Chapter One #3
It made sense considering the spacecraft was supposed to be completing a ten-day-long mission orbiting the Moon.
“Paul’s parents live in Pennsylvania, and we’re in contact with them. They’re worried, but Paul’s father is a Navy man. He understands the drill,” Frank replied, his voice weary. “Everyone is looking for answers. Everyone wants to know where they are.”
Vivian fiddled with the piece of paper in her pocket as the moment stretched on between them, as Frank stood there looking very much like a man who had something more that he wanted to say but didn’t know just how to get the words out.
When Vivian was a young journalist, trying to make her mark in D.C.
, she’d learned the art of letting other people fill silences.
The most extraordinary things tumbled out when someone was trying to erase an awkward pause, and considering her temperament had always been drawn to the conversational breaks such beats provided, she was all too happy to let others fill the void for her.
Frank knew more than he was letting on.
Vivian twisted the paper around in her fingers, trying to remember the last time she’d worn this dress before yesterday’s launch and what she had left in the pocket. Quite frankly, she was surprised it had survived the wash.
A ghost of a smile played at her lips, a memory rising unbidden.
Joe was forever leaving items in his pockets, and early on in their marriage she’d realized that she needed to empty everything out before she did a load of laundry.
It had been a running joke between them—the fact that he was so fixated on his job, able to solve complicated problems and focus under intense pressure, and yet, he never could remember things like emptying his pockets or putting the cap on the toothpaste.
Vivian pulled the paper from her pocket and glanced down at it; when Joe returned from space, she’d share this little story with him, and they’d laugh about it in that way that only the two of them could.
At first she thought perhaps it was some household accounting, judging by the math on the paper.
On closer inspection, the math didn’t look anything like the addition and subtraction Vivian did when balancing their funds.
It was filled with what appeared to be numerical calculations—and complicated ones at that—but the sliver was too narrow, cutting off any decipherable pattern or equation.
She unfurled it more and flipped it over.
Here, she recognized the handwriting instantly, had seen it penned across countless birthday cards and love letters.
It was Joe’s hurried scrawl, the letters spiky and exuberant.
Wait for me.
Her heart pounded.
When had Joe written this? How long had it been in the pocket of her dress, waiting for her to read it? Did Joe leave it there as an inside joke between them given their playful fights over the laundry?
Joe often left love notes for her around their house, folded airplanes on the pillow for her to discover when she awoke, a message waiting for her on the inside.
He always signed his notes with his name, though this time he hadn’t, his messages usually longer and more romantic than this one. And yet—
Wait for me.
Those three words felt a lot like hope she could cling to.
It was just like Joe to somehow leave her the message she needed most at the exact moment she needed it.
Vivian rubbed her fingers over the wadded-up paper again.
“Vivian—”
She glanced up.
Frank stared back at her, shifting from side to side on the balls of his feet. “I need to go—I need to get back to work. If we have any hope of reconnecting with the crew, then it’s going to be all hands on deck.”
“Thank you. I really appreciate all that you’re doing to get them back. Don’t give up hope, Frank. Please. I know they’re out there. I know they’re waiting to be found. They just need us to find them.”
Vivian held the note out to Frank so that he could read the words Joe had written before he left, so he could understand what this meant to her, how badly she needed to see this through to the end, how desperately she needed to know that there were people out there searching for her husband and the other astronauts, that they would bring them home.
Frank took the paper from her gingerly, as though he was afraid of the emotion contained there, of the grief that shrouded her.
They all were treating her that way—save for Polly—as though her misfortune were something catching, no one in this community eager to confront the realities of space travel and the danger it brought to their lives.
Easier to chase invincibility instead, to believe that they could do the impossible and reach the ultimate limits of humanity’s reach than to acknowledge that something as mundane as death could wreak havoc on their best-laid plans.
Frank glanced down at the words Joe had written for her, passing over them so quickly she wondered if he’d even read them at all. He flipped over the page—
He froze. “Where’d you get this?”
“It was in the pocket of my dress. Why?”
“This is my handwriting. They were some calculations I did for the space flight yesterday. I gave it to Joe right before the launch, minutes before he boarded the spacecraft.”