At 2:30 in the morning, the phone next to Sunny’s bed rang. It was NASA. She should come in right away. Communications with the rocket had been established, and there was a video uplink. The men were alive. They were well. She could talk to Maxon, see him, hear him talk. She pulled on some clothes, kissed Bubber awake and dressed him, and bundled them both out the door and into the van. There she sat, blinking, at her reflection in the rearview mirror. She was about to send a love letter with no words in it at all. She set off toward the Langley Research Center, where they would be waiting for her.
AT THREE O’CLOCK IN the morning, the mother’s heart fluttered. It fluttered and faded. Then it resumed operating, but at an unsteady pace. The kidneys had been gone for hours, the liver dead, the blood full of toxins. Underneath her body, her mind was racing. In the room, under the flat sheet, there was no change. The orange light of the parking-lot fixtures filtered through the shade like morning sun through the shell of an egg. A nurse had come in, hours ago, and felt for a pulse. Now the room was silent.
To say that the mother did not resume consciousness just before death would be wrong. It would be something that was said to palliate the people who maybe should have been there for the death. She did not resume the symptoms of consciousness: the fluttering eyelid, the squeezing hand, the gentle nod. But she did resume the awareness that she was dying. And she fought with death. All by herself, in the dark, with nothing to help her control the encroaching darkness inside her, she fought against her own failing blood and the terrible things in it that were at work against her. She fought to live.
In her mind, she was standing at a roadside vegetable stand in Pennsylvania. She was picking over tomatoes, wondering if they could really be local, because they looked so perfect. There was a kid there operating the stand, the same age as Sunny and from the same 4-H club. A car swished down the highway, disturbing the air around the vegetables, a thrush whirred somewhere in the woods back away from the road. She could hear the locusts at their songs in between passing cars. It was late summer, late afternoon, and the warm last rays of the sun slanted across the valley.
The kid was looking at her. She said, “Mrs. Butcher?” Emma remembered clearly the electrified feeling in her body when the kid said, “Do you know where Sunny is right now?”
“Where is Sunny?” Emma said, setting one of her tomatoes back into the bin.
“Um, I’m probably not supposed to tell you.”
“Well, is she in danger?” Emma’s finger pressed a hole into a tomato, then another hole into the same tomato, giving the tomato a little girdle of holes.
“Hmm,” said the kid, sucking her braces. “Yeah, probably.”
Emma in the hospital, static under the blankets, unable to move her arms or make a fist, remembered the desire to throttle this pimply, damp child in her denim short-shorts, to strangle her with her own straggly braid.
“Maggie,” said Emma. “You need to tell me right now where Sunny is. Otherwise I am going to be very angry, and tell your father.”
“Well,” said Maggie, drawing out the word. “I guess it is in Sunny’s best interest if I tell you.”
“Tell me.”
Emma’s teeth ground together, in the hospital bed, by the roadside stand. Where is my child? What is going to happen to her? Fix it, fix it, fix it.
“Uh, Mrs. Butcher, you know the Belmar bridge?”
Emma was gone. She ran to the car, slammed herself into it, and gunned out of the little roadside area, spraying gravel behind her. She knew the Belmar bridge. For three generations, the youth of Yates County had been daring each other to jump off it, and infrequently dying under it. A railroad trestle over the Allegheny River, the Belmar bridge was legendary, its stone pylons driving down thickly into the river, its rusted and inflexible beams rising high above. The kids would climb out to the center pylon, reaching it by means of the rusted rungs of a service ladder, and lie in the sun there, high above the water. The bravest of them would leap off the platform and into the water, almost forty feet below. The Allegheny is a shallow river, but the construction of the bridge and the current in that spot had left a deep eddy just downstream of that huge middle pylon, so if you held your body just right, and hit the water correctly, you could dive down safely, and not get hurt. Or, like several kids over the years, you could kill yourself trying.
