“I knew it. I knew you forgot me, man.” Dr. Nate Royer leaned against Cal’s office doorframe. “You stood me up. I sat there in the cafeteria all by myself.”
“Nate! Oh shit, I’m sorry.” Cal closed his laptop guiltily. He got out from behind his desk and greeted Nate with a clap on the shoulder. “I had that Wells debrief this morning and it threw off my whole day.”
“It wasn’t a total loss. I looked so pitiful, one of those cute new engineers must’ve felt sorry for me. Came over to say hello.”
Cal grinned, motioning Nate into his office and shutting the door behind him. “I bet you milked it for all it was worth, too, didn’t you. You dog.”
Nate shrugged eloquently, his teeth flashing bright in a quick grin. “We talked about the fickleness of straight boys. Especially the cute ones like you.”
Cal rolled his eyes at the long-standing joke. “Did you at least get his phone number?”
“What kind of a man do you think I am, Morganson? Of course I got his phone number.”
“See, wouldn’t’ve happened if I hadn’t zoned out.” Cal sprawled in his chair again while Nate took his usual seat on the other side of the desk.
“So . . . Catherine Wells, huh? How’d that go?”
“If you’re asking if we nailed down everything that happened on TRAPPIST-1f, then the answer is no. We’re not much closer than we were before.” He pawed through the papers on his desk for his tablet and the notes he’d taken during the debriefing. Nate was slated as the crew doctor for Sagittarius II. Even if they hadn’t been close friends, Cal would be doing everything he could to make sure Nate and the others got the answers they needed before they risked their lives.
“Damn,” Nate said. “She doesn’t know anything? I mean, if you’re going to send me up there, it’d be nice to know my chances of coming back were getting better.”
“We’re still working on the assumption that something catastrophic happened to the Habitat . . .” Cal trailed off. He really wanted to be able to give Nate the party line. Nothing to see here. Move along.
“Uh-oh. I know that look. There’s a ‘but’ coming.”
“No, not really, just—” Cal pushed his tablet aside. “Never mind, man. I shouldn’t be talking to you about it.”
“You know I’m going to see the full debriefings eventually, right?” Nate beckoned, like Bring it on.
Cal glanced at the closed door. “It’s nothing concrete. Something’s not adding up yet. Just a feeling.”
“Oh lord, not one of your feelings.” Nate groaned and ran a hand over his face dramatically.
“Listen. How often have I been wrong?”
“It’s not how often, Cal; it’s that when you are wrong, it turns into a colossal clusterfuck.” Nate would know; he’d helped mop Cal off the floor enough times.
But once again, Cal wasn’t going down without a fight. “Oh, come on. It’s not that bad. Name one clusterfuck.”
Nate raised his eyebrows. “You really wanna play this? All right. Let’s go. You spent a month convinced that TRAPPIST-1f was actually a volcanic hell planet.”
“The science was there! With the other planets in the system so close, volcanic activity should have been—”
“It was speculation! You were guessing, Cal.”
“I was a kid. Come on, we were still in college. Besides, it got me the job offer with NASA, didn’t it?”
Nate was unimpressed. “You nearly got the whole program scrapped.”
“Considering what actually happened, would that have been so terrible?”
“They weren’t killed by volcanoes, were they?” Nate stabbed a finger at him. “No moving the goalposts. You were wrong.”
“We don’t know they weren’t killed by volcanoes . . .”
“Cal, we’ve got the crew’s surveys from orbit right before they landed. ‘Volcano’ is probably one of the few causes we have ruled out.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay,” Cal admitted grudgingly. “Fine. I was wrong once.”
“Once.” Nate snorted. “What about that time you were working on Sentinel and you thought—”
This game wasn’t fun if Nate was going to show off his flawless recall of “every time Cal Morganson was an idiot.”
“All right, all right. Maybe more than once.” Cal leaned forward, pointing at him. “But how many times have I been right?”
Nate leaned back in his chair, grin on his face. “Not enough times for me to stop giving you shit every time you say you have a feeling.”
