We Dream of Space

Bird is given permission from her parents to miss school the day after the Challenger disaster. Instead of staying home, she walks through the cold winter morning to Dani Logan’s house, using the family’s hidden key to sneak inside. She announces, “I’m home,” when she enters, hanging up her coat in the closet alongside those belonging to Dani and her parents (341). She sits in silence at the dining room table, cautious but delighted when the elusive family cat Chekov slinks into the room. When Chekov allows Bird to hold him gently in her arms, she confides in him, “They didn’t make it” (344) . Exhausted, she falls asleep on the couch, and when she wakes up, she wishes not only that the Logans would come home and listen to her to allow her to express all that she is feeling about the loss of the Challenger and its crew. She wants to be a part of their family instead of her own.

As he sits in Ms. Salonga’s class, Fitch thinks about the dramatic change in Bird’s emotions since the Challenger disaster, and the profound effect it has had on their entire family. Bird, who always does as she is told, who excels in school, and does all that she can to preserve the peace in their household, has somehow managed to go unnoticed. Fitch wonders why she has been neglected for so long. Ms. Salonga, who took a day off herself to collect her thoughts and feelings in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster, addresses the class, deciding to talk about what had happened two days prior.

She believes that because their class has spent so much time focusing on the Challenger’s mission, it is important that they acknowledge that there surely must be a mixture of feelings among them. She expresses her worry that after what happened, given the tragedy of the lives lost and the expense accrued only for the mission to go so terribly wrong, that there might be those who will come to believe that the space program is not worthy of continued support.

Ms. Salonga delivers the same message to Cash’s section of her class. She speaks about the efforts of the Challenger crew and the ways in which they diligently prepared for their opportunity to travel into space and the selflessness with which committed to the enormity of their task. She suggests that what can be learned from their example is that all people should be continuously improving themselves so that they too can rise to any occasion, prepared to meet the opportunities with which life presents them at their very best, able to commit with every bit of their ability.

As he listens to Ms. Salonga, Cash realizes “that the tone of the house was set by Bird. Not on purpose. It just was. Bird was the even-tempered rock of the family (353).” Cash thinks about how Bird tries to engage with everyone, her desire to share her interests, and what she is working on in her schematics, and how she checks in with her brothers to see how they are, always mindful of their wellbeing, always willing to listen and offer insight.

Alone in her room, despondent and defeated, Bird accepts the grim inevitabilities she believes she must.

Cash, his confidence renewed, is in the kitchen peeling the banana and oranges which constitute his new nutritional regimen as he prepares to become a runner on the Park Middle School track team. When he opens the lid on the trashcan to throw his fruit peels away, he is startled to find Bird’s entire library of hand drawn schematics in the garbage. He digs them out, bringing them to Bird’s room, asking why she would throw them away. She claims that she is finished with them, that they are a waste of her time. Cash asks if maybe her attitude toward them is connected to the Challenger, and she responds dismissively, telling her brother that he can put the schematics back in the trash.

When she returns to school, Bird does not participate in her classes. Though she is curious about what Ms. Salonga had said to the class the day before about the Challenger, she is disillusioned with her dreams of becoming an astronaut, and she sits in silence, not interacting with any of her peers. She believes that if she lowers her expectations she will never again run the risk of being disappointed and hurt.

Despite her efforts to commit to this new way of thinking, when Bird falls asleep, she dreams that she and Judith Resnik are sitting together on a beach. She hears someone calling her name, and as she awakens she realizes it was not Judith calling her name but Fitch, telling her dinner is ready. He hands her a coat, telling her to put it on. Their father is in the living room, their mother at the kitchen island, but Cash is standing by the sliding doors. When she asks what’s happening, they tell her simply that they will be eating outside.

Her brothers have set up a picnic for them, and they sit on a blanket having pizza under the cold starry night sky. A document binder catches her attention, and Cash shows her that he has compiled all her schematics into one volume, unwilling to discard them as she had told him to. She asks whether they are doing all this for her out of pity, but they tell her it’s because she always asks about having dinner together as a family. When she points out that with their parents absent it’s not exactly a family dinner, Fitch says, “They’d only ruin it,” and they all agree that perhaps they will invite their parents to dinner with them someday but not today (373).

In a payphone coin slot on the way to the arcade, Fitch finds a discarded quarter and its strikes him as a symbolic of his change in attitude and perspective. At the arcade, he prepares to slip the coin in the machine and spies Marsh by himself standing at one of the basketball shooting games, taking repeated shots that the hoop, each one unsuccessful. He remembers how the teased the younger boy about his lack of aptitude at this very game. He considers minding his own business and going back to Major Havoc, but instead he approaches Marsh and asks, “Have you ever played pinball?” (377).