“I suppose.”

“In fact, it was all her fault, wasn’t it?”

“No!”

“No? Why not? You tell me why. We both know she was sick that day and had no business driving. She told you she had the flu, right?”

“He made her drive! Okay? My sister was waiting at her school for hours for Dad to pick her up, but he couldn’t break away, so he leaves Mom to do it, knowing full well she was too sick.” The words are a snarl, and exactly what Mike wanted to elicit, and with the native abilities of an oil field negotiator, he eggs Jerrod on.

“That’s all bullshit, son!”

Jerrod is on his feet, his eyes aflame. “No, it isn’t! You don’t know anything about it. You weren’t there, and I was!”

“I don’t have to have been there. I know what you’re saying is bull. Your mama had no business driving that day. She killed herself.”

"No!”Jerrod’s eyes are closed, his arms in the air, fists clenched, his body shaking, as he tries to control the response, tries to avoid punching his in-law grandfather or throwing something at the big-mouthed bastard. He can hear his teeth grinding in pain and anger but doesn’t hear big Mike Summers rise quickly from his chair to suddenly grab him by the shoulders and swing him around.

“It’s okay, Jerrod. Those are the things I wanted to hear you say.”

Jerrod looks stunned and Mike continues, nose to nose.

“I wasn’t there, but there’s a lot more to the story you never knew, and your dad never told you, and it’s time you heard the truth.”

“What?” Jerrod’s voice is subdued, suspicious, like he’s just been maneuvered into a scam, yet Mike Summers is close to a force of nature and he can’t bring himself to completely disbelieve.

“Come here and sit.” Mike guides him back down and scoots his own chair as close as he can.

“I know you heard the crash, Jerrod. I know you ran to the end of the block, saw her car in flames, and ran the rest of the way to the wreck. I know you burned yourself trying to get her out, and that you watched her burn to death. I can’t erase… no one can erase those terrible images. But, son, your mama was having a hard time psychologically. She was, in essence, emotionally disturbed and taking several drugs from several different doctors, none of whom knew about the other. Two of them… a very powerful antidepressant and a drug called Ritalin… should never have been taken together, because one of the dangerous side effects is making really bad decisions, and hallucinating.”

“Hallucinating? Like… like on LSD?”

“Or worse. Or maybe just seeing things that weren’t there, or not seeing things that were. Like a stoplight. Like the one she ran through.”

“I didn’t know this.”

“I know you didn’t. And your dad wrongly believed that if he told you, you’d be even angrier with him for slandering your mom.”

There is a long silence as Jerrod searches Mike’s face for any sign that he’s being lied to.

“But here’s the rest of the story, Jerrod. That day, Julie had already been picked up safely at your dad’s direction by a family friend, but he couldn’t get your mom to accept that. She was paranoid and thought he was lying, and despite the fact that she had been warned not to drive, she did it anyway.”

“I remember Dad called, but she said it was to tell her he wasn’t coming for Julie.”

“Yes, that’s right. He wasn’t coming because she was already picked up, okay?”

“He said that… he told me some of those things, but I never believed him. I asked my mother once weeks before if she was taking something because she seemed so out of it, but she said no and I believed her. And… and that day, I only heard her side of the conversation, and she was furious and told me Dad wasn’t going to pick Julie up because he couldn’t be bothered.”

“In fact, when he was on that phone call—the part you didn’t hear—he was begging her to understand what he was saying. When she sounded so strange, he left work and screamed toward home, and it’s fortunate you didn’t lose both of them that day. Didn’t you ever wonder why he showed up at the accident site so quickly?”

Jerrod shakes his head, stunned. “I never knew it was quick. I was so… horrified…”

“I understand.”

“How do you know all this, sir?”

“Your dad sat right here one night a few years back and told me the whole story. He felt… just like he’s been writing up there in space about guilt… he felt so guilty that he didn’t see it coming, didn’t know about her doubled prescriptions. See, guys like him and you and me, we get this idea that if anything happens on our watch, it’s all our fault, regardless. Especially where women are involved, ’cause, see, we’re supposed to protect them.”

Jerrod is nodding slowly, numbly, as Mike continues.

“Your dad later sent me copies of the prescription drug labels, Jerrod, and I had a friend validate the effects. This isn’t exaggerated.”

Jerrod buries his head in his hands. “Oh God, I never gave him a chance, and now…”

“Okay. Look, I think they’ll get him down from there. I have a lot of hope for that, and you should, too. But there’s something else. What’s really been going on with you, Jerrod, is that you keep blaming yourself even more than him. You think deep down inside that if you’d been faster, stronger, smarter, or what-the-hell-ever, you could have pulled her out of that car before the fire killed her. You know why I know that? ‘Cause you’re a male, and that’s the goddammed way we think. Especially about our moms. Son, I sawthe pictures, okay? The post-fire pictures shot by the coroner.”

“How?”

“Before your dad married my daughter I had him thoroughly investigated, and I wanted every detail of that tragedy to make sure he had no culpability. Jerrod, she was trapped in a tangle of metal. There was nothing you could have done!”

“I could have pulled her out of the window.”

He sighs deeply, his eyes on Jerrod, considering whether to push on.

“Okay, dammit… I’m going to show you a picture, Jerrod, if you truly want to see it. It’s gruesome as hell and it will probably do you more harm, so I beg you not to ask, but you’re an adult now. If you want to see it, I’ll show it to you, but it was taken after her body was burned beyond recognition. It shows clearly that she had been completely impaled on the steering column after the wheel broke off. Run through, Jerrod, all the way through to her backbone. Even if you’d had superhuman strength, all you would have been able to pull out was her upper torso.”

“I… saw her look at me… her mouth moved… she was screaming…”

The only grandfather he’s ever known moves to sit alongside him, putting a big arm around the boy and pulling him into a hug, hanging on as the tears finally flow.

The so-called terminator—the line of demarcation between night and day—is crawling across the middle of the United States again, but Kip has to check his watch and think to realize that it’s been two days since he should have returned to Earth. He’s checked the oxygen and CO ₂scrubber saturation tables twice now, and he figures he has two more days before breathing begins to get difficult. Maybe he should just depressurize the ship and finish the job, freeze drying himself and his dead pilot with the vacuum of deep space and eternal cold.

Bill is about to become a problem. Kip knows it instinctively. A body in room temperature for two days has already gone through rigor mortis, and despite being sealed in plastic as well as Kip could manage, he fears that soon he’ll be inhaling the telltale odor of decomposition. Earlier, he stopped writing for a half hour to search out Bill’s pressure suit, wondering if perhaps putting him in it and sealing everything wouldn’t be the best course of action. But he’s convinced he’s waited too long; were he to open the sealed plastic now…