Free The Astronaut's Wife by Robert Tine Page A

door quickly to restore the crepuscular gloom of the room. Nan threaded her way through the crowd and hugged Jillian tight and long.
    “You okay?” Nan asked.
Jillian nodded. “Yeah. It’s hard, but we’ll be okay. It’s hard to believe he’s gone.” Spencer pointed to a small clutch of NASA people standing in a corner. “I’ll be over there,”
    Spencer whispered and made his way across the room.
“Where’s Natalie?” Jillian asked Nan.
“Upstairs,” Nan replied. “She’s been asking for you. She wanted to make sure you were here
before they said Kaddish.”
    Jillian nodded and walked toward the staircase. As she climbed the steps she looked down on the crowd of mourners. Her husband was already talking to a knot of NASA tech types and did not see her. She noticed that Sherman Reese was looking up at her as she climbed. She assumed that the Director must be around there someplace. One did not travel without the other.
    The door to Natalie’s bedroom was half open and
Jillian pushed it aside. It was gloomy within, but
Jillian could make out Natalie, prone on the bed.
She was dressed in her black dress and even still
had her black high heels on her feet.
    “Natalie?” Jillian spoke into the shadows.
“Jillian?” She slurred the single word. Jillian took a step closer and saw an open vial of sedatives on the bedside table. It was only natural that she take something. She sat down on. the edge of the bed and brushed a. loose strand of hair from Natalie's eyes.
“How are you holding up?” Jillian asked. “I know it’s going to be hard . . .“
Natalie did not answer Jillian’s questions, not directly anyway. “They talked to him, Jillian. They talked to him all the time. They talked to him every night.”
Jillian touched Natalie’s cheek and gently wiped away a tear. She said nothing, knowing it was better to let Natalie speak even if little or nothing she said made any sense.
“I couldn’t understand them,” Natalie continued. Her eyes were fixed on some point far off in the distance, some place beyond the confines of that gloomy bedroom. “I couldn’t understand them, Jill, not while Alex was alive. I couldn’t . . . but now I do.”
“Who talked to him, Natalie?” Jillian asked quietly. “Who talked to Alex?”
Natalie’s eyes closed as the drugs and the exhaustion kicked in. “Who talked to him?” she murmured. “They did, Jillian. They did. They talked all the time “
Suddenly Jillian felt terribly afraid and she shivered as if a chill had just come over her. “Who are they, Natalie?” she asked urgently. “Tell me who they are.”
Natalie said nothing. But as she slipped into her drug-induced sleep she pointed at something on the far side of the room. Jillian followed the direction and saw that Natalie was pointing at a simple, cheap radio. Jillian looked from the radio and then back to the slumbering Natalie..
“Natalie?” Jillian asked.
But she was out cold. Jillian looked back to the radio and then began to walk from the room. Then,
very distinctly, she heard Natalie’s voice out loud:
“It’s not a dream, Jillian.”
She turned but Natalie’s eyes remained closed, her chest rose and fell and she had not stirred.
Jill came back downstairs and poured herself a glass of water and watched her husband.
    Spencer was engaged in an odd, rather guarded conversation with Sherman Reese, a discussion that was wholly out of place in a bereaved household. Reese had not wanted to bring it up at all, not while shiva was being sat for Alex Streck, but with the Armacosts’ imminent departure he took a chance and expressed his fears to Spencer there and then and the hell with the consequences.
    Spencer had not been happy to be approached like this, and he had a hard time getting a handle on exactly what it was that Reese was getting at. It seemed to involve further medical exams—in search of God knows what—even though Spencer had been officially separated from NASA and honorably