“You have your orders, Mr. Lundman. Blow up that rock.”
Ed and his dad went outside the ship, back to the airless surface of Odette. Ed wore a space suit, but Dad did not.
“How is the family?” asked Dad.
“Mom’s okay. She moved to California about two months ago,” Ed replied. “Joan’s not at Georgetown anymore. She chose a contract position at Stanford because she likes it there. And Trim and I had a son last year. His name is Norman.”
“Wow, I’m a grandfather! Whoo-ee!” his dad yelled. “Too bad I couldn’t be there for the boy, Norman’s his name? It’s bad enough that I missed a few years of your life, and now I’m not around for my grandson’s.”
A few years of your life: the words echoed in Ed’s ears.
Ed’s dad quit his job at the car factory when Ed was five years old and spent the next five years moving from one bad business deal to another. During that time, Dad never had money, and Mom never smiled. After five years of financial failures, he had simply walked out. To support Ed and Joan, Mom worked two jobs, one cleaning an office building and another waiting tables at a restaurant.
Dad returned five years later, paler and thinner than ever before, but with a small amount he had earned in odd jobs in California. He was ready to lead his family again, he announced sheepishly. Mom wouldn’t take him back, though. Without any argument, he gave her the money and moved into an apartment across town. He had exiled himself from his family when they had wanted him, and now they were exiling him when he wanted them.
He came to visit them from time to time, though. By the time Ed left to work on the Moon, Mom and Joan were just warming up to Dad again, starting to close the chasm in the family. Eventually, Mom and Joan forgave Dad for his disappearance. About seven years after his return, Dad and Mom renewed their vows, in essence, got married again, with Joan as bridesmaid. But Ed was away on the Moon and couldn’t come back. He had said that his employer had no room for him on the next shuttle back to Earth. In fact, he had not even asked for a seat on the flight.
Ed visited his mom and dad only twice in the next five years. Unlike Mom and Joan, he could not forgive his dad for leaving him when he was ten years old.
And then his dad discovered he had cancer. When Ed got the space transmission from his mother, he realized that if he wanted his father again, he was running out of time. But Ed was on a rock blasting team heading for Mars. By the time the ship returned to Earth, his dad had already died.
Ed wanted to tell his dad that all was forgiven—but was this ghost really his dad?
“Before you arrived here, what was the last thing you remember?” Ed asked.
“Dying,” said Dad.
Ed looked at the stars above them. Is this what heaven looks like? he asked himself. Is that where they were? In heaven?
“INCOMING TRANSMISSION” flashed on the monitor. Andrew watched the words fade out and Colonel Chang’s image fade in. The transmission was coming from the Long Island; Chang had left Space Station Reagan and was heading to Odette.
“You are now three days behind schedule on the demolition of Odette,” Chang said. “Do you intend to blow it up?”
“I repeat, not while there are people here,” said Andrew.
“There are no people there!” said Chang. He sounded agitated; Andrew had never seen him unnerved before.
Chang tried a more reasoning tone. “They’re all in your imagination,” he said.
Andrew looked at Sally. She straddled the floor, legs wide apart, and raised her arms over her shoulder to touch her feet. That was how cheerleaders stretched their hamstrings and calf muscles. He remembered seeing her do those stretches on a football field in Oregon many years ago.
She looked so warm, so lively. When they had kissed, he realized that he had never kissed as passionately as with her. Sally was a real woman again.
Andrew turned back to Chang. “No, sir, they are not our imagination. They are real.”
“So are the two hundred and ninety people now on Space Station Reagan,” Chang reminded him grimly. “That’s two hundred and ninety dead if you don’t blow up Odette.”
“We’re working on a way to move the asteroid into a safe orbit,” Andrew said. “I’m confident we’ll succeed.”
“You know that’s the riskier procedure.” Chang scowled from the monitor. “You leave me no choice, Mr. Lundman. I will demolish Odette and arrest you and your crew.”
“Arrest us?” questioned Andrew. “On what grounds?”
“United States Space Stations Code, section 52, ‘Willful Endangerment of a Space Station,” ‘ Chang stated. “Minimum sentence, ten years. Don’t make this mistake. Obey your orders.”
George and Rachel strolled outside on the asteroid’s surface, talking about the girls. Rachel laughed when she heard how her daughters had grown up.
“Oh, how I wish I could have seen all of it,” she said finally. “Oh, if only I could have been there for them.”
George nodded. “That has been the greatest sadness of my life, that you aren’t there to see them grow up.”
Rachel shook her head. “George, don’t feel sad anymore. I’ll always be with all three of you.”
“Are you in heaven?” George asked.
She took his hand and placed it over his heart. “I’m right here, in your heart.”
“You always have been,” said George as they continued walking.
“I got to hand it to you, George,” said Rachel. “It must have been hard to raise two girls by yourself for seven years.”
George sighed. “There’s something I have to tell you. I wasn’t alone all that time.”
“Oh?” said Rachel. “My mother has been helping out?”
“No. I remarried four years ago. Her name is Abby.”
Rachel stopped walking and looked at George. “Abby. Is she a nice girl?”
“Yes.”
“And how does she treat the girls?”
George said nothing.
“George, how does she treat the girls?” Rachel asked again, anxiously.
George took in a deep breath. “Extremely well. Abby loves them deeply, treats them as if they were her own daughters.”
Rachel crossed her arms and shifted her gaze to a rock beside them, as if to avoid looking him in the eye.
“Oh, I see,” she said softly.
For Andrew, Sally’s death had ended all of their plans: getting married, getting jobs, and starting a family.
“So you never went to that job you had lined up after graduation, the one with the City of Eugene?” Sally asked.
“No, I went into the Navy instead,” said Andrew. Without Sally, he had joined the U.S. Navy after graduation, hoping to fight the terrorists who had blown up her train.
He had felt a brief sense of joy when Navy missiles killed the last terrorist commander in Sudan, but it couldn’t erase the sadness of losing Sally. Afterward, he volunteered for service on the farthest, loneliest space station, and later, went into rock blasting.
“No children?” asked Sally. “Why not?”
“Hard to do with my job,” said Andrew. “I’m always traveling for months in space. No time to meet someone, much less raise a kid.”
He paused. He knew he had been making excuses for years.
“But, remember, I had wanted children,” he continued. “That’s what we had planned. We would get married after graduation. We’d live in Eugene. We would get jobs there. I would be a road engineer. You would be an accountant for the bakery. We would have children.”
Sally smiled. “We had our whole lives planned, didn’t we?”
“We sure did, girl,” said Andrew.
“Things didn’t go according to plan, did they?”