Dare Mighty Things

by Heather Kaczynski

  I closed my eyes, just for a second, letting her words wash over me. I wished I could take them inside me, etch them on my rib cage.

  She tapped on the plexiglass and smiled. “Brought you a present.” She clicked open the box inside the partition and dropped in something small with a light ting. Ten seconds of sterilization to remove any virulent germs, and the light on my side turned green.

  I picked up the tiny metal thing, examining it. It was a thin silver cuff, a ring, stamped with a pattern of dots and stars. In a moment, I recognized it, and felt a grin nearly split my face. “The constellation Leo?” On the back was a tiny black stamp of Leo’s symbol, a circle with a little tail coming from the top.

  Mitsuko looked pleased with herself. “For you, my little lion girl, to remember who you are.” She said it low and spooky.

  “How did you know my birthday?”

  “I’m sneaky like that. Or I looked you up when I got home.”

  I slipped the ring onto my finger and shouldn’t have been surprised that it fit snug. “How did I get so lucky to have met you?” I asked.

  Mitsuko winked. “Michael’s always saying that.”

  She and I shared a smile.

  “I’m so glad you came. I didn’t think you would. I thought . . .”

  Mitsuko inclined her head, conceding the point. “Yeah, well. I didn’t want that stinking astronaut job after all. Pay’s shit anyway. Turns out I’d rather eat empanadas at home with the hubby and watch that shit on the internet.”

  I laughed and it hurt. Those muscles were underused these days. “No hard feelings?”

  “Cass. Would I have flown here at the last minute if there were?”

  Thankfulness filled me to the brim.

  Emilio had taken to shoving her lightly on the shoulder with the toe of his sneaker, apparently impatient for his turn. She sent him a dirty look and stood. “You’d better come see me when you get back, or I’ll hunt you down.” She pressed her palm against the glass, waved, and then she was gone. Nothing left but a fading handprint.

  Emilio grabbed the handset and held it up to his ear. He wore a red T-shirt and ripped jeans, and he still had the single stripe of hair down the middle of his scalp. He’d gelled and spiked it, dyed some of the tips red. To look at him, you probably wouldn’t think he’d been chosen as one of the elite minds of his generation. You’d probably be telling him to stop skateboarding on your sidewalk.

  He cradled the phone in the crook of his shoulder. “Funny, I always knew I’d see you like this one day” were the first words out of his mouth.

  “What have you been up to?” I asked, eager for some taste of a life outside these walls.

  “Oh, you know. Got a new job.” He paused for effect. “At NASA. A contractor job in Houston, actually. Should be fun. Might even get to work behind the scenes on your mission at some point.”

  Doubtful, but I widened my smile anyway. “Reassuring. So you’ll be close to Mitsuko?” I felt a little pang. They’d all be together, and I’d be lifetimes away.

  “Yeah, same town, not far away. We came down here together. We’ve been so busy that we don’t get to hang much, though.”

  Jealousy began biting at the heels of all those good feelings.

  And then, over his shoulder to Mitsuko but loud enough for me to hear: “Shit, you got her a gift?” Emilio sent her a wounded look, then shot me a wicked grin. “Just kidding. I got you something, too.”

  He fished a small pouch out of his pocket and dropped into the box in the wall something so light it hardly made a sound.

  A souvenir patch from the STS-87 mission—Kalpana Chawla’s first spaceflight. Shaped like a space helmet, it was half earth, half space, with the Columbia shuttle forming the border between them. I traced her name along the edge of space.

  “I saw it at the gift shop,” Emilio said, a little sheepish. “I thought it might be something sentimental for you to have. I don’t know if that’s, like, stereotyping you or whatever.”

  If I’d looked at Emilio right then, I might have cried. “No, it’s perfect. I love it.”

  “I hoped you would.” His voice took on a rare note of sincerity. “Take that up there with you. That way I can feel like maybe a part of me is going, too.”

  “That all of us are going,” Mitsuko added loudly.

  I nodded, hugged their gifts between my hands. “I will. I promise.”

