“That’s not for sure yet,” my father pointed out. “But even if it was the SRBs that caused it, Deborah, the design was to blame, not the assembly. Not the work I did.”
This wouldn’t mean a thing to my mother, I knew. I heard the soft static of her exhaling into the phone.
“Do you see that they’re setting you up to blame you,” my mother said quietly, more of a statement than a question.
A long silence went by, with only the faint sounds of static and breathing. The sharp intake of breath on my mother’s end of the phone was the sound of her smoking. That sound made me crave a cigarette too, to feel that quick dirty gasp of maturity.
I hung up the phone as quietly as I could and sat on the couch. I felt sorry for my father; he loved talking to the investigators, and now my mother was spoiling that pleasure for him. I imagined him being called into a series of offices and asked to describe, over and over, what he did when assembling that booster joint. He could go into as much detail as he liked—the more detail, the better. My father was packed tight with information about his job: triumphs, complaints, stories that would take background explanations in order to understand the explanations. I thought again of the way he’d talked to the reporter from Ohio we met at the launch of 51-F, the pleasure it had given him to explain what he knew. My father spoke to the investigators on the clock, but he would have done it for free. He never would have thought to try to protect himself.
Meanwhile, his wife was with the Director of Launch Safety. And if she was with him, she might have access to information that we didn’t. For the first time, it occurred to me that she had probably been with Biersdorfer the night before the disaster; he had probably confided his worries to her in bed, told her about all the delays and the pressure to launch the Teacher in Space mission. She had probably pursed her lips at him soothingly, told him everything was going to be okay, wearing the peach nightgown that was missing from her room.
I sat for a long time, until I was sure that my father had hung up and gone to sleep. Then I called a cab, put on a sweater and a jacket, took my cigarettes and house keys, and looked in on Delia—she was sleeping on her side, her mouth open. I locked the front door carefully behind me before I slipped out. This time I knew just where I was going and how long it would take. After the cab dropped me off and pulled away, I went straight around to the poolside, to the same wrought-iron chair I had sat in before. In a square window adjacent to the back door, a warm yellow light illuminated a single head: Livvie’s. She moved slowly through the kitchen from left to right, then she stopped and moved back again in the other direction. I found it calming to watch her finish straightening up in the kitchen; then that light snapped off too, and I was alone.
I sat in their back yard for a long time smoking, watching the dark and closed house, the blank brick face of the Biersdorfers’. The serene movie-set lights on their landscaping, the impassive heaving of the pool. Every few minutes a car drove by, and every time I waited for its sound to slow and stop, but it never did.
Suddenly the back door opened. The screen door hung ajar for a moment. I couldn’t see who was there because the doorway was in shadows. The screen closed again, and for a second I thought I must not have been spotted. But then a tall stooping figure crept down the three steps to the poolside, stepping carefully with his long feet turned sideways on the stairs. Eric emerged into the light slowly, still holding the screen door with one hand, leaning forward to peer at me. He was at least a foot taller than the last time I had seen him, but unmistakably Eric, his new lankiness dressed in a pair of cotton pajamas and a down vest.
“Dolores?” he whispered loudly.
I felt that everything up to that moment had happened just to allow me to come here. Not only the phone call I had eavesdropped on, but even my mother’s leaving—even the explosion itself—had occurred for no other reason than to guide me here, to this back yard, in the middle of the night, so I could see Eric again.
21.
ERIC WASN’T WEARING HIS GLASSES. HE MOVED TOWARD ME and stopped about three feet away, still leaning forward to get a better look at my face.
“Hey,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “You’re about a foot taller.” He looked embarrassed, as though I’d pointed out something disgusting he’d done. He must be looking at me the same way, I thought, cataloguing my differences. I must have grown too; maybe my hair had changed color, my face restructured like his. I wished I could see myself as he saw me then, to know what I really looked like.
“How did you know I was here?” I asked.