Okay, she told herself. To be fair. To be truthful. Those kids were drunk. Sunny wouldn’t drink. Those kids were stupid. Sunny is smart. Probably she won’t even climb out there. She would know how mad I’d be if I found out. She would have some sense. She would not do this. She would not jump off this bridge. It was a rite of passage, the neighbors had told them over dinner one night, for the local youths. The neighbors’ children had not done it, though. The sensible, smart neighbors’ children had grown up and gone and had not jumped off that bridge at all. The most impressive railroad trestle in three counties. Emma could just picture it. Her skin burned.
She sped down the two-lane highway with no regard for traffic, drifting into the opposite lane on curves to the right, drifting onto the shoulder on curves to the left. The beautiful late-afternoon sun on the countryside had become the fires of hell burning her. She knew that Sunny could not die, and she knew that she could stop her. She could say, “Sunny, STOP.” The bald head would whip around, the girl would wave, turn, and she would sheepishly shrug, let some other kid do it, let some other kid jump off that platform for her.
If only she were with some more sensible boy. Maxon would just let her go, just let her do it, whatever she wanted. He was enslaved to her, and he was hopeless, too damaged, she could not trust him with Sunny’s life. She could not believe that he could keep her safe, not just by thinking about it. Why could she not love some optimistic clod who would tell her the truth, keep her out of trouble, and become a banker? That type of kid would never let her break her neck on a river rock. Never.
At the bottom of the hill, she opened the door and began to run, leaving the car open behind her. Her long skirt beat against her legs and her feet kicked up gravel behind her. Her mind demanded she stay alive. She took a shuddering gasp and let it out, shifting the blankets just a little. She felt the crushing weight of her own ribs, felt that no more breath would come in. Maybe that was her last breath. Maybe it was over. She was done. But it couldn’t be. She had to run, she had to find out. So she dragged another breath in, her pulse jumping up in her neck, one gulping swallow of air as her throat collapsed, enough to keep her alive until she could see her child safe, until she could see Sunny and tell her “Don’t jump off that fucking bridge.”
Her legs carried her like the wind, over the gravel road and then onto the railroad ties, leaping from plank to plank between the place where the rails used to be. She felt no pain, she felt only suffocation. She felt her blood, incapable of doing its job. She felt her mind shutting her off. Don’t tell the feet, she thought. Let them keep running. At last she turned the corner and saw the bridge, its dark brown trapezoids rising against that bright blue sky.
“Sunny,” she tried to cry, but there was no air. Her lungs were finished. They could not do it, not even one more time. Her chest contracted. Her cells struggled. She hung on the nearest beam, clung to it, thrusting her head out over the water, straining to see. There were the kids. Was Sunny alone? No, Maxon was already in the water. Bastard. He had probably worked out all the angles and trajectories. He had probably told her just the right way to jump. It wasn’t fair. She had probably demanded it. She would, she was always trying to be like the other children. How much this would mean to her, poor bald Sunny, with her awful baldness, to jump off the Belmar bridge just like the other kids did, to talk about it later, over sodas at the Jolly Milk, sitting on the roof of someone’s car, a gang of kids, a group of friends, and Maxon hanging back, driving for her, working out the math for her, silent when she told him to be silent, letting her kill herself to fit in.
Sunny was there, poised. The mother tried to gasp out a warning, gasp out a final endearment. Sunny, I love you. But there was no air, and there was no blood, and the blackness came down from on top of her head and shut her down. In the reverie, she hung there, her body limp and crumpled against a beam. In reality, she died there, in the hospital bed, and went into the dark. Her brain stopped working and that was it, just at the wrong moment. One minute there were electrochemical processes inside the skull. The next minute there were not. No one shared it, no one eased it to its end, and no one could have prevented it. It just happened. A death happened at 3:12 in the morning. A private death between the mother and herself, before she could finish her one last dream. This is what it means to die: You do not finish.
