Gabby Read online

  “Right!” Angie said. “An ‘L’ word.” She tapped the photo. “This is the same sound. You turn on the lllll . . .” Angie rolled the letter on her tongue, but Gabby couldn’t follow through.

  “Cheeseburger,” she said, finally. She knew that wasn’t it. She sighed, looked down at her lap, and readjusted herself in her wheelchair.

  “Are you frustrated? Do you need a break?” Angie asked.

  “Yes, yes,” Gabby told her, relieved. That’s about when I entered the room, bearing tulips, which I presented to Gabby with a light kiss. It was the eve of Valentine’s Day.

  I asked her, “What kind of flowers are these?”

  “Chicken,” she told me. That was another word she was inexplicably stuck on in those early days.

  I gave her a clue. “It’s your favorite flower.” She looked at the tulips, then at me. She didn’t answer.

  I wasn’t always comfortable pushing Gabby and testing her. I knew this was all terribly hard for her, and that she often felt like she was disappointing us. But her doctors had told us that engaging and challenging her would help her brain repair itself. We had to help her think.

  Angie offered Gabby something to mull. “These aren’t roses, they’re . . .”

  “Tulicks!” Gabby said triumphantly. She’d gotten it. Almost.

  “Tulips,” Angie corrected. “Yes, Gabby, tulips. Mark brought you tulips.”

  “Tulips,” Gabby said.

  Angie returned to the photo of the lamp. “You turn on the . . .”

  “Lice,” Gabby said. She’d gotten close. Angie helped her: “Light.”

  “Light,” said Gabby. Then they both looked over at the flowers, which were attached to a balloon with the words “I love you” on it.

  “Tulips,” Gabby said. As Valentine’s Day approached, I was happy to hear her deliver those two syllables, and Gabby was happy to have said them. Both of us were learning to appreciate small victories.

  Five weeks earlier, when 2011 began, the new year was shaping up to be a very meaningful one for Gabby and for me. We were both excited by the prospects and the possibilities. Maybe it would be the best year of our lives. Gabby would be returning to Congress for a third term, I’d be returning to space for a fourth time, and we also had high hopes that Gabby would finally become a mother.

  She had just won a close reelection to the U.S. House in a campaign that had been draining and disturbing. She was troubled by the hostile political rhetoric, and we both worried that the angry discourse might even descend into violence. But now that the election was over, Gabby was her usual optimistic self. She looked forward to redoubling her commitment to serving her constituents in southeastern Arizona, including those who didn’t like her or her positions. “I represent them, too,” she liked to say.

  As for me, I was at a turning point in my career as an astronaut and naval officer. NASA’s space shuttle program was winding down—I’d be commanding the second-to-last mission—and the next step for U.S. space exploration was uncertain. NASA and its contractors had begun laying off thousands of workers, a dispiriting acknowledgment that it would be years before the government again launched astronauts from U.S. soil. Given my age, almost forty-seven, and the fact that the need for astronauts was dimming, I knew I’d likely be going into space for the last time. It was bittersweet, of course, but I was committed to ensuring that my last mission was executed as flawlessly as possible. In simple layman’s terms, I didn’t want to screw up. Yes, I looked forward to savoring one last view from on high. But I also wanted to again prove to myself that I was worthy of the promises of space exploration. Gabby, the hardest worker I knew, understood such ambitions and ideals, and what it would take in 2011 to see them through.

  Meanwhile, on the personal front, Gabby and I hoped that 2011 would be the year we finally could have a child together. Gabby knew it would have been tough to be pregnant or give birth during an election year. Her schedule was too crazy. She didn’t get enough sleep. We wouldn’t have enough time together. So our strategy had been to wait until the election was over.

  Gabby, who turned forty in 2010, was in great health and her doctors assumed she could get pregnant naturally. The problem wasn’t her, it was me. I was a divorced father of two teenaged daughters when I married Gabby in 2007, and surgery to reverse my vasectomy hadn’t worked. So Gabby and I enrolled in a program where my sperm was harvested directly from me and mixed with eggs that were harvested from Gabby, who’d been taking fertility drugs. Our doctor at Walter Reed Army Medical Center said our chances for success were better than 40 percent.

