Atmosphere: A Love Story By Taylor Jenkins Reid - 35

In August, NASA was hosting the Bicentennial Balloon Meet. Joan had called and asked Barbara if she could take Frances to see some of the balloon launches.

“Sure. Can I come, too?” Barbara said.

“You want to come with us? It’s just a picnic at JSC.”

“Yeah, I want to see what you do. Where you work.”

“Oh,” Joan said. “Yes, I would love that.”

When Joan got off the phone, she turned to Vanessa. “Barbara wants to come.”

“Well, that’s nice, right? She’s trying. I feel like she’s been nicer to you lately.”

Joan considered it. “Yeah, she seems happier, I think.”

Joan had met Daniel. She’d joined Barbara, Frances, and him out for dinner one weekend. When Joan had shown up in the parking lot of the restaurant, he’d taken off his ten-gallon hat and put it to his chest as he shook her hand and smiled. Joan noticed that he was about ten years older than Barbara, hair graying at the temples. He seemed perfectly nice, albeit arrogant in exactly the way Barbara would confuse for confidence.

“Well, she’s getting laid consistently, so that’s probably it,” Vanessa said.

Joan shook her head. “Would you stop?”

“Still such a prude,” Vanessa said as she kissed Joan’s neck and dragged her into the bedroom.

Joan did not know what to expect that evening, but then, when she met Barbara and Frances at the main parking lot at JSC, she immediately spotted the giant diamond ring on Barbara’s finger. She decided not to say anything.

“Hey, babe,” Joan said to Frances.

Frances was nine now and had taken on an air of maturity that Joan both celebrated and mourned. There was no sitting on Joan’s lap anymore, no smushing their noses together, no carrying Frances across a crowded parking lot. Those things had been replaced by talking about pop music, and wanting to see a lot of the same movies, and less being asked of Joan in the taking care of her.

When Frances had been younger, Joan would sometimes carry her such long distances that it hurt her back. Back then, Frances would hang on so tight that sometimes she would press on Joan’s windpipe or kick her in the ribs. Now Frances would barely hold her hand.

Joan felt, so acutely, that the incurable problem with life was that nothing was ever in balance. That she could not have toddler Frances and fifth-grade Frances at the same time. She could not meet adult Frances and have a moment to hold baby Frances all at once. You could not have a little of everything you wanted.

Joan tried to remind herself that when Frances had been younger, she had held Frances’s little hand every single chance she got. When Frances had been a baby, she had smelled her hair sometimes for whole minutes at a time. She had been present for all of it. Didn’t that mean that she would not grieve its loss, since she had voraciously and self-indulgently taken all of it that was offered?

No. It did not.

She still ached for every version of Frances.

But to love Frances was to be always saying goodbye to the girl Frances used to be and falling in love again with the girl Frances was becoming.

She missed every Frances she had known. But oh, this Frances. This lanky, gangly, whip-smart Frances, with her ears pierced and a Cyndi Lauper T-shirt on, this Frances was a gift Joan would one day miss, too.

“This is how they used to launch astronauts into space,” Joan said as she pointed to the Mercury-Redstone on display. “This was the rocket that launched the very first American in space. And this one”—she pointed to the Saturn V—“launched the first astronaut to the moon.”

“Neil Armstrong,” Frances said.

“That’s right.”

“Are you going to the moon?”

Barbara cut in: “Joan is doing something even more important.”

Joan looked at her.

“One day, she is going to go into low-Earth orbit and put up a satellite or a telescope—or something else that is going to help everyone learn about our universe better.”

Joan was taken aback. She had not told Barbara any of that.

“We’re very proud of Auntie Joan,” Barbara said.

“Of course we are!” Frances said.

For a moment, Joan couldn’t speak.

“We should get going,” she finally said. And then: “Thank you both. That means a lot.”

The grass was packed, but Joan found them a spot a ways back, far from the action, so they could relax and talk. There had been heavy rain for weeks, but tonight was clear and dry.

Joan put a blanket out on the lawn. She rolled up a sweatshirt and used it as a pillow for Frances. Barbara sat down with her legs to the side and covered herself with the skirt of her dress. They watched the sun begin to set.

“Two hundred years ago, in France, the first man flew. He went up in a hot air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers. It was made out of paper, but it was pretty similar to the ones they have on the ground over there.”

“Wow,” Frances said.

Joan told neither of them that some of the balloon teams had asked members of the astronaut corps to accompany them in the air, and that Vanessa had eagerly raised her hand. So only Joan knew that Vanessa was just off in the distance, preparing to go up.

