Atmosphere(72)

“Well, she’s getting laid consistently, so that’s probably it,” Vanessa said.

Joan shook her head. “Would you stop?”

“Still such a prude,” Vanessa said as she kissed Joan’s neck and dragged her into the bedroom.


Joan did not know what to expect that evening, but then, when she met Barbara and Frances at the main parking lot at JSC, she immediately spotted the giant diamond ring on Barbara’s finger. She decided not to say anything.

“Hey, babe,” Joan said to Frances.

Frances was nine now and had taken on an air of maturity that Joan both celebrated and mourned. There was no sitting on Joan’s lap anymore, no smushing their noses together, no carrying Frances across a crowded parking lot. Those things had been replaced by talking about pop music, and wanting to see a lot of the same movies, and less being asked of Joan in the taking care of her.

When Frances had been younger, Joan would sometimes carry her such long distances that it hurt her back. Back then, Frances would hang on so tight that sometimes she would press on Joan’s windpipe or kick her in the ribs. Now Frances would barely hold her hand.

Joan felt, so acutely, that the incurable problem with life was that nothing was ever in balance. That she could not have toddler Frances and fifth-grade Frances at the same time. She could not meet adult Frances and have a moment to hold baby Frances all at once. You could not have a little of everything you wanted.

Joan tried to remind herself that when Frances had been younger, she had held Frances’s little hand every single chance she got. When Frances had been a baby, she had smelled her hair sometimes for whole minutes at a time. She had been present for all of it. Didn’t that mean that she would not grieve its loss, since she had voraciously and self-indulgently taken all of it that was offered?

No. It did not.

She still ached for every version of Frances.

But to love Frances was to be always saying goodbye to the girl Frances used to be and falling in love again with the girl Frances was becoming.

She missed every Frances she had known. But oh, this Frances. This lanky, gangly, whip-smart Frances, with her ears pierced and a Cyndi Lauper T-shirt on, this Frances was a gift Joan would one day miss, too.

“This is how they used to launch astronauts into space,” Joan said as she pointed to the Mercury-Redstone on display. “This was the rocket that launched the very first American in space. And this one”—she pointed to the Saturn V—“launched the first astronaut to the moon.”

“Neil Armstrong,” Frances said.

“That’s right.”

“Are you going to the moon?”

Barbara cut in: “Joan is doing something even more important.”

Joan looked at her.

“One day, she is going to go into low-Earth orbit and put up a satellite or a telescope—or something else that is going to help everyone learn about our universe better.”

Joan was taken aback. She had not told Barbara any of that.

“We’re very proud of Auntie Joan,” Barbara said.

“Of course we are!” Frances said.

For a moment, Joan couldn’t speak.

“We should get going,” she finally said. And then: “Thank you both. That means a lot.”

The grass was packed, but Joan found them a spot a ways back, far from the action, so they could relax and talk. There had been heavy rain for weeks, but tonight was clear and dry.

Joan put a blanket out on the lawn. She rolled up a sweatshirt and used it as a pillow for Frances. Barbara sat down with her legs to the side and covered herself with the skirt of her dress. They watched the sun begin to set.

“Two hundred years ago, in France, the first man flew. He went up in a hot air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers. It was made out of paper, but it was pretty similar to the ones they have on the ground over there.”

“Wow,” Frances said.

Joan told neither of them that some of the balloon teams had asked members of the astronaut corps to accompany them in the air, and that Vanessa had eagerly raised her hand. So only Joan knew that Vanessa was just off in the distance, preparing to go up.

“And here is something else,” Joan said to them. “This is commemorating twenty-five years of spaceflight, too.”

“Like what you do?”

“Like what I’m trying to do. But there are a lot of us astronauts, and we all want to go. There’s only so many spots at a time.”

“You will get picked one day,” Barbara said. “I bet it’s soon.”

Joan had long known that if you’re unhappy, it’s hard to watch other people be happy. So it stood to reason that the opposite was true, too. That if you were happy, you wanted others to be happy alongside you. This was the only reason Joan could think of for why Barbara suddenly seemed so immensely proud of her.

If that was the case, then maybe Barbara had been right. She had needed to set up her future with Daniel in order to take care of the people around her. In order to be her best self for Frances.

“Thanks,” Joan said. “I hope so.”

Barbara inhaled sharply. And then she held out her hand for Joan to see. “I’m surprised you haven’t congratulated me yet,” she said.

Joan looked at the ring and pretended to see it for the first time. “Oh, my God, Barb, it’s gorgeous.”