“What the hell’s telemetry?” Chiarra demanded. “And why would it still be normal? The space shuttle blew up.”
“The debris,” I guessed. “The pieces still had some momentum on them, so the sensors would show them still moving in the right direction.”
“Wow,” Chiarra said perfunctorily. “Did you guys hear that this launch was going more slowly than the others or something?”
“I heard that, but then I heard it actually wasn’t true. Dolores, what have you got? What did your dad say?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t talked to him yet,” I lied. I didn’t want to talk about my father or his Solid Rocket Boosters. “He didn’t come home last night.”
Tina and Chiarra nodded gravely at this.
“Your dad must have a more important job than mine,” Tina observed. “Mine came home at four in the morning or something.” I didn’t mention that my mother had come home, of course; they didn’t know that she had been gone in the first place. I wondered whether Mr. Biersdorfer had been at the Space Center all night like my father, whether Eric had waited for him to come home.
I looked around Dr. Schuler’s classroom, waiting for class to begin. Like my house, it looked different now somehow, bright and bare. Only twenty-four hours earlier we had sat right here, innocent and bored, waiting for the launch, assuming the adults would take care of everything. We’d been stupid to believe it, and now the room felt tainted with our stupidity. All around me, I heard kids having the same conversations, comparing what their parents had reported, gathering data, offering theories, dismissing theories.
Dr. Schuler came in and moved slowly to the front of the room. He’d dressed up for today in a tie and jacket, as if he expected someone to take his picture. He cleared his throat and bent forward slightly from the waist, to signal that he was ready to speak, but then he didn’t. We stared and waited.
“Would anyone like to share their thoughts or feelings or observations about what occurred yesterday?”
No one moved or reacted. Dr. Schuler knit his fingers together and waited. Time went by. Finally he spoke.
“Well, for me…” he said reluctantly. “For me, I had a very difficult day yesterday. For me, personally, it’s very difficult to see something like this happen. The people involved—the seven of them—they were very brave and very young. I know they probably don’t seem young to you, but they were. And to think that we lost them like this…” Dr. Schuler looked off into the corner.
“Well, it’s a tragedy. And I know that in your young lives there are many things that feel like tragedies. Maybe you don’t make the team, or so-and-so doesn’t want to go to the prom with you, or you fail an OTA, or you have a disagreement with your parents. But these—you need to understand—these are not tragedies. A young person in his thirties, at the prime of his life, with a couple of kids at home, never coming back from this mission—” Dr. Schuler got a fake-sounding hitch in his throat and stopped talking. He laid an index finger across his lips, begging our patience.
“Scholars,” he said when he’d composed himself. “I want you to consider the future of manned spaceflight. There are going to be those who suggest that we react to this event by ending the shuttle program altogether right now. I’m sure a number of your parents are concerned about just such an eventuality. I want you to consider whether that would be an appropriate remedy to this disaster, whether this makes sense. And I want you to consider whether that kind of step, taken perhaps out of shock and anger, is really what the Challenger crew would have wanted.
“As an applicant for the Teacher in Space program myself,” Dr. Schuler said with a false offhandedness, “I feel this concern. And I know that if it had been me yesterday, I would want manned spaceflight to go on.”
This was the first time I’d heard anyone refer to what the astronauts would have wanted, and I suspected it wouldn’t be the last. Rodney, a kid in the back who rarely spoke up, exhaled loudly and raised his hand. Dr. Schuler pointed in his direction with an open palm, his face expectant.
“Are we going to have class today?” Rodney asked.
Dr. Schuler’s face fell, and he squinted angrily at Rodney. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said coldly. “The bell rang five minutes ago. We are currently in class.”
“I mean, are we going to go over the homework from chapter six? Are we going to do physics?” A quiet rustle went up around the room as everyone turned to look at Rodney. For once, Dr. Schuler seemed unsure of how to answer.
“In a sense…” he said in the same slow and thoughtful tone he’d been using, “in a sense, we are talking about physics. We are talking about the future of manned spaceflight in America, which is an important application of the field of physics.” Rodney threw up his hands and closed his textbook with a loud thump. Everyone watched him as he crossed his arms in front of him, staring at Dr. Schuler belligerently.
“So does this mean we have no OTA on Monday?” Rodney asked.
Dr. Schuler looked shocked by the question. “As far as I am aware,” he said calmly, “we still have an OTA scheduled for Monday.”
“Will it only cover chapter five, then?” asked Rodney. “Because if we’re not going to start on chapter six today, I don’t think it’s fair we should be tested on it on Monday.”
Dr. Schuler nodded to himself, as if to say that something he had long suspected had just been confirmed.
“This is a difficult time for all of you,” he said. “It’s a difficult time for your parents, I’m sure, if they work for the space agency in some capacity. I’m sure it’s a difficult time at home.” He looked around the room with a cold and appraising look. His eyes caught on me for a second, and I stared back, keeping my face blank.
“When a disaster occurs, a national tragedy with relevance to our own lives and relevance to the field of physics, I would think that you would want to take a class period to discuss it.”
He looked out at us again as if someone were about to answer him. No one did.
