Gabby Read online

  Getting her off the mattress was something of an ordeal then. The nurse had to help her sit up, a slow process given that Gabby could hardly move her right side. Then the nurse had to find Gabby’s helmet and carefully strap it on her head. Gabby couldn’t go anywhere without a helmet, even if she was just getting into or out of her wheelchair, because if she fell, she might hit the part of her head where her skull had been removed. A fall could be deadly.

  All of this maneuvering meant that it was a while before Gabby would finally get on her way. So, just as a precaution, the nurses had been putting her in adult pull-ups before she went to bed.

  “Last night, Gabby didn’t make it to the bathroom in time, and she’s upset about it,” one of the nurses told me when I arrived.

  I walked over to Gabby and sat down. “Awful. Awful,” she said. She was agitated. She felt humiliated.

  I understood that she didn’t like having to wear those pull-ups, and being so dependent on others. Anyone in a hospital setting loses a measure of dignity, and Gabby was in for a long stay. It was clear that this latest trip to the bathroom was an episode that spooked her. She knew she had waited too long to alert the nurse that she needed to go, and she feared it would happen again.

  I didn’t want Gabby to sit around feeling depressed. So I told her a story about my long, tough day of training at the Kennedy Space Center. My story was partly for entertainment value, and partly because, well, I thought I could offer her perspective.

  My crew and I had been inside space shuttle Endeavour for what we call TCDT: Terminal Countdown Test. “This is where we practice the launch count,” I explained to Gabby. “We’re on the launchpad, in the space shuttle, and the test takes us all the way up to the moment when the engines start.”

  When we get suited up to fly into space—or when we do this countdown test—we spend nearly six hours in what NASA calls “launch and entry suits.” Those are the big, orange pressure suits we wear when we walk out to the launchpad. We leave for the pad about three hours before launch and we don’t get out of the suits until two and a half hours after we’re in space.

  “That’s a long time to hold it in,” I said to Gabby.

  “Yes,” she said. “Long time.”

  “So we wear pull-ups,” I told her, “just like the ones you have to wear at night. Huggies.”

  Gabby was listening intently. We’ve always had a lot in common, the two of us. Now we could add something else to the list.

  “Anyway,” I said, “the test lasts for six hours, and we can’t change out of those pull-ups. I don’t like to dehydrate myself, so I’ll normally stuff four maxi-pads in there as well.”

  “Yes,” Gabby said.

  “But this time, for some reason, I wasn’t thinking and I only grabbed three maxi-pads. That was a bad plan.”

  I explained to Gabby that when we’re on our backs for those hours, with our feet up—the position astronauts are in for launch—the fluids shift in our bodies and our kidneys start working overtime. It wasn’t long before I was filling the Huggies. And I quickly realized that the awkward positioning of the maxi-pads, combined with my mistake of being one maxi-pad short, was not helping the situation. I could feel the urine soaking into my long johns on my legs, and then heading up my back.

  There was so much that over the next two hours it defied gravity, working its way up my right leg, which of course was higher than the rest of my body. It traveled uphill, and even soaked the top of my right sock.

  “By the time I desuited a couple hours later, I had ten pounds of wet diapers and maxi-pads to dispose of,” I told Gabby. “I had urine-soaked long johns. And I had a wet right sock.” I paused. “There you have it. That was my day.”

  My wife looked at me empathetically.

  “So, Gabby,” I said, “stop complaining.”

  Gabby and I met in a roundabout way, thanks to my twin brother, Scott.

  Scott is also an astronaut, which made us a curiosity at NASA, and led to mild interest by the media. We’d given a number of interviews over the years, answering questions about what it’s like to be “twin astronauts.” We’d also get a lot of invitations to give speeches or to meet NASA supporters. The astronaut office receives about eight thousand requests each year for astronaut appearances, and there are only seventy-five of us. So we’re lucky if we can accommodate a tenth of what we’re asked to do.

