The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  After a while, we got up to join the others at the arcade. At the top of the escalator, Josh slipped his arm around my waist. His touch was surprising, and I jumped a bit. His usual smirk faded into a closed-down look, concern or annoyance, I couldn’t be sure which.

  “What’s wrong?” Josh said quietly. His voice sounded strange, lowered like that.

  “Nothing,” I said. I panicked, sure I had just revealed to him that I was only thirteen, younger than everyone else, too young to be with a senior. Josh took my hand then, but he didn’t try to put his arm around me again.

  In the arcade, I stood at his elbow, watching him wiggle and jerk a series of colored knobs violently. On the screen, he controlled a tiny white triangle, which shot rows and rows of blobs out of a black sky. He was good, but it didn’t seem to matter—as soon as he cleared one screen, another appeared in its place.

  “You try it,” he said after a while, and held out a quarter to me. I watched the quarter and shook my head. I didn’t want to play in front of him, for him to see how bad I was. I thought of how the quarter would be warm from his pocket if I were to touch it.

  “Come on,” he said. “Have you ever played this game?”

  “No,” I answered. “I’m not very good at video games.”

  “Well, give it a try,” he said. “My treat.” He put the quarter in the slot and stepped back. The game blinked to life, playing its song and flashing information on the screen. My heart beat fast in my throat. I couldn’t let him see me play. I couldn’t stand the idea of struggling to figure out the controls, screwing up, with him watching me. He would know I was just a child.

  “No, really,” I said. “You play it.”

  “I’ve just played five games,” he said reasonably. “I want to see you try.”

  “Well, I don’t want to try,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. The result was that I sounded cold and angry. Josh was still smiling at me, waiting for me to take the controls.

  “You’re going to die,” he warned, looking at the screen. “Lookit, the bad guys are coming to get you.”

  On the screen, rows of alien spaceships marched back and forth, dropping bombs at the white triangle.

  “You’re going to die!” Josh cried, his voice rising to a shriek. “Come on!” At the last minute, he couldn’t stand to watch and grabbed the controls himself. He struggled for a few seconds, but it was too late; the white triangle was trapped and exploded under bombs from above.

  “Aw, man, look at that,” he said quietly. “You let him die. I can’t believe you did that.”

  He went on to play the next two lives of the game. When it was over, he moved on to another machine without mentioning what I had done.

  Josh never asked, so I never mentioned that I was thirteen. Before we met up with the others, he pulled me into a deserted corridor lined with pay phones and lockers, and I read the messages on the emergency exit door over and over while he kissed me carefully, as if conscious of violating something with every move he made. His mouth felt different from Elizabeth’s, his lips rubbery and moist. What satisfied me most, even more than having a boyfriend or becoming suddenly, unquestionably popular, was that my lies about him were no longer lies.

  He kissed me for so long, I had time to think about how far I had come in the months since the disaster, since January, when I’d hoped to fly in the space shuttle and felt proud that my father worked on its rockets, or even since this morning, when I’d thought the astronauts had died instantly. I thought about my home, far away, and Delia there by herself, waiting for me. Delia was old enough to be home alone, I told myself. She would be fine.

  Josh dropped me off at home in his rattling Datsun. I’d been embarrassed to let him see where I lived, but he showed no reaction when I announced, “This is it.” He took a quick glance at the house, then slung an arm around me.

  “Can I have a kiss goodbye?” he asked in a falsely formal tone. Without waiting for an answer, he leaned in. This time it was a quick kiss, almost perfunctory. As I climbed out of the car, I looked around at the neighbors’ houses, afraid that someone might have seen us, that someone might describe this scene to my father. But the street was silent, all the adults still at work.

  Delia was watching a special about Judith Resnik on TV with all the lights off when I went inside. In the darkened room, the interior of the space shuttle glowed white, its walls covered with drawers and switches and handles and unidentifiable white gadgets. Judith Resnik, alive, flying on her first shuttle mission, STS 41-D, drifted into the frame, her curls floating. She was tanned and beautiful in her shorts and socks; she smiled wryly at the camera, then executed a somersault.