“I heard that chair scraping on the concrete,” he said. “You’re lucky my mom didn’t wake up and call the cops.” His voice had not exactly deepened but had somehow widened; it sounded slightly trumpety.
“Do you think she heard?” I asked.
Eric shook his head. “I listened a few minutes outside her door. I don’t think she woke up.”
Eric shivered and pulled his vest tighter around him. I expected him to ask me what I was doing here, but he just looked out over his back yard.
“Is this pool new?” I asked. “I don’t remember it being here.”
He looked at it disdainfully over his shoulder. “Yeah. It was my mom’s idea. She thinks my father should swim every day, for his heart. She talked him into having the pool dug, but she can’t talk him into using it.”
Eric lifted another chair and set it silently on the concrete next to mine. He sat and crossed his legs ankle over knee. In the light of the pool, I could see him more clearly. I had forgotten that his face was lightly dusted with freckles, that he had a large freckle just under his left eye, an orange dot along the eyelash line. That he had pores amazed me, that he had hair on his face—not real facial hair, but fuzz on his cheeks, thick, like a bee. I was surprised by the reality of him, by the very face-ness of his face, its tiny details.
“It’s a nice pool, though,” I said. “It’s pretty.”
“It’s obscene,” he said. “It’s bad enough we live in a house big enough for twenty people and there’s only four of us.” He looked over at me, as if noticing me for the first time. “How did you get here?”
“Took a cab,” I said.
“A cab?” he repeated. “All the way from your house to here?”
“Yeah. It’s not that far.” I decided not to mention that I had been here before. “Actually, I got the idea from you. Remember?”
He gave me a puzzled look.
“You told me once that you took a cab to run away to your old school.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t know, you didn’t say. I guess you wanted to run away, and that seemed like the best place to go.”
“No, I mean—why did you come here?”
“Oh. That.” I ran my thumbs along the arms of the chair, which were shaped like ivy curling around a branch. I considered telling him the truth—that I thought of him all the time, that when I wasn’t thinking of him, I was thinking about the affair between my mother and his father. I wondered how much of this Eric might know. Probably nothing.
“I…I just wondered what you thought,” I stammered. “About the accident and everything.”
“I don’t use the word accident,” Eric said a bit imperiously. “That term implies that no one could have possibly seen this coming, that it was completely unavoidable. Accident means it was no one’s fault.”
“Your father used the word accident,” I pointed out. I’d seen him quoted in the paper. “And he’s the Director of Launch Safety.” Mentioning his father gave me a little shiver. I had started to feel that I had made up Mr. Biersdorfer.
“He did?”
“He said something about ‘this tragic accident.’”
“I’ve only heard him call it a ‘tragedy.’”
“What has your father told you about Challenger?” I asked.
“He hasn’t been home much,” Eric said. “I don’t know what he thinks it was. I assume he couldn’t tell me eve
n if he knew.”
“He hasn’t been home? Do you know where he’s been?” I leaned forward, waiting for some crucial piece of information about my mother to drop.
Eric gave me a look. “Well, he’s been at work. He’s been at NASA.”
“Right,” I said. How could Eric know where his father had been? “What about disaster? Do you like that word better?”
Eric considered, then nodded. “Disaster is a better word. Though it still has some implications of bad luck rather than bad decision-making.”
“What do you think happened?” I asked him.
“Whatever it was, it was probably something simple,” he said. “It was something small and normal and routine.”
“I think it was the cold,” I announced. I wanted to be on record as having predicted that correctly.
“Is that what your father thinks it was?” Eric asked.
“No. He wants it to be the Main Engines, because that way he and his whole department will be blameless. He’d be happiest of all if it was hit by a meteor.” I had never talked about my father this way before, so judgmentally. But saying it made it seem true. Eric was quiet and looked at me gravely.
“Well,” he said. “It’ll come out in the end.”
“What’ll come out?” I asked.
“The truth,” he said.
