Vessel

by Lisa A. Nichols

  The eye mask made everything worse, the darkness overwhelming. It made everything feel unreal. Like she was back on Sagittarius, drifting slowly home, talking to Aimee to keep herself alive.

  You are on Earth. Aimee is right here and seventeen now. You are in a spa, Catherine kept telling herself over and over.

  “I’ll be right back,” the aesthetician murmured and slipped out of the room.

  “Mom? You okay? You went quiet.”

  Catherine peeled up one corner of the mask and looked over. Behind Aimee’s mask Catherine could see her brow furrowed with concern.

  “Yeah. I think I might have dozed off.” She lay back down and put the mask back in place, breathing easier.

  “That’s a good sign, right?”

  “It must be.”

  She had to let it go. She promised herself she’d let go of the past and be more present. No matter what happened, Dr. Darzi would tell her it was normal, and maybe it was. Who the hell knew what “normal” was in a situation like this, anyway?

  “Sorry, Aims,” Catherine said. “I’m not doing a very good job with the whole mother-daughter-time thing.”

  “Hey, the idea was for you to relax. Napping counts.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  Aimee’s self-conscious laugh was an echo of Catherine’s, and Catherine couldn’t help but smile. “At least you’re here. When you first came home, I don’t know, I was afraid something else would take you away from me. Or that you’d vanish. Or that you would have changed so much that you wouldn’t be . . . you anymore.”

  Am I still me? Really me? All the time? “I kept worrying I would vanish, too.” Catherine tried to laugh it off as a joke then winced at the drying gel pulling at her skin.

  “Mom? What made you decide to do it? To be an astronaut? And go away for so long at a time?”

  It was a fair question, and Catherine owed her a true answer. “When I was younger, before you were born, I wanted to see the stars more than anything. I wanted to be out there among them. After you were born I still wanted to see the stars, just not more than anything. Remember that, Aims: you don’t stop wanting things just because you have a baby; you just try to get better at making compromises.”

  “And your compromise was to . . . leave?” Aimee’s voice was careful, as if she recognized that Catherine was working through her thoughts, too, that both of them were trying to find their footing.

  “I know that sounds terrible.” Catherine still remembered the tension between her and David, but every time she asked, every time she tried to talk about it, he insisted it was fine and that she should go. “The Sagittarius missions are so important, Aimee. Now that we can reach planets outside our solar system, there’s a better and better chance we can find a planet like Earth. The Earth may be fine during my lifetime and yours, but . . . it might not. I told myself,” here Catherine’s voice started to thicken, remembering how difficult the conclusion had been, “that I might be away from you for six years, but I was part of making sure you would always have somewhere safe to live.” Remembered sadness faded into wry humor. “Oh, the irony; my biggest adventure yet, and I don’t remember a damn thing about the actual destination.”

  “I’m sorry. That has to suck.”

  All the lost time, during and after the trip, all the worry, losing nearly a decade of her life, and Aimee had managed to distill it down to four words. “Yeah.” Catherine allowed a laugh—because it was either laugh or cry—and said, “It definitely sucks.”

  The aesthetician returned, much calmer than when she’d left. “Ladies, I apologize for taking so long.”

  “Oh, we’re not in any hurry,” Catherine said, managing a smile that felt real behind the mask. The question still lingered in her mind. Had she made the right decision? Hindsight made it easy to second-guess herself. Would she still be asking herself this if the mission had been a success? It was an unanswerable question, as unknowable as her missing memories.

  * * *

  “Tony’s for all three of us?” Catherine kissed David’s cheek before he held out chairs for both her and Aimee. “Are you spending my hazard pay?” she teased. She’d been able to shake off her melancholy thanks to Aimee’s obvious enjoyment of their outing and brute determination on her part not to spoil it.

  “No, Aimee’s college fund. She made out so well at her graduation party, I figure we can get away with it.”

  “Hey!” Aimee protested good-naturedly. “I worked hard for that graduation money!”

