In any case, the next day Gloria drove to Flagstaff and gave Gabby’s trainer what she calls the “stern eyeball.” “Listen,” Gloria said, “the reason I got this girl this horse was so that it would be a substitute for boys. I know this is the Wild West, but I don’t want my daughter to be a wild woman at age fourteen.”
Gloria didn’t have to worry. Gabby would become a serious, accomplished student at Tucson’s University High School, a public school for gifted students. She wowed many of her teachers, who found her to be winningly engaging and self-confident. They saw her as a very bright, optimistic young woman who was excited to find ways to make her contribution to the world.
Gabby has often talked to me about how her upbringing and her Tucson roots shaped her and strengthened her. When she was young, she knew she wanted to make a difference, but she wasn’t exactly sure what path she’d take in life. She didn’t ever say she wanted to grow up to be a congresswoman. And yet I now see that, starting in childhood, all these steps along the way combined with fate and happenstance—and a commitment to her family—to bring her to where she is today.
When Gabby left Tucson for college in 1988, she never would have imagined that, just nine years later, she’d be back in town running the family tire business, following in the footsteps of her grandfather Gif Giffords by starring in her own El Campo commercials.
She couldn’t have guessed that those commercials would make her a recognized face in southeastern Arizona, helping to spark her political career. Or that her political career would almost cost her her life, leading her to a rehabilitation hospital in Houston. Or that in rehab she’d be sitting with her devoted mother, singing “Tomorrow,” her childhood song of hope, as a way of reconnecting the damaged pathways in her brain.
CHAPTER FIVE
A Family of Risk-Takers
It was the ninety-third day of my brother’s second mission to the International Space Station. He had flown there as an American astronaut aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and was serving as commander of the ISS.
As morning broke in the United States, Scott was hard at work, attempting a vital repair job that he didn’t want to entrust to any of his crew members. This was something best left to the commander.
“There are two pieces of equipment in space that are the most important,” Scott likes to say, “and both of them are toilets.”
And so for two hours on that Saturday, Scott had been trying to fix a broken toilet, which is a difficult and complicated task in space, considering how complex a space toilet is. If he couldn’t get it working, and the other toilet failed, too, he and his crew would be left using bags to relieve themselves, and then they’d have to store the bags. It would not be pleasant. Scott knew that much depended on his efforts.
While he was working, he got a call from the CAPCOM, the “capsule communicator” in Houston. That’s the person on the ground, usually a fellow astronaut, whose job it is to remain in constant touch with the crew of a manned space flight.
“Scott, we’re going to privatize the space-to-ground channel,” the CAPCOM said. “Peggy wants to talk to you.”
Peggy Whitson is chief of the astronaut office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The arranging of a private line meant that Peggy wanted to make sure her conversation with Scott couldn’t be monitored by the public, the media, or anyone else within the space program. Such a procedure almost always indicates that an astronaut is about to get very bad personal news. Suddenly the toilet issue seemed unimportant to Scott.
He floated into another module on the space station and awaited Peggy’s call. It took five minutes to set up the private line, in which time Scott traveled 1,460 miles through space, while the thoughts in his mind seemed to be moving even faster. Had one of his kids been in a car accident? Had someone in our immediate family died?
Peggy was finally patched through. “I have bad news for you,” she said. “Your sister-in-law, Gabby, has been shot.”
It was forty minutes after the shooting had begun in Tucson. Peggy told Scott what she knew, which wasn’t much. NASA, meanwhile, had already cut off the system that allows astronauts to watch an intermittent, blurry satellite feed from CNN. It was decided that Scott was better off getting information directly from the astronaut office rather than from speculation in the media.
“I’d appreciate it if you could keep me informed with everything the news is reporting,” Scott said, and when the call ended, he sat in that module by himself for a moment, feeling very alone and helpless. There was nothing he could do for Gabby, of course, but he also was unable to be of assistance to me. After Gabby, he is my closest confidant on the planet, the person whose judgment I value most. But he wasn’t on the planet, and he wasn’t scheduled to return for another sixty-six days.
