“That’s not what I want to do,” Keith had said in response.
“Well, it’s your choice,” his father had answered. “Just my two cents.”
Now they were both gone. In the years that followed he would miss them, especially his mother, who had been one of the only demonstrably affectionate people he had known in his childhood, although he certainly bonded with many of his teachers and managed, despite everything, to have a few brief relationships with girls. His mother had been concerned about his approach to the world, though, and after she passed there had been no one to dissuade him of the notion that his fulfillment would come from work and numbers and not from human interaction. Had it not been for Barb he might have simply drifted away into that world; he certainly had the capacity to do so.
He thought that he should pick Quinn up at school, that the news of her grandfather’s death was something he should tell her straightaway, although when he actually arrived there and asked to take her out of class early he was less sure of his decision and when she arrived in the school office he lost his resolve to tell her anything at all.
“I thought we could go out and do something fun,” he said. It was the only explanation he could think of and he was relieved that she agreed to go with him for somehow he thought she might refuse and return to her classroom.
“Mommy’s coming home soon,” he said when they were in the car.
“Why?” she said. “Is Grandpa dead now?” She looked so small in the rearview mirror, staring out the passenger-side window at the street.
“Do you want me to tell you right now?” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
He did not answer for a long while. Then he said, “Yes, honey. Grandpa died yesterday.”
“Crap,” she said.
He nodded, although she was not looking at him. “Crap,” he said in agreement.
“Did it hurt?”
“No, it didn’t hurt. Mommy said he couldn’t breathe very well so she said now that he’s gone he can breathe better.”
“Because he’s in heaven.”
“That’s right.”
I-675 turned toward the east in a long, lazy curve. He could see horses in a distant pasture. Tract homes here and there amongst the fields. She continued to stare out the window. “You want to go to a movie or something?” he said at last.
She did not answer for a long time. Then, finally, she said, “I just want to go home.”
Again he looked at her, at the road scrolling out before him, back to her again. “Me too,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
“Tell Mommy to come home too.”
“I will,” he said. In that moment he could think of nothing he wanted more. The interstate beyond the windshield: signs passing, cars moving all around him.
“This isn’t the right way,” she said at last.
“I know,” he said.
She was silent again, this time for a long, long while. Then she said, simply, “OK.”
They continued to drive like that, not speaking. He could see the twinned vectors of their forward motion where they pushed toward the horizon, curving not along the interstate upon which they rode but up and out and away. He might have believed that the lines calculated a single path for them both, father and daughter. Would we not all believe such a thing about our families, our children, ourselves? Even as the perfect lines continued: not parallel or convergent but rather diverging so subtly their distance would be impossible to mark or measure, the lines moving away, moving away from each other. A few zeroes past the decimal and everything is changed. A ten thousandth. A hundred thousandth. A repetition. A vinculum. And you would not find their intersection even were you to plot those thin vectors for all your days to come.
Part II
Six
During dinner, Nicole continually peppered him with questions, all of which he answered between mouthfuls of food. Occasionally Jennifer would say something, asking her daughter to let him eat or insisting that some questions were not to be asked in polite company. He said he did not mind, although some questions—questions about his separation from Barb—he answered vaguely enough so that his words amounted to no answer at all. He assumed that Nicole’s parents had divorced, took this to be the reason why she asked so many questions about the topic, but he did not ask Jennifer if this was the case. Perhaps later she would tell him what had happened. Or perhaps it was irrelevant.
The interior of Jennifer’s house was shockingly similar to the way his own wife had decorated their home, the way it had looked before he had left for the mission, and the similarities made him uneasy. The blinds were down and curtains covered the windows. Dried flower arrangements here and there. A giant wreath over the fireplace. Photographs of Nicole at various ages. Impersonal knickknacks. It was as if she had found a page in a magazine and had taken that page to one of the megastores and had bought everything pictured: particleboard angles and curves, gauzy window dressings.
He had been anticipating the dinner for most of the day, mostly because he did not really understand what would be expected of him. The anxiety he felt and the similarities in decor had very nearly turned him away at the front door but Jennifer had touched his arm just at that moment and led him farther into the house, toward the dining room and its table of food. But even when he was seated, something about the whole situation felt wrong to him: this woman and her daughter seeming so similar to everything he had lost and yet here they were, as if surrogates or doppelgängers that had appeared in a house nearly identical to his own.
And there was Nicole, a little girl asking him questions about his mission when his own daughter never again would do so. He had agreed to field the questions but now that he was here he had no desire to talk about what he had done, at least not in the beginning, when he found himself wishing he were back in the empty house across the street, back in the cocoon of his solitude and his loneliness. But he did not rise from the table. Not during the first five minutes, nor the next five. Each time he looked up, the little girl was waiting for another answer and each time he glanced across to Jennifer he found her staring at him, her eyes wide and her body inclining toward him as if hanging on his every word, and such attention drove all other thoughts from his mind. He would catch her eyes momentarily and she would not break the contact and each time he felt a flutter of warmth run through him and the feeling that he was an impostor in a house of ghosts began to fade. There was a simple logic to the questions, requiring of him only a basic rendering of the story of his mission and of his experience, the questions specific and blunt: “How did you go to the bathroom?” and “What was the best thing to eat?” and “Did you get to watch TV?”
He told her about the installation of the robotic arm and subsequent “windshield wiper maneuver” by using his fork, a piece of French bread stuck to the tines, and his lasagna-smeared dinner plate as the surface of the space station, his fork swinging across the plate in a long smooth motion. There and back again.
When he had finished she said, “That doesn’t seem like much.”
“I guess not,” he said. “But no one had ever done it before.”
“Was it dangerous?”
“Probably.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t.”
“Well, which was it?”
He looked up at Jennifer for a moment and she winked at him, a gesture that made him shiver. “It’s always dangerous doing a space walk,” he said. “Things can go wrong.”
“So it was dangerous.”
“I guess so.”
“Then why did you say it wasn’t?”
“Because it didn’t seem any more dangerous than anything else we do.”
“Why not?”
“There are lots of things that help an astronaut stay safe in space.”
“Like what?”
“How long does this report have to be?” he said.
“Five paragraphs,” she said.
“She w
ants to be a reporter,” Jennifer said.
“She’ll be good at it,” he said. He turned back to Nicole. “Do you want to know what the windshield wiper maneuver was for?”
“I already know. I looked it up online.”
“Oh.”
“It’s where you had to have the robot arm carry you over the whole space station and drop you off on the other side to fix some thingie. It said you were really high up and it was great.”
“That’s right,” he said. He realized that his fork, bread, and plate explanation likely seemed silly and foolish.
“So what’s the dangerous part then?”
“Well, you’re only separated from space by the suit you’re in,” he said. “If something went wrong you’d lose your air and that would be that.”
“You mean you’d die,” she responded.
“Yes, I mean I’d die.”
“But that doesn’t happen very often really.”
“No, I guess not,” he said. “Not ever actually.”
“But people die sometimes when they take off.”
Jennifer’s voice came from the end of the table, “Sweetheart, maybe Captain Keith doesn’t want to talk about that.”
“It’s OK,” he said. “I don’t mind. Yes, once the shuttle exploded during takeoff and once it broke up when it was coming back to Earth.”
“Did you know those people who died?”
“Some of them.”
“Were they your friends?”
“No, but I knew some of them in the second one. They were already astronauts, so they were a bit further along than I was.”
“What do you mean?”
He was silent, thinking. Then he said, “What grade are you in?”
“Fourth.”
“They were like sixth-graders.”
“You mean they picked on you all the time?”
He smiled. “No, I mean they were people you could look up to. They were already doing what I wanted to do. They had experience and were going into space already. I wasn’t even training for a mission yet.”
“Were you sad when they died?”
“Would you be?”
“Yes.”
“That’s my answer then.”
The evening had gone like that, or at least the question-and-answer-session portion of it had gone that way and he did not know if it was Jennifer’s presence, her tangible sexuality, that had calmed him or Nicole’s direct and logical questions but he had ceased thinking of Quinn and of Barb. In the light of the dining room, the sense of physical similarity he thought he had recognized when she had been at his sliding glass door dissipated and as the evening continued his comparisons of them stopped altogether.
Jennifer said very little during dinner, instead only staring at him and occasionally commenting on her daughter’s precocious behavior. “She’s like that,” Jennifer would say. She had taken a microscopic slice of lasagna and did not eat the bread at all, and Keith realized only later that he had eaten half of the lasagna tray on his own and most of the bread as well and was uncomfortably full. Since returning to the cul-de-sac he had subsisted primarily on fast food and TV dinners. It was taking its toll on him and he knew it; the lethargy he felt could no longer be attributed strictly to his postflight fatigue. He had not done any serious exercise since he had returned to the cul-de-sac and had not even given it much thought until now, seated across the table from Jennifer and catching her unmoving eyes. He should join a gym. He wondered what gym Jennifer went to. He could feel himself stir when she looked at him, when she did not break eye contact, a fact that was itself surprising.
When dinner was over, Jennifer announced it was Nicole’s bedtime and Keith had expected the stubborn obstinacy that had sometimes accompanied his own daughter’s bedtime at this age, but Nicole merely stood and thanked Keith and walked up the stairs. The room was immediately quiet. Keith looked down at the tabletop, then at Jennifer, who was staring at him yet again, then back to the tabletop. His plate was gone and there were no more questions. A wave of fluttering in his chest like the scrape of wings. He tried to think of something clever to say but no words would come to him.
“Thank you for doing that for Nicole,” Jennifer said.
He looked up at her, relieved that she had said something and that it was no longer up to him to begin. “It’s no problem,” he said. “She’s a surprising little girl.”
“I sure think so.”
“It’s true.”
“I hope she wasn’t too much.”