  There was silence. I collected myself and found him gazing at me, his forehead against the glass. Since he was sitting on the counter he was above me, looking down. “I promise this isn’t me being weird or anything. But I love you. I know we’re not, like—you know, whatever. I just want you to know that. As a friend. You and Mitsuko, too. We went through some shit back there, and I’ll never forget it. Just—you know what I mean?”

  I knew what he meant.

  My parents’ flight had been delayed, and they arrived a few hours after Mitsuko and Emilio had gone.

  Saying good-bye to them—for the second time—made me feel empty and smarting, like my soul had been ripped out from the inside.

  I didn’t know how to say good-bye to my family. I feared it might just kill me.

  My parents entered side by side, obviously fresh from the red-eye to Florida. Then Dadi, the lines of her face deeper than I’d remembered, her hair seemingly more gray. My uncle, hair standing up from where he’d messed with it, one cheek still red from where he’d fallen asleep in the plane. Both my parents looked drawn and tired, as though they hadn’t slept for weeks, their clothes wrinkled.

  They’d come straight from the airport. Hadn’t even stopped at the hotel to change.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said into the phone. That’s as far as I got.

  My mom cried. I cried. Not for myself, but because I realized what she had gone through to let me go.

  She’d walked through fire to bring me, her only child, into the world. Only for her to leave it, literally. And possibly forever.

  My mom couldn’t even speak. She just cried into the phone until Dadi took it from her, gently, and held it to her ear.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, choking back sobs.

  “Cassandra Harita Gupta, you do not apologize to anyone for following your heart,” Dadi said, her rich voice strong and steady. “Your mother understands. We all understand. Now you listen. You will be safe. You will go into the universe and you will come home to us again. Understand?”

  I nodded, tears trailing down my cheeks and prickling in my throat. I could not let myself look at my mother and her tearstained face. If I did, I would walk away from everything I had worked for and never look back.

  Dadi placed the handset gingerly on the table, and with her spindly brown fingers reached up to her neck and unclasped the necklace she wore. She dropped it into the receiving bin that crossed the barrier between us. After a flash sterilization procedure, the box opened on my side.

  Confused, I reached in and retrieved the necklace my grandmother had been wearing, still warm. My hand closed around the charm. The warmth from the stone made it seem alive in my palm. Her pendant of Ganesh, carved in alabaster soapstone.

  The familiar elephant-head god smiled at me with enigmatic black bead eyes. His twisting trunk curled up around his head, human hands held out, open at his sides, welcoming.

  The remover of obstacles.

  It was as much a part of Dadi as the smell of her hair.

  Dadi’s voice was tinny and narrow over the old phone line, and I longed to crawl through it and bury my face in her shoulder, like I had when I was a kid and life overwhelmed me. “My mother gave that to me when I got married,” she said. Her eyes were shining. “From her hands, to mine, to yours.” Her knobby finger jabbed upward. “Now to the stars.” Mom, beside her, had mostly stemmed her own tears but was pressing her lips hard to keep them at bay. They both gazed at me fiercely, as though trying to memorize my face.

  I smiled tearfully and squeezed the pendant in my palm.

  Uncle Gauresh
leaned over Dadi and said, “See you when you get back home.” Then my father finally lifted the phone to his ear, gazing at me silently behind his old-fashioned glasses. He tried to speak but only swallowed thickly, over and over.

  My mother leaned in close to hear my voice and my father held it out for her to share.

  “Why didn’t you guys write me?” I hadn’t planned to mention it, but the words escaped anyway.

  “Oh, Cassandra,” my mother said, taking the phone. “We did, we did. I never received anything back. I thought that you were just too busy to respond.”

  I swallowed back a fresh wave of tears, not letting them surface.

  “I can’t believe I am letting this happen,” she said.

  “You know this is what I want,” I whispered.

  My mom nodded, her eyes swollen.

