Out of Orbit (22 page)

Bowersox’s three boys were old enough to take part in the conversations, showing him work they had done in school and opening birthday presents in front of him, but Pettit’s twins didn’t have a firm grasp on modern communications techniques. He had figured as much, which was one of the reasons he had brought up his didgeridoo.

On the ground, he would come home from work, and they would drag it to him, and he would pick it up out of their tiny hands and blow into it, and they would laugh at the strange noises he made. Now Micki would bring them in front of the camera, and Don would play his didgeridoo, and the noise would crash through the miles and into their ears, and the twins would look at each other and clutch each other and break into laughter, the same as they always had. In the way that Don Pettit had been reduced mostly to a voice for Micki, for his kids, he was the sound that came out of his didgeridoo. He was a low hum and a crackle on their Saturday mornings, another one of their cartoons.

·   ·   ·

By Christmas, while the twins tore open their presents and pulled tricycles out from under the tree, their father was closer to a distant memory, a vague recollection of a smiling face. Micki and Annie, too, had gone from missing their husbands to growing used to the new rhythms that had taken over in their absence. They had begun to stretch into the other side of their beds.

As often as they liked, members of NASA’s family support crew would come over and look after their kids for a few hours (Micki
leaned on them more than the private Annie did), and they would go out and buy the groceries or take the car into the shop or sit down on a park bench and exhale. These were restorative moments. In some ways, having their men in space was easier than having them in Russia. Then, they would see each other just often enough to make the visits feel more like disruptions than oases. For the wives, dragging their kids back and forth was draining, as was the jet lag, as was the wondering what their husbands were up to. Now, Micki and Annie knew that there was only one place their men could be, and soon enough, the messy business of real life had replaced most of their longing, filling the void that would remain open until everyone was together again, safe at home.

As they did in space, the days blurred together, turning into weeks, into months. In the meantime, Micki and Annie had become acrobats. They had become expert jugglers and plate spinners. On the surface, their routines looked nothing like the ones that their husbands had latched on to. But at their heart, they were the same. They used them to find traction in a world that had been turned upside down. Their lives had their own restraint bars; they had found their own versions of ordinary.

Almost mercifully, nothing much changed until January 2003, when Annie’s and Micki’s phones rang with an unexpected proposition. Because of Mike Lopez-Alegria’s Iberian heritage, plans were afoot for the crew of STS-113 to tour Spain on a kind of publicity junket, talking to schoolchildren and touring air force bases. Annie and Micki were asked whether they would like to fill in for their still-absent husbands. For the first two weeks in February, they could escape, maybe spend a little time in the sun, maybe take a dip in a hotel pool or two, and by the time they were back in Houston, their men would be only a few weeks from coming home. Spain would help move along the wait.

Both women jumped at the chance. They made plans for friends to take care of their kids, and they went shopping for some new clothes. Annie and Micki had each begun packing her bags, open on her bedroom floor. And when they went to sleep on the last night in January, they dreamed of Barcelona.

·   ·   ·

When Micki woke up early the next morning, excited and optimistic, she remembered that
Columbia
was coming home. She and her boys had watched the launch from their couch, and now she thought it would be fun to watch what they called “the big rocket” land. She went into the kitchen and got their milk ready, set them up in the living room, and switched on NASA TV. Everything was quiet, all blank faces and whispers. Micki thought she must have had the times wrong, somehow mixed things up in the hour that divides Florida from Texas, and
Columbia
had already touched down. She flicked over to CNN, hoping that they might replay footage of the landing. While she was waiting, she got lost in the start of her day’s routine, until she heard the announcer say—or she thought she heard the announcer say—that Houston had lost contact with the International Space Station.

That sat her down. She began flipping between NASA TV and CNN, trying to piece together an incomplete story. On the former, she could hear a disembodied voice repeating again and again, “
Columbia
, Houston, comm check,” and she could hear that there was no reply. On the latter, she watched the horrible footage come in from Dallas of several vapor trails too many.

She called Cheryl Carey, her Thanksgiving host and wife of Duane “Digger” Carey, who was working in ground control that morning. Cheryl had been trying to reach him to find out what was going on, but even before the film from Dallas had come in, she and Micki knew in their hearts that something terrible had happened. It was a dread that they could feel in the pits of their stomachs, the sort of bad feeling that made their faces go hot.

“Is it gone?” Micki asked. “It’s gone, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Micki,” Cheryl said. “It’s gone.”

·   ·   ·

Annie and Micki, not really knowing what to do next but needing to do something, made the first round of phone calls, mostly to other wives who might not yet be awake. Soon enough, their phones began ringing all on their own, Houston’s massive built-in support
network having sprung to life. But with each call, with each repetition of the same few lines of sympathy and comfort, they began to grow numb to it all. They lifted out of themselves somehow, went away, only every so often allowing their minds to come back to those new widows huddled together in Florida—“Oh my God, Lani, God, Rona, what are they going to do?”—knowing that all they could offer them, at least for now, were prayers. To make themselves feel less helpless, to take back control, they began their Saturday morning routine like robots, making breakfast for the kids (life hadn’t stopped for them), picking up toys and sorting laundry, and putting on some coffee. They didn’t snap out of their trances for more than an hour, when each of them heard knocks at her door.

When they opened them, there were support staff lined up on their front steps, dispatched from the Johnson Space Center, offering hugs and whatever else the women might need. Both women said that they wanted to talk to their husbands. They needed to hear their voices right away.

Micki got on the line with Don first. When their conversation started, Micki was surprised at Don’s coolness. He sounded strangely calm and detached, as though he was giving a press interview to a reporter instead of talking to his wife, saying all of the platitudes that his years of training had prepared him to say, believing in all of the things that he had been taught to believe in. He said things like, “We’re hopeful that their safety systems triggered, and that their parachutes deployed, and that we’ll find them around campfires in the fields and hills.” And Micki would wait for him to finish, nod to herself, and then say, gently, “Don, I don’t think you understand,” and Don would respond to her gut checks with more empty, unfounded hope. Already, in the minutes that had passed since Expedition Six had been delivered those nine awful words, he had managed to trigger his own safety systems. He had put all of that time and distance to good use, building up a wall between himself and a reality that he was now too removed from to take in. Undeterred, Micki chipped away at the divide, not because she wanted to hurt him but because she wanted him to know what she knew. She wanted him, in that moment, to come back down to earth and
look up into the sky and see
Columbia
fall to pieces, so that he might come to understand that there would be no parachutes.

Finally, painfully, he did. Micki could hear the cracks opening up in Don’s voice, and then she could hear his half breaths, and then she could hear his sobs. He had broken down: “But they’re my friends, Willie is my friend, and Ilan is my friend, they’re all my friends, every one of them, and we were just talking to them, Willie and I were playing chess, and they can’t be gone, just like that, they can’t be gone.”

“Yes, Don,” Micki said. “They’re gone.”

·   ·   ·

For weeks after
Columbia
was lost, Micki’s and Annie’s phones continued to ring. Sometimes it was one calling the other—mostly it was the sure voice of Annie Bowersox on the other end of the line, telling Micki that she was there if she needed her. But more often, it was another astronaut’s wife or a relative from one side of the family or the other, from near or far, or it was a friend, close or distant, or it was a reporter, usually clueless. Across the country, there was a small army of people who, when they turned on their televisions and saw
Columbia
fall apart, immediately cast their minds toward station and the men inside of it and very soon after to their wives in Houston. Now those people almost always began their conversations with the same question: “How are you?” It didn’t require nearly as much thought to ask as it took to answer.

Annie told them she was fine, that she knew in her heart that Ken would be brought home as soon and as safely as possible. She believed in the system that she had been a part of for such a long time.

Sometimes, although surprisingly rarely, Micki would allow herself to feel a little less sure about how things might work out. In those moments she would feel sorry for herself. But soon enough she would think of
Columbia
’s wives, each of those women who had lost hold of their husbands forever and not just for a little while longer, and she would breathe out those few traces of self-pity and tell herself that she was lucky or relieved or—“Fine,” she would say.
After a few more minutes of gentle hand-stroking across the wires, she would hang up and wait for the phone to ring again.

Still, she was topped up with worry. About Don and when he might come home, but more about Evan and Garrett. Both of them had started showing early signs of asthma. They were constantly sick in the night, up coughing, and no one was there to spell her. She was exhausted. Her dark eyes grew circles under them to match.

Finally, after a sleepless, stress-filled month, after the phone had rung for the thousandth time—reminding her that no matter how hard she had tried to forget, all was still not right with her world—she broke.

She had been asked to give a talk to local couples who were having trouble making a baby. In the way Annie Bowersox had given comfort sprung from her hard-won experience, now Micki Pettit mined her own difficult history to make strangers feel better about their futures. But in that mining, she had to dig through six years of painful memories: the drugs, the needles, the failed in vitro attempts. Finding out she was finally pregnant, but finding out alone. Wrestling through a challenging pregnancy that she dreaded losing. Don rushing home when she gave birth to premature twins. Six weeks of an almost constant vigil in intensive care. Don having to head back to Star City only two weeks after the boys had come home. His unexpected assignment. The near agony of waiting for liftoff. Thanksgiving, another birthday, another Christmas without Don. Her boys coughing through the night.
Columbia
. And now a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing, and a long line of people wanting to ask her how she was.

“Fine,” she had said again and again. And it was true: somehow, she had made it through all of it, every last brutal bit of it—at least until she had finished her talk, carried the twins back to her car, strapped them in, and climbed into the front seat. Then, before she had the chance to push the key into the ignition, her tears started to flow. She hadn’t seen them coming, but now she put her forehead on the wheel and allowed herself a good, hard, cleansing cry, letting out months of pain and fatigue and upset. She let everything out.

That car, in that parking lot, didn’t look anything like the booth at the back of a church. And her kids—unknowing and hungry in the backseat—were her only audience. Still, in that moment, after she had wiped away the last of her tears in the rearview mirror, Micki was absolved. She had found the peace that Annie Bowersox and her three kids had, knowing that as often as it disappeared, that small, steady white light would come up once again over the trees, crossing their starlit sky on a smooth, predetermined path, the same path that would carry it over South Africa by the time they went to bed.

Since forever, it’s always been easier to be the one who’s gone away. There aren’t the same feelings of having been abandoned, and there aren’t the constant reminders that someone is missing from life. Along with everything else that the departed leave in their wake—the unfinished book on their nightstand, the growing pile of unopened mail on the kitchen table—the uncertainty is perhaps the worst of it. For those left behind, it makes for empty days and restless nights, hours occupied by asking the same question over and over again:
When will you come back home?

After
Columbia
, Expedition Six were finally forced to share mystery’s burden. They knew that they weren’t coming home sometime in March, as had been planned. And they knew—despite reassurances from the ground—that they wouldn’t return to earth on
Atlantis
, the shuttle that was meant to retrieve them. Beyond those absolutes there was only a seemingly infinite list of unknowns. And as hard as Ken Bowersox, Nikolai Budarin, and Don Pettit tried to block out the questions of how they might return, when they were bundled up in their sleeping bags late at night, they couldn’t keep their minds from groping in the dark for anything that looked like an answer. They never found one.

They weren’t alone in their sleeplessness. At the Johnson Space Center in Houston, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., hundreds of men and women were troubled by the fate of these three astronauts who had so suddenly lost their ride home.