Scott called me and we spoke briefly. I gave him the few facts I had, but there were so many issues I was dealing with that there was no time to talk. Shortly after we hung up, Scott got another call from NASA on the privatized line. “This isn’t confirmed,” he was told, “but many news organizations are reporting that Gabby has died.”
Scott tried to call me again. I was already in the air, heading to Tucson, with my cell phone off. But Scott was able to get in touch with Tilman Fertitta, our mutual close friend. Tilman is a well-known businessman in Houston whose company owns restaurant chains such as Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. and Rainforest Cafe, and casinos, including the Golden Nugget in both Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Through our long odyssey in the wake of Gabby’s injury, Tilman would turn out to be a generous friend in a time of need.
Tilman had stepped in to help as soon as we got word of the shooting. First he offered his private plane to take me from Houston to Tucson. And then, knowing how besieged I was, he became a reassuring voice to Scott up in space. “Gabby isn’t dead,” Tilman told him. “It’s a bunch of bullshit! I’ve talked to Mark. The media’s got it wrong.” Eventually, Scott was able to get through to me, and I confirmed that, yes, Gabby was alive and in surgery.
All my life, Scott has been everything to me: my nemesis, my fist-fighting opponent, the most irritating presence in my life—and my best friend. He and I no longer go at it like we did when we were kids, but we’re never touchy-feely either. Over the next sixty-six days, while he remained in space, I had many urges to talk to him, to hear his voice.
I talked to him about decisions that needed to be made regarding Gabby’s medical care. He listened, but he couldn’t really help me decide. “I’m not a doctor,” he said.
I talked to him about the swirling political issues. The whole country was debating whether heated campaign rhetoric had played a role in the massacre in Tucson. Did I need to make a statement about that? Scott listened but couldn’t give definitive answers. “I’m not a political analyst,” he said.
However, when I talked to him about whether I should continue as commander of my upcoming space shuttle mission, that’s when Scott spoke up. He isn’t a doctor. He isn’t a politician. But he is an astronaut. He knew the job that needed to be done. And he knew me.
There was speculation in the media, and frankly, within NASA, too, that I’d be too distracted by Gabby’s injury to perform at my best. Though news reports focused on how I was struggling with the decision, in truth, NASA officials weren’t sure they even wanted to keep me on the job. They said they needed to watch me in training first, to monitor my ability to concentrate and perform. Their uncertainty about their faith in me only added to the stresses of those early days. Gabby was in a medically induced coma and I was in NASA-induced limbo.
From the start, Scott urged me not to step down. Like everyone else who knew Gabby, he told me that she absolutely would want me to remain on the mission. “You’re a military pilot,” he said. “You’re trained to put aside personal issues, to focus on your mission. And the more people scrutinize you, the better you’re going to be. I have no doubts.”
Scott finally headed home from space on March 16, traveling with two crewmate
s aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule. The conditions that day at the landing site in arctic Kazakhstan were terribly cold and windy, but the capsule landed safely, on its side, in knee-deep snow. A medical tent was supposed to be erected, but conditions were too treacherous. Instead, Scott and his crewmates were taken away in helicopters to the city of Kostanay and then directly back to Houston.
I was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps as he came off the plane. We never hug or shake hands. Never. It’s always been that way, since we were kids. But on this day, for the first time, we reached toward each other and shook hands. It was a spontaneous act of affection, though I know it sounds pretty limited compared with the embracing that goes on in a lot of families.
My brother had to undergo the usual battery of postflight medical tests. He had muscle pain, not uncommon after a long-duration flight, and he wasn’t walking normally yet. All of us who’ve been in space know that, at least for a few days after we return, we’ll likely be banging into walls when we try to turn a corner. We lose our ability to judge when it’s time to turn left or right.
