The house was in Timber Cove, a new development close to Murky Lake and the Manned Spacecraft Center that was emerging in gray cubes from the ground. The Original Seven astronauts, as people were now calling them—the fellas—settled here first, picking out lots, their wives choosing their own kitchens. The streets were tidy. Pine and oak trees shaded the sidewalks from the hot sun.
The week following the press conference, members of the New Nine—as they were now being called—flew down to Houston to pick out lots of their own. Grace had known all about the deal that the Original Seven cut with Life; she’d read the personal pieces (ghosted, naturally) by the astronauts and their wives. Exclusive rights to their stories; half a million bucks between them. And Leo DeOrsey, the lawyer that NASA had turned to for advice, refused to take a fee, or even be reimbursed for his expenses! It was a new kind of crazy. After she’d settled down and taken in the news that Jim had hit her with, after that, her mind had found itself thinking about such things—compensations—the goodies—but she simply couldn’t believe that this particularly fat goose, Life magazine, would ever lay another egg, even a silver one. She was wrong. An agent was immediately found for them, the Nine, an ad exec from Philly called Harry Batten. Grace liked Harry from their first meeting. He was thin and tall and dressed in a variety of gray suits cut so precisely she could hardly believe he could move. He laughed loud, and he laughed a lot. And he got them their own Life deal. Split nine ways this time, sure, but she wasn’t about to complain. After years on the pay of an air force captain, it was hard to take in. It hadn’t stopped there, either. The Timber Cove developers, so eager to have astronauts living in their homes, offered large mortgages with practically no interest and proposed they custom-build the houses to whatever specifications they wanted.
Timber Cove was becoming an astronaut village; the wider area a NASA community. The Harrisons lived next door to the Lovells, around the corner from the Whites and the Glenns. Everyone was a short walk away. She felt safe. The sadness she felt at leaving the high desert (and she wasn’t about to pretend to herself or her husband or anyone else for that matter—Life deal or no Life deal—that she didn’t ache with sadness) had just been buried under a mudslide of good fortune, of goodies.
There were times, like that morning, when she felt physically dizzy; a kind of emotional vertigo. On those occasions, she’d walked down to Clear Lake and gaze at the horizon. She felt deep comfort at the space; the absence of everything but the gloomy rippled surface of the water and the blue sky banking overhead. She didn’t even take Milo. She wanted to be alone. It was in those moments that she allowed herself to think about Florence. At home, and everywhere else, she could think of nothing but her. However, staring across the filthy lake, a silty fug of oil from the refinery across the bay thickening the hot air, there, she was able to consciously, deliberately—tenderly—think about her daughter. Silent tears would fall like carnival ribbons and she’d think, how—how—did something that had only been in her life for two years, something that hadn’t even existed for the first thirty years of her life, how did the loss of this … this … thing destroy so much? She’d carried her, nurtured her, given her life, then brought her into the world, which had then slowly killed her. She hated the world for what it had done. The earth, the soil under her feet, everything. It could all go to hell. She couldn’t escape it. It was everywhere. She was part of it. It was her. She would look into the murk and want to drown. She would slide down onto the grass and cry. She’d cry for her daughter, lost, and she’d cry for the thoughts she had in her head. And when the emotion passed, and it always did, she felt exhausted, but, somehow, better. The sun was still warm. The horizon constant. There was so much sky. She’d think about the program. What they were trying to achieve. So many people. So many people. And how she was part of that now.