Atmosphere: A Love Story By Taylor Jenkins Reid - 41

Joan and Vanessa were at the Outpost with Donna, who was going to have the baby any moment.

“How are you feeling about liftoff?” Donna asked Joan.

Joan downed half her beer. It was wild to think there was a time when she did not look forward to the taste of an ice-cold beer.

“Are you scared?” Donna said.

“Me?” Joan asked.

“Yeah. It’s only six weeks away. I know all the men say they aren’t scared to go up there, but I think they are lying. And I think you’ll tell me the truth.”

Over the past few weeks, Joan had become intensely aware of the fact that she was getting into a spacecraft attached to a massive fuel tank and two solid rocket boosters that were alarmingly delicate. If anything went wrong, she might never touch land again.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think I’m scared.”

“Being scared is . . . the rational response,” Vanessa said.

“I’m scared,” Donna said. “I don’t even have my assignment yet. But I’m scared.”

“I’m scared, too,” Vanessa said.

Vanessa’s mission had been scheduled for two days after Christmas. And as it got closer, her training had picked up rapidly. She and Joan were used to going weeks without seeing each other. Now sometimes they couldn’t even talk on the phone.

Joan found it hard to remember how to be that alone. Without Frances. Without Vanessa. She’d taken up running again. It had not been helping much.

“But I also feel ready, ” Vanessa added. “I guess I feel like I’m ready to face whatever it is. I’m ready to pay whatever price is asked of me. I’m scared, but I’m ready.”

“Courage,” Joan said. “You have courage.”

She looked at Joan and smiled. “I guess I do.”

Joan held her gaze for a moment too long, smiled a little too earnestly.

Donna stared at them. When they snapped out of it—when Joan finally saw Donna’s face—she could see that Donna was holding back a smile. Donna had a brightness in her eyes that Joan interpreted immediately.

Donna knew.

Donna knew and she had, perhaps, long known.

And she didn’t care.

Donna sipped her club soda and bitters as she glanced at the two of them. Suddenly Joan felt as if her heart were so swollen it might burst open.

Donna knew! Donna would love Joan anyway, would love Joan still, maybe had even loved Joan because.

Joan was safe with her. Joan was okay.

God, Joan’s entire life she’d been asking that question, hadn’t she? Was she okay? She had been looking around every room she was in to survey the people around her, compare herself to the way she saw them, trying to gauge where she didn’t fit, trying to find where she could. Trying to see if she was okay.

And she was.

She was.

Joan wanted to say something—anything—but there was no air in her throat.

“You should be more scared of what’s happening to you and Hank,” Vanessa said, raising her eyebrows. “That gorgeous miserable bomb that’s going to blow up your life when it arrives, any minute.”

Donna laughed. “I’m not scared of that. I’m scared of what NASA and everybody else in the world is going to try to tell me I can’t do once I’m a mother. ‘How can you leave your child at home while you’re in space,’ even though fathers have been doing it for, let’s see, over two decades. ‘Should mothers even be in space?’ ‘Who takes care of your child when you’re at work?’ That I’m scared about. But I’m not scared of being a mother.”

“Why not?” Joan asked her.

“Because it feels good to love someone,” Donna said. “It feels better than anything on this Earth. And I bet better than anything up there.”

Donna gave birth to Thea four days later, after only eight hours of labor. Hank called everyone that night. By the time he called Vanessa, it was two A.M. Vanessa answered it bleary-eyed as Joan sat up next to her.

“Aw, congrats, Hank. Tell Donna we’re proud,” Vanessa said. “That I’m proud, I mean.”

Joan knew she probably had a message on her answering machine.

That weekend, they drove over to Hank and Donna’s with an oversized teddy bear and a frozen lasagna.

When they pulled into the driveway, Jimmy was leaving the house.

“Oh, nice,” Jimmy said when he saw Vanessa get out of the car with the lasagna. Joan was trying to get the teddy bear out of the back. “It’s good how you women do that, the ‘taking care of each other’ thing.”

“You could have just as easily brought food,” Vanessa said, and Jimmy laughed.

Vanessa was holding the lasagna, and Joan waved her off, encouraging her to go ahead inside without her.

