“OK.”
Nicole’s voice came from upstairs, a thin piercing sound calling, “Mom!”
“Hold that thought,” Jennifer said. She smiled at him briefly and he nodded and then she disappeared out of the room and up the stairs.
He had never been nervous during the mission, not even during the launch, and yet now, here, in this woman’s house, a thin stream of adrenaline ran through him from the pit of his stomach to his fingertips. The room was very quiet. He thought that he should have already left her house, but then wondered why he had such thoughts at all. There was nothing for him in the empty house across the street. Indeed, over the preceding two days since he had dropped the television down the stairs he had even stopped painting, instead sitting at the Starbucks in the dark corner and flipping through the newspaper without any real interest, feeling his anger and frustration at Jim Mullins and the others at NASA fade into a dull sense of irritation and then disappointment. He might simply have left the house in the cul-de-sac, might have actually gone away for some kind of vacation as both Mullins and Eriksson had told him to do, but he had remained for no reason he could define and now sat in a house across the street from his own and waited for the woman who lived there to return from upstairs, his fingers drumming anxiously on the tabletop. He looked around the room without purpose or direction. The decor and furnishings did not seem as similar to those of his house as he had first thought. A vague similarity in style, perhaps, but nothing specific.
He poured wine into the two glasses and looked at the label but he knew little of wine and noted only that the name was French and that the bottle was three years old. He sniffed at it and started to take a sip but then thought that it would be more polite to wait for her and so he did.
After a moment he could hear her on the stairs and then she reappeared in the room again. She was barefoot. He did not recall if she had been barefoot before or if she had taken off her shoes when she was upstairs.
“I poured the wine,” he said.
“Good thinking.”
He handed her one of the glasses and she took it.
“To new friends,” she said.
“To new friends,” he repeated. They clinked the two glasses together.
Keith sipped his wine. It was fruity and slightly bitter and left his tongue dry.
“When do you go back to being an astronaut?” she said.
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Taking some time?”
“Maybe. A little break, I guess.”
“That’s a good idea. You need time.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just trying to get the house sold now. Then we’ll see what happens next.”
“No big plans?”
“I guess not.”
“Oh,” she said. There was a silence in the room, a softness that descended over them. Then she said quietly: “So how are you doing?”
“Fine,” he said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
She actually reached out and placed her hand on his arm. It was a warm thing there, and soft. Then she pulled it away again. “I’m sorry. You probably think I’m being really forward.”
“It’s OK,” he said.
“I’m a really physical person,” she said. “I can’t help it. You looked sad.”
“Did I?”
She blushed. Had he said something to make her blush? “Yes,” she said.
“I’m not sad right now,” he said.
“Well, good then.” She seemed to shake off whatever had entered her thoughts because she was smiling again. “Like I said, if you need anything just let me know. Even if it’s just a good home-cooked meal.”
“I’ll do that. I can always eat.”
“I can see that.” She smiled at him. “Stop me if I’m being too personal,” she said. “I like to know what’s going on.”
“It’s fine,” he said.
“We looked you up on the Internet today. For Nicole’s report. That’s all I really know about you.”
He said nothing. Her eyes locked to his. “My daughter’s name was Quinn,” he said at last.
“Quinn,” Jennifer said. “I remember seeing her a few times. Coming and going.”
“They went off to my mother-in-law’s. She was driving back from some teen party out there. And she apparently went off the road on her way home. They think she was going eighty miles an hour. Hit a tree in someone’s yard in the middle of the night. Coming back from the party.”
“That’s terrible,” she said. There were actual tears in her eyes.
The information felt abstract to him, even now, as if he was relating the plot of a film he had seen and had there been any instinct in him to acknowledge the folly of this abstraction it was quelled in the moment he looked at her. Her hand had left his arm and had not returned but he could feel a sense of the warmth it left behind. He knew he should say something, should try to steer the conversation away from his sense of tragedy, but his mind was empty.
She suggested they move to the couch and they did so and she curled her legs under her body and sipped at the wine and at some point he rose and retrieved the bottle — the second bottle — and refilled the glasses. He was not sure how many glasses of wine he had drained, but he had taken a painkiller earlier that day and the combination had set the room to tilting slowly as if the house had become awash on a gently rocking sea.
She asked him about his work for NASA and when he asked if she was not already tired of hearing about that subject, she told him that she wanted to hear about it for herself and he tried to tell her what it had been like at the end of the robotic arm looking down at the space station, but his memory of it could not be put into words. He told her it had been beautiful, so very beautiful. What could he say? He had opened upon an infinity and it had become an infinity of loss.
When she leaned forward to kiss him his mouth was closed and she slid her tongue between his lips and he thought, in actual words: Well, OK then. It was in a voice that was his own sober voice still in his head and it did not tell him to stop and so he kissed her back and she pressed her hand against his chest and his arms went around her.
“I’m pretty drunk,” he said.
“Shhh,” she said. “No more talking.”
Her force was something to be reckoned with almost immediately, as if he had uncorked a bottle that had been no bottle at all but was a dam that uncorking had pressed to bursting and she climbed astride him, her face somewhere between anger and joy, determined and feral. A wild creature.
It felt as if it had been an eternity since he had touched a woman and he thought of nothing else, his hands on her beautiful tan breasts, encircling them and feeling her breath suck in just as he had imagined it would. When she lifted her arms so that the tight fabric slid up over her and away and he looked at her and leaned in and took one of her pink nipples in his mouth, his own breath was pulled away with hers, his heart thumping in his chest like an ancient, enormous machine that had been resurrected after so many years of forgetting.
They stumbled to the bed, practically at a dead run, his drunken feet staggering up the stairs and then their twin bodies crashing sideways onto the mattress, clothes awkwardly strewn about them, she much more adept than he at undressing under alcohol although who could say how drunk she was in comparison. How many times had he refilled his glass? He could not recall and indeed it mattered little. All that mattered was the thought that there are moments like this in real life, and he was amazed by the realization, as if there was another world inside of this one that was hidden in plain view and then her mouth was on his belly and then his chest and then finding his mouth at last and clamping onto it. Her body was something amazing to him: a hard and muscled creature that for reasons he could not even begin to understand had allowed him to take possession of it even as he grasped her around the waist and threw her over to her back and she moaned, her teeth clamped together in a kind of sneer surrounded by full red lips.