  “This is ridiculous. Everything’s going to be fine,” I said, though my quavering voice betrayed me. “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. You’ll see me in the news. In history books. No one will ever forget our name. Don’t worry. You’re going to be really, really proud of me.”

  Those were the words I’d practiced saying in the mirror in the bathroom four hours ago. But now they just felt rehearsed and ominous.

  My mother’s expression was a wreck, but her voice was steady. “I was already proud, my darling. Always proud.”

  “I’m coming back,” I promised, meaning to be unafraid and confident, and almost pulling it off. “Don’t cry, Mom, you’re making me cry. This is happy, remember?”

  I tried to drink them in, all crowded around the phone like that, loving me so much that they’d hopped on a plane with almost no notice in order to see me, behind glass—not even able to touch—for less than an hour. Hunched over a phone for a last chance to hear my voice.

  They had made me who I was—literally. Wherever I went, there they would be, too.

  When they left, I felt lighter. Unbalanced. Like I’d been carrying a heavy weight for so long, I didn’t know how to drop it. I felt unmoored, unstable, like gravity had become treacherous.

  Now I could truly put all earthly things behind me. No unfinished business. No good-byes unsaid. No regrets. This was what they’d told us, anyway—the NASA experts, the psychologists.

  If only it were true.

  I was already in my pajamas when the intercom buzzed again. Another visitor? At this hour?

  Luka, I thought, with a spark of nervous hope. But that spark quickly died.

  Hanna stood in the visitors’ room, wearing a cardigan and khakis and holding her purse with both hands like a shield. It was way after hours. She should’ve left for home ages ago.

  I hadn’t seen Hanna since entering quarantine. Hadn’t expected to see her. Had thought her part in this to be over. We shared a long look through the glass.

  She picked up the phone on her end and motioned for me to do the same. Up close, I could see the heavy makeup that she’d used to hide dark circles under her eyes. Mr. Crane must be working her to the bone. Or she was working herself.

  I could hear the soft puffs of her breath hitting the receiver. Her eyes locked with mine as she kept me in suspense. “Luka wanted me to tell you something.”

  An iron fist grabbed on to my stomach and tugged. I had to try twice to get my voice to come out. “What? When did you talk to him?”

  “That last day, after the party for the board members when you interfaced with Sunny for the first time. He could see the writing on the wall. Wanted me to pass on a message, in case they didn’t let him say good-bye. Guess they were in a hurry to get this show on the road.”

  “And . . . ?” My entire chest cavity was being crushed now.

  “That he doesn’t regret anything, and neither should you. And to keep your promise.” Her eyes glinted, trying to read meaning in my reaction. I gave her nothing.

  “And there’s something else. Something he wanted you to have. God knows what it is.” She opened up her purse and dropped something in the sterilization box between us.

  I opened the box and pulled out a warm piece of black ivory. It took me a moment to place what it was—familiar but strange on its own, a thin rectangular prism the length of a finger, mounted in silver as though it were a paperweight or some other decoration.

  A piano key. Where would he have even gotten something like that?

  My throat closed around a sob.

  I pressed my lips together.

  “I’ll be watching out for you on this end,” she said. “Good luck. Godspeed.”

  “Thank you.” Then, as she was about to hang up the phone: “Could you do one thing for me, maybe?”

  Her hand stilled, waiting.

  “If there’s any way you could find Luka—I mean, if he’s left the country it’s probably impossible to track him down now. But if SEE has kept up with him, maybe, could you get him a message for me?”

  Her eyebrow perked up. “I can try. What do you want me to tell him?”

  “Just that I . . . I kept my promise. And I intend to tell him that in person, when I come back.”

  I couldn’t sleep. How could I?

  NASA astronauts had usually been allowed to take a small bag, called a Personal Preference Kit, of keepsake-type things with them into space. I was allowed less than a pound and a half for my PPK, and nothing electronic.

  I hadn’t brought much in my luggage that I’d want to take into space. I’d already put in a picture of my family and a scrap of paper with Beethoven’s Sonata op. 106 I’d jotted down from memory.

