The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  At night I kept myself awake in the dark listening for sounds of arguing in their room. When I heard murmuring, I strained to make out the words, imagining that he had finally confronted her about the times she said we were shopping, about some sign that she’d known about the job before he had. But the volume of their talk never increased; I never heard crying or yelling. Soon the talking would stop and the house took on the humming feeling it had when everyone in it was asleep but me.

  In the silences, my imagination could work more freely: I thought they must be whispering horrible things to one another, or packing up for one of them to go. Delia and I might wake in the morning to find one of them gone for good. But in the mornings they were always both still there, wearing their normal puffy morning faces, doing their normal morning things.

  My father took me with him to the Cape for the next launch, STS 51-F. The launch was delayed an hour and a half due to a computer problem, but my father and I were good at waiting. We brought food, drinks, books to read. We listened to the radio. I no longer felt the old dread that something might go wrong; by now I had seen so many flights take off safely, it no longer seemed so dangerous. I secretly looked for Eric, sensed that he might be just behind me at a launch, just outside my peripheral vision. Of course, I knew he would be in the VIP stands with his father where we had sat for the launch of 51-D, nowhere near the public viewing area where my father and I parked. While we waited, my father charmed a man from Ohio with a red beard by telling him that more astronauts had come from his state than any other. He told the man to look for NASA to really come through in the next year, that 1986 would be a breakthrough year for the space shuttle, that there would be more launches than ever, including the Teacher in Space mission. If the shuttle could launch enough satellites, he said, it might even be able to pay for itself. My father began a detailed description of the fee structure for cargo on the space shuttle, which the man with the red beard seemed to find fascinating. He was dressed in jeans and a white dress shirt; he was sweating profusely. But he seemed happy to be talking with my father. He nodded seriously as my father gestured at the Vehicle Assembly Building. After a while, he pulled out a little notebook and took notes.

  “What’s that gravel path?” he asked my father, pointing toward the horizon.

  “That’s the crawlerway,” my father answered. “Once the Launch Vehicle is assembled, it rolls out to the launchpad on a crawler, like a tank. I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of it. They used the same ones for the Apollo spacecraft. That’s the path the crawler uses.”

  “They have to build it with special gravel,” I told the man. “So it won’t get crushed.”

  “That’s right,” my father said. The man smiled down at me.

  My father went back to telling the man about the cargo planned for upcoming missions. He was so engaged in his conversation that he barely paused for the final countdown and liftoff.

  “Cleared the tower,” my father observed as the Launch Vehicle passed the top of the launch tower. “Right now is the most dangerous time, because the Solid Rocket Boosters can’t be shut off. If something goes wrong with them, there’s nothing anyone can do.”

  The man from Ohio didn’t take his eyes off the rising Launch Vehicle, but he cupped a hand behind his ear to show my father he was still listening. My father narrated the whole sequence of events, as he had done with me when I was little—the Solid Rocket Boosters dropping off, the External Tank separating and burning up in the atmosphere.

  When the applause had subsided, people around us began packing up. The man from Ohio kept watching with us as the tiny point moved up in the sky. The speakers crackled a volley of alarmed-sounding talk. I understood only one term: ATO. Abort to Orbit.

  “What happened?” the man from Ohio asked my father. I looked up at him too. This had never happened before.

  “One of the Main Engines must have failed,” my father said reluctantly. “When one shuts down too early, the spacecraft can still reach orbit, but a lower one than planned.”

  “Is it dangerous?” the man from Ohio asked.

  “Oh no,” my father said. “It’s one of the things they plan for.”

  I looked up at my father again, surprised. It wasn’t like him to misstate the facts, and it was certainly a misstatement to say that an Abort to Orbit wasn’t dangerous. Just the fact that a Main Engine had failed—a first—opened up a new world of possible disaster.

  “Could I get your number?” the man from Ohio asked a few minutes later, when he was ready to leave. “In case I have any more questions?”

  “Sure!” my father shouted, then patted himself down showily. The man produced a pen, and my father scribbled our number on the back of a scrap of paper. The man handed my father a card.

  “You can call me too,” he said. “In case you think of anything else. You know, about the abort.” He waved goodbye as he made his way back to his car. I squinted at the card as my father slipped it into his wallet: Rick Landry, Cincinnati Observer.

  “Reporter,” I said. My father grunted. I wasn’t sure whether he’d known that all along, whether the man had mentioned that he was a reporter at some point when I wasn’t listening.

  “Will the shuttle really be able to pay for itself next year?” I asked.

  “Could be,” my father said. We sat in standstill traffic for a long time, and while we waited he told me about a problem with the Solid Rocket Boosters, the joints between the parts not fitting right. My father was still high from the attention the man from Ohio had paid him. So many times in the past few weeks, I’d tried to lead him to the truth about my mother and Mr. Biersdorfer, but today I wanted him to remain innocent. I listened while he talked and talked about his work.

