Christmas Under the Stars

by Karen Swan

  Meg smiled at the memory as she began flicking through the channels. ‘God, I’d forgotten about that,’ she murmured, remembering how Mitch used to blow on her neck just at the very worst moments, making her jump even higher. They’d been – what? Seventeen then? Eighteen? ‘Well, happily I have outgrown those. How about a thriller? Or do you want a romance?’

  ‘Ha, do I!’ Ronnie finally pulled out the cork and brought the bottle over. ‘Hey, did I see they’re running—?’ She stopped as she caught sight of Meg’s face. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Jonas.’

  ‘Who?’ Ronnie looked across at the screen, sinking slowly onto the red sofa and trying to make out who Meg was referring to. All she could see was a picture of a space station, which then cut to old footage of a group of astronauts walking in their orange spacesuits, presumably towards the shuttle; which then cut to dramatic footage of a rocket taking off, huge engines blasting it away from the Earth. Then the presenters were talking in a studio, lots of men in suits looking serious; and then another shot of stressed-looking people in shirtsleeves all looking up at a big screen. The word LIVE was printed on the top corner of that grab.

  ‘Jonas. He’s on board.’

  ‘Uh – who’s Jonas?’ Ronnie asked, refilling their glasses.

  ‘My friend,’ Meg murmured, her eyes reading the ticker tape that ran along the bottom of the screen. She gasped suddenly, her hands to her mouth. ‘Oh, God, no!’ It had been on her mind all day but . . . but she’d never thought anything might go wrong. Not really. This was NASA, the ESA!

  ‘What?’ Ronnie asked again in alarm, handing over the glass and trying to catch up with the story. ‘What’s a ballistic re-entry?’

  Meg looked at her. ‘It’s the very worst thing that could happen! It means they’re coming in too fast or at the wrong angle.’

  They watched in silence as more old footage was played, grainy and faded, showing a metal object dangling below a parachute and coming to rest, bumpily, in a desert. Ronnie glanced over at her. ‘Sorry – how do you know an astronaut?’

  Meg paused, her eyes fixed on the screen. ‘He’s the guy who answered my Mayday call the night Mitch was killed.’

  Ronnie looked at Meg in utter amazement. ‘An astronaut? Seriously?’

  ‘Mitch’s radio was the only way I could contact anyone and they . . . well, they were in range.’ She inhaled deeply as the memories came flooding back. ‘He relayed the message to his control centre and they alerted Search and Rescue. The team got to me before just dawn when the weather broke.’

  ‘And now you and he are friends?’

  Meg didn’t appear to hear, her concentration focused solely on the television. ‘Uh . . . we email, chat on the radio if we can get through.’ She glanced at Ronnie. ‘It felt like he understood, because he’d been part of it, you know? He was easy to talk to.’

  Ronnie shifted onto her knees, eyes bright with excitement and indignation. ‘And how come this is the first I’ve heard of it? You’ve never even mentioned him.’

  Meg’s eyes were back on the screen again. What was happening up there, out there? ‘It wasn’t a secret.’ But only Dolores had been particularly interested – Lucy’s eyes glazed over whenever Meg mentioned him – and even with her, Meg hadn’t wanted to read out all their correspondence; some she had wanted to keep just for herself.

  Her hands flew to her mouth again. ‘Oh, my God, what are they saying? What’s that?’

  She pointed. The cameras had cut to a new shot, LIVE printed in the top corner again. It was of a desert, nine-tenths of the image taken up by sky and in the middle of it, a tiny black dot.

  ‘Christ, it’s fast,’ Ronnie muttered.

  ‘This is where they need to execute de-orbit burn,’ Meg said with a frantic tone. Her heart was pounding. How could this be entertainment? ‘It’s what makes them decrease speed and land on the correct re-entry path. Get it wrong and they’ll burn up or be bounced into deeper space.’

  ‘. . . travelling at 120 miles per second right now . . .’ the TV presenter said.

  ‘It’ll drop to 800 km an hour when they get to 10.5 km altitude,’ Meg murmured, as though speaking to the presenter.

  ‘I can’t believe you know all this,’ Ronnie murmured, agog.

  ‘I told you. We talked.’ Meg was chewing on her nails, both hands clasped in front of her.