THE ROAD TO LANGLEY Research Center leads back through the swampy area of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. In the middle of the night, it is a dark and quiet place. Ditches on each side of the road drain the water, and herons stand, their heads tucked into their wings. It’s like a seedier, smaller version of the road to the Kennedy Space Center, over miles of swampy Florida coastal marsh. There you can see rows of palm trees swaying in the wind, in the morning, on the day of a bright and optimistic launch. Here she saw kudzu in the headlights, mile markers, and she could barely remember where to turn.
At 3:30 a.m. Sunny showed her ID at the gate. Off to the right was the hangar, huge and white, full of rocket parts, airplanes, and all kinds of apparatuses. Behind her was the wind tunnel. The base was like a college campus, but instead of stacked rectangles for office buildings and classrooms, the architecture was all outsized and strange, not built for human habitation, but for the convenience of science. This facility, like its geographical context, was a dingy, underfunded sister of the Kennedy Space Center. But he worked here because he didn’t want to move to Florida. And ultimately, it didn’t matter. He had his trade right between his ears. There were labs, and there were lab workers everywhere.
She drove past the huge round buildings they jokingly called the brain tanks, and past the new accelerator. She drove past the building where Maxon had his materials tested, full of giant machines whose only job is to break things to make sure they’re strong. Many of the buildings at Langley were shoddy and brown, built in the seventies and never refurbished. It was always a surprise to step into the buildings and find everything so high-tech.
Sunny parked, gently eased Bubber out of the backseat. He cried a little bit, and blinked, and then, standing in the car still, said, “Where are we?”
“What a great question,” said Sunny. “We are at Daddy’s work. We are going to talk to Daddy.”
“Daddy is on the moon. The moon has a lava pipe. That’s where Daddy’s going to put the robot. The lava pipe.”
“Right,” said Sunny. “Should I carry you, or can you walk?”
Please say walk, she thought. She hadn’t had any contractions since she woke up, but she was nervous about it.
“Walk,” said Bubber.
“That’s a good baby,” said Sunny. She kissed him and kissed him all over his face. He resisted her, as stony as if she had been kissing the back of the seat.
“I don’t care if you don’t want to be kissed and hugged, Bubber,” she said as she took his hand. “I’m going to kiss and hug you anyway.”
“Fine,” said Bubber.
“Let’s go.”
Stanovich met her at the door. The lobby of Maxon’s building was dimly lit.
“The gate guard called and said you were here,” he said. “Come on, right this way.”
He took her by the arm, and she took Bubber by his arm. They went to a part of the building she had never seen before. He pushed open several sets of brown metal doors and led her up a stairwell. The concrete on the stairs was chipped, the window dusty. Sunny stopped on the landing, waved for Stanovich to give her a second.
“I’m a little pregnant, Stan,” she said. “I can’t go galloping up stairs anymore.”
“Ah, right,” he said. He stood nervously, knocking the railing with his knuckle. Stanovich was a gray-haired man, but smooth and spry, maybe old enough to be Sunny’s father, or maybe forty. He had a thick mustache and thicker glasses, sunken eyes and bushy eyebrows, big ears. He always wore short-sleeved shirts with collars, black or navy pants. He was old-school NASA, and a professional. Maxon had a lot of respect for him, so Sunny did, too. And she liked him. He had a wife and kids in Newport News.
“Okay, I think I’ve caught my breath,” said Sunny. Catching sight of herself in a windowpane, she realized that Stan had not commented on her hair, or lack of it. She wondered if he was just that distracted, or if Maxon had told him. Maybe some late night, bent over difficult problem, or pacing back and forth in front of a whiteboard full of formulas, he’d spilled the beans. Hey, my wife is bald, he might have said, but let’s get back to this robot.
“Bubber, you all right?” Stan said, poised to continue up the stairs.
Bubber, staring at the concrete blocks in the walls, gave him a thumbs-up. Stan leaped up the next flight and pushed open another metal door.
