Page 101 of Atmosphere

“Two hundred years ago, in France, the first man flew. He went up in a hot air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers. It was made out of paper, but it was pretty similar to the ones they have on the ground over there.”

“Wow,” Frances said.

Joan told neither of them that some of the balloon teams had asked members of the astronaut corps to accompany them in the air,and that Vanessa had eagerly raised her hand. So only Joan knew that Vanessa was just off in the distance, preparing to go up.

“And here is something else,” Joan said to them. “This is commemorating twenty-five years of spaceflight, too.”

“Like what you do?”

“Like what I’m trying to do. But there are a lot of us astronauts, and we all want to go. There’s only so many spots at a time.”

“You will get picked one day,” Barbara said. “I bet it’s soon.”

Joan had long known that if you’re unhappy, it’s hard to watch other people be happy. So it stood to reason that the opposite was true, too. That if you were happy, you wanted others to be happy alongside you. This was the only reason Joan could think of for why Barbara suddenly seemed so immensely proud of her.

If that was the case, then maybe Barbara had been right. She had needed to set up her future with Daniel in order to take care of the people around her. In order to be her best self for Frances.

“Thanks,” Joan said. “I hope so.”

Barbara inhaled sharply. And then she held out her hand for Joan to see. “I’m surprised you haven’t congratulated me yet,” she said.

Joan looked at the ring and pretended to see it for the first time. “Oh, my God, Barb, it’s gorgeous.”

“Thanks—it’s five carats.”

Joan did not know much about diamond rings, except for what she knew about diamonds themselves. Which was that scientists had long thought it was possible that there were diamond-like minerals on other planets. In fact, in 1967, a substance named lonsdaleite was discovered in the Canyon Diablo meteorite in Arizona—a fragment of an asteroid that had struck Earth—and it is theoretically harder and purer than any diamond ever known.

Which meant that the rock used in Western civilizations to express romantic love and steadfastness was not the strongest material in the universe, but merely the strongest thing humans had ever found on Earth. The hardest, strongest thing humans knew of at the time.

Language is what allows us to communicate. But it also limits what we can say, perhaps even how we feel. After all, how can we recognize a sentiment within ourselves that we have no word for? And perhaps, Joan thought, science is the same. Even the way we tell one another we want to live alongside them is limited by what we understand is possible in the world. What more could we say if we knew more about the universe?

“I’m happy for you,” Joan said. “I know this is what you wanted.”

“He’s a really good man,” Barbara said.

Joan nodded. “I believe that. And I’m thrilled to hear it.”

“What are you talking about?” Frances asked.

“I’m getting married, honey,” Barbara said to her. “Daniel and I are getting married.”

“Oh.”

Joan squeezed Frances’s hand, trying not to let it show on her face that she was stunned that Barbara had not told Frances all of this before, at home, just the two of them.

“He’ll be your stepdad. We are all going to be a family. And we’ll move in with him. Into his big house with the pool—remember when I brought you over there?”

“I’ll have a pool?” Frances asked.

“You’ll have everything you ever wanted,” Barbara said, rubbing Frances’s cheek with her thumb.

The balloons started to lift, one by one. “Look!” Barbara said. “There they go!”

There was a red-and-yellow one, one with blue and green stripes, and a few were rainbow-colored. They all started to lift.

Vanessa had said she would be in the American Express balloon, but Joan couldn’t quite make out which one that was. And so, as they all began to take off, Joan felt thrilled by each one lifting, all of them potentially holding Vanessa. If she was not exactly sure where Vanessa was, then Vanessa was everywhere.

“You know, Frances, it took us one hundred and twenty years to go from a man in a hot-air balloon to the invention of the airplane,”Joan said. “But then only fifty-eight years to go from the first airplane to the first man in space.”

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