The Waiting

by Cathy LaGrow

  No wonder, then, that Olava didn’t want to leave her family. But her failing body drew her ever closer to the other side of eternity, the side she’d approached when she’d almost drowned in a river so many years before.

  When Ruth discovered she was pregnant a fourth time, she reluctantly kept it a secret from her mother. Why pain Olava with the knowledge of a new baby she’d never get to bounce on her lap, velvety cheeks she’d never get to kiss? Why remind her of all that she would miss in the years ahead? Even though Olava had been ill for more than a decade, Ruth could not yet imagine life without her mother.

  In Olava’s final days and hours, Ruth stayed at the hospital with her every moment she could. Her belly had not yet rounded out, but the tiny baby was there with them, growing inside. She felt torn between the two extremes: joy and grief, anticipation and dread, life and death.

  Six months later, on December 2, 1960, when Ruth delivered Timothy James, it was with bittersweet wonder. She had a new life in her arms, but her own mother would never hold her newborn son. Olava had gone to be with Jesus.

  * * *

  Ruth grieved her mother’s death and worried about her father, now living in the parsonage alone. She wished to call Olava to share news about Tim’s first tooth or tottering first steps, and every childhood marker that Deb, Mark, and Brian were passing: report cards, Christmas programs, and the funny stories that filled their home.

  Ruth and Charles carried on her parents’ values and traditions as if they were woven into their genes. God, family, and church shored up their lives. Ruth sang in the choir, and for fifty years she would be part of a women’s quintet. She and Charles both taught Sunday school.

  Five years after Tim, fifth baby Carrie Ann came along in February 1965, and then Jay Parker just over a year later. Jay arrived so close on Carrie’s heels that people teased Ruth and Charles, asking if they’d figured out how pregnancy happened. There were fifteen and a half years between oldest Deb and youngest Jay. But true to Ruth’s original plan, a total of six children filled their house.

  For the first time, Ruth had two children in diapers. It seemed that if she wasn’t changing diapers, then she was washing them, scrubbing the flannel fabric, hanging them to dry, and barely getting them folded before needing them again.

  Ruth handled the chaos of a house chock-full of children well, but the work could wear out even an “atomic” personality. Ruth kept two long quotes taped to her cupboards for decades, until the paper became tanned with age. Every single day, she’d steal away to read the bolstering words of Walter Wintle’s poem “Courage”:

  If you think you are beaten, you are; If you think you dare not, you don’t;

  If you’d like to win, but think you can’t, It’s almost a cinch you won’t.

  And when she wanted to remind herself of what her children needed most, she read the admonition of Ronald Russell:

  A child that lives with encouragement

  learns confidence.

  A child that lives with truth

  learns justice. . . .

  The Lees worked hard from early dawn to after dark, and as the children grew old enough, they were assigned farm chores. Work and family time, school and sports activities kept them constantly on their toes. Everyone reconnected at the dining room table, even if it was later in the evening. The kids were expected to be in their seats before the supper prayer: “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let this food to us be blessed.”

  At one such dinner, Charles offered one of his frequent challenges.

  “Okay, does anyone have a riddle tonight?”

  “I do,” Brian said, passing a bowl of mashed potatoes on to Deb.

  “Go on, what is it?” Charles asked.

  The table fell silent except for the scrape of forks on plates and the chewing of food. The circle of faces waited, wondering what Brian had dreamed up.

  “What has windows and walks?” The gleam in Brian’s eye piqued his family’s interest.

  They looked around, seeking the inspiration for the riddle.

  “Um . . . the cuckoo clock?” someone said.

  “Nope,” said Brian.

  Seven pairs of eyes sought an object around the room besides the glass of the windows, which clearly didn’t have legs.

  “A car?”

  “No.”

  They studied the smug look on Brian’s face, tried again and again, soon tossing out answers that couldn’t possibly be right. No one in the Lee family liked to be duped by a riddle. The older two siblings especially couldn’t allow their younger brother to beat them. Even little Jay tried babbling out words that he couldn’t quite put together.

