Page 26 of To the Moon and Back

DELLA PRESERVATION

After I broke the law of chastity, I could not bear the thought of going home. I skulked from Steph’s bed to a long shower, then to the hallway outside the office of the LDS Student Association, where I sat in a chair for an hour till the student adviser showed up for work.

I begged for a spot on the winter break mission trip to Mexico, which I stupidly thought might be in Cancún. I’d finally see the beach, at least, on my way to hell. The trip was to Mexico City, though, land-locked, and it was full.

“But I’m having a faith crisis ?” I said, and a spot materialized. I also received an offer of weekly coffee meetings with the LDS student adviser, an email from the bishop of the ward I’d grown up in, and a phone call from my parents, who had been alerted by said bishop.

“I’m so sorry,” my mother said, and at the sound of her voice I cried into the phone.

We were supposed to be together for all eternity, as a family.

Having that, a family and an afterlife with them, was a gift I had received through God’s grace, for being my parents’ daughter.

I hadn’t had to go searching for it, and then find it, and then likely be separated from my parents after death.

That’s how it was for converts, if their parents wouldn’t join them in the church.

All I had to do was be worthy of what I already had.

Wasn’t that more important than the kind of trick my body could do now, than the mechanics I’d realized overnight?

Over the phone Mom told me, for the first time, about her own faith crisis. She’d been almost thirty, childless, and starting to question God.

“In all the years I waited for you,” she said. “I felt like I’d been put on this earth to be your mother. Like you already existed, somewhere, and I just needed to find you. And when that didn’t happen? And I had to go, not pregnant, to those freaking baby showers for every woman I’d ever met?”

The word “freaking” was unlike her. She laughed and breathed out. I could picture her, how she’d lean against the kitchen counter with the phone cord wrapped in rows across her arm.

“ Honey . When I didn’t have you? It made me doubt the whole world.”

Our bishop thought I should come straight home, and Dad agreed with him.

He missed me. Hollis had been a mistake.

But Mom was the only one of the three of them who had ever experienced a faith crisis.

She said that when people pushed too hard, like how her parents and, frankly, her husband had with her, it only made things worse.

She said the mission trip might be just what I needed.

It would do me good to see how other people lived, and to learn how I could serve them in God’s name.

Sometimes we get stuck in our own earthly problems, which are only temporary after all.

She said she’d talk Dad into it, and they would pay.

If it didn’t work out, I could always come home.

When she hung up, I thought about Steph’s hands as “earthly problems,” both of them, and made myself walk three miles to J.Crew to keep from touching myself. I put a long pink peasant skirt on my parents’ card.

I brought in the new year in an orphanage in Mexico City.

A small earthquake sent us scrambling to carry the children outside.

I stood on the street—a street I had been warned to avoid for its poverty and violence.

There was a baby in my arms, somebody’s baby, and despite a full week at the orphanage I felt newly panicked by the anonymity of his parents.

Were they even dead? Where had he come from?

In a crowd of neighbors I’d been warned against, I stood still.

Together we watched buildings sway back and forth without falling.

What if I died? What would happen to me?

I lived. When we were given the all clear, I went back inside and pulled a rose-colored card and matching envelope from the outside pocket of my duffel.

I wrote a letter to Ethan, breaking up with him.

I couldn’t get engaged, let alone married, when I was like this.

I sang “How Great Thou Art” at midnight on a cold tile floor that smelled strongly of bleach, two small children asleep against my chest.

In the spring, I repented. I ignored the open question of a major and took only the courses I’d have to take anyway, like rhetoric and math.

I devoted myself to becoming a godly woman and a good friend to all.

Even to Steph as a fellow member of the Native community—though I’d never spend time with her alone.

Steph didn’t seem to mind. I’d assumed she was obsessed with me, but I was wrong.

She was actually obsessed with, unbelievably, becoming an astronaut.

It was one of those dream jobs like “fireman” or “president” that little kids grow out of, but she apparently hadn’t.

When I tore out of Steph’s room, the morning after what we’d done, she didn’t chase me. She probably just went to the library.

Summer break was a problem to get ahead of. I was still afraid to visit my parents. They would look at me and they would know.

Another work-around. I’d spend two months traveling through small towns in Poland, as part of a free interfaith trip to restore Jewish graveyards.

The graveyards had been established long before the Holocaust, holding deaths by natural causes or illness or childbirth—but it was the Holocaust that ended the generations of community upkeep. No one had been left to care for them.

The trip was free mostly due to a grant and partly due to fundraisers like bake sales, which we had to commit to helping out with once a week for a semester.