  There was a long line of cars waiting to get out of the Space Center, and when we reached an intersection my father turned left onto an empty street. He gave me a wink, and I realized we were heading toward the Vehicle Assembly Building, the first time I would see it since his rehire. The VAB had not been open to the public since 1980, when the first solid fuel was used, because the fuel was toxic. The tour buses now disgorged their contents into the parking lot, where visitors gawked at the building from afar and took in statistics—nearly four Empire State Buildings could fit within, if sliced up; Yankee Stadium could be installed atop the VAB with an acre left over for parking.

  My father proudly presented his badge to a guard at the door, then hooked his thumb at me.

  “My daughter,” he said, and gave the guard a hopeful look, a what-do-you-say-buddy look. “She wants to work for NASA when she grows up.” I watched him, fascinated. I wasn’t used to my father putting on a performance like this, trying to appeal to a stranger, the way my mother would.

  The guard moved his eyes from my father to me. I stood up tall. Luckily, I looked old for my age. The guard gave my father a conspiratorial smile and nodded.

  “You stay close to your dad, now,” the guard said sternly. I nodded obediently, blushing. “Don’t let her get near any of that area where they’re working with solid fuel,” the guard warned.

  “No, we’re just going to walk through,” my father said. “We won’t get near anything.”

  But the solid fuel was exactly what he wanted to show me. Once in the building and away from the guard’s gaze, my father led me right up to the rockets, let me get close enough to smell the grease and propellants. We stepped back to take in the spectacle of the External Tank mated with the Solid Rocket Boosters for 51-I. I stood with my head tipped back to see it, tipped back farther and farther, until I noticed, far above us, hanging from the ceiling, a spread white form, huge. An Orbiter, supported by a yellow lifting sling, hung from a beam. I had been in the Vehicle Assembly Building many times before, but I had never seen anything like this. The name was spelled out on the side in letters as tall as me, black letters on white tile: Discovery.

  “Pretty impressive-looking, isn’t it?” my father ask
ed. I nodded. I was trying to think of something else to say when my father said, “You can see where the explosive bolts attach.”

  I looked at my father out of the corner of my eye. He didn’t have his head tipped back as far as I did; he was still looking at the rockets. I could tell he was about to begin explaining to me how the explosive bolts worked, whether I wanted to hear it or not. I wanted to get a closer look at Discovery, but to my father, the rockets were the only important part of the system; that was what he had brought me here to see. He would never understand that the Orbiter, the part that carried the astronauts and the payload, the part that came back to Earth, was the only part anyone really cared about. The Orbiter was what I pictured when I thought about my future and what I saw in my dreams. I turned away while he was still gazing up, hands jiggling the change in his pockets, a satisfied look on his face.

  We took an elevator up to one of the moving platforms so we could see the explosive bolts more closely. The platform was fifteen stories off the ground, and I walked up to the edge, only a chain preventing me from falling.

  “Careful,” my father said. He pointed out a small sign near the metal bars that attached the rockets to the External Tank. It read: CAUTION: EXPLOSIVES.

  “If those bolts don’t give right when they’re supposed to, the SRBs would burn up in the atmosphere with the External Tank,” my father explained. “And that would be a waste. At the same time, they can’t come off too easily, because if they came off before the shuttle reached orbit, well, that would be real bad, as you can imagine.”

  “They would crash and die,” I said.

  “Well, the Orbiter wouldn’t reach its orbit.”

  “They would die,” I said again.

  “They could do an RTLS,” he said, then snuck a sideways look at me.

  “Return to Launch Site,” I said. “Turn the Orbiter around and glide in.”

  “That’s right,” he said, rubbing my shoulder blade.

  On the way home, as we waited for our lunch at a family restaurant, he told me more about the joint rotation problem he’d mentioned in the car, the impingement and erosion. He drew a diagram on a napkin with a ballpoint pen. As he talked, he kept adding to the diagram, shading things in, labeling. He sipped his coffee as he worked.

  “So at ignition, when the fuel starts to press out, here”—he drew a few quick arrows on the inside of his rocket in the drawing—“the joint rotates like this, instead of like this.”

  He held his two hands together in the air, his fingers touching, to demonstrate how the connection between two pieces of the rocket bent outward rather than inward, as they had been designed to. “So when the hot gas pushes against the joints, it gets into the cracks, just for that millisecond. That’s called impingement. And when the gas actually scorches the O-rings, that’s called erosion.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “Could be,” he said. “Theoretically.” He still held his hands up, the fingertips touching each other. A shaft of sunlight hung in the air over our booth, lighting up the dust particles, lighting up half of my father’s face. It was a compliment to me, I knew, that he was telling me about the impingement and erosion, and not the man from Ohio. Mr. Landry was a civilian, a taxpayer, one of the people whose impressions of NASA must be carefully manipulated to emphasize the positive, a message of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. But I was an insider. I was one of the privileged.

  “I think you’d be good at this kind of thing,” he said. He blinked up at me expectantly. I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “Do you like this kind of thing?” he asked, gesturing at the napkin. “Solving puzzles? Figuring things out?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said. I didn’t see what the drawing on the napkin had to do with solving puzzles.

