Good Morning, Midnight

by Lily Brooks-Dalton

  Sully had, in fact, known all along how to play. She’d learned from a babysitter. But when Jean asked if she wanted to learn she’d nodded vigorously. It was, if nothing else, a chance to earn an extra five minutes of her mother’s time. Sully didn’t mind being stuck at her mother’s office, she was used to it by now. As far as she was concerned, the closer she could be to Jean, the better. It had always been just the two of them, which was how Sully liked it. Sully didn’t question the absence of a father—she had nothing to compare it to.

  Harper picked up his hand and automatically she picked up hers, too, then stared at it for a few minutes before seeing the run she already had: nine, ten, jack of hearts. She laid it down in a fan, drew, then discarded, covering up the offending black ace with a three. She looked at Harper over the top of her cards and met his eyes, which were already on her. Deep lines punctuated his face, and she tried to read them like a sentence. Three crooked dashes above his eyebrows, parentheses around his mouth, half a dozen hyphens traveling outward from the corners of his eyes, like the rays of a sun. A thin white scar running through one sandy eyebrow and another on his chin, cutting through the stubble.

  “What are you thinking right now?” Harper asked, and the question startled her with its intimacy. It was the kind of question a lover might ask. She felt suddenly exposed and blinked back an unexpected film of moisture from her eyes, tears she was unwilling to shed in another person’s presence. She waited until her throat unclenched and she could be sure the timbre of her voice wouldn’t give her away before she answered.

  “I was just thinking about Goldstone,” she said. “About when I lived there as a kid. My mother worked in the signal processing center.”

  Harper kept looking at her. His eyes were a pale, steely blue. “Like mother, like daughter,” he said. It was his turn, but he didn’t draw. He was waiting for her to continue.

  “She taught me solitaire one summer. I already knew how to play, but I wanted the attention, so I let her teach me again.” Sully arranged, then rearranged her cards. “It’s funny, I would’ve killed for a few minutes of her attention. She was all work back then. Before she got married and had two more kids and stopped working entirely. But by then I was older and the twins were more interesting and…I don’t know. I guess I didn’t need her as much anymore, and she didn’t need me, either.”

  Harper slowly took a card, glanced at it, and laid it back down.

  “How old were you?” he asked.

  “I was ten when she got married and my stepfather moved us back to Canada, where she was from. He was her high school sweetheart, before she left for grad school and ended up at Goldstone with me. I don’t know, I think she just gave up at a certain point, like she expected everything to get easier, as I got older, as she found firmer ground at the DSN. Instead it got harder. She couldn’t catch a break. And there was this guy, my stepdad, this perfectly nice guy waiting in the wings, still pining after all that time, calling, writing letters. Finally she just…gave up. Quit her job. Went north. Married him, finally. The twins showed up really fast after that; I was eleven when they were born, I think.”

  The dashes in Harper’s forehead fluttered and drew up toward his hairline. She stared at her cards so she didn’t have to see his look of sympathy. Stop talking, she reprimanded herself. It all sounded so simple out loud—an ordinary childhood, marriage and babies—but Sully was still thinking of leaving Goldstone behind for the cold loneliness of Canada. Of losing her beloved, brilliant mother to two screaming infants. Of gaining a stepfather who was kind but distant, decent but uninterested—not cruel enough to be hated, not loving enough to be loved. She remembered the telescope she and Jean used to take out into the desert in the back of their rusty green El Camino, just the two of them. They would drive with the windows down and Jean’s long hair would fill the cab, a dark tornado whipping against the sagging upholstery on the roof, reaching for the open window, trying to touch the cool, dry night.

  They would set up the telescope, spread out a blanket, and stay there for hours. Jean would show her the planets, the constellations, clusters of stars, clouds of gas. Every once in a while, the ISS would spin into view, a bright, quick light. There and then gone, spinning over some other part of the world. The next day Sully would arrive at school tired but content. Her mother was showing her the universe, and school was so easy she could sleepwalk through her classes. In Canada, when her mother was married and pregnant and then consumed by the twins, Sully hauled the telescope outside by herself, onto the icy second-floor deck crowded by pine trees, their needled boughs swinging over the wooden platform and blocking her view of the horizon. The stars didn’t seem quite as clear without her mother beside her, but still the constellations comforted her. Even in the cold loneliness of this new place, she could find the map she’d grown up learning to decipher—a different latitude, but the same points of reference. Even there she could see Polaris, burning above the feathery tips of the tall pines.

