Two
Leighton celebrates three birthdays in space. She grew up celebrating birthdays away from her family, off on some trip with her friends (Esme and Francesca used to go all out, and when her first birthday during college came around, Leighton easily replaced every memory of them with her new friends: Kimberly had been a surprisingly good party planner) but now that she’s in space, Leighton feels the passage of time differently.
There’s a clock on the dashboard in the cockpit that keeps track of the date and time on earth, so when the astronauts receive a call from home they have some concept of how long they’ve been gone, but as a mathematician who studies the curvature of spacetime, Leighton knows better than anybody that time passes differently in space; gravity and speed and the overall mass of a planet can all influence the way her body will age, or not, physically.
So she turns 32 in space and when she looks in the mirror it doesn’t look like she’s aged a day, but Leighton also knows that to be false; it’s a lot harder to see the physical changes in one’s own body when you look at it everyday. When she answers the call incoming from Tatum and Alicia, she takes a few minutes just to look at them.
There’s a small delay in the video, this far from Earth, but since the spaceship is orbiting Quaaor, it’s a more consistent feed than it had been when they were traveling out here and Leighton can see the changes in her partners over the last six months. Alicia has cut her hair again, moving away from the fashionably uneven layers. Tatum looks like she’s come straight from work, the sleek cut of her suit top highlighting her broad shoulders and giving her a more masculine silhouette, but Leighton can see new laugh lines around her eyes and both her partners look more beautiful than ever before.
“Happy birthday, darling!” Tatum says as soon as the call connects.
“You started without me?! Happy birthday Leighton!” Alicia yells from somewhere in the kitchen. Seconds later, her face joins Tatum’s on the video screen and Leighton laughs at the glare Alicia shoots Tatum. “I can’t believe you started without me,” she whines.
“It was literally two seconds!” Tatum defends herself. “It’s not my fault you wanted to get the whipped cream from the kitchen as an after-work snack.”
“Oh my God, you two calm down. I’m right here,” Leighton says.
“Yeah, but you two are married and I don’t want to seem like some sort of home wrecker,” the tease is flawless, considering Alicia has had several years to bring it up whenever she can. “Any interruption and Leighton might think I’m trying to steal her wife.”
Leighton can’t help but laugh as she thinks back on all the times people had thought Leighton was either cheating or being cheated on by her partners. It didn’t happen very often anymore, but those first few months Leighton was in Houston for training and people thought her wife was cheating on her and Leighton decided not to say anything until Alicia came to visit alone and all the rumors were put to rest.
“Have you had your cake yet?”
“No, Antonio said he wanted to make it fancy this year, so I have been banned from the kitchen.” Antonio, one of the other scientists on this mission, had quickly become Leighton’s best friend after they had spent a night trapped in the simulation room in Florida when the system malfunctioned. They had eventually bonded over their love for baking, and on this trip, Leighton had spent the first two birthdays with a simple rehydrated cookie dough dessert, but when Leighton had opened the box Tatum and Alicia packed for this birthday, there was dehydrated cake batter and instructions from NASA on how to make the birthday cake. Antonio had quickly stolen the package from her hands and whisked it all off to the kitchen while Leighton called her family.
“How did you manage to get the food scientists to make me a cake?”
“Oh Leighton. We’ve been together for more than a decade now, you should know I have my ways,” Tatum smirks.
“Don’t listen to her, Leight. She spent an exuberant amount of money. It was practically extortion. ‘Find a way to send my wife with a birthday cake or I won’t donate to your astronaut fund.’”
“A small donation towards the scientific community is not an “exuberant” amount by any means. Besides, I want only the best for my wife as she spends four years in space doing very important research.”
“I don’t think this is how George imagined you using your trust fund-”
“My parents don’t need to know how I use my trust fund, I’m 35 for Christ’s sake Alicia.”
“Okay! I thought we were celebrating me today, not discussing our financial expenditures for the last three and a half years.” Leighton interrupts. It’s not something they’ve ever had a real argument about, but back in the early days of their relationship, Alicia couldn’t understand how Tatum and Leighton just seemed to throw money at things.
“You’re right, we’re sorry,” Alicia says with a glance at Tatum. “Have you done anything fun for the day?”
“We have a spacewalk planned for later, we’re going to try and measure the change in curvature in spacetime. It’ll be quite fascinating but very boring. Charlie rigged up one of the helmets to measure distance and time and we’re going to play catch with it. The goal is to visualize the geometry of space.” Leighton knows how complex her work is and how hard it is for her partners to understand, but this game of catch could be the turning point in her research.
Mathematically, this pocket of extra gravity shouldn’t exist, and yet it does, and after the six months they’ve been here at Quaoar, Leighton hasn’t figured out how to fix the known equation to account for this. It’s like there’s an extra celestial body, or even a black hole, and yet there is nothing here except the Kuiper Belt and dwarf planets.
The conversation moves on quickly, Leighton is more interested in what’s happening at home than she is trying to explain her theories to her partners, and she’s missed them so much these last few years she wonders why they even let her go. Alicia tells Leighton about the new environmental cleanup project her firm is kickstarting, about how the trial runs have been incredibly successful at recreating the decomposition process of mushrooms and how they’re looking to utilize the technology in nuclear waste areas. Tatum keeps Leighton up to date on all the gossip of New York, how Nico’s wife caused some drama with one of her fashion shoots. It’s all very casual, and by the time Leighton hangs up with her family, she feels rejuvenated in a way that she doesn’t get very often.
Leighton only gets to talk to her family once a week, and while it’s better than she was initially prepared for, she misses Tatum and Alicia in ways she never once thought about. She misses seeing them everyday, whether it’s in bed in the morning or in bed in the evening, or something as mundane as standing in the kitchen together, Leighton misses her girls. She knows they miss her too and she tries not to remind them that they have each other and she has herself, but on days like today, it hurts a little more. She won’t get to be in the middle of their bed tonight or even get a hug from them.
The only solace that Leighton has is that she’s almost done here in space and the engines of their spaceship have been upgraded while they’ve been here and that it won’t take as long to get home as it took to get out here. Gravity and the upgrades will do their job in half the time.
(Charlie the engineer had been experimenting with the one-man pod engine in the last few months to see if they could increase the speed and decrease the time it took to land on the planet, and after a few weeks, they had created a new type of nuclear engine that creates a bigger thrust and will cut down on their travel home time.)
—
Leighton can feel the sweat dripping down her spine as she gears up for one last throw of the converted helmet. No matter how much training she’s done, working out in no atmosphere always makes Leighton sweat buckets. The cooling suit she wears underneath her spacesuit does it’s best to regulate her temperature, but technology is only so capable. Playing glorified football with a bunch of space nerds and the shuttle crew has been the most fun she’s had in a long time and Leighton would stay out here for another few hours if she could. Watching as the boys use their jetpacks to imitate running plays like they’re in the Super Bowl brings a smile to her face, especially when she’s been tasked with throwing what could amount to the game winning touchdown.
The clock on her suit chimes, letting her know this has to be the end of their game or else they’ll all run out of oxygen, and she actually feels disappointment that her fun is being interrupted. It takes her back to her childhood, when her mom would call her in for dinner from the park and she would have to leave the sandcastle she was building to the whims of the neighborhood boys who would crush it.
She lets them helmet fly, pushing with all of her strength so it will fly in the right direction, and she watches as Antonio adjusts his trajectory with his jetpack to catch it in the marked off area of space that denotes the end zone. He beats Charlie to the line of red blinking lights, and they blink green as soon as he crosses their threshold signaling his win. Their team has won this game of scientific experimentation, and now Leighton wants nothing more than to go sleep for two days.
By the time they make it back to their spaceship, Leighton is dragging, and as they all help each other out of their suits Leighton manages to get the zipper stuck on her pants. It’s weird that this is enough to bring her to tears, but she chalks it up to how much she’s missing her partners and the fact that it’s her birthday and the fact that she’s been in space for so long.
She sits down in the airlock on one of the benches there and looks down at her boots in shame. She doesn’t know what’s come over her, and all she can see in her mind is the time Alicia had broken her hand and wasn’t able to tie her own shoe laces and so Leighton and Tatum had taken turns until she recovered enough motor function and strength. Every day for almost six weeks, Leighton got to show her partner how much she was loved with a simple action like tying shoe laces and now Leighton just has to undo the buckles on her shoes and she’s crying because her pants are stuck and she has to reach so far to get to her boots and all she really wants is a hug and a kiss and to be cuddled up in a bed that’s larger than a twin and has more blankets and fits more than just Leighton.
The emotional fallout from a spacewalk is not something Leighton ever looks forward to and she feels like a fool every time it happens. Charlie and Antonio seem to fair perfectly fine, along with a few of the others on their little ship, but the mere fact that Leighton gets to be in space seems to unlock some deeply hidden part of her psyche and if NASA knew about it they probably wouldn’t have picked her to be on this mission. But she has friends in space, has cultivated relationships with everybody here, and so when she swipes at her eyes to clear the tears, nobody says anything, instead just handing Leighton a tissue from the box that has taken up residence in her locker.
“Shall we go eat that wonderful cake that managed to find its way into your belongings?” Antonio offers after Leighton has finished crying. She gives him a pathetic look and a nod and then stands to finally take the rest of her spacesuit off. It never takes as long or is as dramatic an undressing as Leighton’s built it up to be in her mind, and soon she’s walking down the metallic tunnels of the ship to the kitchen area so she can have a slice of birthday cake.
“Thank you,” she says softly as Antonio sets a plate down in front of her. There are no candles, but he’s managed to decorate the cake with sprinkles in the number of 32 and it’s something that Alicia would do; the thought tugs on her heart strings once more, but she only thinks on it for a moment. It’s not like Alicia is dead, only millions of miles away. All things considered, it’s one of the best birthdays Leighton has had in the last few years, but she can’t help thinking about what she’ll do when she turns 33. She’ll finally be back on earth, and she’ll have the universe in the palm of her hand.
The cake is delicious, easily the best thing they’ve had in space, and Leighton is disappointed when she eats the last slice. Chocolate frosting covers her plate, and if Leighton didn’t grow up in the wealthiest echelon in New York, she would’ve licked the plate clean. She’s done it a couple times at home with her partners, but Tatum refuses to see the value in cherishing the last little bite of flavor and has managed to break Leighton and Alicia both of the habit.
When she’s done with her cake and had her fill of conversation for the night, she makes her way to the shower, excited to use the extra hot water Charlie had gifted her for her birthday. At the beginning of the mission, the six of them had sat down to discuss luxuries like hot water considering the water heater in the spaceship wasn’t much bigger than a five-gallon bucket. Collectively, they had decided on no more than two minutes of hot water each week, and Leighton usually saved hers to wash her hair, but now that she has four minutes, she plans to use them all at once, to really relax after what could be their last experiment-focused spacewalk.
The bathroom is small, not much more than a shower stall and a toilet, but Leighton has gotten used to the cramped space over the years. It has taken a while considering the size of the bathroom in their New York home, but that had been a feature she and her partners had chosen specifically because there were three of them, each with their own army of products.
She places her towel on top of the small heat vent that keeps the room at a comfortable temperature before climbing into the stall. The water will never get hot enough to steam up the room, but she relishes in being able to turn the faucet all the way to the left before she starts the built in counter. After four minutes, the water runs cold, and she’s just finished washing the last of the soap suds off her body. Not wanting to take more time than normal, knowing that Charlie and Antonio will want to wash the smell of space off their bodies, she steps out and only takes a cursory glance of herself in the mirror. Leighton wouldn’t say she’s lost weight, it’s more like it’s been redistributed throughout her body over the two years of training and the three years in space. When she compares herself to the pictures on her tablet, Leighton feels like a completely different person.
Her shoulders are more muscular from hauling equipment, but it’s hard to actually build muscle mass in space and with the strict workout regimen that NASA has them following to stay healthy, Leighton thinks she could challenge Tatum to a run and actually win. There’s a blossoming bruise on her hip from where she ran into a table in the kitchen, and the fact that Leighton is still suffering from earthly afflictions like being clumsy while in limited gravity makes her feel a little bit better about herself.
“Leighton, I get that you’re like some high femme kind of lesbian, but literally nobody here finds you attractive so stop hogging the bathroom!” Comes a holler from the other side of the door and it snaps Leighton out of the daze she’s been in.
“You’re one to talk, Charlie. If I’m a high femme than you’re a drag queen and there’s nobody here to impress but Antonio and he’s as straight as a board.” Leighton hollers back.
“Jokes on you babe, you wish you could see Starlight perform but you wouldn’t even like it. C’mooooon. I can feel the sweat drying on my skin and you know how much I hate that,” Charlie begs.
She opens the door, watching as what little steam she had managed to accumulate in the shower leaves the bathroom in a cloud. Charlie has equipped the pout, which works on just about everybody in their mission, but Leighton just rolls her eyes.
“Enjoy your shower, there ain’t any hot water for you to run out of. I’m off to bed if anybody needs me.”
--
Their work is finished a few days after her birthday, and the next week is spent preparing their little spaceship for the return trip to Earth. Everybody is excited, and the energy of the ship is near vibrating; dinners are spent talking about what plans await them back on the planet and days are spent packing up the pods for the journey home.
Because the ship won’t have to battle the gravity of the Sun, and they’ll be traveling towards the center of the galaxy, it’ll take roughly eight months to get home, as opposed to the two years it took to get out this far, and Leighton couldn’t be more excited. Her research is coming together, and she’s set the super computer on board to begin calculating her findings; now, the most deadly thing will be the boredom (if they don’t have to deal with any debris or technical problems, which means Leighton would never suggest dying of boredom out loud.)
Her room is nice and tidy, but she spends the first few hours of the day of their departure fastening all the boxes to the floor. They’re going to use a hydrogen burn for the first five hours of the takeoff to escape whatever gravity well is causing all this weirdness so when Leighton is finished, she changes into her flight suit and heads to the cockpit.
She grabs the photo of her and Alicia and Tatum from her journal and tucks it into the zippered pocket on her left breast. It’s a different launch, this time, since they aren’t battling against planetary gravity to reach orbital velocity, but Leighton still works through the same routine. Tucks the pants of her suit into her mag-boots before sinching the Velcro strap tight across the tops of her ankles, makes sure the St. Christopher necklace Tatum got her is secure.
“Everything ready for launch?” Antonio asks as he comes swaggering into the cockpit.
“From our end, yes. We just have one last call with Houston for final checks and then we’ll be off.” Christian, one of their flight crew, says.
“I swear to God, we’re always on the phone with Houston; you’d think we never left NEO.” Charlie comes in complaining.
“Yeah, well, to be fair, this is the first time any human has been on an extended mission this far from Earth.”
“Do you think we’ll get cool hardware?” Antonio asks.
“Like what?” Leighton turns to look at the boys. “This isn’t the Olympics.”
“Aye! But it could be! Christian is English, I’m Italian, Charlie over there is Canadian, and you’re American, and Javier is Spanish. Do you think we could commission medals or something?”
“Antonio, you have a mission patch. It’s silver and sits right on your flight suit. Why would you want a medal? Just frame it,” Charlie points out.
This is a conversation that the boys and Charlie can’t seem to settle. Leighton would never say no to something shiny, but she has the rings from Alicia and Tatum, one on each ring finger, and that’s enough jewelry for her. She used to be one for big earrings and bangles and rings on every finger, but she quickly got out of the habit when she started her training, and now she only wears the two rings; and ever since she’s left Earth, the rubber versions.
“I’ll buy you a medal if you want one, Tony.” She offers. It’s the same offer she brings up to end this conversation, but this time, Antonio’s response is different.
“Would your wife really allow you to spend her hard earned money on one?”
“Who says I’d be spending Tate’s money? I have my own trust fund you dingus.”
“Yeah sure you do Leighton, but we all know who does the finances in your house and it isn’t you or Alicia. Remember how hard it was to hide that surprise visit home?” Charlie swivels around in their chair while they talk.
“Don’t remind me, I was almost relegated to the couch for that,” she laughs. “I’ll find some way to get us hardware.” Tatum had been the unofficial bookkeeper of their household since Leighton graduated college – something about wanting to do some actual work that used her degree and not wanting to be like her cousins who squandered their parents money. It was nice to not have to worry about doing the accounting, but it did make it very difficult for Alicia and Leighton to do any sort of planned surprise for Tatum.
“Either way, it sounds like Leighton Murray will be bestowing us all with honors? Can I request a gala to go with it? Maybe a dinner cooked by your home chef?” Antonio asked.
“Okay, hold up.” Leighton raises her hand. “First of all, we don’t have a home chef, Alicia would never let anybody into her kitchen, and second of all, we aren’t even that liquid; most of our assets lay in art and property. And also, we aren’t that filthy rich, we are comfortable."
"Leighton, everybody knows 'comfortable' is a code word, you aren’t fooling anybody here,” says Charlie.
Leighton scoffs and turns back towards the front of the cockpit, choosing to end this ridiculous conversation before it derails. She knows how lucky she is to have grown up as a Murray, Alicia reminds her and Tatum of this all the time, but Leighton also knows that she and her partners spend so much time and wealth in giving back to the communities they inhabit; they’re trying to use what they have o some to good. They aren’t just taking what’s been given them and sequestering it away like Leighton’s brother Nico or Tatum’s cousins.
“If all you science types are done arguing over Leighton’s status, we’ve been given the all clear for take-off from engineering." Christian says.
Nobody argues any more after that, and the cockpit is filled with the sounds of safety buckles and Leighton tunes into the words of the pilot and the vibration of the hydrogen engine under her feet.
"Houston, we’ll see you soon.”
And then there’s a force pushing her back into her seat and Leighton closes her eyes, imagines now it will feel to wrap her girls in a hug and never let go, how it will feel to be in their orbit for the rest of her life, and she can feel the smile on her face that matches Antonio's and Charlie's.
They’re going home.