“I’m wounded, Nate. I’m deeply wounded.” Cal pressed a hand to his chest.
“You’ll survive. Your ego has made it through worse.” Nate gave him a shrewd look. “You know, we’re not all really keeping score on how often you’re wrong here. You’re the only one counting, man.”
“Can’t tell if you’re winning if nobody’s keeping score.” He focused on Nate again, growing serious. “I can’t shake the feeling that something’s off. It could be something big.” Cal didn’t care if Nate laughed at him; he probably deserved it a little, and Nate was allowed even if Cal wouldn’t put up with it from anyone else. “I just don’t want a repeat of whatever happened. Not with you guys. You’re my team.”
“I know. I get it. And we appreciate it, Cal, we really do.” Nate grew more serious as well. “Six years is a long time. It would be easy to treat Sagittarius I like ancient history. We all had a chance to get over it and move on. Now that Wells is back, it’s stirring up a lot of old stuff for us. Everybody’s feeling it.”
“How’s the crew doing?”
Nate shrugged. “Better, actually. Nobody talked about it, but it was kinda rough, being the crew to follow a mission where everyone died.”
“I worried about that, how you guys would handle it.” Cal had been tracking the crew’s psych evals. Every one of them was understandably anxious. Anxiety was normal, but it led to errors, errors Cal didn’t want to risk.
“But now that it turns out there was a survivor, in a weird way it makes it better. Maybe if we can find out exactly what happened, we’ll avoid making the same mistakes. If there were mistakes.”
“That’s what we’re working on.”
“Yeah, I know. I trust you, Cal,” Nate said easily. “As long as I keep believing you guys are gonna get us up there and back, I’m fine. I think everyone else feels the same way.”
And that, right there, was exactly why Cal needed to get to the truth of Catherine Wells’s story. He owed it to his crew, to Nate, to make sure they were as safe as possible. It might make people hate him; it might get him demoted even, but he couldn’t risk Nate and the others for the sake of the narrative that made Wells a hero and left his team vulnerable.
3
NONE OF THEM spoke at first. They clung to one another. Catherine was sobbing and so was Aimee, her slender body shaking with the force of it while Catherine held on to her and David held on to both of them. I’m home, I’m home, I’m home. She couldn’t stop thinking it, unable to believe it was finally happening. Our families will be so happy to see us; we’ll be able to make everything work out. Ava had been right.
David leaned in to kiss her carefully, their first kiss in nearly a decade. It was sweeter than she remembered. Catherine closed her eyes and they were twenty-three again, leaning toward each other on a boardwalk bench still warm from the setting sun. She’d been laughing, daring him to kiss her, their mouths sticky with cotton candy like children’s. He still smelled the same twenty years later, still wearing the same cologne.
David drew back and brushed a hand over her hair. “Come on. We’re taking you home.”
Walking out into the sunlight—Earth’s light, not artificial light, not starlight—was like walking out under a spotlight. Everything was so harsh, overexposed, bright. She was walking into a nuclear blast and half expected to see her shadow burned into the concrete behind her. The shapes were all wrong. While she was in quarantine she’d noticed the obsession of Earth architecture and
design with having everything squared off. After the curves and contours of Sagittarius, that blocky squareness felt wrong. It felt dangerous. There were too many sharp corners to cut herself on.
What didn’t feel wrong were the two people with her. Squinting despite the sunglasses, she kept David on one side of her, Aimee on the other, her arms around their waists as they headed for the car.
A car. She laughed at the sight of it sitting there, delightfully ordinary. David wasn’t driving the exact car he’d had nine years ago, but it was the same in all the ways that mattered: midsize sedan, comfortable, safe, and a little dull. She used to tease him relentlessly about it: “You drive the slowest, most boring car of any future astronaut I know.” The rest of their training cohort were notorious speed junkies, an impressive collection of sports cars and classic muscle cars among them. Then David had washed out of the program, and the jokes stopped.
