Orbit

Chapter 32

Air Force wives learn early that family dinners are uncertain events. Especially when the husband is a four-star general. Such men are married to the Air Force first, leaving the wives to feel at times like little more than mistresses with commissary privileges.

Bitsy Risen checks her watch, aware she’s been glued to the television all day—though her slight rebellion against complete submersion has been the piano sonatas playing gently in the background as closed captions march across the top of the silenced flat screen TV. Kip Dawson’s amazing saga continues to scroll haltingly across the bottom.

“It’s like the ultimate reality show and soap opera rolled into one,” she’s telling friends—including the equally solitary wife of the NORAD vice commander who also expects to see nothing of her own husband until very, very late. They both know that a series of space launches are about to start “…popping off the planet like fleas off a dying dog,” as Chris Risen said at five in the morning when he rolled out to find the shower. Bitsy knows the routine. When things start happening in space, NORAD wives open wine, turn on stereos, call their girlfriends, and mostly chill.

But the experience of reading the Book of Kip, as one of her friends refers to it, has been disturbing, and she thinks any wife would feel about the same. She sees Kip’s words about wifely support and intimacy and sex, and she’s surprised that it’s prompting her to suddenly reassess her own, well, performance. It’s the only word she can use within the context of Kip Dawson’s laments—not that such worries really apply to her. She and Chris are still in love with each other, and when it comes to libido, they’ve always chased each other into the bedroom at the drop of a suggestive comment. Still do. So no problem there, right? At least none that she can sense.

Bitsy hopes there’s nothing she’s missing—no blind, unwarranted, dangerous assumptions she might be making.

Chris is satisfied, isn’t he? As satisfied as I am?

She’s kept herself trim and feminine and completely supportive of him in what they, as a team, both chose. But the whole subject is unsettling, as if she might suddenly discover that this marital bliss isn’t real life, but a play in which she’s become too immersed—an illusion that can evaporate as rapidly as a play reaches its finale.

Men like Chris can be seduced by illusions, too, she thinks. Like any pilot who bruises himself hauling on the controls trying to “save” a flight simulator that’s actually bolted to a concrete floor.

But, she hopes what they have is anything but an illusion.

This has got to be deeply rattling a lot of women out there, she thinks, especially those who’ve become lazy and forgotten to be lovers. At the same time, she knows that the male mid-life explosion often has nothing to do with intimacy or frequency.

Sometimes it just happens.

Thank God, Chris and I escaped, she muses, already aware how rare it is to grow together instead of apart over the years. So many of their friends have long since split, leaving kids shuttling endlessly between cities and houses and sets of parents and stepparents. Not to mention the anger and divided retirement funds and the names of former spouses who can no longer be mentioned without pain.

The words begin scrolling across the bottom of the screen again after a pause. He’s been working on the rewrite of his life and the thoughts and ideas and dreams are fascinating. In some ways it’s been like getting a private, completely unauthorized look at the top-secret workings of the male mind.

And some of the things he’s related—some of the things he’s been through and felt—have brought her to tears.

The phone rings with Suzie, the vice commander’s wife, on the other end. They’ve been talking on and off all afternoon. Bitsy takes the portable back to the couch.

“Did you see that montage Fox News did?” Suzie is asking, still amazed at the depth of the reactions through dozens of interviews.

“No. Tell me.”

“I didn’t know they had that many correspondents. They’re flipping all around the country. For instance, there was this little beauty shop somewhere in Iowa, crammed with women who’re holding kind of a vigil with the TV and hanging on to every word he writes. I swear some of those gals were sounding like rock groupies. It was strange.”

“I’m not surprised,” Bitsy replies. “Some of what he’s said… you just want to hold the poor guy and tell him it’s okay, you know?”

“Mother him, in other words?”

“Right. Don’t you?”

“Okay, I’ll admit it. But some of the women they’ve been talking to are thinking less of giving comfort than of getting him under one. But I don’t know, I think it’s what he’s saying that’s sexy. The guy is intelligent, and remember, there’s nothing as sexy as a well-hung mind.”

“Who said that?”

“I did. Seriously, I’ll have to Google it.”

“Well, sexy or not, the reactions of everyone out there are just amazing,” Bitsy adds, still reading the evolving words. “What he’s saying now is really thought provoking. I’m sitting here wondering about a lot of the subjects he’s raised, not just how I would feel up there in his place.”

