Vessel

3

NONE OF THEM spoke at first. They clung to one another. Catherine was sobbing and so was Aimee, her slender body shaking with the force of it while Catherine held on to her and David held on to both of them. I’m home, I’m home, I’m home. She couldn’t stop thinking it, unable to believe it was finally happening. Our families will be so happy to see us; we’ll be able to make everything work out. Ava had been right.

David leaned in to kiss her carefully, their first kiss in nearly a decade. It was sweeter than she remembered. Catherine closed her eyes and they were twenty-three again, leaning toward each other on a boardwalk bench still warm from the setting sun. She’d been laughing, daring him to kiss her, their mouths sticky with cotton candy like children’s. He still smelled the same twenty years later, still wearing the same cologne.

David drew back and brushed a hand over her hair. “Come on. We’re taking you home.”

Walking out into the sunlight—Earth’s light, not artificial light, not starlight—was like walking out under a spotlight. Everything was so harsh, overexposed, bright. She was walking into a nuclear blast and half expected to see her shadow burned into the concrete behind her. The shapes were all wrong. While she was in quarantine she’d noticed the obsession of Earth architecture and design with having everything squared off. After the curves and contours of Sagittarius, that blocky squareness felt wrong. It felt dangerous. There were too many sharp corners to cut herself on.

What didn’t feel wrong were the two people with her. Squinting despite the sunglasses, she kept David on one side of her, Aimee on the other, her arms around their waists as they headed for the car.

A car. She laughed at the sight of it sitting there, delightfully ordinary. David wasn’t driving the exact car he’d had nine years ago, but it was the same in all the ways that mattered: midsize sedan, comfortable, safe, and a little dull. She used to tease him relentlessly about it: “You drive the slowest, most boring car of any future astronaut I know.” The rest of their training cohort were notorious speed junkies, an impressive collection of sports cars and classic muscle cars among them. Then David had washed out of the program, and the jokes stopped.

Catherine settled into the passenger seat and found herself savoring the overheated air from the late spring sun.

“Are you hungry?” David asked. “Do you want to stop and get anything before we get home?”

“I just want to go home.” Catherine couldn’t stop looking at both of them, cataloguing changes. David’s auburn hair was a little thinner at the temples, and there were wire-framed glasses covering his gray eyes that hadn’t been there before. But really, he looked the way he’d always looked. From the cologne to the car to everything else, David never changed. He was her rock, steady and unmoving and always there.

Except he did change, didn’t he? Your rock moved on. To Maggie. Ava’s voice. Catherine willed the thought away. She just wanted to enjoy this.

Aimee was a wonder. For years, Catherine had carried the image of the nine-year-old tomboy in her head, and she scarcely knew how to credit this ethereally beautiful seventeen-year-old sitting behind her. She’d always had David’s friendly features and Catherine’s pale skin, but there was no trace of the tomboy in her now. Her dark-brown hair was pulled back in a loose braid, and she was wearing a perfectly tailored gray dress. It was the kind of thing Catherine would never have had the fashion sense to pick.

“Mom. You’re staring.” Aimee’s smile stayed as bright as ever, but she fidgeted with the phone in her hands.

“You just both look so good. You have no idea.” She shook her head. “I remember I used to have to fight to get you to wear anything other than jeans or overalls. That dress is amazing.”

Aimee glowed beneath the praise, sitting up a little straighter. “Isn’t it great?” She played with the skirt, straightening it out. “Maggie helped me pick it out for the last science fair we—” She stopped, gaze darting to her father and then down for a heartbeat.

Catherine’s smile tightened but stayed in place. “It’s all right.” She reached back to touch Aimee’s arm. “I’m glad she was there for you.”

And she was… but she still had to suppress a rush of jealousy that sat side by side with her gratitude that Aimee had had some sort of mother figure while Catherine couldn’t be there. All the time she spent drifting through space, imagining her homecoming, she’d never imagined she would come back to find that David had moved on and Aimee had been close to calling another woman “Mom.” The two of them were hers again, but Maggie’s shadow still lingered. Maybe Maggie had been a better mom, a better partner… Catherine could never know for sure, and she’d never be able to ask.

“So,” she said, trying to find her way out of the mire they’d stumbled into, “science fairs are still your thing, huh?”

“Aimee hasn’t lost a science fair since she started high school.” David beamed with pride. “This last time one of the judges said he had graduate students that could learn something from her work.”

“Daa-ad, that’s not what he said. He said they could learn from my work ethic.”

“That’s still fantastic. I want to hear all about school,” Catherine said. “Do you think they’d mind if I came to visit? I’d love to see it.”

Aimee made a face, but shrugged. “They’d probably love it and want you to do a whole assembly or something.”

Catherine laughed at the expression on Aimee’s face. “Okay, okay, I won’t come and embarrass you right away. I just… I’ve missed you.” She glanced over at David’s profile. “Both of you. I’ve got a lot of lost time to make up for.”

As they got closer to the house, Catherine grew quiet, watching the neighborhood outside the windows. So much had changed, but so much was exactly the same. The supermarket she used to go to all the time was still there. Those quiet early Saturday mornings had been an oasis for her; leaving David and Aimee sleeping while she wandered the aisles, finding something meditative in the simplicity of it, looking at labels, checking things off her list. The stores around the supermarket were all new—a pet store had replaced the hair salon where Aimee had gotten her first haircut; a storefront computer-repair place was where the dry cleaners had been. It was like seeing a familiar photograph with some of the faces rubbed out and replaced with those of strangers. Once in their own cul-de-sac, the feeling intensified. Houses changed colors, the cars were all wrong. Somehow she’d sideslipped into another universe where the McIntyres’ house was green instead of blue and Aimee was a grown-up fashion plate instead of a freckle-faced tomboy.

