December 29, 1984
“Houston, do you read? I asked how much time does Lydia have,” Vanessa says from the payload bay. She is counting her breaths to keep herself calm.
But the realization that the payload bay doors may not fully close is bearing down on her. How. How. How did we get here? It was only hours ago that Hank and Steve were joking about who had a better barbecue smoker. And Griff had been complaining about drinking breakfast from a pouch. And now everyone is gone but her and Lydia. How?
“If we miss our deorbit opportunity, can Lydia survive?”
Joan does not respond. But Vanessa knows the answer. They all know the answer.
Finally, Joan speaks up. “We do not know if Lydia can survive,” she says.
Then, lower, in a tone that feels to Vanessa like Joan is confessing: “But the
flight surgeon does not believe so.”
Fuck.
Vanessa slams her hand against her helmet. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
“So Griff is gone,” she says. “And if I spend any more time trying to fix the payload doors, I may lose Lydia, too.”
“Yes,” Joan says. Vanessa can hear how much Joan is straining to keep her voice level. “But we believe it is the only way for you to survive.”
“But we have no guarantee that I can fix the doors,” Vanessa says.
“Understood. But we also do not have firm testing on how many open latches the shuttle can maintain through reentry. And we cannot risk losing you.”
Vanessa shakes her head. How the fuck can this be happening?
“Do you read, Ford?” Joan says, her voice rising. “I said, we cannot risk losing you.”
“I want to get something very clear,” Vanessa says. “If I stay and try to fix the doors, there’s still an excellent chance the shuttle will not make it. Is that your estimation as well?”
“We believe our best chance of landing Navigator is for you to attempt to
fix the doors.”
There’s an excellent chance, Vanessa understands, that she is going to die here in orbit. On the space shuttle Navigator.
She thinks back to every single moment of her teenaged years when she thought she was courting danger, daring God to take her. What a little snot she’d been.
In this moment, she is closer to death than she has ever been. And she wants to fight against it with every fiber of her being.
When she’d been messing with drugs and flying planes too low across the mountains, her mother had once asked her if she was trying to die. She’d sobbed one night at the kitchen table and begged Vanessa to care about her life, begged her not to leave her childless.
Vanessa wishes, so badly, that her mother could see her now. To see and feel how incredible the life is that she has made for herself, and how desperately she wants to live it.
She wants nothing more than to go home. To go home and say she’s sorry to her mother. To find Joan and Frances.
Joan. Joan. Joan. Joan. Joan.
“If I stay to fix the payload bay doors, even if I get them to lie flat, Lydia will almost certainly die,” Vanessa says.
“We understand that. But if you do not fix the payload bay doors, it is most likely that the shuttle will not make it. Which means Lydia will not make it, either,” Joan says. Vanessa admires the strength and directness in her voice.
There’s not really any branch of statistics that can weigh her chances of closing the latches against Lydia’s chances of surviving another rev. There is no concrete answer. Everyone listening knows that.
“Lydia saved me,” Vanessa says. “She saved the shuttle. She tried to save
us all.”
“Affirmative,” Joan says.
Vanessa waits and then Joan speaks up again, in a tone softer than she has used all day: “We know. We know.” And then: “But we cannot lose you.”
Vanessa closes her eyes. She can feel her breath quickening. She wants to try to fix the shuttle doors. She wants to get home and smell the dirt and oil of Earth. She wants to find her mother. She wants to see Joan’s face again.
She wants so badly to see Joan’s face again.
Please, God, let her see Joan’s face again.
Joan understands what is going to happen before Vanessa says it.
She understands what is going to happen before anyone in Mission Control does.
She understands that it is the only thing that can happen.
There is commotion on the floor. Ray and Jack are going back and forth about how much time Lydia has. RMU is running through possibilities for what the shuttle can withstand upon reentry.
But Joan stares straight ahead at the telemetry.
Her muscles go limp for a moment, and she can feel her soul retreat into the core of her body.
She cannot love Vanessa without understanding why she will do what she
does next.
But she is also furious.
Vanessa closes her eyes. She stares at the darkness within herself. The fact that Joan is not speaking, Vanessa understands, is because Joan is giving her a chance to think this through . . .
When the answer comes—so clear—she knows that her only course of action is the cruelest thing she could do to the woman she loves.
And she hates the fact that she would not be able to live with herself if she made any other choice.
She had made Joan a promise. That she would wake up every single day
and choose her. Forever.
And now she must break that promise.
“I cannot leave Lydia to die,” Vanessa says.
“I know,” Joan says in a whisper. “I know.”
Vanessa can hear the breathlessness in Joan’s voice, and she wants to reach through the microphone and hold her and apologize. She wants to tell her that given the choice, she would deny herself the joy of having met Joan, just to keep Joan safe from what she has to do now.
She wants to say, “I’m sorry, honey,” in between hyperventilating sobs.
“I’m so sorry.”
But she cannot do that.
What Vanessa is about to do will end her NASA career, if it does not end her life. But Joan’s life will go on. And Joan is great as CAPCOM. She can’t ruin that for Joan now.
So instead, she says, “Houston, I deeply regret any pain that will be caused by what I must do.”
There is no immediate response, so she keeps going: “But I could not live with myself if I didn’t try to get Lydia home in time to save her.”
If she has secured the payload bay doors just enough, she can save them both. If she keeps trying, she can only save herself.
“Navigator,” Joan says. Her voice sounds strong, but Vanessa can sense that it is cracking at the edges. “We are asking you to please continue to work on the payload bay doors in the hopes that we can at least get you home. That is what Jack is commanding right now. Do you read, Vanessa Ford? This is Jack’s command.”
Vanessa nods to herself and closes her eyes.
The way Joan says it reverberates in her mind.
This is Jack’s command.
Vanessa begins gathering the tools and securing them in the tool kit.
“Roger that, Houston. Understood,” she says. “But I believe that trying to land the shuttle with the doors as they are now is Lydia’s best chance of
survival.”
“Navigator, the entire—”
“Tell NASA to do whatever they have to do to me if I survive,” Vanessa says. “Censure me, fire me, arrest me. I do not care. I’m going back into the flight deck, and I’m starting deorbit procedures.”
“Navigator, you do not have the approval—”
“Everybody down there, listen to me. It’s not a discussion,” Vanessa says.
She needs to make Joan understand that there is no way to change her mind, or else Joan will blame herself for everything that happens today. She will replay it in her head for the rest of her life to see if there was anything she could have said to convince Vanessa otherwise. Vanessa cannot allow that to happen.
Vanessa needs Joan to understand that this was always inevitable.
From the moment Vanessa was born, this moment has been inevitable.
“I know a lot of people are listening right now,” Vanessa says. “I know you all know that I’m breaking protocol. For anyone reviewing this later, the transcript will show that I am doing this alone: I’m making this decision.
Joan isn’t. Jack isn’t. No one at NASA is.
“There is one person who can land this thing and potentially save any of the lives on board. And that’s me. So I will be deciding. And what I am choosing to do is to attempt to save the life of Lydia Danes. This decision has already been made. I will not consider any other arguments.”
Joan is crying now. Vanessa can hear her gasp. “Navigator—”
“Joan,” Vanessa says, her voice soft. “We do not know what is going to happen, okay? We don’t know what the next few hours hold. We do not know the aerodynamic effects of the warp in the payload doors. We do not know, for certain, what will happen on reentry. The shuttle has withstood plenty of things we didn’t believe it could. That’s my gamble right now.
Because I will not tinker away back here when Lydia needs me to get her home. I won’t do that. So do not ask me again. We have less than a rev to get her home. If you take any more of my time, you threaten both of our lives
even further.”
She waits.
“Roger that,” Joan says, finally.
Vanessa knows that it is not Joan making that call. She knows that in Mission Control, Jack looked at Joan, and nodded.
Still, Vanessa knows it killed Joan to say the words.
And that Joan did it for her.
Joan is sitting at her console in Mission Control and she cannot breathe. Her body has stopped taking in air as an involuntary process. Instead, every few seconds, she gasps and abruptly exhales. And then holds her breath again.
It’s been happening for the past half hour, as everyone in Mission Control has tried to figure out how to address the unprecedented insubordination of the only conscious astronaut aboard a damaged shuttle.
Jack and the rest of the team have resigned themselves to what Joan knew well before Vanessa said it.
“We have no choice but to support the premature deorbit,” Jack announced when Vanessa got into the airlock against orders. “And do what we can to ensure that Navigator survives reentry under the current conditions.”
Right now, there are teams of engineers trying to calculate to what percentage the shuttle can withstand reentry with the vague specs Vanessa has reported.
And Joan is sitting at her console, trying to catch her breath.
She has never experienced this in her body before.
But she’s also never sat in a chair and pretended she was only worried about losing a colleague when, really, her entire life was at stake.
They have to start the deorbit burn in the next few minutes. All of the final preparations are being made. Joan looks around the room as she gasps again.
Antonio has come onto the floor. He is standing to the right, with both hands behind his back, looking up at the telemetry.
He looks at her and nods, his eyes glassy. From his frown, she can tell he is worried about her.
She feels so much anger. At him. At the shuttle. There is a tiny spark of fury building to a bonfire within her.
But more than that, she has never felt sustained terror like this before, as if she is falling with no end. Her pulse beating against the confines of her neck.
But no one needs her anger and terror and panic right now. They need her
composure.
They need her to be CAPCOM.
When Vanessa gets home, Joan is going to scream at her with such venom she might go hoarse. Then she will fall into her and sob.
But for now, she will be the CAPCOM Vanessa Ford needs.
She can do that for her. She has to do that for her.
It is the only real way to love her.
Vanessa is looking out the window at a star that Joan would know the name of. But her vision grows blurry. In microgravity, her tears don’t fall; they cling to her eyes, pooling under her eyelashes.
She raises her arm and rubs the sleeve of her launch reentry suit across her face, to clear her sight.
She turns to see Lydia, unconscious, in the seat next to her. Vanessa takes
her hand for a moment and squeezes.
“Here we go,” she says to Lydia.
“Navigator, this is Houston,” Joan says. “We need to start the deorbit burn
right now.”
There’s that voice.
That calm, serene voice.
It is possible that Vanessa has asked too much of the world, pushed it too far beyond its limits.
But if Joan’s voice is the one with her now, she must have done something right.
“Houston, this is Navigator. I am ready to start the deorbit burn.”
Joan reminds herself that the burn is the easy part. They might as well be preparing for Vanessa to start the car. It is what happens after that, as the shuttle approaches the atmosphere, that Joan doesn’t want to consider yet.
“Let’s go,” Jack says. He points into the air, signaling he’s ready. “Ground Control, are we go for the deorbit burn?”
“We are go.”
“Guidance?”
“Go.”
“FIDO?”
“Go.”
“PROP?”
“Go.”
“GNC?”
“Go.”
“RMU?”
“Go.”
“EECOM?”
“Go.”
“FAO?”
“Go.”
“DPS?”
“Go.”
“INCO?”
“We’re go.”
“Booster?”
“We are go.”
“Surgeon?”
“Go.”
Jack nods at Joan. “They have a go for the deorbit burn.”
“Navigator, this is Houston,” Joan says. “You are a go for the deorbit burn.”
“Copy that,” Vanessa says. “Go for the deorbit burn.”
Everyone in Mission Control—on the floor, in the director’s suite, in the theater behind them—watches the telemetry with a sense of unease.
First, Vanessa needs to get Navigator into the proper position. She needs to fly it upside down and backward, with her tail pointed in the direction she wants to go.
Barely a breath can be heard as all of Mission Control watches the data on
the screens.
The orbiter slowly moves into place.
“Flight, PROP. We’ve got a good config for the burn.”
There’s a collective exhalation.
Joan: “Navigator, we’ve got a good config for the deorbit burn.”
“Roger, Houston. Good config for the burn.”
In the three minutes it takes for the burn, the future dares to seep into Joan’s mind. She stares straight ahead, her eyes wide, trying not to picture what comes next.
When it ends, she forces herself to redirect her attention back to the present moment.
“Flight, this is Guidance, good burn, no trim required.”
“Roger,” Joan says. “Good burn, Navigator. No trim required.”
“Copy that, Houston. No trim required.”
Joan allows herself a moment to picture it: Vanessa’s feet back on Earth.
Jack is on the main loop: “All right, everybody! Good work. We are in the
post-burn. PROP, any deltas?”
“Negative, Flight. No deltas.”
Jack nods.
The shuttle knows what to do from here. The onboard guidance will direct the firing of the RCS thrusters to maneuver Navigator from the upside-down and backward position to nose forward for reentry into the atmosphere.
Even with everything operating optimally, the entry into the Earth’s atmosphere is dangerous. The pressure of reentry can cause the skin of the
shuttle to reach temperatures up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit—enough to burn up an unprotected spacecraft and everything in it.
But the shuttle, with its coat of thermal tiles and blankets, is built to withstand this heat—provided reentry is executed perfectly and the payload bay doors are closed tight.