“The most touching thing to me are all those people who’re crowding airports and bus stations right now to race across the country and see parents or kids they haven’t talked to in years, and every one they’ve interviewed says the same thing: I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for reading what that poor guy wrote, and realizing how little time there is in this life.”

“Do they say which part, exactly, touched them the most?”

“Just the whole thing, and the anguish when he wrote about his son, I think.”

“He’s broken some sort of mass psychological dam, that’s for sure,” Bitsy says.

“You know, he wrote earlier about a dangerous intersection near his home in Tucson. For six years, he said, he couldn’t get anyone in city government to pay attention to the need for a traffic light there, and three people died. Now, suddenly, because he wrote it up there and half the world read it, the Tucson City Council is debating the issue as we speak.”

“I hadn’t heard that. But yesterday he wrote about how much he loved Banff and Lake Louise in Canada, and almost instantly they sold out for the summer.”

“You reading him right now?”

“About how he’s become a well-known artist, with four kids and a beautiful, Brazilian wife?”

“Yes. His rewritten life. He wants four kids and he already has four kids.”

“And the house in Tucson? He’s put himself right back there, only this time it’s a vacation residence. And the father he was going to fire and recreate? Still works for mining interests in Arizona, only now he always tells Kip he loves him.”

“You know what impressed me? The guy thinks he’s not brave. You probably read that part where he said he was far too timid to do anything bold. But he is brave. Look how much courage it took to delete everything he’d written for two days. He was really deleting his old life and moving on. How many of us could do that, even in writing?”

The sound of the front door opening catches her attention and Bitsy turns to find her husband pulling the door closed and waving. She waves back and ends the call, coming to him quickly, ignoring the prickle of the metallic buttons on his uniform as she enfolds him and holds on tight, aware he’s slightly puzzled, though hugging her back enthusiastically. The hug progresses to a deep kiss and a loosened tie and shirt, and his hands begin an appreciative tour of her body as she tilts her head toward the bedroom.

“How ’bout it, sailor? Wanna get lucky?”

“Does the sun rise in the east?” he answers, grinning as he stops her momentarily. “But… not that I’m complaining, because I’m sure not… but to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Let’s just say there’s a poor guy flashing past overhead every ninety minutes who’s reminding me how very, very lucky we are.”

Arleigh Kerr replaces the receiver as Richard DiFazio comes back into the nearly deserted control room.

“Any news?” Arleigh asks, aware that the final urgent meeting between their director of maintenance and the chairman was scheduled for an hour before.

“It’s final. We can’t fly. I saw all the reasons up close and personal and he’s right. We’d probably lose our second ship. How about you?”

“The Japanese have scrubbed their launch, pulled the plug.”

“And Beijing?”

“Still scheduled for a liftoff tomorrow morning, three hours before the Russians, and four before the shuttle.”

“Two down, three to go.”

“He’s got a fighting chance. Three launches are good odds.”

“You’re sure the scrubbers will hold?”

Arleigh looks at him long and hard before answering.

“No. I’m not sure. But death by CO₂ isn’t instant. Not like suddenly cutting off his air. If someone can get him out of that airlock before he’s too far gone, he could make it. We’ve briefed all of them.”

“And if you were to bet?” Richard asks.

“I wouldn’t. Not on this.”

There are times, Griggs Hopewell thinks, when he can almost recapture that old feeling of NASA invulnerability, those heady days when there was nothing they couldn’t do.

It is night again at the Cape, the night before the launch, the frenetic preparations beginning to pay off, despite the delays. John Kent has gone to sleep for a few hours, but even he’s feeling better about the prospects, and the crew is anxious to go, as most of them always are.

Griggs stands in the heavy night air, swatting at an occasional mosquito as he looks at the shuttle lit up so spectacularly a mile away. The morning he knows will be a challenge. He’s aware that Miss Dorothy from D.C. has not given up, and thwarting her will take a masterful effort, the main thrust of which is just about to begin.

On schedule his cell phone rings and he answers with a quick flipping motion of his right hand.

“Yes?”

“Okay, we’ve got what we came for.”

“Anything overt?”

“Not yet. If she’s got a specific plan, it’s buried in what we found, but there are some very interesting names in the database on her laptop.”

“I’ll meet you in ten minutes as planned.”

He closes the phone, disgusted that he has to play cat and mouse the evening before a launch, just to be able to launch. But if Dorothy Sheehan makes the mistake he expects, she’ll be facing criminal charges—the one element of leverage that may get Shear into another line of work.