Atmosphere

The human body—intelligent as it is—was formed in response to the atmosphere of Earth.

It would be easy to make the case that humans are ill-equipped to be in space. Whatever led to our design, it was not meant for this. But Joan sees it as the exact opposite.

Human intelligence and curiosity, our persistence and resilience, our capacity for long-term planning, and our ability to collaborate have led the human race here.

In Joan’s estimation, we are not ill-suited at all. We are exactly who should be out there. We are the only intelligent life-form that we know of in our galaxy who has become aware of the universe and worked to understand it.

On her last day, the Physics and Astronomy Department threw her a going-away party. By the punch bowl, Dr. Siskin asked—in a way that struck Joan as remarkably transparent—how she’d managed to pull this off. Joan said, “Luck, I guess,” and then regretted it.

Joan knew that Dr. Siskin, and most men like him, had never taken a good look at her.

“Do you know the difference between bravery and courage?” Vanessa said.

Joan considered the question. “I don’t think so.”

“My dad taught me when I was little. Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway.”

Her parents’ marriage seemed fine to her. Good, even. They still loved each other. Her mother, basically a vegetarian, made her father’s favorite meatloaf most weekends with a joy that Joan had scrutinized for years but found completely sincere. Still, when she thought about it, a gloom dared to take over. You could develop your personality your entire life—pursue the things you wanted to learn, discover the most interesting parts of yourself, hold yourself to a certain standard—and then you marry a man and suddenly his personality, his wants, his standards subsume your own?

Joan knew that society was changing and some men were changing with it. Some of them now understood that a woman’s career, her life, her passions were just as important as their own. But still, all Joan could think was that it was now just two people cutting off parts of themselves to make themselves fit together. A world of vegetarians cooking meatloaf.

“Barbara is…very delicate. If you so much as look at her the wrong way, she might just say the worst things you can think of. And mean each and every one of them. We all just tiptoe around her. We always have. I am not…I am not honest with her. Maybe ever. I don’t even know what that would look like. And I hate it about myself.”

“They have excused the college-degree requirement for certain members of the military. So why can’t they excuse the military requirement for certain civilians?”

Vanessa looked at her. “I mean, you already know the answer.”

Joan frowned. “Why didn’t you join the military?”

“Women couldn’t join the military as pilots, and now NASA will only take military pilots. Ergo, women can’t be NASA pilots. It’s a nice little work-around they’ve got themselves there. It’s not like I could go to the Naval Academy, like my father did.”

She was trying to prove that she could be just like a man to all of them. To Jimmy. To Lydia. Because the world had decided that to be soft was to be weak, even though in Joan’s experience being soft and flexible was always more durable than being hard and brittle. Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.

Joan had let men like Jimmy set the terms.

But the terms were false, even to him. He was just as scared as anybody else.

Bravery, Joan suspected, is almost always a lie. Courage is all we have.

All I’m trying to tell you is that I’ve only ever really loved one thing. Being in the sky. But I look at you, and you are so curious about everything. Not just about the planets and galaxies and the stars. But Earth. About the people on it. That’s what I admire.”

“My curiosity?”

“Your commitment to the world around you. How much you care. You are so thoughtful. About everything.”

“You say I don’t know who I am, but do you know who you are?” Joan asked her.

Vanessa laughed. Joan cringed.

“Yes, Joan, I do. And you know who I am, too. If you’re honest with yourself.” Oh, they were much too close to the sun.

“It’s 1981, and I’m done pretending sexist jokes are funny just so men will give me a chance at something I’m probably better at than they are.”

Lydia shook her head. “You just don’t get it. It infuriates me sometimes. Before Group 8, there wasn’t a single woman in this program. All men, and every man who’s been assigned a mission has been white.”

“I obviously know that.” “Group 8 they let in six white women, three Black men, and an Asian man. The rest of the thirty-five? All white men.”

“I know that, too,” Joan said.

“She’s saying we’re outnumbered,” Donna said. Joan looked at her. “NASA is run primarily by men. If we want to go up there, we have to convince a man to choose us. We have to be somebody the men here want to work with. We have to be smart.”

“I have a recurring dream,” [Vanessa] said finally.

“About what?” Joan hoped it was her.

“It’s my funeral. And I’m in the casket, but I’m alive—I’m actually completely fine. But no one can see that, or hear me. So they are all just crying. My mother is there. The other people change, but my mother is always there. And she’s always sobbing into a tissue. And she always talks about something that I never got to do. Sometimes it’s that I never had a family. Or I never got married.

“Do you want those things?”

