The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  “Wait, what do you mean ‘best man’?” Elle’s eyes narrowed. “I wore a dress tonight ’cause I can’t wear one in zero G, and still, I’m just one of the guys. Jeez, I can’t win.”

  “I want you to stand up for me,” Christopher said.

  “Can’t do that in zero gravity either.”

  He pretended to strangle her. “You can wear a dress or a monkey suit as long as you promise me you’ll be there.” And releasing her neck, Christopher kissed her cheek. “Please?”

  Elle’s stance softened, and she hugged Christopher. “You know it, baby brother. I won’t miss it.”

  Maybe Christopher was making her swear to come back to Earth, and I wanted her to keep that promise, but after his announcement no one talked about Elle. The toasts turned to him. Cacophonous conversations rounded the table and then circled back and forth.

  As one of the last hangers-on, I waited for my good-bye and grabbed a quick hug. “The next time I see you, you’ll be in the history books, Peep.”

  She batted me. “NASA doesn’t make the books anymore unless it’s a disaster. Just say ‘good luck.’ ”

  “Good luck,” I mouthed, but really I was whispering a prayer.

  “Will you keep me company and walk the beach for a while? I have to stay up late. They’re trying to move our sleep cycles around for the flight.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  We crossed the street and took the stairs to the beach. She pulled off her sandals, dangling them by the straps. “Quite a party. I can’t believe your whole family came.”

  Following her cue, I removed my Docksiders and let the coarse sand scratch between my toes. “You’re an honest-to-God astronaut. Everyone wanted to come. I was kind of surprised Adam didn’t show.”

  She paused for a beat then resumed walking. “I see him still at work. He’s met someone, so that made it easier.” Her pensive expression made me wonder if she was over him, which once again resurrected my old green-eyed monster.

  “Are you seeing anyone new?” I asked. Not that someone new would make me feel better.

  She wet her lower lip. “I’ve been a little too busy.”

  “You’ve been a little closed off,” I said. “I’m still waiting for you to return my last call, from, um, two weeks ago.”

  She shoved into me. “I needed to focus on the work. I appreciate that you’ve gone with the flow.”

  “It’s not as if I had a choice.” Without thinking, I slung my arm around her shoulder and kissed her temple.

  She shrugged away and crossed her arms as if I’d trespassed. “You’re getting married,” she said. “I had to back off.”

  “Elle—” I hesitated only for a second before I blurted out everything. “I’m not. Carol and I split up a couple of weeks ago. I took the job in Maine, and she wouldn’t even consider moving there. There were other issues, too, but I called it off.”

  Elle stared at me for close to a minute, blinking. Maybe there was even a hint of a smile.

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  I glanced away. “I haven’t told anyone yet, not even Mom. I didn’t want to steal your thunder with my shitty news—like your brother did.”

  “He didn’t—steal my thunder.” Elle touched my elbow. “Are you doing okay with the breakup?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.” I took her hand, patted it, as we began walking again. There we were, for the first time in sixteen years, without anger or partners between us, and I didn’t want to discuss Carol.

  An hour later we were still talking by her hotel room. She leaned against the open doorjamb while I stood by a little awkwardly. Her room had the typical layout: bed, café table, armoire, couch, and minifridge. “Want to come in and play cards?” she asked.

  “You forget that I know you cheat.”

  “I do not.”

  “You count the cards. You can get thrown out of Vegas for that.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “It’s a strategy. I have a good memory. Sue me. We won’t play blackjack.”

  “Okay. Strip poker.” I wagged my eyebrows and strolled past her. I wasn’t serious, but it seemed like a good comeback line.

  She chuckled. “I’m not up for anything quite that risqué tonight.”

  Okay, maybe I was half serious. “Only because you’re not as certain you could win.”

  She shook her head. “Rummy, then.”

  We plopped down at the table. I dealt first. She must have been letting me win to prove she never cheated because, after a dozen hands, I had ten times more points. It grew very late, but I was having difficulty making myself leave. I eased back in my chair to watch her contemplating her next move. She added a queen of hearts to a straight and discarded an ace. Then she rose and grabbed a couple of sodas. “Cheers.”

