The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  “Can’t launch if the forecast says not to,” my father pointed out to the TV.

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “So,” my father said with such exaggerated nonchalance that I knew exactly what he was about to ask, “what have you been learning in physics class lately?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I thought again of Dr. Schuler brandishing my OTA over his head, Dr. Schuler crying, “Ms. Gray!” when he needed the right answer to a hard question. My father would be immensely proud if he knew how well I was doing in such a competitive class, but he would also miss the point. He didn’t feel the desire to be better than everyone else, and I was just starting to understand that this was one difference between us.

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled. “Just the basics, I guess.”

  “Hmm,” my father said thoughtfully, as if I’d just told him something interesting and mildly surprising. “Have you gotten to ballistics yet?”

  “Yes,” I sighed.

  “That’s great. In one dimension or two?”

  I put down my fork, letting it clatter onto my plate. Because he had always asked for so little, those rare times when he pushed me for more, some bratty force took over me. He always backed off from conversations with my mother whenever she warned him in her usual ways, through her tone, her expression, her movements. If she banged one pan down on the stove, he left her alone for the rest of the evening. Why didn’t he respect the same signals when they came from me?

  “What is it?” my father asked carefully.

  “I’m done,” I said.

  “You haven’t finished your dinner yet,” he said in a quiet, defeated voice.

  “Well, I have a stomachache now,” I said. “I don’t want any more.”

  I went into the living room to lie on the couch. After he and Delia finished eating and he cleared the table, he came and sat down next to me. I’d been hoping he would; that was why I lay there and not in my room. For a minute or two I heard him breathing.

  “Hey, D?” he finally asked. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No,” I said, not as hostile as before. He waited another long minute.

  “Why does it bother you when I ask you about school?” he asked, making his voice gentle. “I’m not trying to test you, I’m just…” He breathed heavily, and I felt the shift of weight as he raised his hands in a helpless gesture.

  “I’m just curious about what you’re learning. Okay?” his voice was weak and raspy. I didn’t answer.

  “I just think it’s important, what you’re learning at this stage in your life. I remember it was right around your age that I started doing badly in school. I didn’t do anything terrible, I didn’t fail any classes, but I started goofing off. I started making excuses for myself. I guess I didn’t take it very seriously, because I didn’t know how important it would be later. And I want you to have the chance to do everything I was never able to do.”

  I felt a disorienting shift in my ideas about my father. He had this story about failure, locked away in some drawer labeled FAILURE in his mind, and he had waited my whole life to tell me about it. I didn’t know how to answer him, so I didn’t. I kept my breathing soft and even so he would think I was asleep. But he sat there for a long time before he finally left.

  I woke from a dream about my mother. She was sitting in the passenger seat of our car; I was in the backseat. We were flying down the road, but no one was behind the wheel.

  “It was nice to see you,” she said, but not to me; she was looking sadly through the windshield. I knew somehow that she was talking only to my father.

  Then the dream changed and I was lying on my stomach while my father rubbed my back the way he used to when I was little and had trouble sleeping. Slowly, I became aware of him, his weight on the bed, the sleepy smell of him in his pajamas.

  “You awake, D?” he finally asked. I was. I turned over to look at him.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “What time is it?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Do you want to go out and see the launch this morning?” I stalled for time by rubbing my eyes and looking at the clock.

  “We don’t have to,” he added. “It’s up to you.”

  “When is it going to launch?”

  “Nine thirty-eight.”

  “I have school.”

  “You’d just miss the first couple of classes. I’ll get you there by eleven.”

  I was tired, and I didn’t want to miss physics. But I loved seeing the launches, and this was a special one. I knew that later I would want to be able to say that I had been there.

  “Okay,” I said, and rolled out of bed. I woke Delia and coaxed her into her clothes.

  We drove out to the Cape in silence. Red taillights gathered in the dark—more cars than I had seen for a launch since the first test flights. People milled around talking, shouting, eating, blasting music out of their car radios.

  My father and I got out of the car, leaving Delia to sleep in the backseat, and we sat on the hood with a blanket over us. The hood was still warm from the engine, and the combination of this warmth and the unseasonably cold air was pleasant. Across the river, the stack was lit up dramatically; as always, it was hard to imagine that soon it would actually lift off the ground.

  “Great day for a launch,” my father said. A meaningless claim, he had taught me long ago: if the launch hadn’t been called off, then by definition it was a great day for a launch.

  “Nice and clear,” he added when I didn’t answer. “That’s one thing about the cold. It’s always nice and clear. Good launch weather.”

  I watched the countdown clock—the same big orange numbers that Eric and I had watched together at the Discovery launch. The hundredths of a second skittered by too fast to read.

  “January twenty-seventh,” he said. “Did you know the Mercury accident was nineteen years ago today?” I knew all about the Mercury accident; he’d told me about it a million times. I also knew what he wanted from me now: he wanted me to ask him questions so he could tell about it again. I thought of the reporter from Ohio he’d met here six months ago, the fascinated attention he’d paid my father. I said nothing.

