recognition of the space launch, and the women taking flight from Florida, the song she kept playing was “Amelia.”
The drone of flying engines, is a song so wild and blue. Alone in her studio, Eleanor sang along with Joni. For some reason she felt restless.
Eleanor turned on the new computer. She had finally gotten around to taking it out of the box—as gingerly, that first time, as if she were handling a grenade. Now she started every day at her desk by turning it on, slipping the disk in the slot, listening for the pinging sound that meant she could get to work (designing a company logo probably, or some letterhead). The smiling face appeared on the screen.
She stared at her glowing computer screen. For no apparent reason, except that this was the time of year her parents had been killed in the crash, she thought about her mother.
There was so much about Eleanor’s life now that her mother wouldn’t even recognize. Starting with this house and the three children she’d given birth to here—the one who seemed to live under a perpetual cloud of discontent, the one who just wanted everybody to be happy, and the one who had almost died and returned to them like a sad and silent little stranger.
Her parents, if they came back to life for a day, would barely recognize Eleanor now. They had known nothing of the books she’d published, the farm where she’d made her home, the tall, elusive, red-haired man—one-time goat farmer, first baseman, maker of bowls, and forts out of refrigerator boxes—with whom she’d fallen in love. They knew nothing of the fierce love she had for her children, her obsession with keeping them safe, the unspeakable grief she felt now over her failure to do that, and the wild yearning to reclaim a life for herself—how it felt that day on Timmy Pouliot’s motorcycle, tearing up the two-lane with the wind in her hair—even as she dedicated her days, one after another, to the family waiting for her back at home.
What would Martin and Vivian make of the Macintosh computer in front of her—a device nobody could have imagined twenty years before? A granddaughter who didn’t like wearing dresses, up in her room studying a whole other language called “programming.” The shuttle on the launchpad in Florida and the children in school cafeterias all across America counting down—ten, nine, eight, seven—and the woman about to blast off into space? Strange to think that when Eleanor’s parents died, Neil Armstrong had yet to set foot on the moon.
Reach for the stars, Christa said. This was Cam’s approach to raising Toby—to believe that one day, if they just did enough sun salutations, his damaged brain would somehow restore itself. Words would come. (Did Alison’s hero, Dr. Terry Winograd, have a computer program for that?)
Cam believed their son would learn to ride a bike. He would speak whole sentences. He would tell them what he was thinking again. He’d have thoughts. Maybe he did now, Eleanor just didn’t know what they looked like.
He’d fall in love someday with a woman who might love him back.
Ursula possessed a similar brand of optimism. She clung to the faith that if she just worked hard enough at it, she could make everything how it was before—or at least, make it all right. Maybe this was what had inspired her obsession with the Challenger: the way that space launch seemed to represent, not only to her but to everyone gathered that morning in Cape Canaveral to watch it, a belief in ever-broadening horizons, the triumph of hope at a time when, in her own family, it seemed in short supply.
Eleanor got to work then. Her current job was creating a series of drawings of famous American inventors and writing a capsule profile of each. This morning’s assignment: Eli Whitney and his cotton gin. She wished she could care about Eli Whitney, but she didn’t.
Sometime around noon, Darla called. “You were watching it, right?”
“Actually, no,” she said. “I have all this work to do. I was just getting started on Thomas Edison. And if you want to know the truth, I’m a little maxed out on the Challenger. It’s all Ursula ever talks about.”
“Turn on your television,” Darla told her.
Normally, she let the girls walk home on their own from where the bus dropped them off, but that day she and Toby were waiting, parked across the street from the bus stop, when it pulled up. The three children who stepped down first, before her daughters, all looked dazed, as if they’d just gotten off one of those really awful rides at an amusement park and wanted to throw up. Even Al, who had been walking around with a fuck-you look for half a year, appeared deeply shaken.
Ursula was the last one off the bus—the blue jumpsuit with the NASA patch on the pocket looking, now, like a bad Halloween costume. Her skin seemed to have turned a whole other shade since she left home that morning—she looked bluish, and strangely pinched, as if the air had been sucked out of her. She seemed, suddenly, very small. Crossing the street to the spot where her mother and brother stood, she looked like a very old woman.
“They blew up,” Ursula said. Her voice was flat. “They blew up into a million pieces.”
“Oh, honey,” Eleanor said, wrapping her arms around her daughter. She, the woman who thought if she could just locate that Barbie shoe, she could protect her daughter from sorrow.
A picture came to her of that day in her dorm room back at boarding school when the teacher had come to the door to tell her about her parents’ accident. And how, after, she had to keep going over the same odd, irrelevant details as if maybe, by doing that, she could make sense of what happened.
