Rocket Man

I ran back stage, looking for my lawyer. The back door to the sound stage was open. I ran that way, just in time to see my lawyer's Audi tearing out of the parking lot. I waved wildly at her, but she had floored it and was not slowing down.

I was lucky. There was a taxi coming down the street. I flagged it down and jumped in the back.

I started crying as soon as I gave the driver my address. I was sure that the driver understood that I just needed to cry it out. He never said a word but then maybe I misjudged him. Maybe he just didn't give a damn.

I realized then that I had made two mistakes. The first one was sleeping with any man other than my husband. That had been the major FUBAR. But the second one, listening to that stupid lawyer, was just as bad. The woman convinced me, due purely of course to my highly emotional and desperate state to let someone write and publish absolute lies about my life. I hadn't even bothered to actually read the book. Now I find out on national television that I had accused Jack of abusing me. I allowed myself to be used and in the end, hurt only Jack again. No wonder he wanted nothing more to do with me.

Once again, my husband had shown his bravery and his honesty, and I came off looking like just another greedy whore. Jack had actually admitted on national TV that I had cheated on him and broken his heart. He was brave enough and secure enough in his masculinity to show real emotions. And once again, the viewers and the audience embraced him for it.

Jack had calmly walked into a sound stage full of man hating femi-nazis, and came out a hero. I went in trying to play the victim and embarrass him into talking to me or taking me back and just made a fool out of myself. The worst part was when they started throwing copies of my book at me.

I got home and called my lawyer. She didn't pick up the phone. I checked my messages and found out that she had suddenly gone on vacation and would be away indefinitely.

I had a few ... Okay more than a few stiff drinks and went to bed. Early the next morning my phone started ringing off the hook. I picked it up, only to find out that the rest of my TV appearances had been canceled.

The book abruptly stopped selling. Women were returning the book in droves. There was one group of women who were buying lots of copies. The publisher thought it might be a good idea for me to make an appearance in front of their group. They approached the women and found out that they were buying the books for a large-scale book burning. I was a pariah.

Everyone I knew seemed to be trying to distance themselves from me. My parents were still speaking to me but the notes of disappointment in their words and tone weren't lost on me.

With tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat, I gave Jack his divorce. He was unbelievably fair. After I sold the house, I was relatively well off. I wouldn't have to worry about working for a long time.

Those first few months were rough ones. It was more than six months before I could go outside and not be hounded by reporters. I moved to a smaller town where no one knew me to start over again. I checked the news on a daily basis to see if there was any news of Jack. I saw nothing. It was as if Jack had disappeared as well.

On a whim, I called the senator, hoping that I could get news of Jack from him. He told me that he had indeed made an offer to Jack. He had been turned down flat. Jack had absolutely no interest in politics. He retired from NASA with a nice pension. His biography sold in the tens of millions of copies. Jack had given most of the money to a charity for kids who wanted to become astronauts.

I found out most of my information from a source I never expected it from. I was at my parent's house during the Christmas holidays and noticed a huge bouquet of flowers and a nice card from Jack. My parents never mentioned it, I had to drag it out of them.

"For heaven's sake, Elizabeth, let him have his space. Isn't it enough you broke the man's heart? You're also responsible for him retiring long before he was ready to. Just leave him alone. He's still trying to get over you," said my dad.

"He doesn't need to get over me," I said. "I just made a mistake. I just want him to forgive me, and we can be better than we ever were. Without my stupid job to get in our way and without him, always either training to go back to space or going back to space, there's nothing to keep us apart."

My parents refused to tell me where Jack had gone, or even give me his phone number. It would be more than five years before I would lay eyes on my husband again.

* * * * * *

Jack

It was hard getting over Elizabeth. For the first six months after the TV show, I saw her every time I opened my eyes. I followed women in the supermarket because they looked like her. The funny thing was that once I was close enough to see them clearly I realized that there was really no resemblance.

I went through months of waking up in the middle of the night and reaching for her, only to realize that I'd been dreaming that we were still together, but my nightmare was a reality, and we were divorced.

