Summer 1982
Joan and Vanessa had gotten in the habit of talking on the phone before bed on the days they could not see each other. Those days were coming more and more often as they got more and more busy.
Vanessa had been working as a Cape Crusader—one of the members on the Astronaut Support Personnel team for the missions. They prepped the shuttle, assisted the crew with getting strapped into their seats, and helped close out the shuttle after the mission was over. It meant spending a lot of time on Cape Canaveral.
Which meant that time together was harder to come by lately. Joan would go whole weeks with just these stolen phone calls, whispering over the line to Florida.
But right now, they were both in Houston and Joan was grateful for it. Joan was setting the table at Vanessa’s house as Vanessa came in the side door with the grilled kebabs.
Vanessa set the plate down and told Joan she had a question. “Hank says that if he changes his schedule, he can take me up in the T-38 tomorrow,” she said. “But that means you’d have to find someone else to take you up on Wednesday. I’m really sorry to ask, but he says he’ll let me take the controls the whole time. And I haven’t been able to get up there much this month. Is it okay? If it’s not, I swear I will back out. I don’t want to leave you in the lurch.”
“No,” Joan said, shaking her head and taking a seat. “I mean, that’s fine.
Duke had said he could take me up sometime. I can just ask him, but . . .”
“But what?”
“But we both had the afternoon off tomorrow, remember? And you said you wanted to drive to that Tex-Mex place in the city before you take off for KSC again?”
Tomorrow was supposed to be their last chance to see each other before Vanessa headed out.
“Oh, right,” Vanessa said. “No, I do want to do that. But . . .”
“You want to fly the T-38 even more.”
Vanessa paused and then said, “I mean, yeah.”
Joan had known Vanessa for over two years by then, had kissed her for the first time almost a year ago, had waded further and further into this intimacy.
Joan had given in to Vanessa in a way that still surprised her. Joan had not lost herself to Vanessa, but found herself in her. She had not cut off parts of herself to fit so much as learned to make room for someone other than herself.
Joan would so happily, even if she were a vegetarian, make Vanessa a meatloaf.
This surrender had not always been easy—it had shocked Joan just how much physical pain there was in loving someone like this.
It hurt Joan’s hands not to touch her in front of people the way Donna could touch Hank.
There was a fire in her—a burning through her belly and chest—when they fought.
And they did fight. There was the time Joan lost her temper just before Donna and Hank’s wedding, when Vanessa didn’t want to go in the same car.
And when Joan started crying after Vanessa introduced Joan to a woman she had dated once, without giving Joan a heads-up first. And the deadly silent treatments Vanessa would levy against Joan when Joan canceled on her one too many times. The fights they’d gotten into when Joan defended Barbara’s questionable behavior.
They both had said awful things to each other. It was the first time in Joan’s life that she’d said something untrue just to upset someone else—just to try to make her own sting go away. She’d been horrified by what could come out of her mouth. “Of course you’re not as important to me as my niece!” “You don’t know how to stand by anyone! You always have one foot out the door!”
And the things Vanessa had said: things that, no matter how many times Vanessa apologized, Joan knew in her heart she would never really let go of.
“You’re a doormat to your sister!” “You are childish, Joan. It’s not your fault, because you’re inexperienced, but sometimes you are as mature as a teenager about this.”
How was it, exactly, that two people could scar each other like that and keep going? In fact, go deeper? How was it that Joan could know that
Vanessa did mean some of those things—that Joan could admit to herself in quiet moments that she meant some of what she’d said, too—but somehow the effect was to be tied together even more tightly?
Why was it that when you let someone that far in, you learned to be okay with all the ways they saw you, even if they weren’t flattering? Why, right now, talking to Vanessa, did Joan feel the most perfect sense of safety?
Joan’s scientist mind could come up with a series of explanations for this that had to do with the brain’s talent for denial and compartmentalization. But she suspected that the truth was that acceptance so powerful made everything else feel small.
Vanessa loved her. Would love her. Showed no signs of stopping. And did it at great risk to her own future.
“Yeah, of course,” Joan said. “Obviously, you should fly the T-38 with
Hank. It’s not even a question.”
“Are you sure?”
“Really,” Joan said. “I get it. You have to do it. I will be mad at you if you don’t.”
Vanessa laughed, and just the sound of it made Joan happy. Joan wanted to love Vanessa in a way that never made her give up what she wanted. That never changed her.