Given his deficiencies, Scott wasn’t allowed to drive yet. So the next day, his girlfriend, Amiko, a NASA colleague of ours, drove him to the rehab hospital to see Gabby.
Gabby was in a therapy session, out of her room, when they arrived. I was waiting for them, and offered a heads-up about what to expect. “You have to be patient,” I said, “and give Gabby time to respond. And she can’t follow when two people talk at once, so don’t do that.” I explained that Gabby understood most everything, but wouldn’t necessarily be able to answer them. “You know what it’s like when you’re trying to remember a word and you can’t come up with it, and it’s so frustrating? That’s what it’s like for Gabby every minute of every day.”
Scott looks like me, only six minutes younger, and many people can’t tell us apart. But when Gabby was wheeled in, she had no trouble. “Scott!” she said to him, not me.
He kissed the top of her head and sat down beside her. At first, he was shocked by Gabby’s appearance. Her head was misshapen, her hair was short and a darker color, her right arm was so still. He was almost startled. But as he spent time with Gabby, he saw that her personality remained: her smile, her laugh, her trademark attentiveness.
He showed her the turquoise rubber bracelet he’d been wearing. I’d sent it up with the crew of space shuttle Discovery when they visited the space station a month earlier. The bracelet, worn by Gabby’s staffers, family, and friends, has a heart, a peace sign, and the word “Gabby” on it. “I wore this in space,” Scott said.
“Yay!” Gabby said, and pumped her left fist.
I watched my brother and my wife interacting. Here were the two people I am closest to in the world. Both were safe, and we were finally all together. It felt good, but I wasn’t the type to get mushy.
When Scott stood to walk across the room, struggling on his land legs after 159 days in space, I gave him a little dig. “Hey, you’re pretty wobbly,” I said. “Gabby is doing a better job of walking than you are!”
If I have a choice between complimenting my wife or my brother, it’s always going to be her. Always.
My brother likes to say that Gabby is way too good for me. If you look at my background and Gabby’s, he’s got a point. On paper, we’re not exactly a natural fit.
Unlike Gabby, who had her own horse when she was young, I grew up on a lower rung of the socioeconomic ladder. I didn’t have a horse when I was a boy in West Orange, New Jersey. I had rocks, which my brother and I would sometimes launch like missiles in the direction of other kids who had their own rocks.
While Gabby was the type who got excellent grades, I was a late bloomer on the academic front and on a lot of other fronts, too. And even though both my mother and father were cops, some people considered Scott and me to be borderline juvenile delinquents.
In February 1964, when we were born, my mother, Patricia, was just twenty years old and my dad, Richard, was twenty-three. They had met by happenstance. My dad had been in the army, stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, jumping out of planes as part of the 82nd Airborne. One day in 1961, he bummed a ride back home to New Jersey, and when he got there, he decided to attend a dance put on by local firefighters. That’s where he met my mom. She was very pretty and vivacious, and my father was lucky that she gave him her number.
After they got married, my mother had hoped to have a lot of kids, but a series of miscarriages limited her to the two of us. That was enough. We were more than a handful.
From the time we were two years old, Scott and I were fighting with each other daily, sometimes for hours, often destroying things in the house. We’d go at it, fists flying, and we’d accidentally kick in a door or damage the paneling. Then we’d make peace and, starting in our preteens, we’d repair everything together before our parents came home and noticed. “I smell paint!” my father would say when he arrived.
He bought us boxing gloves and a heavy bag when we were six years old and started teaching us how to box. Then he had second thoughts. “If I give them one more lesson they’re going to know enough to kill each other,” he said to my mother, who had already nixed karate lessons for the same reason.
Scott and I were always climbing, too. We’d be outside a restaurant with my parents and if they blinked, we’d go missing. Eventually, they learned to look up. We were usually on the roof, having climbed up the gutters.