  We hoped Gabby would be pregnant by Valentine’s Day. We couldn’t have fathomed that instead she’d be in a hospital, trying to say the names of simple objects.

  And yet, when Gabby and I look back at the week before she was shot, we see certain moments that foreshadowed the life we’re now living.

  Gabby and I had gone to Rome for four days just before New Year’s, touring the country with Gabby’s parents, Gloria and Spencer. They’re terrific traveling companions; they love art and food and meeting people from other cultures. Gloria, as a gifted painter and longtime art conservator and historian, was like our own private tour guide for the trip. It was a short but lovely vacation. We saw the Pope at midnight mass. We toured museums. We ate at great restaurants.

  Spencer, who has had degenerative disc injuries in his back, was mostly in a wheelchair in those days, and it usually fell to me to push him wherever we were going in Rome. That wasn’t easy. He weighs about 250 pounds and the streets and sidewalks weren’t exactly smooth. At one point we visited a spot near the Coliseum where the Romans used to hold chariot races, and Gabby got a kick out of watching me push her father around. “It’s like my dad is the chariot and you’re filling in for the horses,” she said, laughing.

  After Gabby’s injury, when I’d push her in her wheelchair, I’d sometimes think of that trip to Italy, and I was grateful that Gabby is less than half her father’s weight. “Remember how I had to push your dad up those hills in Rome?” I’d say to her. “In comparison, pushing you is a breeze.”

  Gabby and I have a lot of nice memories of Rome, including just relaxing in bed together in our room in the small hotel. It was pretty romantic. The window was open, with the sounds of Italy rising from the streets below, and we found ourselves talking about what our marriage would look like in the year ahead, and in the years after that.

  “Our lives are so full now,” I said at one point. “Just finding time to be together takes all this scheduling. Adding a baby to the mix is going to increase the magnitude of everything.”

  But Gabby was undaunted by the prospect of motherhood. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. “We’ll find solutions. I’m not worried. I’m excited.”

  That’s how Gabby had run her entire life. I’d learned not to doubt her ability to do anything, or to overcome any challenge. Given my age and the fact that I already had two wonderful children, I could have gone either way on the question of having a baby. But that day in bed with Gabby, seeing again how she yearned to be a mother, I was enveloped by her faith and confidence that everything would work out. She had waited a long time to find me, and to build her career. “Having a baby is really important to me,” she said, and that made it important to me.

  One night in Rome, Gabby and I broke away from her parents and had dinner with an official from the European Space Agency and the physicist heading a major project on my space shuttle mission. We were on the top floor of this terrific restaurant, and talk turned to politics in both Italy and the States. Gabby and I explained how heated her election had been.

  “It’s gotten so nasty,” I said. “It’s almost like people are going to get violent.”

  Gabby agreed with me, though she always had a way of putting a positive spin on a negative discussion. “Yeah, things have gone a bit over the line,” she said. “We’ll just have to figure out a way to pull it back a little.”

  We flew ho
me to the States and spent New Year’s Eve in Charleston, South Carolina, at the annual retreat known as Renaissance Weekend. When people hear about this event, they always think that you’re dressing up like a knight and eating giant turkey legs. But it’s actually just a relaxed, nonpartisan gathering where people from different walks of life, many of them very accomplished, gather to discuss issues and have fun together. This year, Gabby sang in the Renaissance Weekend choir, which puts together smart, funny lyrics about current events.

  A lot of people bring their children, and Gabby and I came with my daughters, Claudia and Claire, then fifteen and thirteen. The girls love these annual weekends, too. They get to spend time with Olympic athletes, Nobel laureates, scientists, professors. Over the years, we’ve met Ted Sorensen, a speechwriter for John F. Kennedy; Thurgood Marshall, Jr., son of the Supreme Court justice; Li Lu, a student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests; and the diplomat Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, the covert CIA agent whose identity was famously leaked by political opponents in 2003.

