Free God is an Astronaut by Alyson Foster Page B

they’re fucking relentless. Hunter was telling me about this guy from Vanity Fair —”
     
    “Just a second.” I held up my hand. I was thinking that it was important that he not distract me. “I have something else I need to ask you. Does the name Norell Ops mean anything to you?”
    I watched him slowly put his scotch glass down. “What?”
     
    “Norell Ops,” I said. “It’s a contractor based out of Dayton. They make aeronautical—”
     
    “I know what they make,” Liam said. His face had suddenly flushed, Arthur. It was startling to see him looking so caught off guard, because you never see Liam looking disconcerted. “How the hell did you hear about them?”
     
    “I had a nice little chat with a reporter from the New York Times, ” I said. “We woke up the other morning to find her lurking at the bottom of the driveway. I’m sure you would have found her a little hipper-than-thou, but she had some interesting things to say.” I had to force myself to let go of the kitchen table, which I was clutching, for some reason, in a death grip. “It was actually one of the most informative conversations I’ve had in weeks.”
     
    “I’ll bet it was,” Liam said. He had been wandering around the kitchen while I was talking with an aimlessness that was frightening. “Fuck,” he said. “ Fuck .”
     
    I could feel my dread ratcheting up with every step. “Please, Liam,” I said. “Tell me it isn’t true.”
     
    “For God’s sake, Jess,” Liam said. “We haven’t even finished the preliminary report yet. Do you know how many moving parts there were on that rocket? Over two million. The debris field has a radius of over eight kilometers. There are pieces of shuttle that we’re never going to find. They’re going to turn into these little, like—” He was sputtering, Arthur. “These little titanium geological artifacts that hitchhikers are going to be finding on the side of I-8 decades from now. And now you’re telling me that some girl Friday at the Times has done two fucking hours of research, and she thinks she’s got it all figured out. That’s great. That’s just—”
     
    We realized simultaneously that he was shouting, and both of us glanced up toward the ceiling where Corinne was sleeping, eight feet directly above our heads. Or at least I prayed that she was sleeping, that she was dead to the world and dreaming of pioneer girls in calico sunbonnets, fearless little girls who were flourishing in the face of adversity. “That’s just fantastic,” he finished more quietly.
     
    “But a defective control panel is one of the possibilities,” I said. “You haven’t ruled it out.”
     
    His jaw was clenching and unclenching. “We haven’t ruled anything out,” he said.
     
    I got up and went to the window. I pressed my forehead against the cool, slightly sticky glass. Through the steam of my breath on the pane, I could just make out Liam’s shed. It’s a sleek little conical outbuilding that Liam built with his own hands. When he has time, he goes out there and tinkers around with his inventions—a zero-gravity hinge, special patches and seals, contraptions that supposedly can keep a person from dying if he’s out in space and something tears apart or springs a leak, something that damn well shouldn’t. They may not be useful to the average Joe Schmo, but they are ingenious, perfect in their own way.
     
    It—by which I mean the shed—is down past the loop of our driveway, and in the spring it’s hidden behind the lilac trees. I don’t know if you saw it—the one and only time you were here, that afternoon you dropped me off. Two years ago, it must have been. I remember the timing because it was a few weeks after I had my miscarriage. Liam was in Arizona, and it was the only time in my life I’ve ever had a migraine. Up until that point, I’d only believed in migraines in a theoretical sort of way. But then I felt it—and nothing has ever been more