“Mae. Should I go? I don’t want to intrude. Whatever you need—”
I slide my arms around Ben’s waist and rest my cheek against his chest. His arms immediately come around me. Oxytocin and vasopressin.
“Don’t go,” I whisper.
“I think those might be my favorite words now,” he says.
Mom would have liked him. So much. She would have figured out what his favorite soup was and then would have devised an elaborate explanation about what this said about him.
“What’s your favorite soup, Ben?”
“I’ve always been partial to Italian wedding.”
I go still. Dad’s favorite. I look up toward the ceiling, even though that is not at all where my mother is because she is nowhere, not even in a body bag in Malaysia.
Did you hear that? I want to say.
When the space shuttle Columbia exploded in 2003, I was only three years old. Just out of foster care, a brand-new member of the Winters family. I don’t remember Columbia, though I’m sure Dad, in a rare moment for him, had the TV on nonstop, watching the coverage. Seven astronauts died when the shuttle exploded on reentry into the atmosphere. The whole apparatus disintegrated, the pieces scattered over two states. The remains of the crew were found in the nose of the shuttle.
It’s good to find them. Even if they are gone. I’m beginning to realize this now.
When an astronaut signs up for a mission, she knows she can die. It’s a dangerous job, to say the least, and any number of things can go wrong. The Columbia wasn’t the first disaster in the field of space exploration, and it won’t be the last. This is the price we pay to know where we came from, how the universe works, and where we’re going.
When you’re up there and it’s no longer a sim, but a real-life bad news disaster, you do everything you can to science the shit out of your situation. To stay alive. You don’t give up.
But if you’re an astronaut on the ground, supporting the crew, there’s only so much you can do. You work with the data you’ve got. You do everything you can to stay in touch with the crew, to give them whatever support you can. But in the end, they’re the ones up there dealing with that rocket, that atmosphere, that universe that is hostile to life. They’re in the suit.
They say that mission control messed up with Columbia. That the Atlantis shuttle was ready to launch, and could have potentially saved the Columbia crew. Maybe. In the end, the astronauts lost consciousness. The restraints didn’t work on reentry, so their little bodies were being thrown around, bludgeoned by the capsule. The shuttle went into a flat spin and some of them died of asphyxiation before they could get their helmets on. A terrible way to go.
Like drowning.
You’d think mission control would be in complete chaos, right? Phones ringing, data shooting out of computers like lasers, people running around and barking commands. But it’s really quiet. I’ve seen the footage online. Columbia’s reentry and landing CAPCOM, Charlie Hobaugh—their point person on the ground, like Ed Harris in Apollo 13—he’s so calm. As an astronaut himself, he knew that panic is the last thing the crew needed. You can hear him trying to talk to the pilot, Rick D. Husband—“Columbia, Houston, comm check”—even though the radio transmission had long since burned up. He kept trying. And on the video, you see the moment, the moment when he knows. He covers his eyes with a hand. Takes a breath.
And then issues the next command.
Send out the ground crew. The rescue crew. But everyone knows it’s not to save the astronauts. It’s to take care of what’s left of them.
One detail that has always stayed with me about the Columbia tragedy, beyond the horror of that moment when those astronauts knew something was wrong and that they were never going to stand on Earth again, is this: In the shuttle, there was a copy of a drawing that had been done by a boy, Petr Ginz, while he was in the Terezín concentration camp—an image of what Earth would look like while standing on the surface of the moon. It’s a charcoal sketch, or maybe pencil, with lots of spiky rock in the foreground and Earth floating beyond. The boy who drew that knew death was close. Maybe just around the corner. But he kept looking up. To that light.
Petr Ginz was murdered in Auschwitz when he was sixteen.
Ilan Ramon, one of Columbia’s crew, had brought Petr’s drawing with him. He was the first Israeli in space.
Today, I picture Petr, looking past the barbed wire, gazing up at the moon. And that man, decades later, flying away from it. With that dead boy’s drawing in his pocket.
What we need, I think, is a grief sim. But I’ve never heard of one of those.
24
Mae
ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit
Earth Date: 31 October
Earth Time (EST): 19:45
The Celestron CPC 1100 telescope cost my dad over three thousand dollars. We named her Lucy, for Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
She’s one of the best telescopes money can buy: an eleven-inch diffraction limited Schmidt–Cassegrain telescope with an aperture of 280 millimeters, which means I can see craters on the moon. And the rings of Saturn. The bands on Jupiter, and its great red spot. The Orion Nebula.
Since we’re in an urban landscape, my images will never be as clear as they would be if I were in true darkness, somewhere like the Cape at night. Still, Venus is gorgeous tonight—bright and huge (with a surface temperature of 750 DEGREES!). The Big Dipper traces the sky with its ladle line of stars. Somewhere out there, past our atmosphere, stars are colliding and exploding and black holes are swirling all while Earth spins at 1,040 miles per hour. (This speed is at the equator. Here in Boston, at forty-two degrees north, it’s roughly 770 miles per hour, which seems fast—except Earth’s orbital velocity around the sun is 67,000 miles per hour. Which ALSO seems fast until you realize that the whole solar system—of which we are, of course, a part—is orbiting around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy at over 500,000 miles per hour. Which means all the humans on Earth are ACTUALLY moving through space at 140 miles per second. WE ARE SPEED DEMONS.) We spin and we spin, like whirling dervishes, swirling in our little pocket of the universe.
But no matter how hard I look, I’m not going to find my parents up there.
I wish I could believe in heaven, in a kingdom in the sky where Mom and Dad are staying at a resort, waiting for us to join them someday. I wish I could see them from my telescope. But I can’t. Actually, I don’t wish I believed in that. Because then that would mean that some god had allowed my parents and all those other people to die a horrible death. And, somehow, that seems worse than total annihilation.
My mother’s body is in a mass grave.
We don’t know where my father’s body is.
They were hurt. And scared. And alone.
These are the facts. I can’t change them, no matter how much I want to.
I close my eyes.
Sky mind. Sky mind. Breathe. Thoughts are weather. Sky mind. Breathe.
I wait until my mind is not swirling, and then I open my eyes, adjust the telescope, zoom in on the moon. Its incandescent light reaches us from 1.3 light-seconds away. It’s by far the largest satellite body in the solar system and the only one astronauts have set foot on. But I bet we’ll be on Mars soon. Dad said if his next book hit the New York Times bestseller list, he’d buy tickets for us to orbit the moon. Mom had said she could think of better things to do with half a million dollars, but when pressed, she couldn’t come up with anything cooler than the moon, so she gave us her permission to go.