None of which was much comfort to Zack, to Rachel, or to Megan’s parents.
James Doyle, Megan’s father, was a thick, ruddy man of seventy who looked like a career cop with a history of alcohol abuse, but was, in fact, a retired insurance salesman with a history of alcohol abuse. He had summed it up for Zack: “No matter how bad things are going, they can always get worse.”
Zack’s own parents were not present, though the circumstances—Dad’s increasing frailty, Mom’s lack of comprehension—were not happy, either.
Now James Doyle sat across from Zack in the limo thoughtfully provided by the funeral home. He was vainly trying to comfort Megan’s mother, Diane, a slim, vital woman of Scottish descent in her midsixties, clearly the one Megan took after.
In the seat ahead sat Megan’s brother, Scott; his wife; and their seven-year-old son. Their grief was either overwhelmingly numbing or under control. But thank God they were here. The challenge of having to face them, to comfort them and be comforted, had allowed Zack to compartmentalize his own grief and put it aside.
For the moment. He had yet to break down over the loss of lover and wife.
Or his loss of the Moon. He would have traded that adventure, every glorious moment of it, to have Megan back.
As the car rolled down the Gulf Freeway toward Forest Park Cemetery, Zack thought about the casket in the hearse ahead of them.
Megan was inside. Megan with the deep brown eyes and that wicked smile. The athletic yet feminine build. The slim legs that still, after eighteen years of intimacy, had the magic to stir him. The walk that had caught his eye at Berkeley.
The throaty laugh and perfectly pitched voice that, he realized after many years, was the single trait he found most attractive in her.
All stilled and silenced. Boxed for shipping.
At the hospital, he had forced himself to look on her battered body. Not as horrible as he feared—the only visible damage a bruise on the right side of her face. But Zack could not believe it was Megan . . . the collection of bone, muscle, and blood on the gurney was too still to be his often-jittery, constantly mobile wife.
Enough. Time to act like an astronaut—don’t look back, look at the problem directly in front of you.
Which was Rachel. She had escaped serious physical injury in the crash, but the shock and trauma would be with her forever.
In the first hours afterward, she had acted irrationally, speaking only to demand her Slate and, when Zack failed to produce it (the unit was still in the wreckage of the car, wherever that was), sinking into a sullen stupor that stretched over three days. She went through the motions of her precrash life—she ate, she dressed, she continued to experiment with makeup. There was nothing robotic about it, nothing overt enough to trigger a diagnosis of depression. She was merely . . . subdued. When addressed, she would respond, but usually with a single word.
At least, that was Zack’s perspective. How reliable were his judgments?
Zack could not make words come out of his mouth. Take a breath. He had to be strong not only for Rachel, but for Megan’s parents, who sat across from them, their faces furrowed with concern. He patted his daughter’s hand and tried to be calm and businesslike. “Have you got your poem?”
Rachel’s eyes widened in apparent horror. Emotion! Zack wanted to cheer. “Oh my God, I think I left it home!”
Before Zack could react, Rachel’s face reset to cold and stoic. Her voice, however, was rich with teenage condescension. “Do you honestly think I’d screw this up?”
By the time the cortege reached the grave site, the wind and rain had stopped. The cemetery was bathed in a gauzy sunlight that Zack found both peaceful and unusual.
As the casket was being wrestled into place, another car arrived from a different direction.
For an instant, Zack hoped it would be Harley Drake. Harley had been badly injured in the accident, likely crippled, alive but still unconscious. Zack wanted Harley to wake up and be well, because he was his friend—and because he wanted to know what happened.
But out of the car stepped chief astronaut Shane Weldon and Zack’s newly former Destiny-5 crewmates: Tea Nowinski, Geoff Lyle, and Mark Koskinen.
And Zack’s replacement, Travis Buell. The new Destiny-5 commander—Zack’s backup these past two years—was a slight, almost scholarly-looking man of forty. Crew trainers used to joke that Zack looked like an Army helicopter pilot, while Buell seemed more professorial. And Zack had been willing to accept the observation. Buell seemed to live in the realm of ideas rather than physical action. In Buell’s eyes you could see the light of true belief, whether in the biblical Jehovah, the perfection of the United States of America, or the necessity of making a manually controlled landing at Shackleton as opposed to one flown by computer. These all happened to be issues he and Zack had sparred over for two years. Even at this distance, in these circumstances, Zack could see the righteous fire in the man.
A step behind the Destiny crew came Taj Radhakrishnan, dapper in a London Fog while the astronauts wore hideous yellow plastic raincoats over NASA flight suits. Tea broke from the others and went directly to Zack. “Sorry we’re late,” she said. “They almost waved us off.” Of course . . . the storm that marred Megan’s funeral would affect air travel in the area, especially for small NASA jets coming into nearby Ellington Field.
They had not seen each other since the press conference. Now Tea wrapped her surprisingly muscular arms around him. “God, Zack, I am so sorry.”
On her best days, Tea Nowinski was the astronaut equivalent of a movie star—blond, blue-eyed, terrific figure—the all-American girl. Half the astronauts in the office thought that she and Zack were having an affair. Not that the idea hadn’t crossed his mind. They were indeed attracted to each other. But there were several reasons why the relationship remained professional and platonic. For one, the intimacy required of Destiny crews destroyed any vestige of romance. As Harley Drake used to say, “Once you’ve seen your buddy use the toilet on the ceiling, you never look at him the same again.” That went double for any male astronaut lusting after a female colleague.
For another, Tea had a history of passionate, troubled involvements with men, including a recent fling with an Air Force weather officer she had met at the Cape. Watching her dial through an unusually broad range of emotions—from pure joy to hysterical fury—thanks to some petty error on the part of Major Right Now was another disincentive.
And, truly, chasing other women was simply not in Zack’s personal tool kit, crowded out by genuine affection for his family and the sheer overwhelming, all-consuming responsibility for the first crewed lunar landing of the twenty-first century.
At this moment, Tea was simply a mess . . . runny nose, blotchy skin, streaming tears. “Hey,” Zack said, knowing how forced he sounded, “doesn’t this violate your quarantine?” The Destiny-5 crew should have been locked down, isolated from stray germs.
Instead of snapping a profane reply—her normal response to any facetious question—Tea simply blinked back more tears and knelt to embrace Rachel, who was several steps behind Zack, flanked by James and Diane. Zack noted that although Rachel’s expression remained blank, her posture snapped rigid. Was that caused by annoyance at being hugged by a relative stranger?
Or annoyance at being hugged by Tea Nowinski? Zack had neither the time nor energy to ponder the matter. Weldon and Koskinen arrived to escort Tea into the crowd while Taj touched a silent hand to Zack’s shoulder.