The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  “Yeah,” whispered Delia again.

  My mother looked at me, her eyes darting back and forth, searching mine.

  “Did your dad take you out to see the launch today?” my mother whispered to me.

  Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could have been at the launch, could have seen it live and in person on NASA grounds. I was infuriated anew that, after driving out for two failed attempts, after sitting through dozens of failed attempts over the years, I had missed the only one I really needed to see firsthand.

  I got up and left the room, feeling my mother and Delia watching me go. I paused in the hallway, listening to hear what they would say about me. But neither of them spoke. I heard only the rustle of my mother’s dress as she reached out to Delia, the quiet creak as she rocked her on the couch. I stayed in my room until my mother called me in to eat. She had found some pizza in the fridge and warmed it up, and she and Delia sat eating in front of the TV. She smiled shyly at me as I sat down, a smear of grease on the corner of her mouth. I made an effort not to smile back.

  As we ate, the phone rang. Delia and I looked at each other, but my mother sprang up to get it. I could tell by her voice that she was talking to my father. She asked him rushed, breathless questions.

  “Do they think that’s what it was, Frank?” my mother asked after a long pause. Her voice was hard with fear. “Do they think it was the rockets? Your thing?” She listened for a long time, nodding. I watched her face, waiting for some clue. The worst of all explanations would be the Solid Rocket Boosters. Then my father would not only be affected, he might actually be blamed.

  “Okay,” she said many times with pauses in between. “Okay. Okay.”

  “There’s no reason to believe it had anything to do with the rockets,” my mother repeated to Delia and me once she had hung up. “It was most likely the Main Engines.”

  “It could have been anything,” I corrected. “The Main Engines, Solid Rocket Boosters, External Tank, fuel lines, anything. They really have no idea what happened.”

  “But your father said the Main Engines were most likely. He said they’ve had the most problems from the beginning, and that the way it exploded…” I could see her trying to reconstruct his exact words. “The way it exploded, it looks to him like Main Engine failure. He said if it had been the rockets, the shuttle would have exploded on the launchpad.”

  “That doesn’t really prove anything,” I said. “There are plenty of ways a rocket failure could develop after launch.”

  “Your father knows more about this than you do, D,” she said, and smiled tightly. She sat on the couch again. She looked uncomfortable, I noticed; she couldn’t change out of her work clothes. “We’ll wait and see.”

  Wait and see sounded strange in her mouth. It was my father’s phrase, not hers.

  “So how have things been at the new school?” she asked me brightly. “We haven’t really had a chance to talk about it.”

  “Fabulous,” I said quietly. It was my new favorite word.

  “Really?” My mother smiled uncertainly. She waited for me to say something more. I just glared.

  “And you’re keeping up with your classes and making friends?”

  “Yeah, everything’s great. The space shuttle blew up and now Dad will probably lose his job along with everyone else in central Florida. I don’t know where my mother lives. Oh, and I’m failing English.”

  For a moment she stared at me, horrified. Even Delia sat up to look at me. My mother opened and closed her mouth a couple of times. I knew my mother wished my father were here now, to help her respond to my behavior. He would react appropriately, angry but not hysterical. He would send me to my room, then comfort her.

  “Dolores,” she said slowly, her voice low with hurt.

  “What,” I said evenly. I’d figured it out: all I had to do was not care what she thought of me. That easily, I had undone her.

  Later, as I was getting into bed, I noticed movement in the dark. I’d thought Delia was asleep, but I could make out her standing outline, her fidgeting silhouette. I watched her hover by her bed, moving from foot to foot, trying to balance and thumping down. The voices on the TV reached us from the living room, although we couldn’t make out what they were saying. We could hear our mother’s voice as well—she was making phone calls every few minutes, murmuring with concern.

  “Go to sleep, Delia,” I hissed.

  “Okay,” she agreed, and she crawled into her bed, but I could hear her there, fidgeting and breathing loudly.

  A while later, my mother came in and crept over to Delia’s bed.

