Houston
"But when are you coming to visit?" her mother asked. "I haven't seen you and Henry since Christmas!"
Mindy smiled. Some things never changed.
"I'll have a bunch of vacation days I can take in June," she reminded her mother. "Why don't you plan on coming out to see us then?"
"But I came to visit you last time," her mother complained. "The last several times, in fact," she pointed out.
"Yeah. I know. I'm sorry about that," Mindy apologized. "It's just with this Ares III thing, I just can't be away from work for very long, you know that."
"I suppose so," her mother conceded, switching back to her cheerful voice. "How is everything at work? How are the," and her mother made a game effort, Mindy had to give her credit for at least trying, "orbital dynamics? Are all of your satellites behaving themselves?"
"Yep," she grinned. "I gotta keep their little butts in line, but yeah."
"And your astronaut? I heard on the news, about the big dust storm. Do you think he'll be okay?"
"Well, he's made pretty good time on his trip," Mindy said, trying not to dwell on how crushingly worried about Mark that Caroline and Richard were right now. "So assuming that he sees it in time and manages to skirt around to the south of it, he should be alright." She sounded overly optimistic, even to her own ears, and her mother picked up on it. Of course she did.
"CNN said on the Watney Report that he won't be able to see the storm because it'll sneak up on him," her mother ventured, obviously hoping that Mindy was privy to insider information that might contradict this unfortunate fact. "He won't know he's in it, until it's too late for him to get out."
"Well, he won't be able to easily see the storm," Mindy agreed. "But if he's being very observant he might be able to. I mean, what does the guy have to do all day, stuck in the rover, except be observant of his surroundings?"
"Oh. Well, I guess that's true," her mother agreed, easily yielding to the authority that Mindy now possessed, concerning a topic that interested almost everyone on the planet these days.
Gone were the days when Candace Park had found Mindy's occupation embarrassing or hard-to-understand. She wore her daughter's accomplishments like a badge of honor, happily regaling her friends and acquaintances about her brilliant, beautiful daughter that had single-handedly saved astronaut Mark Watney by discovering him to be alive.
Even her old friend Marilyn, whose son was a district attorney, couldn't top that.
Mindy wasn't used to finding herself in the bright spotlight of her mother's approval; it was taking some getting used to.
"How about your handsome doctor friend," she prompted, changing the subject. "Did you two have a nice Valentine's together?"
"Oh my god, Mom," Mindy laughed. "Davin and I are friends!"
"Friends that spend Valentine's Day together?" she probed, hopefully.
"No! I am way too busy to date anyone right now," she defended herself. "I work sixty hours a week. I have a ten-month old son. I'm not ready for any of that."
She'd found herself telling poor Davin the entire tale, over dinner when they'd first become friends. He'd taken it all rather well, all things considered. They talked and texted, every few days, but nothing had really come of it. She wanted to take her time. Also, it seemed a little bit disrespectful, somehow, to openly date anyone while she was living with Mark's parents.
"You're holding out for Watney, then?" Her mother did not sound the least bit disappointed by that prospect, either.
"I'm going to hang up on you," Mindy warned her, cheerfully.
"Okay! Sorry!" her mother said, chuckling. "I just get curious, you know, out here on the island, all by myself. Alone. Nobody ever visits," she added, slyly. "Phone hardly ever rings. Emails go unanswered..." she trailed off.
"Mom!" Mindy raised her voice, amused. "Cut it out!"
They were both laughing, as they hung up.
SOL 449
He'd never been able to figure out what, exactly, his mother had been trying to sneak past the nannies, with her weird spy-novel secret messages. He'd been able to pick up on only a few of them before he'd managed to fry Pathfinder.
They had wanted him to know that they lived in Houston now. He knew that much for certain. He'd scoured her earlier messages for more clues, but the pecan tree reference seemed to be the first of them.
From there, Mom had made a handful of tree references; one every other message or so. But he couldn't quite figure out what she was getting at.
Could she have been talking about his family tree, he wondered? Had someone died, maybe, and NASA didn't want him to know?
That was his best guess, though if that were the case, his parents hadn't seemed depressed. And it didn't explain what they were doing in Houston.
It was odd, to think of them living there. He'd had a small apartment there at the JSC residential training facility, all of the crew had, but he'd spent nearly every waking hour working, or studying. In three years he'd only picked up on the barest details of his surroundings.
The summers were hot and muggy there, and the hot weather lingered into October and beyond. And winter seldom got cold enough for long sleeves, let alone a coat. Snow (in any amount) was a twenty-year event, but had occurred once there during his tenure, nevertheless; a light dusting that had melted away almost immediately. When he looked back on his time spent there, it was kind of funny how little of it he actually remembered, except for the weather, endless training sessions, and that last night. He could remember every last detail of that.
Mark was still kicking himself, for not getting Mindy's phone number. All this time later, and he still couldn't stop thinking about her.
She'd been totally into him, too. It was a classic 'one that got away' cautionary tale, he supposed.
At the time, he'd talked himself out of pursuing her, because he was leaving the next day, and he hadn't thought it was fair to start something, to get involved with someone, when he knew he'd be gone for a year.
In retrospect, though, Mark had had a great-grandfather, a pilot in World War II, that had courted and married a girl while he was off fighting a war, for Christ's sake, and all of it had been conducted via handwritten letters and a two week Christmas leave. He could have had that, with Mindy, if only he had been thinking straight.
He could have had messages from her to look forward to on Hermes. Could have had the thought of her waiting for him to sustain him during these difficult, lonely months.
She'd wanted him to ask her, he realized. But now it was too late..
