“I wasn’t dead. I was never dead. I was in hell, David, but I wasn’t dead.” Nothing she was saying was helping defuse this, but it felt so satisfying, like scratching an itch too hard.
“How could I have known that? If you hadn’t gone in the first place—”
“You insisted that I go! ‘You can’t miss this opportunity, Cath, it’s once in a lifetime.’ ”
“What else did you expect me to say? You’d already made it abundantly clear that your career came before me and Aimee.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Come on, Catherine. You weren’t content to do space-station missions like everyone else. You had to be more. You applied for the Sagittarius program when Aimee was still a baby. A six-year mission! You didn’t have to do that, but before Aimee could even walk, you were planning—planning—to leave us.”
“David, you met me in the astronaut training program. Did you expect me to stay home all the time and take care of you and the baby? You knew before you married me, before we had Aimee, that I’d be gone sometimes. You could have said something then, if you were worried. Why didn’t you?”
“I was supposed to go, too!”
Silence fell between them, and then Catherine barked a laugh. “Is that what’s been bothering you all this time? What was I supposed to do, David? Fail, just because you did?”
“Oh. Oh, you’ve been wanting to say that for a long time, haven’t you?” David’s smile was feral. “Catherine the Great got stuck married to David the Failure.”
“That is not fair,” Catherine said. “I never felt stuck. I always loved you.” Too late, she realized she’d used the past tense.
“Why would you feel stuck? You were free to roam the whole fucking cosmos while I stayed home and took care of the baby.”
Catherine realized then she was lying. David had been so calm and steady when she’d met him, but after a few years, she realized that “calm and steady” could also mean “stagnant.” He never changed, and he’d hoped that she wouldn’t either. Catherine put the ring back in its box, closing it with a snap and setting it on the dresser. Then she looked up at her husband. “I thought we were past this, but all this time you’ve resented me for doing what you couldn’t.”
“Of course I resented you. You bailed on us.”
“ ‘Bailed’ on you? Really, David? Was getting to spend time with our daughter that much of a hardship? Do you know how much time I spent wishing desperately I was with her?”
“No. No, I don’t. Because you never fucking talk to me about what happened up there.”
“And boy, are you really making me want to confide in you right now.” Catherine started refolding some of the clothes she’d planned to keep, pulling open a dresser drawer with a sharp jerk.
“When have you ever? Catherine the Great never needed to confide in anyone.” Catherine didn’t miss the way David picked up the engagement ring box and tucked it in his pocket.
“Stop calling me that.”
“You didn’t seem to mind when John Duffy called you that.”
“And now we’re back to the jealousy.” Catherine fought the urge to roll her eyes. “David, do you really think what I did is any worse than what hundreds of men who’ve gone into space long-term have done? If it had been you, do you think anybody would’ve talked about how you ‘bailed’ on your family?”
“You’re her mother!”
Catherine laughed. “Did you really just—” She stopped, unable to believe what she was hearing. “Are you trying to say that it would have been perfectly okay for you to leave us for ten years, but since I’m not a man, I’m the harpy who left her family behind?”
“You can’t understand what it was like here then.” David rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache. “Cath, I was there in Mission Control the day we lost contact. Initial reports said there might be cooling issues in the Habitat, so we were working on that. I was talking to Michael Ozawa about what we’d discovered, and you all just… vanished. Everyone’s vitals dropped to zero. Including yours. I thought I’d just watched you die.”
“For all I know, I did watch them die, David. Can you understand that? Five of my closest friends. I have no idea what happened to them, or if I even tried to do anything to stop it.” The horror of those initial days alone in the ship came rushing back. Realizing that she was almost six months out from the TRAPPIST-1 system with no memory of ever having been there. Sitting in the cockpit again, wondering if she’d abandoned her crew, trying to decide if she could go back to TRAPPIST-1 and still have enough fuel to get home. “You cannot imagine how completely alone I was.”
“No, I can’t. God, Catherine, the list of things about you I can’t understand could stretch from here to Mars.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I’ve ever fully understood you. You’re unknowable—you were then, and you are now.”
Quietly, a little afraid of the answer, Catherine asked, “Then why did you marry me?”
“Back then I found it intriguing, but now it’s just exhausting.” David sank to the edge of the bed, sitting down heavily. “We needed you. I needed you. And career or no career, you weren’t here. Even when you were here, you were never present. Maggie was here. She was the one who helped Aimee through her first day of middle school, who sat down with her when she started going through puberty. Maggie did all of that, not you.”
Her hands curled into fists. “Maggie was here awfully quick, wasn’t she? Middle school? We were barely through the wormhole when Aimee started middle school. What was Maggie doing here then?”
David didn’t respond at first.
“Which one of you was just waiting for the chance?” She paused, a horrible thought occurring to her. “Was it going on all along? Right under my nose?”
“No! Catherine, I would never do something like that. And if I had—”
Catherine’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “If you had, what?”
“Who could blame me? That wasn’t what we planned, not at all. We were both supposed to go into space, to take turns—”
“It’s not my fault you weren’t cut out to be an astronaut.”
“I was doing fine! If you had just supported me a little bit more—”
“The way you’re supporting me right now?”
“I can’t support you if I don’t know what happened.”
It was like a flood of anger pouring out of her, and out of David. A small part of her felt the quiet, vicious joy of dancing around a funeral pyre. Another part of her felt like this had been inevitable from the moment she’d returned to Earth.
She started to see it in Chicago. In her mother’s world, Catherine was dead and gone, and she’d learned to cope with it. The idea of Catherine returning was too much for her, too difficult. Catherine’s return had filled a hole in Aimee’s life—she’d found her mom again. Julie had gotten her sister back. But David, David was the only one who had lost something when she came home. Like Nora, his world had been turned upside down. Did he really love her anymore, or was it just habit?
“You want to know what happened? You want me to tell you about the hallucinations? How I thought I’d die before I had a chance to see you and Aimee again? That’s apparently what Cal wants to hear.” She leaned against the dresser and folded her arms. “Or do you want me to tell you about how I slept with Tom Wetherbee?”
He stared at her in shock.
“There. Now you know. The thing I’m hiding that Cal Morganson keeps trying to find. We got drunk one night with the crew, and I screwed him. It happened once, that I know of, and I felt like shit.”