I remembered his father and mine sitting in my family’s living room, talking about problems with the backup flight system, laughing, assuming that everything broken would always be fixed.
“I was thinking of you when it happened,” Eric said. “I was wondering if you still wanted to be an astronaut.”
Nobody had asked me this, not my mother or father, not Dr. Schuler. I wondered now whether they assumed that I still did or that I didn’t.
“Of course I do,” I said. “Of course I do.” Even knowing the risk, seeing that risk vividly illustrated in the sky, what else was there for me to want? What other fantasy could I fantasize for myself to get me through these long years until I could leave the Space Coast?
Eric was gazing back at me steadily, curiously. In the time that we had been separated, I had always imagined Eric this way, talking with me, leaning toward me, waiting with furrowed brow as if what I had to say were more important to him than anything else. He looked away and watched the surface of the pool.
“I thought of you too,” I said. “I wanted to see you.”
“Why?” he asked, furrowing his brow. “I never wanted to be an astronaut.”
“I know. I just thought of you.”
“I still sneak out sometimes at night,” Eric confessed. I knew he had heard what I said. “I go out to the Cape—you know, to the viewing area, and sit in the stands.”
“You mean where we sat for that Discovery launch?” I asked. He nodded.
“Even when there’s nothing going up?”
“Sure. Sometimes you can see the stack on the pad, all lit up. Challenger was out there for a long time, because of all the delays. Most of the time there’s nothing out there at all.”
“You just sit out there?”
“Sure. It’s nice. You can hear the alligators.”
I felt a shiver of recognition for Eric then, for his type of daring. For most people, a stunt like trespassing at the Kennedy Space Center in the middle of the night would be intended to impress others, but if Eric did a risky thing, it was for no other reason than that he wanted to.
“I’ve missed you,” I said, and the words reverberated in the air, embarrassing. I wasn’t sure why I’d said it. It sounded fake, but it was true.
Eric looked at me for a long time with his steady gray eyes. The pool lapped quietly.
“I don’t really like you, Dolores,” he said, his brow furrowed. “I don’t trust you. Do you understand that?”
“Sure,” I said. And I did understand. “But you’ve missed me anyway, right?”
I had wanted to speak with Judith Resnik’s voice then, to feel her daring, but this wasn’t her voice. I tried to think of whose it was—not Chiarra’s, not Elizabeth Talbot’s. Then I heard it, felt it in my throat: it was my mother’s. This was how she must have felt when she did this, offering herself to men, trying to cajole them into wanting her, this desperate flirting gesture. Maybe she had said such things to Mr. Biersdorfer, maybe feeling the way I did at that very moment: Watched by a man with both desire and judgment; trapped into doing something that he could scorn. Trapped into doing something so that he wouldn’t have to.
“Yeah,” Eric finally admitted. “I guess I have missed you.”
He reminded me so much of himself in seventh grade. He spoke so much the way Eric would speak, his words, his pauses, his expression. I felt nostalgic for everything I’d forgotten about him.
We didn’t say much more, just sat watching the back of his house. We didn’t talk about the disaster, or about our parents, or about what I’d done to him in the seventh grade. I thought about his body, how strange it was that he wore his tallness in exactly the same way he’d worn his tininess when we were younger. When it was time for me to go, Eric lifted a long bony hand that both resembled and didn’t resemble the Eric hand I remembered lying between us on the back seat of his parents’ Oldsmobile, on the way home from a shuttle launch a long time ago, and waved goodbye.
I got home at dawn and snuck in before anyone was awake. I opened my notebook and pulled out the picture of the astronauts again—I still had the feeling that the picture held some sort of evidence if I could just find it. But something was missing: something I had forgotten to think about.