  ‘So how do they de-orbit burn, then?’

  ‘There’s an engine that fires for exactly four minutes forty-five seconds, venting excess fuel and weight – that helps, but the atmosphere basically acts as a brake. The Soyuz capsule will break up into three parts – the orbital module, the descent module and the instrument compartment. They’re in the descent module – the other parts burn up. When they’re coming through the atmosphere, they’re travelling at the speed of sound but by the time the parachute deploys, they’ll be down to twenty-two km an hour.’

  ‘Jesus! You sound like an astrophysicist!’ Ronnie laughed. ‘Did you get a PhD off him?’

  Meg pointed at the screen. ‘Look! Do you see that? Those fiery sparks? They’re the parts that aren’t needed for landing. They’re disintegrating, just like he said they would.’

  ‘Well, that must be good then, right? If it’s doing what he said.’

  Meg chewed a fingernail. ‘As long as the speed is right.’

  ‘Can he see what’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  ‘How long does it take them to land?’

  ‘Once they’re back in the atmosphere, just under an hour. Fifty-five minutes, I think he said.’

  They watched the tiny black dot grow larger, moving so, so fast. It was almost incomprehensible that anyone could be in it.

  Meg chewed another nail, feeling sick. In spite of Jonas’s self-deprecating comments about wearing the Kazakh costumes, she’d thought he’d been joking – or exaggerating. It had never occurred to her that this would be televised, that she could sit on a sofa and just watch it.

  The cameras cut again, this time bringing up head shots of the astronauts. There were three of them. The first was Sergei Taganovsky, the Russian cosmonaut and expedition leader. Jonas had mentioned him in a couple of emails (always playing the guitar and reigning champion of the bubblewrap races) and he looked almost exactly as she had pictured him – short, stocky, bald, with tiny eyes and a ready smile, he looked like the man who had grown up to live his boyhood dream. Miriam Goldenberg, the American, had a dark thick bob, warm brown eyes, olive skin, early forties? She looked probing and intelligent and insightful, but Jonas had told her she was badly missing her two kids. And then Jonas . . . her back straightened as his image came up.

  ‘That’s him? That’s Jonas?’ Ronnie spluttered, even though it quite clearly said Jonas Solberg at the bottom of his picture.

  ‘That’s him,’ Meg murmured, pretending it was no big deal as she took in again his green eyes and fine nose, chiselled bone structure and military-style buzz cut.

  ‘Yeah, ’cause you’d want to keep him a secret,’ Ronnie laughed sarcastically. ‘What a moose.’

  They drank, Meg oblivious to the fact that she was sipping as the minutes ticked past, that tiny black dot growing larger and larger until, steadily, its shape became recognizable, the cameras able to zoom in, the heat on the outer surfaces creating a haze as it ripped through the sky.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Ronnie murmured, in awe. ‘How do they land that thing? I mean, how do you slow it down enough not to break every bone in their bodies?’

  ‘That’s the thing, you can’t guarantee against it. They’re in reclining seats which have been moulded especially around them, and there are shock absorbers that fire up on impact – sort of like airbags – pushing them back up again at the exact moment they touch Earth, but the force is still immense. Jonas said it feels like a head-on collision, even with all those safeguards in place.’

  ‘Where even are they?’ Ronnie asked, staring at the desert scenes and hicc
upping slightly, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth and looking surprised.

  ‘Kazakhstan.’

  Ronnie arched an eyebrow. ‘Why there?’

  ‘Because it’s big and flat and empty.’

  ‘But how will they know where to find them?’

  ‘They won’t now. They’ll have to use helicopters, Search and Rescue . . .’

  The cameras had lost sight of the capsule. Having come in at the wrong angle or wrong speed, whatever it was, it wasn’t going to land where it had been scheduled to, which meant that not only were there no cameras, but also no guarantees that there wouldn’t be any obstacles in its path; there wouldn’t be any emergency vehicles to get to them immediately and help them out; there’d be no one to cut the parachute ropes in case windy conditions dragged them off again . . .

  Meg bit her lip, feeling sick as the television channel cut back to stock footage, the studio presenters all looking tense and sombre.

  ‘What now?’ Ronnie asked.