  “Sure doesn’t seem like that long ago,” he continued. He paused, looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “It was a fire, you know, during a launch rehearsal on the pad. The hatch wouldn’t open from the outside. Can you believe that?” He shook his head in wonder, as if just hearing the news for the first time. “The hatch. Just…a door. Maybe the simplest part on the whole spacecraft. Some people said we should have ended manned spaceflight right then, that it wasn’t worth the risk.” He waited again, a polite moment, for me to respond. When I didn’t, he went on.

  “We lost three astronauts that day. Including the one I liked the best.”

  “The one you liked best?” I echoed, surprised. “Which one?” My father had never mentioned having a favorite astronaut before.

  “Gus Grissom.”

  I could picture Gus Grissom; his portrait was in some of my astronaut books. He had a sad face—full downturned lips, big soulful lidded eyes.

  “Did you know him?” I asked.

  “No, never met him. In those days, the astronauts spent some of their time in the VAB, leading tours of politicians and journalists. So I saw him sometimes. He was educated as an engineer. I guess I liked that about him, that he was an engineer and not just a thrill jockey like some of them. He was just more shy and reserved.”

  “He looked just like you,” I said, and once I’d said it I realized how uncannily true that was—my father had those same drooping lids, the same tragic-yet-bemused look, even the same crew cut. My father gave a smile.

  “Really,” I said. “You look just like him. You should have been an astronaut too.”

  My father gave a little laugh.

  “I never wanted to be an astronaut,” my father said quietly. “Most men my age did, you know. But I wanted to work on it. That was more important to me than
flying.

  “I hope you can grow up to do more than I did,” he said. “You’ve got the brain for it. You might grow up to design a better engine. You might solve the liquid fuel problem. You might design the Mars transport. It’s going to be your generation, D, that goes to Mars.”

  I could have kept quiet. I could have agreed.

  “I’m not going to be an engineer,” I announced. “I’m going to be an astronaut.”

  “That’s what you said when you were a kid. But as you get older, you’re going to see what it would mean to be an engineer. You’re going to want the intellectual challenge.”

  “Why would I work my whole life just so someone else gets to go to space?” I spat. “I’m going to Mars. I’m not going to be a stupid engineer, and I’m certainly not going to be a sucker technician, getting laid off for no reason after years of work.”

  My father nodded, his face neutral, and folded his hands in front of him. I watched him as he looked out toward the launchpad and listened to the calls of Launch Control, waiting patiently for the launch to start and change the subject for us.

  When the announcement came over the speakers that the launch had been scrubbed yet again, I felt the decision to be somehow passing judgment on us, on our family.

  My father dropped Delia off at her school, but then he forgot to take me to mine, or else he had decided not to. When we got home, I fell asleep on the couch, all the long blank afternoon with the TV burbling in the back of my consciousness. I woke up when Delia got home from school. The sun was setting, and my father was sitting next to me on the couch. I watched his profile, tired and blank, while the news made fun of NASA. His face looked the way it always had in the blue light, tired but falling in all its normal shapes and folds. He smiled at me when he saw my eyes were open.

  “Let’s go to the mall,” my father whispered, his voice quiet like a dream.

  We ate dinner in the Food Court. My father told me what he’d heard on the news about the scrubbed launch: a tool used to close the hatch to the crew capsule had broken off, like a key breaking in a lock. After hours of struggle with a hand saw, an electric drill had finally been authorized for use, but all of the batteries in all of the drills on the pad were close to dead. By the time the hatch handle was extracted, the weather had turned windy and the launch had to be scrubbed. I knew my father was remembering our conversation about the hatch and the Mercury accident, that he thought the similarity was eerie. I kept my face blank.

  “Why didn’t they just use an electric drill in the first place?”

  “Well, it seems simple enough that you should use a drill, but when you have tons of rocket fuel sitting out there, you don’t want to fire up an electrical device right next to it unless you have to.”

  He stopped to take a breath and shove some french fries into his mouth.

  “And the thing with the batteries! Did you hear that on the news, saying that we sent up eight batteries for the hand drill, all of them dead? As if all these guys working on the Mobile Launch Platform show up for work with bad equipment? They forgot to mention that when it’s freezing cold, batteries have a tendency to die.”

  “Can we go again tomorrow?” I asked. My father looked confused for a second, woken out of his story.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  The three of us walked slowly through the mall to get back to our car. There was something about the mall that I resisted now, something that ran counter to physics and the hard, sterile comfort of the space shuttle. Judith Resnik wouldn’t spend all of her time in a mall; she was somewhere real, reading about physics, practicing the piano, doing sit-ups; every thought, every action, pointed toward the future.

  My father took Delia into a clothing store while I sat on a bench outside reading my physics book. I pretended to be sulking; otherwise, he might not feel he had to balance things by buying something for me too. I finished the chapter we were working on in physics; then I had the idea to flip back to the first chapter to read it again. Gravity, the book said, is what keeps everything—houses, trees, your school, even you—from flying off the face of the Earth and into outer space. The fake trees in the mall were hung with white lights left over from Christmas. Faraway music played. Suddenly the air around me felt cold. I shivered and closed the book.