“But if you’d rather not discuss it,” he said, “that is fine. We can sit here in silence for the next forty minutes until the bell rings.” His voice had taken on a certain edge that I recognized from my mother. Something had shut down within him, had gone cold, and there would be no way to bring it back.
So we sat in silence for the next forty minutes. Some kids pulled out books or homework from other classes, and Dr. Schuler did nothing to stop them. Chiarra put her head down and went to sleep; some kids doodled on their notebooks or looked off into the air.
When the bell rang, everyone got up to leave, watching Dr. Schuler to see whether he might say anything more. I slipped out, avoiding his gaze.
All the students congregated in the cafeteria at lunchtime. Several TVs were switched to the news. Tina, Chiarra, and I drifted toward the back of the room and stood at the edge of a clump of people talking together. A kid I didn’t know was describing excitedly how he had found something washed up on the beach near his house. NASA had warned people not to touch any debris they might come across, especially the small tanks filled with rocket fuel to power the shuttles’ maneuvering thrusters. The tanks could blow up spontaneously, the papers said.
“I swear to God, when I went out there in the morning, there were a bunch of heat tiles, and a whole chunk of External Tank,” he said. “But the weirdest thing was—there was a glove.”
“Did you keep any of it?” Tina asked him.
“No, my mom called NASA like you’re supposed to.”
“A glove?” someone repeated. “Like from a space suit?”
“Like from a space suit,” the kid confirmed. “It was white and silver. You know, with the rubber fingertips. I was so sicked out, I like almost lost my lunch.”
“You should call Channel Seven,” a girl near him said. Some of the news stations had featured local residents who found interesting debris. I thought again of the reporter my father had met at the launch of 51-F, the way he’d told my father to c
all him if he learned anything new. I hadn’t understood at the time what he might have meant.
“Was there a hand in it?” Chiarra called. Only Tina and I could tell that she didn’t believe him.
“I didn’t look!” the kid cried. “My mom called NASA and they came and picked it all up. All I know is, the NASA guys who showed up made everyone leave the area, and I saw them with one of those boxes that said CAUTION: HUMAN REMAINS on it.”
“Oh my God,” squealed a girl sitting near him, holding her hands up against her mouth.
“Oh please,” I scoffed quietly. I’d meant to speak only for Tina and Chiarra’s benefit, but everyone turned to look at me, including the beach house kid.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“Well, it’s just that there couldn’t have been a hand in it,” I explained, feeling myself blush harder and harder.
“Why not?” asked the girl who had put her hands over her mouth.
“The astronauts don’t wear space suits for launch anymore,” I explained. “They just wear those blue flight suits. No gloves.”
Everyone looked at the beach house kid. He was working his mouth back and forth, looking at me with hatred. Everyone remembered the walkout, the seven astronauts strutting out of Operations and Checkout wearing those blue suits. We’d seen it a million times since then.
“They carry pressure suits on board for the spacewalks,” I offered him. “Maybe the glove was from one of those.”
But now that the glove was empty, no one cared what the beach house kid had found anymore. I felt unaccountably sorry for him, for his simple desire to own something that the rest of us would want to crowd around and examine with him, poke at with our toes. Everyone else seemed annoyed with me too; they knew I was right, but they would rather have been allowed to go on believing him. I decided to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the day, and I did, through other implausible debris stories and theories about the accident’s cause that denied the laws of physics.
As Tina and Chiarra and I left the building and drifted toward our buses, I lit another cigarette from my mother’s pack. I’d worried I would look stupid doing it, but I lit it smoothly and inhaled easily while they watched; it was like I’d been doing it all my life. Everything about it seemed familiar: the match catching the crispy ends of tobacco at the cigarette’s tip, the rich dirty feeling of the smoke pulling into my lungs. Tina and Chiarra exclaimed briefly over my smoking, but not as much as I had expected. They each took one, and then we were smoking together, the three of us.
I could see already how yesterday’s events would become shaped and smoothed over. Sitting on the afternoon bus, I heard my first Challenger jokes: What does NASA stand for? Need Another Seven Astronauts. What were Christa McAuliffe’s last words? “What’s this button do?” It’s hard to imagine laughing at such jokes, but I did—not the way I laughed at things that were actually funny, but I laughed all the same. I opened my mouth and out came a sort of dry, sarcastic, incredulous sound.
My father’s note lay on the kitchen table, on top of the one our mother had left, in his familiar blocky capitals. His handwriting always looked exactly the same.
DEAR GIRLS, the note said. I AM GOING TO HAVE TO WORK LATE TONIGHT. I’LL PICK YOU UP AT 8 TO GO TO DINNER, BUT THEN I WILL PROBABLY HAVE TO GO TO WORK AGAIN. PLEASE BE READY WITH YOUR SHOES ON. LOVE, DAD.
He must have known that our mother wouldn’t stay; they must have discussed it. Apparently they made all kinds of plans between them without bothering to inform Delia or me of the simplest of facts.
“What did you do in school today?” I asked Delia.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Jennifer threw up.”
“Didn’t your teacher talk about the space shuttle? Didn’t she mention that at all?”