I knew right where that paper napkin was, stuck into my science folder from seventh grade. I found it quickly: a diagram in ballpoint pen, labeled and cross-hatched, drafted carefully months ago. Most of the words were unfamiliar—CLEVIS, PRIMARY O-RING, SECONDARY O-RING, ZINC CHROMIUM PUTTY. The entire diagram was neatly labeled SRB FIELD JOINT with the date, 7/29/85, in my father’s square handwriting. My hands trembled as I studied it. The napkin seemed to glow with the force of evidence. I could show it to people, and they would pay attention to it, take it seriously, and believe they were being shown something secret and therefore significant. I hid it in my notebook and went to sleep.
22.
AS SOON AS I GOT HOME FROM SCHOOL THAT DAY, I WENT FOR the phone book before I lost my nerve. The Biersdorfers’ number was listed.
“H’lo?” Eric mumbled on the first ring. It sounded like he had something in his mouth, his voice flattened and altered by the phone’s speakers. I’d never spoken to him on the phone before. He said hello again before I could gather my voice.
“Eric? Hey, it’s me. Dolores.”
Then there was a silence, an oceany emptiness that reminded me of my parents’ conversation the night before.
“Uh—hi,” Eric said eventually.
“So,” I said. “You didn’t get caught last night, did you?”
“What? Oh…no, I don’t think so,” Eric said. “I’m pretty sure no one woke up.”
“Good,” I said. “I would feel really bad if you got into trouble for hanging out with me in your back yard.”
Eric was quiet again, except for a faint sound that might have been him chewing.
“Is that why you called?” he asked. “To find out if I got in any trouble?”
“Well, also to see if you wanted to get together again.”
“Oh,” Eric said. He didn’t seem to feel any need to answer.
“I wanted to show you something,” I said. “If you can meet.”
“What is it?” At least he sounded curious.
“Oh, I’ll wait until we see each other,” I said coyly. “It’s pretty top secret.”
Eric breathed loudly into the phone.
“I don’t think I can,” he said. “I mean, where would we go? We don’t really have any way of getting together.”
“Well, we could meet at the mall,” I suggested. “We could both get rides there. Or maybe take cabs, if we didn’t want our parents
to know.”
“The mall?” he repeated, in a tone that suggested that he had never been there and would never go under any circumstances. “Why don’t you just tell me what it is you want to show me?”
“You know what?” I snapped. “Never mind. I’ll show it to someone else.” I spoke in what I hoped was a chilly tone and not a babyish whine.
“Okay,” Eric said neutrally. “’Bye.” The sound of the phone hanging up on his end was slow, a series of muffled clicks as if he were having trouble getting the receiver to stay on the hook. I held on at my end, listening, until the dial tone broke in, moaning its steady indifference.
I watched the salvage operation continue on TV that night, the ships with cranes on them pulling torn pieces of the shuttle out of the ocean. I watched a long flank of the Orbiter being hoisted up through the surface of the ocean, sheets of gray water reluctantly pouring off, its black heat tiles soaked and warping white at the edges. It was daunting to see, impressive in a way completely different from watching a shuttle launch. The piece of ruined broken ship, huge as a whale, dangled from metal cables. And where were the astronauts?
The presidential commission investigating the accident held its first televised hearing, much to the delight of my father and me. We watched it for hours, both of us making an effort to be companionable, nodding at each other’s remarks. The hearing took place in a large room, the commissioners sitting on two tiers, nameplates on the tables identifying them. The witnesses—managers and engineers, mostly—spoke into a silver microphone, explaining slowly and carefully everything they knew about Challenger. The chairman, William Rogers, asked most of the questions, but the commissioners all felt free to interrupt the witnesses to ask follow-up questions.
While my father and I watched, a thin man with light red hair testified. He wore a dark suit and sat back easily, toyed with a pen, paused for a long time before answering each question. He clearly felt himself to be immune; I immediately hoped he would be blamed for something egregious and be fired. The witnesses I had seen who looked nervous, looked sorry, wiped their brows, and hunkered forward into the microphone—those men I sympathized with and assumed were telling the truth.
The Time It Takes to Fall Page 25