  “Anyway,” Sully said, but had nothing to change the subject to. Harper put down a run and discarded. “Did you—do you have brothers and sisters?” she asked, trying to fill the silence and to even the exchange of personal information, as if they were keeping score: one point for every revelation extracted.

  “Yeah,” he said, but slowly, as if he weren’t sure. For a moment it seemed he wasn’t going to say anything more. “Two brothers, one sister.” Sully waited, and after a few more rounds of drawing and discarding, Harper finally went on.

  “Both of my brothers are dead, but it’s too weird not to count them—one of them overdosed a few years ago and the other drowned when we were teenagers. My sister lives in Missoula with her family. Cute kids, two girls. Her husband’s a real shithead.” He snapped a run down onto the table with a mischievous grin. “You’re in trouble now, Specialist,” he said, even though she was clearly winning. She shook her head at him.

  “Keep dreaming, Harper,” she said. She considered asking Harper who was the oldest sibling, but she didn’t really need to. She knew that he was without having to be told. It was the way he guided his crew, the way he nudged them along like delinquent ducklings wandering away from the group. The older brother who’d lost two of his younger siblings already. She couldn’t imagine him at the back of a crowd, and certainly not in the middle—he would always be in front, always leading, protecting those who came behind.

  Sully thought of her brief and beautiful life as an only child. The taste of desert grit on her tongue, the pinpoints of light against the velvety black night. She knew that if she closed her eyes she could be there, lost in memory, lying next to her mother, tracing Ursa Minor, the first constellation she’d learned to find, their heads propped against the back tire of the El Camino—but she didn’t. She kept them open, trained on the man across from her, anchoring herself with the texture of his face, his neck, his hands. Gray had infiltrated Harper’s sandy hair, blending into the neutral tone like silver shadows. His hair had grown unkempt since the last trim, which Tal had given him months ago, when they were passing through Mars’s orbit. It stood up from his head in lopsided tufts, as if he’d just gotten out of bed. There was one emphatic curl that bobbed when he moved. Sully remembered the way her own daughter’s hair had done something similar when she was very small. It was almost impossible not to fall backward, to lose herself thinking of what she’d probably never see again.

  The hand ended, and as they counted their cards Harper eked out a narrow victory. He looked relieved. “Phew,” he said. “I thought if I lost one more time I’d have to show some modesty. Not the case.”

  He swept the cards into a heap and began tapping the deck together, squaring the edges. “Another?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Maybe just one more.”

  She watched him deal. With his sleeves pushed up above his elbows she could see the thick blond hair that lined his forearms and the sturdy knobs of his wrists. He was wearing his watch, the same one he’d been wearin
g the day she met him, the same one he always wore, with the watch face nestled against his pulse, the clasp facing out. His hands were broad, the skin on his palms and the pads of his fingers tough, his fingernails cut close to the quick. Sully wondered who he missed, what he’d left behind. Who he thought about in these idle moments. A friend, a lover, a mentor? She knew his résumé by heart, as she did everyone’s, but knowing that he got his PhD in aeronautics and astronautics after two tours in the Air Force wasn’t the same as knowing him—knowing whether he’d admired his father, or how many times he’d been in love, or what he’d dreamed about when he watched the Montana sunsets as a teenager. She knew that he’d traveled through the earth’s atmosphere and back more times than any other human being in history, that he could cook better than she could, that he was terrible at rummy, okay at euchre, and almost good at poker. But she didn’t know what he wrote about when he scribbled in his spiral-bound journal, or who he thought about as he fell asleep.

