I watched one afternoon as Commissioner Feynman, a physicist with a sense of showmanship, soaked a piece of O-ring in his ice water, then held it up for the cameras to show how brittle it had become. The tape was replayed on the news again and again: Professor Feynman’s smirk as he fished the C-clamp out of his glass, unscrewed it to reveal the flattened O-ring, then held it up in two fingers.
“I think this might have something to do with your problem,” he said wryly.
My father shook his head at the professor’s demonstration—“a little dramatic,” he complained—but of course Feynman was right. When cold, rubber loses its flexibility. My father would have preferred that the commission talk about something else altogether—the Main Engines, for instance—but Feynman endeared himself to me by focusing the attention where it belonged: on the design of the booster itself, not on the work my father had done assembling it.
Tourists swarmed to central Florida to visit the site of the disaster, more than had come to see the launch itself. They pointed up toward where the smoke formation had hung in the sky; they traced with outstretched arms the path the short flight had taken. After some discussion and agreement, they solemnly snapped pictures of the horizon, then got back into their cars and returned to where they came from.
I watched my father those days even more closely than before, monitoring him for signs. After being at the Cape day and night for the first weeks after the disaster, now he stayed home from work most days. There was nothing for him to do, since all missions had been canceled for at least a year. Many workers at the Cape had been laid off already, and rumors predicted more. Delia loved coming home from school to find him there, ready to fix her a snack and hear about her day. To me he was still distant but polite.
Things had gone almost completely back to normal at school. No one cried in class anymore, and no teachers, not even the softest ones, let us discuss the disaster rather than having class. But the habit of skipping classes I had started the week of the disaster had proved impossible to shake once I’d discovered that teachers didn’t care. I still went to physics and math every day and still did well in those two classes, but the others—English, history, French, and physical education—I skipped often, experimenting to see how much I could miss without affecting my grade and without the teachers calling my father.
I had kept my reputation as the star physics student. I made a habit of getting to class early in order to help other kids with the hardest homework problems. One Monday morning as we waited for Dr. Schuler to arrive, after I had helped Doug and Tina with a tough problem on buoyancy, we discussed where we might have to move if our fathers were laid off. It was all over the papers, the number of workers at the Cape who would have to find work elsewhere. As a physicist, my father would have had a good chance of keeping his job, so I acted nonchalant. Tina was convinced we would all be sent to Houston. On the other side of her, Doug was talking to Chiarra, and at first he seemed to be telling her of other jobs his father would be qualified for, but then he was telling her something that caused her to bring both hands up to her face, moaning, “Oh my God, oh my God,” over and over in a low drone.
“What?” Tina demanded. Chiarra turned to us, hands still on her mouth.
The look on Doug’s face as he pulled his chair closer to Tina and me was a look common to people bearing bad news that doesn’t affect them—self-importance straining at the seams of a thin humility.
“Okay,” Doug said, his head bowed, his voice quiet to keep others from hearing. “Okay. So you know my dad works on accident reconstruction,” he began. “Well, he told me that yesterday they finally dragged up…” and here Doug looked around again and lowered his voice even more. “They dragged up the crew cabin.”
He paused to let this sink in.
“Why wasn’t this in the news?” I asked. I kept such careful notes on the coverage, I found it hard to believe that something as momentous as this could have escaped my monitoring.
“It was recovered in the middle of the night,” Doug explained. “It’ll probably be in the news tomorrow.”
“Why would they pull it up in the middle of the night?” I challenged him.
“Because NASA didn’t want it to be seen. Any way,” Doug said with a sideways look to Tina. It was clear I was ruining his fun. “They recovered the crew cabin in the middle of the night. And you’ll never guess what they found.” He waited, as though we might actually take a guess.
“Dead astronauts?” Tina offered.
“Well, yeah,” Doug whispered. “But you’ll never guess what about them.”
In the seconds that ticked by while Doug paused to let the suspense build, I tried to imagine what he might say about the astronauts that I didn’t already know. I knew everything about them—where they had grown up and gone to school, their military training and specialties. I knew their hobbies and their children’s names. I knew how they had smiled and how they had touched their helmets. For Judith Resnik I knew even more, the inner life I had imagined for her, the daring and intelligence I wanted for myself.
“What?” Tina begged. “What is it?”
“The astronauts survived the explosion,” Doug said. “After the shuttle blew up, they were still alive.”
We sat back in our seats, taking this in.
“How is that possible?” Tina demanded. “The shuttle was a fireball.”
“Yeah, there was a huge explosion, but the crew capsule didn’t blow up,” Doug said. “It’s, like, separate from the rest of the shuttle, and it’s pressurized. It was blown free. The astronauts almost certainly survived the explosion.”
I watched Doug’s face then, the way he tried to watch all three of us at once, savoring our reactions to what he’d told us. It was hard not to start hating him a little for it, the way I’d started hating my father.
“Were they awake? Did they know what happened?” Chiarra asked.
“It probably depressurized,” I put in. “Maybe they were still alive, but they probably blacked out instantly.”
Doug shook his head, trying to suppress a smile. “They wore emergency oxygen packs that have to be turned on by hand. They’ve found three of the packs so far in the debris, and all of them had been turned on.”
“So they were awake and falling,” Tina said gravely. We sat silently for a minute, imagining this.
“So they drowned?” Tina asked.
“No, they would have died from the impact,” I corrected. “They would have hit the surface going really fast.”
“How long did it take?” Chiarra asked. “I mean, how long did they fall?”
They all looked at me.
I pulled out a piece of notebook paper and sketched out the variables. It was simple ballistics: . They watched over my shoulder as I sketched in the numbers, then worked through the math. I didn’t know how to correct for air resistance, so I had to estimate that.
The others watched as my pencil scratched over the paper, holding their breaths, Tina and Chiarra covering their mouths. I had never felt so powerful, not even when I called Rick Landry. I felt as though I were determining our fates; if I could somehow find that this equation made no sense, then it would not be true that they had fallen, and maybe they could still be saved.
I started to cry a bit as I worked through the last of the math. I was embarrassed and tried to hide my tears, but no one seemed to notice; they were still watching my pencil.
“About two and a half minutes,” I said when I reached the end. We all pondered this for a moment.
“I guess that’s not all that long,” Doug said.
“Are you kidding?” Chiarra spat. “If you jumped off the Empire State Building, that’s like eight seconds.” We all knew this because it was a popular example on Dr. Schuler’s OTAs. “They fell, like, twenty times that long.”
We were all quiet, counting silently in our heads, for eight seconds, then more. Long before we reached two minutes, Dr. Schuler arrived and class began.
I cou
ldn’t concentrate after that; my mind was singing a high note of horror, imagining that long fall. All this time, I had assumed for the astronauts instant death, painless. Standing outside and watching the explosion rain down the sky, I had thought they were already dead. That was the mystery I had pondered: living one moment, gone the next. It was terrible to imagine that they had not been dead yet as I watched, that while I stood out there, they were still falling. Somehow, every tiny comfort was being eroded for me, even the comfort of assuming that their deaths had been painless. As soon as class was over, I cornered Chiarra.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I told her.
She put on a serious face. “Where are we going to go?” she asked.
“We’ll go to the mall,” I said. “Tell Tina.”
Chiarra’s mouth fell open into a pink little O.
“The MALL,” she repeated. “But how would we get there?”
“Hitch,” I said in a high voice, as if it were obvious. Hitch. Just one little throwaway syllable. I had never hitchhiked anywhere, and had never known anyone who had.
We found Tina and told her the plan.
“Good,” she said, slamming her locker. “If I have to hear Mrs. Nichols tell us one more time how inspiring it was to watch fucking John Glenn walk on the moon, I’m going to puke myself.”
“Is she still talking about that?” I asked. “It’s been two months. And it was Neil Armstrong,” I added. We marched down the hallway, pushing past the tide of kids headed the other way.
“Whatever,” Tina responded as we pushed out the side door. “Why do teachers think that stuff is relevant? Or one more story about how they thought about applying to be the Teacher in Space, and now they’re aware of their own mortality.”
“Yeah. I wish Dr. Schuler had been the Teacher in Space,” Chiarra said.
“Wow,” Tina observed. “That’s harsh.”
We ran across the athletic field as fast as we could so we wouldn’t be spotted by a teacher looking out the window. The weather was warmer than it had been the week before, but still cold, in the fifties. When we reached the road, there were no cars. We trudged along the shoulder in the direction of the mall. Scrubby grass grew up to the edge of the thin gravel, and a fine layer of trash was strewn everywhere, bits of glass, bottle tops, straw wrappers, pieces of plastic. It seemed so depressing that this road should look like this, that this wind should blow so cold on us, that nothing could ever just be clean and perfect.
We heard the low whine of a car approaching. Tina and Chiarra watched me, waiting to see what I would do. I stuck out my thumb, feeling like an idiot. The drivers of approaching cars glanced at me, surprised. In one car, a woman about my mother’s age leaned forward to squint at us, her face a ball of worry. But she didn’t pull over. Another car approached, a huge station wagon stuffed full of redheaded kids, and it rolled to a stop. We stamped out our cigarettes and ran toward it. The driver was a smiling fat woman with the same red hair as the kids. She was turning herself in her seat to greet us as we piled into the back.
“Well, hello!” she cried. “Aren’t you three adorable!”
The children squeezed over against the door to make room for us and stared at us, openmouthed.
“What are you girls doing out in the middle of the day?” the mother called from the front seat. “Don’t you have school?”
“We got let out early,” Chiarra lied as the mother piloted the car back into traffic. “Special recess.”
“Oh, sure,” the mom agreed in a happy voice. “That must be fun.” Something in her voice made me think she knew we were lying, but she felt no need to let us know that she knew. I was moved by her generosity; most of the adults I knew would have started questioning, narrowing in on details, exposing the lie.
