She watched him deal. With his sleeves pushed up above his elbows she could see the thick blond hair that lined his forearms and the sturdy knobs of his wrists. He was wearing his watch, the same one he’d been wearing the day she met him, the same one he always wore, with the watch face nestled against his pulse, the clasp facing out. His hands were broad, the skin on his palms and the pads of his fingers tough, his fingernails cut close to the quick. Sully wondered who he missed, what he’d left behind. Who he thought about in these idle moments. A friend, a lover, a mentor? She knew his résumé by heart, as she did everyone’s, but knowing that he got his PhD in aeronautics and astronautics after two tours in the Air Force wasn’t the same as knowing him—knowing whether he’d admired his father, or how many times he’d been in love, or what he’d dreamed about when he watched the Montana sunsets as a teenager. She knew that he’d traveled through the earth’s atmosphere and back more times than any other human being in history, that he could cook better than she could, that he was terrible at rummy, okay at euchre, and almost good at poker. But she didn’t know what he wrote about when he scribbled in his spiral-bound journal, or who he thought about as he fell asleep.
She imagined answers for him instead of asking: He’d loved his father very much, and had been missing him since his death with a yearning he’d never felt before. His mother was still alive, but it wasn’t the same with her. He’d been in love a few times—once as a teenager, and it had burned hot and steady until it went out like a light, then again in his late twenties, when he asked a woman to marry him. She’d said yes and then slept with one of his colleagues, leaving him heartbroken and careful.
The third time was written all over his face, but Sully couldn’t see it.
Instead, out of all the other questions spinning through her head, Sully picked, “What do you miss the most about home?”
She arranged her cards in her hand without looking to see what she was holding. Instead, she kept her eyes on his face, the jump in his jaw as he clenched his teeth together, the wistful shrug of his mouth.
“My dog, Bess,” Harper said. “She’s a chocolate lab, had her for eight years and her mother before that. It’s stupid, but I miss her like hell. I leave her with my neighbor—he loves her almost as much as I do. I never did get on with humans as well as I got on with ol’ Bess.”
Halfway around the centrifuge they heard Tal turn off the gaming console, shuffle into the lavatory and then out again. He gave Sully and Harper a solemn, sleepy nod before he climbed into his bunk and drew the curtain.
“What about you?” Harper asked.
“My daughter, Lucy. Also hot baths.”
He laughed. “I think I’d go with mountains over a bath. Or big, empty fields.” He lowered his voice and said in a dramatic whisper, “I’d push Ivanov out the airlock if I could walk through a field for five lousy minutes.”
Sully chuckled under her breath. When Ivanov dropped in through the entry node a few seconds later, with uncanny timing, she imploded with laughter. She hid her face behind her hands as Ivanov walked past and strode along the ring. There was a sullen stare already fixed on his face, and he went to bed without saying a word to them. Harper gave Sully a stern look.
“Get it together, Sullivan.”
She nodded, her lips pressed together against any further eruptions. She suddenly remembered what Devi had said, about Ivanov being frightened, and the laughter left her completely. She wondered if she sometimes mistook sadness for sullenness. If he was more vulnerable than she realized. Ivanov’s light went off behind his curtain.
“What about the husband?” Harper asked, drawing a card.
“Ex,” she corrected, and was going to add something, but realized there was nothing she could say about him that would make sense. Jack was a minefield, planted with resentment and deadly shards of joy. No sooner had she alighted on a bright, comforting memory—Jack asleep on the couch with a two-year-old Lucy facedown on his chest, the two of them snoring in concert—than she was blown back by the unexpected detonation of a deeply buried bitterness a few inches away. Lucy had stopped falling asleep with Sully when she was eight months old. She changed the subject.
“I can just see you galloping around on some big piece of land in Montana, on your black stallion or whatever, ol’ Bess running alongside. You know, I always wondered…why are you still hanging out with all these geeky scientists? You broke the damn record—retire already.”
He smiled. “I guess I always think, just one more ride, you know? One more, then I’m done. Then they’ll ask me to do another one and I’ll think, what the hell. You are pretty geeky, though. If I had realized what I was getting into this time around I might have stayed home.”
Sully let her jaw hang slack in mock horror. “I can’t believe you!”
“I know, I know, outrageous. But I’m definitely retiring after this one—promise. I’ve got the land all squared away. You’re gonna visit me and Bess when we get home, right?”
When we get home. The words hung in the stagnant, recycled air. Sully let them drift away and played along with the fantasy of the invitation.
“I suppose I will,” she said. It was a nice thought. She’d never seen Harper’s house, but she pictured something small, off the beaten path, with a big front porch and a long driveway, surrounded by acres and acres of empty space. There was his muddy truck parked in the driveway and Bess sitting tall by the front door, waiting for her. In her imagination this became her home, too. In reality, she didn’t have a home anymore, she’d left her things in storage and given up her apartment for the two-year trip. It felt good to pretend she had somewhere—someone—to return to. She caught Harper looking at her.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing,” he replied, “just wondering.”
“Wondering what?”
He shook his head. “I’ll ask you when we land.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not kidding. I need something to look forward to.” He winked at her. “We all need something to look forward to.”
They passed another hour playing. “It’s getting late,” Harper said.
Sully began to put the cards away. He held out his hand and said “Good game,” in that half-chivalrous, half-wisecracking way of his. She took it, but instead of shaking they just held hands for a moment. She felt the pressure of his grip, the scratch of his callused palms, the dry heat of his skin against hers. The moment passed and he didn’t let go; neither did she. He looked down at her and suddenly she was terrified—of what, she wasn’t sure. She flipped his hand over to look at the watch on the inside of his wrist.
“I should go to bed,” Sully said, and let go. “Sleep well.”
She climbed into her bunk without looking back at him, knowing that if she did, he would still be watching her. She shut the curtain and sat hugging her legs to her chest, her forehead resting on her knees as she listened to him moving through the centrifuge, brushing his teeth, switching off the light in his bunk. When we get home.
THE NEXT MORNING, Sully didn’t rouse herself until hours after the alarm buzzed. The lights were at full strength beyond her curtain. The rustling of the others entering and exiting the lavatory, opening and closing their curtains, shuffling around the centrifuge in their rubber slip-ons, made it impossible for her to go back to sleep, though she would have liked to. She could have slept all day, she was so tired lately. After running a brush through her hair she began to braid it, and her arms were aching by the time she finished. She felt weak, as though she were ending the day instead of beginning it.