  She imagined answers for him instead of asking: He’d loved his father very much, and had been missing him since his death with a yearning he’d never felt before. His mother was still alive, but it wasn’t the same with her. He’d been in love a few times—once as a teenager, and it had burned hot and steady until it went out like a light, then again in his late twenties, when he asked a woman to marry him. She’d said yes and then slept with one of his colleagues, leaving him heartbroken and careful.

  The third time was written all over his face, but Sully couldn’t see it.

  Instead, out of all the other questions spinning through her head, Sully picked, “What do you miss the most about home?”

  She arranged her cards in her hand without looking to see what she was holding. Instead, she kept her eyes on his face, the jump in his jaw as he clenched his teeth together, the wistful shrug of his mouth.

  “My dog, Bess,” Harper said. “She’s a chocolate lab, had her for eight years and her mother before that. It’s stupid, but I miss her like hell. I leave her with my neighbor—he loves her almost as much as I do. I never did get on with humans as well as I got on with ol’ Bess.”

  Halfway around the centrifuge they heard Tal turn off the gaming console, shuffle into the lavatory and then out again. He gave Sully and Harper a solemn, sleepy nod before he climbed into his bunk and drew the curtain.

  “What about you?” Harper asked.

  “My daughter, Lucy. Also hot baths.”

  He laughed. “I think I’d go with mountains over a bath. Or big, empty fields.” He lowered his voice and said in a dramatic whisper, “I’d push Ivanov out the airlock if I could walk through a field for five lousy minutes.”

  Sully chuckled under her breath. When Ivanov dropped in through the entry node a few seconds later, with uncanny timing, she imploded with laughter. She hid her face behind her hands as Ivanov walked past and strode along the ring. There was a sullen stare already fixed on his face, and he went to bed without saying a word to them. Harper gave Sully a stern look.

  “Get it together, Sullivan.”

  She nodded, her lips pressed together against any further eruptions. She suddenly remembered what Devi had said, about Ivanov being frightened, and the laughter left her completely. She wondered if she sometimes mistook sadness for sullenness. If he was more vulnerable than she realized. Ivanov’s light went off behind his curtain.

  “What about the husband?” Harper asked, drawing a card.

  “Ex,” she corrected, and was going to add something, but realized there was nothing she could say about him that would make sense. Jack was a minefield, planted with resentment and deadly shards of joy. No sooner had she alighted on a bright, comforting memory—Jack asleep on the couch with a two-year-old Lucy facedown on his chest, the two of them snoring in concert—than she was blown back by the unexpected detonation of a deeply buried bitterness a few inches away. Lucy had stopped falling asleep with Sully when she was eight months old. She changed the subject.

  “I can just see you galloping around on some big piece of land in Montana, on your black stallion or whatever, ol’ Bess running alongside. You know, I always wondered…why are you still hanging out with all these geeky scientists? You broke the damn record—retire already.”

  He smiled. “I guess I always think, just one more ride, you know? One more, then I’m done. Then they’ll ask me to do another one and I’ll think, what the hell. You are pretty geeky, though. If I had realized what I was getting into this time around I might have stayed home.”

  Sully let her jaw hang slack in mock horror. “I can’t believe you!”

  “I know, I know, outrageous. But I’m definitely retiring after this one—promise. I’ve got the land all squared away. You’re gonna visit me and Bess when we get home, right?”

  When we get home. The words hung in the stagnant, recycled air. Sully let them drift away and played along with the fantasy of the invitation.

  “I suppose I will,” she said. It was a nice thought. She’d never seen Harper’s house, but she pictured something small, off the beaten path, with a big front porch and a long driveway, surrounded by acres and acres of empty space. There was his muddy truck parked in the driveway and Bess sitting tall by the front door, waiting for her. In her imagination this became her home, too. In reality, she didn’t have a home anymore, she’d left her things in storage and given up her apartment for the two-year trip. It felt good to pretend she had somewhere—someone—to return to. She caught Harper looking at her.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he replied, “just wondering.”

  “Wondering what?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll ask you when we land.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not kidding. I need something to look forward to.” He winked at her. “We all need something to look forward to.”

  They passed another hour playing. “It’s getting late,” Harper said.

