“That’s not what Christa says,” Ursula told her. “Christa says if you just try hard enough and believe you can do it, anything’s possible. Christa says, reach for the stars.”
Al rolled her eyes and took a piece of chicken. Her hand extended across Toby’s plate, as if no one was sitting there. Toby, observing the chicken passing by, studied his fork.
“Anyways, I got a B plus in arithmetic this report card,” Ursula said. Also, she was doing sit-ups every night.
“You know how many people there are that try out for NASA? Like, a million.”
“I think it’s great that Ursula wants to be an astronaut,” Eleanor offered. She still said the kinds of things normal mothers said to their kids, even though Ursula could tell it was mostly an act.
“I might just sign up to be an astronaut, too,” Cam told them. “What do you think, El?” He held out a biscuit as if it were a spaceship and landed it on her plate.
She just looked at him. Her behavior had started to resemble Toby’s. Whatever faraway place he occupied now, she seemed to have gone there, too. Or maybe a different one.
“You’d be a great astronaut, Dad,” Ursula said. “You’re great at everything.”
“They have an age limit on astronauts,” Al told her.
“Oh, well,” Cam said. Come to think of it, if he went up in space he’d miss his family too much.
There was another reason why Ursula brought up theChallengerso much. It gave them something to talk about. She never remembered them having this problem before, but in the six months since the accident, they had less and less to say to each other. Maybe because so often it had been Toby who got the ball rolling, his silence now left them all at a loss for words.
A loss for words. Ursula couldn’t remember where she’d heard that expression, but she understood what it meant now. You could lose your money, or your appetite, and one time she heard a woman at the post office talking about a man she knew who lost his marbles. But a loss for words seemed to her now the saddest of all.
There was this giant space in their family that Toby used to occupy,and even though he was right there in the room with them—more so than ever before, actually, now that he never ran off on his own the way he used to, climbing up on things and disappearing at museums and shopping malls—Ursula did everything she could to fill it. Not that her efforts worked very well.
It was as if their whole house was a zero-gravity chamber, Ursula thought. They were all floating around like astronauts, waving their arms, turning upside down or sideways, doing these normal kinds of things like eating Jell-O or getting toothpaste out of the tube, except the Jell-O just hung there in the air waiting for one of them to get a hold of it.
Nobody bumped into anybody. They spread out their arms, but nobody touched each other. The only difference was, when they showed zero gravity on TV, the astronauts all looked like they were having fun.
50.
A Million Pieces
All month, Ursula had been counting down the days to theChallengerlaunch. They’d canceled it twice on account of unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral. Then came the news: the shuttle was launching. That morning, the astronauts were going into space.
Students at the girls’ school were going to watch the launch in the cafeteria. They had all signed a card that they mailed off to Concord, where Christa McAuliffe lived, letting her know they’d be cheering for her as she blasted off the launchpad. Nobody would be cheering louder than Ursula.
Eleanor was packing the school lunches when Ursula came down for breakfast. She had on a light blue jumpsuit to match the jumpsuits of the shuttle crew. She told her mother she was too excited to eat. She’d eat after at the party they were planning at school for after the liftoff. Cam was heading out that day for an all-day physical therapy workshop. Watching him as he headed out the door, Eleanor was struck by what a beautiful man he was, and how long it had been since they’d touched each other. When he bent low to kiss Ursula and touch her cheek, Eleanor felt a strange little stab, remembering how that felt. She had been so angry for so long now, she had almost forgotten.
Eleanor wasn’t done being angry at Cam. But she admired what he was trying to do with Toby. More than any of the other things they’d tried, it was the yoga that seemed to get through to him.
“Don’t you want to see theChallengergo up, Dad?” Ursula asked Cam as he headed out.
“You can tell me all about it tonight,” he said.
“This is the best day of my life,” Ursula said as she headed out to the school bus. “I’m going to remember this forever.”
Eleanor thought about the moon walk then. Neil Armstrong planting the flag. Matt Hallinan on top of her in the front seat of his car, after, whispering in her ear as he thrust his body into hers.One small step for man.
She stood in the doorway, watching her husband head to his truck. She wished she could make her heart open up.
“Cam!” she called out to him. She was thinking how good it would feel to put her arms around him, the way she’d done with Timmy Pouliot when she rode on the back of his motorcycle. She had almost forgotten what it felt like to have her husband put his arms around her. She wanted to say something—something loving, even; it had been so long—but she couldn’t think what. They had drifted so far apart from each other. She didn’t know how to get back.
Cam didn’t turn around. Maybe he didn’t hear Eleanor calling out to him. He drove away.
After the kids were gone—the girls to their regular school, Toby to his special one, Ursula hugging to her chest that morning’s newspaper clipping with a giant picture of theChallengerand the words “Up, Up and Away!”—Eleanor took her coffee and bagel and headed to her office.
She put on a Joni Mitchell CD she loved,Hejira. It was her habit, when at her desk, to keep a single song on repeat so it became a kind of mantra for her. That morning, no doubt in recognition of the space launch, and the women taking flight from Florida, the song she kept playing was “Amelia.”