My mother says that, starting when we were eighteen months old, Scott and I would talk in this gibberish twin language that only we understood. We were probably plotting something. Later, when we were about five years old, my mother thought we had somehow taught each other Spanish. She was impressed, but we weren’t savants. We were just singing the “Frito Bandito” song.
From the time we could walk, we were neighborhood roamers. One morning before we were two years old, my mother woke up and noticed that we had wet oil stains on the bottom of our footed pajamas. It was a mystery until a neighbor came to the door to tell her we’d been seen that morning hanging around the gas station up the street. While our parents were sleeping, we had unlocked the back door and escaped. They had to install new locks on the doors that were above our reach.
Looking back, I feel like I had a pretty unconventional childhood. In the summers, when the bug-spray truck passed through, my parents would let me and Scott run through the mist of chemicals. People then didn’t know any better, especially in my neighborhood.
While Gabby was growing up as a child of the desert, I was more of an urban menace, palling around with a motley crew of characters.
When I was young, I figured the whole world looked like our neighborhood: a third Jewish, a third Italian, and a third Irish, like us. We lived just twenty minutes from Manhattan, and some of our playmates were the sons of mobsters. Their fathers would get in trouble—my father even arrested some of them—and the children could be troublemakers, too. That’s why my mom insisted that our friends hang out at our house, playing pool in the basement. She wanted to keep an eye on all of us.
The kids in our neighborhood were the types who’d throw things at passing cars just for the laughs. One Halloween, we threw a scarecrow dummy in front of a car. The driver was at first hysterical, thinking she’d killed a pedestrian. It wasn’t until we pulled the scarecrow out from under her car that she was able to breathe again. We’re lucky she didn’t have a heart attack. When Scott and I did completely stupid things like that, and someone called the police, we’d get off with a warning because the cops worked with our parents.
Warnings didn’t have much impact, however. Our group of friends was incorrigible. When we were young, the Good Humor guy would drive his ice cream truck down our street on summer afternoons. Eventually, though, after being pelted with half-eaten ice cream, he wised up and never returned. We’d hear the tinkling music from his truck on the block before ours and the block after ours, but he knew better than to venture down our stretch of Greenwood Ave
nue.
I’m lucky I lived through my childhood, because I was the most injury-prone kid in West Orange.
My brother and I shared a crib, and I broke my jaw falling out of it. My brother claims he pushed me. Sounds likely. Other injuries were due to my own stupidity or bullheadedness.
When Scott and I were in kindergarten, my mother asked us to put a letter in the mailbox across the street. “Make sure you cross at the corner,” she told us. We were usually pretty obstinate, but on this particular day, my brother decided to listen to her. He walked toward the corner. Me, I walked straight across the street, between two parked cars, and got nailed by a passing motorist. I went flying through the air and woke up in the hospital, throwing up from a bad concussion.
When I was twelve, my friend Tommy dropped a jar of worms while we were fishing. I stepped on it and got worm guts, glass, and dirt in my foot. I was in the hospital for a week with blood poisoning.
Another time, Tommy’s cousin shot me in the foot with a pellet gun. The doctor recommended just leaving the pellet in there, but my mother wanted it out. So this surgeon started cutting where the hole was and he wound up taking my foot halfway off trying to find the damn pellet. I ended up with nerve damage. When I woke up after surgery I heard the doctor saying, “I don’t know if he’ll be able to walk right anymore.”
In ninth grade, I broke my knuckles in a fight. That taught me a lesson: Don’t punch someone as hard as you can, because it’s going to break your knuckles.
There are more injuries to recount, but I’ll stop here.
I guess I had a habit of coming out swinging in part because I was the son of a hard-charging, hard-drinking, hardworking Jersey detective. Every year or so, my dad would come home with a cast on his right hand. Working the narcotics unit, he had to use his fists a lot, he’d say. I assumed there were a few bar fights thrown in there, too.
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