Page 2 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH ALL THAT IS OR EVER WAS OR EVER WILL BE

Eight Years Later

I was thirteen years old in Oklahoma. Eight years now in the house in Tahlequah to which our mother had brought us. I wanted, more than anything, to be gone.

To outer space. To a better school than my own, that could help me get to outer space. And before that, to Space Camp. At least to Space Camp! The one thing that could hold me over while I waited for the rest of my life.

At Space Camp, I’d heard, you could take turns sleeping in a pod modeled after the real ones. You could zip yourself into a sleeping bag tethered to the wall, strap yourself down and close the hatch like it was real. Like if you didn’t do these things, you’d float away.

I used to get this feeling sometimes, where everything would stop, and it would be like I was flying above myself, watching, remembering the moment I was in but from years ahead.

It happened in moments when I most believed that maybe my life would take the shape I wanted it to.

I felt that so many nights, with my sister breathing softly in the bunk below.

My sister, content. Me sitting up, shivering and wrapped in an old blue quilt, ordered piles of papers spread around me.

Flashlight waving over PSAT scores and essays.

Financial aid forms filled with numbers, from pay stubs I had slipped from our mother’s purse.

Whenever I started to think about how Phillips Exeter Academy might not let me in, and then how hard it would be to impress NASA without Phillips Exeter Academy, I’d switch off the flashlight.

I’d lean back and look up at the glow-in-the-dark stars that Brett, my teacher but also my mother’s boyfriend, had stuck to the ceiling.

I enclosed a letter with my application. I told them I was “on track” to become an astronaut, which meant I’d done very well in middle school science and would likely attend Space Camp in Huntsville that summer.

Then I waited for my Exeter acceptance letter. And I waited for my Space Camp application. My mother had said she would call to request it.

On the phone they said camp costs a thousand dollars. She said thank you and hung up.

She spent the next four weeks changing the subject when I asked about it, and then in April (still no word from Exeter) she sat down me and Kayla and said she had a surprise.

(Brett was apparently excused from this family meeting, as he’d gone out to the country.

He was visiting his ancient parents, and I wished he’d brought me with him.)

There wasn’t money for Space Camp. It wasn’t happening.

Kayla said, “Got it, okay, can I please be excused?” She’d been calling it “nerd camp” since Thanksgiving.

“No, you listen,” our mother said, “both of you. You’re not going to the Space Camp, but you are going to a Space Camp!”

“Oh no,” Kayla said.

“Huh?” I said.

“I’m running it!” our mother said.

“Oh no ,” Kayla said.

“Kayla, watch it,” our mother said, but she looked at me. Her hands gripped the couch cushion under her, tight. Her eyes were bright, wide, daring me not to be thrilled. I watched the clock above the couch, unwove the woven baskets on the bookshelf with my eyes.

Our mother explained that she and Brett had spent the last month staying up late, typing a grant proposal on the computer they’d bought together. “I even had a meeting with an astronomy professor, at his office,” she said, clearly having waited days to tell me that.

“You’re gonna make Cherokee Culture Camp all spacey,” Kayla said, “aren’t you?”

Our mother looked down at her hands, raw and rough but sweet-smelling from the bread factory where she worked. I used to press her palms to my face, used to breathe in the strange mix of rising dough and sharp-smelling machinery.

“You’ll like Space-Culture Camp,” she said.

I said we should try again for Space Camp. The real one, for next year. I could save up. Sometimes Exeter let kids have jobs on campus. I could see myself standing behind a tall marble desk in a library, getting paid to explain things to my fellow students. Maybe I’d wear my hair in a low bun.

Our mother looked like I had hit her. She was quiet and careful, opening her mouth and then closing it, and then she looked at me like, Is this really who you are?

She said, “This is the best that I could do.”

All that was left was to pretend. We nodded and said great, thank you, can’t wait.

We did the dishes. I washed and Kayla dried. I tried to look out the window over the kitchen sink, tried to find the night sky, but the lights were too bright. All I could see was the two of us reflected in the glass. Kayla played the Top 40 countdown on the radio and sang along.

Nothing stuck to her. The way she’d flit through the hallways at school—from class to class, friend to friend—it was incredible to me, and alien.

My sister belonged, happily, like she’d sprouted out of the ground behind this house.

I was something like a refugee, from a time and place my sister had forgotten.

I wished I could have just a little of all that Kayla was.

At Space Camp, you strap into a multi-access trainer—like a spinning cage inside a spinning cage—and are rotated in every direction, no more than two turns the same way in a row, to keep the inner ear fluid from disrupting your balance.

Astronaut candidates (they’re called “ascans!”) use something very similar in training, only with a joystick, so they can practice stabilizing a shuttle on reentry if it starts to spin out.

Without stabilization, a real astronaut could experience g-forces so strong they die.

Space- Culture Camp was held in the middle school gym. It smelled like boys, and the lights overhead glared bluish green on our skin. Our words clapped off the walls and rushed back loud and harsh.

On the bleachers, which were folded against the wall, our mother had taped cutout paintings of planets and stars.

She’d made them herself the night before, on the backs of old protest signs.

Moms Against Nukes on the back of Venus.

Della Owens Belongs with Her Tribe… Support the Indian Child Welfare Act!

on the back of the moon. Our mother was never good at protest slogans and gave too much of herself to other people.

When things didn’t go as she had hoped (when, for example, Della Owens was taken from her family and sent back to the adoptive couple in Utah), our mother saw it as evidence of her own powerlessness. Like she alone had let down the world.

After snack time, our mother and Brett stacked everyone into the bed of a truck and drove us to the top of a low hill behind the cemetery. They then brought out a new, clean garbage can with Styrofoam duct-taped to the inside, and tipped it over. One at a time, we put on a helmet and climbed in.

Our mother did a countdown from ten—she was working from a limited base of knowledge, and for near everything we did, she had to say “blastoff”—and pushed us down the hill.

When everyone had gone, we sat in a circle in the grass and talked about how it had felt.

How we thought astronauts might feel in the same scenario .

“This circle time is just like a mission debrief!” is what she would have said, probably, if she even knew about mission debriefs. Most people didn’t.

“They’d maybe be scared at first,” said Meredith. She was new in town, and had wide-set, blue-green eyes. She had a look to her that was serious and a little spooky to me, but also made me want to stare at her when she wasn’t looking.

“They’d get used to it, though,” I said. “If you can’t handle the vomit comet, then you can’t handle space!” I was proud to know that nickname—“vomit comet.”

Brett laughed. “Doyu hadvneliha,” he said. It was nice sometimes, having words and phrases in Cherokee as our own language.

“Anyone else?” said our mother. “How would astronauts feel ?”

“Nauseous,” said Daniel. He’d lingered in the trash can at the bottom of the hill, before throwing up inside it and ending the activity for everyone.

Kayla helped him climb out and brought him water and rubbed circles on his back with her hand.

Kayla was always taking care of people. Even our own mother when she was sad, which was often.

Kayla was so good at looking good, I sometimes looked bad in comparison.

“Nauseated,” I corrected. Brett scrunched up his eyebrows and cocked his head at me, like he did at school or at home whenever I “got in my own way.” That’s what he called it when I was a show-off or a know-it-all or a bad friend.

“Tsaneldodigwu awaduli,” he’d say in the living room, the lunchroom, the carpool line.

I just want you to try . Whenever he said that, whenever he made that face like he was worried about me, like I was the kind of child one had to worry about, I felt alone.

I felt thrown out of the air lock, suited up without a tether.

Do you see me? I wanted to say. Do you see me at all?