Neither my mom nor my dad went to college, but they both had PhDs in street smarts, and Scott and I were proud of them. As the sons of career police officers, we grew up knowing what it meant to serve the public and to put your life on the line. We also saw how crazy a calling police work could be.
When we were five years old, my father would take us to this particular playground and push us on the swings. We didn’t know it, but he picked that playground so he could stake out a nearby house. He needed evidence to obtain a search warrant and we were his cover. “Just keep swinging, boys,” he’d say, with one eye on us and the other on the house.
My dad was a cop who had his own special tool kit. He’d be interrogating some nitwit, and he’d have the guy put his right hand on the police-station photocopier. “This is our lie-detector machine,” he’d say sternly, and the sort of degenerates he dealt with wouldn’t know any better. My father would ask a leading question, and if he didn’t like the answer, he’d hit the “print” button. “The machine says you’re lying!” he’d bark. Such creativity often led to confessions, and helped my father rise to the rank of captain.
My father could be equally audacious on the home front. Gabby’s father toughened up his daughters by sending them to that Mexican summer camp where no one knew English. That was easy! My father toughened up Scott and me by sending us into shark-infested waters.
We did a lot of boating as boys, and one day when we were about fifteen years old, we were out with my father in New Jersey’s Barnegat Bay. We ran aground on a sandbar, and making things worse, sharks had begun surrounding the boat. “You boys get in the water and pull us off the sandbar,” my dad ordered.
“But, Dad, what about the sharks?” we asked, almost in unison.
My father took out his gun—he was a cop, after all—and said, “If they come too close, I’ve got you covered. Now get in the water!” Maybe the sharks heard my father and knew he was aiming for them. They left us alone and we freed the boat.
Suffice it to say that flying in space is not necessarily the riskiest thing we’ve ever done.
My mother, meanwhile, has her own history of putting herself in peril. In the mid-1970s, she became the first female police officer in West Orange and one of the first in the state. She was always pretty fearless. One night, she got dispatched to a home where a man in his twenties had killed his parents and was holding his sister hostage. When my mom arrived with a partner at 3 a.m., the young man was shooting out the window. My mother took cover on a dirt patch outside the house, only it wasn’t just dirt. “Oh my God, I’m in dog shit,” my mother said to herself, “and if I stick my head up, I could be shot.” She stayed sprawled for two hours atop that stinking pile, her gun poised, until reinforcements came and the gunman surrendered.
My mother tells people: “The boys don’t fear being astronauts, because they were born into a family of risk-takers. It’s in our blood.” Her father was a New York City fireboat captain. Her sister is a retired FBI agent. Her brother is a retired cop.
In 1982, my mother was seriously injured on the job. It happened on a night she was in a squad car alone, patrolling behind a strip mall. She saw two men with a large garbage bag and asked them what they were doing. They scuffled with her as she tried to grab the bag—she never learned what was in it—and then they knocked her down and ran off. She ended up falling fifteen feet into a creek behind the store, ruining her back and knees. She was up to her armpits in water and couldn’t get herself out. She ended up retiring on disability, and she still copes with daily pain from that incident.
My dad warned us not to be police officers. He described his job as being “a human garbageman.” “The job sucks everything out of you,” he told us. “If you want to be cops I’ll break your legs.”
We assumed he didn’t mean it, because he seemed to like his job. And, at least when we were very young, a career in law enforcement felt like an option. We talked about being astronauts, like a lot of kids do, but we certainly didn’t think we’d make it. Astronauts were usually academic all-stars, which Scott and I most definitely were not.
My parents weren’t on top of us to do our schoolwork. They didn’t give us the suburban mantra: “Study hard and you’ll be a success.” But they did have a blue-collar work ethic that spoke to their aspirations for Scott and me. “You both have the ability to do anything in this world if you try hard enough,” they’d say. They knew we were both bright underachievers. Unlike some of our teachers, they liked to think that nothing was beyond our potential.
Sometimes they had to fight to make their point.
At our fourth-grade parent-teacher conference, our teacher told my parents that both Scott and I had learning disabilities. My father was having none of it. “You’re out of your mind, lady!” he said to her. “We’ll be back tomorrow with a real expert, and we’re not going to sit in these little chairs, either.”
His expert was his mother-in-law. My grandmother happened to be a learning-disabilities specialist, and she had tested us. She explained to the teacher that we were rambunctious boys with very high IQs. My father had the last word. “I think someone should be testing the teacher!”
Through junior high, my grades, like my brother’s, were mostly embarrassing—Cs and Ds—and my father got tired of our academic indifference. Eventually he came up with a plan, and he started with me. “I’ve set up a deal for you,” he said. “I’m going to get you into the welders’ union. I’ve got a contact there.”
A part of him was being realistic. Given how lackadaisically I approached my studies, maybe college wasn’t for me. But my father was also picking his moment to make a strategic play. He figured that deep down, I had ambitions beyond being a welder. He was right. After that conversation with my dad, I truly had an epiphany. I thought, “Jeez, I’d better get myself together!”
