Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
Ten Days Gone
In the end, ten days after the Saturn V rocket launched Joe and his crew into space, they celebrated his life, commemorated his death in Arlington in a funeral with military honors that paid homage to his career, to the impact he’d had on the world, a ceremony that was so widely attended that when Vivian glanced out at the sea of faces during her eulogy, she wondered what Joe would think of it all, if he would have been a little embarrassed by the attention.
Vivian imagined him going over and shaking hands with the distinguished guests in that very Joe way of his, when he would captivate a room with the force and charisma of his presence.
She stood in his stead, channeling that quiet dignity she had seen the First Lady adopt following the president’s assassination.
Vivian had written Joe’s eulogy before the launch, and it had been a different exercise when it was a theoretical one.
Delivering it in person in front of hundreds of people was another thing altogether.
That her husband’s body was somewhere in space and not interred in the ground made it even more difficult for Vivian to process what was happening.
And at the same time, it was a situation she’d envisioned before—albeit in the context of Joe’s career as a military pilot rather than his time as an astronaut.
They had friends, colleagues of Joe’s who had gone missing in Vietnam, who were presumed dead and whose families were faced with the horrifying prospect of never having a body to bury.
Physically, Vivian was there, present, but her mind was elsewhere—imagining Joe’s last moments, puzzling over the strange things that had happened since they lost contact with him—the note in her dress pocket, her name over the squawk box, the blank postcard, the boots between his side of the bed and the closet.
She hadn’t told anyone else about them besides what she’d mentioned to Polly, was too afraid that if she did, they would think she’d gone mad in her grief.
But they plagued her, the same way the memorandum the man handed her plagued her.
So here she was.
Vivian saw him as soon as she walked into the bar in Arlington.
For a moment, she felt like she’d gone back in time, as though someone had wound back the clock seven years, and all the intervening events that happened had simply disappeared.
Graham Carlson sat at a table in the back, hunched over his usual—a gin and tonic—his suit a little rumpled, a notebook in front of him as he jotted down notes.
Her gaze only rested on him for a beat before it darted over to the bar, to the space where she had once stood—
What’s more romantic than space, than flight?
I’ve never felt more at peace, more in awe of the world around me, of life, than when I’m in the air.
There’s a poetry about it, a simplicity and beauty to how very small you feel when confronted with the vastness of the universe and your place inside it.
It humbles you, I suppose. Or makes you feel like anything is possible.
Maybe that’s the humbling part. I can never decide.
She heard the words Joe had spoken that night so clearly that she felt like he was standing with her, and she closed her eyes, indulging in the memory, one moment in a string of them when she had fallen in love with him.
It was a cruel irony that the thing he had loved had killed him, that the vastness of the universe that he had once spoken of with such possibility had consumed him.
For an instant, she time traveled seven years into their past.
When she opened her eyes, the bar was nearly empty save for a few gentlemen who seemed like regulars propped up at the bar, not looking at or bothering anyone.
No doubt that was the reason Graham liked coming here so much.
He’d never been a man who sought the limelight, even if the limelight loved him.
In its heyday, the bar had been the sort of place young professionals had gone to let off steam after work. Clearly, things had changed since 1961.
Now that she was here, now that she felt Joe all around her, she was grateful for the choice she’d made, for the ghosts of her husband that lurked throughout the room.
Wait for me.
She swore she heard the words whispered in her ear, in Joe’s achingly familiar voice, and she’d never been one to believe in the idea of ghosts, but if she was being haunted by her husband, then she was at least grateful that she wasn’t alone.
Graham looked up from his notebook and their gazes collided.
Vivian hadn’t seen him in six years, since she’d ended things between them, and she’d been so consumed with the questions she wanted to ask him about the spacecraft that she hadn’t thought about the pang of guilt she would feel over the way she had left him.
Graham rose from his seat as she walked toward him. He hesitated for a moment, and then he wrapped her in a half hug, and everything inside her froze. Polly was the only person who had embraced her since Joe disappeared.
