Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

“Houston, this is Navigator. We have a cabin leak.

They have ended only when the leak is found. Or the crew dies. This is NASA. We have a plan for this.

And then Vanessa’s voice. “Houston,” she says. “I think I am the only one left.”

When someone admired them, she never bothered to tell them she’d drawn them. The praise was never the point. In any case, no one in a long time had asked her about herself enough to know any of this. And Joan found a familiar peace in going unnoticed.

So it came as a huge shock to the men in the department, many of whom fancied themselves secretly destined for victory, to see that the woman they’d overlooked was lapping them in a race they did not know had started.

What could Joan offer someone so much more worldly than her? How could Barbara look up to someone so far behind?

“You’re really lucky,” Barbara said, her voice lightening. “That you are free to do something like this. No kid or husband or anything holding you back. I always think about where I would go if I could. And I think London or Paris…but you’re going to the stars. You’re thinking so much bigger.”

It was disarming—a little confusing, maybe—to think of Vanessa as in want of company. She was the sort of woman who seemed like she could have any friend she wanted. Didn’t the world revolve around women like her? She was tall and lean, with big eyes. Her hair was so shiny. That way she smiled out of the side of her mouth—certainly that pulled people in.

But…you’re the astrophysicist, right?” Vanessa said. Joan corrected her: “Astronomer.” “What’s the difference?” Joan shook her head. “There barely is one.” “But there is a difference, clearly.” “An astrophysicist studies the physics of space, whereas my focus is on space itself, the sun in particular. Then again, you can’t study space without studying the physics of space. And time. Or math. Or anthropology and the history of humans’ understanding of the stars. Or mythology and theology, for that matter. It’s all connected.”

I begged my parents to buy me a Unitron telescope for my twelfth birthday. I had never made a fuss about anything before, never asked for so much as a doll, I don’t think. But I had to have that telescope. I had to see the stars up close. And that was before we landed on the moon, mind you.”

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

The same one as when she’d convinced her parents to take her to Death Valley the summer before her senior year and—with the clearest view of the sky she’d ever yet seen—she’d spotted the Andromeda Galaxy, two and a half million light-years away.

When you look at the red star Antares in the southern sky, you are looking over thirty-three hundred trillion miles away. But you are also looking more than five hundred and fifty years into the past. Antares is so far away that its light takes five hundred and fifty years to reach your eye on Earth. Five hundred and fifty light-years away. So when you look out at the sky, the farther you can see, the further back you are looking in time. The space between you and the star is time.

To look up at the nighttime sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.

But it felt, to her, like people were making a very big deal out of what was, essentially, no different from eating a cracker.

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

And then she looked up at the clouds, raised her hand in a thumbs-up, and smiled. My God, she thought, what else can I do?

Joan so loved the beauty in this world: showing people the stars, spotting the fuzzy glimmer of the Orion Nebula with just her eyes, the rare moments when auroras are visible even in the southern states because of intense geomagnetic storms, trying one more time to really nail Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor, rereading The Awakening, listening to Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush, drawing for so long, so late into the night that her palm cramped, running so far that she forgot to think, taking Frances for ice cream and watching how long she deliberated over which flavor to choose, the smell of Frances’s hair… That was the stuff that made life worth living. And she worried Barbara didn’t see that.

You could develop your personality your entire life—pursue the things you wanted to learn, discover the most interesting parts of yourself, hold yourself to a certain standard—and then you marry a man and suddenly his personality, his wants, his standards subsume your own?

But still, all Joan could think was that it was now just two people cutting off parts of themselves to make themselves fit together. A world of vegetarians cooking meatloaf.

She had been here before—not often, but enough to recognize it for what it was. The glances that lasted just a bit too long, the softer tone of voice directed only at her. It almost never ended easily. There was always a thrash or two, when she tried to kill it. Joan moved forward quickly, away from his touch.

“I used to take Frances there when she wouldn’t fall asleep.” “How old is she, again?” “She’s six now,” Joan said. “It was a long time ago. My sister would lose her mind after so many nights not sleeping and so I’d take Frances and just drive. Usually out to Brazos. Most of the time, she’d be asleep by the time we got to the park, but sometimes, she’d still be wide awake, so I’d lay her on a blanket and show her the stars.” “Raising the next generation of astronauts,” Vanessa said.

“No,” Vanessa said. “You know how they are about that stuff. It’s like we’re not even supposed to admit we’re curious.”