  Most invitations are pretty basic: Can you come speak to a school assembly or to a civic luncheon? But once in a while, an invitation comes in that is more exotic. Astronauts keep their eyes open for those.

  In the summer of 2003, a request arrived from the National Committee on United States–China Relations. It was an organization that invited professionals and rising leaders from both countries to spend time together, sharing cultures and ideas. The group of about fifty participants, all under age forty, would meet for one week in China, and the following year, would gather again in the United States. Perhaps the bonds created at this Young Leaders Forum would lead to a strengthening of ties between the countries.

  The organizers thought it would be good to add an American astronaut to the mix. It sounded like an all-expenses-paid vacation, and Scott, no dummy, signed up for it. But then, a few days later, he looked at his schedule and realized his wife was set to give birth the very week of the trip to China. “Want to go in my place?” he asked me.

  To the organizers, one twin astronaut was as good as another, so they took me. At age thirty-nine, Scott and I had just made the cut.

  Because there’s no direct flight to China from Houston, I had to first fly to Vancouver, British Columbia, where I was told I’d meet up with two other participants from the trip. One was a young high-tech executive from California. The other was a thirty-three-year-old state senator from Arizona named Gabrielle Giffords.

  The three of us were being put up that night at the same Holiday Inn in Vancouver, and we had exchanged e-mails a few days earlier, planning to meet for dinner. When I got there, however, I learned the executive from California had missed his flight. It would just be me and this state senator from Arizona.

  I was married at the time, and for me, this dinner would be just another professional encounter, like hundreds I’d had before. I certainly didn’t see or consider anything romantic. But I was impressed with Gabby immediately. I couldn’t help but notice the obvious. She was beautiful, ambitious, incredibly smart, accomplished, and a lot of fun to talk to.

  At the time, my first wife and I were struggling in our marriage. We already had filed for divorce once and then reconciled, but we were preparing to file again. I didn’t get into any of that with Gabby. We were both very circumspect. We ate, we talked about our jobs and the trip ahead, and then we said good night.

  The next day, as we boarded the plane for China, Gabby spotted me, the only familiar face in the crowd, and said, “Why don’t we sit together?” That sounded like a good way to pass twelve hours, so I agreed. We talked the whole way to China. Again, it was very professional. I was a married guy with two daughters. She was dating someone and told me a little about him. We remained friendly while in China, but our schedules were so full there, we didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time interacting.

  After we all returned to the States, a year passed without any contact between us. But then, in 2004, it was time for the group to meet up again in the United States, and Gabby being Gabby, she volunteered to host the entire gathering in Arizona. She wanted to show off her state—the Grand Canyon, the Red Rocks of Sedona, the charms of Tucson. It was a lot of work, but the civic booster in her embraced all of it.

  My life had changed since I’d last seen Gabby. I arrived at the reunion as a divorced man. In fact, the divorce had been finalized just two days earlier.

  Though Gabby and I were glad to see each other again, I still didn’t have romance on my mind. For one thing, I thought she was way out of my league. Given all that she had going for her, I doubted that she’d want to get involved wit
h a newly divorced guy who had two kids and lived almost a thousand miles away in Houston.

  But we did enjoy spending time together during that reunion in Arizona. Gabby brought the Chinese-American group to a local ranch for a cattle roundup, and after we all assembled, the ranch owner made a very generous offer. “If any of you can lasso three cows in a row,” he announced, “I’ll give you my ranch.”

  Gabby always reveled in a challenge, and she figured I must have a similar personality, being an astronaut. When we were broken into teams of six, she wanted to be on my team. She figured we’d win.

  As the rancher surmised, this group of smart, proud, self-confident Chinese and American go-getters turned out to be ill-suited for cow-lassoing. Only one person got the hang of it: me. None of the participants could lasso even one cow, but for some reason, I was able to lasso two of them. I just missed on the third—the rope was on the cow’s head and slipped off—so I didn’t get the deed to the ranch. But I did impress Gabby. “So you can fly space shuttles. You can lasso cows. What else can you do?” she asked.

