Devi’s death had stirred something deep and dormant in Sully’s subconscious. No longer moving chronologically, her brain began to replay everything horrible that had ever happened to her, everything that had ever wounded her. Lucy’s tiny heart-shaped face looking back, framed by Jack’s shoulder as he walked away from her in the airport—the day Sully left them behind for Houston, hoping that the separation might work, knowing that it couldn’t, and leaving anyway; boarding her flight with the damp of her daughter’s tears still soaked into the collar of her shirt. Then leaving them behind again just before the launch of her first spaceflight, when Jack had already served her with divorce papers and Lucy was so incredibly grown-up, speaking in full, eloquent sentences, the blond in her hair beginning to darken, the innocent trust in her eyes beginning to fade; the knowing slant of her eyebrows when Sully couldn’t help but say things like I’ll be back before you know it.
Then her return: knocking on a front door that used to be hers, being greeted by what’s-her-name, although of course she knew all along her name was Kristen, those letters emblazoned on her brain as permanently and painfully as an unfortunate tattoo. Watching her daughter fold herself into what’s-her-name’s lap, feeling Lucy’s reluctance to leave the house with her when they went out to a movie, the slight but discernible roll of Jack’s eyes when she said she had to be back in Houston by Monday, the sight of the three of them sitting on the sofa together in the living room as she showed herself out, knowing that her family was loved and safe and appreciated and that she had absolutely nothing to do with any of it. Knowing that she had been replaced, and that her replacement was an improvement—a better mother, a better spouse, a better person than she could ever be.
She had visitors that day. Each of the other crewmembers stopped by her compartment, some more than once, but their voices, the tap of their knuckles against the wall, seemed far away. Harper and Thebes went so far as to sweep aside the curtain and look at her with mournful eyes, but all she could say was “Tomorrow,” because what she really needed was to finish this day and get to the day after. It was the only way she could escape the day of and move beyond it—not even a real day, just a sliver of silence between light and dark when she’d held tight to the radio dish while Devi died beside her. She was vaguely ashamed to dismiss her crewmates, her friends, seeing the hurt hiding in the lines around their lips, above their eyebrows, and turning them away with just a single word: tomorrow. It couldn’t be helped. Today was full.
WHEN HER ALARM clock buzzed at the usual time she was exhausted from a sleepless night, but she got up anyway. She couldn’t spend another day in hiding, not that she knew how to spend it any other way, but something had to give. They had work to do, a mission to complete. She needed to configure the new comm. dish—the reason all of this had happened. She sat up and changed her shirt, her underwear. She scooted into a fresh jumpsuit and zipped it up to the neck. Running her fingers over the stitching of her monogram, she traced the initial of her first name—a name that not even Jack had called her. She’d been Sullivan since college, Sully for short. The name she’d inherited from her mother. She closed her eyes and pictured Devi’s monogram, white thread against the burgundy she’d always favored for her Aether uniforms: NTD. N for Nisha.
“Nisha Devi,” she whispered. Then she said it again. And again, like a chant—or perhaps a prayer.
In the kitchen she found Tal, eating oatmeal paste straight from one of the nonperishable pouches that most of their food came in. His black hair rocketed away from his head in unwieldy curls, so thick and wiry that it looked the same in Little Earth and zero G.
“Hi,” he said cautiously.
“Morning,” she responded, and sat across from him with her own serving of oatmeal paste.
“I’m glad you’re up,” he said.
She nodded. They ate in silence, and when Tal had finished his breakfast and disposed of the wrapper he stood behind Sully and laid both his hands on her shoulders.
“It was awful, and it wasn’t your fault,” he whispered, then squeezed, gently, and let his arms fall to his sides. Sully forced herself to keep eating the oatmeal even though it tasted like mud and she felt sick to her stomach. There would be plenty of things she didn’t want to do today, things that made her feel ill, but she would do them. All of them. She owed Devi that much.
On the table in front of her sat the deck of cards she and Harper used to play with. Used to? She wondered if this feeling would ever lift, if she would ever be able to laugh with her whole body or exchange silly banter with Harper again, shuffling the deck into a waterfall as they had just a few nights ago. It didn’t seem possible. She remembered again that day in Goldstone when her mother taught her how to play alone. How to stay occupied, she’d said at the time. It was useful—the hours Sully had spent playing alone in her mother’s office seemed to overshadow the rest of her childhood. School was a blur, her elementary school friends faceless, nameless entities that wove in and out of her memories. It was only that office that was crisp in her recollection, the mornings at the kitchen table listening to her mother read the newspaper headlines, the nights driving out into the desert. It was only the snap of the plastic cards against the plastic desk, the groan of the air-conditioning, the muffled voices emanating from the control room that seemed real. She had been so proud of Jean, never for an instant begrudging her the time that could’ve been spent teaching Sully how to swim the breaststroke or ride a bike or cook an egg sunny side up. One year Jean got a promotion, and it was a thousand times better than any A+ or gold star, it was their hard work, their joint sacrifice, coming to fruition. Sully didn’t mind being sequestered in the dark, dusty office because she knew that Jean was doing important work—practically changing the world, just down the hall. As a child, she admired Jean more than anyone else. From the moment she understood what her mother did for work, Sully knew that she wanted to follow in her footsteps.
The mythos of her nameless, faceless father was similar. The work he was doing was bigger and more important than any one family. Whenever Sully asked about him, Jean would tell her he was a brilliant man, that he was so smart and so dedicated to his work that he didn’t have any room left in his heart for them. Jean told her to be proud of his calling—to know that she didn’t have a father because the world needed him more than they did.
“Little bear,” Jean would say, “your daddy is too big for one family, but you and me, we’re the perfect size for each other.”