  Sully began to put the cards away. He held out his hand and said “Good game,” in that half-chivalrous, half-wisecracking way of his. She took it, but instead of shaking they just held hands for a moment. She felt the pressure of his grip, the scratch of his callused palms, the dry heat of his skin against hers. The moment passed and he didn’t let go; neither did she. He looked down at her and suddenly she was terrified—of what, she wasn’t sure. She flipped his hand over to look at the watch on the inside of his wrist.

  “I should go to bed,” Sully said, and let go. “Sleep well.”

  She climbed into her bunk without looking back at him, knowing that if she did, he would still be watching her. She shut the curtain and sat hugging her legs to her chest, her forehead resting on her knees as she listened to him moving through the centrifuge, brushing his teeth, switching off the light in his bunk. When we get home.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Sully didn’t rouse herself until hours after the alarm buzzed. The lights were at full strength beyond her curtain. The rustling of the others entering and exiting the lavatory, opening and closing their curtains, shuffling around the centrifuge in their rubber slip-ons, made it impossible for her to go back to sleep, though she would have liked to. She could have slept all day, she was so tired lately. After running a brush through her hair she began to braid it, and her arms were aching by the time she finished. She felt weak, as though she were ending the day instead of beginning it.

  Everyone had retreated to a separate corner of the ship. There was only Tal left on Little Earth, looking at a radar tablet showing the local activity in the asteroid belt. The belt was in fact sparsely populated, millions of asteroids spread out across such an incredible distance that they’d be lucky to see even one on their way through. Their passage through the belt had been scheduled around a particularly inactive window, a Kirkwood gap, when all the larger asteroids were swept up into the orbital resonance created by Jupiter’s massive gravity. The chances of colliding with an asteroid were infinitesimal, but it was Tal’s job to make sure they didn’t b
eat the odds.

  “Clear skies?” Sully asked as she took a protein bar from a cabinet in the kitchen area.

  “The clearest,” Tal said, looking up from the smudged tablet screen. “Nothing but dust and pebbles for a couple thousand miles.”

  Sully peeled back the wrapper from the bar like the skin of a banana and leaned over Tal’s shoulder. “I’d hate to get creamed by Ceres.”

  Tal snorted. “Yeah, me too. But—not to worry, I’ll keep an eye on things. Anyway, I think we’re two weeks or so away from Mars’s orbit—so, getting there.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder for a moment and then left Little Earth, climbing up the exit node’s ladder, her protein bar clamped between her teeth. After a few rungs she felt the weight slip from her body and she let go, kicking off to float the rest of the way. A few crumbs detached from the bar and drifted in front of her. She snapped them up like a hungry fish and propelled herself down the greenhouse corridor. She grabbed an overhead rung to stop herself in front of one of the tomato plants, where she rubbed a few leaves between her fingers, releasing the smell into the air, and then checked the late bloomer she had told Devi about yesterday. She noticed that the little flowers were gone, replaced by tiny green nubs, and she immediately began looking forward to sharing her observation with Devi—looking forward to anything had become so rare. She continued past the entry to Ivanov’s lab, where all the rock samples were being categorized. Through the doorway she glimpsed him peering into the enormous microscope built into the wall, pulling one piece of rock from the viewing drawer and replacing it with another. He spent most of his time in there these days.

  Before turning into the comm. pod, Sully drifted straight ahead, onto the command deck, where she hovered in front of the clear cupola for a moment. The view had lost its novelty, but not its magnificence. The deep black of space, studded with bright pinpoints of light: burning steady red, or pulsing blue, or faintly glimmering like the wink of a coquettish eye from beneath the dark lashes of space and time. Sully could smell the sticky sap of the tomato plant on the pad of her thumb as she gazed out into the void, breathing in the earthy smell of photosynthesis to quiet the accelerated beat of her heart as she took in the overwhelming, infinite space that surrounded her. No beginning, no end, just this, forever. From here, the idea of Earth seemed like an illusion. How could something so verdant, so diverse and beautiful and sheltered, exist among all this emptiness? When she pulled herself away from the cupola she spotted Thebes working behind her, a tablet in one hand and one of the engineering apertures open in front of him, a hive of knobs and wires and switches.