Chapter Twelve
Twelve
Four Days Gone
“What are they telling you?” Vivian asked Bridget Drayer, the phone receiver cradled between her neck and shoulder as she glanced out the kitchen window to the backyard, where Polly’s daughters ran through the sprinkler in their bathing suits, whooping and cheering, their energetic play a stark contrast to the nagging worry in Vivian’s stomach.
There were no updates.
Nothing.
After her meeting yesterday with Frank in his office, she’d come to Polly and Frank’s rental near the beach this afternoon, needing a reprieve from the people crowding into her little house, needing a sanctuary where she could call Michael’s wife in privacy.
She’d thought about reaching out to Paul’s parents as well, but in the end had decided against it. There was a difference in living this experience as a spouse, having a front-row seat to the space program and all its dangers, and she didn’t want to worry his parents any more than they likely were.
Despite their differences and the fact that they had never quite gelled, Bridget more than anyone would understand what Vivian was going through.
And she was desperate to know if Bridget had the same feeling she did, the same intuition that perhaps NASA was wrong and the three of them were out there trying to get home, waiting to be rescued.
“They’re not telling me much,” Bridget replied. “You?”
Vivian sighed. “Just that they don’t know anything.”
“That’s what they’re saying to me as well,” Bridget confirmed. “Seems hard to believe, doesn’t it? That they could just lose a spacecraft out there like that?”
“It does.”
“I suppose they don’t have anything to gain by keeping it a secret, though. And secrets always come out sometime.”
It was the way she said “secrets” that broke Vivian’s heart, the way Bridget slurred the letters together.
In all the years they’d known each other, Vivian had never seen Bridget have more than a few sips of wine at dinner, and while Vivian was the furthest thing from a teetotaler—and if any situation called for coping however you were able to, it was this one—the fact that Bridget was acting so out of character, the way a thin thread of criticism toward the space program and the agency filtered through Bridget’s words, emphasized the precariousness in the situation.
Bridget, like Frank, sounded like someone who had given up hope.
And suddenly, Vivian felt very, very alone.
“He cheated on me.”
Surprise filled Vivian, not just at the non sequitur, but at the vulnerability contained in that admission.
It wasn’t the cheating part—Michael hadn’t exactly done a good job of hiding it—but more the fact that Bridget was admitting it to her.
Of all the wives, they were about as opposite as you could be, and neither one had ever warmed to or confided in the other.
“Did you think I didn’t know?” Bridget asked, correctly interpreting Vivian’s silence for discomfort.
“I—I wasn’t sure.”
“I knew. Always. In the beginning, he was better at hiding it, but eventually—he couldn’t even be bothered to try.
The more attention they all got, the more it seemed like he thought it was part of the life—like the women came with the press conferences and magazine articles, as though they just went together.
After all, what’s the point of being a celebrity if you can’t enjoy the perks? ”
Vivian had never liked Michael. All the guys were arrogant in their own way, but a lot of them were ultimately good guys.
She hadn’t known him well, but based on the impression she had, Vivian wouldn’t have put Michael in that category.
“I’m sorry,” Vivian replied. “You don’t deserve that. No one deserves that.”
“What would you know about it? Everyone knows Perfect Joe didn’t so much as look at another woman.”
“We have our problems,” Vivian replied quietly.
Bridget laughed sharply, the sound sending a sinking feeling to Vivian’s stomach.
She’d never realized it before, but there had always been something about Bridget that made her uncomfortable.
While everyone else praised Bridget’s three well-behaved children, and her elegant home, which she’d decorated on a military wife’s shoestring budget, and her gourmet casseroles, and the aplomb with which she handled whatever the space program threw their way, Vivian hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that whenever she spoke to Bridget, she wasn’t really speaking to Bridget.
There had been something false behind her smiles, an insincerity that had reminded Vivian of when she was a little girl trying to read her mother’s moods, utterly confused by the fact that what her mother said never quite matched up with what she did, leaving Vivian in a constant state of alert to make sure she’d chosen the appropriate response.
“Why didn’t you live in Togethersville?” Bridget asked. “You never went to A.W.C. meetings, either,” she added, referring to the “Astronauts Wives Club.”