  I held the Ganesh pendant in my palm, feeling its little but significant weight. Felt the echo of my great-grandmother—a woman I’d never met, but whose blood ran in my veins—and imagined the familial line of my ancestors, the mitochondrial DNA that stretched in an unbroken chain of the women who’d made me, all the way back to the beginning of human life. I carried the echoes of the past with me and within me.

  Emilio had been the first person to befriend me—not just the first person here, but the first ever. He’d sat down beside me by chance, and hadn’t left my side since. My first impression of him had been so awful. Luka, too, I realized. And Mitsuko. Maybe Hanna most of all.

  I’d made snap decisions about all of them and been wrong.

  I had thought I was above them. That other people would distract me, compete with me, get in my way. Without my friends, I wouldn’t be here. I had fulfilled the promise to my mom after all.

  I brought the pendant up to my lips and kissed it. “Thank you,” I whispered. Emilio had been right—he was the remover of obstacles, but Ganesh also placed obstacles in the paths of those who needed to be made humble.

  I put Ganesh and the piano key in my PPK, along with the rest of my mementos from home.

  Finally, there was nothing left to do but wait. I lay awake for hours, counting each as it passed.

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember what it had been like to kiss Luka. Had that actually happened? It had been over so quickly, and I’d never gotten a chance to talk to him after.

  Luka was my only regret, the only question left unanswered. Where was he? Was he thinking about me? What did he think about me? I imagined him in some faraway room, sitting awake like me, tortured by what he didn’t get to say. I hoped he didn’t blame me for taking his spot. Somehow I didn’t think he would.

  But why didn’t he come say good-bye?

  I was never going to find out.

  I checked the clock.

  T-minus twenty-four hours.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “ALL SYSTEMS ARE go for launch. Over.”

  Strapped in, on my back, looking straight up into the sky—if the sky were a curve of metal instead of atmosphere, and the twinkling status readouts from the instrument panels were stars.

  We’d been sitting here for two and a half hours already, going through endless rounds of safety checks, but to me it had felt like nothing. I had no fear, just an urgent desire for liftoff.

  Okay,
so maybe there was a little fear.

  The official line was that we had only a certain window of time for the launch, to coordinate with local weather patterns and the gravity well of the moon—that was the reason for the night launch. The launchpad was lit by so many stadium lights it was like a hundred miniature suns bearing down on us, but outside of the pad was utter darkness and quiet.

  Night launch meant secrecy. Obviously they weren’t going to be able to keep the noise a secret, but as long as no one saw the ship, they could pass it off as a routine satellite launch.

  I’d been to a few launches as a kid. This time there were no crowds in lawn chairs and bleachers to watch. No press conference. No press at all. Only one picture of the crew before takeoff. The official photographer showed it to us after he’d taken it, and no one was smiling. There were no mission patches, no names on suits.

  In all the launches I’d ever been to, the mood had been excited, jubilant. Command and crew spoke over the radio conversationally, spoke as friends, used nicknames and call signs.

  This was entirely different. No one was joking to try to lighten the mood. Everyone was somber, resolute. Maybe they were summoning their bravery.

  We pulled up to the launchpad. I saw the ghostly white form of the Odysseus for the first time, lit like a massive metal angel in the darkness.

  It was shaped roughly like the old space shuttle—aerodynamic, like a plane or a bird. But these wings were short, stubby, rounded. The hull was smooth and unblemished except for a few NASA insignias on the wings. The middle was elongated and bloated, like a huge egg that the ship had swallowed whole. That was the habitation module, where five HHMs waited to insulate us for the long journey. The egg could detach and become an escape pod in an emergency.

  The entire ship was encircled by a thick white ring, like a halo of steel. The Alcubierre drive. Which, according to hypothesis, could bend reality and take us to another star.

  It was glowing faintly, the shining surface reflecting the bright lights of the launchpad. White vapor was emanating from the boosters like the breath of a sleeping dragon, shrouding Odysseus in a veil of dissipating fog. It looked mystical, magical. Like something from another world.