Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
Vivian stabbed the seal on the box, slicing through the packing tape the moving company had placed there.
What would greet her when she opened it up?
The contents of half the boxes had been filled with broken items, mementos from the early days of their marriage in Italy, heirlooms that had been passed on to Joe after his aunt and uncle died.
She should have done a better job of overseeing the move from Houston to Cocoa Beach, but even as she was annoyed with herself for not managing things better, for not making sure everything was carefully wrapped, she had to acknowledge that she had been in no state to do so.
They’d had to leave Togethersville. The house that they’d gotten for a song from a builder who offered deals to the astronaut families no longer felt like the dream they’d been promised.
The room at the end of the hall, the one Vivian had lovingly painted every square inch of while Joe was away at the Cape, the walls stenciled with airplanes and rockets despite her reservations about encouraging such pursuits, was a constant reminder of all that they’d lost.
The doctors told her that she was young, and healthy, and there was absolutely no reason why they couldn’t try for another child, that what happened was so rare, they were just unlucky, and Vivian wanted to scream.
Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore and asked Joe to please put the house on the market so they could move on with their lives. He’d balked at first before they’d finally come to the compromise of renting it out for a year to one of Joe’s NASA colleagues and his family.
At least in Cocoa Beach there were fewer memories to haunt her.
The boxes that contained all the items from the baby’s room had been carefully packed away by Joe and immediately taken to a storage unit after they arrived here.
She’d wanted to go after him and ask him to bring them all back, and at the same time she needed them to disappear, needed to forget everything that had happened, needed to disappear herself.
Vivian pulled items out of the box, setting them on the Formica countertop with a thud.
How many more times would she do this? The other spouses talked about careers that had them moving every two or three years.
One of the perks of being an astronaut was that it kept the families in Houston, at least, but Vivian couldn’t forget her earlier conversation with Joe and the mention he’d made of going back to flying, the guilt she knew he felt that so many of his friends were being sent to Vietnam while he stayed in the space program, treading water.
Selfishly, she didn’t want her husband going to space, but she didn’t want her husband going to war, either, and she didn’t think she could face one more loss, not on the heels of the staggering one she’d just suffered.
“Viv!”
Joe called to her from the bedroom.
She hadn’t even realized that he was home; he’d taken a day off to help her with the movers and to assist with the unpacking, but something urgent had come up at the space agency, leaving her to tackle it on her own.
When had he come back from work?
He must have come in through the garage.
Vivian headed through the little house they’d rented, walking toward the back room they’d chosen as their bedroom.
Vivian stopped in her tracks, her gaze drifting from the open suitcase sitting on the bed next to Joe, a shirt in hand.
At first, she thought he’d come home and decided to unpack after all, but then she realized that Joe was neatly folding the shirt and putting it in the suitcase, not taking it out.
“What are you doing?” she asked him.
Joe looked up from the suitcase. “I’m sorry. I got a call from Frank. I need to go to Houston.”
Houston.
Vivian glanced around the room at all the boxes surrounding them, the lack of furniture, the mattress still on the floor.
After her C-section, her body still pained her, and she was beyond ready for the rest of their furniture to be delivered, sleeping on the mattress on the floor more uncomfortable than she’d imagined when she first agreed to it.
“We just moved into the house,” she protested.
As soon as the words left her mouth, she regretted them, hated the way in which they snipped at each other now.
She felt like she was holding herself together with tattered threads, and even though Joe said he understood, even though Joe promised he was there for her for whatever she needed, she didn’t know how to convey to him what she needed, how she felt like she had fundamentally changed and she wasn’t sure she would ever go back to the version of herself she’d been.
Joe frowned. “I know. And I’m sorry. I promise I’ll help you get set up when I get back from Houston.”
She knew him well enough to tell that he was distracted, his mind not on her but looking firmly ahead to whatever reason Frank wanted to see him.
Vivian didn’t say the rest of it, couldn’t voice the words that were stuck in her throat, the pain that ate away at her until she couldn’t look at him the same way that she once had.
You went to work when I needed you most.
“I’m sorry, Viv. I’ll make it up to you. I promise.”
She doubted that. He would try, yes. And she really did believe he was sorry. But there were some moments you couldn’t get back, some memories you couldn’t replace, and she wasn’t sure she would ever forget that she’d been forced to grieve their son while he had gone back to work.
“Why does he want you to go to Houston?”
Joe glanced away, his gaze focused on some spot she couldn’t see. “I don’t know.”
He was lying. He’d never been any good at it, and he certainly wasn’t now.
“Why does he want you to go to Houston?” Vivian repeated, dread filling her because she knew the answer even before he gave it, could see it in his eyes.