Of all the questions she expected Bridget to ask her, she hadn’t seen that one coming.
“I—I don’t know. I suppose I’ve always been more comfortable on my own.
And Togethersville—it didn’t feel like the right fit.
It didn’t make sense to me to be away from Joe during the week while he was at the Cape, to only see him on weekends.
I vastly preferred having that time together.
And I—I couldn’t be in Houston anymore. I couldn’t take it… Not after…”
Silence greeted her on the other end of the line, Bridget likely remembering who she was talking to, remembering that while she’d envied Joe’s fidelity, there were other parts of Vivian’s life that no woman wanted to bear.
Vivian knew how it sounded, how it likely made her appear to the other wives.
Polly had shielded her from much of it, Polly’s loyalty impregnable and daunting to anyone who dared utter a negative word about her best friend, but she could only imagine what they had said about her behind her back when Polly wasn’t there to silence them with a look and the full weight of Frank’s prestigious job at NASA.
The other wives took the approach that if you needed them, they were there, but Vivian often worried that the message she sent by not joining in on their monthly gatherings was that she didn’t need them, that she’d rather be alone than part of their group, when the truth was more complicated.
But more than anything, Vivian didn’t want to discuss the real reason she couldn’t stay in Togethersville anymore, didn’t want to offer up the most vulnerable part of herself.
“Consider yourself lucky, then,” Bridget replied. “That was probably what kept him from having a Cape Cookie on the side.”
Maybe. Who knew? Early on, Vivian had spent a sleepless night or two wondering if like so many of his fellow astronauts, Joe was off drinking and carousing with other women.
He’d never given her any reason to doubt him—to the contrary, there was a part of her that believed in his fidelity with a certainty that resided deep in her bones—but it was impossible to ignore that so many of his coworkers seemed to view their marital vows as something to be ignored.
She’d tried to maintain a healthy balance between having faith in her marriage and not overly relying on a sense of exceptionalism, as though they’d somehow managed to escape the curse of infidelity and strain that plagued so many astro marriages.
And still, she looked to the couples who had been happily married for decades, the ones where the wives and husbands operated as though they were one unit, navigating the challenges the space program threw their way with a commitment to each other that Vivian envied.
“Do you think they’re doing enough to get them home?” Vivian asked, steering the conversation back to her original reason for the call.
“ ‘Get them home’?”
“Of course. That should be the priority, shouldn’t it? We don’t know what happened to them, don’t know if they’re out there, needing our help,” Vivian argued.
If Bridget and Paul’s family gave up and accepted that the astronauts weren’t coming home, how long would it be before NASA gave up as well?
“Vivian.”
She turned at the sound of her name, the phone’s cord wrapping around her waist with the motion.
Polly and Frank stood in the kitchen of their rental house, side by side, their hands linked.
It was strange that they were holding hands considering they’d just told her that they were going to get a divorce, and then she looked up from their linked hands to their faces—
“Bridget—I have to go.”
Vivian struggled to set the phone receiver back on the cradle, her hands trembling.
She didn’t look away from Frank’s face.
Somewhere in the periphery of her vision, she sensed Polly walking away from Frank, toward her, felt Polly’s arms wrap around her.
Frank’s expression said it all, his eyes misty with unshed tears.
She’d stood up beside Polly at her wedding, and while Frank had beamed at his bride like he was the luckiest man in the world, he hadn’t shed a tear.
One slid down his cheek now.
“No. Please no.”
“Vivian,” his voice cracked over her name.
She shook her head, panic filling her. “No. You’re not going to tell me what you want to tell me. You’re not going to deliver news to me in that tone, not with that look in your eyes. Do you think I don’t know what’s coming next? I know what you’re going to tell me. No. No.”
The last word came out with a shout, and she felt Polly’s arms wrapping around her, holding her up.
“Why aren’t you out looking for him? Why aren’t you doing something to bring him back?” she shouted.
The sound of wailing filled her ears, and then she realized the sound was coming from her, and Polly held on to her tightly, whispering words in her ear that Vivian couldn’t begin to decipher through the grief that threatened to destroy her.