As soon as my leg had healed, the first question on everyone's mind was when I would go back to space. I think they were all shocked when I told them that I was retiring. I'm sure they all thought they knew the reason, but they were mostly wrong. I didn't lose my nerve. I wasn't shaken up by the last mission. I wasn't wracked with guilt over Nathan Penn's death, truthfully his death was just the luck of the draw and bad timing. If he had just gotten his ass over to the space station, instead of trying to dictate who went and in which order, he would probably still be alive. Nathan Penn's death was a tragic accident; nothing more.

I did take advantage of the counseling NASA offered us all, but I spent more time talking about the breakup of my marriage than anything else. Sometimes we hear things, and we pick up signals from the people we love, but we choose not to act on them. That had been the case with Elizabeth and me.

Elizabeth, I couldn't really call her Beth any more, Beth was all mine and Elizabeth clearly wasn't. Anyway, she had been telling me for years that she'd hated it when I went to space. So in a way, I blamed space for ending my marriage. So with that said, I just lost the desire to go back.

NASA offered me my choice of several jobs and assignments. I was offered everything from mission control to NASA administration to lobbyist positions in Washington DC. I turned them all down. I did tell them that I would keep in touch, but I didn't.

I did have lunch with a crazy old bird from DC. A Senator whom I had never heard of named Cargill, tried to get me interested in politics. He talked a good game and intimated that he knew more about my situation than he was letting on, but truthfully, politics bored me to tears. I know this is a terrible thing to admit, but I rarely even voted. That was something I had to get a handle on since I was retired and had tons of free time. However, I usually noticed that politics turned even the best men into criminals. No one involved with the political scene came out of it unscathed or unscarred. It just wasn't something I saw myself doing.

I took a couple of years off and went and wrote a book. I got a seven figure contract for it. I didn't take an advance because I wasn't sure if I would ever finish the thing. It just seemed more honest for me to get paid once I delivered the book than to accept money up front and have the pressure on me to have it done by a certain date.

The publisher was happy with the book. We did have several disagreements. One of those were over the fact that I never mentioned Elizabeth by name in the book. I also refused to discuss our marriage or its breakdown due to her cheating. The book still sold like hot cakes. My agent negotiated another huge contract for the movie rights to the book. She also arranged for me to serve as a technical advisor on the film.

A little bit after the film wrapped up production, I was faced again with deciding where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. I ended up moving to Arizona. I bought a nice house with several outbuildings. The house was far enough away from the major cities and suburbs that I got it dirt cheap.

I spent most of my time after that doing pretty much nothing. Over the course of a few years, I became a part of the community, due to caring neighbors and Arizona's hospitality.

Although I had originally moved there to get away from people, I was soon involved in the local scene of the nearby town. I spoke to school groups and even to the local church once. The town adopted me and I it, in a mutually beneficial arrangement.

It wasn't unusual for me to wake up to my phone ringing and answer it to find that one of my neighbors was calling me to find out if it would be okay for their kids to come out and swim in my pond during the ridiculously hot summer weather. I never said no. Even if there was a bunch of kids in the pond, my property was so big I'd probably never notice them.

I spent most of my time in the barn I had converted over to house my horses. I had four horses when I first started. I have since taken in a few more strays. I have a 1967 Fastback, a 1968 GT 500 Eleanor, a rare 2000 cobra R, and a 2013 Shelby GT 500 KR among others.

Most of my time is spent working on my cars and getting them ready for car shows. I also spend a lot of time working on improving my house, although not necessarily the ground around it. I don't grow anything or farm, although there are several organic farms springing up in the region around me.

One of the main reasons I haven't developed my property is that at night I can turn off all of the lights in the house and all of my buildings, and sit out on my patio behind the house and find myself surrounded by stars in the dark sky.

The view from there is as close to the view from space that I have ever experienced. Sometime I'll get into one of the Mustangs and drive out into the desert for an even more spectacular view.

