He swung his feet to the floor and let his torso hang in his lap, head in hands, while the dizzying black clouds seeped away from his vision and he recovered his balance. He closed his eyes until his head stopped spinning and found a sense of stillness; when he opened them, Iris was in front of him, in the chair she had sat in throughout his illness, keeping watch over his fevered body. She blinked at him and didn’t say anything.
“Where did you come from?” he asked. “Have you been there long?”
She nodded and continued to look at him, a blank stare on a beautiful face. He struggled to understand what he had known all along. His head ached from it.
“Why are you here?” he whispered. Iris cocked her head and lifted her shoulders as if to say You tell me. Augustine pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, watching the dance of light and dark on the backs of his eyelids. He knew that when he opened them the chair would be empty. He opened them, and it was.
THERE WAS ONE night in Socorro that he hadn’t thought about in years. He’d gone to every effort never to think of it again, but it came to him then, his breath rattling inside his dying lungs. It was soon after Jean told him she was pregnant, after he demanded she get an abortion. It was late, he was uninvited, but she let him in anyway, into the little adobe guesthouse she rented near the facility where they both worked. It was full of books and reams of fresh printer paper. Her dissertation sat on the dining room table in piles, her purple felt pen uncapped, a splayed legal pad full of indecipherable notes and a cup of tea beside it. Augustine stumbled to the table and threw himself down in the chair. He was drunk. The tea spilled somehow, an errant elbow, an oversized gesture, and began to soak into her work, the purple ink running down the page like tearstained mascara. Jean wasn’t angry, she was—what? She was sad. She sat down next to him, righted the now-empty teacup, and threw a dish towel over the puddle as it traveled to the edge of the table and began to drip down onto the floor.
“Why are you here?” she asked him. He didn’t answer her, only stared at the ruined pages in front of him. She waited. “Augie,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
And then the most ridiculous thing happened: he began to cry. He went to the cupboard where she kept a few bottles of liquor, one of whiskey and one of gin, hoping she hadn’t seen the tears. He remembered that he’d finished the gin last week, so he took down the whiskey and poured two fingers into her empty teacup. She covered her face with her hands as he drank it in one gulp. They were both crying then.
“What do you want?” she said, and he understood suddenly that he shouldn’t be there. That she truly didn’t want to see him—a flash of empathy for her that fizzled immediately.
“I want to try,” he slurred. “Let’s try.”
She shook her head, slowly and firmly, and took the whiskey off the table. Put the bottle back in the cupboard.
“I want to fix it,” he protested.
She looked at him and made sure he met her eyes before she answered him.
“No,” she said. “Look at yourself.”
She herded him to the door and he did—he looked at himself in the mirror that hung above a table where she put her keys and her mail when she got home, where she kept a little cactus in an aquamarine pot. He saw the way his features hung slack, as though the elasticity in his skin had already lost its snap, the way his eyes were rimmed with red, the corneas bloodshot and yellow. There was blood on the collar of his shirt. He wasn’t sure who it belonged to or how it had gotten there. The man looking back at him was older than he expected—more broken and more lost than he’d ever allowed himself to acknowledge. The haze of a brain soaked in alcohol shimmered around his reflection like heat waves, and somehow, instead of seeing less, for once the haze let him see more. It sharpened the image. He saw that it was himself that needed fixing, and with crushing certainty he realized he didn’t have the tools for the job, or even the conviction to try. He saw what Jean saw, and he understood that she and their unborn child were better off without him.
Augustine turned away from the mirror and left behind that brief shimmer of honesty—too heavy to carry with him, too blinding to look at for very long. Jean opened the door for him, and when he stumbled against the frame she guided him through the opening, gently but firmly, then shut the door behind him. Alone on her front step, he leaned back against her door and stared up at the overcast sky, dark and dense and impenetrable. No stars, just clouds. It was the last time they spoke.
AUGUSTINE PULLED HIS outerwear on slowly and with great difficulty: scarf, hat, parka, boots, and finally his mittens. The tent was empty. The quiet sounds of his zippers being zipped, the clomp of his boots, the whisper of his parka rubbing against itself, all came together to create a soft symphony of incremental movement. Outside the wind still moaned, softly—Iris’s melody. Augie was already breathing hard by the time he opened the door. The cold nearly knocked him down. The wind filled his lungs with ice crystals blown up from the ground, and his breath was already frozen on his beard before he’d gone more than two steps. He screwed up his strength, his determination, his sadness, and turned it into forward motion—one last burst. The radio shed was visible beneath a bright sliver of moon, and he stumbled toward it as fast as he could go.
He wasn’t sure how he would begin when he spoke to her, or what he needed to say, but it didn’t seem to matter. He only wanted to hear her and be heard. To have one honest moment, after all this time. Just one. He was halfway to the shed when he noticed a set of tracks in the snow and stopped. He followed them with his eyes, down to the edge of the lake, where he saw a small, snow-covered hill that seemed out of place. He followed the tracks, and when he came to the hill he realized that it was the bear that had been following him—after all this time, over all these miles. Part of him wanted to be afraid, to run for cover, but the rest of him—most of him—wanted to reach out and touch its haunch. He did, gingerly, and the bear chuffed softly. He walked around the huge animal to where its nose was pointed toward the lake, its neck and stomach laid flat against the snow, paws tucked beneath. He took off his mitten and touched it again, where its shoulder blades came together in a peak. The bear’s fur was covered with a thin dusting of snow, but he let his fingers sink in and found a layer of warmth emanating from the bear’s skin.
The bear chuffed again, but still it didn’t move. Augie understood that it was dying. Its yellowing fur looked almost golden in the moonlight. Augie’s legs gave way and he collapsed to his knees beside the bear, his fingers still buried in its fur. The radio shed could wait, he decided, it was this—this was the moment he’d been looking for. The wind picked up and began to sweep the snow into the sky, obscuring the radio shed and the other tents behind a curtain of white, till there was nothing left but Augustine and the bear.
He thought of Jean. The first time he had seen her was from across the parking lot of the research facility. She’d pulled up in her dusty green El Camino, her dark hair swirling around her shoulders as she unloaded her bags from the passenger’s seat. Even from the entrance to the facility he’d noticed the red lipstick she was wearing, the sliver of skin that showed between her blouse and her jeans. He thought of the first time he’d undressed her, the first time he’d watched her sleeping, and wondered what it was that made her so compelling. So magnetic. He never did figure it out. And he thought of the photograph she’d sent him. That one snapshot: the child, the girl, their daughter. Standing still, arms crossed over her chest, wearing a pale yellow dress and no shoes, her dark hair cut just below her jaw, the straight line of her bangs ending above her eyebrows. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she wanted to say something, and her eyes were defiant—a bright, hazel glare.
The bear groaned and rolled onto its side. Augie moved closer. He wasn’t afraid any longer, and as he fitted himself against the bear’s warm stomach and felt its massive arms close over him, he was at peace. No longer an interloper, but a part of the landscape. He felt the bear’s hot breat
h against the crown of his head and burrowed deeper against it, turning his face away from the wind and into the fur, where he found the quiet thunder of a heartbeat, slow and deep and steady as a drum.
TWENTY
ON BOARD THE International Space Station it looked as though the other astronauts had just stepped out for a moment: machines still turned on, half-empty food packets floating in the kitchen area. The only things missing were the Soyuz reentry pods—two of the three were gone. The equipment in the space station was archaic compared to Aether’s facilities, but the crew was already familiar with it, all of them having lived on the ISS at one point or another. Sully inspected its comm. station with curiosity, comparing the silence to that on Aether. Both stations were hearing the same signals—that is, none at all. She clung to the frequency where she’d found the man in the Arctic, but he wasn’t there, and eventually she had to move on, scanning for other survivors. She wondered if she’d ever find him again.
After sweeping the station for habitants and clues, and finding neither, Aether’s crew came together near the remaining reentry pod. The last pod held three seats. Three of them would descend and two would remain on the ISS, circling Earth indefinitely. The options were murky: without a ground team to collect them, there was the potentially fatal possibility of landing in an ocean or a desert. The state of the planet below them was unknowable. Perhaps the dirt and the air and the water were poisoned, perhaps they weren’t. Perhaps there were survivors, perhaps there weren’t. In space, a finite amount of resources were available and it was unclear how long they would last. Neither choice was certain, and neither was safe. But they weren’t ready to decide yet. They huddled together and talked about the docking procedure, the supplies, the equipment—anything but the question of who would go and who would stay. Anything but that.
THEY SLEPT ON Aether that night, grasping at inane small talk over dinner. After two years of wandering the solar system they were home—almost. After two years, some of them would make the last leg of the journey and some wouldn’t. All the waiting, the torturous uncertainty, had led to an impossible but still-unspoken divide. Sully lay awake in her bunk, and she guessed the others did as well, weighing the options and arriving at the same solution over and over: none. She turned from one side to the other, flopped onto her back, then onto her stomach, burying her arms under the pillow, laying them at her sides, throwing them over her face. Sleep was impossible. She thought of her daughter and touched the photograph pinned to the wall, just a dim square in the dark, but she could see Lucy’s face anyway, her costume, the wavy dirty-blond hair—the curve of her smile burned into Sully’s brain like a beacon.