  I didn’t want to tell her I was running out of amazing feats. She’d figure that out soon enough.

  We spent more time together at this gathering than we had in China. One day, Gabby and I skipped the aerial tour of the Grand Canyon and went hiking instead. For the first time, we talked in more detail about our personal lives. Gabby told me about the men she had dated. Some were very wealthy or had big jobs, but she didn’t think there was the right chemistry or she saw no future. “It’s tough to be single,” she told me.

  I talked about my daughters, Claudia and Claire, then ages nine and seven, and about how my ex-wife and I were figuring out the best way to share custody. Gabby was easy to talk to, and she was a great listener.

  When I got back to Houston, what I saw as a growing friendship continued. We’d trade e-mails. We talked a little bit on the phone. I went on a few dates with women in Texas and Gabby gave me advice so I wouldn’t seem like an oaf. “Call her the next day to thank her,” she said, “even if you didn’t have such a great time.”

  I thought I’d made a friend. Truly, I didn’t think Gabby wanted to get romantically involved with me. But she was beginning to see the possibilities. The distance, my divorce, her busy career, my busy career—she was hesitant, but willing to give us a try.

  Gabby talked about me to her mother. Gloria liked to say that Gabby was on a lifelong quest for “a glamorous guy who will understand and adore her.” That was a tall order. So far, as her mother saw it, Gabby had been coming up blank, dating men who were mostly self-involved and not fully comfortable with her smarts and ambitions. “I’ve always known my life would be pretty irregular,” Gabby told her mom. “I need a guy who will support me and my career, but who is strong enough to stand on his own.”

  As she gave her mother a few details about me, she pulled out a photo taken in China of the entire young leadership group. “So which one do you think is Mark?” Gabby asked.

  Gloria studied all the faces in the photo. She thought a Navy pilot in the astronaut corps would be tall, blond, well-built, and movie-star handsome. Not expecting a bald, regular guy like me, Gloria couldn’t pick me out of the lineup. When Gabby pointed me out, her mother said, “Hmmm, OK.”

  With her mother’s lukewarm endorsement, Gabby took the lead. In November 2004, she called me in Houston and asked me out on our first date, though it didn’t exactly sound like a date to me. “I’ve got to go to the Arizona State Prison in Florence,” Gabby said. “I need to visit Death Row. Want to come with me?”

  She was working on legislation in the Arizona Senate regarding capital punishment and, always diligent, figured she’d better get an up-close look at the issue before she weighed in on it. That was Gabby. Her idea of a date included a foray into public policy.

  As for me, the son of cops, this trip sounded like an adventure. Not everyone gets the chance to visit a maximum-security prison and possibly sit in the chair in the gas chamber. It would also be nice to see Gabby again.

  Because I was training then as a pilot on the space shuttle, I was required to log a considerable amount of time flying the Northrop T-38 Talon, the supersonic jet trainer. I needed a lot of hours in the air, so I could take it up pretty much anytime I wanted and fly it anywhere. “I’ll fly the T-38 over to Tucson and meet you,” I told Gabby.

  I reserved a room at the officers’ quarters at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. But then four days before the trip, Gabby called and said it wasn’t a good time to come. Her dad wasn’t feeling well. I’d later learn that her dad’s health was secondary. In truth, she was getting cold feet. Did she really want to start a long-distance relationship with a divorced father?

  I told Gabby I’d already reserved the jet and the room at the Air Force base. “I’ll come anyway so I can get the training hours,” I said. “I’m sorry I won’t see you.”

  A couple days later, Gabby reconsidered. She called and told me her dad would be OK. She wanted to take me to the prison. I flew in as planned and she picked me up at the air base.

  It was a forty-five-minute drive to the prison, and at first we talked mostly about the criminal-justice system. She had been a supporter of the death penalty, but her feelings about it were shifting, and she eventually changed her position. She had been reading a book about death penalty cases in the United States, and how mistakes were made in some of them.