  “Did you know that you got the highest scores in math on the standardized tests in your school?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. How would I have known unless someone told me? He was silent for a moment, letting the information sink in. I felt not pride exactly, but a sort of satisfaction, a pleasant warm weight in my chest, at the idea of being the smartest.

  “Your scores were in the ninety-ninth percentile,” he said. “Do you know what that means?” I shook my head no.

  “That means that if you rounded up a hundred kids from all across the country at random, one of them, at most, will be as good at math as you.”

  He looked at me for a response. I struggled to keep my face blank. I thought about beating out those ninety-nine kids for a spot in the astronaut corps. My father was proud of me, not just for doing well in school, but for the hope I implied for the future. He hadn’t had the money to go to college, so he’d had to settle for being a technician rather than an engineer. But I would earn scholarships. I would set myself apart from the others.

  “They’re starting a new Gifted and Talented program in the school district,” he said. “Have you heard about that?”

  “No,” I said. I wondered how it was my father knew something about my school that I didn’t know yet.

  “The program will start in the fall. Some of the students will skip ahead and take classes with higher grades. I spoke to your principal, and he agrees that you could start at the high school next year, at least for science and math.”

  “High school?” I repeated. “But that’s in a different building.”

  “Well, it’s only across the street,” my father pointed out. “You might still take some of your other classes in the middle school. We’ll see how it works out.”

  I’d often daydreamed about changing schools as a way to escape Elizabeth Talbot, but the fantasy had been hopeless; without going to a private school, which I knew my parents would never be able to afford, there was no other school to go to. But here: high school. A daydream I hadn’t even thought to dream.

  “Starting this fall? Like, a month from now?”

  “That’s right,” my father said. “Of course, it’s completely up to you. It depends on whether you think you can handle the work.”

  In my mind, I walked out the front door of Palmetto Park Middle School and crossed the street to the high school. Elizabeth and Jocelyn and Abby ran to the windows to watch me go, and the rest of our class clustered behind them. The wave I gave them was affectionate, a bit pitying. I saw myself walking through the hallways in the high school, my hair French-braided, wearing lip gloss. By the time Elizabeth and Jocelyn and Abby got there the following year, I would have already made friends and wouldn’t need them anymore. I would be Gifted and Talented. I would have a quiet maturity to me; people would be drawn to it.

  “I’d have to leave my friends,” I said. I wanted to seem reluctant, to be talked into this.

  “Well, it might be a hard adjustment,” he said, clearly quoting something the principal had said to him. “But sometimes you have to make a decision. Sometimes you have to decide what’s more important to you, your friends or your education.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. He gave me a satisfied smile and went back to his coffee. Somehow that had decided it. Before we left the restaurant, I took the napkin with my father’s drawing on it and put it in my pocket. We rode home together in amiable silence.

  As I always did, I cut out all the newspaper articles about the launch we’d seen and wrote up a summary in my notebook.

  STS 51-F, Challenger.

  Launch attempt July 12 aborted 3 seconds before launch due to malfunction in a Main Engine.

  Launch July 29, 1985, 5 pm.

  Five minutes, 45 seconds after liftoff, the number one Main Engine shut down prematurely, causing an Abort to Orbit. Challenger still reached orbit, but one lower than planned. This is the first abort after liftoff and proves there are still major problems with the Main Engines. If that engine had failed 30 seconds earlier, Challenger would have had to attempt a Transatlantic Landing abort and try to land in Zaragoza, Spain.

  On this flight, the crew did a “Carbonated Beverage Dispenser Evaluation.” Coke an
d Pepsi both wanted their drinks to be chosen for future space shuttle missions, but the astronauts said that both tasted bad because they were warm (no refrigeration on the space shuttle) and fizzed excessively.

  We met a reporter from Ohio who was covering the launch for his paper.

  My father took me to this launch.

  10.

  MY MOTHER DROVE UNEVENLY, SMOKING AND LOOKING IN THE mirror at every red light. She was wearing a new outfit, a short purple skirt that fluttered around her knees and a white blouse. It was so hot that my mother’s curls had already collapsed. We both fanned our thighs with our skirts.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I told you,” she said. “I need to run some errands.”

  “What kind of errands?”

  “A few different things,” she said distractedly. “Different places.”

  She pulled down the visor and grimaced into the mirror, checking her teeth for lipstick.

  “Why did you get dressed like that?” I asked. “Are you meeting someone?”

  She sighed loudly.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do this to me today,” she said in a quiet, defeated voice. “I don’t know how you decide which days to hassle me, but could I please put in a request for not today? I’ve just got too much to deal with.”

  I wanted to say Mr. Biersdorfer’s name then, just to see how she would react—just ask her, point-blank, whether she was going to meet him. But there was a limit, it seemed, to how bratty I was willing to be.

  She turned into the parking lot at the strip mall and pulled up at the curb instead of parking. She took the car out of gear but didn’t shut it off; she opened her purse and handed me two twenty-dollar bills.