  David picked up his menu, but then let his eyes linger on Catherine. “You look radiant, both of you.”

  Catherine and Aimee had finished the afternoon by getting their hair, makeup, and nails done. Catherine had to admit, it was the most glamorous she’d felt in a long while. “Your daughter is clearly better at being a girly-girl than her mother ever was.”

  “Director Lindholm was telling me at the party that he wants you to start doing TV interviews. You should see if someone there can do your makeup if you do,” Aimee suggested.

  Catherine groaned. “Is he still pushing that idea? Every time I think I’ve gotten him to give up, Paul tries a new angle to get me to agree.”

  “The man is a bulldog. He doesn’t give up on anything,” David said.

  The waiter arrived and they gave him their orders, then talk turned to Aimee’s plans for her dorm room. Even facing the fact that her daughter was going to go thousands of miles away in a few months was more appealing than thinking about Lindholm and his hunger for media coverage. More important, it felt normal.

  “You should see the rooms, Mom. They’re so tiny! I don’t know how they expect future engineers to live together in such a small space. There’s hardly any work space at all . . .”

  “We’ll get it figured out,” Catherine said.

  After she and Aimee decided what dessert they wanted to split, Catherine realized something else had been weighing on her since yesterday. “Julie mentioned something at the party yesterday . . .” She toyed with the napkin in front of her. “The doctors have decided it’s all right to tell Mom about me coming back. Julie wants us to come to Chicago to see her this summer. ‘Sooner rather than later,’ she said.”

  “Cath, that’s fantastic.”

  “It is and it isn’t.” God, Catherine hated to bring this up here. “It . . . might not be much longer now. We might be going to, well, . . . say good-bye.”

  Aimee took her hand. “Mom, we’ve known that for a long time now. It’s just new to you.” Aimee, as always, cutting right to the heart of the matter.

  Goddamn it, she wasn’t going to sit here and cry in the middle of a restaurant. Catherine held her eyes open to keep the tears from spilling out, holding on to her husband and daughter. “Yeah, I guess it is. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

  “It’s fine,” David said. “We’ll figure out the next weekend you can get away, okay? Talk to Aaron Llewellyn; he’ll find you some time.”

  With the launch of Sagittarius II just weeks away, that was going to be hard. It might have to wait until after the launch, but now that Catherine knew she could go, she wanted to desperately. She missed Nora so badly, and couldn’t help feeling that seeing someone else who knew her, someone who knew her deep down in her bones, would help her shake this feeling of unreality and disconnection.

  “Yeah, okay. Thank you.” Catherine was able to swallow the lump in her throat and smile at both of them. “I’m so lucky to have you both.” The idea of visiting Nora hung before her like a glimmer of hope, and she was going to reach for it with both hands.

  12

  “SOME THINGS DON’T change around here, do they?” Catherine sat in the cafeteria across from David on Monday, enjoying the sunshine coming through the atrium windows. “The politicking, the jockeying for the right sort of attention . . .” She nodded over to where a small group of systems engineers sat, and she could read enough body language to see a competition between two of them to get control of the conversation
—even over lunch. Conversations like that happened all over NASA. Catherine had been in her fair share of them.

  “Admit it—you missed it, didn’t you?” David teased.

  “You know, it’s weird. Yes, in a way. People in large groups act so differently from those in smaller groups. I mean, you’d think people are people, right? But it’s . . . different.” Catherine shook her head. “I guess I just mean it’s nice to be back with everyone again.”

  David smiled, then his gaze moved to a point behind Catherine. Cal Morganson stood there with a chilly smile. “Sorry to interrupt. David, can I steal Catherine for a few minutes?”

  David stood up. “Of course. Cath, you want me to wait here?”

  “Sure. I shouldn’t be long, right?” Catherine smiled curiously at Cal and stood as well.

  “No, I won’t keep you,” Cal said, still radiating ice.