  My father and Delia were at the back of the store, lined up at the counter. My father stood frozen with his credit card outstretched toward the frozen cashier. My sister rested her chin on the glass counter and the rest of her body drooped away from it as if she’d been shot with a tranquilizer. The two of them stood fixed; somehow I had frozen them like that. Fake violins played on as my father and sister stood motionless. But then they moved: Delia kicked her foot against the floor, the cashier finally took the credit card from my father’s hand, which he dropped nervously to his side. But the chill remained, and as we pushed our way out the ten glass doors, we felt the cold wind blowing outside, colder than I’d ever felt, and we all huddled together as we ran out to our car. The cold felt like something menacing, like something that meant us harm. My father put on the heat in the car. It blew unfamiliar in our faces, hot and dry.

  That night, I wrote up the launch attempts for this mission so far in my space notebook.

  STS 51-L, Challenger.

  Launch attempt January 22, 1986, slipped to January 23, then January 24, due to delays on the previous mission, 61-C.

  January 24 attempt delayed one day due to bad weather at transoceanic abort site.

  January 25 attempt postponed one day to let launch processing crews at Kennedy prepare.

  January 26 attempt postponed to January 27 because of predicted bad weather.

  January 27 attempt scrubbed when hatch closing handle could not be removed from the hatch.

  My father took me to the fifth attempt.

  January 28, 1986

  17.

  DR. SCHULER PULLED THE TV ON ITS CART INTO THE ROOM AND positioned it up at the blackboard where he usually stood. He drew the blinds so we could see the TV better, but light leaked in pink at the edges of the windows. We watched the astronauts emerge into the day, waving, single-file. We knew they had eaten a breakfast of steak and eggs together while photographers snapped their pictures. We watched the seven of them emerge from the Operations and Checkout Building for the ceremonial walkout to a rising cheer and the flashes of cameras. We watched them climb into their strange silver van, one by one, ducking their heads to get in, flashes punctuating their smiling and their awkward gestures.

  We all knew about the elevator they rode up to the top of the stack, the White Room where they waited their turns to climb through the hatch. The astronauts are tipped onto their backs for launch, the entire crew cabin pointing toward the sky. We knew about the white-coated technicians whose job it was to strap them violently into their seats, then wish them godspeed and seal the hatch.

  The planned launch time of 9:38 came and went. This was the hardest part, the waiting. I imagined myself as Judith Resnik: for a mission specialist, there was nothing to do during the wait—no sensors to monitor, no controls to adjust, no plans to review. She sat tipped on her back, wiggling her feet now and then to keep them awake, talking with the crew and the ground. Sitting on the mid-deck and wearing a helmet, she couldn’t see any of the others, and if they all fell silent for too long, it became weirdly possible to imagine that she was entirely alone up there, miles from any other living soul, the empty static in her headset loud as swimming underwater. Judith Resnik was always the one to break the silences—she’d complain about the wait, crack some joke. She was reassured by the sound of her own voice echoing back through the headset. And then the warm responses of the others, their voices layering over one another, and all was well.

  We counted down along with the NASA announcer, and when the countdown reached T minus six seconds, we saw the Main Engines ignite, the Launch Vehicle bucking in place against its restraints. We held our breaths at the moment of ignition, that strange
fire and shudder. At one, liftoff, the bolts detached and I felt the thunderous force of the rockets.

  After so many delays, it was finally happening. We saw the ship struggle against gravity and lift itself slowly, clearing the tip of the launch tower. For one long minute, the shuttle rose on a fat column of puffy smoke, rising and gradually tilting itself, executing its slow, lazy roll. We knew it to be moving, but it appeared to be stationary, jiggling only slightly in the camera’s frame.

  The explosion was subtle but unmistakable to people who had seen previous launches, and we had seen many of them. The rising exhaust trail popped into a ball of smoke; then two contrails arched away, carving a white Y onto the cloudless sky. Then there was nothing.

  The Solid Rocket Boosters were supposed to jettison at T plus two minutes, but the elapsed time was only seventy-three seconds. A tiny confused cheer went up on the TV at the moment of the puff of smoke—those people thought the boosters had dropped off early. But we knew better.

  I wondered what this would feel like to Judith Resnik—an unexpected bang and shudder, then a low thrum as the Main Engines take over and the vehicle slows. The pilot would have to do an RTLS, Return to Launch Site, circling the vehicle around and landing it on the runway at Kennedy. This had never been attempted.

  But then where was the shuttle? The camera searched and searched the sky, crazily panning and tilting, picking up bits of building, the ocean at the edge of Merritt Island, a palmetto tree, a bird flying low over the causeway.

  I thought of Eric, the way we had stood together at the launch site and watched Discovery tear into the sky. I wondered where Eric was watching this now, and wondered whether he thought of me.

  The announcer spoke again in his authoritative, noncommittal voice: “Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation…obviously a major malfunction.”