God is an Astronaut (9 page)

He had grown a beard in the time he’d been away. He was windburned and raggedy. He looked like an agate-eyed stranger as he stood there studying us. I feel like I’m expected to hew to a narrative cliché here, to remark on how the past few terrible weeks have aged my husband in some appreciable way. But that isn’t true, so I’ll spare you. If anything, it is the opposite. It would be more accurate to say that some youthful remnant of Liam has resurfaced, one dating back to the time we first met, back in the days when he was zealous and unshaven and arrogant. He has on that old embattled expression of his I had almost forgotten. He used to wear it out the door every morning. It came from having something to prove. You could see it in everything he did, no matter how offhand—in the way he signed his name at the top of his engineering papers, carving a groove with every flourish. Our old dining room table, a hulky pressed-wood monstrosity, was covered in “Liam Callahan”
engravings, and by the time we stopped being poor and threw it away, you could run your hands across the surface and feel them all—it felt like topography, like the map of a world he was fearlessly making his impression upon. It was that absolute certainty that drew me in. Back in those days, I could spend five minutes standing in front of the rutabagas at the supermarket, turning them all over in my hands, weighing the merits of each one. OK, yes—I still do this on certain days, when I am running my errands alone, and time seems bent on getting away from me. And—as you have kindly pointed out—this indecision is a kind of cowardice, a kind of shrinking away, or faltering disguised as caution. But you, you of all people, should understand that it isn’t that simple.

The sight of Liam after a trip always affects the kids like a sugar high: a giddy rush, followed by an inevitable crash. This time, though, they were even more ecstatic to see him than usual, especially Jack. He wrapped his arms around Liam, burrowing his flushed face against his chest and talking in a punctuationless rush. Liam couldn’t get a word in, not even in the breaths between paragraphs. All he could do was nod and say
uh huh uh huh
over and over while he got down on one knee and began pulling off Jack’s shoes. The tenderness of this gesture, the careful meticulousness with which he picked out the knots in the laces and laid the sneakers side by side next to the radiator—it made me absolutely certain, for a moment, that whatever insinuations I had heard from our own personal bearer of bad tidings, they didn’t matter. Because they were wrong. I felt so sure, Arthur, as I stood there in the hallway, looking on, with my arms crossed like a one-woman judge and jury waiting to pronounce a verdict.

Our chance to actually talk didn’t come until almost two hours later. We were sitting downstairs at the kitchen table, both of us propped up on our elbows. Liam was nursing a glass of Glenlivet from his carefully guarded stash. The blinds were open, and you could see out into the backyard. Even in the dark, you could make out my handiwork of the past few weeks—the mangled saplings, the overturned birdbath, my eclectic collection of newly acquired plants, the churned-up dirt where I have started digging. If you didn’t know better, Arthur, you might think that we had been hit by a storm, a microburst, one of those freaks of the atmosphere that concentrates all its punishing force into a single point and leaves everything else around unscathed.

“You’ve been busy,” Liam said finally, and I thought I detected a hint of bitterness in the words. I understood then that he thought I’d been home playing Gertie the Gardener while he’d been thousands of miles away wandering through the desert, ankle deep in smoking spaceship wreckage. It made me remember a picture I had seen on the
Times
site a few days ago. In it, several Spaceco guys are crouching down in the sand, looking at some twisted piece of metal. The wind must be up—they all have their faces wrapped, like a bunch of mujahideen, and their dress shirts are ghostly with dust. I knew Liam was there in the crowd, and I kept looking and looking, but I couldn’t for the life of me pick him out.

“You have no idea.” I reached out for his glass and took a careful sip. I actually can’t stand scotch, you know. I don’t care how much you and Liam love it. But I dabble in it anyway—just every now and then when Liam is away, something compels me to measure out one of his precious, golden rations and drink it down, to feel its sickening burn smoldering in the back of my throat. “What with dodging the paparazzi on the grocery runs, and getting the stink eye at faculty meetings, and teaching Corinne how to spell the word
explosion,
and attempting to explain to our neighbors that we’re not terrible people—”

“Did you?” Liam said. “Did you explain it? That’s good to hear. I wish I could have been there. I’m sure it was a rousing defense.” He stood up from the table and began jerking his tie loose. It was his bloodred silk one. His litigator tie, he calls it. He bought it a few years ago when he and his fellow wannabe spacemen started making their pitch to investors. It was a tie to win hearts and minds, and it worked. He’d clearly been at a board meeting earlier that day. I’ve always known, Arthur, that whatever gets discussed behind those closed doors is something so technically and intellectually rarefied that it is completely out of my reach, that I would never understand it. It was a fact that I took a kind of vain, vicarious pride in—even if you were the only one I ever admitted that to. Sitting there, at that moment, I was thinking again how these bragging rights now seem stupid, or worse, downright sinister.

I was momentarily diverted from these thoughts by Liam’s long, profoundly weary sigh. “Look, Jess,” he said. “I get it. I threw you to the wolves. These people, they’re fucking relentless. Hunter was telling me about this guy from
Vanity Fair
—”

“Just a second.” I held up my hand. I was thinking that it was important that he not distract me. “I have something else I need to ask you. Does the name Norell Ops mean anything to you?”

I watched him slowly put his scotch glass down. “What?”

“Norell Ops,” I said. “It’s a contractor based out of Dayton. They make aeronautical—”

“I know what they make,” Liam said. His face had suddenly flushed, Arthur. It was startling to see him looking so caught off guard, because you never see Liam looking disconcerted. “How the hell did
you
hear about them?”