  Dinner grew cold. Ruth knew it was time to end it.

  “We give up,” Ruth said, winking at her middle son. He beamed triumphantly and took a bite of his meal.

  “What’s the answer?” Tim asked. The entire family was waiting.

  Brian looked up from his plate, eyebrows raised as he scanned the table.

  Someone shouted in dismay. “He doesn’t have an answer!”

  Guilt flushed Brian’s face.

  “What? You don’t have an answer to your own riddle?” Charles asked his son.

  “I . . . no, I don’t.”

  The room roared with groans and laughter in equal measure. The story of “What has windows and walks?” became legendary in the Lee family. Brian would never live it down.

  Grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins were constants in the Lees’ lives. Ruth’s father, Peder, retired from his pastorate in 1962, though he continued to lead special prayer meetings and fill in for other pastors when asked. He also delivered clothing to Native American families in the Dakotas. Eventually arthritis and knee surgery slowed him down, and for the rest of his life he walked with two canes.

  Brian often did chores for his grandpa Peder, like mowing the lawn and taking out the garbage, for which he was always paid. Peder would pull out fifty-cent pieces from the Old Spice deodorant decanter where he kept his change and hand them to Brian.

  “You paid me too much,” Brian once said.

  “When I’m gone, I don’t want you telling people your grandpa Peder was stingy,” Grandpa responded.

  Once each summer, Peder treated the entire Lee brood to dinner at Hokey’s South Lawn drive-in, an outing the kids looked forward to every year. As they spread out over several picnic tables, they liked to retell some of the cherished family stories.

  “Remember when Tim was four or five years old, and he followed his dog Duke down the frozen creek? We couldn’t find him for the longest time. . . .”

  “Remember when Brian got his finger bit by a mink, and then another one bit his rear end, not once, but twice!”

  “What about the story of the Magic Carpet Ride? Dad shaking that rug over the second-story railing in the garage, and the rail breaking. Mom walked by at that very moment, and it seemed like Dad rode the rug down, landing unharmed on the ground with the rug still in his hands.”

  “How about when Mom and Deb went shopping when Carrie and Jay were really small, and the saleswoman at J. C. Penney thought Mom was the grandmother? Deb said when they left, ‘See, Mom, I keep telling you to color your hair!’”

  All the children did well in school and kept busy participating in extracurricular activities and playing on sports teams. Ruth would pack up the younger children to hurry off to the various events: cheerleading, wrestling, track, baseball, scouting. Naps were often interrupted, dinner served late, schedules juggled. Charles would watch from the stands still dressed in his work clothes. But he and Ruth never missed a game.

  The Lees could have posed for a Norman Rockwell painting. They were the epitome of a rural American family, with sons joining the military and each of the children earning college degrees. The family was garnering one accomplishment after another.

  And there was one among them who reached for the stars and captured the sky.

  Chapter Twenty

  FROM CHILDHOOD, it was
obvious that Mark was smart as a whip. He studied hard with no prompting and earned excellent grades. He excelled in sports, too. His younger brothers and sister idolized him. Busy with a procession of babies, Ruth was grateful for her second child’s self-sufficiency.

  On the same day that Alan Shepard launched into space in 1961, nine-year-old Mark and a friend were kept in from recess. To commemorate the launch, the boys took all the art clay the school had and molded it into projectiles. After wetting the clay in the water fountain, they threw the “missiles” onto the ceiling of their classroom. During the middle of class, as the teacher was explaining how to diagram a sentence, the clay missiles lost their grip and began to plop down onto students’ heads.

  The teacher pulled Mark aside and asked for an explanation. Mark told her that he thought the missiles would stay up there forever. She looked at him thoughtfully and told him, “You need to go to the library and learn about gravity.”

