14. Maxine
CHAPTER 14
Maxine
She’s two months in. Two months into widowhood, and just weeks away from giving birth to her third child. Maxine Trager is a shell of the woman she’d been before December thirteenth, and she has no idea how to pull herself together. How to be a mother again, and how to put one foot in front of the other after losing Derek.
Actually, that’s not true: she knows that finding a purpose will help her to get out of bed in the morning. Wendy and this new baby should be enough—not to mention Ryan, though he’s plenty old enough now to take care of his own daily needs and to process the loss of his father without constant explanations about where Daddy is and why he’s not coming home—but Maxine has quickly discovered that the notion of endless days and nights of diapers, bottles, laundry, and cooking aren’t enough to help her see the light at the end of this long, dark tunnel.
What actually pulls her out of her own head surprises even her: it’s the protestors that have taken up residence on the outskirts of Cape Kennedy. They’re just enough off the property that no one can take away their right to peacefully protest, but they show up every day, without fail. They’re a motley crew of young men and women, of college age students and retirees, of people holding homemade signs, and of others just pacing and chanting things that can’t be heard when car windows are rolled up.
Maxine passes this gathering each day as she makes her way around town, forcing herself to walk into the grocery story, the pharmacy, or the bakery. She takes Wendy to the Little Spinners dance classes that Frankie Maxwell runs each Monday and Wednesday morning for girls ages two through four, and she stops at the service station for gasoline, staring through the windshield as the young men in their starched shirts and pants rush around, filling her tank, washing her windows, and checking the air in her tires.
It’s on one such morning—Valentine’s Day, in fact—that Maxine sees this group of protestors, and her first response is indignation: how can these people be opposed to NASA when they aren’t even sure what goes on there? How can they be angry at the way this country has prioritized space exploration when it’s clearly the way forward—the way of the future?
She’d been called into the office shortly after Derek’s death, and it had taken Jude Majors and Jo Booker nearly two hours to coax her out of her robe and slippers and into a dress, and then Jude had driven Maxine to the meeting with Arvin North, holding onto Maxine’s arm the entire time to offer her support.
Arvin North, along with a small faction of men in suits and ties, had greeted Maxine with gravity, leading her into a conference room where a table was laden with coffee, cream, sugar, pitchers of water, and a small tray of breakfast pastries. All of it remained untouched.
“Thank you for joining us, Mrs. Trager,” Arvin North had said. He sat at the end of the table, looking at Maxine as she perched, shrunken, in the chair at the opposite end of the room. Next to her, Jude had sat with her purse looped over one arm, chair pulled close to Maxine’s in solidarity. Jude had not been invited directly, but Maxine had refused to attend without her.
“Your husband is a hero both in this program, and to our entire country,” Arvin North said. An ashtray rested near his elbow, though he made no move to light a cigarette. “He and Bob Young will go down in history as men who gave their lives so that America could make progress towards the moon.”
This had rung hollow for Maxine then, and it still does now.
“Derek leaves behind a wife and three children,” Maxine said in response, rubbing her ever-expanding belly as she eyed the men in suits. “He lost his life before he ever got to meet his newest baby. That is a tragedy, Mr. North. There is no way for me to reconcile me losing my husband—my children losing their father—with this country making great strides towards outer space. The two things do not compare, in my book.”
“Yes, I understand, Mrs. Trager.” Arvin North bowed his head slightly, pausing before he said more. “But when a man signs on to become an astronaut, he understands that there are certain dangers involved. He knows that he must accept that death is a possibility, and that in the event of a tragic, unforeseen accident, his family might be forced to go on without him. That does not make it any easier, but Derek Trager was a man of great practicality, and he knew both the risks and the rewards.”
“I’m sure he did,” Maxine said, pulling her spine straight and sitting up as much as she possibly could, given the incredible weight she carried around in her chest every minute of every day. “But I’m also sure that he did not believe for one second that a test mission would have ended this way. He would have never chosen to leave us behind, Mr. North. He would not.”