My roommate, Patty, had just made popcorn. I was working on a painting, but I’d taken a break. We were putting on nail polish.
“We saw it happen but at first nobody understood what was going on, not even Mrs. Ferguson,” Ursula said. “When we saw the smoke, we thought it was supposed to be like that.”
Eleanor got down low to put her arms around Ursula. She wanted to hold her older daughter, too, but Al pulled away, where Ursula pressed in tight against her mother’s chest.
A surprising thing happened then. Toby might not understand the part about the shuttle explosion or the astronauts, but he did not fail to recognize that something terrible had happened. One look at Ursula’s face and you knew that much. Now he patted her hair.
We were all watching on TV. We saw her kids in the ble
achers. Everybody was cheering. Then it was like everything went crazy. When the rocket exploded, we all clapped. We didn’t get it. Then we did.
The pieces fell in the ocean. They scattered everyplace. There wasn’t anything left.
One more thing happened that day. In the scale of what took place over Cape Canaveral, this bore no consequence. But for their family it did.
After she picked the girls up from their bus, Eleanor took the long way home, past the waterfall.
The waterfall was not a place they usually went at this time of year, and passing it required her to abandon their usual route.
The falls seemed like a totally different place in winter than in the spring, when Eleanor and the children came down to launch their cork people, and later, when the weather warmed up and the fishermen appeared, when they’d lay out their picnic blanket and drawing pencils and books.
There was something about the way the ice formed over the rocks—the way the waterfall seemed to have been suspended in midair, in a column of ice, with sharp glacierlike forms rising up under the bridge in the very places where, a few months from now, they’d be launching their boats. Looking down from the bridge, a person’s dark imagination might turn to what it would be like if she slipped on the ice at the edge and fell in. Maybe you wouldn’t crack your skull on the rocks, but if not, you’d probably die of the cold before you could make your way out. Even in early summer, the water in this brook was heart-stoppingly cold.
But that afternoon, maybe because this had been the place they so often came in their happiest times, Eleanor wanted to sit there by the stone arch bridge for a moment with her children. Just sit there together, taking it all in. Maybe, she thought, on this day of terrible sadness, they’d find solace in this place they’d known so many happier times.
Somewhere deep down under the ice, trout slept, who would awake in springtime. That’s what the seasons taught you. After every winter came spring. Even after great sorrow, a new day.
For Eleanor—and possibly the children, too—the waterfall was the closest thing she knew to church.
In the rearview mirror, she studied the faces of her children in the back seat. Whatever it was that Toby took in of the world that afternoon, and what he made of it, Eleanor had no clue.
Al’s eyes were locked on a game of Donkey Kong. Ursula stared at her well-worn commemorative edition of People magazine, all those pictures of Christa as a little girl playing her piano, Christa and her children at Disney World, Christa at astronaut training school. Christa in her blue jumpsuit, waving to a crowd as she set out across the tarmac toward the space shuttle.
The memory came to Eleanor of how, when she was Ursula’s age, she’d studied pictures in Life magazine of JFK and Jackie, in the moments before the assassination. As if they might contain some clue to the awful event about to take place.
Eleanor had imagined they’d have the place to themselves on a day like this. But a truck was pulled over at their spot—a familiar one. They were a hundred feet from the waterfall, but it wasn’t hard to recognize the bright green 1972 Dodge that belonged to her husband.
On any other day, the unexpected sight of their father’s truck pulled over along the side of the road would have prompted the suggestion from Ursula, “Let’s go surprise him.”
Not this time. Eleanor was the one—the only one—who had spotted Cam’s old truck, but even from that distance, she took it all in. Not just the truck, but the rest.
Braking as hard and sharply as she did then was not a recommended move on icy roads. She could feel the wheels of her car seeking traction.
Another few seconds and Eleanor had managed to turn the car around. Icy as it was on this patch of road, she accomplished a screeching U-turn. Hearing the sound of the tires on the gravel road, the girls looked up and turned their faces to the window.
“What are you doing, Mom?” Al asked from the back. She looked up briefly, just long enough to see her father’s truck. Ursula had taken her eyes from her magazine now to look out the window.
“What’s Dad doing here?” Ursula said. “Maybe they canceled his workshop thing on account of the Challenger.”
Then Al again: “Why are we turning around?”
“I decided to go home the other way after all,” Eleanor told them. “Maybe your dad needs to be alone.”
Only he wasn’t alone. Her children, with their heads bowed, hadn’t seen it, but Eleanor had. There was another person on the bench seat next to her husband.
It was Coco. Easy to tell, from the back even, on account of that red beanie of hers and a scarf knit by Alison, a gift from the Christmas just past.