  So Mark went to the city library, found a book on Sir Isaac Newton, and prepared a report for class. A whole new world opened up. Mark began reading all the biographies and autobiographies the library had. While watching the Alan Shepard flight into space, he’d made a decision: he knew what he wanted to do when he grew up. And every step he took from then on would bring him closer to that goal. His elementary, junior high, and high school teachers all would unknowingly contribute to his dream.

  Someday, Mark would travel in space.

  He became a Boy Scout and achieved the highest ranking of Eagle Scout. He was pleased to learn that an extremely high percentage of astronauts had taken part in Scouting, and a large number of those were Eagle Scouts. After high school, he was accepted by the Air Force Academy. He earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and spent years flying fighter jets. He then entered MIT to earn a degree in mechanical engineering, specializing in advanced composite materials, something NASA valued.

  One Christmas, Mark came home and began talking about NASA’s astronaut program. Ruth was busy in the kitchen but finally began to wonder why he was going on about the subject. Then she realized: this was Mark talking.

  She looked at him.

  “You wouldn’t want to go up into space, would you?”

  Mark held her gaze. He spoke directly, as all the Lees did.

  “Yes, I do.”

  After two decades of working toward a single goal, it was the first time Mark had mentioned a word of his plan to his family. They were surprised, but Charles and Ruth had always supported their children and encouraged their aspirations. They would support this idea too.

  No one doubted Mark’s abilities, so no one was surprised when, out of more than five thousand applicants, he was one of just seventeen accepted as an astronaut candidate.

  In January 1986, seven months after Mark completed his training, the shuttle Challenger exploded seventy-three seconds into its launch, killing everyone on board. The images of debris falling back to earth replayed on television screens across the United States and around the world. Excited schoolchildren had been watching the launch live in American classrooms as Christa McAuliffe became the first teacher to head to space. As a result, the tragedy—and the danger of space exploration—was magnified.

  Mark, who had just become the first in his astronaut class to be assigned to a future space flight, called his parents. He needed them to understand just how dangerous this really was. His resolve had not wavered—neither did their support.

  In late April 1989, the extended Lee family gathered on the narrow strip of Cocoa Beach, just south of Cape Canaveral. Mark was scheduled for his first space flight on the shuttle Atlantis. Two days before launch, NASA hosted the astronauts and their families for a beach house barbecue. Like all the guests, Mark’s family members were examined by a doctor before being allowed into the house. The government took no chances that someone would pass along a sore throat or fever to a crew member.

  Despite the unspoken sense that this might be their last time together, the mood at the barbecue was upbeat. As usual, Brian lightened the conversation with wisecracks, but they all felt the gravity of the occasion, the sense of purpose. After a couple of hours, the five Atlantis crew members had to leave. Ruth hugged her boy tightly, but she did not cry.

  While the crew finished preparations, the families were treated to a tour of the Kennedy Space Center and a nighttime visit to the launchpad. Their buses were driven to the foot of the massive structure, now illuminated with brilliant lights. A guide explained the different components of the pad: The enormous fuel storage tanks. The sophisticated venting system designed to contain exhaust and contaminated water after the launch. The eight enormous bolts, four inches in diameter, that held the rocket boosters to the platform and that would split in two at ignition. The escape baskets, which could slide the astronauts into a bunker in case of emergency.

  Ruth felt her heart racing as she studied all the vital pieces and complex parts that had to work perfectly together to take her son into space and bring him safely back home.

  Above them loomed the massive external tank, nearly half the distance of a football field and weighing over a million and a half pounds, most of that liquid oxygen and hydrogen. Clinging to its sides were the two solid rocket boosters, which would power the launch during the first two minutes of liftoff, and the familiar white body and finlike wings of the orbiter Atlantis itself.

  It was the most stunning sight that Ruth, who’d grown up climbing trees and marveling at her family’s first washing machine, had ever seen. As she tilted her head back and looked at the fearsome expanse of machinery standing ready to transport her thirty-six-year-old son, it was astonishing to think that her family was a part of all this.

