Page 18 of To the Moon and Back

DELLA THE WELFARE OF BABY D

When journalists and legal scholars choose to be protective of the almost-adult me today, which isn’t always the case, I’m referred to as “Baby D.”

But Mom and Dad have fought to keep me out of the spotlight and to make sure the name from my baby blessing sticks. “You’re an Ericson, sweetie.”

They used to say that when I cried. I would jump in their bed during every storm, scared by the way the walls shook.

I ran six blocks home from Sunday school when my teacher told our class I was a Lamanite turned “white and delightsome.” When I lay in bed and light from passing cars raced across my bedroom walls, I was afraid.

I saw the cameras flashing, the bright blue squares when I blinked.

The guns and the screams and the fingernails pressed to my skin.

Growing up I cried more than most kids, and my parents would hold me and say, “Sweetie, you’re an Ericson.” Like that’s all I would need to be safe in the world—the parents who won.

For the first five months of my life, in Utah, people called me Emma Ericson. Then, in Oklahoma, Della Owens. Then Emma Ericson. In the years I’ve lived in my parents’ house, these last thirteen years of my life, I have been Emma all but twelve hours a year.

Dad woke me up at four a.m. I lay in bed and chewed on my hair and thought about not going to Oklahoma this time. It was the anniversary of Matthew’s custody loss, which was also my annual visitation.

Dad’s voice came out muffled from the other side of the door, and I knew he’d cupped his mouth against the painted wood.

He called good moooorniiiing in this weird, high-pitched, not-Dad voice and walked away.

I heard him singing “The Morning Breaks,” then chopping and dropping and humming over frozen fruit shredding in the blender.

I had seen the same blender in a black-and-white photo of my parents in their kitchen at the top of a New York Times interview.

I read online that, until things got really bad, Dad tried to do every interview with a can-do attitude and a cheery disposition.

Mom said he’d handled things so well because, no matter what the courts said, he had faith as a Latter-day Saint. I pulled the blanket over my face.

Dad kept coming back. His voice got lower, and louder, and he pounded on the door and said I’d miss my flight. Finally, he marched in and pulled the blanket off, which made me hate him every time, even though I loved him very much. I threw my arms over my braless T-shirt and groaned.

“I’m in the car, Emma.”

Dad knew it would take me a while to get dressed, but he didn’t want much to do with me on the days I visited Matthew.

Neither did Mom, who was asleep and had spent the last week making sure there were no open opportunities for Matthew to parent.

She took me out for highlights, made an acne follow-up appointment at the dermatologist, sent in my housing application for Hollis, restocked my purse with tampons, and washed and folded my clothes. She was methodical.

Mom had always been like this. I was the first in my class to ride a bike, the first with pierced ears, and the first to drive.

I had to do everything fast, milestones mastered and checked off, just in time to disappoint my biological father.

I knew she did it out of love. That’s why I did it all over again.

When I was nine, I let Matthew help me get up on the purple bike he’d bought me just for that day.

He ran fast, holding on to my handlebars, not letting go and not letting go till I finally said he could, and I yelled, Look!

Look! I’m doing it! Four years later, I asked him to take me to the mall for a second piercing.

After I learned to drive, I asked him to teach me to drive stick shift.

Matthew brought flowers to the airport and dropped them when he saw me at the gate.

He picked me up and spun me around and I knew he must have felt the weight I’d put on in senior year, but he didn’t say I looked different.

He put me down, hugged me, picked me up, spun me around the other way, put me down.

We smiled at each other, me a little closer to his chin than I’d been before.

Matthew said, “Well damn, Della, it’s so good to see your face.”

Nobody had called me Della in a year.

I said, “Good to see you, too.”

I didn’t call him anything. He hadn’t been Dad since Ericson v. Cherokee Nation , but to call him Matthew felt cruel.

“You got any bags?” he asked. “Anything I could help with?”

“No bags,” I said. “I say we just do whatever fun you must got planned.”

Sometimes I talked like that in Oklahoma.

I’d get caught up in how much we looked alike.

I talked like him, slouched like him, ate what he ate.

