Christian duty won out. “All right,” she said. “Let me call Jim.”
I rounded up the kids and sent them on their way. It’s a clear shot from our house to Beth’s, no streets. From the upstairs bedroom window I watched them cutting through the trees in the backyard. Jack was holding Corinne’s hand with a protective tenderness that, at another time, would have brought tears to my eyes. They disappeared for a moment, and I blinked, one long, woozy blink, and then they appeared out on the other side on Beth’s perfectly square lawn. I waited until I saw Beth’s back door open and close, and then I peeled my face off the windowpane. It took a bit of effort, and I observed—with the same kind of detachment you feel while noting measurements in the lab—that it was getting harder to stand up without leaning on something. There was only one thing left to do, and that was to go find Lacroix.
He was sitting in Liam’s study in front of his giant, glowing screen, wearing an enormous pair of air-traffic control headphones and clicking through some footage. In it, Liam and I were walking across the lawn together, which struck me, in my dim-witted state, as strange, because I couldn’t place when it would have been taken. The scene was shot from behind. As soon as Lacroix heard me come in, he hit pause, just in time to catch a peculiarly synchronized turn of our heads: Liam turning to look at me, me turning to look away. The sun was setting in front of us, and we both looked like we were on fire.
“Yes?” said Lacroix, glancing up at me and smiling, and then he caught sight of something and whatever it was made him stop abruptly and push back his glasses. When I looked down at myself, I could see that I had bled through the reinforcements I had added to my makeshift bandage, and there were several dime-size spots of blood on my sweatshirt—like I had been standing next to someone who had been shot.
I pulled my bloody hand out of my pocket and held it up for him to inspect. “I need you to help with me something,” I said.
Your
Jess
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2014 7:08 am
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Re: Bush-beating, foot-dragging, and other kinds of bloody hell
Wait. Let me finish. I didn’t mean to cut off abruptly. It’s just hard writing epic e-mails when you only have one thumb to space with.
I’m fine. Apparently there’s a vein that runs up the wrist into the base of the thumb and I just nicked it. It only needed fifteen stitches, but it was enough of a slash job that the ER doctor—a no-nonsense ex-military guy with a no-nonsense crew cut—felt obligated to send me upstairs for a psych consult to make sure that I hadn’t been trying to halfheartedly off myself. Of course it didn’t help that I was lying, and not very convincingly. An alibi that involved a dull butcher knife and a sweet potato was the best I could come up with—just not for the reasons they thought.
“A yam?” repeated the young Indian woman, writing down something on my chart. She looked about twenty-four, an intern was my guess, probably young enough to still believe that there’s no despair in life that cannot be conquered with the help of a little self-acceptance and a few good pharmaceuticals.
“Yes,” I said. The jagged piece of the spaceship was still in the pocket of my bloody sweatshirt, so I had to sit with my arms awkwardly out in front of me, so I wouldn’t accidentally shred anything else. “I’d forgotten how tough those things are. Next time I want soup I’ll just buy the organic stuff in the can. I don’t know what I was thinking, messing around with this homemade crap.” I rolled my eyes, in a way that I hoped came across as agreeable—ditzy, but not to the point of complete derangement. “All that work, and for what?” It was the exact same story I had tried out on Lacroix in the car, and the same spiel I would be giving Liam back at home, after I had smuggled the piece of shuttle back upstairs, wrapped it back up in its handkerchief, and set it carefully on top of the dresser as though it had never been touched. He didn’t believe it either. He held on to my wrist while I talked, examining the Frankenstein stitches, but before I could finish, he cut me off. He shook my arm and said, “If you’re not going to tell me what happened, Jess, then don’t bother.”
“Mrs. Frobisher,” Dr. Patel said, leaning forward on her stool and refusing to crack a smile. She was clearly a good doctor, one who took her job very, very seriously. “I understand that accidents happen. We just want to make sure that you’re OK. Now there are a few questions that I’d like to ask you before you go. Have you experienced any feelings of hopelessness or despair lately? Any difficulty concentrating or problems sleeping?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes?” She looked up from her clipboard and frowned a little. “I’m sorry. . . . Yes to . . .”
“To all of them.” I gave myself a one-handed boost to my feet. There was a clock ticking on the wall, and all I could think about was Lacroix downstairs in the waiting room, wandering around, getting into God knows what, talking to God knows who. “Look, I appreciate your concern, but are we done here? I really need to get going.”
“Mrs. Frobisher—”
“Dr. Patel.” I had to resist the urge to call her sweetheart, which she surely would have taken as an insult, and not at all the way I meant it. “I appreciate your concern, but the logistics we’re talking about here aren’t that difficult. If I wanted to slice my veins, I would have just done it. ”
Ten minutes later I was down in the waiting room with Lacroix, signing out.