I had always assumed that my parents viewed me as someone bright enough to go to college. Now here they were, telling me that maybe I wasn’t. It was hurtful.
Until then, my school day had been spent looking out the window or staring at the clock, waiting for class to be over. But after my dad’s lecture, I decided to start paying attention. I would tell myself, “I’m going to sit in this class and try to understand whatever it is the teacher is saying. I’m going to read whatever she puts on the board. I’m going to understand all of it.”
The way I remember it, that’s all it took. Starting in ninth grade, and for all the years that followed, I was nearly a straight-A student.
As my parents see it, my transformation, and Scott’s, too, was not as abrupt as we remember it. In their own way, they’d been trying to show us the light, usually by example.
My mother decided she wanted to become a cop in 1975, when she was thirty-two. She’d been a waitress and a secretary but wanted a greater challenge. Thanks to a class-action suit, the state of New Jersey had just changed the weight and height requirements for police officers, which meant women could qualify. My mother was determined to be the first woman in our community to be hired.
Scott and I, then eleven years old, watched her train two hours a day for the physical. Her exercises were posted on the refrigerator. To pass the test, she’d have to scale a seven-foot-four-inch wall in nine seconds. My father built a wall out of plywood in our backyard, and without telling her, he made it seven feet, five inches tall. She spent two months trying to get over it, but never could. Then she figured out the secret: She had to run, hit the board with her left foot, use the momentum to grab the top of the wall, and then flip over it. She was able to scale the thing in just four seconds.
As part of the test, she’d also need to drag a 125-pound dummy seventy-five feet in twelve seconds. She used Scott as her dummy, which made sense to me, and dragged him around the backyard.
When she finally took the test, she passed easily, coming in fifty-sixth out of more than three hundred applicants, almost all of them men.
Scott and I had accompanied her to the test. We
saw her actually jump in the air and kick up her heels when she passed. We saw her wipe away tears.
My mother knows that Scott and I think she didn’t push us enough. She didn’t make us study for hours every night. But she believes, and she’s surely right, that we developed our ambition and our drive in part by watching her.
“You knew how badly I wanted to be a police officer, and that I’d been told I’d never get the job,” she says. “You saw how hard I worked at it day after day. You saw my determination. Maybe watching me helped you.”
For his part, my father thinks he may have told us things that, somewhere along the way, sank in. He recalls standing on the beach with me and Scott when we were maybe twelve years old. We were all looking into the water. “These friends you’re hanging out with, a lot of them will never leave West Orange,” my dad said. “They’re not looking beyond the horizon. But you two, you need to remember that there’s something over that horizon. Go look for it. Go find it. Go do it!”
I don’t think we were really listening, but the way our lives turned out, we must have heard him.
Unlike Gabby, who was born as an overachiever, my brother and I had a late start. But once we got the urge to succeed, we took off.
At Mountain High School in West Orange, both of us wanted to run for student congress president our senior year. Rather than duke it out like we used to, we took a mature approach, flipping a coin. I won the coin toss and the election, and Scott served as vice president.
He and I did everything together. We were both captains of the swim team, and we were both pole-vaulters and scuba divers. We served together as emergency medical technicians on the local ambulance corps, working from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. on many school nights. We have a lot of shared memories of pulling passengers out of car wrecks and helping elderly people who’d fallen and broken bones. Once, the two of us had to carry a three-hundred-pound woman down several flights of stairs, giving her CPR every time we stopped on a landing. I can still see the grimace on Scott’s face as we carried that woman on the stretcher.
After our ambulance runs ended at dawn, we’d usually shower and go to school—but not always. Sometimes we just had to crash. I missed sixty days of classes my senior year and still worked hard enough to get mostly As.
The shooting in Tucson led me to have a few flashbacks from my teen years as an EMT. Scott and I worked some tough neighborhoods. I put on my first bulletproof vest at age seventeen. I remember one night we picked up a young African-American man in Newark who had seven bullet holes in him, including a gunshot wound to the head. He was alive when we delivered him to the hospital emergency room, but I never found out what became of him. After Gabby was shot, I found myself thinking about that young man. I wonder how he is doing today, if he’s still alive.
I’m lucky I have Scott to talk to about all of these memories.
Once Scott and I became astronauts—the only twins and the only siblings to fly in space—people often asked us about the role our upbringing played in shaping our lives and careers. Later, after Gabby and I got married, people often asked us about how our upbringings shaped our marriage.
Well, here’s an answer.
Gabby and I have come to realize that though our backgrounds appear so different on the surface, we have much in common. We both come from families that are colorful in their own ways. That’s obvious. And we both come from parents who stressed to us the importance of public service. For my mom and dad, dangerous police work was their way of making a difference. For their part, Gabby’s parents spent a lifetime being charitable and serving their community, instilling in Gabby the idea that she had it within her to change the world.
There’s another thing, too. I think both Gabby and I were raised to be risk-takers. Going into space is one kind of risk. But setting up a table in a public square as an elected official is a risk, too.
Sometimes, risk-taking yields inspiration and hope. You take a risk—as a cop, an astronaut, a congresswoman—and good might come of it. You might get new perspectives you can share with other people.