  Catherine expected Cal to ask her to follow him to his office, but instead he surprised her by leading her out into the courtyard off the cafeteria.

  “Let’s walk for a moment,” he said.

  He led her away—from potential listeners, she realized. Once they were out of earshot, she asked, “What can I do for you?”

  Cal didn’t answer, uncharacteristically quiet at first. Catherine waited, curious to see what sort of game he was playing.

  Finally he said, “I was here late Saturday, finishing paperwork. I looked out my office window and saw you drive up a little after midnight. I just wanted to make sure everything was all right.”

  “Saturday?”

  Sunday morning. Her dirty feet with no explanation. Oh God. She’d been so careful, on guard every waking moment to keep from losing time again. And so it happened while she slept. She’d lost time again, and, worse than that, she’d driven herself here. And, of course, Cal Morganson had to be the one to have seen her.

  Cal was watching her expectantly, and she managed a bright laugh, her heart beating so hard it was making her feel sick. “Saturday was a frantic day. It was my daughter’s graduation party. Some of the folks here gave me cards for her and I’d forgotten them, so I came back to get them.”

  “That late?”

  Catherine just smiled at him. “I can tell you’ve never thrown a graduation party, Cal. We had dozens and dozens of people in and out of the house all day, but I worried about those damn cards all afternoon. You know how it is when you get something stuck in your head. I felt bad that she hadn’t had them to open at the party.”

  “Funny how that is,” Cal said without a smile. “But you never came up to your office. I went by to say hello.”

  “We must have missed each other. I wasn’t here long. Just long enough to pick up the cards and go.”

  “Catherine, you never went up there. I know you didn’t.” Cal was looking at her the same way he’d watched her in her last debriefing, as if he not only knew she had a secret but also knew what that secret was, and was just waiting for her to confess.

  “Cal, honestly. Why would I lie about something like that?” She tried to keep her voice calm, despite panic rising in her gut. If she hadn’t come up to her office, what was she doing here? She had an image of herself wandering mindlessly through the dark halls of JSC on a Saturday night like some sort of zombie and had to suppress a shiver. The early-afternoon sun was warm on her shoulders and she tried to focus on that, to let it ground her.

  Cal wasn’t going to give her that chance. “People lie for all sorts of reasons.” He stopped walking and looked her dead in the eye. “Catherine, I know there’s something wrong. You’re not telling us everything.”

  “Of course I’m not telling you everything!” Catherine cried, exasperated. They were going to have this argument, right here in the middle of the courtyard. Sure, no one could hear them, but plenty of people could see them, so she tried to control her body language as best she could. “Do you think I want my official record to talk about how many times I hallucinated having my daughter in the cockpit with me?” She met his eyes, feeling as if her free-floating anger and anxiety had finally found a valid target. “Do you want a day-by-day record of all the times I was certain I was going to die alone in space and that my corpse would go drifting through the cosmos forever?

  “I know something terrible happened out there, Cal. I would give anything to be able to tell you the whole story of what happened, but I can’t, because I don’t know what the whole story is.”

  “Do you want to know what I think, Catherine? I think you remember more than you’re saying.” Cal folded his arms, but she read uncertainty in his eyes, as if her words had struck home.

  “Cal, I swear to you. I don’t know how to make you believe me, but I don’t remember a single goddamn thing that happened on that planet, and it’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”

  “I’m not going to let anything put my crew in danger.”

  Catherine was struck dumb, the breath knocked from her lungs. “Do you seriously think so poorly of me that you think I’m capable of that? I care about them! Leah is my friend. I would never—”

  “Ava Gidzenko was your friend, too.” Cal let that sink in while he watched her. “If you’re hiding anything, tell me. Let me help you.”

  “There’s nothing.” Catherine felt a small tremor in her hands.

  “Well.” Cal walked them back toward the atrium. “If you change your mind . . .”

  “If I know of anything that will help, believe me, I’ll say something.”

  “Catherine, this isn’t personal.”

