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She hates being in the hospital. They don't even transfer her closer to somewhere she knows; they leave her at the Army Clinic at White Sands, too scared to move her and cause more problems.
It's stupid. She's fine. She got a little banged up, but her wrist has been wrapped and the concussion is clearing and she can think now, which isn't the relief she had expected, because all she can think about is getting out of here. She keeps telling herself that she's fine, she really is, but when she sleeps she dreams, and she wakes up panicky, sure that she's meant to still be on the move and in a damn hurry about it.
Zach comes in, all smiles, and she can't help smiling back at him; that damn smile – it's always gotten her, since the day she met him.
"You're cleared for the press conference!"
She can feel the smile fall off her face as he crosses to the bed to raise it so she's seated.
"Oh, come on! This is your moment! The whole country wants to know how you saved those kids. We're gonna get you back in uniform, and you can remind a few jackasses of just how much they missed out on every time you didn't get up there before."
She has no idea how he doesn't know the story, since he was there the whole time and she's already told him everything – every moment when she'd failed, when she'd been unable to execute. Those kids had saved her ass, over and over, but leave it to Zach to only see the story that makes her the hero. She's always loved him for it, but just for a second, she wishes he could see somebody besides her.
---
The story isn't a new one. She hadn't been able to enroll in the Academy; it didn't accept women until she'd worked her way up through college AFROTC. But she had been one of the female officers brought in back in '76 to support their first 100 female cadets, and even then it had been apparent that integrating women into the service academies wasn't going to be an easy maneuver to pull off. It's different now, she knows, but not different enough. It's happened before, and it will happen again; you apply that much alcohol to hormones and stupid, unearned confidence, and it will keep happening. Kathryn, at least, has the guts and the leverage to do something about it, if she can only remember that.
“So you have to just do it. You have to report it. Make them hear you.”
Kathryn is quiet on the other end of the line. Andie tips back her head, resting it on the pillow and closing her eyes against Zach's damn lamp. She can see Kathryn there, bundled up against the crisp Colorado wind in her everyday blues, the mountains as a backdrop outside the dorm window propped open. She imagines her sitting alone, trying desperately to make herself small, and she smiles to herself. That girl never could make herself small, she thinks.
"You still there?"
"Yeah."
"You talked to Tish about it?"
"Not yet. I don't… she gets fierce about this stuff. You know her."
She smiles. "Yep." Tish sends her emails, still; she doesn't know if Kathryn knows, if they talk about her, but Tish will send out long, rambling diatribes about how hard it is to be a woman in a man's world, rants at her about the patriarchy, like Andie doesn't already know that lesson in her bones.
"You've got a break coming up – go see her. If anybody knows how to make herself heard, god knows it's that girl."
Kathryn laughs at that, which is good – she'll need her sense of humor. They talk a few more minutes, and when she rolls over to hang up the phone, Zach says, "Everything okay?"
She rolls back and looks at him. He's peering over his glasses at her.
"Same shit, different day. Another girl in trouble at the Academy, and Kathryn's right up in the middle of it."
"Pregnancy trouble?" He looks so innocent with his earnest little frown, so completely wrong-footed and lost that she wants to scream at him.
"No, Zach. Rape trouble."
He puts his book down, and turns toward her. "There's an Honor Code for a reason."
"Then somebody should probably tell those cadets that."
It's not worth it – she rolls back over and turns her back to him. It's fucked up and she knows it – she knows it better than anybody else possibly could, and she can get him riled up and it still won't do a damn bit of good. Kathryn is strong enough to handle herself, and if this girl isn't, well, she's going to learn to be, or she's going to go somewhere she doesn’t need to be. The Air Force is not ready to face itself, not on this one, and she learned the hard way that there's not a damn thing she can do about it, not if she wants to still be there for the next girl it happens to.
That's just… the way it is, and as much as Zach tries he won't ever be able to get it - he can't see it the way she does. She didn’t get where she is by not knowing how to pick her battles.
It doesn't mean she has to like it, and she doesn't sleep well for weeks.
