Free The Infinite Tides by Christian Kiefer Page B

hundredmiles above the surface of Earth. And now a woman had asked him to dinner, a woman who was not Barb. He should have felt elation, triumph, a sense of release from his marriage, but what he felt was guilt. To compound his irritation, there was also a small dull lump of pain at the base of his skull, a fact that he tried not to focus on but which was present nonetheless.
    He knew the marriage had been far from perfect. Had it not been for Quinn they might have dissolved their partnership long before. But it could not be denied that there had been a time when she had been by his side, that she had helped press him in the direction of his goals, of their goals. Even what he thought of as their honeymoon—their real honeymoon—had been part of that progress, her excitement at the adventure of their move to Palo Alto for his graduate work fueling his desire to choose that school over MIT. That drive—from Georgia to California—had been a lovers’ journey filled with tiny hotel rooms and gas stations and roadside attractions and Barb paging through the AAA guidebook incessantly, circling things to see, hotels to stay the night in, restaurants that were good and were near enough to the freeway to actually stop at. There had been a trip to Hawaii funded by Barb’s parents but he remembered the road trip as the real honeymoon, and somewhere amidst those long days of gas stations and fields and farms and deserts they had conceived their first and only child, although they would not know that Barb was pregnant for another month, after they had settled into their tiny Palo Alto apartment and Keith’s first semester of graduate school had begun.
    The whole of it comprised one long moment in his memory now, the moment after Quinn had been born and the three of them had been a family at Stanford and Quinn was an infant and then a toddler and his marriage to Barb was still new. They were broke and there had been arguments about money and, sometimes, already, about the workload that kept Keith so often away from their apartment. And yet what he remembered was an overriding sense of contentment, each day dawning on a California that seemed as blessed and magicalas any place they could conceive of, the sun slanting crossways through the wild golden grasses and red-tiled roofs of Stanford’s architecture, the arcs and lines and towers of which were decorated with tiny and innumerable mosaic tiles. They woke in the early morning when Quinn climbed into bed between them, the three of them radiating the golden glow that was the glow of his memory, magnificent and endless, and Keith would ride his squeaky ten-speed bicycle from their apartment to the campus as he settled into a world filled with research facilities that were among the very best in the world.
    Perhaps his marriage had already begun its slow stumble into entropy. Perhaps it had been crumbling from the very first moment and he had been unaware of it or had been unable to see it. He wondered sometimes if he might have forestalled her leaving had he been able to return from the mission, wondered this even though he knew she was already gone. But of course he had not wanted to return. In the days after Quinn’s death Houston told him that it was their intent to get him home and his response had been to refuse, explaining that while he appreciated their concern he intended to complete the mission he had been trained to do. They might have left him alone then had the migraines not begun but this medical reality made his return to Earth a priority for the agency, or at least this was what they had told him. But then his return had been delayed by weather and then by a technical problem and then by weather again and so he had remained on the space station with the rest of the crew and had continued with his tasks and experiments, such as he could between the agony of the migraines. In that time his anger at Barb had faded into a kind of liminality that was a reflection of the