And this year? Fifty percent of NASA’s astronaut candidates are women. FIFTY PERCENT!
Someday I’m going to be up there. I’m going to be on the International Space Station and I’m going to do space walks and listen to “Starman” while watching my sixteenth sunrise of the day and I’m going to call my dad from space and it is going to be SPECTACULAR.
That phone call is going to happen because my father is alive. We are going to find him and he’ll come up with a great metaphor about this wave. Just another opportunity to visit the event horizon, he’ll say. And Mom will announce she’s going to make soup and we’ll help her and it will be so good, the best soup anyone has ever eaten, and maybe we’ll call it Miracle Soup, even though only half our family believes in miracles. I’m not in that demographic, but maybe I could be, if they came home.
I started training to be an astronaut when I was six years old, but I think I actually began preparing when I was born. I had to learn, from day one, to adapt to hostile environments that threatened my existence.
Not being picked up when you cry is a hostile environment.
Having a social worker come into your home and realize your diaper hasn’t been changed in an entire day is a hostile environment.
By the time I was three, when my parents adopted me after my biological mother officially chose drugs over me, I’d been in seven foster homes.
The thing about being an astronaut is that you have to spend your whole life training. From the second you decide you want to be in that big white suit someday, to the moment you’re strapped in, listening to that ten, nine, eight, seven, six—you never stop getting ready for the mission.
Your whole life is a sim.
Practicing for disaster. For the worst-case scenario. For Houston, we have a problem.
Expecting the unexpected.
The worst happens and you work the problem. Right away. That’s what you do. You do not cry or have a panic attack or pray or get angry at the engineers on Earth who did incorrect calculations or blame it on the Russians or have a deep-space existential crisis. No. You work the problem.
Work the problem is NASA protocol when there’s bad news or flashing red lights or space debris in your trajectory: Work the problem.
My favorite scene in Apollo 13 is when the engineers all get in a room and one of them holds up a cylindrical carbon dioxide filter and says, “We need to fit this”—and then he holds up a square one—“into this”—and then he points to a bunch of junk he’s thrown on the table—“using this.” The Apollo crew is up there breathing in CO2, dying, in a shuttle that might not have enough juice to make it back to Earth. These engineers on the ground have to figure out how to turn what those astronauts have on the shuttle into the ultimate breathing hack. In outer space. And they do it. They save the astronauts. That’s working the problem.
Astronauts spend hours in simulators, dying every single day so that they can stay alive on the day that counts.
A good astronaut knows that anything—rejection, failure, death—can be a sim. Everything in your life is preparation for the mission.
I start working the problem before Hannah gets to the house, which means I have been on hold with the Red Cross or the State Department for the past twelve hours. From the time Gram called last night, I had to alternate between calling my sister’s boyfriend and trying to ascertain whether my parents have survived a wave that has destroyed a good portion of the Malaysian coast.
My vitals are good—coffee and math have assisted in this—but Hannah’s are not. This is apparent as soon as I see her step out of Micah’s Jeep. I suspect she cried all the way down the freeway.
There is a part of me—irrational, I understand—that is surprised to see her. Somehow, in calling and not hearing from her and in calling Dad’s and Mom’s cells and not hearing from them, I started to think that Hannah had been caught in the wave, too. That, somewhere in Malaysia, my sister was floating facedown.
And so, when her feet hit the driveway, I run. Her mouth opens in an O, an expanding galaxy, because I am not given to displays of emotion and have never run toward her, just beside her, but I can’t help it when I throw my body against hers, which is much taller and softer than mine.
“You’re alive.”
I don’t know why I say this, because of course she is. I attribute this cognitive malfunction to a severe lack of sleep.
Nah cries harder, her whole body sagging against me, as though we are doing a trust exercise for AP Psych. I shift my weight as we start to fall, keeping us upright because she can trust me. I am working the problem. I will find them.
“We got here as fast as we could,” Micah says. “Fucking 405. You know.”
Nah pulls away, just a little. “Have you heard anything? Like, anything?”
I didn’t notice at first: the smell. In my rush to catch our fall, with my nose pressed against the clothes she left the house in yesterday, my olfactory system was hoodwinked. But the breath is an excellent carrier of alcoholic substances.
I check her pupils first: normal-sized. No opiates. But that just means no pills in the past few hours. I couldn’t check her pupils last night, because she didn’t come home. Didn’t check in.
I should have known. When she didn’t check in. But I trusted Micah—and I shouldn’t have.
I am perfectly capable of handling a natural disaster. My sister is another matter entirely. All those nights, holding back her hair. Lying to Mom and Dad for her when I caught her buying from Priscilla because, she promised, this was the last time. Becoming smaller to help make her feel bigger, talking less at the dinner table, after she made that joke that wasn’t a joke about how, since I’m six months older, I’m the heir and she’s the spare. “You’re the Elizabeth,” she said, “and I’m the Margaret.” I don’t read the magazines my sister does, but because of my extensive research for an AP Euro paper on sibling dynamics in the monarchies of Europe between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries, I did get her reference about sibling rivalry in the House of Windsor.
I have never been angry at my sister for the drinking, the drugs. I have felt scared and sad and sorry for her, but never furious. Until now.
How can she choose to drink instead of look for our parents? What kind of person does that?
I pull away from her. “I have been trying to call you since 8:17 last night.”
“That’s my fault,” Micah says. “My phone wasn’t on.”
I am just now realizing how often we all make excuses for Hannah. It is Micah’s fault because his phone wasn’t on, not her fault because she didn’t bring one in the first place.
It was Dad’s fault—according to him—that Hannah had a drug problem, because he worked such long hours. Or Mom’s theory: Pappoús was also tempted by the devil more than once. Like grandfather, like granddaughter. It’s in the blood. Their blood, not mine, since mine is different. Hannah’s addiction, the counselor said, was also, in part, attributed to me: Having a high-performing sibling can, she noted, trigger a user’s lack of self-esteem.
The literature on addiction says it’s no one’s fault, that you can’t blame yourself for a loved one’s substance abuse, but I don’t buy that theory. Every time a rocket goes down, there is an inquiry. Someone is always to blame.