Catherine settled into the passenger seat and found herself savoring the overheated air from the late spring sun.
“Are you hungry?” David asked. “Do you want to stop and get anything before we get home?”
“I just want to go home.” Catherine couldn’t stop looking at both of them, cataloguing changes. David’s auburn hair was a little thinner at the temples, and there were wire-framed glasses covering his gray eyes that hadn’t been there before. But really, he looked the way he’d always looked. From the cologne to the car to everything else, David never changed. He was her rock, steady and unmoving and always there.
Except he did change, didn’t he? Your rock moved on. To Maggie. Ava’s voice. Catherine willed the thought away. She just wanted to enjoy this.
Aimee was a wonder. For years, Catherine had carried the image of the nine-year-old tomboy in her head, and she scarcely knew how to credit this ethereally beautiful seventeen-year-old sitting behind her. She’d always had David’s friendly features and Catherine’s pale skin, but there was no trace of the tomboy in her now. Her dark-brown hair was pulled back in a loose braid, and she was wearing a perfectly tailored gray dress. It was the kind of thing Catherine would never have had the fashion sense to pick.
“Mom. You’re staring.” Aimee’s smile stayed as bright as ever, but she fidgeted with the phone in her hands.
“You just both look so good. You have no idea.” She shook her head. “I remember I used to have to fight to get you to wear anything other than jeans or overalls. That dress is amazing.”
Aimee glowed beneath the praise, sitting up a little straighter. “Isn’t it great?” She played with the skirt, straightening it out. “Maggie helped me pick it out for the last science fair we—” She stopped, gaze darting to her father and then down for a heartbeat.
Catherine’s smile tightened but stayed in place. “It’s all right.” She reached back to touch Aimee’s arm. “I’m glad she was there for you.”
And she was . . . but she still had to suppress a rush of jealousy that sat side by side with her gratitude that Aimee had had some sort of mother figure while Catherine couldn’t be there. All the time she spent drifting through space, imagining her homecoming, she’d never imagined she would come back to find that David had moved on and Aimee had been close to calling another woman “Mom.” The two of them were hers again, but Maggie’s shadow still lingered. Maybe Maggie had been a better mom, a better partner . . . Catherine could never know for sure, and she’d never be able to ask.
“So,” she said, trying to find her way out of the mire they’d stumbled into, “science fairs are still your thing, huh?”
“Aimee hasn’t lost a science fair since she started high school.” David beamed with pride. “This last time one of the judges said he had graduate students that could learn something from her work.”
“Daa-ad, that’s not what he said. He said they could learn from my work ethic.”
“That’s still fantastic. I want to hear all about school,” Catherine said. “Do you think they’d mind if I came to visit? I’d love to see it.”
Aimee made a face, but shrugged. “They’d probably love it and want you to do a whole assembly or something.”
Catherine laughed at the expression on Aimee’s face. “Okay, okay, I won’t come and embarrass you right away. I just . . . I’ve missed you.” She glanced over at David’s profile. “Both of you. I’ve got a lot of lost time to make up for.”
* * *
As they got closer to the house, Catherine grew quiet, watching the neighborhood outside the windows. So much had changed, but so much was exactly the same. The supermarket she used to go to all the time was still there. Those quiet early Saturday mornings had been an oasis for her; leaving David and Aimee sleeping while she wandered the aisles, finding something meditative in the simplicity of it, looking at labels, checking things off her list. The stores around the supermarket were all new—a pet store had replaced the hair salon where Aimee had gotten her first haircut; a storefront computer-repair place was where the dry cleaners had been. It was like seeing a familiar photograph with some of the faces rubbed out and replaced with those of strangers. Once in their own cul-de-sac, the feeling intensified. Houses changed colors, the cars were all wrong. Somehow she’d sideslipped into another universe where the McIntyres’ house was green instead of blue and Aimee was a grown-up fashion plate instead of a freckle-faced tomboy.
The flutter in her stomach worsened as they reached their house. Would Catherine be able to tell that another woman had been living there?