The flutter in her stomach worsened as they reached their house. Would Catherine be able to tell that another woman had been living there?

David pulled into the garage and jumped out to open Aimee’s and Catherine’s doors. He huffed out a breath and then gave Catherine a bright smile that was a little forced. “So, welcome home!”

She stepped inside. Nothing had changed that she could see at first. Aimee followed her into the living room while David hung back in the kitchen, closing the garage door. “I’ll be right back. I need to change out of this before I get something on it.” That, at least, sounded like the Aimee that Catherine remembered, and she smiled as Aimee took the stairs two at a time.

Looking around the living room, she could see them now, a million little changes. The drapes were different. And the furniture. Unbidden, the mental picture formed of David and Maggie furniture shopping, redecorating the living room in celebration of the new life they were planning…

Maybe it hadn’t happened that way at all. Maybe David and Aimee had done it to welcome her home. Maybe—

“You doing okay?” David pressed a cold glass into her hand and kissed her on the cheek. “They said we needed to make sure you stayed hydrated. It’s just club soda and lemon.”

“I’m fine.” Catherine forced a smile and gave him a one-armed hug. “Thank you. It’s all… a lot.”

David took her words at face value and smiled back before glancing around. “Where’s Aimee?”

“She went upstairs to change.”

“She goes through about five outfits a day these days, seems like.” He shook his head.

“I was like that at her age, too.”

They fell silent. Catherine couldn’t tell if it was because neither of them knew what to say, or that they had so much to say that neither of them knew where to start. David leaned in and rested his head against hers, lingering there. What did she look like to him? How much had she changed in his eyes? It was hard to imagine. She’d always been pale, but now she was ghost-white from years without direct sunlight. There were creases around her eyes that hadn’t been there when she left, and she was starting to find the occasional gray hair in the straight, nearly black strands. The first year she was alone on Sagittarius she’d taken to cutting her hair to keep it from falling into her eyes. As time went on she stopped caring, and ended up pulling it back in a ponytail or a braid. One of the first things she did after she’d landed was get her hair cut into a short, blunt style. She still wasn’t sure she liked it; she was afraid it made her look too severe.

Catherine took a sip of her club soda. David still wasn’t talking. Should she be talking? She’d craved human contact so much while she was alone, sprawled on her hard bunk on Sagittarius, and now that she had it, it didn’t feel anything like she’d imagined. Leaning against him this way should have been natural and soothing. She could feel each breath he took, his body moving lightly against hers. A wave of revulsion washed over her. He was too soft. Touching him was like touching some sort of grotesque bag of seawater and viscera, wrong and unnatural and…

She looked at him, and for a moment didn’t recognize what she saw, seeing something alien in his familiar features. She blinked, and her vision cleared. David was just David again, and leaning against him felt the way it had always felt: comfortable and warm.

Still, her heart thumped uncomfortably, even as she told herself it was just an adjustment issue. She’d been alone for so long. She wasn’t used to touching things that were alive.

“Oh.” David seemed unaware of any discomfort and took her hand. “Come over here and see what we put together.” He led her over to the wall next to the fireplace. It was lined with photographs of Aimee and David, arranged chronologically from the time Catherine left—literally from the day: she recognized the outfit Aimee had on in the first photo as the one she’d worn on launch day. There were photos of birthdays, Christmases, several science fairs… all the things Catherine had missed.

Her eyes stung and she blinked rapidly to clear her vision. “This is… it’s amazing.”

He looked pleased. “I tried to get photos of everything. There are a lot more that we didn’t manage to put up. And videos. I have hours and hours of videos.”

As heartwarming as the photos were, something about them made her uneasy. It took her several moments to see it. None of the photos had Maggie in them. Even photos that Catherine might expect her to be in, like holidays and birthdays. There was no sign of Maggie at all. David had carefully edited all traces of her from his and Aimee’s life. Catherine was equal parts touched and disturbed. Was it so easy to erase someone from your life? Had he done that with her while she was gone?

Aimee came trotting downstairs in jeans and a T-shirt. “You found the pictures!” She smiled and bounded over. She hovered there, tension rippling through her, as if on the edge of a decision, then reached out to give Catherine an enthusiastic hug.

“I love them,” Catherine said, returning the hug tightly. This was the sort of hug she’d dreamed of while she was away, unrestrained and affectionate.

“Well,” David said, clapping his hands together like a master of ceremonies, “now that you’re home, what do you want to do first? Do you need to rest a bit?”

“I’ve been ‘resting’ for three weeks now.” Catherine smiled. “I’m so glad to be here, I don’t even know where to start.”

“Let’s show you the rest of the house.” David offered her his hand and she took it, twining their fingers.

“I did live here before, you know,” Catherine couldn’t help but tease, but David’s offer made it obvious: right now, she was still a guest in her own house.

He recognized his misstep and tried to make a joke of it. “Well, yeah, of course, but… I don’t know. This is just so much more room than you’re used to, I want to make sure you don’t wander off and get lost.”

“All right, all right. Commence with the grand tour.” Catherine played along with him, but couldn’t help but wonder, now that she was home, how long it would be before this really was home.