  “Innocent people have been executed,” she told me. “And besides that, I’ve come to believe that the state shouldn’t kill its citizens.” I told her I agreed with her. (Our conversation in the car that day would return to my mind after Gabby was shot, when the U.S. Attorney’s Office asked for our views on the issue of capital punishment. As a victim, Gabby will get to weigh in as the government decides whether to seek the death penalty in her case. As the spouse of a victim, I’m entitled to have my voice heard, too.)

  Later on our drive to the prison, we got to talking about Gabby’s dating history. She said she was always attracted to successful people, but it was hard for her to find anyone she really liked. She had dated one man who was a Republican politician, which made for ideological differences. He later tried to run against her for the congressional seat she held, but lost in the Republican primary.

  She dated a doctor with offices all over Tucson. There wasn’t enough chemistry. She dated another man who had recently sold his computer company for tens of millions of dollars. He picked her up in limos and wined and dined her, but then he spent two weeks skiing in Italy and neglected to even call her. Gabby didn’t want a man who could disappear for two weeks without thinking of her. When he returned, she gave him the brush-off.

  “It’s not been easy finding someone,” Gabby told me. “Not every guy wants to date a thirty-four-year-old career woman.”

  “Well, I’d date you,” I said. I don’t know what made me say that. I think I was confused about whether this death-row visit was an actual date. It certainly wasn’t dinner and a movie.

  When we got to the prison, the warden was happy to give Gabby a tour, hoping it would help her make decisions as a state senator. We were given full access, and I noticed that Gabby was pretty fearless, propelled by curiosity and a need to understand the societal and governmental issues that informed this place. For both of us, it was quite an education. We had to wear shields over our faces as we entered one of the cell blocks. We were told some inmates would throw feces or other things from their cells. We also were given “stab vests” for our protection.

  Gabby had a lot of questions, though sometimes I found the conversations to be surreal.

  In one maximum-security wing, she met with an inmate in his cell. “So why are you in here?” Gabby asked him. He was a giant man. He looked like he could be the twin brother of Michael Clarke Duncan, the six-foot-five, 315-pound actor from The Green Mile and Armageddon.

  “I’m in here for murder,” the inmate said. He had the deepest, scariest voice I’d
ever heard. He sounded like a tuba.

  “Who did you kill?” Gabby asked.

  The man corrected her. “You mean, who was I accused of killing?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I meant,” Gabby said, not missing a beat.

  “Well, I was accused of killing my girlfriend,” the inmate told her. “But I’ll be getting out of here.”

  “Oh,” Gabby said. “When are you being released?”

  “Six years from now, in 2015,” he said. I did the math in my head. It was 2004. We were actually eleven years away from 2015. But I wasn’t going to give him the bad news, and neither was Gabby.

  Gabby then asked him what he liked best about this prison. He said he liked having a television in his cell.

  “Well, thank you for your time,” Gabby said. “It was nice visiting with you.” She was cheerful and friendly to voters and nonvoters alike. (Convicted felons can’t cast ballots.)

  The warden told us that the televisions in cells were actually more of an accommodation for the guards than the prisoners. “A large percentage of these prisoners can’t read,” the warden said. “Without TV, they’re bored and completely unruly.”

  As our visit continued, I was so impressed with Gabby. She wasn’t there on a lark. She truly wanted to learn about the justice system, incarceration rates, and what elected officials could do to improve the prison system in Arizona.

  We stopped by the plant where the inmates made furniture and license plates. We talked to guards and other prisoners, including a sex offender who told Gabby about the lack of good treatment options in the system. “I’m glad you shared your story with me,” Gabby said. “It’s helpful for me to know this when we’re voting on which programs to fund.”

  And then we got to Death Row, where Gabby asked detailed, intelligent questions and I behaved like a tourist, asking to step inside the gas chamber. I sat down and pulled the door closed. I just wanted to sense what that might feel like. Gabby had no need to do that.