The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  Toward morning, as we sat in the pool chairs behind his house holding hands, we talked about the disaster again. I told him what I had done, about my call to Rick Landry; I told him about the long fall, about the napkin and the joint rotation, about his father’s attempts to blame the workers at the Cape. Eric listened quietly, taking everything in and staring at the pool. I watched his profile, waiting for some change in expression.

  He shook his head. “I can see why you think this whole thing in the news happened because of what you did,” he said carefully. “But it didn’t, necessarily. The same information could have come from another source at the same time.”

  “That would be an awfully big coincidence, don’t you think?” I asked. “The same information on the same day coming from two different sources?”

  “Well, if you think about the number of people who know stuff, the amount of different kinds of information, it’s possible. It probably happens all the time,” Eric said. “Like Watergate. Those guys at the Washington Post broke the story, but there was another reporter at another paper who was figuring out the exact same thing, just a few days behind. It probably happens all the time.” Part of me felt annoyed that Eric couldn’t just be impressed by something I told him, that ever since we were little, he had never just said, Oh, really? or Wow, I didn’t know that. He always had to have a new interpretation, something I hadn’t thought of.

  But at the same time I found it comforting that Eric could hear my story and imagine that I wasn’t to blame. I almost felt absolved.

  “Thanks, Eric,” I said.

  “For what?” He dropped my hand to scratch his nose. Then he flashed a smile at me as he took my hand again, that smile I’d seen as we snuck into his father’s study. It seemed all I’d wanted all along was for that smile to be for me.

  Eric drove me home near dawn, and I watched him drive, the easy swing of his arm as he turned the wheel.

  “Maybe we can meet again tomorrow,” he said as he pulled up at my house. “Or maybe Saturday.” I felt a thrill of anticipation for the days to come when I could see Eric and know he wanted to see me too. It seemed we could do whatever we wanted now.

  As I climbed out of the car, I didn’t notice at first that our house was the only one without a newspaper on the stoop, the only one with a light on in a living room window. I had become so accustomed to sneaking out at night, I was capable of silence, and so as I unlocked the front door and stepped in as quietly as I could, I didn’t cry out when I saw a hulking human shape on the couch. My father.

  He must have woken up and found me gone. Or maybe I had made some sound on my way out. Maybe he had lain awake in his bed fighting the impulse to get up and check, and when he finally did, he must have been horrified to find me missing. Now he’d been sitting here in his pajamas and robe, drinking coffee and waiting for me to return.

  He stared at me for a long time. My father had never yelled at me, and I knew he wouldn’t yell now. I looked back at him, at the exhaustion etched into the lines of his face, the faint stain on the lapel of his pajamas where he had dripped coffee on himself.

  “Where in God’s name have you been?” he asked, only once it was clear that I wasn’t going to speak.

  “With my boyfriend,” I said. A terrible silence ticked by as my father stared at me. “I’m sorry,” I added lamely.

  “With your boyfriend?” my father repeated. “Dolores, you are thirteen years old. Who is your boyfriend?”

  And what would my father say, I wondered, if I spoke the name Eric Biersdorfer? His wife lost to the father, his daughter lost to the son. I would have happily said it a month or two ago, just to watch his reaction. Just after the disaster, I would have announced it without hesitation, looking for a way to hurt him. But not now.

  “Josh Fitzgerald,” I said. My father thought for a second, scanning his memory for the name.

  “That accountant we saw testify? His son?”

  I nodded.

  “How old is he?”

  “Seventeen, I think. He’s a senior.”

  My father winced and shook his head.

  “I had no idea,” he said. “What would your mother think of me? I do the best I can with you girls, I do the laundry and feed you and drive you where you need to go, and meanwhile my thirteen-year-old is sneaking off in the middle of the night with a boy who is nearly an adult.”

  “You shouldn’t worry what she would think,” I told him. “This is more her fault than yours.”

  “Don’t say that,” he said. Even now he was trying to defend her from any criticism.

  “Do you know where she is?” I asked.

  He looked at me, confused. “Who? Your mother? Not at this very minute.”

  “No, I mean—do you know where she’s staying? Since she left us?”

  He nodded. “Of course. She’s staying with Carol. Her friend from work.”

  “Did you know that all along?”

  He nodded again.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was never a secret,” my father answered.

  The image of Mr. Biersdorfer’s broad white back as he sat across from my mother came to me, the jingling of the ice in his glass.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. After months of never apologizing to him for anything, now I couldn’t stop. The truth was that he didn’t know what my mother’s relationship with Biersdorfer had been, and I didn’t either. Maybe she had left us to be with him, and maybe she hadn’t.

  “She just wants to be wanted,” I told him. “Maybe if you just told her that you really want her back.”