Anyway, that was the way that things went for a long time. The people in the small town near me both valued my company and respected my privacy at the same time. After a few well-intentioned attempts, they even stopped trying to hook me up with single women. My life was a happy one.

It wasn't the way I had envisioned it, but I had no complaints. Perhaps that is the very definition of a happy man: someone with no complaints because he has no idea what he's missing.

Then, my life changed one cold winter night. And yes, some parts of Arizona get a little cold during the winter. And we even get a light dusting of snow from time to time. It doesn't really get Michigan's cold, and we don't get Michigan's snow either, but we get some.

Anyway, I was just about to put a log in my fireplace and watch Monday night football when someone knocked on my door. I opened the door, expecting to find one of my neighbors, or one of my neighbors' kids who needed help or a ride.

All I saw instead was the small form of a woman. It clearly wasn't Elizabeth. She was far shorter than Elizabeth had been since her late teens. Even bundled up in her heavy coat, I could see that she had a lot more bust than Elizabeth, too.

"Can I stay with you for a while J ... Jack?" she asked. "It seems so weird calling you by your first name. I'm not sure I like it."

"What do you usually call me?" I asked.

"Commander," she said. That was all it took. I pulled her into the light of my living room, and those green eyes shone through. It was all I needed.

"Cassie?" I said loudly. She nodded.

"But how? What? ... I don't understand," I said.

"Commander, it all fell apart," she said. A huge tear rolled down her cheek.

"When we were training for the mission, you were always there to save me when I goofed. When we were on the mission, you saved my life. And then you sacrificed yourself to put me on that station when you could have gone yourself. Saving me is your job. Can you do it one more time?" she said. And then she collapsed into my arms.

I lifted her small form and carried her up the stairs. I put her on the bed in one of the bedrooms on the second floor. I took her coat off, her shoes off, and she still didn't awaken. I smelled alcohol on her breath and shook my head. She must've been desperate to drink and then drive to find me. I wondered then how she had found me. Very few people knew where I lived.

I also wondered what had happened to Cassie since we'd lost touch. Five years had wrought a lot of changes in Cassie. Her insanely red hair was just as bright as ever. Her incredible green eyes were still nearly luminous. Her tiny waist had thickened just a bit. It was still smaller than the average woman's, but not as small as it had been. But then five years ago she'd been barely thirty. Her breasts were larger; her butt was rounder, but the biggest change was that her smile was gone.

Even asleep, I could see that she had been through hell. I brushed her hair from her face while she slept. I stood there watching her sleep for longer than I should have. Then I turned off the light and went down to watch my game.

As usual, the next morning I was up and out by six thirty for my morning run. The temp had been in the thirties the night before, but it was already fifty as I stepped out of the house. I usually ran south around the pond and down the path to the highway. I ran about four miles to the first freeway overpass and then looped around and came back. According to my GPS app, the run was about ten miles. Most of it was flat but there were a couple of miles of gently rolling hills to keep me honest.

When I got home, I started breakfast. Maybe it was the noise I made while moving around the kitchen ... Or it could have been the smell of the food, but I was soon treated to a pair of green eyes staring at me around the corner.

"Hi," I said, smiling at her.

"I made it, huh?" she said.

"Yep," I answered. "You're just in time for breakfast."

"No, Commander, I meant I made it here," she said.

"Cassie, you've been here since last night," I said. "So that can't be what you meant."

Her eyes lit up slightly and there was a hint of the old Cassie revealed. "You're doing it again," she smirked. "You're messing with my head, Commander."

"No I'm not," I smiled. "I'm just continuing our conversation from where we left off before we were so rudely interrupted by a space accident and a little over five years of life." She looked at me as if she was confused.

"Remember, I told you what NASA stood for. And then you told me I couldn't handle the one I had?" I said.

"I remember," she said. "Then we got to the station. You docked us. That huge piece of space debris hit us, Nathan Penn died, and you saved me, and put me on the station. You went through hell. I had to wait on the station to be rescued. It was awful at first."

"How was it awful?" I asked.