“That’s what made me fall in love with astronomy as a kid,” she said. “That the night sky is a map, and once you know how to read it, it will always be there. You’ll never be lost.”

Being human was such a lonely endeavor. We alone have consciousness; we are the only intelligent life force that we know of in the galaxy. We have no one but one another. Joan was always moved by the fact that everything—all matter on Earth and beyond, up past the atmosphere, going as far as the edges of the universe, as it expands farther and farther away from us—is made from the same elements. We are made of the same things as the stars and the planets. Remembering that connection brought Joan comfort. It also brought her some sense of responsibility. And what was kinship but that? Comfort and responsibility.

“They have excused the college-degree requirement for certain members of the military. So why can’t they excuse the military requirement for certain civilians?” Vanessa looked at her. “I mean, you already know the answer.”

“He flew in the Korean War.” Vanessa looked up at the sky. “I think most of my life I’ve been both drawn to and terrified of the idea of being just like him.”

“I liked him fine. He’s a nice enough guy. Taught me to drive a car.” “But he wasn’t your dad.” “Hard to compete with a war hero.”

“Sometimes I don’t know if I knew my dad or I just created a man out of thin air, as a god to pray to.”

I hope he felt conflicted about it. I hope he knew that he was needed back home. But I think he did it…. I think he flew that jet with a sense of duty. So, in that way, I think or I hope that he was okay that that’s how he went.”

“I think he’s why I did a lot of things, honestly. Lashed out at my mom, cut school. I gravitated toward people I knew were bad news. I remember knowing exactly how stupid it was, what I was doing, and doing it anyway.”

“I don’t think I was lost. I think I was trying to lose myself.” Joan nodded.

“I think I just wanted to feel something other than sad,” Vanessa said.

“But that wasn’t it,” Vanessa said. “I think flying that plane, glancing at the ground below me, watching the horizon ahead…it was the first time I remember feeling…peace.”

Joan did not believe there were gods up there, but she did believe that God was there.

“Of course we look for the gods there,” Vanessa said. “And if we make it up there, we’re going to have to fight against that sneaking suspicion that we might just be gods ourselves.”

Did Vanessa know that, on some level, Joan could not resist the idea that to go up there would be to touch God? That Joan could not help but wonder if, among the stars, there would be answers to questions no human had yet found? It seemed so clear to Joan, as crazy as it might be, that the meaning of life had to be up there, somewhere.

Jimmy had been told from a young age that fear and failing and trying and wanting and openness and kindness and sincerity made him weak. And because he had believed it, he’d learned to suppress all of those things. And when he saw those traits in others, he hated them because he hated himself. Jimmy was hiding.

She was trying to prove that she could be just like a man to all of them. To Jimmy. To Lydia. 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.

Bravery, Joan suspected, is almost always a lie. Courage is all we have. She didn’t want to lower herself to the game men played.

“Marrying Adam Hawkins and being a wife? Waiting at home and making dinner every night? My mom is so good at that stuff, but I never looked at her and saw myself. I know that hurt her feelings. I know that me choosing a different life didn’t quite make sense to her at first. But I think choosing that other life, her life, would have been very hard. I think it would have been one of the hardest things I’d had to do. I chose the only life I knew how to choose.”

“Why are you calling them doodles? Why are you doing that? All I’m trying to tell you is that I’ve only ever really loved one thing. Being in the sky. But I look at you, and you are so curious about everything. Not just about the planets and galaxies and the stars. But Earth. About the people on it. That’s what I admire.” “My curiosity?” “Your commitment to the world around you. How much you care. You are so thoughtful. About everything.”

“I think you’re wrong. Who else would put up with us except each other? Who else is going to understand why we might have to miss our kid’s recital or can’t be home on Christmas, or why we’re risking our lives?”

Joan looked at him, considering. She could not ever miss Christmas with Frances. Not ever.

“Because people never fall in love with who they should. This whole world is full of stories of people falling in love with exactly who they weren’t supposed to.”

“I don’t believe in love,” she said. “For me. So how can I be a romantic?”

Just watching them, Joan liked her own body more. As she saw Duke tip a topless waitress, Joan made so much more sense to herself for one crystal-clear moment. Of course men were uninteresting to her. They were fundamentally uninteresting. We are interesting.

The world clicked into place for Joan then: why men were so obsessed with women’s bodies, why they made so many mistakes just to get closer to one.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “I don’t think we are…like this.”

“I thought it might be. I thought you might be.”