Atmosphere(79)

“It was so good!” Frances said.

Joan laughed.

Barbara and Daniel danced all night. Soon Barb’s high heels were off, and her makeup started to smear, and Daniel drunkenly, joyously, put Barb’s garter in his mouth. Which was when Joan and Vanessa volunteered to take Frances to her room at the hotel.

Frances walked on her own across the hotel lobby, and into the elevator. But once they were on the right floor, Vanessa picked Frances up and carried her. Frances was too big for Joan to carry. But she smiled to herself as she watched Frances close her eyes and let Vanessa take her the rest of the way.

Vanessa put Frances down on one of the beds. Joan took Frances’s shoes off and they both put the blankets on top of her.

“I’ll stay with her,” Joan said to Vanessa in a low whisper. Eventually, Joan’s parents were going to sleep in the room with Frances. But Joan didn’t mind waiting for them. “You can head home.”

“No way,” Vanessa said. “I want to stay, too.”

There was a balcony with two chairs and a mottled-glass coffee table. Joan grabbed two beers from the minibar and the two of them went out there. There was no bottle opener.

“I got it,” Vanessa said. She lined the first beer up along the railing of the balcony at an angle and then swiftly, confidently, slammed her hand down and popped the top off, handing Joan the bottle.

“Wow,” Joan said, standing next to her, leaning against the railing. “I feel like I know everything about you, but I didn’t know you could do that.”

Vanessa did it again for hers. “I try to remain a woman of mystery.”

“I don’t need any mystery,” Joan said.

They were quiet for a moment until Vanessa cleared her throat and said, her voice cracking halfway through, “I’m sorry that I can’t give you all this. What they have.”

Joan looked at her.

Vanessa closed her eyes. “I feel like I . . .” She shook her head. “That maybe you could have had more—had an easier life—if I hadn’t convinced you to love me.”

Joan took Vanessa’s hand. “I don’t think you had any say over whether or not I loved you,” Joan said. “I don’t even think I had any say in it. It happened without me even giving myself permission.”

Vanessa looked at her and smiled, but Joan could tell she was serious.

“I would give you anything I could,” Vanessa said. “But I will never be able to give you what your sister has, or what Donna and Hank have.”

“I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” Joan said.

“I can’t hold your hand as we cross the street,” Vanessa said. “I can’t pull you into the crook of my shoulder when we go to the movies. I can’t ask you if you want to dance.”

Joan nodded.

“I can’t stand up in front of everyone we know and announce how good it feels to love you,” Vanessa said.

When Joan was a kid, she learned that her father’s father had left him when he was a baby. She could not imagine this, being raised without a father. She had asked her father if he had missed him. And her father had said, “You can’t miss something you never had.” It had sounded good at the time. It had a finality to it that she had liked.

But it wasn’t true, was it?

Joan missed what she’d never had every time Donna and Hank arrived for the all-astronauts meeting in the same car on Monday mornings.

“I’ve always known I could never have that,” Vanessa said. “But . . . I hate to think I took that opportunity from you.”

For a moment, Joan couldn’t look at her. But that’s what was so nice about talking about big, deep things outside at night. You just looked up at the stars.

“Why are you saying all of this now?” Joan said.

“Because today, at the wedding, I realized I would marry you,” Vanessa said.

Joan turned to her. My God, who could care about the stars when there was her to look at?

“I would marry you in a second,” Vanessa went on. “I’ve never felt that way about anyone. In my entire life. What am I even doing here? At your sister’s wedding? Meeting your parents? This was a stupid thing to do. To come here. But I . . . want to be a part of your life in every way I can.”

Joan nodded. She opened her mouth to say something and then, at the last moment, thought better of it and, instead, looked around at the trees and the other balconies. And she saw, far to the left, outside a corner room, a man and a woman standing on their balcony. The man was resting his hands on the railing, and the woman was behind him, resting on him. As he’d felt her come up, he’d taken his arm and put it around her and pulled her toward him. Joan wondered if that man felt for that woman half of what she felt for Vanessa.

It cost him nothing. Nothing! It cost him nothing to hold her like that where everyone could see. The man kissed the woman on the top of her head. Had they been together for over two years? Or did they meet last week at a bar?

“I know our life will look different, does look different, than other couples’. But there are plenty of women who make this work.”

Vanessa nodded. “Yeah, but most of them aren’t employed by a government agency in careers that put them in the public eye.”

“No, I know,” Joan said. “I know.”