“This is my domain,” said Stanovich. “Welcome. Sorry not under better circumstances.”
“But these are great circumstances, right?” said Sunny. “They’re alive, they’re talking. They’ll make it.”
Stan was silent, moving down the gray hallway more slowly now.
“Stan,” said Sunny, grabbing him by the arm and stopping dead. “It is good news, right?”
“Sunny, now I don’t want to get you upset. But you should know the truth.”
“What’s the truth?” Sunny asked.
“The truth is they might still not make it back,” said Stan. Then he coughed, put his hand on his face, and smoothed his mustache. Sunny found herself crazily trying to decode this gesture, like maybe Maxon would have done. Was he shielding the pregnant lady? Overstating the danger? Itchy?
“What?” Sunny breathed.
“The meteor did more damage than we thought, honey. Once we established the link, Houston ran some diagnostics with them, and it’s not good. I can’t see how we down here can help them up there without the navigational stuff that they need to fix their orbit, to get to the surface, to fire the rockets … it’s just too much.”
Stan sounded like he was going to cry. “Maxon did a good thing fixing the comms. That was a really great thing. But, this might be the last you get to talk to him, honey. That’s why we called you here in the middle of the night. Do you understand?”
“Did they dock with the robots? Did they get that far?”
“Yes,” said Stan. “They have now docked with the robots. I don’t know how, because they shouldn’t have been able to, but somehow they did. Unfortunately, I think that’s as far as it’s going to go.”
“No,” said Sunny. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he would go up there and get himself killed.”
Stan put his hand on a doorknob. Inside, through a pane of reinforced glass, Sunny could see people, hear voices.
“The meteor was something that no one could account for,” said Stan. “You can’t blame him. There was nothing he could have done.”
“But Maxon accounts for everything,” she said, pushing past him to throw the door open. “I want to talk to him. I want to talk to him right bloody now.”
The room was big, with shaded windows on one wall. There were benches and tables around the room littered with drills, pieces of metal, and mounted laser saws and fabricators. A poster on the wall proclaimed, “This is where we make the magic happen!” Angela Phillips had already arrived and was sitting in front of a big silver flat-screen monitor on a dirty old wooden desk. Of course she’d gotten there first; she lived in Hampton. Like any sensible person whose husband worked at Langley.
Sunny had demanded a Norfolk residence, for the opera house and the art museum. She was on the board of this and the committee of that, using Maxon’s money to buy their way into the social stratosphere of this old town. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She regretted everything. Where would Maxon die, in the cold of space? Would he fall into the moon? Or would he make it halfway home and then run out of air? Would he kill everyone on board? Would he? She saw her husband under layers, under the rocket, under the space suit, under the jumpsuit, down to the core of him, where he was breathing, low and strong, his pulse never rising above fifty. It was crazy. The doctors couldn’t explain it.
There were others in the room. A man she remembered having over to the house for dinner with his dowdy wife approached her. He was clearly not distracted enough to not notice the bald head.
“Sunny,” he said. “Are you all right? Are you … cancer?”
He trailed off, but Sunny firmly shook his hand and winked.
“Hey, Jim, you guys called me so early, I didn’t have time to brush my hair, so I just decided not to wear it, right?”
He didn’t laugh, but then, neither did she. When Angela saw her, she motioned for her to come over. Bubber was playing with graduated metal cones on the floor, and was rocking. On the monitor, Sunny saw Fred Phillips, his face filling the whole screen. Angela put out her hand and grabbed Sunny’s hand. She was a genuine blonde, with tiny shoulders and a soft baby voice.
The voice of Fred, slightly buzzing through the speakers, said, “Sweetie, tell me something. Tell me anything.”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Angela. “Everything will be all right. You’ll be home before you know it.”
“Actually it’s not,” said Fred, rolling a wild eye. “Actually that’s not true. So tell me something else, anything else. Tell me what the kids had for breakfast today.”