Vanessa shook her head. “It’s more about what my mom wants for me. But it’s always about how short my life was. And when I’m in the casket, I realize how little I did on Earth. That I didn’t get a chance to do something with the time I had.”

[…]

“What do you mean?”

She inhaled deeply and blew out her next words like cigarette smoke. “I mean, don’t confuse my respect for you with patience.”

“It was my seventh birthday […] I got to meet Minnie, Mickey, Donald, and Daisy all by myself. Just me. Even Barbara didn’t go.”

“And you broke into hives when you saw them?”

“I broke into hives walking over there. On the way across the park, I was walking just with my dad, and he explained where we were going and that it was a special thing, just for me and…I broke out into hives. And then I met them all, and I cried and could barely get up the courage to talk to them. I was just so happy.”

[…]

“This is dangerous,” Vanessa said as she handed Joan a towel. “Those hives of yours might just be the most romantic moment of my life.”

Joan could not conceive of telling her own parents; she certainly was not going to tell Barbara. Sometimes, Joan felt as if the words were in her throat, desperate to leap out of her mouth. But she held them back.

No matter how easy it was for Joan to lose herself in this new life, she was constantly aware of the cold, hard borders of it. The world would not care for her and Vanessa as they cared for each other.

Joan beamed and tried to hold back her smile. In all of her time spent watching others, she hadn’t picked up on this part of falling in love, that someone could look at you as if you were the very center of everything. And even though you knew better, you’d allow yourself a moment to believe you were worthy of being revolved around, too.

“Happiness is so hard to come by. I don’t understand why anyone would begrudge anyone else for managing to find some of it.”

Joan wanted to tell [her parents] that they thought she didn’t want to get married, but the truth was that she wanted exactly what Barbara had. She wanted what they had. She wanted what Donna and Hank had. And what every marriage in the whole godforsaken country had.

The right to exist and to love and be proud and happy.

The right to live.

“It’s so small,” Harrison said, having just floated up beside her.

Joan nodded. “It’s a midsize planet orbiting a midsize star in a galaxy of a hundred billion stars. In a universe of one hundred billion galaxies.”

“With almost five billion people on the planet,” Harrison said.

Joan nodded.

“Hard to believe any one person has any significance,” he said. “I knew that before, but I never knew it, until now. Human life is…meaningless.”

Joan looked at him.

How was it that two people, right next to each other, given the rarest of perspectives, could draw two totally opposite conclusions?

When Joan looked back at the Earth, she was overwhelmed with her own life’s meaning—and the fact that the only meaning it could have was the meaning she gave it.

Joan studied the thin blue, hazy circle that surrounded the Earth. The atmosphere was so delicate, nearly inconsequential. But it was the very thing keeping everyone she loved alive.

Intelligent life was her meaning.

People were her meaning.

Frances and Vanessa.

“I went to his office to talk about Mission Control, and I was about to leave, but before I got to the door, he calmly reminded me of the importance of security clearances for astronauts, and that they require no appearances of ‘sexual deviation.’ He said it leaves one open to blackmail.”

Vanessa flinched. “Well, yeah, it leaves us open to blackmail because people act like who we are is shameful. If we didn’t have to keep it a secret, then people wouldn’t be able to blackmail us,” she said. “Did he ever think about that?”

“When one asshole scares you, you’re going to give it all up? No! I don’t accept it. I love you. And I love Frances, too, and you don’t get to take her away from me. Just because you’re scared. Or just because you think you know what’s best for me.”

“All you’ve ever wanted is to fly the shuttle,” Joan said.

“All I ever wanted—past tense,” Vanessa said. “But you changed what I wanted, and what I thought was possible.”

[…]

“But you might lose everything you dreamed of.”

“Then I’ll lose it,” Vanessa said. “Let them take it. Just don’t let them take you.”

The way the universe had developed—the way God itself unfolded—was that Vanessa had been here for thirty-seven years.

But Joan had been given four of them.

She had been given so much of Vanessa when so few ever understood her at all. She had been given that face to sketch for the rest of her life. To spend her days trying and failing to capture her hair.

In this one moment of brilliant clarity—a clarity Joan knows she will lose her grasp on within seconds, and have to fight like hell for years to come back to—Joan understands that God gave her something spectacular. A love, and a life, beyond the confines of her imagination.

Small, slight, unimportant Joan. Just one person of five billion, on a small planet orbiting a small star, in a humble galaxy, one of billions of galaxies. Joan is so insignificant and yet, look what God had given her. Look at all that God had given her. Look at what no one will ever be able to take away.