  My father smiled sadly, the kind of smile he gave Delia and me whenever we asked him for something unreasonable. I knew he was about to end this, tell me everything was all right, tell me to go to bed. “It’s very complicated,” he said. “It’s not that simple.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said. “But…do you love her?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s none of my business.”

  “No, it’s not,” my father said. “But I do. I do love her, very much.”

  I stood alone in the living room for a few minutes after he went to bed, then walked around turning out the lights. He’d said that it was complicated between him and my mother, that it wasn’t that simple. But wasn’t it? I wondered as I climbed into my cool bed, listening to Delia’s soft snores. I knew that some things were complicated—I’d learned that, I thought, as well as any adult. But weren’t some things, in fact, that simple?

  The space notebook stayed at the bottom of my desk drawer under a dictionary. I’d stopped adding to it or studying it, though new articles about the flaws in the Solid Rocket Booster design kept appearing every day. Now my desire to know all the details seemed childish anyway. I thought of telling Eric what I’d learned when I saw him that night, that people can’t hurt you if you decide not to care what they think. But it occurred to me he’d just nod and say, Of course. He’d known that all along.

  I rode the bus home the next afternoon, sitting alone although the bus was crowded. I watched the trees through the scratched school bus windows, and I was moved by the way something so ugly could make everything outside look so beautiful: the shiny green leaves lit up white by the sun; the smudges of people dressed in white, pink, blue; hanging Spanish moss like brushstrokes. The bus stopped at my corner, and as I climbed down the three steps, I sensed something different about my house—it held itself tensed, pulsed slightly with energy, the way Columbia had seemed to glow with fate as it stood on the launchpad at the very first test launch. The way my house had looked so different from the others the night my mother and I had walked, swinging our two hands between us. I fit my key into the door, and I swear I was so prescient then, so sharpened by all that had gone before, I knew already what I would see. The door creaked open slowly to reveal my mother’s battered plaid suitcase, her kicked-off shoes, and her limp jacket over a chair. And in the middle of the room, the pillar of
my two parents, just as I remembered from when I was a tiny girl and used to put my two hands on their knees to stop them, my two parents standing in the middle of the living room, in the middle of their house, embracing.

  Epilogue

  ISTILL THINK ABOUT THAT O-RING. I’VE LEARNED THAT IT WAS manufactured in 1985 in Brigham City, Utah, cleaned off like a newborn, inspected and measured and inspected again before being packed and shipped to Florida. That O-ring made an American journey by railway, across deserts and mountains, across the width of the American South to arrive at the coast of central Florida on October 11, 1985, at the marshy wildlife refuge, the improbable spaceport. There it waited to be unloaded into the Vehicle Assembly Building, unpacked and reinspected and remeasured and reinspected again, by Frank Gray. By my father.

  I can see my father turning that O-ring back and forth across his square fingers, peering at it through his square glasses. In the moments when I have hated my father most, this is how I have pictured him, so fixed in his concentration, his gaze so focused he is nearly blinded, looking for flaws but missing the point. When I have loved my father most, I picture him this way too.

  After my mother came home, she was different; being away from us had changed her. She seemed more solid, more sure of herself, as if she too had grown up during those months she’d been gone. Sometimes I’ve wanted to ask her where she was, just to know whether any of the scenarios I’d imagined for her had been accurate. Sometimes I’ve wished we could go through my memories together piece by piece like photos in an album, so she could explain to me what each image had really meant: Mr. Biersdorfer watching her at the dinner party, our mysterious trips to the strip mall, our midnight walk. When I was younger—when I was as young as I’d been before she came back—I would have pursued the truth relentlessly. But now I could admit to myself that this was one truth that didn’t need to be exposed. Everything I’d suspected might have been true, or she may not have been with Biersdorfer at all. And nothing would be changed if I never knew.

  In June, the presidential commission released its findings. The technical cause for the disaster was found to be a burnt O-ring; the larger cause was faulty management. Mr. Biersdorfer resigned as Director of Launch Safety and took a job in Colorado, moving his family with him. Eric and I wrote letters for a few years, but we never saw each other again. My father, to everyone’s surprise, was cleared of wrongdoing in connection with the failed Solid Rocket Booster, but he was laid off again anyway, for the last time, along with thousands of workers at Kennedy.

  The details of the astronauts’ deaths are only alluded to in the commission’s report, buried in an appendix. What Doug had told me was true—partly used emergency oxygen packs had been among the debris found in the crew cabin. NASA had recovered the tape of crew communications from the cockpit and, miraculously, experts had been able to restore the tape despite its being soaked in seawater for months. To this day NASA will not release the recording or a transcript, citing the privacy of the families.

  I read those pages in the report over and over that summer when my father brought it home, analyzing the language for some glimmer of the long fall. The reality of the astronauts’ deaths is neither present nor absent, neither confirmed nor denied. We are asked simply to look away. Most people today have no idea that the seven of them survived the explosion.