But, maybe, that wasn’t exactly true.
After Vanessa went flying the next day, she showed up late at Joan’s apartment, when Joan was already in her pajamas, getting ready to go to sleep.
Vanessa took off her pants and her bra, brushed her teeth, and got into bed in her T-shirt alongside Joan, pressing her cold legs against the warmth of Joan’s body.
As they were falling asleep, Vanessa said, “I haven’t had a dream about
my funeral in months.”
“Really?” Joan said. “I wonder why.”
And Vanessa, as she buried her head in Joan’s neck, said, “You.”
Joan and Vanessa were driving back from dinner in Vanessa’s convertible with the top down, the hot August wind in Joan’s hair.
Joan noticed that Vanessa had taken to driving with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on her knee. Sometimes, Joan would watch Vanessa do a reverse three-point turn, her palm flat as it moved against the wheel. It never failed to light something up in Joan.
Vanessa pulled into her driveway and cut the engine.
“I want to take you somewhere special,” Vanessa said.
“I’ve always wanted to go away,” Joan said, and then more quietly as she moved closer: “Somewhere far from here where no one can see us, and I can kiss you in the sunshine.”
Vanessa closed the convertible top, and they walked inside. Once the door was shut behind them, Vanessa pushed Joan against the wall and kissed her.
Joan never got tired of it, being pushed and pulled like that.
“Do you know what I want?” Vanessa said. “I want to be lying on a beach where we don’t know a single soul. And you are in a bikini. And I lay out this big blanket. And everything smells like suntan oil. And there are waiters bringing us French 75s. And the water is warm.”
“And we can go into the ocean together and I can put my arms around you as the waves come and put my legs around your waist and just rest there with you.”
“And I can kiss you and no one looks, no one cares.”
“I want that, too.”
“You know, my friend Eileen has an airfield outside of Miami. Sometimes she uses her client’s Hawker 400 and takes her partner, Jacqueline, down to Costa Rica. Maybe we could do that one day. Hitch a ride with them.”
“Or borrow a plane and you can fly us.”
“Well, it’s funny you should say that . . .”
“Are you going to fly us somewhere?”
“Would you like that?”
“I want to watch you do it. I’ve never gotten to fly with you piloting before. To watch you up close. I want to see it.”
“Well, I know we don’t have enough time to take a big trip at the moment.
But I had a more manageable idea.”
“Tell me.”
Vanessa smiled. “In a little over a month it’s going to be Labor Day
weekend.”
Joan’s heart throbbed.
“Last year, at that time . . . we went to Rockport.”
“Yes, we did,” Joan said.
“And it was great.”
“Yes, it was.”
“And I thought maybe to commemorate that, I could take you out to dinner.”
“Okay,” Joan said. “Labor Day weekend, take me out to dinner.”
“But not just anywhere, obviously.”
Joan copied her tone, smiling at her. “Well, obviously, it’s an important dinner.”
She laughed. “What if I flew you to Glacier Park in Montana, and we ate under the stars?”
“What if we did, Vanessa Ford?” Joan said. She could not contain the smile that was erupting across her face. “What if we did!”
Vanessa flew a plane like she drove her car. Quiet, focused, and confident.
There was an ease about the way she moved the controller.
They were flying over Big Bend National Park and Joan had her forehead against the window, looking at the immenseness of the mountain range below.
“I love it up here,” Joan said. “I don’t know how I spent so much of my life down there, quite frankly. What a chump I was.”
Vanessa laughed. “Sometimes, with both feet on the ground I feel lost,”
she said. “Does that make any sense?”
“Of course it does,” Joan said.
“I find it easier up here. It’s quieter, there’s less people. I can be myself in a way that I’m not sure I can down there.”
Joan nodded. “That makes a lot of sense.”
“But I think I also find flying to be really . . . hopeful.”
“Hopeful?”
“Oh, yeah. I mean, right now you’re in a machine that eighty years ago they said couldn’t exist. In 1903, The New York Times declared that we were still one to ten million years away from a flying machine.”
“They said ten million years?”
Vanessa nodded. “The article was called ‘Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly.’ Some of the most notable engineers in the world said it was impossible to create a flying machine heavier than air.”
“I don’t think I knew that.”
“But then sixty-nine days later, the Wright brothers did it.”
Joan laughed. And so Vanessa did, too.
“I know! It made them all look incredibly stupid. But the thing is, they had good reason to think it could never happen. So many people had failed.
Samuel Langley had just crashed his Aerodrome into the Potomac. And engineers had been at it for a long time. They hadn’t been able to achieve anything approaching powered flight.”
“And then the Wright brothers just figured it out?”
“The Wright brothers figured out a lot of things that Langley and the others didn’t. Three-axis control, balance, you name it. But one massive thing that the others hadn’t understood that the Wright brothers did was that it wasn’t just about the plane, it was about the pilot.”
Joan smiled and then closed her eyes. “Of course.”
“It’s not just about making a machine that can fly. It’s also about understanding the way to fly it. The pilot matters. Knowing how to be a part of the machine is what makes the machine possible.”
“Ooooh,” Joan said. “Okay. Okay, I get it.”
Vanessa looked at her. “You do?”
“I do. You’re bigger than just human,” Joan said. “When you’re flying.”
Vanessa blushed and then looked forward again, nodding to herself. “The Wright brothers didn’t have funding or even college degrees. They had a bike shop and a younger sister named Katharine, who deserves way more credit
than she gets because she took care of everything for them as they tinkered around. But they just wanted to see if they could learn how to fly. And that’s why they stuck with it, because they loved the pursuit. When I think about that . . . I guess that’s what I mean when I say ‘hopeful.’ Because when I think about that, I wonder—”
“What else everyone has said is impossible that you could try to do just for fun?”
“Yes!” Vanessa said. “Can you fucking imagine what’s possible if this is possible? Can you imagine what the shuttle can do?”
“I think you’re going to be the one to find out,” Joan said.
Vanessa bit her lip and did not look at Joan. “Do you really think that?” It was the smallest Joan had ever heard Vanessa’s voice.
Joan put her hand on Vanessa’s knee. “I really do.”
Vanessa nodded and then inhaled. “Hey,” she said, her voice back to normal. “Can I add a pretty big detour and fly you over the Grand Canyon?”
“A thousand times yes,” Joan said.
And with that, Vanessa nodded and turned the plane so smoothly that if Joan hadn’t seen her do it, she was not sure she would have known they were changing course.
Joan watched her some more, watched her change the controls, reset her sights. She watched Vanessa’s chest as it rose and fell. So calm, so controlled, so free.
As they flew over the Grand Canyon, Joan pressed her forehead to the window and looked as far down as she could at the vastness of the chasms below. She marveled at the millions of years of time Earth had existed without humans on it, at how unhurried the Earth had been to unfold.
Joan looked back at Vanessa. She watched the smile erupt on Vanessa’s face as she kept them steady just over the North Rim, the calm that took over as she pulled them up, back to altitude. Joan saw Vanessa’s ears move back, her eyes soften, her shoulders drop, all nearly imperceptibly. This was the woman she loved.
And Joan could find no fault with her, no complaint that didn’t, in that moment, feel so small. Joan had not ever believed that God sent down two halves of a soul in separate bodies, destined to meet. She did not believe in a
God that could.
But she did believe in a God that had led them here. That led their lives to intersect. That led Vanessa to need what Joan had to give. That led Joan to have what she needed.
That led the North American tectonic plate to shift, causing the uplift of the Colorado Plateau, pushing former seabeds nine thousand feet above sea level.
Joan believed in a God that, indifferent and unknowing, sent the Colorado River cutting through those rock formations.
She believed in a God that put a young girl without a father in proximity to a family friend with an airplane. She believed in a God that had pulled her to Joshua Tree to fall irretrievably in love with the stars. She believed in a God that had led them to this very moment: the two of them flying together, so
safe, above the Grand Canyon.
And Joan loved that God.
Later, Vanessa laid out a blanket under the stars in Montana. She brought out Joan’s telescope, which she had carefully packed up. And a picnic basket she’d picked up from a deli, and a glass bottle of sparkling water.
“I forgot cups,” she said.
“I don’t care,” Joan told her.
They drank out of the bottle, passing it back and forth.
“There’s Pegasus,” Vanessa said, pointing east.
“Vanessa,” Joan said. “I want to do this forever.”
Vanessa turned to Joan and smiled. And then kissed her temple and said, “Wouldn’t that be something?”