They had their arms around each other. They were kissing.
“When we get home, I’m making us popcorn and hot chocolate,” Eleanor said. She would have liked to gun the engine, but the road was so icy, and she carried the memory still of a spin on this very spot, a winter far from this one, a baby in her belly and her husband back at their farm, stoking the fire, a time when it seemed their whole lives stretched before them, and the idea of a moment like this one would have been unfathomable.
They rode in silence then. Normally, Eleanor would have put on a tape, and they might even have sung along with it, but not today.
Passing Walt and Edith’s house, she saw Walt outside, shoveling snow, and something possessed her to stop.
“I’ll just be a minute,” she told the children. She stepped out of the car, left the motor running.
“You look like you saw a ghost?” Walt said as she approached him. “That Challenger business got you upset, I reckon.”
“My marriage is over,” she told him.
“Oh, honey,” he said. The same words she’d spoken to Ursula. He held out his arms to her, and for a short time—no more than thirty seconds, probably, on account of the children in the car, the motor running—she just stood there with her face pressed against his shoulder.
“I just had to tell someone,” she said.
She drove very slowly the rest of the way home. Maybe it seemed that as long as they were still in the car, as long as they hadn’t got to the house yet, she could stop time.
Cam didn’t show up for dinner. Eleanor made a meal for the family, but nobody wanted to eat. For all the days leading up to the launch, Ursula had insisted on keeping the television on the news, but that night nobody turned it on. The girls went up to their room. Toby put on his Thomas the Tank Engine bathrobe, retrieved his meercat from her bed, and sat on the rug. Eleanor stoked the woodstove.
It was seven thirty when Cam walked in the door, bringing a gust of cold air with him. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Guy on the road needed help changing a tire.” Standing over the table, with his parka still on, he reached for a chicken leg off the platter and bit into it.
He must have been the one person in the United States of America who didn’t know what had happened that day. He had come through the door, shaking snow off his boots, calling out to Ursula to tell him all about it. Meaning Florida. Christa. The Challenger.
“She’s upstairs,” Eleanor said. “She said she wants to be alone.”
“Where’s my future astronaut?” he called up the stairs. “Come down and give your dad a hug.”
“I saw you with your girlfriend at Hopewell Falls,” Eleanor told him, as he reached for a beer. Off in his truck all day away from the news, though not alone, he was thirsty. “Also, Christa McAuliffe is dead.”
That night, after she tucked the girls in—Eleanor alone this time, though it was Cam who got Toby in his pajamas and settled him on his mattress in the borning room—Eleanor fixed a pot of tea and the two of them sat at the kitchen table. They waited until they were sure that everyone was asleep and kept their voices low, knowing how sound carried to the upstairs bedrooms. Cam’s face, as he looked across the table at Eleanor, bore an expression she could not remember having seen before. She would have preferred despair, but what he offered looked more like eerily calm regret, and pity.
“We didn’t mean for this to happen,” he told Eleanor.
We. A new configuration, in which her husband had aligned himself with their babysitter. Years ago—when she was not much older than Alison, now—Coco had shown up in their kitchen with a loaf of banana bread to mark the birth of Cam and Eleanor’s first child. Back in the fall, Eleanor and Ursula had baked a carrot cake to celebrate her eighteenth birthday.
Cam took a sip of his tea, rubbed his fine chin. His eyes, looking into hers, offered no excuses. This was supposed to be the moment when he’d put his arms around her and say, “What was I thinking? You’re the woman I want.”
“You know as well as I do that things between us have been bad for a long time now,” Cam told Eleanor. She did know this, now that he mentioned it. Since that morning just over seven months ago when she’d knelt at the edge of their pond over the lifeless body of their son, she had not been able to forgive her husband. In many ways she’d left their marriage that day. Now he was the one departing from it.
“This isn’t just about the accident,” he said. “It’s been a long time since we were in a good place together.”
Eleanor studied his boot. Remembered, crazily, a night they danced the polka together in the Akersville town hall, the night they’d skated under a full moon as the ice below their feet made those weird, groaning sounds. Expand. Contract. Expand. She remembered a night, not so long ago—after Toby’s accident—when he’d reached for her in the dark, and she had said, “Oh, God, not now.”
“I have no desire for that anymore,” she’d told him. “I don’t know if I ever will, ever again.”
“If there was anything I could do to fix it, I would,” he told her. (And he had, actually. Tried. Yoga class at the Y. The plaster in their bedroom. Milk paint.)
Why was it a surprise that he had chosen to look for someone else—or that when such a person presented herself to him, as she had all those afternoons in their field, playing soccer, he would have leapt at the opportunity?
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