Atmosphere(87)

There would be people who loved Joan for exactly who she was. Donna, Griff. Maybe her parents, hopefully Frances. But Barbara would never be one of them.

The world was full of Barbaras. That was the whole problem.

Joan hung up without saying goodbye. She called Frances’s hallway phone three times but kept getting a busy signal.

Later, Barbara would make a remark about how she could never forgive Joan for hanging up on her.

But Joan would never be able to forgive Barbara for not loving Joan as Joan had loved her. For not knowing how to love Frances as Joan loved her.


The next morning, Joan found it difficult to drag herself out of bed. It was so comfortable, Vanessa’s body so warm as it clung to her.

“I have to go,” Joan said.

She had to go to the airfield and get into a T-38 to Cape Canaveral. She would not—could not—see Vanessa or anyone other than her crew for over a week.

It would be her and the guys in the crew quarters until the morning of liftoff.

As Joan lay in bed, her legs sinking into the welcoming mattress, her pillow so soft, she kept trying to understand how she’d gotten here.

Hadn’t she been an associate astrophysics professor, teaching freshmen about Copernicus, just yesterday? She would go home each night and heat up her dinner. Frances was six and slept over every weekend.

But as Joan had taken each small step forward, the world had kept spinning on its axis. Days had formed into weeks and months and years, which people marked with watches and calendars, all based on the only thing they had to tell what time it was: the stars.

As the Earth orbits the sun, it shifts toward the sun’s warm embrace. Then summer turns to fall, fall to winter. Soon it loops back around, and winter thaws to spring, spring to summer. Through it all, babies are born from stardust and grow taller. They begin to walk and talk and learn the days of the week, the months, the seasons. Then they look up at the sky, to see where they came from.

And the adults spend most of their days looking down. They fall in love and make mistakes and learn new things and feel tired. They lose people they love, and fail themselves, and change or never change. They get new jobs and fall out of love and convince themselves that if they just get this one thing, they will finally be happy.

Day in and day out, the Earth keeps spinning and revolving and sailing through the Milky Way. That is why time never stands still.

And that is why, small as they were, Joan’s choices had added up to something magnificent. In the changing of seasons these past four years, Joan had found it all.

Something she loved, someone she loved, the parts of her she had hidden within herself.

“Goodbye, my love,” Joan said as she kissed Vanessa’s temple.

“Come home soon,” Vanessa said.

It felt so good to Joan, to hurt to leave her.



“T minus ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .”

Joan was in her flight suit, her helmet on. She was strapped to her seat in the mid-deck, lying on her back. The four guys on the crew, including Harrison, were sitting in the flight deck. She did not have a view out any window during ascent. All she could see were the lockers in front of her.

“Six . . . five . . . main engine start . . .”

The shuttle ignited, her bones vibrating as the ship came to life and began to quake. And it was a great relief to her—to shake like that.

She’d barely been able to sleep the night before—adrenaline running through every limb of her body. But the morning had been so slow, so methodical. She could not rush or indulge her excitement. Each item had to be checked off one by one, cross-referenced with Launch/Mission Control.

The difference between the outside of her—so controlled—and what ran inside her—such thrill—was jarring and hard to reconcile.

Until, now, finally, the outside was matching the inside. Joan felt an intense sense of equilibrium for the first time in days.

“. . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . zero . . . and liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery.”

The ignition of the rockets hit her like a bang, her body hurling into the air.

Joan tried to think of how to explain the feeling to Frances. It was like being dragged through a hurricane, all the blood in her brain rushing to the back of her skull.

Discovery dropped its solid rocket boosters. And as the ship ascended higher and higher, going over seventeen thousand miles an hour to fight against gravity, Joan felt an intense lift in her belly. Then there were two loud blows, which she knew to be the dropping of the huge external fuel tank, now emptied of its liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Then they hit main engine cutoff, and everything went quiet and still.

The cacophony, the quaking of the ship, the pressure—gone. Replaced with an eerie sense of calm.

Joan’s body started to catch the air and she felt suddenly, excruciatingly alive—somersaults overtaking her chest and lower body. She detached from her seat.

“And we are in orbit,” she heard Commander Donahue say.

Joan’s stomach was in her feet, her head in her chest. She took off one of her gloves and let it go, remembering just in time to grab the tether attached to it as it began to float away. She removed her helmet and took a deep breath.

She tried to swim to the window, to look out across the expanse of space to spot the terminator line, dividing dark from light across the Earth’s surface.