The drone of flying engines, is a song so wild and blue.Alone in her studio, Eleanor sang along with Joni. For some reason she felt restless.
Eleanor turned on the new computer. She had finally gotten around to taking it out of the box—as gingerly, that first time, as if she were handling a grenade. Now she started every day at her desk by turning it on, slipping the disk in the slot, listening for the pinging sound that meant she could get to work (designing a company logo probably, or some letterhead). The smiling face appeared on the screen.
She stared at her glowing computer screen. For no apparent reason,except that this was the time of year her parents had been killed in the crash, she thought about her mother.
There was so much about Eleanor’s life now that her mother wouldn’t even recognize. Starting with this house and the three children she’d given birth to here—the one who seemed to live under a perpetual cloud of discontent, the one who just wanted everybody to be happy, and the one who had almost died and returned to them like a sad and silent little stranger.
Her parents, if they came back to life for a day, would barely recognize Eleanor now. They had known nothing of the books she’d published, the farm where she’d made her home, the tall, elusive, red-haired man—one-time goat farmer, first baseman, maker of bowls, and forts out of refrigerator boxes—with whom she’d fallen in love. They knew nothing of the fierce love she had for her children, her obsession with keeping them safe, the unspeakable grief she felt now over her failure to do that, and the wild yearning to reclaim a life for herself—how it felt that day on Timmy Pouliot’s motorcycle, tearing up the two-lane with the wind in her hair—even as she dedicated her days, one after another, to the family waiting for her back at home.
What would Martin and Vivian make of the Macintosh computer in front of her—a device nobody could have imagined twenty years before? A granddaughter who didn’t like wearing dresses, up in her room studying a whole other language called “programming.” The shuttle on the launchpad in Florida and the children in school cafeterias all across America counting down—ten, nine, eight, seven—and the woman about to blast off into space? Strange to think that when Eleanor’s parents died, Neil Armstrong had yet to set foot on the moon.
Reach for the stars,Christa said. This was Cam’s approach to raising Toby—to believe that one day, if they just did enough sun salutations, his damaged brain would somehow restore itself. Words would come. (Did Alison’s hero, Dr. Terry Winograd, have a computer program for that?)
Cam believed their son would learn to ride a bike. He would speak whole sentences. He would tell them what he was thinking again.He’d have thoughts. Maybe he did now, Eleanor just didn’t know what they looked like.
He’d fall in love someday with a woman who might love him back.
Ursula possessed a similar brand of optimism. She clung to the faith that if she just worked hard enough at it, she could make everything how it was before—or at least, make it all right. Maybe this was what had inspired her obsession with theChallenger:the way that space launch seemed to represent, not only to her but to everyone gathered that morning in Cape Canaveral to watch it, a belief in ever-broadening horizons, the triumph of hope at a time when, in her own family, it seemed in short supply.
Eleanor got to work then. Her current job was creating a series of drawings of famous American inventors and writing a capsule profile of each. This morning’s assignment: Eli Whitney and his cotton gin. She wished she could care about Eli Whitney, but she didn’t.
Sometime around noon, Darla called. “You were watching it, right?”
“Actually, no,” she said. “I have all this work to do. I was just getting started on Thomas Edison. And if you want to know the truth, I’m a little maxed out on theChallenger.It’s all Ursula ever talks about.”
“Turn on your television,” Darla told her.
Normally, she let the girls walk home on their own from where the bus dropped them off, but that day she and Toby were waiting, parked across the street from the bus stop, when it pulled up. The three children who stepped down first, before her daughters, all looked dazed, as if they’d just gotten off one of those really awful rides at an amusement park and wanted to throw up. Even Al, who had been walking around with a fuck-you look for half a year, appeared deeply shaken.
Ursula was the last one off the bus—the blue jumpsuit with the NASA patch on the pocket looking, now, like a bad Halloween costume. Her skin seemed to have turned a whole other shade since sheleft home that morning—she looked bluish, and strangely pinched, as if the air had been sucked out of her. She seemed, suddenly, very small. Crossing the street to the spot where her mother and brother stood, she looked like a very old woman.
“They blew up,” Ursula said. Her voice was flat. “They blew up into a million pieces.”
“Oh, honey,” Eleanor said, wrapping her arms around her daughter. She, the woman who thought if she could just locate that Barbie shoe, she could protect her daughter from sorrow.
A picture came to her of that day in her dorm room back at boarding school when the teacher had come to the door to tell her about her parents’ accident. And how, after, she had to keep going over the same odd, irrelevant details as if maybe, by doing that, she could make sense of what happened.
My roommate, Patty, had just made popcorn. I was working on a painting, but I’d taken a break. We were putting on nail polish.
“We saw it happen but at first nobody understood what was going on, not even Mrs. Ferguson,” Ursula said. “When we saw the smoke, we thought it was supposed to be like that.”
Eleanor got down low to put her arms around Ursula. She wanted to hold her older daughter, too, but Al pulled away, where Ursula pressed in tight against her mother’s chest.
A surprising thing happened then. Toby might not understand the part about the shuttle explosion or the astronauts, but he did not fail to recognize that something terrible had happened. One look at Ursula’s face and you knew that much. Now he patted her hair.
We were all watching on TV. We saw her kids in the bleachers. Everybody was cheering. Then it was like everything went crazy. When the rocket exploded, we all clapped. We didn’t get it. Then we did.
The pieces fell in the ocean. They scattered everyplace. There wasn’t anything left.
One more thing happened that day. In the scale of what took place over Cape Canaveral, this bore no consequence. But for their family it did.
After she picked the girls up from their bus, Eleanor took the long way home, past the waterfall.
The waterfall was not a place they usually went at this time of year, and passing it required her to abandon their usual route.
The falls seemed like a totally different place in winter than in the spring, when Eleanor and the children came down to launch their cork people, and later, when the weather warmed up and the fishermen appeared, when they’d lay out their picnic blanket and drawing pencils and books.
There was something about the way the ice formed over the rocks—the way the waterfall seemed to have been suspended in midair, in a column of ice, with sharp glacierlike forms rising up under the bridge in the very places where, a few months from now, they’d be launching their boats. Looking down from the bridge, a person’s dark imagination might turn to what it would be like if she slipped on the ice at the edge and fell in. Maybe you wouldn’t crack your skull on the rocks, but if not, you’d probably die of the cold before you could make your way out. Even in early summer, the water in this brook was heart-stoppingly cold.
