““I’m okay, Jillian,” Spencer insisted. ““Please, just leave it alone. I can handle it.”
With her free hand she dabbed at the blood on his chin with a piece if tissue paper. Then she looked into her husband’s eyes, a quizzical smile on her face. “I think I see the problem here… Spencer, you are right-handed,” she said.
They both looked at the razor. Spencer was holding the blade in his left hand.
Jillian took it from him. “Let me,” she said very softly, as if she was talking to a child. “It’s okay, let me do it, honey. Please…” And slowly, Spencer opened his left hand and allowed Jillian to take the razor. Slowly, gently, as if dealing with a spooked horse, she raised the blade to his neck and ran it over his skin.
Spencer’s eyes looked sad and closed to the world around him. “Alex is dead,” he whispered. Suddenly he looked like a little boy who had lost his best friend. Bereft and lost, foundering at sea in a ocean of melancholy emotions.
Jillian knew that look and was just as heartbroken for her husband. “I know,” she said. There were tears welling in her eyes now. “I know, Spencer…”
She looked at her husband in the mirror, but he looked past her, staring into at his own reflection, gazing into his own eyes as if looking into the workings of his own mind. Jillian and Spencer had never thought that the Strecks were particularly observant Jews, but Natalie was insistent that the instant she returned from the cemetery where Alex had been buried the seven days of shiva had to begin. The week of mourning was intense and the rituals had been followed to the letter. Natalie had covered all the mirrors, drawn the drapes to darken the entire house and had served the “seudat havrach” meal to the members of the immediate family.
By the time Jillian and Spencer arrived the Strecks’ relatives had been joined by a number of men and women from the NASA program, as well as other friends and neighbors. Men and women clad in funereal black stood around the Streck room feeling self-conscious and talking in hushed tones.
Periodically the front door opened, admitting along with guests harsh shafts of bright afternoon sunlight. Spencer and Jillian entered on a blade of light, shutting the door quickly to restore the crepuscular gloom of the room. Nan threaded her way through the crowd and hugged Jillian tight and long.
“You okay?” Nan asked.
Jillian nodded. “Yeah. It’s hard, but we’ll be okay. It’s hard to believe he’s gone.”
Spencer pointed to a small clutch of NASA people standing in a corner. “I’ll be over there,” Spencer whispered and made his way across the room.
“Where’s Natalie?” Jillian asked Nan.
“Upstairs,” Nan replied. “She’s been asking for you. She wanted to make sure you were here before they said Kaddish.”
Jillian nodded and walked toward the staircase. As she climbed the steps she looked down on the crowd of mourners. Her husband was already talking to a knot of NASA tech types and did not see her. She noticed that Sherman Reese was looking up at her as she climbed. She assumed that the Director must be around there someplace. One did not travel without the other.
The door to Natalie’s bedroom was half open and Jillian pushed it aside. It was gloomy within, but Jillian could make out Natalie, prone on the bed. She was dressed in her black dress and even still had her black high heels on her feet.
“Natalie?” Jillian spoke into the shadows.
“Jillian?” She slurred the single word. Jillian took a step closer and saw an open vial of sedatives on the bedside table. It was only natural that she take something. She sat down on. the edge of the bed and brushed a. loose strand of hair from Natalie’s eyes.
“How are you holding up?” Jillian asked. “I know it’s going to be hard…”
Natalie did not answer Jillian’s questions, not directly anyway. “They talked to him, Jillian. They talked to him all the time. They talked to him every night.”
Jillian touched Natalie’s cheek and gently wiped away a tear. She said nothing, knowing it was better to let Natalie speak even if little or nothing she said made any sense.
“I couldn’t understand them,” Natalie continued. Her eyes were fixed on some point far off in the distance, some place beyond the confines of that gloomy bedroom. “I couldn’t understand them, Jill, not while Alex was alive. I couldn’t… but now I do.”
“Who talked to him, Natalie?” Jillian asked quietly. “Who talked to Alex?”
Natalie’s eyes closed as the drugs and the exhaustion kicked in. “Who talked to him?” she murmured. “They did, Jillian. They did. They talked all the time ”
Suddenly Jillian felt terribly afraid and she shivered as if a chill had just come over her. “Who are they, Natalie?” she asked urgently. “Tell me who they are.”
Natalie said nothing. But as she slipped into her drug-induced sleep she pointed at something on the far side of the room. Jillian followed the direction and saw that Natalie was pointing at a simple, cheap radio. Jillian looked from the radio and then back to the slumbering Natalie…
“Natalie?” Jillian asked.
But she was out cold. Jillian looked back to the radio and then began to walk from the room. Then, very distinctly, she heard Natalie’s voice out loud: “It’s not a dream, Jillian.”
She turned but Natalie’s eyes remained closed, her chest rose and fell and she had not stirred.
Jill came back downstairs and poured herself a glass of water and watched her husband.
Spencer was engaged in an odd, rather guarded conversation with Sherman Reese, a discussion that was wholly out of place in a bereaved household. Reese had not wanted to bring it up at all, not while shiva was being sat for Alex Streck, but with the Armacosts’ imminent departure he took a chance and expressed his fears to Spencer there and then and the hell with the consequences.
Spencer had not been happy to be approached like this, and he had a hard time getting a handle on exactly what it was that Reese was getting at. It seemed to involve further medical exams—in search of God knows what—even though Spencer had been officially separated from NASA and honorably discharged from the armed forces.
“I assure you,” Reese was saying, “this will hardly take a moment of your time, Commander, and it could be quite important. For the future of the program and the agency.” Reese knew there was no better way to get an old astronaut to cooperate than to run the old space program flag up the mast.
But it did not work with Spencer Armacost. At least, not this time, anyway.
“I appreciate your concern, Mr. Reese,” said Spencer evenly, “but I have been poked with more than enough needles to last me a lifetime, you understand. And your superiors have given me a clean bill of health. That’s good enough for me.”
Reese nodded vigorously. “I know they have, Commander. I know they have. It’s probably nothing at all, but I think it would make sense to have—”
Spencer’s eyes narrowed and he looked at Reese with a certain amount of suspicion. “Tell me, do your bosses know that you want to do this? Does the Director know? Or is this a purely extra curricular activity on your part, Mr. Reese?”
Reese looked at the floor and shook his head slowly. “No one knows about this. No one but me. And now you, of course.” He looked up and directly into Spencer’s eyes. “And I’m sure I can count on your discretion in this matter, can’t I?”
“Of course,” said Spencer with a thin smile…
As he spoke the lights in the house blinked off and then after a second or two blinked on again. There was a loud, fast zapping noise and the acrid smell of smoke from an electrical fire.
“Fuse?” someone wondered aloud. There were a couple of seconds of silence, which was immediately dispelled by the loud, high-pitched sound of a little girl screaming. She was upstairs.