  Meg shrugged. ‘We wait. Once they land, the ground teams will be trying to get to them asap.’

  They watched, silent and sipping wine, the Vietnamese dinner forgotten – at least for the moment, the menu unopened on the sofa as they listened to expert after expert offer an opinion as to what had gone wrong.

  ‘Well, at least they didn’t burn up or bounce onto Mars,’ Ronnie said earnestly, slurring her words ever so slightly. ‘’Cause that would suck. Majorly.’

  Meg looked sidelong at her. ‘It’s good to have you looking on the bright side,’ she said. ‘I can see your bedside manner is probably a thing to behold.’

  Ronnie sat back and laughed. Meg chuckled too but her eyes were on the screen, waiting. The worst of the damage had passed. So long as their landing was good and he was OK . . . This was entertainment to everyone else, to Ronnie, but for Meg . . . he was her friend, her voice in the sky, her orbiting angel – the one radioing Mission Control in Houston for her, or warning of incoming storms . . .

  After half an hour or more of waiting – another bottle opened – the LIVE box appeared on the screen again.

  ‘Oh! Look!’ Ronnie slurred, pointing to it as the cameras cut to the Soyuz capsule, now grounded, a huge orange parachute tangled and torn on the ground behind it. There were all sorts of vehicles clustered around it – fire engines, ambulances, jeeps – lights flashing . . . Some men in military uniform had placed a ladder against the side and were opening the hatch on the top.

  They watched with bated breath as it was swung back and Meg thought of Jonas enjoying that very moment – fresh oxygen and sunlight flooding the cavity, the wind stirring the thick, still air they’d brought back with them from space. It felt like an age before anything happened, but then a hand appeared, and then a head – a bald one.

  Ronnie started singing David Bowie’s ‘Starman’, a wicked smile on her lips, but Meg was oblivious. She pressed her hands to her mouth as she saw the effects of gravity imposing itself on these bodies, which had lived without it for six months. Sergei came out first, pulled under the arms by the ground crew and carried to a waiting wheelchair, where he was covered with a blanket and some sort of crown. His legs didn’t seem to work and his head appeared to be too heavy for his neck to support, lolling slightly as he tried to wave to the small assembled ground crew, all cheering. He was pale and couldn’t seem to move his head in any direction – Meg knew, from what Jonas had told her, that that was the nausea kicking in.

  Miriam came out second and it was the same for her, so Meg knew what to expect when Jonas finally emerged, limp and lean and very still. He looked different from his official photograph, the one she’d scrutinized, because of course his hair had grown in the time he’d been up there so that now it was shaggy and darker than she remembered, framing his face and making even more of a feature of his eyes. Or so it seemed to her, anyway.

  She leaned in closer to the screen as she watched him being settled onto the chair, his head immobile but his eyes swivelling, taking in the vast, barren landscape, the scale of the distant hills, the denseness of the rocks, the colours of the desert, the feel of the wind on his face, the heat on his skin . . . And then, slowly, so slowly, he looked back up – up into the sky from which he had just fallen. ‘The long, delirious, burning blue . . .’

  It was as though he was moving through water, every movement tiny and exhausting. He had told her about this – the extreme nausea that was induced as gravity immediately took hold of their bodies, the fluid in their brains still spinning from weightlessness. It would be several days before he would feel ‘normal’ again.

  She watched, rapt, as he slowly looked back at the earthly panorama, at the assembled dignitaries and ground crews rushing about, his gaze finding the cameras trained upon him.

  And as his hand raised in super-slow motion, just for her, Meg felt a sudden lurch in the pit of her stomach. Her rocket man was back on Earth.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Saturday 29 July 2017

  It wasn’t the strobe of light peeking from underneath the curtain and pooling on her face that woke her. Nor was it the traffic – sirens and car horns punctuating a background soundtrack of idling engines as they stopped at the lights below. It was the coffee machine, gurgling and frothing on an automatic timer, that made her wake with a start.

  ‘Morning.’ Ronnie’s voice from on high was still thick with sleep, the word coming with visible effort as she struggled to sit up, before coming into view with hair that looked as though it had been carded by Russian weavers in her sleep.