  “To your flight. Nine days and what—three more hours?” I said.

  She glanced at her watch. “Two hundred nineteen hours and twelve minutes, but who’s counting?”

  And then she was planning to strap herself to a stick of dynamite. Actually, the Space Shuttle was closer, in my opinion, to a nuclear bomb with a half-million gallons of rocket fuel as a detonator. I stood and pulled her up into my arms. I wanted to try one more time to convince her not to go, to tell her I couldn’t survive if Atlantis blew up like Challenger did on takeoff, or disintegrated like Columbia did on reentry. Instead I said, “I always knew you could do it,” which was equally true.

  Her eyes crinkled up at the corners. Actual lines tracked around her eyes. When had she grown old enough for a few lines on her face?

  She followed, as she always did when complimented, with a non sequitur. “Can you believe my little brother is getting married? Arianne is sweet, but he’s so young.”

  I fingered the fabric of Elle’s dress at her shoulder. “I don’t want to talk about Christopher.”

  “I’m glad they told me. What if it goes wrong?”

  “It won’t,” I said as much for my sake as for hers. “Are you scared?”

  “A little. Don’t tell anyone.” She laced her fingers with mine and rested her ear against my chest as if she were listening to my heart. “I’ll be fine. And for the record, afterward, I’m planning to make a radical transition—from rocket ship to rocking chair. After this mission I’m determined to land a teaching job back home, hopefully at Bowdoin, and then I will grow old, watching sunsets on my grampa’s porch. Maybe, since you’ll be nearby, I’ll even beat you now and then, playing a game of rummy.”

  “Strip poker,” I whispered into the crown of her head.

  “Flirting with me again, huh? After being asked to be the best man, I suppose I should be grateful.”

  “You don’t need to worry. You’re sexy as hell.” I ran my hand down the back of her dress, which wasn’t revealing, but still she curved in all the right places.

  “If you think this is sexy, you should see me in my space suit.” She stepped away and winked. “Now, there’s a look that makes astronauts hot and bothered.”

  “Yeah, right.” I picked up the deck from the table and fanned the cards like a Vegas dealer. “I’m pretty sure I’d prefer you naked. Come on, one hand of poker. Winner takes all.” I permitted myself a quick visual sweep of her body.

  Elle’s face turned crimson. “What are you doing? Is this one of those games of truth or dare? A joke?”

  Before I answered, I considered my words carefully. “It’s not a joke or truth or dare, although maybe it’s both. The truth is that, on the surface, I only meant to put you at ease, make you laugh. But you have to know I could never take you to bed and not have it mean more. Last summer you minimized what happened by saying it was lust. Sure. But not only lust. The real truth is I love you, Elle. As a friend.” I paused. “And more deeply. Much more deeply.” I thought I should leave; this was not the time for a reevaluation of our relationship, so I pecked her cheek. “Come back to me safely.” I turned and reached for the doorknob.

  “Wait. You can’t say something like
that and just breeze out the door.” She grabbed me by the elbow. “Tell me what you want.”

  “Okay. There’s the dare.” I drew air into my lungs and then exhaled. Why not tell her? I stared straight into those hot green eyes of hers. “I want you. I want another chance. I have never stopped wanting you. And after wearing my heart on my sleeve for five years, I finally made a decision. I could handle the scraps you gave me in the form of friendship; as long as you were part of my life, I could manage. Now it’s my turn to ask: Is friendship enough for you? I need to know if there’s a chance you still love me.”

  She stood before me with a charged stillness, silent, pensive, searching my face. “Yes,” she finally said. “I still love you. Oh God. Even when you broke my heart, I wanted you. Even then. Please don’t walk out that door. Don’t marry someone else. Don’t ever marry anyone else. Please. Just stay with me. Please.”

  “I’ll stay. I want to stay,” I said. “And I would have married you when I was seventeen.”

  “We were too young back then.” She swallowed then nestled herself in my arms.