  In the end, Mark’s first launch was scrubbed at T-31 seconds due to a problem with a pump. The relaunch would take place in four days. While they waited, the Lee family visited Disney World, SeaWorld, Rocket Park, and the IMAX theater at the Space Center. They tried to ignore the tension knotting their stomachs.

  Finally, on the morning of May 4, they boarded buses for the LC39 family viewing center. It was a warm day, with a bright sun heating the tarmac and glinting off the bus windows. Every one of the Lees wore a red shirt proclaiming, “Viroqua, Wisconsin, home of astronaut Mark C. Lee.”

  As the buses prepared to roll from the loading area on Merritt Island, Uncle Ole stood up and addressed the people settling into the rows of seats. The extended Lee family filled over half of the bus that was packed with other astronauts’ families and friends.

  “Excuse me, and hello, I will be your tour guide this afternoon,” Ole said in an exaggerated monotone.

  “Here comes a sermon,” someone tossed out, followed by a ripple of laughter.

  “No, just a song.” Ole cleared his throat, then winked at Ruth and laughed. “All joking aside. My name is Ole Nordsletten, the proud uncle of astronaut Mark Lee. A group of people up in Seattle like to call me Reverend Ole.

  “I’m sure each of you has a million memories attached to those boys out there like we do. I remember Mark as just a little fella running around the farm out in Viroqua, Wisconsin. And now we’re going to see them go down in history.”

  Ole took a deep breath as his eyes swept the faces on the bus, resting again on his little sister. He remembered the day his parents brought home little infant Ruth—the girl who always laughed at his jokes and brought an unquenchable sunshine to their family.

  “This is a remarkable day, and I’m incredibly proud of my sister, Ruth, my brother-in-law, Charles, and of course my nephew Mark. I am sure each one of you feels the same for your astronaut. If there are no objections, I would like to offer up a prayer for a safe launch, a successful mission, and the safe return of our loved ones.”

  There were approving murmurs throughout the bus. Ole closed his eyes and in his deep voice sent his prayer beyond the shuttle’s destination. Ruth thought of her parents and how amazed they’d be by all of this. Olava had been gone for almost thirty years,
and her father had passed away in 1974 on the day of Mark’s graduation from the Air Force Academy. It seemed impossible that he’d been gone fifteen years already.

  Once they reached the viewing area, the family settled into the stands for a long wait. Loudspeakers broadcast feeds from mission control and launch control. A narrator explained what was happening as the launch timeline moved forward. Astronauts were on hand to answer questions. Three miles away, the shuttle shimmered through the heat.

  From behind her sunglasses, Ruth stared at the launchpad. A light breeze ruffled her short hair. She knew that Mark was already in the shuttle crew compartment, lying flat on his back with his feet in the air, strapped in for hours of preflight checks and procedures. Her stomach clenched with a mixture of emotions. Excitement. Fear. Immense pride.

  The crowd was silent as a pleasant male voice started the countdown. Everyone tensed, not knowing whether the count would be aborted, as it had been days earlier. But at T-14 seconds, as 300,000 gallons of water poured onto the launchpad to muffle the powerful sound waves, steam began to billow underneath the shuttle.

  Ruth’s heart was pounding so hard that she could actually hear it.

  At seven seconds, bright flames ignited on the shuttle’s main engines. Great clouds of steam nearly obscured the entire launchpad. Then the countdown completed: two, one, zero . . . and liftoff.

  The sound hit the crowd a few seconds later. Even as they cheered, the noise thundered against their bodies, an insistent percussion. Ruth’s eyes were locked on the shuttle, whose rockets were like infernos pushing it upward. She could feel her heart tugging toward them, toward Mark. Tears slid from beneath her dark glasses. Tears stained nearly everyone’s cheeks—the majesty of the spectacle fairly demanded it. Nothing they had ever seen, or ever would see, had prepared them for the flames blazing under the rockets, colors of an intensity and brightness unlike any they’d witnessed before.