  Meg blinked up at her sister through the bars of the mezzanine, the duvet on her bed half off the mattress and inching towards the ladder.

  ‘I think you look how I feel,’ Meg mumbled, bringing a hand to her temple. ‘Oh. I don’t feel so good.’

  ‘How do you think I feel?’ Ronnie groaned. ‘I’ve got to get down that ladder and right now, I can’t even coordinate my eyes to blink.’

  Meg smiled, falling back on the bed and curling into a foetal position, pulling the duvet tighter round her. But what the apartment lacked in size, it made up for in warmth and a second later she kicked it off again. ‘Oh, my God, it’s so hot in here,’ she moaned. ‘Why don’t you sleep with the windows open?’

  ‘I usually do. But I figured the traffic would wake you.’

  Dozily, Meg gave a sort of grunt of appreciation, her mind slowly remembering last night’s events. He was back. He was safe. He was gone.

  The coffee machine continued to bubble.

  ‘You couldn’t get up and pour the coffee, could you?’ Ronnie mumbled.

  Meg made a strange close-to-death sound. Couldn’t her sister tell she wasn’t used to being hungover? That she’d lived the life of a nun for the past four months? ‘Why me? I don’t even know how to work that thing.’

  ‘Because you’re the closest.’

  ‘Ugh,’ Meg moaned. ‘But you’re the hostess.’

  ‘I know, but you’re the eldest.’

  Meg smiled into her pillow and reluctantly got up. Some things never changed.

  ‘God, I feel amazing,’ Meg sighed, stretching out long in her chair, her face angled to the sun as the waiter took their menus away. The café was already full; they’d had to wait a quarter of an hour for a table and the queue was beginning to tail down the block now that brunchtime was seguing towards lunchtime. All around them were people just like them – twenty-somethings with ponytails and wearing exercise kit, rewarding themselves after a morning run or yoga class, Apple watches and Fitbits on their wrists, ear bud leads dangling down their chests, iPods strapped to arm wallets, as they laughed and chatted, meeting up with friends or lovers, and all the while, the queue shuffling slowly forwards in the midsummer sunshine. If that ‘Saturday morning feeling’ was a place, then that place was here.

  Meg watched it all keenly, feeling the vibe buzz her bones as though a cable had been plugged into her and was charging her up. After their slow, somewhat bro
ken start this morning, her hangover hadn’t stood a chance against the refreshing waters of Lake Ontario – stand-up paddle-boarding was harder than it looked and she had fallen in several times – and she wore the small damp patch blooming on her vest between her shoulder blades from where her wet hair dripped, as a sort of badge of honour, proof that she was like the rest of them – out there, doing stuff.

  She had the same flushed complexion too, her muscles pleasantly heavy and wearied, and with Ronnie’s kit on, Lululemon leggings and a boyfriend tee – her sister had flat-out refused to let her put on the shiny black Lycra cycling shorts she had packed – no one passing them would know she was an interloper from another world, just passing through. ‘I never knew that would be so hard.’

  ‘The SUP boarding? Best thing I know for getting rid of a hangover,’ Ronnie said, pleased. ‘Well, if you can’t get a saline IV, obviously.’

  ‘Do doctors really do that?’

  ‘Of course,’ Ronnie shrugged.

  Meg looked around them again. They were sitting outside in the heart of Toronto’s Mink Mile, so named in honour of the big-money designer boutiques that flanked this strip. The café’s seating area was demarcated by neat box hedging trimmed to hip height, and calico awnings that rolled out from the wall cast a soothing shade over all the diners. On the windowsills were dense planters filled with herbs, and pinch-pots of Himalayan pink salt were placed on every teak-slatted table. Everything was so chic, Meg mused, taking in her surroundings with the eye of an outsider. It was casual and low-key – there was clearly no dress code – and yet, it had a level of sophistication that even the swankiest restaurant back home couldn’t match. In Banff, quality of this level necessitated a suit, tie and small mortgage, but Ronnie just came here for brunch. She had ordered poached eggs and smashed avocado on rye, a green juice and a black coffee, and Meg had ordered exactly the same, not quite sure what a matcha crêpe or kimchi were. It was hard to believe she’d only come into the city from the mountains and not from another country altogether.