Boone Cross calls the family members heroes.
Mireille at this moment sees the older Russian kid raising his eyebrow in a very funny, sardonic sort of way at this, and then the kid sees Mireille watching him and quickly makes his face blank in response to her smile. And then Mireille sees that the Japanese wife is watching her, and she doesn’t look at all like a beauty pageant contestant held at gunpoint, but like someone who has had about enough crap for one day. And Mireille looks back at the Russian kid—Dmitri—and he looks back at her again and then they both look over at Madoka and the three of them are caught, she thinks, in a moment where they understand that they have all been mentally hurling lasagna at the walls all night.
Mireille feels a rise of something—hope?—but it passes. She tries to tune in to the speech.
If this whole circus works, then her mother might go to Mars. Her mother might go to Mars.
Mireille thinks, My mother could die, and the idea—which is certainly not new to her—strikes her as unbearable on a level that is not manageable. Johnson Space Center has a Memorial Grove of live oak trees, each one planted to commemorate a fallen astronaut. At Christmastime, they hang lights on them. Mireille sees herself at a memorial for her mother. Probably if her mother died on the way to Mars there would be a state funeral; the president might even attend. And then, when it was all over, she would have to go back to her life with no mother. No mother for the rest of her life.
She must love her mother very much. She must.
? ? ?
“WILL THIS GUY never shut up?”
Dmitri acknowledges his mother’s muttered attempt to amuse him with a perfunctory smile. If he ignores her completely, she will just try harder. She is worried that he is mad at her, which he is not, but they are not supposed to talk during speeches. In America, you have to sit quietly and stare at the person talking like they are a hypnotist. Dmitri shakes his head slightly at his mother, who sighs and crosses her legs.
She is like a child, his mother. You shouldn’t give in to children. Alexander gives in. This makes his mother happy, but fretful. Dmitri’s father did not give in, and this made his mother unhappy, but calm. Yes, Alexander would never have left Dmitri’s mother alone for such long periods of time, would not have assumed, over and over again, that she could handle everything, manage all situations, cope with any emergency. But the fact that his father had done so had resulted in his mother being perfectly competent and someone you could rely on. Now, Dmitri was not so sure. Now, if something happened, Alexander would probably rush in and say, “Oh, don’t worry, I will take care of it,” and his mother would stand there as if she had forgotten how to use her hands, and smile at Alexander.
Dmitri does not know for certain that his mother had sex with his father here in Utah before his father went into quarantine, but he’s pretty sure. He is now in the position to know how people behave after having secret sex, if you count what Dmitri has done as sex, which he does not, but still. He knows.
His mother is worried that Dmitri will tell Alexander that she had sex with his father. This is insulting. He’s not an idiot. If Dmitri told Alexander, Alexander might leave his mother, and then his mother would be unhappy and helpless at a time when Dmitri was particularly invested in having her be fully occupied and not particularly noticing.
It was that satisfied look on his father’s face that had pissed Dmitri off. Once again, his father had gotten to have everything. It didn’t matter what his father did, none of them would stop loving him. His father loved them too, but so effortlessly.
This part, the part where his father goes away, they are all used to, it’s no big deal. Dmitri and Ilya hated those children in that movie about astronauts going to Tau Ceti. Screaming and crying. “Don’t leave me, Papa, don’t leave me.” Nobody did that. Come on.
But now, when his father comes back, he will not come back to them. His father doesn’t have a home anymore, and his father loved having a home. And it was something, it was a way to organize things, to know when his father would be coming back from training, or a conference, or a mission.
Yesterday, for their special walk to talk about meaningful things, his father had taken him to Goblin Valley State Park. The “goblins” were hoodoos: sandstone spires in strange shapes. The rocks were reddish, coated in hematite, so crazy-looking you could not believe you were on Earth. The valley was like a science-fiction movie, with mushrooms and gnomes and globules all made out of rock, some four or five meters tall, some like toadstools. “The Entrada sandstone is a combination of sandstone, siltstone, and shale,” his father said. “Sediments from ancient seas and river channels. Jurassic period, one hundred seventy million years ago. These formations are maybe ten million years old. You can touch. You can climb on them if you want.”
Dmitri had looked at the hoodoo nearest to hand, which was about one meter tall and the exact shape of a dick. The hoodoo looked so much like a dick that his father’s suggestion that he touch it seemed, not perverted, but like an accusation, like his father was saying, “I know what you’ve been doing in secret.”
Dmitri moved to another hoodoo, one that looked like a loaf of bread sitting on top of a tombstone. The texture of the rock was softer than he expected. It did not seem like something that had been made from dirt that had been around since the dinosaurs and had been holding this particular shape for ten million years.
“Nothing on Mars will look as crazy as this place,” Dmitri said.