---
Zach leans against the counter, watches her prepare their dinner. It's their quiet time, and she just ruined it with a diatribe. "Do you want me to talk to him? He's a good old boy, no two ways about it, but it's not that he doesn't like you. He just… isn't good with change."
"Don’t you dare." She chops harder, and dares the onions to defy her. She's earned their deference, their respect, and the onions don't fight back.
The chicken turns out well. The onions melt into the gravy, and not a single goddamn one is big enough to stand against her or call her 'little lady'.
---
Boston in the late spring is gorgeous. They spent three days in DC so they could take meetings with distant colleagues and see old friends who ended up in that bureaucratic minefield, and their dinners were filled with wine and memories and gossip. She steered the talk away from Kathryn and Tish by reminding the table that hard missions always bring people closer. She has no idea who's been talking, but she will find out and shut that shit down, hard. Kathryn is making her presence felt, and she's seen attention to personal lives derail strong, incredibly promising early careers. It's happened to too many smart young women in the Force; she's not about to let it happen to one of hers. The Uniform Code hasn't helped many women; she'll be damned if she lets it actively hurt them, too.
But Boston. Max beams when he sees them, and when he bends down to hug her tight she can't believe how he's grown. It's good to see his parents, too. They look shell-shocked and relieved to have finally gotten him here; there were some rough years, she knows, when it wasn't clear to anybody that this genius boy would actually finish high school, much less college.
But he graduates from MIT with a degree in AeroAstro, and he's used masking tape to fashion a crude imitation of Jinx on his cap so that anybody could pick "that kid who went up in the Shuttle" out of the crowd. His mother collapses into open weeping when he tosses it into the air, and Andie rubs her between her shoulder blades while Zach smiles at her.
Later, as they walk along the river, he says, "That was sweet, watching you with her. I know you think of Max as one of your own, but do you ever wish we'd had one?"
She watches the sun bounce off the river and shakes her head. "No. Besides, Max isn’t like my kid – I don’t get to be proud of him, not like that." They take a few more steps before she says, "He's just one of the best colleagues I've ever had."
---
She loves Seattle, so much that she never wants to leave it. They slow down as they reach into their 50s; not as much as her mother would have (the comparison still makes her laugh – her mother was old by the time she reached 50, and she finished the Seattle Marathon at 3:47 three months ago) but she doesn't feel the same urge to travel that she once did. Their house is beautiful – wood and glass and stone and right on Puget Sound, and although she never regretted retiring her commission in favor of the spoils (and salaries) of civilian life, it wasn't until they finished building this house and she woke up to the water for the first time that she really appreciated it.
This morning, though, for the first time since they've moved in, she has the smallest rush of regret that she's here, in her gorgeous home that their work built.
It's early, 5 am, when her body wakes her up. She remembers instantly what today is, and has just a moment of smugness that she'd cancelled classes for today months ago. Today is hers.
She runs and is back in the house by 6. Zach is up, moving blindly through his early morning coffee but already dressed for work, but he smiles at her as she bangs in the back door. She's distracted, thinking about her hamstrings, when he says, "Morning. Want me to stay here and watch it with you?"
He's greying fast, and she runs a hand over his hair on the way to the coffee maker. He still makes it strong; both of their bodies have gotten too use to the boost to go back to weak coffee, and even after the cool morning air of her run she wants it. "No, I'm good. Go on to work."
"You sure you're okay?"
She leans against the sink, cup in hand, and watches him as she takes her first sip. "Of course." They've talked about this… at least 100 times; it's a mainstay of their marriage. She never did go back up, and she's not above admitting her petty jealousy that Kathryn's going to get a second chance. "Go. Get out of here – I want to shower before I fire it up. Leave me to it, old man."
He swats her on the ass as he goes, and she finishes her coffee in the kitchen. She bumps their dog Sully with her toe on her way to the shower, and she snorts when Sully barely moves, peering up at her with lazy eyes.
