Page 112 of Atmosphere

Joan closed her eyes.

“I love you,” Vanessa said. “And I’m sorry.”

“I know,” Joan said. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” Vanessa said. “The whole situation is not okay. But…I guess I’m saying that I can accept the trade-off. And I want to make sure that you can.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can wake up every single day and choose you, over and over and over again. If you’re in bed next to me, I will take your hand. If you are not, I willgo find you.I will spend the rest of my life, if I get that lucky, seeking you out. Not because I promised you or because you’rethere.But because I will want to. I will want to be beside you. Every day. Forever.”

“You will?”

Vanessa tucked a strand of Joan’s hair behind her ear. “Every morning, I wake up and I think, ‘God, yes, her.’ ”

Joan smiled and dried her tears.

“If that can be enough for you,” Vanessa said, “it’s yours until the day I die.”

—

A week later, Joan gota stomach virus and had to call in sick. She forbade Vanessa from coming over because Vanessa was supposed to leave for Cape Canaveral the next day. And so, that night, there was no knock at the door. But her phone did ring.

“There is homemade chicken noodle soup at your doorstep. With crackers, ginger ale, and a cookie,” Vanessa said.

“What?” Joan asked. “Were you just here?”

“I’m at the pay phone.”

Joan stretched the phone cord as close to the window as she could to sneak a glimpse of Vanessa across the street. Vanessa looked toward the window and waved at her.

Joan waved back.

“I have something to tell you,” Vanessa said.

“What?” Joan said.

“Antonio called me in this morning.”

Joan’s eyes went wide. “No! What did he say?”

“STS-LR9. Steve’s my commander. It’s him, Hank, Griff, Lydia, and me. Right after Christmas ’84, six weeks after you.”

“You’re going up into space,” Joan said, smiling.

Vanessa laughed. “I’m going up into space.”

Spring and Summer 1984

For the next few months,Joan’s training for her mission became so intense that she was not always able to see Frances. Meanwhile, Vanessa’s parallel training had her in the dunk tank in Alabama so often that she and Joan would go weeks without seeing each other.

But Joan threw herself into it.

She was running simulations with the crew, going through various physical tests, and preparing Spacelab to run the solar experiments. Joan sometimes hit the bed at night like she’d been knocked out, sleeping heavy and hard, the morning feeling more like coming to than waking up.

Still.

As stretched thin as she was, she walked into Antonio’s office and asked for more.

---