Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer Read Free Book Online Page B

when we did your other ultrasound. Do you want to know now?”
    “Tell me,” said Sunny.
    “Your baby is a little girl.”
    A girl. It was as if she couldn’t move. Her veins were cold with love and fear.
    *   *   *
     
    I N THE WEEKS BEFORE the launch of the rocket, Maxon and Sunny received requests from media outlets, asking for interviews. To populate the moon with robots and then with humans: this was potentially a story. There was no other NASA wife as perfectly presentable. There was no other NASA couple as lithe and tall. When Maxon and Sunny appeared in pictures together, there was a certain sexiness about them that led people to wonder what intrigued them about this whole moon situation. Was it really the fact that a rocket was taking robots to live up on the moon? Or was it just this handsome elegant woman and her tall, haunted astronaut man?
    Cooperating with the NASA publicity department, Maxon went to New York for eighteen hours to visit the talk shows. He joked and smiled, made small talk, and comically misunderstood sexual innuendoes. But Sunny refused to do any appearances at first. She said, “I am pregnant. I can’t fly.” When the Today show agreed to send a crew to her house, she balked at that, too. She didn’t want to disrupt the life of her child any more than his father would disrupt it by going into space. She said this, and the people that she was talking to seemed to understand.
    Finally she agreed to be interviewed on the local news in Norfolk. In this way, she would not seem to be avoiding notice. She would seem to be a trooper. That’s what they would call her. She would glitter with sacrifice. She wore her most amazing wig, the kind of style you can only achieve with a two-hundred-dollar styling appointment, or with real human hair permanently affixed in a shape. She wore coral, which was said to warm under studio lights. She wore pearls.
    The network was housed in a brick building on Granby Street, unremarkable except for the news channel logo attached to its roof. Inside, the studio was a large dry room, painted dark, high ceilings hung with canister lights. Cables in braids roped from camera to set and around the floor, like black rivers across the dark room, and she picked her way across them to the set, supported on one side by Maxon.
    “What are you going to wear, Maxon?” she had said that morning.
    “My space suit,” he said. “That’s what I always wear when I’m astronauting.”
    “You don’t even have the space suit here,” she said, too distracted with her eyebrows to acknowledge his joke.
    “Well, I’m going to wear red overalls and a straw hat.”
    “Oh yeah?”
    “And sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”
    “Maxon, I don’t want to do this,” she said.
    “Why? You’ll do great. Look how great you are, all the time. Nothing rattles you. You’re a machine.”
    “Maxon, why would you even say something like that?”
    “Like what?”
    Sunny peeled off an eyebrow and put it back on, a tiny bit higher up on her brow.
    “I’m afraid to do it, because I’m afraid I’m going to cry or throw up or something.”
    “Why?”
    “You’re going into space. I’m worried. People worry about their spouses going on business trips to Kansas City.”
    “Well, Kansas City is perilous. The gravity there is nine-tenths of what it is in Virginia.”
    “That’s not even true.”
    “I bet I can get the news guy to believe it.”
    “Shut up.”
    “I bet I can though.”
    Eventually he had chosen to wear a NASA polo shirt and navy dockers. As they took their places on the set, she appraised his appearance and found him acceptable.
    “You look good,” she told him. “Just don’t start talking about the robot that can really understand the tango and we’ll be fine.”
    “You’ll be fine,” said Maxon. “The robot that can really understand the tango was my only material.”
    Les Weathers bounded onto the set, fresh from hair and makeup, no doubt. He