Page 1 of To the Moon and Back

I imagine her terrified. Our mother. Two children in the back seat.

She drove like a woman followed, even after we left him at the foot of that tall hill.

There was blood there, back in Texas, and tiny shards of glass still covered my sister.

She sat beside me, her small body glittering in passing lights—the brights of cars, the moon.

I remember our mother pulling off the highway into dark towns, buying biscuits at the drive-through with small bills in a rubber band, pulled from under the driver’s seat.

Kayla slept and I ate three biscuits, hers and mine and our mother’s, too.

Our mother, who cried silently behind the steering wheel from Dallas to Plano to Sherman to McAlester.

I practiced reading highway signs. Our mother helped me sound them out, until she didn’t.

I was in my school clothes. My underwear said Tuesday in cursive.

A long time later, we passed a blue sign with a buffalo-skin shield and eagle feathers and little brown crosses.

Oklahoma. Our mother corrected me, oh not ah , but she was talking again.

She was alive. She pulled off the highway at the first rest stop past the blue sign and she took one giant breath, in and out with her eyes closed.

I copied her. Kayla wiggled against the straps in her booster seat.

She started to sing, happily and to herself.

I would grow up with stories in Tahlequah, though never the kind I asked for. There were no stories for what had happened, for why we’d left Texas and when we might return.

Instead, this: “When I was a little girl,” our mother said, “my mother and my father got into some trouble and my mother took us to spend the summer with my grandmother in Oklahoma. There weren’t any movie theaters, and we had to walk a long way to fill up jugs of water in the mornings, but my arms got strong, and I read a lot of chapter books, and it was peaceful, all the way to August.”

Instead, this: “When your great-grandmother was a girl, she was a student at the Cherokee Female Seminary, which was very special before it burned down. Your great-grandfather was a scholar, too, at the Cherokee Male Seminary. They learned there and then taught there, and even before that their parents had been educated there, too. One of them was a superintendent! People will tell you all kinds of things about Indians, all your life, but I’ll tell you this.

You girls come from people who studied Greek and Latin.

Who studied philosophy and astronomy. Steph! Astronomy! ”

Instead, this: “When your great- great -grandmother was a girl, she had to go all the way from Georgia to Indian Territory. Not Tahlequah, but close, along the Arkansas River. To this land, for sure—it’s all ours—and on the way all sorts of people got sick and died.

And after all that, Stephanie, no, for the love of God, I do not see the point in us moving again. ”

Our mother took my sister and me, and she drove through the night to a place she felt a claim to, a place on Earth she thought we might be safe. I stopped asking questions. I picked little glass pieces from my sister’s hair. I watched the moon.