There’s one more part I want to tell you, but I have to stop here/now.
Later,
Jess
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2014 12:32 am
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Re: please tell me you’re kidding
I guess I thought you would find it funny. I mean, come on, me as a suicide case?
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that there aren’t days when a shot of Thorazine and a peaceful padded cell with a few ivy tendrils twining picturesquely around the sunlit iron bars of my window sound like a kind of perverse bliss. But who, Arthur, would remember to feed the kids? Who would act as Jack’s personal hygiene gestapo? Who would teach Corinne how to wrestle her way into a pair of panty hose? Not Liam. He’s become so embattled that I’m not sure he’ll ever be able to go back to tinkering with rockets. I’m afraid his passion has been ruined, that it’s like something that’s been dragged through the mud, that it might be beyond the possibility of repair.
It’s about midnight now as I’m typing this to you. I wasted the last hour or so wandering around the house, admiring all its idiosyncrasies, both the ones other people have put here (the bathroom wallpapered in parrots) and the ones we can claim for ourselves (the planets Jack painted on the laundry room ceiling, and labeled with fantastical names). I was thinking that maybe it’s a good thing Lacroix came and filmed here—that maybe along with his heroic spacemen, he’s going to capture and preserve a tiny piece of our life on the brink, the way an ethnographer comes in to take notes on some obscure tribe out in the bush, just before the loggers and miners come in to strip the land out from under them. He just doesn’t know it yet.
Or maybe he does.
As I was pacing around like the madwoman in search of her attic, I was making halfhearted efforts to compose this e-mail to you—although in actuality it was just more procrastinating. Because I know you’re going to hate it. You’re going to fucking hate it when I tell you what I’ve been putting off telling you for over a week.
Which is this: that I’ve agreed to go up into space with Lacroix and Elle next month on Spaceco’s first trip since the accident. There’s plenty more to the story, obviously, but I’m not sure if you want to hear it, so I’m stopping here.
There you have it at last, Arthur: the truth passed as painful
ly as a kidney stone. Nothing for me to do but take some Ibuprofen and go upstairs to try to sleep.
I’ll be flying over you, and I’ll tell you what those forests look like from space. But only if you want to know.
Your star-bound
Jessica
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2014 11:09 am
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Re: Jess, tried to call, check your voice mail
Hey,
I saw the strange number on my cell last night. I knew it was you before I even heard the message. Please, please don’t call me again, Danielson. There are things I have to do here, and I’m afraid if I hear your voice again, it will undo me.
You know those papers that delivery guy brought to the house the other day? They were consent forms for the spaceflight, with my name pre-typed by Spaceco’s legal department in all the appropriate “I, the Undersigned” blanks. The information packet they gave me was the size of a novella. Death. Dismemberment. Blood clots. Severe anxiety attacks. All the things that can go wrong, and all the possible ways in which they can transpire—it’s all spelled out in single-spaced eleven-point font. There’s no way you can say you weren’t warned. So I won’t.
I met Liam at Amer’s during my lunch hour to sign them. Lacroix wanted to get some footage of me signing the paperwork, so there the three of us were. Liam and I hunched over the tiny, sticky table while he pointed out the places where I was supposed to initial or sign, “Here, here, here” in the most expressionless voice he could manage, while I signed excruciatingly slowly again and again and again with my left hand, leaving behind a scrawl that was completely unrecognizable as mine. Lacroix was staring into that fucking camera, dead and gone to everything going on in his peripheral vision, including the people who were standing in line waiting to order their lattes and passing the time by watching our little folie à trois with expressions of mild curiosity. The table was gimpy; I had to keep my heel clamped down on one of its metal feet to keep it from wobbling.
“You are official now, Jessica,” Lacroix said, when I had finished the final, painful signature and began shaking the cramp out of my hand. “How does it feel to be the next woman going into space? Tell the camera. For the record.”
I took a long swig of my chai and let out a loud ahh. If Jack or Corinne had made that noise, I would have told them to knock it off. “Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
I stared straight into the camera and smiled, trying to show as many teeth as possible. “It feels fantastic.”
“Are we done here?” Liam pushed his chair back from the table. “I have to get back to the office.”
“Don’t forget these.” I tapped the papers with my latte cup. “I just signed my life away, after all. You’ll want to make sure you get them into the right hands.”
Liam didn’t say a word, Arthur. He just cut his eyes toward the camera and then looked back at me. You could see his jaw working. Finally, he said: “Right you are.” He picked up the papers and tucked them under his arm. “See you at home.”
