Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Once, when Joan was a teenager, her mother told her that she and her sister each had their own strengths. She said that Barbara’s were loud and Joan’s were quiet, but both were powerful in their own way. When her mother said this, Joan hugged her.

I told my mom that I wasn’t going to help him, and my mom said that if I was going to be proud of myself for being generous, that I had to do it even when it meant I might lose something.

‘You have to have something on the line, for it to be called character.’ ”

Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway.”

Because the world had decided that to be soft was to be weak, even though in Joan’s experience being soft and flexible was always more durable than being hard and brittle. Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.

“I’m excited,” Vanessa said, closing the gap between them. “I want to take you everywhere. And do everything with you. And ask you every single question that’s been on my mind for months. And I want to know when you knew what was happening between us and I want to tell you when I knew. And I want to hold your hand in a quiet corner and I want to lie in bed and hear your heartbeat through your chest. I want to bring you coffee in bed. And I want to hear you tell me anything you’ve always wanted to tell someone. Because you know that you’ve met someone who desperately wants to listen.”

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?

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.

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.

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?

The minutes were speeding by and Joan ached to slow them down. It had been that way for much of Frances’s childhood. Stay. Stay. Stay right here. Don’t go so fast.

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.

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.”

Joan studied the thin blue, hazy circle that surrounded the Earth. The atmosphere was so delicate, nearly inconsequential. But it was the very thing keeping everyone she loved alive. Intelligent life was her meaning. People were her meaning.

Joan marveled at how easy Barbara’s inner life must be. How entirely undemanding of yourself it was to believe that everything happened to you. And everything was about you. And that your feelings were the only ones that mattered. Worse yet, to afford yourself the role of the victim always—regardless of how grotesquely it required you to twist reality—so that you never had to look in the mirror and admit you were the perpetrator.