“I had a nice little chat with a reporter from the
New York Times,
” I said. “We woke up the other morning to find her lurking at the bottom of the driveway. I’m sure you would have found her a little hipper-than-thou, but she had some interesting things to say.” I had to force myself to let go of the kitchen table, which I was clutching, for some reason, in a death grip. “It was actually one of the most informative conversations I’ve had in weeks.”

“I’ll bet it was,” Liam said. He had been wandering around the kitchen while I was talking with an aimlessness that was frightening. “Fuck,” he said. “
Fuck
.”

I could feel my dread ratcheting up with every step. “Please, Liam,” I said. “Tell me it isn’t true.”

“For God’s sake, Jess,” Liam said. “We haven’t even finished the preliminary report yet. Do you know how many moving parts there were on that rocket? Over two million. The debris field has a radius of over eight kilometers. There are pieces of shuttle that we’re never going to find. They’re going to turn into these little, like—” He was sputtering, Arthur. “These little titanium geological artifacts that hitchhikers are going to be finding on the side of I-8 decades from now. And now you’re telling me that some girl Friday at the
Times
has done two fucking hours of research, and she thinks she’s got it all figured out. That’s great. That’s just—”

We realized simultaneously that he was shouting, and both of us glanced up toward the ceiling where Corinne was sleeping, eight feet directly above our heads. Or at least I prayed that she was sleeping, that she was dead to the world and dreaming of pioneer girls in calico sunbonnets, fearless little girls who were flourishing in the face of adversity. “That’s just fantastic,” he finished more quietly.

“But a defective control panel is one of the possibilities,” I said. “You haven’t ruled it out.”

His jaw was clenching and unclenching. “We haven’t ruled anything out,” he said.

I got up and went to the window. I pressed my forehead against the cool, slightly sticky glass. Through the steam of my breath on the pane, I could just make out Liam’s shed. It’s a sleek little conical outbuilding that Liam built with his own hands. When he has time, he goes out there and tinkers around with his inventions—a zero-gravity hinge, special patches and seals, contraptions that supposedly can keep a person from dying if he’s out in space and something tears apart or springs a leak, something that damn well shouldn’t. They may not be useful to the average Joe Schmo, but they are ingenious, perfect in their own way.

It—by which I mean the shed—is down past the loop of our driveway, and in the spring it’s hidden behind the lilac trees. I don’t know if you saw it—the one and only time you were here, that afternoon you dropped me off. Two years ago, it must have been. I remember the timing because it was a few weeks after I had my miscarriage. Liam was in Arizona, and it was the only time in my life I’ve ever had a migraine. Up until that point, I’d only believed in migraines in a theoretical sort of way. But then I felt it—and nothing has ever been more unbearable or more real. I remember slumping down in your car, leaning my head on your shoulder, and you put up your hand to anchor it there—your fingers on my temple, your thumb pressed carefully along my jaw—to keep it from being jarred by the potholes. When I opened my eyes, the jagged chinks of sky between the tree leaves were burning fiery trails across the windshield, so I had to close them again.

We haven’t ruled anything out, Arthur. Do you hear me?

jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2014 10:23 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: Fool’s errand (n): a task or activity that has no hope of success. See also . . . 

I hate, hate, hate it when you call me Jessica. Nobody calls me by my so-called Christian name except for my dead mother, who still shows up regularly in my dreams to tell me that she can’t understand how on earth I didn’t see X, or Y, or Z coming from a mile away. “Tell her to fuck off,” says Paula. But I can’t. That’s the problem with the dead. You can’t tell them to fuck themselves. You can’t tell them anything. They always win.

You, on the other hand, are still among the living, if only barely, subsisting on some subarctic periphery, so here it is: go fuck yourself, Arthur. You’re the one who relishes that stupid quote, “Insinuations are for cowards.”
If you have something to say, then say it. Otherwise

piss off,

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2014 1:01 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: speaking of my mother

I know I must have told you that story about her will. How she bequeathed to me those ridiculous chandelier earrings. Two grand on each ear—to a woman who once accidentally dropped a ruby-cluster engagement ring down a storm drain. The only other thing she specifically willed me was her ancient edition of
Emily Post’s Etiquette
. All her gifts came with a reproach, even after death. The book is a tome—I accidentally just typed
tomb
, whoops—more than 700 pages long, and I read it straight through from Formalities to Funerals in the week after her death, looking for something. A note in the margin, a sticky spot of jam, a grocery store receipt for orange juice and toilet paper. I found nothing. I didn’t realize until weeks later that I had memorized it—not the entire book, but whole passages. I would be out in the garden early in the morning pulling up radishes all bitter and gone to seed—when it was still too dark to see—and I would bend over to tie my shoe and these lines would pop unbidden into my head, word-for-word correct, as though I’d just read them straight off the page:

“How are you?” is a widely-used phrase. Since it is not usually accompanied by sincere interest in an answer, the best response is either “Fine, thank you,” or “Very well, thank you.”

It was a neat little trick, and it’s one I’ve never been able to pull off since.

I’ve wandered OT, but I’m getting to something that seems apropos to me: there’s a whole section on how to say you’re sorry. When you look up “apologies” in the index, it takes you to a section titled “Letters That Shouldn’t Be Written.” The book’s upstairs, so I’m paraphrasing here, but it goes something like this: