Vessel

16

THE HOUSE WAS quiet when she got home. David was still at work, of course, and Aimee had a summer job at a nearby computer repair shop. The silence was oppressive.

Catherine went to her computer and turned it on, planning to make good on her promise to keep an eye on anything that might need her attention. But even as she sat at her desk in her own home, a sense of impending doom hovered, as if someone were still watching her.

Images flickered through her mind: getting called in front of some sort of committee, or worse, a federal judge. Scandal. Losing Aimee. No matter what she tried to focus on, her thoughts spiraled out of control.

Without thinking about it, she went to the kitchen and poured a glass of wine.

She sat at the breakfast bar with the open wine bottle next to her. Slowly, the worst of the images started to fade. The second glass wiped them away almost entirely. Finally, Catherine was able to sit there in the kitchen and breathe. A third glass was tempting, but now she at least felt able to focus on something, so she decided to go with her other favorite method of distraction.

David hadn’t gotten rid of any of her belongings while she was gone, and they were all still waiting for her, packed away in the guest room. Now she could go through some of them—all the clothes that were ten years out of date, that didn’t fit anymore, that she never liked to begin with.

As she cleaned, she was better able to think through her options. She should tell someone what was happening. She’d kept this in for too long. Even if Dr. Darzi wanted to insist that everything was normal and fine, it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Catherine felt as if a random hand were moving her around like a chess piece, and she had no idea if she was a pawn or the queen. Either way, the strategy in play wasn’t hers at all.

But Dr. Darzi was employed by NASA. Could Catherine trust her? If not her, then who? The answer was obvious. David. She could tell David. Let me help you, he’d said.

Decision made, she threw all her energy into sorting through the closets, drawers, and boxes full of her belongings.

By late afternoon she was sweaty and a little grouchy, but her mind felt clearer, and all the extra stuff that had been stored in the guest room was cleared out and sorted through. And it was worth it: there were several bags of things to donate as well as to toss out.

In the master bedroom, she worked through the dresser drawers, reorganizing, putting things away. Tucked in the back corner of one of those drawers was a black velvet box. Thinking she might have found a piece of old, forgotten jewelry, Catherine pulled it out. The hinges were stiff and it took more effort than she expected to pop it open.

Inside the box was a diamond solitaire in a gleaming platinum setting. It wasn’t Catherine’s. Her engagement and wedding rings had made the trip to TRAPPIST with her in her Personal Preference Kit—the collection of personal items all astronauts brought on missions—along with photos of her family and a USAF sweatshirt, and were back on her left hand. Besides, she hated platinum. She took the ring out and checked—it was too small for her fingers.

Maggie had small, delicate fingers. And Catherine had seen her wearing platinum jewelry.

She’d known that David had moved on while she was gone. But, knowing it was one thing. Holding the proof in her hand… that was something else entirely. All she could do was stand there, staring at the sparkling item in her palm.

“Hey, there you are. Feeling better?”

She jumped out of her skin as David came up behind her, slipped his arms around her waist, and kissed her neck. “I just got home. Aimee’s talking about going out again, so it’s just going to be us. I was thinking, we could order something in for dinner, settle on the couch—”

She pulled away from him and turned around, unsure what to say.

David’s forehead creased as he looked at her, and then at the ring in her hand.

“When were you going to tell me about this?” Catherine asked.

“Catherine, I—”

“Had you already asked her? Were you planning a wedding when I reappeared and messed everything up?” Something bubbled in her chest and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep it from boiling over this time.

“I hadn’t—” David took a breath and stepped back. “We’d talked about it. I hadn’t formally proposed yet. We were talking about it after she moved in here, with Aimee and me.”

Logically she knew that David and Maggie had slept in the same bed she slept in every night, the same bed David had been about to try to get her into. But that did nothing to calm her irrational anger.

“In here,” she said flatly. “In our bed. How could you do that?”

“You were dead!”

“I wasn’t dead. I was never dead. I was in hell, David, but I wasn’t dead.” Nothing she was saying was helping defuse this, but it felt so satisfying, like scratching an itch too hard.

