“What, you didn’t tell them?” Now she looks angry.
“The crew was about to begin the landing sequence.” Luke makes an effort to speak gently, but not in too measured a tone. Kyrah had said something to Luke once about how Mireille was “quick.” Also, Mireille has been an astronaut’s daughter for most of her life; in many ways she is much more familiar than he is with the world and the language and these kinds of conversations. He has a list on his knee of things he can’t say to Mireille, and things he can. He is supposed to let Mireille know that she has support and resources available to her.
Mireille scrubs a fist across her face, smearing more makeup. Oddly, she looks quite pretty like this. He guesses—from the hour and the dress and the shoes—that she was on a date. Maybe there is a guy in another room, waiting to pat her back.
“They don’t know what happened, right?” Mireille’s throat and mouth are constricted for shouting, but her voice is at half-volume. She is whisper-shouting. Someone might be in the other room. “They don’t even know. God.” Mireille knocks her screen down again. Luke looks at Mireille’s fallen shoe and listens to the sound of banging. The walls of Kyrah’s cubicle are covered with paper calendars, one for each member of Helen’s immediate family. Next week is Helen’s sister’s birthday. Her brother Phil is in Albuquerque at an IT conference. Helen’s mother has a doctor’s appointment at the end of the month.
“The landing sequence. They’re in fucking Utah.” He still cannot see Mireille. Her voice is muffled. Luke looks down at the list on his knee. He has a bad feeling about what might be coming next. He needs Mireille to not make this difficult, because there isn’t any way to make it easier and he’s out of practice for confrontations with people who aren’t professionally obligated to keep it together.
The screen tilts and Mireille moves partially back into frame. The green fabric is a dress. He is looking at her hips now, and waist. The screen jerks again and it’s Mireille’s face. She’s holding a huge blade to her throat.
“I want to speak to my mother. I want to tell her the truth.”
Luke laughs before he can do anything else, feels his face go instantly hot, chokes, notes clinically: tachycardia and some sort of penile reflex, and leans forward, knocking the list off his knee.
“Okay. Mireille. Okay, I want you to listen—”
“Oh, relax.” Mireille flourishes the blade in front of her face. “It’s a bread knife. You think I would slit my throat with a bread knife?”
They blink at each other for a few seconds. Jesus, Luke thinks.
Mireille sniffs, swipes at the makeup under her eyes. Shakes her head. She’s not crazy, Luke thinks. She’s ahead of him, somehow, she knows what he’s trying to do, what’s expected of her, and is going big before he forces her to be small, and reasonable.
“Right,” he says. “Right.”
“What happened to Kyrah again?” Another shift now: a demonstration of calm.
“She’s having root canal surgery. I’m sorry you have to—I mean, we did want to reach out to you as quickly as possible, but I know Kyrah wanted to be able to speak to you herself.”
“No, poor Kyrah.” Mireille takes a breath. “Quick” doesn’t begin to cover Mireille. This is her talent, of course. Professionally compelling, watchable, interesting. But Luke had assumed—without thinking about it too much—that Mireille wasn’t a very good actress. But why shouldn’t she be? Why shouldn’t she be the astronaut of actresses?
“You know,” Mireille says, “before, it’s been my mom that picks who the Kyrah person is. I mean, at NASA, the family always has a person, but my mom always picked one of her male colleagues. I always thought that was weird, that she didn’t pick another woman. Astronauts are very competitive, so maybe she didn’t want us—my father and me—to see that another female astronaut was better than her at nurturing-type things. Mostly the family person just ends up driving people around at launches, although you know what happened with my uncle Phil, right? You’re on the psych team, so probably you know everything about us?”
There’s nothing on Luke’s piece of paper—now on the floor—that lets him know how much he is officially supposed to know.
“Everything here is treated with the strictest confidentiality,” Luke says, wondering if he could manage to message in with Ransom without Mireille noticing, and get a little advice here. But Ransom is with Boone, figuring out, probably, what to say to the crew. The astronauts, focused as they are on the landing sim, are still aware of the lunar launch that was meant to happen, will be expecting to get news in one of today’s uplinks.