Shine Shine Shine (32 page)

The room was big, with shaded windows on one wall. There were benches and tables around the room littered with drills, pieces of metal, and mounted laser saws and fabricators. A poster on the wall proclaimed, “This is where we make the magic happen!” Angela Phillips had already arrived and was sitting in front of a big silver flat-screen monitor on a dirty old wooden desk. Of course she’d gotten there first; she lived in Hampton. Like any sensible person whose husband worked at Langley.

Sunny had demanded a Norfolk residence, for the opera house and the art museum. She was on the board of this and the committee of that, using Maxon’s money to buy their way into the social stratosphere of this old town. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She regretted everything. Where would Maxon die, in the cold of space? Would he fall into the moon? Or would he make it halfway home and then run out of air? Would he kill everyone on board? Would he? She saw her husband under layers, under the rocket, under the space suit, under the jumpsuit, down to the core of him, where he was breathing, low and strong, his pulse never rising above fifty. It was crazy. The doctors couldn’t explain it.

There were others in the room. A man she remembered having over to the house for dinner with his dowdy wife approached her. He was clearly not distracted enough to not notice the bald head.

“Sunny,” he said. “Are you all right? Are you … cancer?”

He trailed off, but Sunny firmly shook his hand and winked.

“Hey, Jim, you guys called me so early, I didn’t have time to brush my hair, so I just decided not to wear it, right?”

He didn’t laugh, but then, neither did she. When Angela saw her, she motioned for her to come over. Bubber was playing with graduated metal cones on the floor, and was rocking. On the monitor, Sunny saw Fred Phillips, his face filling the whole screen. Angela put out her hand and grabbed Sunny’s hand. She was a genuine blonde, with tiny shoulders and a soft baby voice.

The voice of Fred, slightly buzzing through the speakers, said, “Sweetie, tell me something. Tell me anything.”

“I don’t know what to say,” said Angela. “Everything will be all right. You’ll be home before you know it.”

“Actually it’s not,” said Fred, rolling a wild eye. “Actually that’s not true. So tell me something else, anything else. Tell me what the kids had for breakfast today.”

“The kids are asleep, Fred,” said Angela. “I left them at my mother’s.”

“I want to see my kids,” Fred said, and his voice choked. They saw him, on the monitor, grab at his mouth, and shake his head. “What the hell, Angie,” he sobbed.

There was a delay in transmission, so it was hard for them to communicate. They would talk over each other, and then wait too long, and then someone would start talking, then the other would wait.
Is this what it’s like to have a spouse who talks all the time?
thought Sunny. All this stopping and starting. Sunny heard a voice in the background that was not Maxon say, “Pull yourself together, Phillips.”

“Fred, Sunny’s here,” said Stanovich, leaning over Angela’s shoulder. “Wanna get Dr. Mann on the feed there? Thanks.”

“Sure thing, Stan,” said Fred. “Here you go, Genius, time to cry and die.”

Angela stood and let Sunny sit down in the chair in front of the wooden desk while Fred seemed to levitate out of the seat he was in, and Maxon seemed to levitate in. Sunny sat perfectly still as she saw his head come into focus. He made sure he was sitting in exactly the right spot, and then he looked at her. She stared back at him, at the wide, bold lines of his face, his precious mouth, his ears, his curls. She wasn’t sure what kind of picture she was seeing, but she saw him very clearly, and it made her want to cry. He smiled his standard, formal smile, and then he leaned closer, peering into his screen. Sunny saw his face change from formal and public, to hungry, the way he looked when he really needed to eat something immediately. He had seen her bald head.

“Hey, baby,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“Well, I’m probably going to have to eat Phillips first,” Maxon said.

“Oh yeah?” she said.

“Yeah, Gompers is such a nice guy, and Tom Conrad is made out of silicon, so…”

“Rethink, Maxon, rethink.”

She reached her hand out and touched the line of his nose, the curve of his cheekbone, the angle of his jaw on the monitor. He was quiet. She wanted to force him to see her, confirm that he knew. She wanted to tell him what to say, write it down for him, hand him a piece of paper with letters on it that he could truly understand. He was quiet. Was she telling him? Was the message getting through? Was she sending him all he needed, to survive? She wanted to say,
Maxon, I love you, I’m sorry I’ve been a shit, I am straight now, I’m ready to be nice to you again and give you what you need. Please don’t die.
He said nothing.