  Delia looked up at me.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “The mall,” I said.

  “The mall?” she repeated, incredulous. “How did you get there?”

  “I went with my friends. What did you tell Dad?”

  “He didn’t call,” Delia answered. She looked back at the TV. Judith Resnik floated to a window and looked out at the turning Earth.

  “But you were okay, right?” I asked. “You were okay by yourself.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Delia, look at me,” I said. Delia turned her little face up to me.

  On the TV behind her, the astronauts were floating candy across the crew cabin to each other, trying to catch it in their mouths.

  “You were okay, right, Delia?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted. She hadn’t been in any kind of danger—she had a key of her own, she knew the rules. She knew not to open the door to anyone, not to use the stove or the toaster, not to open the drapes. Someone looking in might see there were no adults, my mother had taught us long ago.

  That night, I dreamt of falling.

  The newspapers the next morning verified Doug’s story. The crew cabin had been found along with some of the crew remains, though there was no reference to the emergency oxygen packs. The article did mention a cockpit recorder, which might have been damaged by salt water, but if it could be restored NASA could listen to the crew communications after the explosion, establishing how long the astronauts had lived and how much they had known.

  I cut out the article but didn’t bother pasting it into my space notebook. Of all the questions I’d thought I was interested in—the precise technical causes, which part of the Launch Vehicle had malfunctioned and why, who had known what and when—it seemed now that all I really wanted to know was this. How they had died, what I might have experienced if I had been Judith Resnik. I’d thought I wanted much more, but now that I knew about that two and a half minutes, it was hard to imagine what more I could possibly want to know.

  25.

  THE SECOND TIME I WOKE UP TO FIND MY MOTHER SITTING ON my bed, I wasn’t as surprised as I had been the first time. When I opened my eyes, she was humming to herself quietly, kicking through a pile of clothes and books next to my bed. She picked up a tape, turned it sideways to read the case, then let it fall back to the floor.

  “Mom,” I whispered.

  “Hi, D,” she said. “You shouldn’t be wearing these jeans anymore. They’re too short. Or is that the way the kids are wearing them?”

  “That’s the way they’re wearing them,” I whispered.

  “Well, still,” she said. “Tell your father to get you some new things. You’re in high school now, and clothes are important. I remember how it is.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I missed Delia’s birthday,” she told me, as if confiding something I didn’t know. Delia had turned six a few days before.

  “It was fine,” I said. “We had a special dinner for her.”

  “Does he ever talk about me?” she asked, turning her face away shyly.

  “Who?”

  “Your father. What does he say about me?”

  I didn’t know what to say. My father never mentioned her. He seemed to believe that if he avoided talking about her, Delia and I wouldn�
�t be hurt by her absence.

  “He says he misses you,” I lied. “He says he hopes you come back.”

  “He says he hopes?” she asked, suddenly enraged. “Is that what he’s been saying to people? That he hopes I come back?” I didn’t know what to say. She shook her head, picking at a loose thread in the hem of her dress.

  “What else does he say?” she whispered. This time I knew what she wanted to hear.

  “We all miss you, Mom,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, tilting her head modestly. “I know that. I’ve known that for quite a while now.”

  “Are you coming back?”

  “Oh, that depends, baby,” she said finally.

  “That’s what everyone always says,” I said. “But on what? What does it depend on?”

  She looked at me for the first time. She seemed surprised that I’d asked.

  “Well, baby. It all depends on you.”

  The TV news had shown Coast Guard ships pulling up still more of the wreckage. The salvage operation had become the largest in naval history. My father and I watched together as a crane hauled up a long flank of the Orbiter, the words UNITED STATES and a small emblem of the flag still barely visible, washed translucent by their weeks underwater.

  My father had nodded gravely at these images on the news.

  “You know, they’ve found almost all of the debris,” he said quietly. He told me about the warehouse where the wreckage was being catalogued and laid out in a grid on the floor, each piece of the Launch Vehicle painstakingly reconstructed.

  “Can we go see it?” I asked.

  “Why would you want to see it?”

  I didn’t answer. A few minutes later, he added, “It’s probably restricted.”

  I watched the news for mention of what Doug had told me about the emergency oxygen tanks, the astronauts’ long fall, and every day that no mention appeared, I only became angrier. I didn’t know who I resented more—the journalists for not finding out, or NASA for keeping it a secret.

  Every afternoon that week at lunch, Josh waited for me in the parking lot where everyone could see us, lying on the hood of his Datsun. I came to look forward to seeing him in the middle of the day. I started to notice that I felt something for him other than curiosity—a surprisingly sharp affection for his goofy gestures, his sunburned nose, his immature sense of humor, his generosity in not pretending nonchalance with me.

  I skipped afternoon classes with Josh. Missing class didn’t make me anxious anymore. I felt only relief, a simple pleasure at being able to get out of school, at not caring about the consequences. He always took me to the mall. The time was our own, so we wasted it. We didn’t need to do anything at the mall but walk around holding hands, letting people see us, laughing conspiratorially together and basking in the warmth of their watching. I let Josh buy me a silver necklace, and he stood behind me in the Food Court, right in front of everyone, to clasp it around my neck.

  On Friday Josh picked me up at lunchtime, which meant that I would be missing all my afternoon classes again. I assumed we were heading toward the mall, as we always did, but instead of turning right at the end of the road, he turned left.

  “I thought we’d do something different for a change,” he explained before I had a chance to ask. “I’m getting tired of that place. It’s always the same.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever you want to do.” But I felt mildly alarmed. I loved going to the mall, seeing the same things and the same people every day. At the mall I could forget about the accident; I could forget about my mother’s absence. It was only at the mall that I felt the full force of what I had accomplished with Josh, the way I had successfully changed myself into a different kind of person.

  “You’ve never seen my house,” he said a few moments later.

  “True,” I agreed.

  He hadn’t seen the inside of mine either, and I hoped to keep it that way. So far, I’d been successful at keeping him from knowing anything about my family.

  Josh’s house was much bigger than mine, though not as big as Eric’s. I was used to this, though; nearly everyone’s house was bigger than mine. I looked around, taking in the white carpet, high ceilings, leather furniture, huge patio, landscaped yard.

  “You want something to drink?” Josh asked, disappearing into the kitchen.

  “Sure,” I said. I sat at one end of a robin’s-egg blue leather couch. It was as long as a car. He returned with two cans of Coke and jumped over the back of the couch to sit next to me.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked, flipping on the TV.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever.” Unlike my family’s TV, Josh’s had cable, so he cycled through eighty channels before coming back to the ones we’d seen first. A few of them still showed images of the disaster—the walkout, the split cloud formation in the sky. Those images were as familiar to me now as my own face, but I still watched them closely when they appeared, hoping somehow to see something new in them. When Josh reached the channel showing the commission’s hearings, he stopped. A middle-aged white man with glasses sat in the same chair Mr. Biersdorfer had sat in, the same chair Josh’s father had sat in. This man leaned forward to speak into the microphone. He was sweating, a stricken apologetic look on his face. He described inspecting the Mobile Launch Platform for ice.

  “My dad had to testify for this,” Josh said with false offhandedness.

  “I saw him,” I said.

  “Really? What did you think?”

  I remembered my instant decision that Josh’s father was arrogant and guilty. I remembered my father saying, “The commission is really grilling him,” and feeling satisfied that we agreed on something.

  “He did fine,” I said. “I only watched for a few minutes.”

  “He said they might call him back, you know, like, to ask follow-up questions.”

  Josh’s talking made it hard for me to hear the testimony about the ice, and for the briefest moment I wished I were home to watch in peace with Delia. Josh soon grew bored and leaned in to kiss me. I’d become accustomed to the feeling of kissing him, the weird muscular movement of his tongue, the taste of spit not my own. I had even come to enjoy it now that I understood what the pattern of it was, the way he would kiss me for a while with his head pointing in one direction, then in the other. He had never tried to go any further. But, it occurred to me now, we had always been in the school building or in the mall; we had only ever made out in hidden corners of public places. But now we were in his house by ourselves. Before long, I found myself pinned on the couch with him halfway on top of me, his kissing becoming faster and more desperate, his breath rasping in his nose.

  So this was why we had come to his house, I thought calmly. I couldn’t see the TV, so instead I listened to the voices: a man with an exaggeratedly grave voice ran through the evidence indicating whether or not the astronauts had known anything had gone wrong before they died. The man assured us that they hadn’t known a thing. I felt a shock of anger at his lying, or his ignorance. The image of the astronauts awake, alive, strapped into their seats and falling, came back to me like a remembered bad dream. Josh was surprisingly heavy, and his weight made breathing difficult. I felt only mild alarm when I realized that he was fumbling with my shirt. I sat up.

  Josh’s face was flushed and his bottom lip hung open, crimson and heavy. I studied him: his eyes were lowered into a look that I knew was meant to convey some sort of longing, but instead looked like a drugged stupor. I resisted the urge to look toward the TV, where something bright was flashing. Probably the explosion again.

  “I want you,” Josh groaned. This struck me as the funniest thing I had ever heard, and the nervous giggle that came out of me felt like someone else’s, high and light.

  “What?” he said angrily.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re funny.”

  He glowered. “Why is that fucking funny?”

  His look, his tone, should have intimidated me—the thought
of angering Josh, causing Josh to think I was immature, normally would have filled me with horror. But I had been infused with a strange sense of confidence.

  “What do you mean, that’s funny?” Josh asked, his brow creasing. He picked up the remote and clicked off the TV without looking at it; his eyes flicked back and forth between mine as he tried to figure out whether he had been insulted.

  “Nothing,” I assured him. “Really.”

  I had finally understood that I was something he wanted, and not the other way around.

  “When do your parents come home?” I asked.

  “Late,” he grunted, to show me he was still put out. “Like, nine.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Josh’s eyes widened in disbelief when I peeled off my shirt, the same shirt he had been fumbling with for long minutes. I was wearing a bra that I’d stolen from my mother’s drawer, pink with lace edging.

  “Come here,” I said, and he did. He moved toward me in a low crouch. He was smiling again, my laughing at him forgotten now.

  “Are you sure about this?” he asked a short while later. He was looking up at me then, his expression hopeful. I smiled and took him by the hand. His room was at the end of a long hallway, twice the size of Delia’s and my room. All the furniture matched, a pale wood, but it all seemed too small, things bought for a little boy and never replaced. A single bed with blue plaid sheets, unmade, a chest of drawers, a small desk covered with dirty clothes. This room, like everything else about Josh, could have intimidated and confused me before today, but now the room felt suffused with my new power, my new understanding, which stood in the air like dust motes as he drew the curtains against the reddening afternoon light.

  “Are you sure about this?” he asked again, and I thought it was sweet that he didn’t want to take advantage of me, didn’t want to be that kind of boy. I didn’t answer him, just crawled into his unmade bed. His sheets had a simple boy smell, a mild stink, like a puppy. When he undressed in front of me, I saw that his fingers were shaking. All this time, he had been an impenetrable figure of cool, never had shown the slightest emotion or vulnerability. But look: I had conquered him, this easily. I had never seen a naked boy before, but what I focused on were his big red hands dangling by his thighs, limp and obedient. He was waiting to be told what to do.