And if the worst had happened? If her daughter was nothing more than hot ash floating in a bright sky, or even more horrible, a heap of decomposing remains returning to the dirt? She tried not to think these things, and yet—she had abandoned her entire family, she couldn’t think about anything else. If only she had been a better mother, a better wife, a better person, then someone else would be lying in this bunk right now, replaying her own regrets. She would have stayed in Canada, she never would have applied for the space program or gone to Houston. The raspberry-red door in Vancouver would still be hers, and the copper pans that hung above the stove, and the task of folding her daughter’s miniature T-shirts. There would be no divorce, no separation, no trouble finding a more recent photograph of Lucy when she wanted one. This picture of how her life could have been seemed so perfect, lying there in the dark, but it was pointless. She wasn’t built for that life. She’d never been the woman Jack wanted, the woman he needed, she had never loved Lucy in the right way—she wasn’t even sure what the right way was, only that the other mothers did it differently, that she could never seem to say the right things or do the right things or be the right person around either of them. The truth was, having her family had been even harder than losing them. There had always been something missing, and only now, after all this time and all these miles, could she begin to understand what it was: a warmth, an opening. The roots of something that had never been given the chance to grow.
LITTLE EARTH HAD begun to seem very small now that the actual Earth was filling the view from the cupola with its big blue girth. But they felt safe on the centrifuge, spinning inside their own familiar little world. They knew what to expect here, while their home planet had become a mystery in the time that they’d been away. After traversing the unknown, they’d only returned to more of the same. The mood over vacuum-sealed oatmeal and hot coffee was somber. It was time to discuss reentry.
“It’ll have to be random,” Harper said finally. “A lottery, drawing straws. Something like that. I’m not sure how else to go about it.”
The rest of them nodded assent.
Harper made eye contact with each of them, gauging their support for the idea, then returned his gaze to the table, licked his lips, and swallowed. Sully watched the nub of his Adam’s apple dip and rise in his throat, moving sluggishly, as if the effort pained him. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s bear in mind that we don’t know what we’re going to find down there. We might not even make it, but if we do, who’s to say we won’t be able to launch another Soyuz? So. Straws, I think. Might as well get on with it.”
There was a stockpile of straws in the kitchen; Harper rounded up five of them and Thebes shortened two with his utility knife. Harper swept them off the table and into his fist. Short straws for a life sentence in space. Long for an uncertain descent.
“Okay,” he said again. “Who’s first?”
There was a pause and then Tal reached out across the table. He plucked a straw from Harper’s hand and let out the breath he’d been holding when he saw that it was full length. He laid it down in front of him. Thebes, to his right, went next and drew another long straw, which he examined with an indecipherable expression. Ivanov chose, and it was short. The others gasped involuntarily and tensed, waiting for his reaction, but after a long moment of stunned silence he smiled. Gloomy Ivanov, smiling, like a marble statue suddenly altering its pose.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I think I’m relieved.”
Thebes laid his broad hand on Ivanov’s shoulder. Harper swallowed again and offered the two remaining straws to Sully. She drew. It was short.
THEY SCHEDULED THE reentry sequence for two days after the drawing. Tal needed time to figure out the trajectory of the pod, the angle at which they would enter the atmosphere, and the coordinates where they hoped to end up, all of which were incredibly complex without the assistance of a ground team. The crew decided to aim the pod for the Great Plains of Texas, where the weather would be temperate, the open space would be considerable, and they hoped to find some kind of answer from Houston. It seemed like their best chance—but for the first time in two years, the they had become fractured. Three would descend, two would remain. Their futures were suddenly divided.
After the meeting, Sully went to Aether’s cupola and peered through the swirling layer of feathery clouds as they zipped over the rich green of Central America, the deep, rippling blue of the Atlantic, the tawny deserts of northern Africa. She stayed there for a long time, watching the continents fly by—long enough to see the sun rise and set along the hazy rim of the planet’s atmosphere a few times over. Maybe staying up here was for the best. Maybe she didn’t belong on the surface anymore. She thought of Lucy, her glowing beam of know-it-all sunshine; she thought of Jack, the way he was before the divorce—mischievous, brooding, brilliant, and in love with her. She thought of Jean, pointing to the sky when Sully was little, the stars, the desert, introducing her to the electromagnetic spectrum and all of its magic. Her family. She watched the sun rise and set, rise and set, rise and set. As she watched the fourth sunrise flood the darkened planet with light, she let go. Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, wisps of pink cloud moving over blue water, she released her memories and her plans for the future—she let them float out through the cupola and down to the atmosphere, where they sizzled ag
ainst the hazy blue shell of a planet she would never return to.
That night, Sully returned to the centrifuge long after the others had closed their curtains and turned out their lights. She felt lighter than she had in years. She brushed her teeth and padded along the curve to her bunk, her feet whispering against the floor. As she passed Harper’s compartment she heard him turn over inside, the rustle of his bedding and the frustrated sigh unmistakably his. She stopped short. Sully stood still for a moment, not thinking, just pausing, then adjusted her direction. Her feet moved and she followed them, climbing into his bunk before her brain had a chance to object. His face was barely visible in the dark, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t need to see his features to know what he was thinking. This connection had unsettled her before, had kept her away, but not anymore—not now that it was her last chance to be near him. He moved over and she lay down next to him. She could smell him: the musk of sleep, Old Spice deodorant over stale sweat, antibacterial soap, tomato plant sap, and another scent, one she couldn’t name or describe, but that she recognized as his.
Good Morning, Midnight Page 20