“Whose side are you on?” Tonight was Bertie’s final public talk at the observatory.The Tale of the Comet. I never responded to her invitation.
“Yours—but you can’t get past those facts. They discovered you. Bertie Tuttle made you who you are.”
I thought of my own mother, of how when she’d bought me thatBoys’ Lifebooklet on ventriloquism, she’d given me her old hand mirror so I could watch myself practice. She helped me repaint Sal. She oiled his jaw so it wouldn’t squeak. It never occurred to me until later that maybe I was her own life presented back to her. A second chance. With Sal, I could say anything I wanted. Things she could never dare.
“Their lawyer—what’s his name—Gene Longworth. The guy has rocks in his stomach. He swallows people whole.”
Behind him, I noticed the producer standing by the live feed. He shushed everyone and turned up the volume. On the television, we watched a live clip of young teens in an auditorium. They were somewhere in New Hampshire, from the school where the teacher on the shuttle worked. Christa McAuliffe taught social studies, and she had won a contest that would shoot her two hundred thousand miles away from her husband and two kids. The space shuttleChallengerwould carry her and the crew and the SPARTAN satellite to study the spectra of Halley’s Comet before its perihelion. Meanwhile, I had been bound by gravity, by the boundaries of my own choosing.
On the screen, the kids realized they were being filmed, and they waved to the camera, braces flashing on their teeth. The difference between ordinary people and celebrities is that celebrities never wave.
“Twenty seconds,” the personality from the national affiliate said. He began counting down. “Nineteen, eighteen…” John Dale adjusted his tie. “You’ll be okay,” he said. “What you’re doing is important. I mean it. This story… We’re talking millions of women, if not more. You’ll be on the right side of history.”
“Fourteen, thirteen, twelve…” the announcer counted.
“You’ll be famous. A household name,” he said.
“On a household product,” I said. “That’s how I’ll be remembered.” I turned again to watch the screens.
“Why not just go to the cops with this?”
“The Tuttles own this town. You know that,” I said. “You’ve said so yourself. I’m afraid that if I—”
On the screens behind John Dale, smoke was bursting from the booster nozzles of theChallenger. Once the shuttle launched, the satellite would travel for several more days to reach the comet. Space travel is slower than you think. We pinch our fingers together to measure the stars, but, up there, the distance is vast. The comet would be visible to the naked eye from Earth, and that’s what’s truly astonishing aboutcomets and eclipses and stars: We can see that light from millions of miles away while we often can’t see what’s right in front of us.
“Four, three, two…” I shifted to get a better view of the television.
One.
You already know what happened next. But at the time, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. The grip crew stopped what they were doing and turned toward the televisions. John Dale’s mouth gaped. The producer covered his eyes and peeked through his fingers. On the screen was a streaming ball of fire—not a comet, but something else. An explosion, then a cloud in the shape of a caterpillar. I watched the cloud transforming into white limbs against a blue sky, then drifting down the screen toward the earth. The makeup girl gasped. She dropped a hand mirror, and it shattered.
Then, silence. Pure silence. Most of us don’t know the sound of pure silence because we’re conditioned to the constant hum of electricity. Our brain adapts easily to background noise to shut it out. Sound is perception. Memory is perception, too.
In my memory, the televisions were muted. I remember the stiff quiet of the room, the smoke and shrapnel that streamed down from the sky. I thought of the kids on the television, the students of Christa McAuliffe, the teacher inside the shuttle. I remembered how, on the day we moved into our house, Wyatt and I placed an egg on the hardwood to test the evenness of the floors, and the egg rolled and cracked against the wall. I don’t know why that memory came to me at that moment, probably because the children on the screen had been oblivious to what was going to happen next, how something so jubilant can be ruined in an instant.
John Dale jumped up and changed the channel to a different network. Did he think the news would be different somehow? That this was a trick of the camera? There it was again, on a loop, the same footage from a different station and a different angle: The explosion and the branching cloud. Another channel. Another clip. I know seven astronauts were aboard, but I kept thinking about the teacher. Thecivilian. The footage made it seem like she’d be caught for an eternity in this moment, trapped between below and beyond, looping forever.
John Dale was the first to speak. He stood and unclipped his microphone. “I’m sorry, Nona, but…”
“I know,” I said.
“I’ve got to get on the ground,” he said. “Interviews, reactions. Call around and find local connections.” He was making a mental list.
John Dale walked me to my car. He hugged me and he smelled like Old Spice and he whispered, “Soon. I promise.” His body felt like a body. He kissed my forehead. I looked up to the sky, where the shuttle had exploded. Of course I couldn’t see it, even if it was the same sky above us. I tried to picture her, that teacher in space, how she packed her son’s stuffed animal frog among her things, how nervous she must have felt upon liftoff, how she’d never felt weightless, not even for a moment.
I DROVE AROUND FOR Awhile after that. I drove past my agent’s office, decorated in flamingos and palmettos. I drove past Wyatt’s new apartment building. I looked up to his window, and I imagined him inside, in one of those soft, gray T-shirts he loved to wear. I drove past the lunch spot where I used to meet Halley. I’d ordered inside-out egg rolls, but Halley called it what it really was: a cabbage salad. I drove past the gym where I spent so many hours on a treadmill—how odd it seems to jog in place, never getting anywhere. I drove past the hospital where I stayed those horrible nights a couple years back, and then past the house where I grew up. Someone had torn out my mother’s rose garden and replaced it with a shed.
And then, finally, I drove to my own house. It’d been vandalized again. Toilet paper swung from the trees in graceful loops. Someone had strung caution tape from one porch lantern to the other. It looked like a crime scene. Maybe it was. Domestic crimes had been committed, crimes of the heart.Oh, don’t be melodramatic, I could hear my agent say.Save it for Stella.But Stella was dead.
I turned off my car when I noticed Wyatt sitting on our front porch. As I approached him, I could tell he’d been crying. His nose was rosy. The rims of his eyes were pink. I didn’t care if tragedy had brought us together, if we’d always tell the story of how the day theChallengerexploded was the day we realized something about the impermanence of life. We’d try to fix what we’d broken.
“It’s so terrible,” I said. “Awful.” He stood, and I reached for him. My arms slid around his waist, but he pushed me away.
“John Dale?” he said.
“What?”
He handed me the paper. “Tempo of the Times,” he said flatly.