“The kids are asleep, Fred,” said Angela. “I left them at my mother’s.”
“I want to see my kids,” Fred said, and his voice choked. They saw him, on the monitor, grab at his mouth, and shake his head. “What the hell, Angie,” he sobbed.
There was a delay in transmission, so it was hard for them to communicate. They would talk over each other, and then wait too long, and then someone would start talking, then the other would wait. Is this what it’s like to have a spouse who talks all the time? thought Sunny. All this stopping and starting. Sunny heard a voice in the background that was not Maxon say, “Pull yourself together, Phillips.”
“Fred, Sunny’s here,” said Stanovich, leaning over Angela’s shoulder. “Wanna get Dr. Mann on the feed there? Thanks.”
“Sure thing, Stan,” said Fred. “Here you go, Genius, time to cry and die.”
Angela stood and let Sunny sit down in the chair in front of the wooden desk while Fred seemed to levitate out of the seat he was in, and Maxon seemed to levitate in. Sunny sat perfectly still as she saw his head come into focus. He made sure he was sitting in exactly the right spot, and then he looked at her. She stared back at him, at the wide, bold lines of his face, his precious mouth, his ears, his curls. She wasn’t sure what kind of picture she was seeing, but she saw him very clearly, and it made her want to cry. He smiled his standard, formal smile, and then he leaned closer, peering into his screen. Sunny saw his face change from formal and public, to hungry, the way he looked when he really needed to eat something immediately. He had seen her bald head.
“Hey, baby,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“Well, I’m probably going to have to eat Phillips first,” Maxon said.
“Oh yeah?” she said.
“Yeah, Gompers is such a nice guy, and Tom Conrad is made out of silicon, so…”
“Rethink, Maxon, rethink.”
She reached her hand out and touched the line of his nose, the curve of his cheekbone, the angle of his jaw on the monitor. He was quiet. She wanted to force him to see her, confirm that he knew. She wanted to tell him what to say, write it down for him, hand him a piece of paper with letters on it that he could truly understand. He was quiet. Was she telling him? Was the message getting through? Was she sending him all he needed, to survive? She wanted to say, Maxon, I love you, I’m sorry I’ve been a shit, I am straight now, I’m ready to be nice to you again and give you what you need. Please don’t die. He said nothing.
She picked up a piece of paper from the desk and folded it, and a Sharpie that was sitting there, and she wrote on the paper in very thick letters: I AM SORRY. Then she held it up in front of her head, so that her face was covered. When she took it down and looked at him, she was certain he understood.
“Sunny, do you want me to come home?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said clearly. “I want you to come home.”
“Great, okay,” he said. “Put Bubber on.”
Sunny retrieved Bubber from the floor and put him on her lap, a smooth metal cone clutched in each fist. He was making noises, like sound effects, and rocking. She knew he was far away in his mind.
“Hey, buddy,” said Maxon. Bubber did not look up. “Whatcha got there?”
“Can you show Daddy your cones?” Sunny prompted. “Tell Dad what you have there.”
Bubber lifted the cones in the air but did not look at the monitor. He continued to beep and shriek quietly, little sci-fi noises.
“Bubber, look right here where Mommy is pointing,” said Sunny, but Bubber wouldn’t look up.
“Sorry,” said Sunny. She saw Maxon lean down and get something. He was clutching something in his lap, his eyebrows up and his head shaking back and forth.
“It’s okay. He looks great,” said Maxon.
“He knows you’re there,” said Sunny. “It’s just that—”
Now Maxon was holding up a sign, too. On a clean page in his notebook he had written I LOVE YOU. He had gone over the letters several times so that they could really see it. He held it up to his chest, over his heart.
“Bubber,” said Sunny, pressing her lips into his ear, “I really need you to look where Mommy is pointing right now. Just look where Mommy’s finger is pointing.”