Pulling up to the mall entrance, the redheaded mother made us promise never to hitchhike again, because of the perverts, she said, and we promised happily, knowing that we would.
“Now, do you girls have a way to get home?” she asked, rummaging through her giant purse.
“Yeah,” Chiarra lied as the lady handed her a quarter.
“Just in case you need to call home,” the mom said. “Do you have any money in case you get hungry?”
“No, thank you, we’ll be fine!” Tina called as we all clambered out. “Thanks for the ride!”
The kids in the back turned to wave through the rear window as the station wagon pulled away.
“That was nice of her,” Tina observed, waving back. “My parents never give me money.”
“Should have taken it,” Chiarra said. “She’ll just spend it on food.”
I laughed with them, but there was something about the fat lady that I loved, the way she fussed over us as if we were her own. Even with so many children demanding her love and money, she still had more to give us, strange girls she’d never see again. She cheered me and made me feel hope for the day. But as we walked around in the mall, I quickly forgot her face and her voice, and everything seemed bleak again. The only people in the mall at this hour were the employees and a few old people who sat on the benches full-time. I remembered how it had felt to walk into this mall when it had first opened, the shivering sense of elegance and possibility. Now the mall seemed grubby; its surfaces had worn thin, like a strong wind could blow everything away. All the merchandise on the tables looked flimsy, too brightly colored, and I didn’t feel the old lust for the things I saw. I could already see how they would change when I got them home, how the clothes would look after they had been worn a few times, pilly and thinned and misshapen, how nothing would ever quite make me better. I thought of my mother, the way she fixated on things, thinking if she only had a certain lipstick or pair of shoes that her life would be changed forever.
We headed to the Food Court and sat down at a plastic table near the entrance to eat our fries and Cokes.
“What class are you supposed to have now?” asked Chiarra. The question was strange to me—I’d adjusted so quickly to the idea of being here and not at school.
“French,” I said, and imagined my empty chair in the middle of the room. All around it, kids were chanting sentences after the pudgy Madame Davis: “Elle porte un chapeau rouge.” “Il faut que je fasse mes devoirs.”
Tina looked over my shoulder at something far away.
“Oh my God,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t look.”
Chiarra and I turned to look. A clump of boys from the soccer team was moving toward us, among them Doug and Josh. They didn’t show any outward signs of noticing us, but, seemingly by accident, they walked directly to our table and surrounded it.
“Shouldn’t you girls be in school at this hour?” Josh asked, crossing his arms over his chest. He was wearing a shell necklace that emphasized his tan. I admired him for wearing the necklace; I could imagine the other boys giving him a hard time about it, and somehow his taking that risk made me like him even more.
“Hey, thanks for offering us a ride,” Chiarra said nastily. “We had to risk getting raped and killed just to hitch a ride here.”
“You hitched?” repeated Josh. “I can’t believe you guys hitchhiked to the mall. I figured you, like, rode your little bikes or something.”
“It was Dolores’s idea,” Tina supplied, and the boys all looked at me.
“Innocent little Dolores?” Josh asked. “Girl, where’d you learn to hitchhike?”
“What’s to learn?” I said. “You just stick out your thumb and a car stops.”
For some reason, everyone thought that was hilarious. The laughter went on for a long time, and Josh gave me his special sneering smile.
Some of the other boys drifted downstairs toward the arcade. Tina and Chiarra exchanged a look and got up to join them. Josh slid into the plastic seat next to mine, giving me his most mischievous smile.
“We’ll catch up with you,” Josh said, looping a tanned arm around the back of my chair. I wasn’t sure what he meant by this, but everyone else seemed to, and a
long low hooting rose from the crowd as they walked away. I felt a happiness crossed with panic, a privileged terror as I let my bag slump back to the floor. Neither of us spoke until our friends had disappeared over the lip of the escalator.
“I can’t believe you hitched,” Josh said again. I felt I should answer, but I had no idea what to say to this. Now that we were alone, I had lost the power of speech.
“You are so unbelievably cute,” Josh said. He didn’t look at me as he said this, but instead showed me his handsome profile, his jutting chin and blond mop of hair grazing the top of his nose. I blushed hard, feeling I should provide some response, but I had no idea what. You’re cute too? Thanks? But he didn’t seem to expect a response; he just smiled at me. Something had been decided by his paying me this compliment, by his first nonsarcastic statement in my presence.
Josh and I sat in the Food Court for a long time, and he held my hand under the table. The big warm ball of his thumb kept tracing a circle on the palm of my hand, around and around. I tried to cultivate an air of mystery by not saying anything at all. Every once in a while, Josh looked at me and laughed, but it didn’t seem that he was mocking me, only that he couldn’t contain his amusement at noticing me, finding me here with him, over and over again. I thought about Delia—my father had been at work again this week, organizing files, so Delia would be coming home right about now to an empty house.
The Time It Takes to Fall Page 27