1986 #2
Behind him, I noticed the producer standing by the live feed.
He shushed everyone and turned up the volume.
On the television, we watched a live clip of young teens in an auditorium.
They were somewhere in New Hampshire, from the school where the teacher on the shuttle worked.
Christa McAuliffe taught social studies, and she had won a contest that would shoot her two hundred thousand miles away from her husband and two kids.
The space shuttle Challenger would carry her and the crew and the SPARTAN satellite to study the spectra of Halley’s Comet before its perihelion.
Meanwhile, I had been bound by gravity, by the boundaries of my own choosing.
On the screen, the kids realized they were being filmed, and they waved to the camera, braces flashing on their teeth. The difference between ordinary people and celebrities is that celebrities never wave.
“Twenty seconds,” the personality from the national affiliate said.
He began counting down. “Nineteen, eighteen…” John Dale adjusted his tie.
“You’ll be okay,” he said. “What you’re doing is important.
I mean it. This story … We’re talking millions of women, if not more.
You’ll be on the right side of history.”
“Fourteen, thirteen, twelve…” the announcer counted.
“You’ll be famous. A household name,” he said.
“On a household product,” I said. “That’s how I’ll be remembered.” I turned again to watch the screens.
“Why not just go to the cops with this?”
“The Tuttles own this town. You know that,” I said. “You’ve said so yourself. I’m afraid that if I—”
On the screens behind John Dale, smoke was bursting from the booster nozzles of the Challenger.
Once the shuttle launched, the satellite would travel for several more days to reach the comet.
Space travel is slower than you think. We pinch our fingers together to measure the stars, but, up there, the distance is vast. The comet would be visible to the naked eye from Earth, and that’s what’s truly astonishing about comets and eclipses and stars: We can see that light from millions of miles away while we often can’t see what’s right in front of us.
“Four, three, two…” I shifted to get a better view of the television.
One.
You already know what happened next. But at the time, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.
The grip crew stopped what they were doing and turned toward the televisions.
John Dale’s mouth gaped. The producer covered his eyes and peeked through his fingers.
On the screen was a streaming ball of fire—not a comet, but something else.
An explosion, then a cloud in the shape of a caterpillar.
I watched the cloud transforming into white limbs against a blue sky, then drifting down the screen toward the earth.
The makeup girl gasped. She dropped a hand mirror, and it shattered.
Then, silence. Pure silence. Most of us don’t know the sound of pure silence because we’re conditioned to the constant hum of electricity. Our brain adapts easily to background noise to shut it out. Sound is perception. Memory is perception, too.
In my memory, the televisions were muted.
I remember the stiff quiet of the room, the smoke and shrapnel that streamed down from the sky.
I thought of the kids on the television, the students of Christa McAuliffe, the teacher inside the shuttle.
I remembered how, on the day we moved into our house, Wyatt and I placed an egg on the hardwood to test the evenness of the floors, and the egg rolled and cracked against the wall.
I don’t know why that memory came to me at that moment, probably because the children on the screen had been oblivious to what was going to happen next, how something so jubilant can be ruined in an instant.
John Dale jumped up and changed the channel to a different network.
Did he think the news would be different somehow?
That this was a trick of the camera? There it was again, on a loop, the same footage from a different station and a different angle: The explosion and the branching cloud.
Another channel. Another clip. I know seven astronauts were aboard, but I kept thinking about the teacher.
The civilian. The footage made it seem like she’d be caught for an eternity in this moment, trapped between below and beyond, looping forever.
John Dale was the first to speak. He stood and unclipped his microphone. “I’m sorry, Nona, but…”
“I know,” I said.
“I’ve got to get on the ground,” he said. “Interviews, reactions. Call around and find local connections.” He was making a mental list.
John Dale walked me to my car. He hugged me and he smelled like Old Spice and he whispered, “Soon. I promise.” His body felt like a body.
He kissed my forehead. I looked up to the sky, where the shuttle had exploded.
Of course I couldn’t see it, even if it was the same sky above us.
I tried to picture her, that teacher in space, how she packed her son’s stuffed animal frog among her things, how nervous she must have felt upon liftoff, how she’d never felt weightless, not even for a moment.
I DROVE AROUND FOR A while after that. I drove past my agent’s office, decorated in flamingos and palmettos.
I drove past Wyatt’s new apartment building.
I looked up to his window, and I imagined him inside, in one of those soft, gray T-shirts he loved to wear.
I drove past the lunch spot where I used to meet Halley.
I’d ordered inside-out egg rolls, but Halley called it what it really was: a cabbage salad.
I drove past the gym where I spent so many hours on a treadmill—how odd it seems to jog in place, never getting anywhere.
I drove past the hospital where I stayed those horrible nights a couple years back, and then past the house where I grew up.
Someone had torn out my mother’s rose garden and replaced it with a shed.
And then, finally, I drove to my own house.
It’d been vandalized again. Toilet paper swung from the trees in graceful loops.
Someone had strung caution tape from one porch lantern to the other.