  “Hey, duckie,” she whispered. “Are you having trouble sleeping?”

  “Yeah,” Delia whispered back.

  “How come?”

  “They’re missing,” Delia said. “Are they going to be okay?”

  My mother breathed in and out before she answered. “They might,” she said, “We’ll see.” And then she sang a tuneless lullaby, just la-la-la. It was so dark I could hear the liquid clicking sounds inside her mouth while she sang.

  “Dolores said they’re dead,” Delia said. I felt a jolt at hearing my name.

  “Well, Dolores is probably right,” my mother said. “But, you know, Delia, we can hope if we want to. She’s probably right, but we can hope.”

  “Can we say a prayer for them?” Delia asked. I rolled my eyes in the dark. Delia had never set foot in a church in her life.

  “Where did you get that idea, baby?” my mother asked. Delia didn’t answer. I knew: from TV. People prayed all the time on TV, when they were worried about someone. The whole family praying together, clasping hands, heads bowed. That was the sort of thing Delia loved, just the look of it, even though she didn’t understand the meaning.

  “You can pray if you want to, Delia,” my mother said finally. “You know what? It’s good to have hope. It’s good to think positive thoughts because sometimes that helps good things happen.” It was just like the two of them, I thought, to believe that, even on a day like today.

  I woke again in the middle of the night from busy dreams, plumes of smoke rising from playgrounds. For hours I’d been hearing through sleep the strange, familiar sound of my mother’s voice, whether on the phone or talking to someone in the house, I couldn’t tell. Now all was silent; she had finally gone to bed. (In the bed she used to share with my father? Would he sleep on the couch?) I took the pack of cigarettes from its hiding place in my desk and crept down the hallway. In the living room, my mother had left a mess of food and ashtrays. I took a lighter from the coffee table and slipped on a jacket before letting myself out the front door.

  I’d thought about taking a cab to Eric’s house again—thinking of him earlier in the day, I’d become almost convinced that he wanted to see me again too—but I couldn’t risk leaving the house with my mother here. Out on the stoop, the cold air was oddly quiet. The cicadas sang their drifting song, but the usual thrum of air conditioners was missing; people had turned them off because of the cold. My fingers grew numb quickly, making it difficult to open the cellophane wrapper on the pack. I opened one edge, and the cellophane lifted off in a perfect box shape, the plastic clinging to my fingers. The top cracked open to reveal the cigarettes lined up in there, in two perfect rows, their ends snow white and marred by a few crumbs of tobacco. I drew out a cigarette slowly; it was surprisingly light, weighed almost nothing at all. Smokers somehow held them as if they had more substance to them, but the cigarette I held was light as air. I held it between my index finger and middle finger as my mother always did, as all women did.

  It took me a few tries to get the lighter to work, and even when I had a pale yellow flame, I couldn’t get the cigarette to light. I tried again a few more times before I figured out that I had to suck in at the same time. All this business of smoking was harder than it looked, and I thought of my mother’s easy gestures, the fast click of her lighter, her quick suck of breath.

  I had nearly finished the cig
arette when my father’s car pulled up slowly at the curb. He shut off the engine and turned off the headlights; I waved, still holding the cigarette, but he didn’t seem to see me. He stared straight forward, his hands resting lightly on the inside of the steering wheel. My father was gathering himself before getting out of the car, waiting for something to settle. I had never seen him do this before. He seemed to be staring at a high branch that dipped toward the street, nodding vehemently in a sudden breeze. When he finally opened the car door, setting off the dome light and a faint pinging sound, he squinted at my left hand, looking at the cigarette for so long that I looked down at it myself, curious to see what it looked like. I flicked off a bit of ash.

  “Dolores, what is that?” my father asked, his voice weary. As he stepped into the light, I saw that the bags under his eyes were heavier than usual, swollen and purplish. The skin hung on his face in exhausted folds.

  “What, this?” I asked, holding it up for both of us to inspect. “Oh, don’t worry about this. It’s nothing.” I was almost giddy. While he watched, I lifted the cigarette to my lips and took a drag. My father closed his eyes for a second and breathed a jagged breath as though the sight caused him pain.