Joan reminds herself that the shuttle is capable of more than their conservative estimates. They’ve already seen that on other missions. That’s
what Joan is holding on to.
“Houston, this is Navigator.”
Joan sits forward. “We read you, Navigator.”
“I’m over the Pacific.”
“Affirmative, we read that you are over the Pacific.”
“Reentry will be in less than an hour.”
“Affirmative, Navigator.”
“Goodwin, can we . . .”
“Ford, do you read? We lost you.”
“No, I’m here. I just . . . Look, I want to say something. Before . . . I know people are listening. I know they can hear me say it, but . . . Will you tell
everyone I’m sorry?” Vanessa says.
“Roger that,” Joan says.
“No, please, listen to me,” Vanessa says. “I’m sorry.”
Joan closes her eyes.
“Do you remember when we were arguing about the best song about
space?” Vanessa continues.
“Of course I do.”
“I was so intense about it,” Vanessa says. “I feel so silly. I got so mad at Griff.”
“He understood,” Joan says. “You know he understood you, right?”
“I know. I know he did.”
Joan’s chest begins to cave in. She snaps herself out of it.
“I think both of us—Griff and I—should have been listening to you,”
Vanessa says. “You had the right idea the whole time.”
“Ford, my song was from Sesame Street,” Joan says.
Vanessa does not laugh. “Yeah, but . . . it’s kind of that simple, isn’t it?
You get up here, and then for one reason or another, you realize you want to come home.”
Joan does not answer for a moment. Jack moves closer to her, standing just behind her. She cannot bear to look at him. To see how much of this he
understands.
“Goodwin, do you read?” Vanessa says.
“Of course.” Joan nods. “Yes, of course. Roger that.”
“I want to come home.”
“We know you do,” Joan says. “We know.”
“It’s just that I can’t do it without Lydia. I couldn’t live with myself.”
Joan does not know what to say back.
How could I say I loved you if I didn’t love this about you?
“Tell her when we see her again,” Jack says, “I’m going to slap her on the back to congratulate her, and Antonio is going to fire her—all in one fell swoop.”
Joan looks at him. His eyes are bloodshot. The smile plastered on his face is so superficial she can already see the frown underneath it.
But she relays the message.
Vanessa tries to laugh. “Who all is there?” she asks. “At the flight center.
You must have a lot of guests by now.”
Joan looks around the room. She’s unsure how to answer, unsure what a good answer would be.
Jack speaks up: “Tell her everyone. We are all here for her. Tell her Donna and her baby girl are in the theater. Tell her Helene is here. Tell her the entire astronaut corps is with her in spirit right now. Tell her everyone here is rooting for her.”
Joan nods and gets back on the loop. “Well, Ford, just about anybody you’ve ever met is here.”
“Does my mom know?” Vanessa asks. Joan can hear the jovial tone Vanessa is trying to hold on to slip away.
Joan looks to Jack, who nods. “Affirmative,” Joan says. “Your mother
knows.”
“She’s probably scared.”
Yes, she’s probably terrified. She’s not sure how she’s going to live through the next hour.
“I don’t think she is scared at all,” Joan says. “I think she knows what her daughter is capable of. I think she knows exactly who her daughter is.”
“Yeah,” Vanessa says. “Maybe.”
The future bleeds in again, and Joan can’t deny what may be coming. She won’t be able to live with herself if she doesn’t tell Vanessa this one thing.
“You are courageous, Vanessa Ford,” Joan says. “Beyond all measure.
You have proven yourself to be of stunning character. And I believe your father would be proud.”
Vanessa does not respond for a moment. But then: “Joan, can I ask you a
question?”
“Roger that,” Joan says.
“No, Joan,” Vanessa says. “I need to ask you something. Is it okay to ask you something?”
Joan looks to Jack as if he can help her, but he can’t. Only she knows what Vanessa is intimating.
“Affirmative,” she says. “Yes. Anything.”
Vanessa blows air out of her lungs and then says, “Will you tell Frances that I really wanted to fix the payload bay doors? Will you tell her that I was deeply conflicted?”
Joan has to bite down on the inside of her cheek to stop the tears from
forming in her eyes.
“Joan? Did you hear me?” Vanessa asks.
“I heard you,” Joan says. And then: “Vanessa, I heard you.” She tries to steady her voice. “I will tell her. Of course I will tell her.”
“I don’t want her or anyone—I don’t want anyone out there who can hear this right now—to wonder if it’s that I didn’t have anything to live for. I do.
Okay? Do you think everyone knows that?”
Joan takes in a deep breath, and Jack catches her eye. She begins to cry.
Then Jack nods to her with a downward motion that is so quick, she could
swear it never happened. But as he holds her gaze, she understands.
He need not choose any words to convey it. The sentiment—perhaps beyond language—is strong enough.
He puts his hand on Joan’s shoulder. “Tell her what you need to tell her,” he whispers.
Vanessa is wondering if she’s lost the connection, but then Joan’s voice comes back.
“Do you remember when you told me you felt like you’d never met someone who had also seen the color blue before?”
Vanessa smiles. “Yes, I do.”
“Well, this is what I think the color blue looks like right now,” Joan says.
“I think that you want to come home and sleep in your warm bed. I think you want to go out for milkshakes and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And watch Marlon Brando and Paul Newman movies. I think you want to know what David Bowie is going to record next. I think you want to listen to Joni Mitchell albums with the stereo on low, staring at the ceiling at midnight.
And lie down on the grass with a picnic blanket and look up at the stars and wonder if all the answers are up there. I think you want to play Scrabble at a kitchen table with a ten-year-old girl. I think you want to go to weddings and slow dance. I think you want to live in a two-bedroom bungalow, and when the hinges on the cabinet are broken, you’ll fix them. I think you want to take the people you love flying over the Rockies at dawn. I think you want to be here to find out which, of all the things we believe to be impossible, we figure out next.
“And I think the only thing you want more than any of that,” Joan says, “is to know that you did everything possible to save the lives of your fellow crew members.”
Vanessa is trying not to cry, not to break down over the loop.
“And I think that you have to do this,” Joan says. “Because you come from a long line of heroes. And we are lucky that today, we have a hero on board STS-LR9. That’s what I think. Okay? That’s what I am . . .”
Joan can’t finish her sentence. She tries again: “That’s what I am . . .” She
stops once more.
“It’s okay,” Vanessa says.
But now Vanessa is crying and unable to speak as well.
Vanessa can see that Navigator is over Mexico now. Any moment, the shuttle will hit the dense atmosphere and enter ionization blackout. There is not much more time to set everything right. To make sure everyone can live with whatever happens.
“Will you do me a favor?” Vanessa says. “Please tell my mother that I love her. Tell everyone down there that I loved them. That we loved them—I know Hank and Steve and Griff and Lydia would all feel the same way. Can you tell Donna and Helene and everyone that? Don’t let this hang too heavy, don’t carry it with you all too far down the road. We wouldn’t want that.”
“Vanessa, you . . .” Joan can’t finish her sentence again.
“Listen. It’s okay. We asked for so much, didn’t we? We wanted to touch the stars, and look what we did. There’s nothing more we could ask from the universe, or this God you always talk about, than that. So it’s okay. It’s fine.
Okay, Joan? For me, as long as you all know what you meant to me, it all worked out fine.”
She knows that Joan is crying. She doesn’t know how she knows, but she knows. But, for once in this godforsaken day, Vanessa doesn’t feel sad at all.
How could she?
She had asked the world to please let her earn the love of that gorgeous, brilliant astronomer with that beautiful smile. She had asked the world to let her leave a legacy she could be proud of.
She’d been given everything.
“Do you know why I kept saying the best song was ‘Space Oddity’?”
Vanessa asks.
“Because of your favorite part.”
“When he says, ‘Tell my wife I love her very much . . .’ ” Vanessa says.
“And then he says, ‘She knows,’ ” Joan says.
“Yeah,” Vanessa says. “That’s it. That’s the best part of that song. But do you think she knows? Do you really think she knows?”
“She knows,” Joan says. “She absolutely knows.”
“Okay,” Vanessa says. “I can live with that.”
They lose communication with Navigator seventeen seconds later.
Joan puts her head in her hands. Jack places his hands on her shoulders.
It is routine. The communications—both the telemetry and voice—cannot penetrate the plume of ionized plasma formed by the hot atmosphere around the shuttle. And so, with every landing, there is this period, which usually lasts for around ten minutes, in which there is charged silence.
Everyone at Mission Control remains speechless, staring up at the screens, waiting for any sign.
Voice and telemetry have not kicked back on. C-band tracking data isn’t coming in. The radar shows no signs of the shuttle in the atmosphere.
“We should have them back by now,” Jack says.
Every single person in Mission Control is now standing up, their hands covering their mouths. This is the moment they have been fearing for hours.