“He’s gone, Vivian.” Regret threaded through Frank’s voice. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing we can do. We’ve lost the spacecraft. We’ve lost all of them. It’s over.”
—
Polly walked her to the bedroom door, and for a moment, Vivian stood in front of it, unable to recall how she’d gotten from Polly’s house to hers, pockets of time that had slipped through her fingers.
“Do you want to be alone?” Polly whispered.
Alone.
She was going to be alone. For the rest of her life.
It was the thing she’d feared most after she met and fell in love with Joe—the understanding that she’d found the person she was meant to spend her life with, the person who fit her like the missing piece of a puzzle, and the inescapable fear that one day his job would take him away and she would be left alone.
Once—before Joe, at the beginning when they were just getting to know each other, when he wasn’t a part of her—she’d been comfortable, content on her own. But now she knew the loss of what it felt like to be seen by another person, and that was another beast indeed.
Vivian nodded.
Polly gave Vivian a hug that barely registered, and then she closed the door, leaving Vivian by herself in the bedroom she and Joe had shared.
Vivian walked over to the dresser, the squawk box gone completely silent, and even though she knew what Frank had told her, knew that the scientists had decided that something unknown but catastrophic had happened to the spacecraft, that there was no hope of recovery, desperation filled her as she stared at the radio speaker, willing her husband’s voice to come out of it, begging Joe to give her some sign that he was still out there, that he wasn’t dead.
Silence greeted her instead.
Vivian opened the top drawer, pulling out the sheet of paper resting on top of her nightgowns.
She stared at the words she’d written there, the eulogy she’d composed the night before Joe’s launch.
She would deliver the words at his funeral at Arlington.
In the city where they’d met and fallen in love.
In the city where he’d be laid to rest among the men and women who had served the country. Where he would be honored as an American hero.
Vivian glanced to the closet, belatedly realizing that she had no black dress to wear to her husband’s funeral.
She’d gone to plenty with Joe, but each time she’d gotten rid of the outfit afterward.
Even though dresses were dear, the sight of that black dress hanging in her closet had always felt like a talisman, a harbinger of things to come, as though death stalked them.
The eulogy fell from her hands.
From her vantage point near the dresser, she could just make out the corner between the side of the bed that had been Joe’s and their closet.
She’d bought him a chair from a good secondhand store after she moved to Cocoa Beach, and each morning before work he’d sat in it wearing his uniform as he put his boots on.
He’d had a terrible habit of leaving the boots there even when he wasn’t working, and Vivian had tripped over them a time or two or twenty considering the spot was right in front of the closet door.
Joe’s boots were in the middle of the walkway near the closet.
They hadn’t been there when she’d gotten dressed to go see Frank.
In fact, they hadn’t been there since the day Joe had left to go stay in his astronaut quarters to prepare for the launch.
She knew because she’d organized that very closet in a fit of pique three days before launch when she hadn’t been able to take all the nervous energy coursing through her body.
She’d placed those very boots—his spare pair—in the back of the closet.
What were they doing here now?
For a moment, Vivian considered the possibility that she’d gone mad in her grief, that she was hallucinating the boots in her desperation to feel a tangible connection to Joe.
She walked over to the closet on shaky legs, and sank down to the ground, her fingers brushing against the leather, the boots unmistakably real in her hands.
Was her husband haunting her now?
How had his boots gotten there?
It made no sense for someone to have come in and put them in front of the closet, and much like Joe hadn’t shared their marital woes with Frank, she hadn’t shared hers with Polly, didn’t think she’d mentioned their playful arguments about the boots to anyone.
“Joe,” she whispered, feeling a little bit silly for even entertaining the possibility that her husband was a ghost. “If you’re here, please let me know.”
Vivian waited for a sign, something to let her know that he was here, that he hadn’t left her—a book knocked off his bookshelf, perhaps, or a chill in the air, or some kind of indicator that there was another presence in the room with her.
But she didn’t feel like there was someone else with her, didn’t feel Joe at all.
Tears spilled down Vivian’s cheeks as she gathered the boots up in her arms, clutching them close to her as sobs racked her body.