“How could I have known that? If you hadn’t gone in the first place—”

“You insisted that I go! ‘You can’t miss this opportunity, Cath, it’s once in a lifetime.’ ”

“What else did you expect me to say? You’d already made it abundantly clear that your career came before me and Aimee.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Come on, Catherine. You weren’t content to do space-station missions like everyone else. You had to be more. You applied for the Sagittarius program when Aimee was still a baby. A six-year mission! You didn’t have to do that, but before Aimee could even walk, you were planning—planning—to leave us.”

“David, you met me in the astronaut training program. Did you expect me to stay home all the time and take care of you and the baby? You knew before you married me, before we had Aimee, that I’d be gone sometimes. You could have said something then, if you were worried. Why didn’t you?”

“I was supposed to go, too!”

Silence fell between them, and then Catherine barked a laugh. “Is that what’s been bothering you all this time? What was I supposed to do, David? Fail, just because you did?”

“Oh. Oh, you’ve been wanting to say that for a long time, haven’t you?” David’s smile was feral. “Catherine the Great got stuck married to David the Failure.”

“That is not fair,” Catherine said. “I never felt stuck. I always loved you.” Too late, she realized she’d used the past tense.

“Why would you feel stuck? You were free to roam the whole fucking cosmos while I stayed home and took care of the baby.”

Catherine realized then she was lying. David had been so calm and steady when she’d met him, but after a few years, she realized that “calm and steady” could also mean “stagnant.” He never changed, and he’d hoped that she wouldn’t either. Catherine put the ring back in its box, closing it with a snap and setting it on the dresser. Then she looked up at her husband. “I thought we were past this, but all this time you’ve resented me for doing what you couldn’t.”

“Of course I resented you. You bailed on us.”

“ ‘Bailed’ on you? Really, David? Was getting to spend time with our daughter that much of a hardship? Do you know how much time I spent wishing desperately I was with her?”

“No. No, I don’t. Because you never fucking talk to me about what happened up there.”

“And boy, are you really making me want to confide in you right now.” Catherine started refolding some of the clothes she’d planned to keep, pulling open a dresser drawer with a sharp jerk.

“When have you ever? Catherine the Great never needed to confide in anyone.” Catherine didn’t miss the way David picked up the engagement ring box and tucked it in his pocket.

“Stop calling me that.”

“You didn’t seem to mind when John Duffy called you that.”

“And now we’re back to the jealousy.” Catherine fought the urge to roll her eyes. “David, do you really think what I did is any worse than what hundreds of men who’ve gone into space long-term have done? If it had been you, do you think anybody would’ve talked about how you ‘bailed’ on your family?”

“You’re her mother!”

Catherine laughed. “Did you really just—” She stopped, unable to believe what she was hearing. “Are you trying to say that it would have been perfectly okay for you to leave us for ten years, but since I’m not a man, I’m the harpy who left her family behind?”

“You can’t understand what it was like here then.” David rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache. “Cath, I was there in Mission Control the day we lost contact. Initial reports said there might be cooling issues in the Habitat, so we were working on that. I was talking to Michael Ozawa about what we’d discovered, and you all just… vanished. Everyone’s vitals dropped to zero. Including yours. I thought I’d just watched you die.”

“For all I know, I did watch them die, David. Can you understand that? Five of my closest friends. I have no idea what happened to them, or if I even tried to do anything to stop it.” The horror of those initial days alone in the ship came rushing back. Realizing that she was almost six months out from the TRAPPIST-1 system with no memory of ever having been there. Sitting in the cockpit again, wondering if she’d abandoned her crew, trying to decide if she could go back to TRAPPIST-1 and still have enough fuel to get home. “You cannot imagine how completely alone I was.”

“No, I can’t. God, Catherine, the list of things about you I can’t understand could stretch from here to Mars.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I’ve ever fully understood you. You’re unknowable—you were then, and you are now.”

Quietly, a little afraid of the answer, Catherine asked, “Then why did you marry me?”

“Back then I found it intriguing, but now it’s just exhausting.” David sank to the edge of the bed, sitting down heavily. “We needed you. I needed you. And career or no career, you weren’t here. Even when you were here, you were never present. Maggie was here. She was the one who helped Aimee through her first day of middle school, who sat down with her when she started going through puberty. Maggie did all of that, not you.”

