Page 12 of To the Moon and Back
“Calm down, Mom,” Kayla said, which was not a thing we said. Our mother lifted a hand like she was set to slap her, then folded it back into her lap. I winced. Kayla smirked.
“Ma’am, please,” said the man in front of us. He wore a suit. He was white-haired and scowl-faced.
Our mother ignored him. Maybe she thought he was speaking to someone else. “Kayla Anne Harper,” she whispered, “you hand me that bag or there will be consequences.”
Kayla fell back in her seat and tossed our mother the bag. A few potato chips fell to the floor, like confetti.
“Ma’am,” the man snapped, louder this time.
He twisted around and looked at her and her oversized shirt, reading ugly yellow, reading small town, reading loud tacky poor dumb.
“Ma’am, I just need you to control your daughters,” he said, softer now.
“Some of us have been following Dr. Carson’s work a long time. ”
Our mother breathed in and out, slowly.
The man turned back to the front.
“My daughter ,” my mother said. Stopped. Started again. “My daughter has been following Dr. Lars Carson since she was thirteen fucking years old .”
The man stiffened. He didn’t turn around again, didn’t fight back, and that was worse than anything he could have said to her.
He let her words hang in the air, echoing in our ears, so that Kayla and I could hear them over and over in the silence.
So we could see that she was trashy, and uncivilized, and not a person worth engaging.
Dr. Carson paced up and down the stage, waving his hands in the air to the rhythm of his own speech. He talked about the Big Bounce theory, and how we’d emerged as the kind of leftovers of a preexisting universe.
Our mother sat between us, her chest heaving forward and back, tiny sobs caught and silenced in the dark.
When we got to Kituwah it was dark. Dr. Lars Carson had gone over his allotted time. Someone had put a ticket on our mother’s car, for parking in the wrong spot. She had to track down a university employee, and then she yelled at him (to no avail) over a fine that cost more than two days’ work.
The ceremony was over, and there was no moon. Our mother walked toward the low mound and disappeared into shadow. I picked up a rock and put it in my pocket.
Our mother had prepared us for the ceremony at Kituwah, after she’d prepared herself.
She’d asked Beth, who’d asked her mother, who told her that Kituwah was the place we came from.
Where water spider carried over the first fire in a basket she’d woven on her back.
When we spread out into towns across the mountains of the Southeast, Beth’s mother said, we carried embers from that first fire to every town at the start of each year.
So we would always be connected, and feel the pull back home.
When they tore us from the mountains, Beth’s mother said to my mother who said to me, we’d hauled the embers to Oklahoma in battered tin buckets.
I was still open to some things I didn’t have proof of, like alien life, but the bucket story seemed far-fetched.
Still, I understood that this was ours. I understood the last morning of your life in a certain place, before it’s destroyed.
Sitting in the car, my sister asleep in the back seat, I realized our mother had to believe.
She had to, for her life and her choices to make sense.
As a young woman she had responded to every disaster—poverty, neglect, abuse—with a move one step closer to her grandmother’s childhood home.
In Tahlequah, before Brett, she’d been an outsider—a single mother, kinless, clinging tightly to the light blue paper of her tribal ID.
Our mother would never have Kayla’s confidence, because Kayla had no memory of another self. Of another place. Of what was possible, here on Earth. Maybe what was wrong with our mother was also wrong with me.
When our mother had started talking about the ceremony at Kituwah, weeks before, I’d asked Brett to take me to the library.
We’d sat together on the floor, leaning against the bookshelves.
I’d learned that Kituwah was destroyed in 1776, when the Rutherford expedition razed thirty-six Cherokee villages just before harvest time.
They left no homes, crops, or livestock.
Survivors lived on nuts and wild game through the winter, then began to sign away land.
The Eastern Band had purchased the site back, this field and what remained of the mound, only a year ago.
Our mother walked slowly back toward us. Her knees were brown with mud, and I knew she had knelt in some kind of prayer.
Kayla groaned. She stretched out across the back with her cotton underwear showing, her short denim skirt hiked up in sleep.
Her sketchbook had fallen to the floor, open, the drawing of the peacock cape ripped out and crumpled.
My mother and I sat in silence awhile, headlights shining into the forest at the field’s edge.
“I’m sorry I made us miss the ceremony,” I said.
“Well, Duke is far,” she said.
“We could stay here awhile,” I said. “Maybe I could show you constellations?”
My mother laughed. She shook her head and sighed. Like I was the weight that lived on her shoulders, that crushed her sometimes.
“No, Steph,” she said.
She took my head in her hands and I breathed in her smell. She kissed me at the top of my head, where she’d insisted on combing my hair that morning. Where I sometimes touched my fingers to at night before I slept.
“You’re too old not to see it,” she said. “The world doesn’t revolve around you. You have to be a part of us. To meet us halfway, even.”
The part of our lives that we spent together would be over soon, in just two more years. It seemed unfair to her, and maybe all mothers, that I’d know this and still feel so ready to run.