  Catherine, who had started to walk away, stopped and looked back at him. “You’re accusing me of harming my crew. That feels pretty fucking personal.”

  “No, I’m not saying—”

  Catherine stopped listening and left Cal behind. She was shaking inside, and trying to keep it from showing. Her thoughts ping-ponged between how dare he accuse me and oh God, he knows everything. David was still at their table, checking his phone.

  “What was that all about?” he asked.

  “It’s nothing. Just Cal being Cal.” Talking about this was out of the question.

  But David hadn’t gotten that message. “It didn’t look like it was nothing. What’s going on, Cath?”

  “It was nothing, okay?” Catherine spat.

  “Hey, hey.” David lifted his hands in surrender. “I’m on your side here, remember?”

  “Then stop pushing me, David!” A few heads turned in their direction, and Catherine leaned closer, lowering her voice. “Jesus. I get grilled enough here as it is without you joining in.”

  “There’s a difference between grilling you and just wanting to reconnect with you, Cath.”

  “I talk to you all the time!”

  “Bullshit.” David kept his voice low as well despite the vehemence of his words. “You never talk about the mission. Not to me, and not to Aimee. Believe me, she’s noticed.”

  “Don’t bring Aimee into this. This is about you. Since when have you wanted to connect with me at all about my work?”

  “What the hell . . . Where is this coming from?”

  Maybe Catherine wasn’t being fair, but why should she be when nothing else seemed fair? “We used to talk, really talk about what was going on here at NASA, about missions, about the future . . . and all that stopped the second you knew you would never be an astronaut.”

  “Come on, was I supposed to be excited that you were going to leave me behind?”

  “Excited?” Catherine laughed bitterly. “Christ, David, I would have been happy if you’d even acted interested.”

  “I’m sorry, I was too busy being interested in how I was going to raise our daughter alone.”

  “What do you want from me?” Catherine asked with deadly calm.

  “I want you to tell me what’s going on!” David was speaking through clenched teeth now. “Let me help you, for once in your life. God, some things really don’t change. Catherine the Great, able to do everything by herself, just like in trai
ning.”

  “I’m alive right now because I can do everything myself, so I guess it turned out to be a damn good thing, didn’t it?”

  They both froze, looking at each other.

  “Sorry.” David’s voice was quiet. “I’m sorry.”

  Fuck. Catherine sighed and pushed her hair back from her forehead. “I’m sorry, too.” Was sorry enough? For now it had to be. “Cal is just— he’s been on my case ever since I got back. He’s sure I’m lying about the mission somehow.”

  David had his listening face on. They were going to act like a normal couple again, it seemed. “He doesn’t think the amnesia is real?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I think he hates me.”

  “Cal’s just an asshole. Everybody knows that.”

  Catherine looked down at the table. “I think . . . I think he thinks I did something up there, maybe even something that got everyone killed.” Just saying it aloud hurt more than she expected. Frightened her more than she expected.

  “He doesn’t.” David finally reached for her hands, ducking down to look her in the eye. “I know he’s brusque, I know he asks all sorts of annoying questions, but that’s his job. He’s good at that sort of thing, getting to the bottom of problems, solving them.”

  “Well, he’s decided that I’m one of his problems to solve.” Catherine felt the warmth from David’s hands and tried to draw on it. David was trying to fix everything, the way he always did. That was a good thing. Wasn’t it? And he wasn’t wrong. Cal did look at her as if she were a problem, not a person.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about him. Most people around here see him as kind of an oddball. A useful oddball, but an oddball nonetheless.”

  She thought about the odd way he conducted himself at meetings and briefings, focused on his own information, and thought of the way Aaron Llewellyn seemed to rely on him. “Not everybody. Everyone working on Sag II takes him pretty seriously.”

  “Cath, trust me when I say nobody outside your department takes him seriously. You’ve got Lindholm in your corner, and that’s all that matters. Plus, your psychiatrist, right?”