Lacroix kept the camera trained on his back while he walked to the door, pulled it open, and disappeared. Finally he pulled the camera away from his face and saw me looking at him. “What?”
“Nothing,” I said.
This is all a long way of saying that the ink’s on the page. It’s a done deal, and you can’t change my mind now if I wanted you to.
Go ahead and call me an ass.
~j
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2014 9:01 pm
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Re: fucking insanity
That’s EXACTLY what I thought you were going to say. Which is fine. I know I deserve it.
But leave Jack and Corinne out of it.
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2014 10:17 pm
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Re: re: fucking insanity
Do I know how what looks? You make it sound like someone’s holding a gun to my head. Think what you want, Arthur, but no one’s forcing me to do anything.
Can I also point out that you’re not the most objective party here? I know how you feel about Liam’s line of work. You made it clear without ever opening your mouth.
And yes, you’re entitled to your opinion.
But I’ve had more time than you to mull this over. Think about what a chance I’m being offered, Arthur. There are only a handful of people who have gone where I’m about to go and seen what I’m about to see. If it weren’t me, it would be somebody else. You had your chance, and you took it. You went off to the end of the world without looking back. Now I’m going to take mine.
Jess
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2014 12:49 am
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Fine
Here are the gory details:
Two Sundays ago I was outside in the proto-greenhouse, washing down the new slate floor, sometime around dusk, when Liam came around the side of the house.
“What brings you out here?” I thought but didn’t add: to enemy territory. It was strange to see him standing there next to one of the gardenia trees. Lacroix, Elle, Abah, Ikenna, a baffled Tristan, have all been found wandering around through our house’s ever-expanding jungle. Jack and Corinne used to avoid it, but eventually they started playing in there. They poke around the half-laid stone floor, like it’s some sort of ancient archaeological dig site, and run around in their astronaut helmets through the elaborate system of trellises I’ve jerry-rigged, using string and stakes and my gravity-defying willpower. It’s part of a game with rules that are mysterious to me. They involve disappearing into the foliage and then letting out what I heard Jack refer to as “a transmission”—a long, bloodcurdling scream. It’s like having a shot of adrenaline delivered straight to the chest. Liam and I have both threatened them with the pain of death, but that doesn’t stop them.
But Liam hasn’t set foot in the place once. As soon as I looked up and saw him loitering there in his running T-shirt, damp with sweat, I knew that some sort of necessity must be behind this incursion. Liam may be pissed when he leaves for a run, but usually when he comes back he appears, if not relaxed, then whatever passes for relaxed these days. Businesslike. Perfunctory. Since the accident, his runs have been twice as long as they used to be, and I imagined that the whole biochemical process behind his physical exertion had changed. That instead of converting sugars to energy, his body was fueled by rage or grief or regret, or some other potent emotional propane with a long, slow burn.
Whatever that process was, it had clearly failed. He still looked pissed—I could tell by the way he was kicking his feet around too hard, making the high-tech reflectors on his sneakers wink in the gloom.
But he was trying to play nice. “I just wanted to see what you were working on,” he said. “For once.” He was twisting one of the gardenia buds around, but he caught himself before he broke it off. “Don’t you have a light out here? I don’t know how you can see anything.”
“I do,” I said. “I mean, I just need to go buy one.” The electrician put in miles of wiring for all the lighting the greenhouse is going to require. Up by our door to nowhere, there’s a whole slew of covered sockets, enough that we could probably power a whole fleet of spaceships, but I haven’t installed any of the fixtures yet. Still, Arthur, I am making progress. I added, “I think I’ve acquired a taste for the dark.”
“Yes, well,” Liam said. He shifted again and sighed. “Actually, I
need to talk to you about something. We’ve been hammering out the details of Lacroix’s launch. It’s now tentatively scheduled for August 16.”
“Fine with me,” I said. I was determined, Arthur, to be agreeable for once. “What is that? A Friday?”
“It’s a Saturday.”
“So Sunday to Sunday you’ll be gone.” We were losing the last bit of the light, and so I went back to sponging.
“It’ll be more like two weeks. Lacroix wants to film all the preparations and he wants me to be there the whole time. Since I’m the main person he’s been tailing. Relentlessly.” There was still that odd, slightly aggrieved note to his voice, Arthur, and I was trying to think if I’d done something earlier to antagonize him, something I’d forgotten but was now going to have to pay for. He had started attacking the innocent bystander gardenia again. “Jess, will you stop that and listen to me? You need to listen to this.”
God is an Astronaut Page 18