By 6:45 she's curled up on her sofa, dressed in soft pants and a baggy NASA sweatshirt, with another cup of coffee in her hand. NASA TV blares out, "T minus 15 minutes and counting for the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery."
The last-minute checklists are just as she remembers, and every time she hears Kathryn's distant voice say "go" she smiles. The cockpit cam gives her just a flash of Kathryn's serious face before she drops her face shield, and she grins to herself when she sees her small hands wrapped in those bulky orange gloves. Kathryn had bitched when she's first joined the program; "how I'm supposed to be precise with my hands wrapped in 15 layers of thermal insulation remains a mystery".
She has the sound turned up loud and it helps; Sully curls up next to her and she distantly reaches out to pet at her head, but she can still almost feel the shake and rumble as the engines fire.
She watches the video feed until the shuttle disappears into the blackness of space. She whispers, "Good luck, baby girl," and just for a few minutes, she lets herself cry. Sully leans into her, and she buries her hand in her fur, and every time she hears Kathryn's voice come through the comm it heals a piece of her, just as it rips a new piece out. The reassembly of her soul is a precise operation, but NASA has always been good at those, and she's a child of that agency if she's anything.
---
JSC still looks the same on the outside – limp and barren of humanity in the oppressive humidity that Houston summers are notorious for, but still imposing in its solidity, like it wants you to know that it's really there.
She didn’t know why she expected it to be any different; she hasn't been here for a while, but Zach is back often and he says it never changes. The drive from Ellington down to the center is still flat, ugly, and the parking lot is jammed.
She finds her people already gathered together behind a potted plant. The stepchildren of NASA astronaut corps, the mission that wasn't supposed to happen but still did, they always find each other at things like this. This will be the last one – they're all here not just to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their own accidental flight (the best 24 hours of her life were an accident; a gift of age is an increased appreciation for irony), but to bear witness to the decommission of Shuttle program.
That appreciation for irony has been coming in really handy in the last decade.
They're all there, and it's the first time they've all been together in… years, she thinks. Since Max graduated from high school – they grew up and got busy, following the smoke trails of their own lives. Max is in from Boston, where he's back at MIT as a researcher. Kathryn and Tish are still living here in Houston so she knew she'd see them, and there they are, trying to talk while they keep an eye on the two adorable kids they adopted just a few years ago. Kevin has been in and out of relationships, always smooth-talking but rarely remembering what he's capable of, but 40 hit him like a truck a few years ago and he's finally got a girl on his arm who is actually age-appropriate – it's a damn miracle. And Rudy, her dear darling Rudy who saved her life, who she never sees because he's the busiest of them all, has actually made it here.
She steps up next to him before any of them can see her and elbows his arm. "Chancellor, it's a miracle to see you here."
His surprise and delight is etched across his face, and she envies the schoolchildren of New York, who have somebody like him running their schools and looking out for them. They stay in touch, sure – he sends her kids sometimes, people who have talent and the mind for science but who need to be somewhere far away from home so that it can flourish. His kids are her favorite undergrads, and the only ones whose work she says actively involved in, because to a one they are all smart, capable, and independent.
The six of them spend the afternoon together – Zach checks in, but he walks away every time, saying, "Don't let me get in the way of this family reunion – I see somebody over there I have to talk to," before he disappears and leaves just the ghost of that charming smile behind.
She squeezes them all one-by-one, harasses them to come visit her in Seattle. She tells them that there's room, that the house is huge, and Kathryn and Tish chime in, talking about how lush and lavis the guest rooms are. Before the afternoon ends they make plans to get together, to not let it end here. There won't be another one of these events, and they'll have to make their own resolutions.
They end the day at their hotel, just across the street, and Andie stands at the window and looks at the public entrance to JSC. She looks at the cars speeding by, just people back and forth on their everyday lives, and she wonders how many of them have any idea what they're passing or have any idea of what the lives of NASA's people have been like.
Zach stands behind her and says, "Now you understand why I'm always coming back here."
She turns and smiles at him and says, "I've always understood."