Chapter Twenty-Five
Twenty-Five
Twenty-One Days Gone
“Are you nervous?” Graham asked her.
“Is it that obvious? I’m terrified,” Vivian replied.
“There’s no need to be nervous. You’ll be great. You worked in television enough to know the drill.”
“Yes, but that was behind the camera, not in front of it. I don’t know how you do it every single day.”
“I like the attention,” he joked.
Vivian smiled, glancing around the newsroom, the energy infectious. “I miss this. Miss working in an environment where I feel valued. Important.”
“Why did you stop?”
“When I married Joe and moved to Italy, well, I knew what I was giving up. I’ll be honest that I thought it was temporary, that when he received a stateside assignment, I’d find a television station to work at.
But when we moved to Houston, it was hard for me to find work.
I’d been out of the industry for a couple years, and it wasn’t exactly easy being a woman and a journalist before that, but when you add in the fact that I had a gap in my work experience, especially so early in my career, it became next to impossible.
“One man told me in the interview that there was no point in hiring a married woman like me when I was just going to get pregnant and quit a few months later.”
Graham frowned. “That isn’t right.”
“No, but it’s also not surprising. Those sorts of things happen all the time.”
“What are you going to do now?” Graham asked her.
“Go back to work, I hope. Joe didn’t have life insurance.
No company would insure him. Not that I blame them given the risk.
I’ll get some money from the government and there’s the money from the Life contract, but it’s not much.
Certainly not enough to support me for the rest of my life.
Besides, I can’t imagine not having something to do every day.
I think I’d be very lonely waking up each day without him and not having anything to occupy my time. ”
When Joe was in the military, he hadn’t been flying for the money.
Their finances had always been tight. Vivian was used to living on a frugal budget after her childhood, and things had definitely improved after Joe left the military and became an astronaut, but she was never more grateful than now for the fact that she hadn’t married straight out of college, that she had a career she could hopefully go back to even if she did have an embarrassingly long gap in her résumé.
“I can put out some feelers. Ask around for you to see if any stations are looking for someone,” Graham said. “You’re a terrific reporter. Are you looking for something here in Washington D.C.?”
“I think so. I thought I’d look for an apartment in Arlington, maybe.”
Now that they’d had a conversation and settled things between them, it felt good to be able to consider him a friend once more. After all, it was how they had started out, and it felt like a more natural friendship between them than anything romantic ever had.
One of the producers walked over to them. “Are you both ready?”
Graham looked to Vivian for confirmation.
She nodded.
Vivian followed him out onto the interview set. She sat still while they checked the lighting and sound, Graham making chitchat with the various crew members he normally worked with.
She glanced down at her hands, folded in her lap, at the wedding ring she wore, and hoped she was doing the right thing.
And then it was time.
Graham pivoted away from her slightly, facing the camera, that warm, reassuring smile on his face that greeted millions of Americans each night filling her with a sense of calm.
“Tonight, I’m joined by a very special guest for a very special broadcast. As many of you know, three weeks ago we lost a spacecraft on a mission to complete a lunar orbit. Three astronauts were on board, and I am joined by Vivian Mitchell, the widow of Joe Mitchell, mission commander…”
She imagined this was the point when the powers that be at the space agency started getting very upset.
Press engagements were supposed to go through the press office at NASA.
Usually, everything was coordinated for them, but Vivian was tired of being handled.
She hadn’t told anyone other than Graham that she was planning on giving this interview, hadn’t even shared it with Polly out of fear of putting her friend in an awkward position with her husband.
She felt a twinge of guilt for not giving Frank a heads-up considering he was probably getting an earful about it at work, but the last thing she wanted was to have them try to suppress or change what she needed to say.
There had been more articles published over the last week since she called Graham to set this interview up, articles suggesting that Joe and the rest of the crew were somehow at fault for what had happened, and she needed to do her part to clear the air and protect her husband’s reputation.