Everyone else had treated Vivian like there was an invisible barrier erected around her that they couldn’t breach, and she liked it that way, didn’t want anyone to touch her right now, didn’t want to be close to anyone.
She existed on an island as she’d always preferred—except for with Joe, of course.
Vivian took a step back, extricating herself from the exchange, and she slid into the seat across from the one Graham had occupied.
His notebook rested inches away from her, his familiar scrawl taking up the page. She couldn’t help but scan the words there, trying to untangle his messy penmanship.
Was that word “telemetry”? Or “transportation”?
It was hard to tell. Graham tended to write parts of letters without finishing them, so they were half-formed thoughts that only Graham could decipher.
She wasn’t sure if it was an intentional exercise or not, but she’d always thought it was a genius move to keep his thoughts to himself in an industry where everyone was often jockeying for a scoop on the next big story.
If anyone in journalism was well-connected enough to have information surrounding the spacecraft, it was Graham.
“How are you?” Graham asked once he’d taken his seat again.
He reached out between them, pulling the notebook toward him in one smooth swoop.
The expression on her face must have said it all, because he frowned.
“Right. It’s a ridiculous question to ask. I’m sorry, Vivian. So sorry. When I heard what happened to Joe’s spacecraft—I wanted to reach out to you. Wanted you to know that I was thinking of you, of him.”
“I got the flowers you sent. Thank you. That was very kind.”
“It was the least I could do.”
He might have felt that way, but the gesture had struck Vivian as incredibly generous given all they had been through together. Graham would have been forgiven if he hadn’t sent anything at all.
The door swung open, the sound of footsteps filling the bar, and Vivian turned instinctively.
A man walked over to the bar.
Not Joe.
Of course it wasn’t Joe.
It would never again be Joe.
Would she forever be looking over her shoulder, scanning rooms when she entered them, searching for him?
Wait for me.
The words were there, in her mind, in her ears, in her heart, and she wasn’t sure if it was sheer stubbornness or a testament to the connection they had that she felt like Joe was still out there waiting to be found, waiting for her, asking her to wait for him.
“He was a great man,” Graham added when Vivian pivoted to face him.
“He was.”
It felt wrong speaking of Joe in the past tense. When her father had died, Vivian had accepted that he wasn’t coming back. But now—
“I keep thinking he’s going to walk in the door,” she admitted. “Being back here, without him, feels strange. Not in a bad way, necessarily. It’s just hard to reconcile the fact that he’s gone, particularly without any evidence of the spacecraft or what happened to them.”
Graham whitened. “I’m sorry—I’ll admit when I suggested we meet here after you called, I was feeling a bit nostalgic.
After all, this is where we met. You were standing over there…
” His voice trailed off, and she saw the moment when he belatedly realized and remembered who she was standing with.
That was the thing about a man like Graham Carlson.
He was a star. His world naturally revolved around everything he did, the people in his life orienting themselves around him and his needs.
He wasn’t a bad man—in fact, she would argue that he was certainly a good man.
He wasn’t unkind, and he cared about people—he’d cared about her once upon a time—but he was so used to thinking of himself that sometimes he forgot to think of others.
“Was that—was that the night that you met him?”
Vivian nodded.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I should have realized. We never talked about it.”
No, they hadn’t. In the beginning, there hadn’t been a reason to, and then later, as she was falling in love with Joe despite being in a relationship with Graham, he had been a secret she had clutched to herself.
Vivian took a sip of her drink, struggling to keep from falling apart.
“The eulogy you gave was very moving,” Graham said.
His was one of the few faces she’d clocked in the crowd while she was speaking. He hadn’t been there in his capacity as a newsman, but he had sat in the audience honoring Joe.
“Thank you. He would have appreciated that you came. He had a great deal of respect for you.” Vivian hesitated. “He always felt bad about the way things ended between us.”
Graham chuckled. “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that for a second. Not that I blame him. I don’t think he had any regrets. The Joe Mitchell I knew wasn’t afraid to go after what he wanted and didn’t apologize to anyone for the way he lived his life.”
He wasn’t entirely wrong. Joe had felt bad, but she also knew he wouldn’t have changed a damned thing.