“No, it was fine.” He waited for her to say something more and when she did not he rose to his feet. “Thanks for dinner,” he said.
“Oh, stay a little while longer,” she said. “We grown-ups haven’t had the chance to talk. At least stay long enough to have a glass of wine.”
He glanced around the room, knowing that he wanted to stay but then again that he did not want to stay. Perhaps he had misread the entire evening. Still her eyes were on him, but what kind of sign was that?
“Look, I’m not very good at this,” he said at last.
“Good at what?”
He paused before answering. Then he said, “If you tell me to stay I’m going to think that’s what you want me to do.”
She smiled. “I’d like you to stay. What do you want to do, Astronaut?”
“I want to stay,” he said. There was no hesitation in his answer.
“That doesn’t sound very complicated,” she said.
“It’s not,” he said.
“Good. So you sit and I’ll uncork the wine.”
He nodded and sank down again, folding his hands before him on the tabletop as she rose to her feet.
“So there was some talk about you at the homeowners association last night,” she said. “Everyone’s really interested in the return of the astronaut. They all want to meet you.”
“Who does?”
“Everybody. They also complained about your car.”
“They complained about my car?”
“Yeah, they want it washed. I told them to leave you alone. Nicely, of course. You don’t want to make enemies of your neighbors.”
“They want to meet me and they want me to wash my car?”
“That pretty much sums it up.”
“Glad I wasn’t there,” he said.
She laughed. “They’re just busybodies. They want the gate put in but there’s just no money for that right now so there’s nothing else to talk about. They complain about the foreclosures and the fact that half the development is still just dirt after three years.”
“It’ll get done, I’m sure,” he said.
“Oh, I know it will get done. Just doesn’t leave much for the busy-bodies to talk about except who needs a car wash.”
“I guess so,” he said. He could think of nothing more to say and certainly did not want to continue a discussion that involved the admittedly filthy rental car in his driveway. These were the moments he dreaded in any conversation. The lulls. The spaces he was supposed to fill in. He tried to smile. Then he said, “You know my wife and I are split.”
“I know,” she said. Her back was to him and, as she reached up to an upper cabinet to pull down a wine bottle, her top slid along the curves of her body. “Barb and I talked a few times,” she said. She pulled two bottles down and turned toward him again. “We went to the same gym.”
“I need to join a gym,” he said. “My trainer in Houston would be disappointed if he knew I wasn’t working out.”
“You should come with me to mine sometime.”
He rose suddenly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Let me help you with that.”
“No, no,” she said. “You’re my guest. When I’m your guest you can wait on me, OK?”
“You know, she took everything,” he said abruptly.
“What’s that?” she said. She had opened a drawer and had been fishing through it but now she stopped and looked at him, the neck of the wine bottle held in her grip.
“Sorry,” he said. “That’s probably too much information. It’s just … your house is really similar to mine inside, but Barb took all the furniture. So my house is empty. I mean completely empty.”
“Completely empty?”
“There’s a sofa and the bed.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“That’s awful,” she said. She actually reached out toward him, not quite touching him, her hand just inches from his on the tiles. He wondered momentarily if he should slide his own across that gap but then she returned her free hand to its hunt for a bottle opener. “I guess you have some shopping to do,” she said.
“I guess so,” he said. “I can’t decide if I’m staying or going. Or where I’d go if I’m going.”
“You’re trying to sell it, though.”
“Well, it’s on the market.”
“Any interest?”
“I don’t know. The realtor showed it to some people or said she was going to but I don’t know if anything came of it.”
“Fingers crossed,” she said. “Sounds like you have a lot of decisions to make.” She uncorked the wine bottle with a loud pop. “We’ll let that breathe a bit.”
“OK.”
Nicole’s voice came from upstairs, a thin piercing sound calling, “Mom!”
“Hold that thought,” Jennifer said. She smiled at him briefly and he nodded and then she disappeared out of the room and up the stairs.
He had never been nervous during the mission, not even during the launch, and yet now, here, in this woman’s house, a thin stream of adrenaline ran through him from the pit of his stomach to his fingertips. The room was very quiet. He thought that he should have already left her house, but then wondered why he had such thoughts at all. There was nothing for him in the empty house across the street. Indeed, over the preceding two days since he had dropped the television down the stairs he had even stopped painting, instead sitting at the Starbucks in the dark corner and flipping through the newspaper without any real interest, feeling his anger and frustration at Jim Mullins and the others at NASA fade into a dull sense of irritation and then disappointment. He might simply have left the house in the cul-de-sac, might have actually gone away for some kind of vacation as both Mullins and Eriksson had told him to do, but he had remained for no reason he could define and now sat in a house across the street from his own and waited for the woman who lived there to return from upstairs, his fingers drumming anxiously on the tabletop. He looked around the room without purpose or direction. The decor and furnishings did not seem as similar to those of his house as he had first thought. A vague similarity in style, perhaps, but nothing specific.
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