This isn’t right.
Joan isn’t breathing.
“Navigator, this is Houston, do you read?” Joan says.
Nothing.
Jack: “Try them on UHF.”
Joan switches to the analog frequency. “Navigator, come in. Come in,
Navigator.”
Again, nothing.
Joan’s stomach starts to sink.
This was not supposed to happen. No. No. Vanessa was supposed to do the right thing and survive it! That’s what was supposed to happen!
No, there is still so much Joan needed to say.
She should have told her that she loved her. She should have said the exact words. No matter who was listening, or what NASA might have thought about it.
She should have told her that Frances needed her.
Joan should have told her about everything she’d been thinking since the day Vanessa left for quarantine. That she would quit NASA if she had to.
That the three of them could be a family, taking care of Frances together.
That once Frances went to college, the two of them could move to some small town and keep to themselves, or maybe live together in a house out in the country. Or they could move to San Francisco and hold hands on certain street corners.
Joan should have told Vanessa about this idea she’d had a few days ago.
That when they were in their sixties, Joan would spend nights in the backyard with her telescope, and Vanessa would spend early mornings taking out her prop plane. They’d get a dog.
Vanessa had been right; Joan should have told her that. They could not back down. Joan should have told her that she was determined to rail against the world at every turn. She would scream and she would fight against how the world treated people like them, treated anyone on its edges.
Because Joan knew they would win in the end, they all would. They would hold on long enough to see the world change. To make it accept what Joan knew to be true.
That her life was complete only if lived next to Vanessa’s.
They say love isn’t always enough, but Joan knew, in that moment, that it could have been. It could have been for them. She should have told Vanessa that.
And that nothing—not even Vanessa not making it home—would ever be
able to stop how much Joan loved her.
She should have said that.
Oh, she should have said that.
“Navigator,” Joan says, through her tears, standing up. “Navigator, please.
Please come in. Please. Please, Navigator.” She is begging now. She’s not sure whom.
There is silence. Jack touches her shoulder again, but Joan pushes him off.
No! No! “Navigator! PLEASE! Do you read? NAVIGATOR!”
Joan’s is the only voice that can be heard on the entire floor of this building. Everyone else is looking down, silent.
“Please, Vanessa, don’t go.”
She listens for anything, a single vibration. Anything at all. The soundlessness feels so sharp it could cut her.
And then she understands what everyone else does.
They are gone.
They are gone.
Vanessa is gone.
Vanessa died somewhere over Texas, having proven herself to be the exact sort of person she had always hoped she was. And now Joan is left to bear it.
Joan’s legs buckle underneath her. She falls to her desk, the ground underneath her disappearing. She cannot hold her own weight. She can feel her heart begin to implode.
But then, in a shock, Joan feels the most perfect peace overtake her.
What a gift. To have known Vanessa, and to have loved her.
The way the universe had developed—the way God itself unfolded—was that Vanessa had been here for thirty-seven years.
But Joan had been given four of them.
She had been given so much of Vanessa when so few ever understood her at all. She had been given that face to sketch for the rest of her life. To spend her days trying and failing to capture her hair.
In this one moment of brilliant clarity—a clarity Joan knows she will lose her grasp on within seconds, and have to fight like hell for years to come back to—Joan understands that God gave her something spectacular. A love, and a life, beyond the confines of her imagination.
Small, slight, unimportant Joan. Just one person of five billion, on a small planet orbiting a small star, in a humble galaxy, one of billions of galaxies.
Joan is so insignificant and yet, look what God had given her. Look at all that God had given her. Look at what no one will ever be able to take away.
Vanessa has gone into the ether.
And it will make Joan even more eager to take each breath.
What a world.
Joan hears a crackle in her headset. She lunges forward.
She watches Jack turn his gaze to the screens. All at once, they begin to update.
“—ston, this is Navigator. Do you read?”
The air rushes into Joan’s lungs. “Vanessa? Vanessa, are you there?”
And then Vanessa’s voice comes through, loud and clear.
“Houston, this is Navigator. Lydia Danes is alive. I’m about to land at Edwards.”
The entire room erupts into such loud cheering that Joan jumps.
“Navigator,” Joan says. “We read you.”
Vanessa lets out a wild sigh, sharp and whistling.
“Hi,” Vanessa says.
Joan takes a breath. “Hi.” She closes her eyes and smiles.
Maybe they had not asked for too much. Maybe they would get everything they wanted.