  “D, what are you doing?” He slumped against the side of the car, resigning himself to the fact that this conversation might take a while.

  “Smokin’,” I answered happily.

  “This isn’t like you,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything, just examined the end of my cigarette and ashed carefully onto the grass.

  “Should we go in?” he asked. “It’s freezing.”

  “Mom is here,” I said. He raised his eyes to the roof for a moment, then looked back down at his shoes. He nodded, a weak nod, a gesture without any authority. She was here, tomorrow she might be gone, back to wherever she had been, and he would do nothing to try to make her stay.

  And for that, I decided to hate him. Like a key turning in a lock, I turned against my father. I dropped my cigarette into an old pile of my mother’s butts behind a bush, stamped it out with a single twist of the toe as my mother did. Once I took my foot off it, I couldn’t tell mine from hers, and that pleased me. My father nodded at it once, a nod that meant he wouldn’t say anything to my mother about this if I didn’t. We would agree to forget about it. I felt a premonition for the rest of my teenage years: whatever I did, he would find a way to absorb my hostility, cover it up. He would rather do that than have to react.

  “How did you know where to find Mom?” I asked. “Have you known where she was all this time?”

  “Your mother needs some time to herself,” he said vaguely. “I try to respect her privacy.”

  “Where is she sleeping tonight?” I asked. “Are you sleeping in your room together? Or did she kick you out of your bed?” He opened his mouth, struggling to find a response.

  “Are you just…maybe you’re just upset, D. About what happened today. And you’re just…expressing…. Maybe that’s normal. But let me tell you, D, this isn’t going to help.”

  “Why do you keep saying, ‘what happened today’?” I demanded. “Why don’t you just say ‘the space shuttle exploded’?” He didn’t react.

  “What difference does it make?” he said. “You know what happened.”

  “Not really,” I corrected. “I don’t really know what happened. I saw the Launch Vehicle explode. And I assume the astronauts are dead. But it’s not clear what happened. Maybe it was the Main Engines. Maybe it was a crack in the fuel line. Maybe it was the Libyans.” I gathered my courage before saying the last piece: “Maybe it was your Solid Rocket Boosters. Your joint rotation.”

  His eyes flicked to me for a second, and he opened his mouth as if to speak. But then he just rubbed his hand across his mouth and looked back down at his feet.

  “So no, I don’t know what happened. And how will they ever find out, with everything in pieces, burnt up on the bottom of the ocean?”

  He had nothing to say to that, and his silence scared me so much I lost my nerve. I was ready to take everything back, apologize, beg to start over. But it was too late. He had finally shut himself off to me.

  “Goodnight, Dolores,” he said, and his stooped figure behind the screen didn’t pause, but kept moving slowly, toward his bed.

  I didn’t sleep that night. I sat up paging through my space notebook again. The saddest pages were the early pictures of the first test launches, my childish handwriting and childish enthusiasm. Launch attempt delayed, I’d written. And, Judith Resnik became the second woman in space. And, We met a reporter from Ohio. And, I saw this launch with my father, Eric Biersdorfer, and Mr. Biersdorfer, the Director of Launch Safety. And, My father took me to this launch. Every launch was there, every astronaut to fly, every mission objective. Every time I made my way through the notebook, it was a surprise to turn the last page and find the picture of the seven Challenger astronauts, wearing their sky blue suits and smiling hard, looking for all the world like they were alive and well, up in space and playing a joke on us all.

  After the Disaster

  19.

  WHEN I WOKE UP, THE HOUSE WAS QUIET. AT FIRST I FELT ONLY a vague impression of worry, but then I remembered that Y in the sky. The memory of it had the weird power of a dream, as did everything I remembered from the day before—my mother’s face glowing in the light of the TV, Dr. Schuler’s working jaw, the cackling kid on the bus, the chunks of grass under me where I had crouched, dizzy.