Bubber looked, just one glance; then he turned back to lean on Sunny and click the cones together. Sunny smiled at Maxon and said, “He saw.”
But Maxon kept on holding up the sign. And she knew it was for her, too. She tried to memorize the sight, so she could hold on to it forever, him there framed in the screen, wearing his white turtleneck, holding that sign over his heart.
“I gotta go, Sunny,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. But I’m going to go ahead and land this thing.”
“Maxon,” Stanovich broke in, “it’s too dangerous. Not without the starboard boosters.”
“Yeah, I gotta switch this thing off, Stan. See ya.”
And then the monitor went black. Immediately, from inside Bubber a wail went up. It came from the back of his throat but it sounded like it came from his toes. She knew from experience that this was the beginning of a meltdown, possibly an epic one, definitely not for public consumption. She wanted to get him out of the room, let him scream and rail and arch and foam and smack at her in the hallway, but first she had to get those cones out of his hand.
“No, honey,” she said. “No, no. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
She began to pry his fingers from around the cone.
“We have to go,” she said urgently. “Come on, Bubber, put down the cone.”
But that was the wrong thing to do. The screaming peaked. Red-faced and spurting tears, Bubber fell to the floor, clutching the cones to his body. He rolled along the floor, kicking anything in his way, until he was wedged under a desk, where he stuck. Sunny went stumping after him, so wide and awkward. It would be very hard to deal with Bubber in this way. She couldn’t even pick him up, if he was trying to get away. She wasn’t strong and balanced enough. She started to get down on her knees, to try and talk him out, but Stan put a hand on her arm.
“It’s okay,” he said to her. “Let him keep the cones. In fact, you all can stay here if you want to, for a while.”
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “This is…”
“Sunny, it’s fine,” he said. “I have a boy with Asperger’s myself. And Rogers over there too. I mean, he is autistic, not his kid.”
“Really?” she said.
“Really,” said Stan. “You might say it kind of runs in the family. The NASA family.”
Sunny and Bubber stayed in Stanovich’s office at Langley for the rest of the night. In fact, when Sunny took a blanket and pillow into the lounge to get some sleep, Bubber stayed in the office with the other men. He was perfectly happy to play with the robot parts, finger the machines, and say absolutely nothing to anyone.
Up in the rocket, Maxon had laid out his plans for landing the rocket and the robots on the moon. Gompers hesitated.
“I don’t know, Mann,” he said. “We’re going to do it, but only because there’s nothing else to do.”
Phillips said, “Hey, Genius, who told you it was okay for you to do my job?”
“Shut up, Phillips,” said Gompers. “Unless you have another plan.”
“Phillips,” said Maxon kindly, “of course I can do your job. If I couldn’t do your job and everyone else’s job up here, I wouldn’t have come.”
Phillips stared.
“No disrespect, sir,” said Maxon to Gompers.
“None taken, son,” said Gompers. “Now let’s hope you’re right.”
WHAT THEY HAD DONE to conceive the second baby had taken only a few minutes. It had happened under the wig, under the sheets. It was on Maxon’s timetable, but this time there was no resistance from Sunny. “You’re right,” she said to him. “It’s time to have another baby.” They did it on purpose, all the while knowing that something was wrong with Bubber, that something was wrong with Maxon, that something was wrong with Sunny, that something was wrong with her mother, that something was wrong with everyone else. They did it knowing that a flawed thing would be the result of this effort, and that they would be expected to love it anyway, in spite of, because of. She had containers in the cedar closet labeled “maternity.” It would all be managed handily by the girl who had become a blonde. They would replace themselves, Sunny and Maxon, in the world. They would do what was required of them by evolutionary law.
But the pregnancy of the girl who had become a blonde had changed into the pregnancy of the girl who had always been bald. And the certainty disappeared. The laws were unwritten, the map faded. It was Maxon’s baby, and Sunny’s, and anything could happen. There were no expectations that could be logically brought to bear. The baby could be born a miracle.