As it turned out—she discovered later—the boy wasn’t from a poor family, either; that part of his story was another bit of his creative application of truth.
“Bainbridge?” another student told her much later. “Him? He’s a dickhead. You don’t pay attention to him, do you?”
For the rest of her years in medical school and her residency, she chose her friends carefully—and watched her back.
4
A Walk in the Twilight
John Radkowski walked along the edge of the cliff. The bottom was already in darkness, and it was as if he walked along an ocean of blackness, as if he could dive off of the edge and swim into the lapping pool of dark.
Trevor had come to talk to him again, this time not even bothering to disguise the fact that he was pleading for his life, and he had again put Trevor off. Radkowski knew that it was time for him to face up to the decision that was his to make. The return vehicle could not save them all. Who should be saved?
And with this, the thought that he had been avoiding. When they got to the return ship—and he would get them to the return ship, whatever the cost—when it came time for the ship to launch, he would not be one of the ones to return.
He owed a debt.
It was time for the debt to be paid.
5
The Road to Houston
Tana did her internship and her residency at a hospital in Pittsburgh. She married a bouncer at an East Pittsburgh bar, Derrick; she’d become fed up with doctors in her time at school and at work, and wanted nothing more than to get away from them in her personal life.
Derrick was more than a tough guy; he aspired to be a poet and took her to poetry readings and to gatherings of folksingers and artists. Even in the bar, he would be more likely to deal with a drunken customer by jollying them out the door with a quip than by violence. Nevertheless, her father had not approved of him; he’d still cherished the idea that she might marry the son of one of his banker or lawyer friends, somebody closer to being worthy of her.
Much later, Tana wondered whether, to some extent, her marriage had been an attempt to demonstrate to her father in the most vivid way possible that she had her own independence and was going to live her life her own way.
After a year, she found herself pregnant. She hadn’t wanted to have a baby, at least not yet, but Derrick was so pleased by her pregnancy that he almost glowed. They named the child Severna.
When she completed her residency, she applied for a job as a flight surgeon for NASA. She considered it a long shot—she could barely remember her coursework in aerospace medicine after two years stuffing intestines back inside knife slits and sewing up gunshot wounds in the emergency room—but Houston was her best way to get inside, to find herself an inside track to get selected for the astronaut corps. When, to her own surprise, she was accepted, Derrick refused to leave Pittsburgh. “Houston?” he said, his voice incredulous. “Houston? In Texas? Girl, you’ve got to be joking.”
But she never joked about her career. This time, she had never been more serious in her life. Pittsburgh was nothing to her; she’d never even stopped there for gas before she moved there for her residency. But Derrick had roots, cousins and uncles and family back three generations, all living within half a mile.
He was angry when she said she was going anyway, no matter what he thought. She made the paycheck in the family, not him, she told him, and Houston wasn’t so bad. Besides, the salary she’d been offered was triple the meager amount she’d been earning. He could learn to live with it.
A woman’s place is to follow her man, he told her, and fuck if he’s going to leave the city he grew up in to move to fucking Texas. Where was she going to go next, anyway? He had roots in this city. Roots.
“I’m going, Derrick,” she said. “With you or without you, I’m going.”
He grabbed her blouse and jerked her toward him, almost pulling her off the ground. “The hell you are!” he shouted. The muscles in his jaw, his neck, his shoulders were all bunched up with rage. “You think I’m going to let you just leave me?” His fist was clenched, and she knew that he was about to hit her. They’d had arguments before, but he had never hit her.
She closed her eyes. “Go ahead, Derrick.” She could feel his arm trembling with the strength of his anger, the motion of his other arm pulling back to strike. She screwed her eyes shut, clenched her jaw, willed herself not to scream.
He let go.
The release was so unexpected that she almost did scream, suddenly unbalanced. She was afraid to move, afraid to look.
The door slammed, and when she looked up, Derrick was gone.
It was an hour before he came back. He had been walking, he told her, he had to walk it off, or else he would hit her.
Derrick made up to her when he realized what he’d done, how badly he’d frightened her. He was extravagantly affectionate, promised he’d never hit her, never, and they made love. She was still tense, though, still afraid of what he was capable of. He was slow and loving, but she got nothing out of it.
She left with Severna and all the stuff she could cram into the car. She no longer knew Derrick, didn’t know what he was, or was not, capable of.
Derrick petitioned for custody. It made sense, he said: He had family in the area—his parents and aunts and brothers and cousins and their multitudinous children. And who did she know in Houston? Nobody.
It was the one time that she broke her self-imposed rule: She went to her father for money. He knew better than to say that he’d told her so. The lawyer that her daddy’s money bought told her not to sweat the custody hearing. It would be a slam dunk. The judge had never, he told her, never once awarded custody to the father unless the mother was dead, drunk, or in jail.
The judge was an old, white-haired black man, who looked so old that he might have been on the bench since the Clinton administration. And he seemed sympathetic, cutting off Derrick in midsentence. And it had, indeed, seemed a slum dunk, right up until the judge told Derrick to cut the crap, and just tell him in simple terms, no bullshit, tell him just why he thought he should take the child away from her mother.
“I just don’t want my child growing up in the South, judge,” Derrick said.
“South,” the judge had said. “The South?” He turned to Tana.
Tana looked at her very expensive lawyer, but he seemed at a sudden loss.
“Well?”
“Houston isn’t really the South, your honor,” Tana replied.
But the case was lost. “I don’t think is in the child’s best interests,” the judge ruled, “to grow up surrounded by rednecks, when she could instead be surrounded by her family. Custody goes to the father.” He slammed his gavel on the bench. “Case closed.”
Derrick’s family bickered constantly—they seemed like they had a constant low-level feud—but they were, all in all, a loving clan. Severna will be okay, Tana told herself, she would never lack for a home to go to. She knew that if she told the court that Derrick had hit her, she could probably win an appeal. He had almost hit her, she told herself. It wouldn’t really be a lie. She could say it in court.
She didn’t appeal. As a single mother, she would have no chance at becoming an astronaut. It came down to the child or her dreams, and dreams had come late to her; she didn’t want to give them up.
She felt guilty sometimes, even now, but she suppressed the feeling.
Derrick had found himself a girlfriend before she had barely even left Pennsylvania, before the divorce was even final. Last she’d been in touch, he’d gone through two more wives, but still didn’t have any problem finding women.