The men looked at one another uncomfortably, and finally, one of them stood. He slid a manila folder down the length of the table, passing it from one set of hands to the next, until it stopped in front of Maxine.
“We have prepared an offer of settlement that we’d like for you to read over, Maxine,” the man who was still standing said. He averted his gaze as she stared at the file with wide, unseeing eyes. “This is a standard provision for an astronaut in the event of catastrophic loss of life, and it accounts for the fact that your husband had a family that he leaves behind.”
The room was so quiet that Maxine could hear the stomach of the man closest to her grumble. She touched the front of the file, and then opened it slowly, seeing a page with black typewritten words all over it. None of it registered.
“You can take this home with you, Max,” Jude whispered, leaning in closer to her. “You don’t need to sign anything now.”
The men shifted around in their chairs, and the one still standing tapped the table with the tips of his fingers. “Actually, we’d really like to get this signed off on today.”
Maxine looked right at him. “Today?” she said, shell-shocked. “You want me to sign off on the value of my husband’s life today ?”
The discomfort in the room ratcheted up several notches as everyone realized that this was exactly what they were asking of her.
“How about if we step out and let you read it over?” Arvin North offered, standing up slowly so that the other men would follow suit. “Perhaps we could leave you and Mrs. Majors here, and you could talk it through with her. You know, bounce some thoughts and questions around with another girl.” His smile was lopsided, and Maxine wanted to stand up and slap him. Hard.
“Yes,” she said frostily. “Why don’t you leave us girls to talk about how much money will make it okay if our husbands go to work one day and then never come home?”
The room cleared out quickly, and she and Jude were left alone.
“Oh, Max,” Jude said, keeping her eyes off the file. “This is more intense than I ever could have dreamed. Are you okay?”
She was speaking so quietly that it made Maxine think of being in a classroom where the teacher had left and you knew you weren’t supposed to be talking to your neighbors.
“I am most definitely not okay,” Maxine said out loud. She stood up and winced visibly at the cramp that shot through her stomach. She put both hands on the sides of her belly and rubbed the baby, trying to soothe its kicking as she paced the room. “I feel like someone is trying to get me to say it’s fine that my husband died, and that a few thousand bucks is enough for me to walk out of here today and get on with my life.”
Jude stood near the wall with her arms folded. “I don’t think it’s that simple,” she said gently. “This is a formal way of NASA apologizing to you and showing you that they’re sorry for your loss, Maxine. And of course they care about you and the children, and about doing right by Derek.”
Maxine let out a huff. “Doing right by Derek,” she repeated, almost under her breath. “Hardly.”
Jude walked across the room and put her hands on the back of a chair so that she was standing next to Maxine. “Look,” she said. “I cannot fathom what you’re going through right now, and I sincerely hope I never have to. That’s me being honest—selfish, but honest—however, I want you to know that we’re all on your side. We’re here to help you get your bearings.”
Maxine’s eyes flashed and tears clung to her bottom lashes. She pressed her lips together tightly and gave Jude a nod. “Of course,” she said. “I know you’re all here. I just can’t pull myself upright, Jude. Every single minute of every single day is a challenge to hold my own head up on my neck.” She motioned at her head as if it might fall off her shoulders and roll away at any moment. “I have no idea how I’m going to take care of myself as well as a baby and a toddler.”
“We’ll help,” Jude offered. “And Ryan is with you. He’s a big boy—he can help. We’ll do this as a team, okay?”
Maxine looked right at her. She knew that Jude wasn’t just being kind, and that this is what the wives of astronauts needed to be prepared for, even if only in the darkest recesses of their mind. The fear of losing their husbands needed to be always present so that they weren’t caught unawares. And in that morbid preparedness was always the knowledge that they might need to step up and help a fellow wife in need.
Maxine shook her head. “But the other wives are your friends, not mine. They barely know me.”
“Not important,” Jude said. “Sometimes I feel like I barely know them myself—or maybe that they barely know me—but I know without a doubt that any one of them would step up and help if it was needed. Trust me on that.”
