“I'm glad you decided not to become an astronaut, Brett—that could be you,” Jenn said as they sat anxiously in front of the television that last morning, waiting for the reentry, praying like everyone else on earth that the command module would work when they reactivated it. And while Brett was considering that—had she decided against being an astronaut? Or had it all been decided for her?—Jenn said, “They could sure use your help now, though.”
“My help?” Brett said.
“I used to want to be an astronaut, too,” Jenn said. “Like you and Brad. But I was never smart enough.”
Brett laughed. “But you're in medical school, Jenn!”
Jenn looked at her, and something in her sister's green eyes reminded Brett of how she had looked on Brett's wedding day: a fourteen-year-old in a long, silver bridesmaid dress, trying to look grown-up.
Jenn shrugged. “Like that's a big deal, a doctor.”
“Of course it is!” Brett insisted. “It would be for anyone, even if you weren't a girl.” At the same time still thinking of her wedding day, thinking how her brother had promised not to miss it for the world, how she'd waited at the back of the church for such a long time until finally her father said, “You just have to let Brad go, Brett. We all just have to let him go and hope he finds his way.”
“I wanted to be more than a doctor, Brett,” Jenn said. “I wanted to be like you.”
“Like me? I change diapers, Jenn!” Wondering if it was the eight years that separated her from her sister that made the difference, or if there was more to it than that. Wondering if she, too, would have gone on to become someone if she hadn't met Chip, if she hadn't gotten pregnant before she finished graduate school.
“But you're so you, Brett. You do everything easily while I'm pedaling as fast as I can. I swear, one day you're going to be halfway through changing a diaper and the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem will just come to you.”
Brett laughed, thinking that seemed like another lifetime, the days when she'd thought she might be the one to solve anything.
“While you're changing a darn diaper, I swear!” Jenn insisted.
On the screen, three bright red-and-white-striped parachutes burst open against the blue sky and the white puffs of cloud, and the capsule splashed safely into the sea.
“A poopy or a wet?” Brett said, and they laughed as they watched the men being lifted by helicopter and the capsule being loaded onto the USS Iwo Jima, the crew waving from the deck of the ship.
It wasn't until later, as Jenn's car was pulling out of the drive, that Brett started thinking: What am I doing? What am I writing, exactly? Thinking: Couldn't I write something more meaningful than this failure of a book that is really about nothing at all?
By the time Chip arrived home from SLAC—he'd worked late that evening—Brett was stooping at the fireplace, watching the flame creep from the match in her hand to the paper under the grate. Stacks of paper littered the coffee table, the couch, the La-Z-Boy recliner, and the new shag rug. Every single page of all twelve drafts of her novel, including all the carbon copies.
“Brett?” Chip said. “What are you doing? It's already hot as blazes in here.”
She grinned up at him. “I'm burning this rubbish,” she said, and she sat on the hearth, crumpled the top page of the stack nearest the fireplace, and tossed it onto the fire. Yes, the fire. The garbage was not permanent enough.
She'd decided everything she'd written to date was utter dross, not worth the paper it was typed on, so much worse than the worst dreck she'd ever read that she would be mortified to see it in print.
“Rubbish?” Chip said.
Brett crumpled a whole fistful of pages and tossed them in with the first page, which was collapsing black into the flames. “Rot,” she said. “Tripe. Twaddle.”
And maybe Chip thought Twaddle? or maybe he didn't, maybe he understood—I rather think he did because what he said was “I see. Well. Do you need some help, then?”
He stacked several of the piles from the coffee table one atop the other and set his briefcase and the evening paper in the space he'd cleared. He sat on the floor in front of the fire, on the other side of Brett's stacks, and picked up the top sheet, pausing to read the first few words.
She wrested it from him, her bare fingers brushing against his. “Drivel, that's what Frankie would say,” she said. “Linda would say garbage because that's about as direct a way of saying it as there is. Ally would say . . . maybe blather—that seems like an Ally word. And I can hear Kath now: ‘This dog won't hunt.’” She crumpled the page he'd tried to read and tossed it gleefully onto the fire.