Graham was still researching what happened, and she hoped that doing this interview would inspire someone to come forward and share what they knew about the navigation system, that bringing things out into the open would force a broader conversation about the safety of spaceflight.
Graham opened the interview talking about how he had received a memorandum from an anonymous source who was employed by the contractor who worked on the spacecraft. He talked about how there were internal concerns that corners were being cut to advance the space program quickly.
“How does that make you feel, Mrs. Mitchell? Hearing that what happened to your husband and to the two other astronauts aboard the spacecraft with him might have been avoidable?”
“It concerns me greatly,” Vivian replied.
“Not just because of what happened to my husband and the crew, but because of future spaceflights. I don’t want to see this happen to another astronaut because in our singular focus on beating the Soviets at the Space Race we’re more concerned with winning than we are about loss of life. ”
“Is that why you’re speaking to me today?”
“Partly, yes. But also, because I feel a responsibility to speak for Joe since he’s no longer with us. I’ve seen the news reports, read what the papers are saying. ‘Operator error,’ they’re calling it, which often feels like a catchall phrase for ‘we don’t know what happened.’ ”
“Do you think the agency wants you to speak out about this?”
“I’m certain they don’t. It would surely be easier for the space program if I didn’t say anything, if I kept my head down and continued on.
But I’m not going to go away and I’m not going to be quiet.
I’m not going to let them sweep this aside.
Joe gave his life to serve his country. So did the rest of the men.
I know they would all want to see the necessary changes made so that a tragedy like this doesn’t happen again. ”
“There are some critics who would argue that this is what your husband signed up for, Mrs. Mitchell. That he knew the risk he was taking, both during his career as a fighter pilot and now as an astronaut. That he was dedicating his life to something greater than himself?”
They’d discussed some of the questions beforehand, and this was one of the ones Vivian had wanted Graham to ask her, this argument one that she heard time and time again, that made her blood boil.
“My husband agreed to take risks in his job, yes. And he understood those risks. But he also trusted that there were systems and mechanisms in place to protect him. He was not a foolish man, and he wasn’t a careless one, either.
He believed in what he was doing, but he also believed that things were being done the right way.
That’s all I’m asking—to make sure that the spacecraft is safe, that there aren’t any material defects, before you send a person up in space in one of them. ”
“Are you saying that you think we should scale back the manned space program?”
They’d agreed before the interview that it would be better if the discussion between them appeared to be more of a conversation, and given their history and friendship it had seemed like an easy enough endeavor.
They hadn’t prepared this one, and it took her a moment to think of her answer, to separate how she felt as Joe’s widow, filled with anger and regret, and how she felt as Joe’s wife, knowing how much he’d dreamed of space.
“I apologize, Mrs. Mitchell,” Graham added when she remained silent.
“I realize that is a big question, although it is at the crux of what we’re discussing here tonight.
I suppose on a more personal level I’d ask you, if your husband Joe had known he wasn’t going to come back, do you think he would have still gone into space? ”
“I’m not sure.”
Graham looked surprised by her answer, and she realized he’d intended it to be a softball question, expected the answer to be an obvious “no.”
“I just wonder—” Graham tried again. “If he’d known how things would end up, would he have made different choices? If he’d known that the cost of the Moon was so high, would he have still gone up?”
It was the question she wrestled with in the late hours of the night. It was the question she would ask herself every day for the rest of her life.
They were surrounded by loss. When Joe was a pilot, and in the space program, there was an inevitability to the fact that one day he would go to work and would come home having lost men he considered to be brothers.
It was the risk they all accepted to tackle something so audacious as flight and then the Moon.
But did it have to be? Was it worth it in the end?
Certainly not from her perspective. But would it have been from Joe’s?
And then she remembered that man she had fallen in love with.
The man she met at a bar who spoke of chasing the universe with a romanticism that had nearly taken her breath away.
And she laughed, because sometimes the universe was cosmically funny, and she knew the truth, no longer had to wonder what her husband would have done.
She knew.