After Vanessa walked away, Jimmy stopped at his car door and turned to Joan.

“It’s early,” Jimmy said, “in the morning, don’t you think?”

It was nine A.M. on a Sunday.

“What do you mean?” Joan asked.

“No, nothing,” Jimmy said. “Just that you two are always together. Early in the morning. Late at night.”

Joan looked at him. “Oh, no,” Joan said, her voice as condescending as she could muster. “Little Jimmy Hayman has never had a friend.”

Jimmy squinted at her, got in his car, and left.

Joan finally pulled the teddy bear out of the backseat and tried to lower her heart rate. She planned on telling Vanessa later. But Donna looked so happy, and Hank and Vanessa seemed to be having such a great time talking about their upcoming mission, and Thea felt so good in Joan’s arms. It reminded her of when Frances was so light that Joan kept worrying she would drop her.

The day was such a good one that Joan just put it out of her mind. There was so much to do. She could not be worried about Jimmy Hayman.

The rest of October passed by so fast she felt dizzy. It was wild to Joan how long you could wait for something—how much you could ache for it to hurry up and happen—and then how it could come too quickly.

The simulations the crew had tackled over the past months had gone well. Joan felt as prepared as she could imagine herself being. But in early November, she also felt like each moment was carrying more and more weight, the closer she got to the day.

The night before Joan went into quarantine, Joan was waiting for Vanessa to come over when the phone rang.

When Joan realized it was Barbara, she assumed her sister was checking in one last time before Joan’s mission. But no. Barbara had called to talk about Thanksgiving.

“Barb, I have other things to focus on right now other than what I’m bringing to Thanksgiving.”

“Joan, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. We aren’t hosting Thanksgiving this year. Mom and Dad aren’t coming. We’re not doing it.”

“What?”

“Daniel is taking me to Gstaad.”

Joan blinked. “I’m confused.”

“I don’t have to host Thanksgiving for the whole family, you know. That’s not my responsibility.”

“I know, but why are you bringing Frances to Gstaad for the few days she has off for Thanksgiving? You can’t drag a kid that far across the world and back in four days.”

“Don’t be absurd. She’s staying at school.”

Joan gripped the receiver. “What do you mean, she’s staying at school?”

“She has asked to not come home,” Barbara said.

“I don’t believe that for a second.”

“Well, I don’t care what you believe. I asked if she wanted to abide by my rules or stay there and she said stay there. So we booked a trip to Gstaad instead.”

“You can’t leave her alone for the holiday. Even if she said to.”

“Okay, first of all, it’s Thanksgiving, not Christmas. No one likes Thanksgiving. We do it because that’s what people do. And she’s not alone. There’s a whole program there where kids have Thanksgiving together. Lots of her friends will be with her. That’s why she wants to stay.”

“I don’t buy that. Something must have happened for her to make that choice. What was it?”

“I mean, ask her. We went for a parents’ weekend and it was horrible, Joan.”

Frances had told Joan that Barbara and Daniel had left early, but Joan hadn’t been able to get much more out of her than that. “I don’t care if it was horrible!”

“She kicked me in the shin!”

“But why did she do that? She wouldn’t do that for no reason.”

“I don’t know, but I’m really getting tired of you always taking her side. She kicked me. And she told Daniel she wished I’d never married him. I really don’t understand it, because she’s getting glowing reviews at the school. Her grades are good. She finishes her work early most of the time. Her teachers say she has a lot of friends. Everyone loves her. Apparently, she won an essay contest that included the entire middle school. She actually won!”

“Well, that’s great.”

“So I don’t get it. And I’m not going to waste more time trying to. She’s perfectly well behaved when she’s there. So let her stay there.”

“Of course she is well behaved there—she isn’t mad at them.”

“Well, why on Earth would she be mad at Daniel? He hasn’t done anything to her.”

“But she can’t see that. All she can see is that he showed up and you suddenly stopped paying attention to her.”

“I swear, sometimes you act just like a child,” Barbara said.

“Hey.”

“No, I mean it. It’s like you can identify with a child’s point of view because there’s still something very childlike about you.”

“That’s completely out of line.”