She picked up a piece of paper from the desk and folded it, and a Sharpie that was sitting there, and she wrote on the paper in very thick letters: I AM SORRY. Then she held it up in front of her head, so that her face was covered. When she took it down and looked at him, she was certain he understood.

“Sunny, do you want me to come home?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said clearly. “I want you to come home.”

“Great, okay,” he said. “Put Bubber on.”

Sunny retrieved Bubber from the floor and put him on her lap, a smooth metal cone clutched in each fist. He was making noises, like sound effects, and rocking. She knew he was far away in his mind.

“Hey, buddy,” said Maxon. Bubber did not look up. “Whatcha got there?”

“Can you show Daddy your cones?” Sunny prompted. “Tell Dad what you have there.”

Bubber lifted the cones in the air but did not look at the monitor. He continued to beep and shriek quietly, little sci-fi noises.

“Bubber, look right here where Mommy is pointing,” said Sunny, but Bubber wouldn’t look up.

“Sorry,” said Sunny. She saw Maxon lean down and get something. He was clutching something in his lap, his eyebrows up and his head shaking back and forth.

“It’s okay. He looks great,” said Maxon.

“He knows you’re there,” said Sunny. “It’s just that—”

Now Maxon was holding up a sign, too. On a clean page in his notebook he had written I LOVE YOU. He had gone over the letters several times so that they could really see it. He held it up to his chest, over his heart.

“Bubber,” said Sunny, pressing her lips into his ear, “I really need you to look where Mommy is pointing right now. Just look where Mommy’s finger is pointing.”

Bubber looked, just one glance; then he turned back to lean on Sunny and click the cones together. Sunny smiled at Maxon and said, “He saw.”

But Maxon kept on holding up the sign. And she knew it was for her, too. She tried to memorize the sight, so she could hold on to it forever, him there framed in the screen, wearing his white turtleneck, holding that sign over his heart.

“I gotta go, Sunny,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. But I’m going to go ahead and land this thing.”

“Maxon,” Stanovich broke in, “it’s too dangerous. Not without the starboard boosters.”

“Yeah, I gotta switch this thing off, Stan. See ya.”

And then the monitor went black. Immediately, from inside Bubber a wail went up. It came from the back of his throat but it sounded like it came from his toes. She knew from experience that this was the beginning of a meltdown, possibly an epic one, definitely not for public consumption. She wanted to get him out of the room, let him scream and rail and arch and foam and smack at her in the hallway, but first she had to get those cones out of his hand.

“No, honey,” she said. “No, no. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

She began to pry his fingers from around the cone.

“We have to go,” she said urgently. “Come on, Bubber, put down the cone.”

But that was the wrong thing to do. The screaming peaked. Red-faced and spurting tears, Bubber fell to the floor, clutching the cones to his body. He rolled along the floor, kicking anything in his way, until he was wedged under a desk, where he stuck. Sunny went stumping after him, so wide and awkward. It would be very hard to deal with Bubber in this way. She couldn’t even pick him up, if he was trying to get away. She wasn’t strong and balanced enough. She started to get down on her knees, to try and talk him out, but Stan put a hand on her arm.

“It’s okay,” he said to her. “Let him keep the cones. In fact, you all can stay here if you want to, for a while.”

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “This is…”

“Sunny, it’s fine,” he said. “I have a boy with Asperger’s myself. And Rogers over there too. I mean, he is autistic, not his kid.”

“Really?” she said.

“Really,” said Stan. “You might say it kind of runs in the family. The NASA family.”

Sunny and Bubber stayed in Stanovich’s office at Langley for the rest of the night. In fact, when Sunny took a blanket and pillow into the lounge to get some sleep, Bubber stayed in the office with the other men. He was perfectly happy to play with the robot parts, finger the machines, and say absolutely nothing to anyone.

Up in the rocket, Maxon had laid out his plans for landing the rocket and the robots on the moon. Gompers hesitated.