Maxine heaved an exhale that released a knot of tension in her chest. She nodded again. “I’m just going to step into the hall for a moment and look for a restroom. If anyone comes back, will you tell them where I’ve gone?”
Jude nodded and stayed standing, hands on the chair. “I’m right here,” she promised.
Maxine let herself out into the hallway and as she closed the door behind her, she took another deep breath. She smoothed the front of her dress over her baby bump and leaned her back against the door as she got her bearings.
“And you’re sure that Booker understands?” A man’s voice drifted through the cracked door of an office across the hallway. He was speaking quietly, but the hall was silent, so Maxine heard every word. “He knows that no matter how strong his misgivings were prior to the launch, he needs to keep his mouth shut at this point while we do the investigation, right?”
“I’ve spoken to him on a number of occasions,” Arvin North said. Even without seeing his face, Maxine knew it was him talking. “He put up a stink that day about the bolt and his feelings that we should hold off on launch, but frankly, I think he was a day late and a dollar short.”
The men were silent for a long minute.
“You don’t think that listening to him would have been the way to go?” the other man asked.
“Obviously it would have,” North said, his words thick with sarcasm. “But hindsight is always twenty-twenty, isn’t it?” They fall silent again. “We need the wife to sign off. Bob Young was single and had no children, so that’s a bit more open-and-shut. His parents came, signed papers, and left with a check. Case closed. But Trager’s wife seems a bit more undecided.”
“Pregnant women are loose cannons,” the other man said with warning in his voice. “We need to watch her.”
“We need to be kind to her,” North said firmly. “She’s not just an obstacle or something to be dealt with. She’s a pregnant widow who has done nothing wrong.”
For as much anger as Maxine had felt towards NASA and at the whole situation, respect welled up in her then for Arvin North and she looked up and down the hallway for the women’s restroom sign. Her bladder was actually screaming at her, and before she thought any further about signing paperwork, she needed to relieve herself.
“Well,” the other man said. “Let’s just hope she takes the money and signs the papers. It’s not that I have no feelings, Arvin, and it’s certainly not like I have no sympathy for a woman and her young children, but I have a job to do here, and that job is to protect the program. At all costs.”
The door, which had been opened just a crack at that point, started to inch open further. Maxine decided to go to the right, and she rushed down the hallway and ducked into the ladies’ room before anyone stepped out into the hallway.
She flipped on the light and locked the door, looking at herself in the mirror over the sink. They wanted her to sign off on Derek’s death, and apparently Bill Booker had put up some sort of a fit about the shuttle on launch day. She wasn’t sure what he’d been worried about, but it was clear to Maxine that there was more to this tragedy than a simple accident that couldn’t have been avoided.
There was more to the way the men in charge were handling the disaster, and more to the way they were handling her.
And she didn’t like any of it.
Thinking of it now, on Valentine’s Day morning, Maxine feels a rush of discomfort. She’s been putting off signing the papers—in fact, she’d taken them home the day of the meeting, telling Arvin North and his cronies that she wanted to have a lawyer look everything over—and now she’s feeling more sure than ever that the right thing to do is not to sign the paper, but to dig deeper.
“Check your air, ma’am?” a young man in coveralls asks, leaning into Maxine’s window at the service station. “You’re looking a bit low on the front right side.”
Maxine’s mind is somewhere else entirely, but she drags her eyes over to the boy, who is all of about nineteen, and gives a distracted smile. “That would be great,” she says. “Yes, please.”
As soon as she’s paid up, Maxine rolls out of the lot and onto the main street that passes in front of Cape Kennedy. There, as they are every day, are the protestors. A woman in an orange shirt lifts her sign by its stick, bouncing it in the air as she shouts something at Maxine, who is staring as she waits at a red light.
Maxine rolls down her window.
“NASA doesn’t care about how much money it takes from this country!” the woman in orange shouts, cupping her mouth with one hand. She stares at Maxine intently after the words are out. “They’re taking from education, and from social services. They’re taking money from your pocketbook!”