“I’m really not trying to be mean. But think about it. You’ve still never even gone on a date outside of high school, have you? Have you even had a real kiss? Do you know how adult life goes? Of course you don’t understand what I have with Daniel. Because you’ve never had it.

“And you could certainly never understand how to actually raise Frances. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings. It’s just that I’ve felt judged by you for such a long time. Such a long time. And I’m finally seeing the situation as it really is. Which is that you judge me because you don’t understand what it is like to be in an adult relationship. You don’t understand what it means to love. You may never understand that. You’re probably just not built for it. And that’s not your fault. I just have to stop letting you get into my head.”

“Barbara, that is completely . . .”

“What? You may not like it, but nothing I said is factually incorrect.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Which part?”

Joan wanted to tell her that she knew exactly what it meant to love someone. That she’d had kisses and dates and a whole life that Barbara knew nothing about. But that—also!—her opinion would still matter even if she hadn’t. Even if Joan had never fallen in love, she would still matter. She wasn’t a child just because her life looked different from Barbara’s. She wanted to tell her that there were many, many people in this world who had full, rich lives the likes of which Barbara could not fathom because of her tiny little brain.

But when she played it out in her mind, it was so clear how such a conversation would go that there was no need to see it through.

“Forget it, it’s not worth it,” Joan said.

Barbara had done so many things society said were “wrong.” And Joan had stood by her, cared for her, taken her side. How many nights had Joan wiped away Barbara’s tears while she was pregnant? How many times had she made Barbara feel better after someone made a disapproving remark about the absence of a father?

The rules of society came for everyone eventually: the too big, too small, too wild, too quiet, too strong, not strong enough. When Barbara had been kicked out of the main group, she’d never stopped to question the injustice of it all, she’d just been so desperate to get back in.

There would be people who loved Joan for exactly who she was. Donna, Griff. Maybe her parents, hopefully Frances. But Barbara would never be one of them.

The world was full of Barbaras. That was the whole problem.

Joan hung up without saying goodbye. She called Frances’s hallway phone three times but kept getting a busy signal.

Later, Barbara would make a remark about how she could never forgive Joan for hanging up on her.

But Joan would never be able to forgive Barbara for not loving Joan as Joan had loved her. For not knowing how to love Frances as Joan loved her.

The next morning, Joan found it difficult to drag herself out of bed. It was so comfortable, Vanessa’s body so warm as it clung to her.

“I have to go,” Joan said.

She had to go to the airfield and get into a T-38 to Cape Canaveral. She would not—could not—see Vanessa or anyone other than her crew for over a week.

It would be her and the guys in the crew quarters until the morning of liftoff.

As Joan lay in bed, her legs sinking into the welcoming mattress, her pillow so soft, she kept trying to understand how she’d gotten here.

Hadn’t she been an associate astrophysics professor, teaching freshmen about Copernicus, just yesterday? She would go home each night and heat up her dinner. Frances was six and slept over every weekend.

But as Joan had taken each small step forward, the world had kept spinning on its axis. Days had formed into weeks and months and years, which people marked with watches and calendars, all based on the only thing they had to tell what time it was: the stars.

As the Earth orbits the sun, it shifts toward the sun’s warm embrace. Then summer turns to fall, fall to winter. Soon it loops back around, and winter thaws to spring, spring to summer. Through it all, babies are born from stardust and grow taller. They begin to walk and talk and learn the days of the week, the months, the seasons. Then they look up at the sky, to see where they came from.

And the adults spend most of their days looking down. They fall in love and make mistakes and learn new things and feel tired. They lose people they love, and fail themselves, and change or never change. They get new jobs and fall out of love and convince themselves that if they just get this one thing, they will finally be happy.

Day in and day out, the Earth keeps spinning and revolving and sailing through the Milky Way. That is why time never stands still.

And that is why, small as they were, Joan’s choices had added up to something magnificent. In the changing of seasons these past four years, Joan had found it all.

Something she loved, someone she loved, the parts of her she had hidden within herself.

“Goodbye, my love,” Joan said as she kissed Vanessa’s temple.

“Come home soon,” Vanessa said.

It felt so good to Joan, to hurt to leave her.

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