He had thought, at the time, that he wasn't looking for any distractions. Ha! What a joke that was, now. He wanted distractions, needed them, even, as many of them as he could get!
That morning, though, when he'd packed up the solar panels to set out for another lonely, boring trudge across the endless ocean of red sand in the rover, he'd noticed something. Not a welcome distraction, either. The solar panels had not charged as much as he'd expected, for the third day in a row.
They were getting old, he supposed. They weren't designed for being packed and unpacked, and flung around and hauled all across the planet, strapped down with homemade rope to the rover as it jolted along for weeks on end.
Yeah, that's what he'd told himself, right up until he had stood on the edge of that crater's rim, and found himself able to see one side of it clearly, and the other side not at all.
He'd wandered right into the middle of a dust storm.
Houston
DUST… STORM…
Mindy had Kapoor on the line before Watney even had a chance to finish his message.
MAKING… PLAN…
"But what can he do? Pick a direction and just drive, hoping he can outrun it?"
"Oh my god, south, Watney," Mindy said, as though he could hear her. "Anywhere to the south."
Watney did not go south. Instead, the horrified onlookers at NASA watched as he turned around and headed a day's journey back the way he'd come. Satellite imaging was still clear enough to see the rovers, but the images had a slightly cloudy look to them now, as they repeatedly analyzed each satellite pass.
The day after that, he'd apparently decided, at random, to change directions again and head off in a different direction.
"What the hell is he doing?" Kapoor asked, as the satellite images grew cloudier by the hour.
Was he second-guessing himself? Had he totally lost his mind?
And then Mindy had spotted the left-behind solar panel at each of the sites he'd camped at. He was using them as what, some kind of experiment? A triangle of sensors. To see…
"Which direction the storm is going!" she muttered, annoyed that she hadn't gotten it before.
It was such a typically brilliant, unlikely, Watney invention, that she couldn't believe she hadn't seen it coming.
Watney then spent the next couple of days backtracking to pick them up.
He'd managed to pinpoint the heading of the storm, and he quickly beat a path away from it, heading straight south for several days. Despite having made no preparations for such an event, even though no such equipment even existed on Mars, he'd figured out a way.
The world cheered him on, as he made his way towards the MAV, and Mindy watched over him, fondly, almost, as he managed to outsmart Mars once again.
SOL 496
It had been just the one night, and he'd dismissed the possibility out of hand, at the time, but now Mark found himself second-guessing his decision. Mindy had liked him. Really liked him. How he knew that, after just a few hours, a year and a half ago, he couldn't quite say. It was inviolable, though. He knew he was right.
He'd known it, he'd felt the same way, and then he deliberately hadn't acted on it.
Why did I do that?
Had it been to protect her? Protect himself? What harm would it have done, he thought for at least the tenth time, to have exchanged emails with her for a year, until he made it back home?
Except for that minor detail of how I still haven't made it home.
It would have been a workable plan. It was sensible. It would have been so nice. She would have sent him sweet and funny messages on Hermes as they got to know each other better. And then, when he'd returned, maybe they would have had a shot at embarking on something real, together.
What the hell was I so afraid of?
He wasn't afraid of it anymore, he realized, a little surprised. He'd never had much success with women; frankly, he didn't have the patience for people who didn't understand his work and how important it was to him. Chasing down his goals, moving around and living abroad had left very little time for worrying about such things, anyway, and as the years had passed, he'd never met anyone special enough to make him reconsider.
Sure, he'd pursued, occasionally. There'd been a few flings, and a couple of ill-fated relationships that had quickly fizzled out. He'd liked a few of them. But he'd never been in love. Indeed, as cynical as it sounded, he hadn't really believed that "love" even existed. Not really. He'd always privately thought it was something for other people to fool themselves with. The notion that happiness, security, warmth, sex, that all of that could be tied into one person, forever. It wasn't sound science, he'd reasoned. It was an illusion.
It was less than pleasant to realize that it wasn't an illusion after all, a year and a half after the fact. He'd finally met someone that he could have had that with. And he'd stupidly pushed happiness away with both hands.
Was it possible that he'd ever get another chance? He didn't know. It had been such a long time now. Mindy the actual person had probably long-since moved on. She'd never been his, in the first place. But what if she did still think about him?
It was a huge 'what if?'
One of his favorite things that he liked to imagine, though, was that Mindy was watching him. Had been watching him all along. She was cheering him on, proud of him for making it this far. Who knows, he thought. Maybe she was.
Maybe…
And this was a crazy thought, but what if… he had the power to actually make it happen? Make her watch.
Get her attention, and keep it.
He knew he was being an idiot, but he impulsively decided to do it anyway.
The thought of Mindy, the real girl, back on Earth and not the perfect figment fantasy girl that he'd invented, actually watching over him like a guardian angel, for real, the rest of the home stretch to the MAV, was so tempting that he couldn't help himself.
That night when he spelled out his nightly report in Morse, he scrounged together more rocks than usual and added an extra line.
Houston
She stared at the new satellite images, not sure if she should laugh or cry, as she pulled focus on the rovers.
It wasn't real; none of this could possibly be real.
Because underneath the normal line of Morse code, there was a second line.
It wasn't possible.
She was reduced to checking her Morse chart twice to make sure she was really seeing this correctly, and then she checked again to make sure she wasn't viewing it upside-down. Then she tried to imagine that it was a simple misspelling. A couple of letters were transposed, maybe? Or there was a missing dot or dash that had totally changed the message that Mark had been trying to send. But no, there could be no doubt.
HI MINDY was spelled out in rocks there next to the Rover, as though it was the most normal thing in the world.