  “We aren’t too young now,” I said, stroking her hair.

  A smile crept across her face. “Definitely not.”

  I tipped her chin up and kissed her. “This time we’ll get it right.”

  Although I hadn’t planned to attend the launch, I had to now—for my own sake as well as hers. Even before I returned to New York the following afternoon, I was on the phone calling in favors. I needed time off, and for once everything fell into place. Almost everything. Prior to the launch the astronauts meet with their spouses for one last visit at a beach house along a NASA-owned, twenty-five-mile stretch of ocean. Elle told me it was a beautiful place and that she wanted me to come. But NASA wouldn’t allow me to be her significant other. They said that working in a hospital exposed me to too many pathogens, and I could make her sick. So the next time I saw Elle it was from a distance as she followed the mission’s commander to the bus, which would take the crew to the launch pad. No matter what fetish astronauts joked about, Elle’s orange flight suit was not nearly as sexy as the sundress I peeled off her nine days earlier. She was smiling and searching the crowd for me. When our eyes met, she tapped her chest with her fist. God, I loved her.

  Beautiful stars on a balmy night promised the flight to be everything Elle had hoped. And I thought of little Celina. Her name meant goddess of the moon. Surely, I didn’t believe in gods or goddesses, yet it seemed fitting that a full moon hung like a spotlight over the launch pad.

  I imagined that inside the orbiter, Elle was counting up as the announcer counted down. The engines fired, and at zero, Atlantis lifted off. My heart pounded louder in my ears than the damned booster rockets. Booster rockets I didn’t trust. Booster rockets, which were known to explode.

  They didn’t. Atlantis rumbled up into the night sky with spectacular grace. We all waited on the bleachers as the shuttle disappeared from sight.

  Ten days later, buried in the medical library—all day—I missed the announcement. One of my friends paged me. After a couple of strained questions: “How are you doing, Matt?,” “Are you okay?” he finally said, “You must not have heard. There was a terrible accident on the Space Shuttle. It’s all over the news. Elle McClure was on her space walk and something happened. They got the other guy inside, though he’s in bad shape, but—”

  I didn’t hear the rest of what he said, I was flying out the door, careening down the hospital corridor, in search of a television and news footage and reality. I shook as I pulled out my cell phone, running headlong onto a surgical floor and smack into Dr. Shah, my direct supervisor.

  “Easy, Matt. Hey, are you all right?”

  “I have to find out what’s happening with Atlantis.”

  His pity shot me right between my eyes. “That’s right; you went for the launch. You knew one of the astronauts.”

  I barged into a patient’s room, an old guy with an oxygen mask. “Mind if I turn on your TV?” I asked, but I didn’t wait for his reply.

  He pulled the oxygen away from his face. “Nothing’s on ’cept that astronaut who got killed. They got to land in someplace in Sweden. Can’t even wait to get to the good old USA. Guess the other guy’s in a bad way.”

  I flipped channels until I got to CNN. The footage of the crew going into the bus in their orange flight suits crossed the screen, Elle beaming as she passed. The voice-over said, “Dr. McClure was a mission specialist. Jabert and McClure were six and a half hours into their EVA—that’s extravehicular activity—when a micrometeor punctured Jabert’s space suit. McClure spotted the gas venting and immediately tried to get back to the orbiter along with fellow astronaut Jabert. At this point we are uncertain about the condition of Dr. McClure. Jabert is said to be in critical condition. They are expected to land within the next twenty minutes.

  “Again, if you are just joining us, the Space Shuttle Atlantis is making an emergency landing in Arlanda, Sweden, after a micrometeor penetrated one of the astronaut’s space suit during the Hubble upgrade. Here to explain this is Darlene Kruger, former NASA engineer.”

  The woman, who looked like the principal of a Victorian girls’ school with her hair tied back in a severe bun, sat next to the CNN anchor. “This has long been one of NASA’s concerns, and it is why we minimize the time the astronauts spend outside the vehicles. Although space is a virtual vacuum, it is not empty. Particles as small as specks of dust travel at speeds upward of sixty kilometers per second, passing through just about anything due to their velocity. In order to minimize the risk, the astronauts’ suits are lined with Kevlar, and they try to work in the shadow of the shuttle, and in this case, Hubble’s shelter wasn’t enough.”

  The CNN anchor said, “NASA representative Adam Cunningham is going to make a brief statement.”

  Adam strode up to the podium. I hadn’t seen him in a year or two. His hairline had receded slightly, and he looked strained. “Thank you. I’m going to read a brief statement and take a few questions. At thirteen twenty-three EST, mission specialists Dr. Elle McClure, an astrophysicist, and Dr. Andre Jabert, an aerospace engineer, were on an EVA, having just completed repairs to the Hubble Telescope and were preparing it for release. We believe a micrometeor, perhaps two, penetrated Andre Jabert’s space suit, rendering him unconscious. He was on personal jet pack. Elle McClure, who was on tether, recognized his situation, untethered herself, and managed to get him into the air lock before his suit fully depressurized. We’re not sure how the miscommunication occurred, but the media has reported that Elle McClure was left outside the shuttle and slipped off into space. That did not happen. She’s safely inside Atlantis. First of all, the outer hatch is never closed with a crew member outside, because in the event of a hatch failure, we would be unable to bring the crew member back into the shuttle.” Adam shuffled the papers in front of him.

  “Jabert, however, is critically injured, with a serious chest wound. The flight surgeon is stabilizing him while Atlantis prepares for an emergency landing. Medical personnel are awaiting the shuttle on the ground. The crew is currently expected to land at eighteen-forty EST.”

  I dropped into an empty chair.

  “Are you all right, Matt?” Dr. Shah asked.

  “Elle’s okay. Hell, yeah, I’m fine.”

  Two days later, via satellite, Elle looked a little shaky as she approached a podium in Sweden. She wore a NASA-issued polo shirt and a pair of khaki pants. She cleared her throat. “I’m Dr. Elle McClure, mission specialist. You know the Mark Twain quote, right? The news of my death was greatly exaggerated. Greatly. Those of you who saw me walking in here might have noted that I was a little unsteady. I’m still readjusting to gravity. Nothing more. Let me get straight to the real issues. Andre Jabert is awake and talking—and joking about the landing being so smooth he barely remembers it. However, I assure you the rest of the crew always will.

  “What occurred is something NASA has considered to be one of the major ris
k factors for space walks for some time. Space exploration is an inherently risky endeavor, but those of us involved believe it is worth the risks. We are passionate about our work and its necessity. Each of us takes our love of space with us when we leave Earth’s atmosphere. Although some will point to this day and say we endangered more lives, I see this more like the Apollo 13 mission. We overcame the obstacles, and we saved our crew. We’d practiced for this very contingency and were able to complete our mission. When Andre was injured, everyone immediately geared into action, and we released Hubble in working order.”

  A British-sounding reporter said, “Dr. McClure, you’re being hailed for your heroism. Do you care to comment?”

  Elle chuckled, but she looked uncomfortable, shifting her feet. “Heroism? No. I did what needed to be done, what I’ve been trained to do, what we all learn to do. The entire Atlantis crew brought us inside. Our commander did a fantastic job of coordinating the rescue. Hubble is working, and I’m repeating myself here, but we’re alive.” Elle smiled broadly and then a sober expression fell over her face. “I do apologize for the worry the false reports of my death caused my family.”

  “Speaking of your family, have you spoken to them?”

  “I’ve only talked to my dad. I promise I’ll try to reach the rest later. Matt, if you’re listening, I’ll get ahold of you soon.”

  “Who’s Matt? Your husband?”

  Elle grinned. “No. Not yet.”

  46

  After Elle’s Accident

  Day 27

  Blythe Clarke told me that when Paul Klein interviewed her, he grilled her for nearly three hours, asking very specific questions about Elle’s obstetrical history. Although I was still hoping he would be blindsided by what she would reveal, I was dreading her testimony today.