David pulled into the garage and jumped out to open Aimee’s and Catherine’s doors. He huffed out a breath and then gave Catherine a bright smile that was a little forced. “So, welcome home!”
She stepped inside. Nothing had changed that she could see at first. Aimee followed her into the living room while David hung back in the kitchen, closing the garage door. “I’ll be right back. I need to change out of this before I get something on it.” That, at least, sounded like the Aimee that Catherine remembered, and she smiled as Aimee took the stairs two at a time.
Looking around the living room, she could see them now, a million little changes. The drapes were different. And the furniture. Unbidden, the mental picture formed of David and Maggie furniture shopping, redecorating the living room in celebration of the new life they were planning . . .
Maybe it hadn’t happened that way at all. Maybe David and Aimee had done it to welcome her home. Maybe—
“You doing okay?” David pressed a cold glass into her hand and kissed her on the cheek. “They said we needed to make sure you stayed hydrated. It’s just club soda and lemon.”
“I’m fine.” Catherine forced a smile and gave him a one-armed hug. “Thank you. It’s all . . . a lot.”
David took her words at face value and smiled back before glancing around. “Where’s Aimee?”
“She went upstairs to change.”
“She goes through about five outfits a day these days, seems like.” He shook his head.
“I was like that at her age, too.”
They fell silent. Catherine couldn’t tell if it was because neither of them knew what to say, or that they had so much to say that neither of them knew where to start. David leaned in and rested his head against hers, lingering there. What did she look like to him? How much had she changed in his eyes? It was hard to imagine. She’d always been pale, but now she was ghost-white from years without direct sunlight. There were creases around her eyes that hadn’t been there when she left, and she was starting to find the occasional gray hair in the straight, nearly black strands. The first year she was alone on Sagittarius she’d taken to cutting her hair to keep it from falling into her eyes. As time went on she stopped caring, and ended up pulling it back in a ponytail or a braid. One of the first things she did after she’d landed was get her hair cut into a short, blunt style. She still wasn’t sure she liked it; she was afraid it made her look too severe.
Catherine took a sip of her club soda. David still wasn’t talking. Should she be talking? S
he’d craved human contact so much while she was alone, sprawled on her hard bunk on Sagittarius, and now that she had it, it didn’t feel anything like she’d imagined. Leaning against him this way should have been natural and soothing. She could feel each breath he took, his body moving lightly against hers. A wave of revulsion washed over her. He was too soft. Touching him was like touching some sort of grotesque bag of seawater and viscera, wrong and unnatural and . . .
She looked at him, and for a moment didn’t recognize what she saw, seeing something alien in his familiar features. She blinked, and her vision cleared. David was just David again, and leaning against him felt the way it had always felt: comfortable and warm.
Still, her heart thumped uncomfortably, even as she told herself it was just an adjustment issue. She’d been alone for so long. She wasn’t used to touching things that were alive.
“Oh.” David seemed unaware of any discomfort and took her hand. “Come over here and see what we put together.” He led her over to the wall next to the fireplace. It was lined with photographs of Aimee and David, arranged chronologically from the time Catherine left—literally from the day: she recognized the outfit Aimee had on in the first photo as the one she’d worn on launch day. There were photos of birthdays, Christmases, several science fairs . . . all the things Catherine had missed.
Her eyes stung and she blinked rapidly to clear her vision. “This is . . . it’s amazing.”
He looked pleased. “I tried to get photos of everything. There are a lot more that we didn’t manage to put up. And videos. I have hours and hours of videos.”
As heartwarming as the photos were, something about them made her uneasy. It took her several moments to see it. None of the photos had Maggie in them. Even photos that Catherine might expect her to be in, like holidays and birthdays. There was no sign of Maggie at all. David had carefully edited all traces of her from his and Aimee’s life. Catherine was equal parts touched and disturbed. Was it so easy to erase someone from your life? Had he done that with her while she was gone?
Vessel Page 3
