Chapter Twenty-Four
Twenty-Four
Joe was gone most of the day training for the mission alongside the two other astronauts who would be joining him.
Vivian occupied her time by setting up their new home and volunteering with some of the local organizations in town.
It wasn’t nearly enough to keep her busy, and she’d begun thinking about going back to school or applying for jobs in some of the larger cities farther away.
It already felt like she and Joe were living separate lives; maybe it would be easier if they had a commuting marriage—they certainly wouldn’t be the first or only couple in their circle to do so.
Eleven days before the launch, the astronauts were sequestered into the flight crew apartment at the Cape.
Access was limited to contain any possibility of them becoming ill.
They tried to sneak away when they could to spend a few minutes with their families, but considering where they were going and the possibility that they weren’t going to come back, it hardly seemed like enough time.
Vivian felt especially bad for Michael’s children, who at one, three, and five years old were clearly too young to understand the implications of what was happening, to comprehend much beyond the fact that their daddy wouldn’t be around for ten days, that he was going to space.
Considering what an amorphous concept it seemed to her, the challenges Vivian faced conceptualizing the mission, she couldn’t imagine what it was like for them at such a young age.
How their mother, Bridget, managed to keep it all together with a constant smile on her face, Vivian would never know.
The press ate them up, and Vivian was grateful for the way Bridget gravitated toward the limelight, leaving her mostly to her own devices, which she vastly preferred.
Polly and her daughters arrived at the Cape before the launch, and Vivian spent her free time visiting with them, she and Polly sitting beside each other on the beach while the girls played in the sand.
“How are you doing?” Polly asked Vivian.
“Honestly? Barely holding it together.”
Polly reached out and patted her hand. “Can’t say that I blame you. From where I’m sitting, you’re doing great. You have a very stoic look about you.”
Vivian snorted because she was pretty sure Polly was full of it. Yesterday she’d hidden in the back seat of her car for an hour to avoid a group of reporters who had somehow followed her to the grocery store.
“Are you going to sit in the VIP section tomorrow?” Polly asked, referring to the sectioned-off seats where the family of the crew usually sat, although lately the crowd had been growing larger and larger until you were packed in like sardines and the view wasn’t all that great anyway.
Vivian shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m not sure I’m in the right headspace to have all that attention on me. I asked Rick to find me a good spot to watch it somewhere a little more private, away from the crowds.”
She wanted to be somewhere where she could be invisible, where she could process her worry in private rather than feeling as though all eyes were on her.
It was strange to reconcile the fact that every single television network would be covering her husband’s ascent to space, that this was the broadcast the world would be watching while she was going through her own personal hell.
She remembered that day years ago when they’d viewed Alan Shepard’s launch and Vivian had thought about what it must have been like for his wife, Louise, to watch that Redstone rocket carry her husband to space.
Now Vivian was joining the small club of women who had been in a similar position.
“Do you want some company?” Polly asked her.
“I’ll be fine on my own, but thank you. You should sit in VIP with the girls. It’s as much Frank’s launch as it is anybody else’s, since he’s the mission commander on the ground.”
Suddenly, Polly glanced over Vivian’s shoulder. A smile spread across her lips. “Look who it is.”
Vivian whirled around.
Joe strode toward them, dressed casually in a pair of jeans he’d rolled at the ankles and a faded blue T-shirt he’d had as long as she’d known him.
Vivian rose on unsteady legs as he walked toward her on the sand, his shoes in hand.
Joe stopped a few feet away from them and offered a quick hello to Polly before drawing Vivian to the side.
“How did you sneak away?” she asked, drinking in the sight of him, the surprise of seeing him when she’d mentally prepared for the fact that they wouldn’t have a moment together until after the launch.
Joe shrugged, spreading the sand around with his feet, looking down at the ground, anywhere but at her.
“Told them I needed some fresh air. Michael did the same earlier and said bye to the kids and Bridget. Paul called his parents. I tried calling you, but the phone at the house just rang and the operator said no one was answering. Frank mentioned Polly was taking the girls to the beach, and I had a feeling you would be with them.”
“Sorry—if I’d known you were going to call, I would have been there.”
“I understand. I didn’t tell you ahead of time. Besides, I wanted to see you. Didn’t want to say goodbye to you over the phone.” His voice lowered. “Especially after the last few months.”
Vivian glanced over her shoulder, wondering how much Polly could hear of their conversation, her gaze drifting to the other beachgoers.
She wished they were doing this in private, wished she’d had a chance to say goodbye to her husband without an audience around them, wished for the space to say all the things that she wanted to say, to apologize for their last fight, to assure him that she loved him, to somehow make this right.
She shouldn’t have waited so long to have this conversation with him, should have tried to repair things earlier, but the timing had never felt right with Joe so focused on the Moon, and even as she balked at it, even as she knew how hard it was to bottle her feelings up, she’d lived with the refrain for long enough that she was loath to do anything that might jeopardize his safety while he was undergoing a dangerous mission like the one before him.
“We’ll talk about it when you get back,” Vivian whispered, and something that looked a lot like hope flared in his eyes.
“Will you wait for me?” Joe asked, moving closer to her, matching her tone with his.
She nodded, because what other answer could she give? Of course she would. She loved him.
“I’m sorry, Viv. For everything.”
“I know. I’m sorry, too.”
Neither one of them moved, neither one of them seeming to know how to navigate this situation they’d found themselves in.
“I love you,” Joe vowed.
She felt like crying. “I love you, too.”
And she did love him. That was the part that made this so hard.
She loved him even as she wondered how she could possibly continue in this lifestyle, loved him despite all the sacrifices she’d been forced to make, loved him in spite of the hurt that lingered.
Maybe she loved him so much because it was hard.
Because it was a choice she consciously had to make day after day, because she saw the weight and measure of that love, the sacrifice of it.
It had value because she paid it time and time again.
Joe walked away from her—
“Wait—I—” Vivian called after him.
Joe stopped in his tracks, his back to her, and for a moment, he seemed very much unlike a man who was going off into space, who was joining the great unknown where anything was possible.
Instead, he looked like a man who was carrying far too much on his shoulders, who had been broken down by the weight of life just as she had been, a man buckling under the responsibilities of it all.
He turned—
She saw the doubt, the nerves, the worry.
The parts of him that he never shared with anyone but her.
And in that moment her fears, and her anger, and her pain disappeared, and Vivian went to him like she always did, because despite a million little slights, despite the frustrations and seeming impossibilities of it all, he was her husband and she could see that he needed her, needed something to ground him.
Vivian wrapped her arms around his waist, laying her cheek against his chest, and she felt the tension leave his body as he embraced her, as he held on to her.
“You’re going to be great tomorrow,” she whispered. “I love you.”
They stayed like that on the beach until Joe had to go back to the astronaut quarters to get the required crew rest before they woke up in the middle of the night to prepare for the launch, until the sun began to set in the sky.
He kissed her once for goodbye, the kind of kiss that still dazzled her years later, and then he was gone.
—
The night before the launch, Vivian barely slept more than an hour or two at a time. Each time she woke with a jolt, convinced it was morning, that the event she had been waiting for—and dreading—was finally here, only to realize it was one a.m., or two a.m., or four a.m.
Finally, when it was six in the morning, Vivian rose from the bed and began getting ready, the dress she and Polly had picked out on a shopping trip earlier in the week hanging at the front of her closet.
The other dress they’d picked—the somber color in case something went wrong and she had to appear before the press—had been shoved in the back of her closet in the hopes that she would never actually have to wear it.
Vivian glanced at herself in the mirror, not quite recognizing her reflection.
It was her—yes—the same face she had stared at for nearly thirty years, time having changed it a bit, but she couldn’t help but think—you’re married to a man who is going to the Moon today—and shake her head in disbelief that her life had come to such a moment, that such things were even possible.
Once she was dressed, Vivian grabbed a scarf and a pair of sunglasses Jackie Kennedy would have approved of and headed out the door.