  For a guy like me, the son of cops, it’s a crowd I certainly wasn’t hanging out with as a kid. But I feel fortunate that I can offer such experiences to my girls. It’s a perk of being an astronaut married to a rising young politician; we get invited places. Over the years, we’ve made some close friends at Renaissance Weekend—such as the NPR host Scott Simon and his wife, Caroline—who’d end up being there for us in unexpected ways in the wake of Gabby’s injury.

  The New Year’s Eve celebration at this year’s retreat was fairly low-key, and near midnight, Gabby and I found ourselves sitting at a table, thinking about the twelve months we’d just been through. Her reelection campaign had been so wearying and hard. “The coming year will be better,” I told her, and she agreed.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “A lot of good things are going to happen.”

  On Sunday, January 2, Claudia and Claire flew home to Houston to go back to school, and Gabby and I drove north together, toward Washington, D.C., where, on Wednesday, she’d be sworn in for her third term. I took three days off from work so I could be with her.

  The weather was pretty rotten on our drive, a lot of rain, but we were grateful just to be alone together. Given our crazy schedules, there are many days each year when we’re apart. Granted, ours was not the usual marriage, but it was working for us because we valued the time we did have for each other. People would say we acted like perpetual newlyweds, which sounds pretty saccharine, but that’s how we felt.

  Sure, maybe we’d argue more if we lived in the same city. Maybe we’d get on each other’s nerves more. Maybe a baby would add an unavoidable level of tension. We understood that. But on the other hand, maybe our bonds became stronger because we logged an hour or two every night on the phone. A lot of married couples share households, but don’t carve out any time to talk. Our relationship had forced us to focus on each other night after night. We had to listen. We had to respond. And you know what? I kind of had a thing for Gabby’s voice. She was so intelligent, so eager to hash out ideas. Talking to her was the favorite part of my day.

  That was especially true when we were actually together. On this drive to Washington, our conversation turned to the next career steps for each of us. Gabby was weighing the idea of running for the U.S. Senate in 2012, if the incumbent, Jon Kyl, a Republican, chose to retire. She was also considering passing on that race, and instead, waiting until 2014 to run for governor of Arizona.

  Gabby was troubled by some of the policies of Governor Jan Brewer, especially her signing of Arizona SB 1070, the act that required local law enforcement officers to determine the immigration status of people they suspected could be in the country illegally. The bill encouraged racial profiling and shifted attention away from the real problem: the federal government’s failure in its duty to secure our borders and fix our broken immigration system. Gabby’s 9,000-square-mile congressional district borders Mexico for 114 miles, and she has devoted much of her public life to finding ways to better secure the border. Still, she felt that SB 1070, which stirred anger and protests nationwide, had damaged her state’s reputation, hurting business and tourism.

  A part of Gabby felt a calling to run for governor, to do what she could to improve policies—especially in education and budget management—that she considered destructive. She had other worries, too, about her state’s housing crisis, its vulnerability to the economic downturn, and the deep problems in the health care system, including the inadequacies of mental-health policies.

  Gabby was a raging optimist, but she was also a pragmatist, and as we drove north, I saw both sides of her. She knew it would be hard for her, a Democrat from Tucson, to win statewide office. Arizona is a red state, with passionate conservatives wielding a lot of influence, and those Democrats who are able to succeed usually come from Phoenix, where their voters and campaign contributors are more plentiful. (The last time a Tucsonan had won a statewide election was in 1976, when Dennis DeConcini was elected to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate.)

  “I don’t know that I could win the governor’s race or a Senate seat,” Gabby told me. “But someone has to do something for the sake of Arizona. Maybe I’m the someone. Maybe I have a duty to run.”

  Later on the drive, talk turned to my future. Gabby was always the biggest dreamer. Nothing was going to hold her back, and she didn’t want anything holding me back, either. The Navy had loaned me to NASA for the astronaut program, and Gabby thought that when I left NASA, I ought to aim high. Maybe I could be an admiral.

