The whole of it comprised one long moment in his memory now, the moment after Quinn had been born and the three of them had been a family at Stanford and Quinn was an infant and then a toddler and his marriage to Barb was still new. They were broke and there had been arguments about money and, sometimes, already, about the workload that kept Keith so often away from their apartment. And yet what he remembered was an overriding sense of contentment, each day dawning on a California that seemed as blessed and magical as any place they could conceive of, the sun slanting crossways through the wild golden grasses and red-tiled roofs of Stanford’s architecture, the arcs and lines and towers of which were decorated with tiny and innumerable mosaic tiles. They woke in the early morning when Quinn climbed into bed between them, the three of them radiating the golden glow that was the glow of his memory, magnificent and endless, and Keith would ride his squeaky ten-speed bicycle from their apartment to the campus as he settled into a world filled with research facilities that were among the very best in the world.
Perhaps his marriage had already begun its slow stumble into entropy. Perhaps it had been crumbling from the very first moment and he had been unaware of it or had been unable to see it. He wondered sometimes if he might have forestalled her leaving had he been able to return from the mission, wondered this even though he knew she was already gone. But of course he had not wanted to return. In the days after Quinn’s death Houston told him that it was their intent to get him home and his response had been to refuse, explaining that while he appreciated their concern he intended to complete the mission he had been trained to do. They might have left him alone then had the migraines not begun but this medical reality made his return to Earth a priority for the agency, or at least this was what they had told him. But then his return had been delayed by weather and then by a technical problem and then by weather again and so he had remained on the space station with the rest of the crew and had continued with his tasks and experiments, such as he could between the agony of the migraines. In that time his anger at Barb had faded into a kind of liminality that was a reflection of the situation itself: he could do nothing but ask her not to leave and he did so and she told him she was already gone. All the while he continued to float in that low orbit, working when he could and huddling in the dark pain of his shattered mind when he could not.
She told him she was sorry but that he had been absent from their marriage and their family for so long and that she simply did not want to be alone anymore and when he pressed her she finally told him the truth about what she had done, about what she had been doing. Even now his body shivered at the memory of it, that mixture of confusion, panic, anger, and grief flooding through him once more, the paint roller trembling in his hand. At the time he had been too shattered to do much more than float in the microgravity and listen without real understanding. He had suffered a migraine just before and was in that long period of recovery, his mind feeling soft, the numbers it held a jumbled collection of broken symbols signifying quantities that held no real import or meaning at all. When he had received the video call it had been as if he were watching a kind of static scene that included someone who looked like him and someone who looked like his wife: a man suspended in the closet-size compartment, staring at a computer in silence as a woman’s face spoke from the screen. “I need you to understand that it’s over,” she said to him.
“You keep saying that. Just wait until I’m home and we can talk about it.”
Then she said nothing for a time. She had been saying essentially the same thing for the course of the conversation and he had responded the only way he could think to respond. Their daughter was dead and now she was telling him — trying to tell him — that she did not want to be married to him anymore.
And then her voice returned from that silence: “I’m seeing someone else, Keith.”
“What?”
“I’m seeing someone else. I’ve been seeing someone else for a while.”
He drifted. He had been drifting. “You’re having an affair?” he said.
“Yes, I’m having an affair.”
The quiet that came seemed to have no beginning or end, as if it had existed forever and he had merely slipped into its flowing stream. What had she said? Could he have heard her wrong? Could she be making some kind of weird joke he did not understand?
“Say something,” she said to him at last.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Anything.”
And then not speaking for so long, his body floating in the compartment.
“You don’t know how lonely I’ve been,” she said. “You never talk to me.”
“I talk to you.”
“No, you don’t.”
Again the silence. Then: “You had … you had an affair?”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
“Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. You had an affair?” His voice — the voice of this man who looked like him and who was him but somehow was not — this voice not even angry but flat and emotionless, as if discussing something tedious: a policy, a simple string of numbers, a procedure.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?”
“Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t plan it.”
“Does that even matter?”
“Yes, it matters,” she said.
“How?”
She did not respond.
“Who is it?” he said.
“You don’t know him.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“You don’t know him and you won’t ever know him. I’m not going to tell you that.”
Silence. Silence everywhere.
“I’m sorry but I thought you should know,” she said.
“Jesus Christ, Barb.”
“It isn’t working anymore.”
“Obviously.”
“You’re not being fair.”
“I’m not being fair? You’re sleeping with someone else.”
“Don’t.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Even though his words were angry, his tone was resigned, disappointed, as if he was reading the script of an argument, reciting the words he knew he was supposed to say and he did say them but without feeling or emotion.
“You’re never around,” she said.
“I wanted you and Quinn to move to Houston with me—”
“Don’t. Don’t even say her name. That’s not what this is about. This is about me getting my life back.”
“I wanted you both to move to Houston with me but you wouldn’t do it.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” she said.
“Yes, it would have.”
“No, Keith. It wouldn’t have mattered because you still don’t really talk to me about anything.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t. It was the same with her. You pushed and pushed and pushed. And you didn’t listen to her. You made her miserable.”
“Don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what? You just sit there thinking about math. That’s all you ever think about. I need someone to think about me, goddammit. I need someone to think about me.”
“Is that what this other man does for you?”
“Yes, since you asked. That’s what he does. He thinks about me.”
He said nothing for a moment. Then: “After all we’ve been through. Now this?”
“This started before … before Quinn …,” she said, and her voice cracked when she said their daughter’s name.
“Fantastic,” he said. “Even better.”
She was silent, staring at his face from the laptop screen. Then she said, “I told you because I want you to understand that it’s over.”