“And here is something else,” Joan said to them. “This is commemorating twenty-five years of spaceflight, too.”

“Like what you do?”

“Like what I’m trying to do. But there are a lot of us astronauts, and we all want to go. There’s only so many spots at a time.”

“You will get picked one day,” Barbara said. “I bet it’s soon.”

Joan had long known that if you’re unhappy, it’s hard to watch other people be happy. So it stood to reason that the opposite was true, too. That if you were happy, you wanted others to be happy alongside you. This was the only reason Joan could think of for why Barbara suddenly seemed so immensely proud of her.

If that was the case, then maybe Barbara had been right. She had needed to set up her future with Daniel in order to take care of the people around her. In order to be her best self for Frances.

“Thanks,” Joan said. “I hope so.”

Barbara inhaled sharply. And then she held out her hand for Joan to see. “I’m surprised you haven’t congratulated me yet,” she said.

Joan looked at the ring and pretended to see it for the first time. “Oh, my God, Barb, it’s gorgeous.”

“Thanks—it’s five carats.”

Joan did not know much about diamond rings, except for what she knew about diamonds themselves. Which was that scientists had long thought it was possible that there were diamond-like minerals on other planets. In fact, in 1967, a substance named lonsdaleite was discovered in the Canyon Diablo meteorite in Arizona—a fragment of an asteroid that had struck Earth—and it is theoretically harder and purer than any diamond ever known.

Which meant that the rock used in Western civilizations to express romantic love and steadfastness was not the strongest material in the universe, but merely the strongest thing humans had ever found on Earth. The hardest, strongest thing humans knew of at the time.

Language is what allows us to communicate. But it also limits what we can say, perhaps even how we feel. After all, how can we recognize a sentiment within ourselves that we have no word for? And perhaps, Joan thought, science is the same. Even the way we tell one another we want to live alongside them is limited by what we understand is possible in the world. What more could we say if we knew more about the universe?

“I’m happy for you,” Joan said. “I know this is what you wanted.”

“He’s a really good man,” Barbara said.

Joan nodded. “I believe that. And I’m thrilled to hear it.”

“What are you talking about?” Frances asked.

“I’m getting married, honey,” Barbara said to her. “Daniel and I are getting married.”

“Oh.”

Joan squeezed Frances’s hand, trying not to let it show on her face that she was stunned that Barbara had not told Frances all of this before, at home, just the two of them.

“He’ll be your stepdad. We are all going to be a family. And we’ll move in with him. Into his big house with the pool—remember when I brought you over there?”

“I’ll have a pool?” Frances asked.

“You’ll have everything you ever wanted,” Barbara said, rubbing Frances’s cheek with her thumb.

The balloons started to lift, one by one. “Look!” Barbara said. “There they go!”

There was a red-and-yellow one, one with blue and green stripes, and a few were rainbow-colored. They all started to lift.

Vanessa had said she would be in the American Express balloon, but Joan couldn’t quite make out which one that was. And so, as they all began to take off, Joan felt thrilled by each one lifting, all of them potentially holding Vanessa. If she was not exactly sure where Vanessa was, then Vanessa was everywhere.

“You know, Frances, it took us one hundred and twenty years to go from a man in a hot-air balloon to the invention of the airplane,” Joan said. “But then only fifty-eight years to go from the first airplane to the first man in space.”

Barbara looked at her.

“I’m reading a book about the Wright brothers,” Joan said. It was the closest she could come to saying to Barbara, I love a pilot.

“Well, then imagine what we will do in the next fifty-eight years,” Barbara said, smiling. She started French-braiding Frances’s hair as they watched the sky.

Joan looked up. Vanessa was in the air somewhere. And if Joan was looking up, trying to find Vanessa, it stood to reason that Vanessa was looking down, trying to find her.

“Wow,” Barbara said.

“I want to fly,” Frances said. “Someday.”

“Then someday you will,” Joan said.

“Who knows,” Barbara told her. “Maybe one day Daniel will buy you a plane.”

“I can’t wait until you get assigned to a mission, and I can tell everyone at school that my aunt is going to space,” Frances said.

As the hot-air balloons floated above their heads and the sun had set and the stars dared to come out, Joan grabbed Frances’s hand. It was not as tiny as it had once been, but it was still so small compared to hers. Frances was still so young. Joan could not wait to meet the adult she would be, but also wished she could pause here, in this moment, forever.

Joan kissed the top of Frances’s hand. “I’m glad you’re both here,” she said.

And then she bent her head back and looked up at the sky with the wonder of someone who’d never seen it before.

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