He glanced around the room: a white box the walls of which were mostly covered over by music posters. “How’s the new room working out?” he said.
“OK.”
“Did you decide on a color?”
“Not yet.”
“What’s happening?”
“Nothing much.” She waved her mobile phone at him. “Texting.”
“Ah,” he said. “Texting who?”
“Shawn.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s the tall kid?”
“Yeah, he’s the tall kid. I only have one boyfriend.”
“Got it,” he said.
“Don’t be mean,” she said.
“I’m not being mean. Why do you and your mother always think I’m being mean? I’m never being mean.”
“Just don’t be mean.”
It was silent then but for the faint strains of music from the stereo behind her. After a moment he said, “How’s cheerleading?”
“Good.”
“Good game on Friday?”
“Yeah. We did our new pyramid at halftime. Mom said it looked great.”
“I’ll bet it did,” he said. “Did she video it?”
“I think so.”
“Good, I’ll watch it later then.” He stood looking at her and still she did not look back at him. “School?” he said at last.
“Fine,” she said. A pause and then, “How’s work?”
“Hard. We leave tomorrow.”
“I know. Are you excited?”
“Of course.”
“Cool.” A long silence now.
“So,” he said, “I wanted to talk to you about something before tomorrow.”
“Uh-oh.” She looked up at him and then sat up and leaned against the headboard.
“Well, I guess I wanted to know what you had planned. Or if you were thinking about that at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re seventeen.”
“Are you asking me what I want to be when I grow up?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Any idea what college you might want to go to?”
“Probably City. At least for a while.”
He was silent, staring at her.
“What?” she said.
“You can do better than that.”
She did not say anything in response.
“I just want to make sure you’re thinking of your future. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I am thinking of the future,” she said.
“City College is not your future.”
“Says who?”
“Look, honey, I want you to do something. At least go to the university.”
“And do what?”
“I don’t know. I figured you’d be a math major or something.”
“I probably will be a math major or something.”
“I just want to make sure you have some kind of goal. That’s all.” She did not respond and after a moment he said, “This is important, Quinn.”
“What’s important?”
“This. All of it. The thing you can do.”
“What thing?”
“You know what I’m talking about. You’re gifted.”
“God, when will you stop about that?”
“When you do something about it. Or if it’s not that then something else.”
“Something else like what?”
It was silent again. He could feel the blood pumping in his body, the thrumming rhythm of it. “I just don’t understand,” he said at last.
“What’s to understand?”
“You,” he said. “I don’t understand you.”
“That’s because you don’t talk to me anymore.”
He stood there, surprised and confused, looking for some response but finding nothing.
“I know you’re busy and I know your astronaut stuff is important,” she said at last, “but you can’t blame me for you not being around. It’s not fair.”
“OK,” he said. “Then tell me what’s going on.”
“There’s nothing going on.”
He exhaled loudly, as if resigned. “That’s my point, Quinn,” he said. “You’re not doing anything.”
“I’m doing plenty,” she said. “I have straight A’s.”
Even in that moment he knew he was telling a half-truth, the calculus of his argument reaching no clear conclusion except the conclusion that had been clear and true for him and which he had decided must also be true for his daughter. This, even though he knew that she was not like him, that she did not need the numbers in the way that he had, the way he still did. He knew that even then. And yet he continued pushing because he also believed that he was right. Her gift, her abilities, were stronger than his own. But she had chosen to be a cheerleader of all things, a cheerleader, a choice that made so little sense to him he could not even begin to work out a response. It was as if the girl he had known and loved — the girl who was not even a girl anymore but who was a young woman — had erased the equation he had made for her, leaving only the variables or not even that, leaving only the aleph and some range of infinities that could not be counted.
And so he said what he would regret for all his days to come: “I’m disappointed,” he told her. “I’m disappointed in you.” His daughter who was a straight-A student, who was brilliant, and popular, and beautiful. Even in that moment, standing in her doorway, he could feel his heart crumbling inside the cage of his chest. And yet he was angry and frustrated and somehow believed that if he said the right combination of words he might turn her back to the course he had envisioned, even though he knew that he could never find the right words, not in this situation nor in any other.
She was quiet for a long time after that and when she spoke again her voice cracked with tears. “You don’t understand,” she said at last.
“I guess I don’t.”
She stood from the bed quickly. “I’m going over to Shawn’s,” she said and when he did not move from the doorway she looked him in the eye and said, “Get out of my way,” and of course he did so.
Those were the last words he would hear from her in person, the last not separated by atmosphere and electricity. She and Barb had come to the launch but he felt it was only because they were obligated to do so. He had seen Quinn one last time: from across a barricade since NASA rules dictated that any school-age children were potential carriers of illness and any kind of close proximity was therefore forbidden. He might have been relieved by this. If so, he now could not will himself to remember. It was late in the evening and she was standing next to her mother in the harsh artificial light. He walked along the road with the others in the crew, a line of men and women in orange launch suits, and she had waved to him and he had waved back. He could not even remember what she had been wearing. Had she called something to him? Had she yelled that she loved him? That she wished him good luck? If so, the words were lost to him. Instead, there was her wave. That was all.
When they talked later via the laptop while he was in orbit they did not mention the argument. Instead they both acted as if it had never occurred, their conversation a variety of pointless small talk. She and her mother were going on a vacation to Atlanta to visit Grandma. She had some cousins there that she was looking forward to seeing. Yes, she could take his car. Yes, cheer camp was going well. Nothing beyond such wandering and pointless topics but even these he now wished he could have recorded, wished he could play them back in the gray shadow of the days and weeks and indeed the years to come after, as if the whole of his memory had become a floating haze of detritus the outer reaches of which only tangentially obeyed him, circling, instead, some other false center, as if the brightness that had fallen from that distance would, at any moment, come rocketing in from the outer dark with its pale and luminescent shift dragging out behind it like a gown.