"We all thought that you had floated away on a damaged ship to die," she said. "They all blamed me, you know. You were this space legend. Everyone knows you or knows about you. And while they were all in shock about what was going on, even the Russians and your crew, you had not only figured out what had to happen, but made a decision about how to handle it. You had figured out how many people could live and chose to save me instead of yourself.

They talked about it right in front of me, as if I wasn't even there. They talked about how if there was any type of emergency while waiting for rescue, you would be a lot more useful than I would. That crewman of yours, Captain Morgan ... He even asked why the fuck you had saved me in the first place. He kept talking about how we all knew the risks before we launched."

"They were all out of it," I said. "When you come that close to death, you tend to panic. In moments like that, you value life because of your own self-preservation instincts."

"Terry, you remember him, right? The black guy ... He's probably the smartest guy I ever knew. He told them that you had probably decided that since I was so much smaller than you were then, and my lungs were smaller, and I needed less of the ship's oxygen production. So you had probably decided that having me there gave them a better chance of surviving. He was the only one who wasn't grumbling about me being there. Then we heard about your absolutely insane exploits and how you'd made it back to earth alive," she continued. "That changed everything. They started apologizing and making excuses for their behavior. At first, no one believed you had pulled it off. They thought that it was NASA, trying to reassure us that we would survive. We thought they were trying to lift our spirits and increase our chances of survival. But then you spoke to us, and we knew. We knew that if we just stayed calm, we could make it, too.

I think in retrospect, that after hearing what you did and hearing how positive you sounded, they recovered their courage. The same way you made me recover mine with stupid jokes."

"What stupid jokes," I asked.

"Need another sexy agriculturist," she smirked, still turning so red that her freckle covered face almost matched her hair.

"No thanks," I quipped. "I've already got one."

Her face erupted in tears, and she dove for me wrapping her arms around me like a child who needed to be comforted by her parents.

"If I'm so sexy, why was my husband sleeping with my secretary," she bawled.

Suddenly, I understood why she was there with me, and why she was crying into my shoulder. "You always told me to go with my instincts," she said. "I never should have married that bastard. I should have gone with my instincts. But by the time I realized that it was possible it was way too late."

She cried for a few more minutes, and I sat her down at the kitchen table. "I knew something was wrong with you in the capsule," she said. "You WERE crying weren't you? I saw you on that TV show before you disappeared, and it made the whole thing clear. I mean everyone knows how brave you are, but the way you handled everything, while dealing with what you'd just found out ... I mean ... If you ... I have no idea how you were able to function."

She just started crying and reached for me again. I put a cup of coffee and a plate with bacon, eggs, and toast in front of her. She attacked the bacon and the coffee first. She nibbled the toast and completely ignored the eggs.

"I hate eggs," she said.

"No more eggs," I promised. I got us each another cup of coffee and took her out onto my deck.

We sat in the porch swing next to each other. She seemed to need contact, so I wrapped an arm around her, and she began talking.

"Not so sexy now, huh," she began.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Commander, you must have noticed all of the weight that I put on," she whined. "I'm a cow."

I couldn't help it; I burst out laughing.

"I'm almost thirty pounds heavier than my flight weight," she insisted.

"So you weigh, what a hundred and twenty now?" I laughed.

"One twenty-five," she hissed.

"I could probably still get my hands wrapped around your waist and have my fingers touch," I laughed.

"I'll bet you couldn't do that with my fat ass," she cried. "All the weight seems to have settled down there and on these." She cupped her breasts and suddenly my jeans were too small in the front. It had been a long time for me.

She lay back on the swing and tucked herself back under my arm. She curled her legs beside her and snuggled her head against my ribs.

"When I got back, I didn't know what to do," she began. "Even though I never got to do the experiments with the plants that I designed for the space station, my NASA career was over. Everyone seemed to want a piece of me. My longtime boyfriend, like your wife was a lawyer. But, he aspired to more. He wanted to go into politics. He lost a couple of local elections before I went into space. But he thought that having a wife who was a famous astronaut could help his career.