Her hands curled into fists. “Maggie was here awfully quick, wasn’t she? Middle school? We were barely through the wormhole when Aimee started middle school. What was Maggie doing here then?”

David didn’t respond at first.

“Which one of you was just waiting for the chance?” She paused, a horrible thought occurring to her. “Was it going on all along? Right under my nose?”

“No! Catherine, I would never do something like that. And if I had—”

Catherine’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “If you had, what?”

“Who could blame me? That wasn’t what we planned, not at all. We were both supposed to go into space, to take turns—”

“It’s not my fault you weren’t cut out to be an astronaut.”

“I was doing fine! If you had just supported me a little bit more—”

“The way you’re supporting me right now?”

“I can’t support you if I don’t know what happened.”

It was like a flood of anger pouring out of her, and out of David. A small part of her felt the quiet, vicious joy of dancing around a funeral pyre. Another part of her felt like this had been inevitable from the moment she’d returned to Earth.

She started to see it in Chicago. In her mother’s world, Catherine was dead and gone, and she’d learned to cope with it. The idea of Catherine returning was too much for her, too difficult. Catherine’s return had filled a hole in Aimee’s life—she’d found her mom again. Julie had gotten her sister back. But David, David was the only one who had lost something when she came home. Like Nora, his world had been turned upside down. Did he really love her anymore, or was it just habit?

“You want to know what happened? You want me to tell you about the hallucinations? How I thought I’d die before I had a chance to see you and Aimee again? That’s apparently what Cal wants to hear.” She leaned against the dresser and folded her arms. “Or do you want me to tell you about how I slept with Tom Wetherbee?”

He stared at her in shock.

“There. Now you know. The thing I’m hiding that Cal Morganson keeps trying to find. We got drunk one night with the crew, and I screwed him. It happened once, that I know of, and I felt like shit.”

“You cheated on me,” David said flatly. “With him? Jesus, Cath, I didn’t think you even liked him!”

“I sure as hell wasn’t in love with him! Remind me again, had Sagittarius cleared the atmosphere before you brought Maggie around, or did you wait a few days?”

They looked at each other. She knew she’d just shattered something between them irreparably—no, to be fair, they’d both shattered it. Catherine waited to see which of them would be the one to say it. When he didn’t, she did. “Should I go?”

“Catherine, I didn’t want this.”

“Neither did I.”

She just kept looking at him, waiting for his answer. Finally, David stood up and sighed, resigned. “Yeah. Yeah, I think you should go.”

Catherine turned without a word and fetched one of the suitcases from the closet to start packing.

“Where will you go?” David was still standing there, watching her.

“I don’t know yet.”

“What about Aimee?”

Catherine stopped, holding a half-folded blouse. She sighed. “Can you send her up here? Let me tell her?” Christ, I’m leaving her again.

“Fine.” David left and Catherine sank down on the bed. She expected that she might cry later, but for now there was nothing, just a slow-growing sense of relief.

“Mom? Dad said you wanted to talk to me?” Aimee caught sight of the suitcase. “What’s wrong? Is it Grandma?”

“No, honey. Your grandma’s fine.” She patted the bed next to her. “Come sit down.”

Aimee sat down, but before Catherine could speak, she said, “You’re leaving. Why are you leaving?”

“Your father and I just need some time to think about things.” There might be a time to share the details with Aimee, but this wasn’t it. “It’s not anybody’s fault.”

“It’s Maggie, isn’t it?”

“Not really, no. I’m not going far,” Catherine said. “I’ll stay nearby, and you’ll be able to come see me and stay with me whenever you want. I love you, and this is not about you at all, you know that, right?”

Aimee threw her arms around her mother’s neck. “I don’t want you to go. You just got home.”

“I know. I know.” Catherine stroked her back, closing her eyes against tears. “I have to, though; at least for a little while.” Even as she said it, though, Catherine knew her comforting words were delaying the truth; her gut told her she wouldn’t be coming back. She’d already lost her crewmates. And now she’d lost her family, too.