“Mrs. Givings said, ‘How many children are sad today because of the space shuttle?’”
“Yeah? And what did you say?”
Delia dug into her backpack for something, then fished out a drawing. It showed a crude outline of the space shuttle, several disproportionately large children clustered around it. We are sad for the shettle, she had written across the bottom, and signed it, extravagantly, Delia Gray.
“It’s a nice picture, Delia,” I told her. “And it’s shuttle, not shettle,” I couldn’t resist adding. “But you did a good job.”
Delia nodded and put the picture on the fridge where our father would see it. We watched TV again all evening as the living room grew dark. Right at eight we heard a honk: our father had pulled in the driveway, and we ran out. The dome light illuminated the top of my father’s head and the trash on the floor of the car, crumpled homework papers, old fast-food wrappers, a lost sock.
“Hi, Daddy!” chirped Delia.
“Hi, D,” said my father to Delia, and, “Hi, D,” to me. His eyes were red and puffy.
“How are you doing?” he asked in a weary voice.
“Good,” said Delia. She was back to being normal and chipper. It seemed there was nothing that could happen to Delia that would bother her for more than fifteen minutes. “A girl threw up. And we made igloos. Out of sugar cubes.” I had hoped that Delia would ask the questions she had asked me that morning about our mother—where she was, why she had come back only to leave us again. I wanted to see my father struggle to answer them. But Delia seemed to have forgotten about all of that.
“Igloos, huh?” my father echoed, craning his neck to look at Delia in the backseat. “That sounds great. What about you, D? How was your day?”
“Fabulous,” I said flatly. I wanted to know what had happened at his work, but I knew he wanted to tell me, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
The radio was playing low, a song I couldn’t quite make out, as we drove along the freeway, slowing, turning, finally stopping in the vast landscape of parking lot. We walked into the mall, and it seemed ages since I’d been there now, a different place, busy and more substantial. The multicolored lights looked lurid reflected in the beige tiles of the floor, and tinny music echoed oddly off the walls.
“Well, the investigation’s gotten started,” my father said once we were all settled at a plastic table with our trays in the Food Court.
“I’ve had to fill out a lot of reports, more than you would have thought possible,” he said. “There’s a lot of data, a lot of notes we took, that we have to straighten out while we can still remember all the details, write everything up clearly for the investigators.”
“Do they think something went wrong with the SRBs?” I asked.
“Not necessarily. They just want to be very thorough and get every scrap of information about every single component.” He paused, chewing, for a few minutes.
“But if I had to guess, I’d look at the Main Engines. A cracked turbine blade in a Main Engine.”
We left the mall and walked to our car. The sun had gone down, letting the cold reassert itself. The wind on our faces felt cruel, intentional. NASA had already denied the possibility of any connection between the accident and the cold, but I felt certain that a cold like this must have had effects they couldn’t have predicted. According to my physics book, there was actually no such thing as cold, only the absence of heat. But I felt the cold, even if it didn’t exist: the cold like a substance, like a force of its own with a menace to it, a hostility.
My father pulled into the driveway and sat back with an exhausted sigh. He didn’t shut off the motor. Delia and I both waited.
“Do you have your key?” he asked me.
“Why?” I asked, suspicious. “Where are you going?” I felt cheated that he wasn’t even going to come in with us.
“I’ll be back soon,” he answered placidly, with a small fake smile. “There’s some more things I’ve got to take care of at work. Make sure you and Delia both brush your teeth.”
“I want to go with you,” I said. I thought of Eric, the way he would demand to know everything his father knew, the way he would stand, arms crossed and
scowling, asking relentlessly for the truth. Maybe if I went to the Space Center, I thought, I could see him.
My father just smiled sadly, didn’t bother to say no; it was obvious my request was unreasonable. I sat for a few more minutes, waiting him out, and Delia waited too. My father tapped his fingers against the steering wheel, waiting for us to get tired of waiting.
“Don’t cry, D,” he said after a few minutes. I looked at Delia, surprised—she had been so calm and happy all day. But Delia was dry-eyed, staring back at me with a look of concern. My father was looking at me too. Then I felt it, my eyes stinging, and then, a second later, the sadness. I sniffed hard. My father pulled out the tissue he always kept in his pocket and handed it to me.
“Where is Mom?” I demanded. “Why would she come back and then just leave again?”
“It was an emergency,” he said. “I asked her to come back just for the evening because it was an emergency.”
“Why don’t you ask her to come back for good, then? If that’s the way it works?”
He shook his head sadly.
“That’s not the way it works,” he said.
We both thought about this for a minute before he spoke again.
“I want you to know that no one has said anything about layoffs,” he told me. “They’re taking this one step at a time. Once the cause is determined, everything is going to get back to normal. No one has said anything about laying anyone off, or about any budget cuts.”
“It’s still too early for that,” I pointed out.
“Well, we’ll see,” he said. “But in the meantime, don’t worry.”
I blew my nose and continued to sit, waiting for him to say something more.
“Dolores,” my father said heavily to the steering wheel, “I don’t want you to blame yourself. I don’t want you to think that any of this is your fault.”
The Time It Takes to Fall Page 23