  “Gabby, I’ve been at NASA, and essentially out of the Navy, for fifteen years,” I reminded her. “I don’t know if the Navy would want me as an admiral.” Gabby was undeterred. She didn’t just think I should come to Washington to seek a spot on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She thought I ought to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “That’s not a very realistic idea,” I told her, shaking my head at her audacity.

  “Well, you’d be great,” Gabby told me. “And you’d enjoy yourself, too.”

  Being married to Gabby was like hanging out with a full-time motivator. It was hard to be lazy or unenthusiastic when she was making plans for your life.

  On Monday night, after we pulled into Washington, we had dinner with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and her husband, Jonathan. Gabby had gotten very close with Kirsten and a few other women on the Hill, including Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. There aren’t a lot of young women in Congress, and when they find and like each other, the bond is pretty powerful. Not all women share a passion for talking about government regulations or the differences in various congressional districts. When Gabby would meet legislators like Kirsten or Debbie, women who seemed sort of like her, she had to pick their brains, learn their secrets, and share her own.

  Over that dinner in D.C., Gabby asked Kirsten how she handled having two young kids and a political career. Since Kirsten became a senator, Jonathan had taken a larger role in caring for the kids, and Gabby was intrigued by the ways in which the couple made everything seem doable. In 2008, when Kirsten was in the House, she became just the sixth woman to give birth while serving in Congress. In the year ahead, Gabby hoped to join her on that short list.

  The next morning, Tuesday, January 4, we headed over to Walter Reed to meet with Mark Payson, the physician overseeing Gabby’s fertility treatments. I’d already donated sperm, which had been frozen, and on January 20, Dr. Payson planned to remove eggs from Gabby, fertilize them for a couple days in a dish containing my thawed sperm, after which he’d be implanting them back into her.

  Very few people knew that we were trying to have a baby. Most of Gabby’s colleagues and staffers had no idea. We’d kept it to ourselves. But this was not the first time we’d been through this process. Once, when Gabby was going her usual thousand miles an hour for her job, she lost track of exactly when she was supposed to take the medication. After she learned the mix-up meant she would have to start all over again,
she was tearful but resolute. “It’s OK,” she said. “On the next try, I’ll be more careful.”

  Another time, she was in Tucson for meetings and to see constituents, and a snowstorm on the East Coast kept her from making it back to see her doctor in Washington. By the time she landed in D.C., her cycle was off. Another disappointment. She’d have to try again.

  The next attempt, in August 2010, was just three months before the toughest election of Gabby’s career. Although there were no mixups in her medication, and no blizzards to delay her, doctors worried that the campaign stresses and Gabby’s lack of sleep would affect her chances. She went ahead with the surgery, but doctors weren’t able to extract as many eggs as we hoped.

  Now, for this 2011 attempt, our third, Gabby was determined to get everything right. She asked Dr. Payson to carefully go over all the medicines and procedures. “So when do I take this,” she asked, “and when do I take that?” She was focused like a laser beam, the way she’d get at congressional hearings about border issues or solar energy or space exploration. She wanted to understand everything. She also made sure that, for this round, she was getting lots of sleep and exercise.

  She made an appointment with Dr. Payson for six days later, Monday, January 10, at 7:00. She planned to fly home to Tucson on Friday, and then back to Washington on Sunday, so she could be sure to make it to the appointment. We were a little nervous, but the anticipation was exciting. If everything worked out, she’d soon be pregnant.

  Wednesday, January 5, was a special and memorable day on a lot of fronts. Gabby was sworn in for her third term, and those of us who loved her were there to proudly cheer her on. But January 5 was also the day Gabby made a decision that would change her life forever, a decision made with the best of intentions and an open heart, but with ramifications that would impact the lives of other people in terrible ways. January 8, 2011, was the day six people were shot to death in Tucson, and thirteen people, including Gabby, were wounded. But we also can’t help but think back to January 5, the day the dominoes of that tragedy were set in motion.