They were filled with zeal.
There were two reasons why Frank would ask Joe to drop everything and come to Houston. One—that Joe had finally told him about his intent to retire and Frank was determined to talk him out of it. The other—the other terrified her.
“I don’t know. Honestly. He didn’t tell me.”
“But you have your suspicions.”
“Viv.”
She used to love the way he would say her name and inject so many different emotions in it. How he could convey so much with the tone of his voice. Now she heard apology and resignation, and she hated the way the sound of it filled her with dread.
“You’re getting the next mission.”
She said it flatly, as though they were talking about him working late rather than going to the Moon, but this lifestyle had leeched the romanticism of space—if she’d ever believed in it at all—right out of her.
Joe didn’t confirm it, but then again, he didn’t have to. That gleam said it all.
It was surprising that they would give it to him considering the loss they’d just experienced, but Joe must have impressed the doctors with how well he was handling everything.
They never would have sent an astronaut up on a mission if he was too filled with grief to do the job at hand.
The fact that he was doing so well felt like another betrayal.
“He couldn’t tell me the reason he wanted to see me over the phone.”
Because it was a sensitive topic. Like the next mission.
“What happened to you walking away?” Vivian asked. “To looking for a job in the private sector? To going back to flying?”
Not that flying was necessarily a better alternative.
What happened to the future he’d sold her, that day he’d told her he was thinking of giving it all up? What happened to the healing she desperately needed? She needed time, needed some peace and quiet. Without it, she felt like she would break, already felt as though she was breaking.
“I want you to stop.”
Five words had never sounded louder. They filled the bedroom, bouncing off the walls, too much to be ignored.
Joe stilled; his head bowed.
He didn’t speak, gave no indication that he had heard her, save for the fact that he looked like a man who had just been dealt a felling blow.
She said it again, louder now, the confidence that those five words gave her filling her with purpose. In their years together, she’d shouted it in her mind time and time again, but she’d never voiced it aloud to him. Not once.
All this time, she’d told herself it was because she was a good wife, a loving wife, a supportive wife.
It was a lie.
Now that the words hovered in the air between them, now that she couldn’t take them back, she couldn’t deny that she’d never said them because she’d been afraid of what would happen once she did, that she would be carrying them both to the point of no return, that when faced with a choice between her and flying, between her and space, she would lose every single time.
“Viv.”
“What happens when the luck runs out?” she asked him.
He looked at her, instinctively widening his stance in a move she had seen him adopt countless times when facing off with an adversary, but never with her.
Joe had given an interview once, not long after he’d been accepted into the space program, and they’d asked him what made him such a good pilot, what would make him a good astronaut.
Without hesitation, he’d replied in that charming, smooth way of his—“I suppose I’m too stubborn to accept otherwise. I don’t know how to quit. And I refuse to give up.”
The interviewer had laughed right alongside Joe as he ended the quote with a good-natured chuckle and a self-deprecating shrug, but if he had known Joe like Vivian did, if he’d watched him choose a career that would knock him down time and time again, only for him to claw and fight his way to the top, then he would have known that if there was anything Joe was deadly serious about it was his job.
He hadn’t been joking at all. It was simultaneously the thing she loved most about him and her greatest fear.
Because that was what had drawn her to him in the first place—his drive.
“It won’t run out,” he vowed.
“You can’t promise me that. You can’t say that to me.” Her voice shook. “Not after everything.”
“I loved him, too.”
He said it so quietly that it sounded like he shouted it at her.
“And I’m grieving, too,” he added.
“I wouldn’t know. You won’t talk about it with me. All you do is work.”
“Because when I’m at work it distracts me.
” This time he did shout. “Because when I’m at work, I don’t feel helpless all the time.
I can’t save you and I couldn’t save him.
And I don’t know what to do anymore, Viv.
I don’t know how to fix this. I can’t fix it.
At least at work I feel like I’m doing something, like I’m not letting you down. ”
She wanted to tell him that she understood. She wanted to tell him that she loved him, that she forgave him. She wanted to tell him that she was sorry.
“When will you go to the Moon?” she asked instead, her voice stiff, her anger and hurt too far of a chasm to cross.
“In a few months, I’d imagine. You can’t tell anyone, though.
What we’re trying to do—orbiting the Moon—it’s audacious.
They’ll want to keep it under wraps as long as possible in case something goes wrong and they have to call off the mission, to keep the Soviets from finding out.
NASA can’t afford any public failures right now.
” He hesitated. “Will you be there when I come back? Will you wait for me?”
This time she didn’t answer him.