It looked like a crime scene. Maybe it was.
Domestic crimes had been committed, crimes of the heart.
Oh, don’t be melodramatic, I could hear my agent say.
Save it for Stella. But Stella was dead.
I turned off my car when I noticed Wyatt sitting on our front porch.
As I approached him, I could tell he’d been crying.
His nose was rosy. The rims of his eyes were pink.
I didn’t care if tragedy had brought us together, if we’d always tell the story of how the day the Challenger exploded was the day we realized something about the impermanence of life. We’d try to fix what we’d broken.
“It’s so terrible,” I said. “Awful.” He stood, and I reached for him. My arms slid around his waist, but he pushed me away.
“John Dale?” he said.
“What?”
He handed me the paper. “Tempo of the Times,” he said flatly.
I shuffled the pages until I found what Wyatt wanted me to see.
A full-page spread. A series of photos. An accompanying article.
John Dale and I were caught mid-embrace.
You can see my open car door in the background, the fuzz of my steering wheel cover, a curved blur of white.
In the photo, John Dale’s mouth is to my ear, and my eyes are looking up, not at John Dale but toward the sky.
It looks like I’m laughing, but I’m not. I wasn’t.
Beneath that photo were others, the quick shutter clicking of the photographer: me, walking into his house last night.
John Dale, carrying my bag. Me, looking back over my shoulder before I step inside.
The article called it an affair. Not a tryst or a one-night stand or a movement of bodies in space and time, or a kind of revenge against my own life, the anguish of it, which is exactly what it was.
I’m not excusing it. Beneath the article was a still from the set of the Christmas in July Fund Drive.
There I was as that elf, holding the screaming baby.
How unnaturally I was holding that child.
Her neck bent back, unsupported. No wonder she was crying.
“Wyatt—”
“Stop.”
“It’s not what you think,” I said.
Wyatt turned to go inside the house, and I followed him.
“You didn’t sleep with him?”
A pause.
“You don’t understand.” I covered my face. I tried to think of what to say. I closed my eyes and opened them again. “I tried to call you. You didn’t answer. You never answer. You never talk to me. I went there to—”
“Oh, I know why you went there.”
“Halley left me something. It’s about Earthshine. It’s connected to the Jane Does, to the lawsuit. This is bigger than us.” I used John Dale’s words.
Wyatt walked to the refrigerator and looked inside, then slammed it closed.
“There was a woman named Opal Doucet. She was medicating these women with Comet Pills, but they had these terrible effects, and she was pregnant, and she was trying to get to France. I read all these letters from her friend or—or I don’t know what they were to each other.
But Opal didn’t die in the Earthshine fire—it’s not at all like Bertie said. ”
“John Dale Fox.” He was still on that. He still felt rage, which, looking back, was a good sign. Rage contains love, I think, the pain of something you want being taken from you. I felt rage, too. “I mean, look at him. He looks like Wham! in a suit. And you look…”
“Like what?” I said.
Let me dispense this advice: Never ask a question you do not want the answer to.
“Desperate. Really fucking desperate. Clinging to your last shred of fame. Riding the wave of a third-rate soap character. Pretending like those stupid commercials were the best thing that ever happened to you, like you’re something to the Tuttles other than marketing material.
They have to be nice to you, Nona. Your face is on the fucking package.
Stella is dead, and now you’re nothing. You’ve aged out. Middle-aged. You’re done. Next.”
In fifteen seconds, all my fears articulated.
Maybe that’s the difficulty with marriage in the first place.
You must hand yourself over, armorless, knowing your vulnerabilities might be weaponized against you at any point.
It’s a long-term struggle not to say the meanest things we could possibly say in order to protect ourselves and our pain.
I could have said plenty to Wyatt in this moment.
About him. About how this wasn’t the life I wanted, about how I was desperate, but not in the ways he imagined.
I dug into my handbag for that gray notebook Halley had left me. It was a formulary—a list of drugs and their ingredients—I know that now.
“They call them ‘showmances,’ right? So you don’t come out looking slutty?” He opened and closed the cabinets, looking for something, though I didn’t know what.
Wyatt’s neck beat with his pulse. His nostrils flared, and it occurred to me how rarely I’d ever seen him angry, how rarely I’d ever seen him yell or cry or react with anything other than perfectly measured breathing.
I tried to imagine how I looked to him, standing there with that old formulary, holding it out like it was the answer to all our problems.
“Get out,” he said. “I pay the mortgage. This is my house.” He was pointing toward the door as if I didn’t know where it was. “I don’t even know you anymore. Look at you. That hair. A walking midlife crisis. You look ridiculous.”
“Maybe you just don’t like me.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
We locked eyes and stood there in the living room until Wyatt kicked the coffee table and it landed on its side. I could see the ring mark from where he’d once set a glass down without a coaster. Who cares? he’d said at the time. I did, that’s who. I cared, and didn’t it matter what I cared about?
“I want a divorce,” he said.
The word divorce comes from a Latin root that means “to divert, to change direction.” But I had already changed direction. I was moving toward the door.