When I was twelve, I stole some self-tanner lotion at the pharmacy so I could look more Indian in time for our visit.

I ended up orange, with dark patches on my elbows and knees.

Mom tried to yell at me, but her voice kept breaking.

I spent most of our visitation days on airplanes.

Matthew and I had only five hours together, and there were certain things that had to get done.

Seeing the family, getting my required dose of Cherokee nationalism, organized fun, and taking enough photos of said fun to fill the albums of my visits stacked on Matthew’s coffee table.

He took out a disposable camera and aimed it backward to capture our trip down the moving walkway.

“Say cheese,” I said, laughing.

He smiled with all his teeth. “Commodity cheese!” he said. He snapped the photo.

I stared.

“It’s cheese you get from the government. For being poor.” He shrugged. “Indian humor.”

Matthew wasn’t as rich as my parents, but he wasn’t poor. Was the joke funny because other Indians were poor? Was being poor part of being Indian? If I belonged here, I might have said to Matthew that I didn’t like that. But then would I sound uptight, like white people?

He pulled me in for another hug, and my shoulders tensed. I felt for Matthew in waves.

Sometimes I thought about the photo from our family sealing, thirty or forty Ericsons in white dresses and three-piece suits outside the temple in Salt Lake.

High above us on a spire was the Angel Moroni, golden, trumpet in hand.

I was just a newborn in a long white gown, but they made sure I’d be with them for time and all eternity.

And then sometimes I saw the smallest thing in Matthew, like our matching long torsos and short legs, and I was hit with something pretty close to love, even though I didn’t tell him I love you anymore.

I wished I still did, that I had never stopped, so I could say it without a big proclamation.

But then he’d say something with a country accent, or laugh too loud or drive too fast, and I wouldn’t even know why I was there.

It was an hour to Matthew’s house outside Tahlequah. I used to think it was a waste, spending all that time getting to a small town when there was more to do in Tulsa. There was a skating rink and a rock-climbing gym, and even a trampoline park.

But my old bedroom was in Matthew’s town, and so was his family. He let me drive. When we got close, the road was almost empty except for the two of us. When I looked like I was coming up too close to the edge he said, “Easy there, sweet girl.”

Matthew put on a George Strait tape and asked me if I’d been listening to the Greatest Hits album he sent me at Christmas.

“Sure have!” I said. I hated country music.

“Good,” he said. “When you were little, you were crazy for him! Our whole family is. Must be in your DNA.”

By that logic, I must’ve gotten the non–George Strait–obsessed gene from Matthew’s one-night stand, the white woman who gave me away.

But I didn’t say that, and we didn’t talk about her.

All I knew was she’d grown up by a beach, which was a place I’d never been to.

She might be somewhere like California, or one of countless other places, but I didn’t care.

Seeing my grandma was the worst thing in my life.

She couldn’t handle it so well, either, so a few years back we made it one of our rules.

Family first, and family gone in an hour.

It might sound harsh, but harsh is what it takes when you’ve got five hours once a year.

There were other rules. No arguing, no talking about my parents, no talking about the Indian Child Welfare Act, and no talking about what my plans were for when I left my parents’ house for college and the visitation agreement expired.

I pulled into Matthew’s driveway, and his family spilled out over the porch. They held the same tattered banner they’d made thirteen years ago.

WELCOME HOME, DELLA!

They shouted and cheered and clapped, and next thing I knew there was a crowd of twenty or so standing around the truck. A neighbor sat outside his house, watching.

Della! We missed you! Look at you grown!

I jumped down from the driver’s seat, and I was held. I was held and I was held and I was held. I wandered, arms out, held and let go of and held. They called my name and grabbed on to me, though I’d never learned who was who.

My grandmother was last. She was crying. Her husband had died young, and Matthew was her only child. I was her only grandchild.

I’d been told there was a time she was like my mother, that for the five years I lived here we’d slept side by side. I’d straddle her hip while she stood over the stove and warmed milk in a small pot. Most afternoons I played on the rug at her feet.

Soon after I was sent back to my parents’ house, my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Matthew said she’d always been quiet. But now, she barely spoke.