After Scott returned from space, on that first day when he saw Gabby, he told her a story. “You know,” he said, “I had such a unique vantage point from up there. I’d look out the window, and I’d see a lot of beauty.”
He explained to Gabby that in the wake of her injury, he had tweeted a photo from space of the Tucson area as a tribute to her. He said that people in Arizona and beyond were very touched by that. He talked about how inviting and peaceful the Earth looks from space, how there are no borders between countries. Gabby listened and nodded.
I was grateful that my brother came bearing this message. It was as if he wanted to reassure Gabby that, although she was a victim of violence, he saw the possibilities of a more peaceful planet.
CHAPTER SIX
“Fly Away Home”
During the five months when Gabby was in the hospital and then in the rehab facility, her doctors and nurses joked that the elevator door would open and they never knew who might be asking for directions to Gabby’s room. It could be a senator, a former cabinet member, the president of the United States, or someone less assuming—a colorful old friend from Tucson who had come to reminisce and make Gabby laugh.
Especially at the beginning, we limited visitors. Like many brain-injury victims, Gabby was often exhausted and in pain. Those of us closest to her appreciated that people wanted to see her, but we noticed that being around too many visitors felt overwhelming to Gabby. Her natural inclination to be perky and engaging sapped her strength.
We also had to consider well-wishers’ motivations. We’d hear from lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans, asking to stop by, and we’d have to think: How close to Gabby is this person? Honestly, there was a concern, too, that someone from Washington might use a visit to assess Gabby’s competence and her ability to remain in office. That’s only natural in the cutthroat world of politics. Competitors want inside information they can pass along, or that will help them raise funds or recapture congressional districts. Especially in the early months after Gabby was injured, we thought she was entitled to privacy as she tried to heal. That’s why we didn’t release photos of her, we didn’t go into great detail describing her recovery to the media, and we didn’t encourage a parade of politicians—even allies and friends—to walk through her hospital room.
We also learned to closely study the list of would-be visitors. Some were people Gabby hardly knew or had met once or twice. Others were merely curiosity-seekers. Several times, doctors from out of state introduced themselves at the front desk and said they’d come to see Gabby. They flashed their credentials. When the security detail discovered that they had never treated Gabby and didn’t know her, they weren’t permitted to go to her room. We were taken aback that medical professionals would behave this way.
Other strangers stopped by, too. Though they likely meant well, they were turned away. Because Gabby was the victim of an assassination attempt, the U.S. Capitol Police guarded her room in shifts, twenty-four hours a day. The gunman in Tucson had been captured, yes, but there were concerns that a deranged copycat might seek to finish the job. Those of us who loved Gabby had to be cautious and alert. The security issues were stressful for all of us.
In late January, after Gabby first arrived at TIRR Memorial Hermann, the rehab hospital, former president George H. W. Bush wanted to come by and welcome her to town. It was very kind of him to call, but things hadn’t been easy for Gabby early on, so I asked him to wait.
“Well, why don’t you come by our house and bring your daughters?” he said. “Barbara and I would like to say hello.”
He was reaching out as both the eighty-six-year-old elder statesman who lives in town, and as someone who seemed genuinely concerned about Gabby and her loved ones. The girls and I took him up on his invitation and stopped by the Bush house in Houston’s Tanglewood neighborhood.
We stayed for two hours, talking about Gabby’s career, her recovery, my u
pcoming shuttle mission, and the girls’ life in Texas. It turned out to be a lot of fun. At one point, Mrs. Bush asked Claudia where she was thinking about going to college. “Maybe Pepperdine,” Claudia said.
“Well, how about Yale?” President Bush said. “I went to Yale. That’s a good school.”
That’s when Barbara said, “You know, our son George went to Yale, too, and then he went to Harvard. I don’t know why people say he’s the stupidest president ever!”
“Yeah, I never got that either,” I said, and we all laughed, especially Mrs. Bush.
President Bush and I were both naval aviators, and I told him that I had served during the first war with Iraq in 1991. “I was one of your guys over there in Desert Storm,” I said.
He asked for details, including what ship I’d flown from—it was the USS Midway—and then he told me, very soberly, “Thank you for your service.”
The visit to the Bushes’ house was surreal in some ways, especially when I thought about the chain of events that brought me and my kids there. I flew thirty-nine combat missions in the Persian Gulf, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me during the war that twenty years later I’d be hanging out at the president’s house, receiving a personalized thank-you. Or that I’d be there because my wife was seriously injured in the line of duty during an attack on U.S. soil, also while serving her country. It would have been hard to fathom any of it.
In early March, about two months after Gabby was shot, I thought it would be an OK time to finally invite the Bushes over to see her. I’d told Gabby they were coming, but she wasn’t clearly focused on everything then. When the Bushes arrived, Gabby was feeling pretty beat. She was in a chair, not her bed, but she had her head in her hand and was dozing off. The president walked in and she opened her eyes and looked up, not recognizing him at first. Then he came closer and she sat up straight.
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