“I don’t know, Mann,” he said. “We’re going to do it, but only because there’s nothing else to do.”

Phillips said, “Hey, Genius, who told you it was okay for you to do my job?”

“Shut up, Phillips,” said Gompers. “Unless you have another plan.”

“Phillips,” said Maxon kindly, “of course I can do your job. If I couldn’t do your job and everyone else’s job up here, I wouldn’t have come.”

Phillips stared.

“No disrespect, sir,” said Maxon to Gompers.

“None taken, son,” said Gompers. “Now let’s hope you’re right.”

*   *   *

W
HAT THEY HAD DONE
to conceive the second baby had taken only a few minutes. It had happened under the wig, under the sheets. It was on Maxon’s timetable, but this time there was no resistance from Sunny. “You’re right,” she said to him. “It’s time to have another baby.” They did it on purpose, all the while knowing that something was wrong with Bubber, that something was wrong with Maxon, that something was wrong with Sunny, that something was wrong with her mother, that something was wrong with everyone else. They did it knowing that a flawed thing would be the result of this effort, and that they would be expected to love it anyway, in spite of, because of. She had containers in the cedar closet labeled “maternity.” It would all be managed handily by the girl who had become a blonde. They would replace themselves, Sunny and Maxon, in the world. They would do what was required of them by evolutionary law.

But the pregnancy of the girl who had become a blonde had changed into the pregnancy of the girl who had always been bald. And the certainty disappeared. The laws were unwritten, the map faded. It was Maxon’s baby, and Sunny’s, and anything could happen. There were no expectations that could be logically brought to bear. The baby could be born a miracle.

26

In the morning, Sunny received a phone call from the hospital. Her mother had died in the night.

There is a real elevation of the conversation, when death and birth come into it. Nothing is unspoken. Everything underneath comes out, and the darkness spills up into the everyday language. You talk about dark things because you have decisions that need to be made. There is no subtlety when you have to decide between cremation and burial, or tell someone whether or not you want to be sedated through it all.

There was a moment, when Sunny was sitting at a small, cheap desk at the hospital, on a rolling office chair, when she forgot her mother’s maiden name. Then she knew she was coming unhinged. But she kept signing paperwork anyway, kept the pen going across the paper. In the normal course of your life, do you have any dealings with the coroner? No. Do you have any reason to say the word “autopsy”? Never.

As an orphan, you are alone. There is no one on the Earth watching, when you say, “Look at me!” There is no one standing in the gap between you and oblivion, putting up her hands, and saying “Stop.” You have come this far surrounded, and now you must continue without defense. As a pregnant person, Sunny had to hide herself from this exposure. She had to protect the baby from this distress. So as her mother’s ship disappeared, sinking below the horizon, and her own ship sailed up into the wind, she had to let it go without fireworks, without searchlights, without a trumpet blast. Almost without remark.

Sunny decided against a funeral. She decided that her mother would be cremated. These things were going to be handled by the guy at the mortuary, and she signed the release form that authorized him to take possession of the body. This transfer would take place somewhere in the bowels of the hospital. Her mother would exit out the back of the building. Sunny did not know what her mother would look like, at that point. It could be really terrible.

There could have been a funeral in Yates County, where all of Emma’s friends could attend. There could have been a funeral in Virginia. But Sunny could not arrange a funeral now. She knew her mother would say, “Whatever makes it easier for you, dearest. Do whatever you need to do. I don’t care.” So her mother would be cremated. It all seemed so impossible that she wanted to tell the mortician to check carefully and be sure her mother was dead. She wanted to install a brightly colored button on the inside of the kiln: “If you are alive and being wrongfully cremated, PRESS HERE.” It had been so slow, this dying. Maybe it was not completely done, in spite of what the doctors said. Maybe there were still some synapses firing, some spirit to be resurrected and intone the words “Good job, Sunny. You are great. You are handling this really well.”

“Are you doing okay back there?” a nurse asked her. She had been given two black pens with which to sign all the papers. A pen and a backup pen. But the first pen had worked just fine.

“I’m done, I think,” Sunny said. “I think I’m done.”

*   *   *