“But here’s the rest of the story, Jerrod. That day, Julie had already been picked up safely at your dad’s direction by a family friend, but he couldn’t get your mom to accept that. She was paranoid and thought he was lying, and despite the fact that she had been warned not to drive, she did it anyway.”
“I remember Dad called, but she said it was to tell her he wasn’t coming for Julie.”
“Yes, that’s right. He wasn’t coming because she was already picked up, okay?”
“He said that… he told me some of those things, but I never believed him. I asked my mother once weeks before if she was taking something because she seemed so out of it, but she said no and I believed her. And… and that day, I only heard her side of the conversation, and she was furious and told me Dad wasn’t going to pick Julie up because he couldn’t be bothered.”
“In fact, when he was on that phone call—the part you didn’t hear—he was begging her to understand what he was saying. When she sounded so strange, he left work and screamed toward home, and it’s fortunate you didn’t lose both of them that day. Didn’t you ever wonder why he showed up at the accident site so quickly?”
Jerrod shakes his head, stunned. “I never knew it was quick. I was so… horrified…”
“I understand.”
“How do you know all this, sir?”
“Your dad sat right here one night a few years back and told me the whole story. He felt… just like he’s been writing up there in space about guilt… he felt so guilty that he didn’t see it coming, didn’t know about her doubled prescriptions. See, guys like him and you and me, we get this idea that if anything happens on our watch, it’s all our fault, regardless. Especially where women are involved, ’cause, see, we’re supposed to protect them.”
Jerrod is nodding slowly, numbly, as Mike continues.
“Your dad later sent me copies of the prescription drug labels, Jerrod, and I had a friend validate the effects. This isn’t exaggerated.”
Jerrod buries his head in his hands. “Oh God, I never gave him a chance, and now…”
“Okay. Look, I think they’ll get him down from there. I have a lot of hope for that, and you should, too. But there’s something else. What’s really been going on with you, Jerrod, is that you keep blaming yourself even more than him. You think deep down inside that if you’d been faster, stronger, smarter, or what-the-hell-ever, you could have pulled her out of that car before the fire killed her. You know why I know that? ‘Cause you’re a male, and that’s the goddammed way we think. Especially about our moms. Son, I sawthe pictures, okay? The post-fire pictures shot by the coroner.”
“How?”
“Before your dad married my daughter I had him thoroughly investigated, and I wanted every detail of that tragedy to make sure he had no culpability. Jerrod, she was trapped in a tangle of metal. There was nothing you could have done!”
“I could have pulled her out of the window.”
He sighs deeply, his eyes on Jerrod, considering whether to push on.
“Okay, dammit… I’m going to show you a picture, Jerrod, if you truly want to see it. It’s gruesome as hell and it will probably do you more harm, so I beg you not to ask, but you’re an adult now. If you want to see it, I’ll show it to you, but it was taken after her body was burned beyond recognition. It shows clearly that she had been completely impaled on the steering column after the wheel broke off. Run through, Jerrod, all the way through to her backbone. Even if you’d had superhuman strength, all you would have been able to pull out was her upper torso.”
“I… saw her look at me… her mouth moved… she was screaming…”
The only grandfather he’s ever known moves to sit alongside him, putting a big arm around the boy and pulling him into a hug, hanging on as the tears finally flow.
The so-called terminator—the line of demarcation between night and day—is crawling across the middle of the United States again, but Kip has to check his watch and think to realize that it’s been two days since he should have returned to Earth. He’s checked the oxygen and CO 2scrubber saturation tables twice now, and he figures he has two more days before breathing begins to get difficult. Maybe he should just depressurize the ship and finish the job, freeze drying himself and his dead pilot with the vacuum of deep space and eternal cold.
Bill is about to become a problem. Kip knows it instinctively. A body in room temperature for two days has already gone through rigor mortis, and despite being sealed in plastic as well as Kip could manage, he fears that soon he’ll be inhaling the telltale odor of decomposition. Earlier, he stopped writing for a half hour to search out Bill’s pressure suit, wondering if perhaps putting him in it and sealing everything wouldn’t be the best course of action. But he’s convinced he’s waited too long; were he to open the sealed plastic now…
Besides, he might decide to go for a spacewalk and just end it out there as his own satellite.
But for now the air remains okay and he’s way too far into the story of his life to waste the remaining forty-eight hours pulling and hauling on a space suit that—given Bill’s slightly smaller frame—probably wouldn’t fit him anyway.
The pull to get back to the keyboard is great, and this time not because of the escape it provides, but because he’s worried about the import of everything he’s chronicled, frightened that it doesn’t amount to as much as he thought. An autobiography of mundane occurrences and banal sameness, and an embarrassing lack of significant achievements. He isn’t happy with the way his life looks so far, and he’s hoping it will get better, rounding the corner of the last ten years. There have been happy times, he’s sure of that. But somehow, in print, as a chronicle, it seems so ordinary, and he’s caught himself wanting to lapse into fiction a few times, spice up a few things here and there. After all, who on Earth would know, so to speak?
But the fact that it is, or was, his life forces him to stay honest about the details, even some that he would never have spoken about on Earth.
There’s an incident in particular a few years back that still bothers me to the point of losing sleep, something I did nothing about in order to save my job. I didn’t find out until too late, and when I discovered the corporate leaders knew about it, I was convinced they would can me if I said anything. I just stowed the evidence away quietly and sat on it like a coward. I’ll never know how many people, if any, have been injured or maybe even killed. But a corporation that knowingly ships a bad, completely inactivated lot of a major antibiotic just to avoid the costs of a recall has to be committing a criminal act.
Kip stops, wondering whether to risk putting the details down in print for the first time, knowing it could put several executives of the American branch of the company in prison. But who will care twenty or fifty or whatever years from now? And if by some miracle he does get rescued, he can quietly delete it.
Ah, what the hell. No one’s reading this but me anyway.
I think I want to tell you in detail exactly what happened, and how I found out.
Ron Porter makes it a point never to charge out of his office like the West Wing is on fire. He knows about the adrenaline that races into bloodstreams when a Chief of Staff looks panicked, and now is no exception—even late in the evening with most of the staff gone.
He strolls to the desk just outside the Oval Office still occupied by the President’s secretary and catches her eye. Technically, she works for Porter, but he wouldn’t dare fire or chastise her without the President’s permission. She’s been working for the man for twenty years.
Not that she needs chastising or firing, but sometimes Elizabeth Dela-court can be a bit too harsh as a gatekeeper.
“Is he ready, Liz?” he asks, glad for the relaxed smile in return as she waves him in.
He expects to find the President behind his desk, but instead sees him in front of the TV, quietly reading the latest words from Kip Dawson.