  On January 28, 1986, seven astronauts are awakened at 6:20 A.M. exactly. They eat their breakfasts together, steak and eggs. They are served a cake before the photographers, smiling so hard they grit their teeth. They climb into their spacecraft, wait for the countdown, and finally launch. The feeling of launching cannot be described. They tear into the sky.

  The first thing that happens after the explosion is a blinking light and buzzer alerting the pilot to a drop in cabin pressure. As they have been trained to do, they activate their emergency oxygen packs. Mike Smith cannot reach his, so Judith Resnik, seated behind him, reaches forward to switch his on. They all breathe. They have six minutes of air. Five men and two women, all in the prime of health, sit strapped into their seats, breathing, refusing to panic. They have been trained to respond to malfunctions, accidents, and emergencies of every kind with calm and logic. And so it is with calm and logic that they scan their sensors and readouts to understand what has happened.

  Attached to nothing, the crew cabin flies free, trailing its comet tail of wires and hoses. So powerful was the thrust exerted by the two rockets and three Main Engines that the crew cabin continues to climb. They travel skyward for another sixty long seconds. After the unbearable noise and vibration of the launch, then the crushing pressure of the explosion, this quiet is a relief, a blissful silence except for the distant hiss of wind. The cabin sails smoothly and silently, still traveling up and up, pointing its nose at the clear cold sky.

  Then there is a moment of equilibrium, of weightlessness. The women’s hair lifts, their bodies rise against their seat restraints. Just for a second, they feel the weightlessness they had anticipated and trained for. They float. It seems that they could go anywhere they want now. It feels as though they are finally free.

  Then, slowly, gravity gathers itself in their stomachs; then, gradually, they begin to fall.

  The front-heavy cabin points its windows at the ocean. At first they are still so high up—over eight miles—that the sea and sky are indistinguishable, the coast they left not three minutes earlier a fuzzy green and brown map. They can easily make out the Cape, that strip of land from which every American astronaut has been launched.

  They have plenty of time to think. They fall for so long that falling starts to seem a natural state of being; they start to feel that they could live normal lives this way. They have time to observe the blue of the bright sky separate itself from the blue of the wide blue Atlantic. They don’t panic, not one of them. They have time to review what they will miss most about being alive. Those with children will miss their children; those with loves will miss their loves. They already miss the simple pleasures of this mission they had trained so long for, so looked forward to. The simple pleasure of hovering by the window, watching the turning world.

  They also think they will probably survive this. They remind themselves of the fact that every single American astronaut on every mission has returned to Earth alive. Experimental orbits, unstable rockets, multistage moon shots. Every one! Why should they be different? They consider the spectacular redundancy of NASA safety: surely someone has anticipated the minuscule possibility of this situation and created a contingency plan. That plan is, at this very moment, being activated in Houston or at the Cape. Their minds reel with the possibilities—parachutes built into the crew cabin, as they were on Apollo capsules? Ejection seats? Thrusters to dampen their fall? In the time they have, they can imagine quite a few. Even as the water draws close, as the waves develop wavelets, whitecaps, birds, the astronauts do not panic. They are not dying; they can’t be. They feel fine. In fact, they feel wonderful, full of energy and optimism. They have never felt better.

  They fall for two minutes and forty-five seconds, longer than anyone else has ever fallen unfettered. They have more time to contemplate their impending deaths than anyone ever to feel the acceleration of thirty-two feet per second per second. But—and this is the odd thing about falling—no matter how far they fall, no matter how long they wait and how certain they are now that no parachute, no net, nothing can save them, in the moment just before impact, they are still perfectly whole, breathing, living, and in that state it is impossible, impossible, to believe in their own deaths.

  Acknowledgments

  ALTHOUGH THIS NOVEL IS BASED ON TRUE EVENTS IN NASA’S history, all of the main characters and their actions are fictional.

  Several books were especially important to my research for this book. Claus Jensen’s No Downlink, Richard Feynman’s What Do You Care What Other People Think?, and Gene Gurney and Jeff Forte’s Space Shuttle Log all provided important details. Diane Vaughan’s The Challenger Launc
h Decision deserves special mention for changing my thinking about the cause of the disaster.

  Special thanks are due to my professors and classmates at the University of Michigan MFA program. While I was a student, this book, then a novel-in-progress, was the recipient of a Hopwood award; I’m also grateful to the English department for funding a research trip to Florida and to the Davis family for their hospitality.

  For their wisdom, good humor, and tireless efforts, I’m indebted to Julie Barer and Marysue Rucci. I’d also like to thank my friends and family for their love and support.

  And finally, most of all, thank you to Chris Hebert, who is on every page.

  About the Author

  Margaret Lazarus Dean was born in 1972. She grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and received a BA in Anthropology from Wellesley College and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor.