Page 19 of To the Moon and Back

The family gave us our space. My grandmother leaned on my arm, and I helped her up the porch steps. She gripped my elbow so hard it hurt. She muttered something I couldn’t understand, kissed me on the forehead, and cried. I wished she wouldn’t do that.

Matthew said she rarely knew what was happening. But when she saw me, she remembered that she was sad. I hated it. She tried to stroke my hand.

Just the feel of my grandmother’s shaking fingers, the look of confusion in her eyes, the tears—any one of these things hurt .

I wanted to run, or scream; to lie down on the floor and press my face to her slippered feet and sob.

In my new, almost-adultness, I felt a heaviness, a tiredness, an awareness that I could not and did not respond to things honestly.

That I was too good at pretending. The adults around me would call this maturity.

I told my grandmother I was going to college in two months. To a very famous school in Connecticut.

“I applied to a lot of places,” I said. “But Hollis was the most prestigious one that let me in. After Yale. And I got into BYU, where—”

I stopped myself. My parents had wanted me to choose Yale for the slightly better name, or BYU for the (much, much) better chance at finding a husband. But mentioning my parents felt unkind.

“Did you know,” I said, “Hollis has a pretty significant Native American population?

“Lots of Indians,” I added, as if that would help.

My grandmother touched my cheek.

“I don’t know if I’ll even count as one of them, you know? Or if things might be weird,” I said.

She said something.

“Well, other than that, Grandma, I don’t really have much news for you. High school had plenty of drama—friend stuff, a little boy stuff—but you don’t want to hear about that.”

I thought about my worst secret, Ada, the girl at LDS sleepaway camp last year.

She’d slipped a love letter under my pillow.

For a few weeks afterward I slept with it tucked in my waistband, against my skin, until I threw it away.

I didn’t tell any of my three parents, who’d fought over me without knowing I’d turn out like this.

My grandmother and I were used to silence. The distance of language and memory was like we were standing on opposite sides of a canyon, shouting love that crashed down somewhere in the trench between us. I imagined it like water. Rushing, loud.

The people outside—none of them closer than a great-aunt or a first cousin once-removed—laughed together and ate sheet cake. The cake had my two-year-old face printed on the white icing, from a photo of me sitting on my grandmother’s lap.

I stopped trying to talk to her. We sat side by side, holding each other, her small bones against my chest. Her white hair was pulled loosely back with a blue scrunchie, her head at rest under my chin, and she smelled like something I didn’t know.

We stayed that way until the people outside went home, and then she got up to take a nap.

I moved to sit in the place she’d left behind.

From the passenger seat, Matthew called a cousin and asked her to make me an Indian taco.

He got me one every year. Matthew’s cousin—who wasn’t really a full cousin, but he called her that—let us swing by to pick it up on our way to the big office supply store. Matthew took the wheel so I could eat.

The windows were down, and I balanced a Styrofoam plate on my knees.

My fingers were shiny with oil, my plate streaked with bits of ground beef, shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, and cheese.

Matthew turned the dial to a country radio station, and sang along to a song.

In it, a man asked his friends, in the event of his death, to prop up his corpse beside a jukebox and place an alcoholic drink in his hand.

Unconscionable.

On the other side of the car door the whole world was open. Ground, grass, trees. I considered the tiny gold cross around my neck.

“This is good,” I said, holding up my messy hands as proof.

Matthew said I’d always liked fry bread. He said Indian tacos used to be too heavy for my little hands. I used to put my paper plate on the floor and dip my face into my food and then scream when it got in my eyes.

“Rule Three,” I said. He wasn’t supposed to talk about the old days.

Matthew tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He pressed harder on the gas. He was obviously mad at me, but I was mad right back.

Why’d he have to make all this drama in the first place?

I could’ve been some regular-enough adopted kid with a vague idea of Native American ancestry.

Instead, I had fry bread grease on my chin and parents in Provo who still cried out in their sleep, whenever they dreamed Matthew had stolen me back.

Matthew bought me a hundred and thirty dollars of school supplies to take to college. New binders, pens, and Wite-Out that came in a little pink tape dispenser, so I wouldn’t have to wait for it to dry.

For everything we picked out, I’d reached first for the cheap version.

Then he’d pointed to something prettier—the hardback floral planner with extra room to track weekly personal goals, the canvas backpack with a gold clasp and a pattern of tiny blue birds in flight, the rose-colored stationery set that I took as a hint I didn’t write him enough.

It was an expensive trip. Then again, according to the visitation agreement, Matthew was only allowed to give me presents twice a year.

Once when I visited in June, and then something “modest” mailed at Christmastime, like the stupid CD.

If I’d never been adopted, I wouldn’t have gone to private school and I wouldn’t have had half the nice things I had in Utah, not to mention Mom and Dad.

I wouldn’t have had Heavenly Father, either, or at least not the way I knew Him now—but I didn’t know what to do with that.

Matthew told me to turn onto the highway. He took a picture of me hunched over the steering wheel, and I rolled my eyes and laughed. I said, “What’s next?”

We went to the Cherokee Heritage Museum for the thirteenth year, where we got free entry.

After Matthew lost the custody case, the Cherokee Nation attorney general made it his personal mission to keep me Cherokee.

He set up a fund for strangers to donate toward my future plane tickets.

He drove all over Northeastern Oklahoma, getting Cherokee-owned businesses to volunteer free stuff if I visited.

Most importantly, he got Mom and Dad to sign the visitation agreement, which I still can’t believe they did.

They had no legal requirement to go along with it, and they hated this day every year. That meant they’d done it for me.

Matthew and I looked at ancient carvings. Historical documents. Pottery. Woven baskets. Beaded moccasins. Maps of the Trail of Tears.

Outside the museum was a living history exhibit, a replica of a village, but it had been years since I’d agreed to walk through it.

I hadn’t liked it when one of the older workers recognized Matthew and got too excited to see me.

Even worse than that had been the younger workers, kids about my age now, out in a field playing a Cherokee sport together.

Their whole deal seemed to be, We are having so much fun without you!

Inside, the museum was like someone’s basement.

It was dark and cold, and smelled like the belongings of old people.

I could tell which artifacts needed to be switched out by how much dust was caught in the grooves of their name plates.

Glass cases smudged with layers of fingerprints lined the walls.

I pressed my hands to them because sometimes I got this feeling that I wasn’t in the place I was in.

Like I was watching myself? It helped to touch things.

Matthew was still talking; I was getting tired, and he wanted to fill the silence.

He said they’ve already put together the funds to build a new museum, the kind with multiple floors and some kind of modern-meets-traditional design by an up-and-coming Cherokee architect.

He had gone to Hollis, too, and now he was based in Oklahoma City.

“It’ll be another five years or so before it’s open,” Matthew said, “so maybe you can come…”

He trailed off. When I left for college, it would be up to me to decide if and when I’d see Matthew.

He walked faster, passing several cases of stone tools. He stopped at a wall of posters detailing traditional ceremonies, the text faded nearly to gray.

I caught up to him. Matthew backed quickly away from a poster about traditional beliefs around menstrual blood. He wouldn’t be as cool as Dad was about period stuff at the pharmacy.

Matthew stared at the woman pictured in the next poster.

It was a black-and-white photo of a woman who had died, the last Cherokee midwife known to practice the old ways around pregnancy and birth.

It was exciting, if still weird, to think how close I was to having a baby.

A lot of girls I knew were moms by the end of college.

That could be me in the next five years.

“Is there some kind of ceremony around babies?” I asked. “I don’t know, like for the first time I ate or laughed or, I don’t know, when I got my name?”

I wasn’t sure why I was asking. If there was a ceremony for me to pass on—which in my imagination involved a baby dressed in eagle feathers waving an ear of corn—there was no way the Church would like it.

“Beats me!” Matthew said. “Our family isn’t traditional.”