  I got up and stumbled out to the living room. Delia sat at the kitchen table, quietly crunching cereal. When she saw I was awake, she picked up a note from the table and held it out to me, its ink bleeding in places where she had dripped milk onto it.

  Dear D and D, it began.

  My mother’s handwriting showed that she had been agitated when she wrote it, the blue pen clenched in her fingers so hard her knuckles were stiff and drained of blood. My mother had always had trouble writing, even simple things like notes or lists; her words looked wrong to her written down; she got frustrated and forgot what she wanted to say. Delia looked over my shoulder, mouthed the words of the note as I read, but didn’t speak them.

  I was so happy to get to see my precious girls last night.

  I am going to be away for a bit more and I hope that you can understand. Take care of each other and I’ll see you just as soon as I can. Love and kisses to you both,

  Mommy.

  I read the note again. Her handwriting looked different on each line, sometimes cursive, sometimes print.

  “Where did she go?” Delia asked after a while.

  “Shh,” I said. I was still reading, though by that time I had already read the note through four or five times. Away for a bit more. My precious girls. The last word was strange; we had never in our lives called her Mommy, only Mom. It seemed in her hurry to leave us again, she didn’t quite remember us, only a vague impression of children.

  “But she came back,” Delia pointed out with a faint note of protest.

  “I know,” I said. I understood how she felt. When a mother goes missing for six months and then comes back, we assume she’s come back for good.

  “She was only here because of the explosion,” I said. “She only came back because it was an emergency.”

  “Oh,” Delia said.

  But where was she now? The more time that had gone by, the harder it was to keep her in any of the places I had chosen for her—hotels, motels, the Biersdorfers’ spare room—none of it actually made any sense. And now that I’d seen her, remembered the specific sound of her voice and planes of her face, now it was even harder to imagine where she might be.

  When Delia and I walked outside to catch our school buses, we found that the air had warmed ten degrees. We smelled the dirt smell of thawing, a spring smell. I wondered whether Eric was smelling this smell right now too, whether he was on his way to school and thinking about whether Challenger might still be fine if his father had decided to wait one more day. There was a weir
d Saturday feeling in the air, as if it wasn’t really a school day, and I was almost surprised when the bus pulled up. The long ride to school was unusually silent; kids acknowledged each other with quick nods, then sat together without talking.

  At school it was the same—everyone moved through the halls quietly, their conversations hushed, the words Challenger, McAuliffe, NASA muffled in their mouths. Everyone offered theories and dismissed theories with equal conviction.

  “They said it wasn’t the cold.”

  “But how could it have not been the cold?”

  “Except they wouldn’t have launched if the cold was a danger.”

  “I heard Greg Jarvis’s father had a heart attack when it happened.”

  “I heard the Vice President is here.”

  “They should have sent the President.”

  “It had to have been the External Tank. All it would take is a breach in the wall and a spark. The thing is like a huge bomb.”

  “Sure, but no one’s talking about how easy it would be to trip the remote self-destruct. All you’d have to do is crack the code.”

  I went to my locker and spun the combination. The familiarity of the motion comforted me. The scratched army green surface of the steel, the deep click when the lock disengaged, the way the door shivered in its hinges when it first stood open. My things, inside, just as I’d left them the day before. My limp jacket, unread books, crumpled old homework papers, all of them innocent of the disaster.

  Tina and Chiarra came up behind me.

  “My mother said I looked like a whore this morning,” Chiarra drawled, examining herself in the magnetized mirror in my locker. She ran a fingernail under her eye, removing a green smudge. Then she turned to us and clapped her hands together in a businesslike way.

  “Okay. So what have you guys heard about the accident? Tina?”

  “Well, my dad was on telemetry?” Tina started. “He works in Launch Control. He wasn’t watching the monitors right then, so he didn’t know that anything had gone wrong? Some guy was, like, yelling, ‘Where’d it go? Where’s the bird?’ But my dad didn’t get what they were talking about? Because the telemetry was normal.” With her finger, Tina traced the normal trajectory of the shuttle through the air, a gentle skyward lift.