The light turns green and Maxine rolls forward, but slowly. Almost on a whim, she pulls into the next parking lot, turns off her car, and gets out. Before she knows what she’s doing, she’s wandered down the sidewalk towards the knot of protestors, and she stops in front of the lady in orange.
The woman looks back at her as she lowers her sign, her eyes going from Maxine’s face, down to her overly large belly, and back up to her face. It takes a moment before recognition dawns. “You’re the lady from the car,” the woman motions at the street. “You just passed by.”
“I did,” Maxine says, putting her hand to her stomach. She rubs it and looks at the other protestors, who are still chanting and waving signs. Most are ignoring Maxine altogether. “You looked right at me.”
The woman lifts her chin defiantly. “I look at everyone. I want the word to get out: NASA is taking money from other deserving programs and using it for disastrous missions that are getting us nowhere closer to being on the moon. And why the hell do we want to be on the moon anyway?”
Maxine bites her bottom lip; Derek had a million reasons why he thought man should walk on the moon, and his love of space has infused most of her adult life. Keeping her mouth shut is hard, but Maxine does it. She nods to let the woman know she’s listening.
“The Gemini orbital mission that caught fire in December was a travesty,” the woman goes on. “And can you imagine how many millions of dollars it’s going to cost taxpayers? Not just the loss of equipment and the payouts to the astronauts’ families, but in the investigation that’s sure to follow?”
One car passes by beeping its horn cheerfully in agreement with the signs, and right after, another passes by blaring the horn with a middle finger thrown out the window. Stardust Beach is mostly made up of astronauts and astronauts’ families, so Maxine feels fairly certain that this group of sign holders sees more birds flying through the air than it sees friendly waves. The cars drive on.
“Of course. Space travel is expensive,”
“But are you prepared, as a taxpayer, to eat the cost of that mission?” the woman asks, her eyes burning as she searches Maxine’s gaze. “Do you think that’s the right way for the government to be spending its money?”
As cars whiz by and people shout their sayings and objections to NASA into the wind, Maxine stands there, thinking about this question. For as many years as she’d supported Derek’s desire to go to the moon and the fact that space travel is, in fact, inevitable and exciting, she is suddenly left to wonder whether these people might be right: maybe sinking all this effort into missions that leave women without their husbands and children without their fathers is a travesty. Maybe it all is a waste of time, money, and energy.
And, in her heart, she knows what she heard that day in the hallway when Arvin North had mentioned Bill Booker needing to keep quiet. She knows that something went catastrophically wrong and resulted in the death of her husband, and she knows that whatever that was, Bill Booker has something to do with it.
“You should come to our next meeting,” the woman says, walking towards a chair that has a pile of mimeographed papers on it. There is a big rock resting on top of the papers to keep the wind and the breeze from the passing cars from picking up the pages and sending them flying. She takes a paper and thrusts it at Maxine, glancing at Maxine’s stomach again as she does. “We meet on Thursday evenings, and we’d love to have your participation.” Again, her eyes fall on Maxine’s huge belly. “As long as you’re able to, anyway.”
Maxine takes the paper and skims it quickly. All the details are there. She folds the paper and tucks it into her purse, nodding her thanks before she turns to walk away.
“Hey,” the woman in orange calls after her. Maxine pauses. “Why did you pull off the road and walk all the way over here? What sparked your interest? I’m just curious. Is your husband opposed to the space program?”
It’s a fair question, given that most women she knows do vote and choose their stances based on their husbands’ feelings on the issues at hand, but Maxine lets the question sit for a minute before answering. “My husband,” she says. “My husband was definitely not opposed to the space program.” She feels the tears coming on and wants to get away from the protestors before they start. “He believed in it wholeheartedly. In fact, he died for it.”
Maxine doesn’t wait for realization to register on the woman’s face before she turns to go, walking back to her car hurriedly with one hand cradling the squirming baby inside of her.