The free part mattered because my parents wanted me to visit them, and if they couldn’t have that, they’d rather I travel with our church.

When Dad heard about the trip to Poland, he was frustrated with himself for not seeing earlier that I had a heart for service.

“We should have encouraged you to serve a full-time mission—given you a year or two before all that pressure to choose a college.”

Steph was going to Poland, too, surprisingly. There weren’t any free summer programs that were space-themed. And the Poland trip seemed to be half Jewish people and half non-Jews avoiding their families? I didn’t ask Steph what was wrong with hers.

I didn’t have to go to Poland. Sam put his mother on the phone so she could invite me to spend the whole summer with their family in Kansas. “Stay as long as you want,” she said. “We’d get a real kick out of meeting Sammy’s best friend!”

Sam looked embarrassed.

I brought him a hot chocolate later that afternoon, with a little bag of marshmallows to share, and said no thank you.

I’d been required to take a weekly extracurricular Holocaust class as part of the grant, and to read memoirs of survivors between sessions.

I said Poland was starting to feel bigger than avoiding my parents.

Sam asked if I was just excited to be with Steph.

“Why would you say that?”

“Come on, Della,” he said, but his tone was cautious. He was the only person, besides Steph, who knew what I had done with her. He had guessed the morning it happened, and I’d been too shocked and upset to correct him. I had my own guesses about Sam, but it didn’t feel right to bring that up.

“Fine. It’s kind of exciting being near her,” I said. “Even though, like, nothing would ever happen.”

“Duh?” he said. “It’s called sexual tension?”

I threw a marshmallow at him. He caught it in his mouth.

In June I went to Poland. I asked to switch seats with the rabbi who was our chaperone, so I could sit next to Steph on the plane.

Steph gave me a weird look as I buckled my seat belt, probably because even in Holocaust class I’d stayed on the other side of the room from her.

She put on a giant set of headphones and watched movies from takeoff to landing.

For weeks we worked beside each other in mostly silence, scrubbing moss and dirt and once even spray-painted swastikas from Hebrew-lettered tombstones.

Sometimes we had the help of local Polish teenagers who had never met Jewish people before, recruited by their high school teachers as part of a cultural exchange program.

Aaron, a junior theater major I’d first met at a frat party, would follow behind the rest of us and squint at the faded letters before transcribing them in a notebook.

His writing looked like a different language than the Hebrew letters on the stones, but Aaron said it was just cursive.

And then Aaron’s tattoo-covered girlfriend Helen would sit under a tree and type them back into print letters, which did look like the letters on the tombstones, and she’d upload the names and dates to an international online database.

This would help survivors, and the people who had and would come from survivors, to find their ancestors.

Every day I thought about these descendants, logging on to computers scattered across the world to learn the names of the towns they were maybe supposed to have lived in.

According to Helen, who was majoring in genocide, before the war there’d been Jews in Poland for over a thousand years.

Matthew’s family—my family—had only lived in Oklahoma since the Trail of Tears.

But where had they been before that—back East?

It was a feeling I turned over daily that summer—a life I was maybe supposed to have lived.

Over the course of this work, I backslid.

I started talking to Steph, alone, in a conversation that stretched across six small Polish towns.

On the last week of the trip, we went on a walk.

We heard people drinking and shouting just down the road, in the market square where, decades ago, they had rounded up the Jews.

In a field, in the shadow of a barn, I reached my hands out and pulled Steph into my face.

She gasped. She put her hand on my forehead and pushed me, gently, away. “ Jesus! Ericson! Are you out of your mind?”

I shifted on my feet like a child.

“We’re in Poland!”

I nodded, not understanding.

“Della. I wanted that to happen all year. Didn’t you realize?”

“I—”

“Oh my God, I thought you’d decided you were straight. But no, you were just waiting till Poland ? This is like, one of the worst places in Europe for you to stage your gay awakening.”

“Oops?” I said.

Steph laughed and shook her head. She looked past the barn at three men walking in the middle of the road. She took a step back. “I am begging you. Begging you ,” she said. “Try that again at a small liberal arts college.”

At the end of the trip we went to Auschwitz. I made the whole thing about me in my head.

I held Steph’s hand outside the visitors’ center restrooms and cried because I missed my parents, and I loved them, and I knew they wouldn’t want me the way I had turned out.

I was so afraid of losing them. I didn’t want to die, ever, for anyone ever to die, or for the world to end as Steph said it someday had to, and I didn’t want to think about all the Holocaust victims suffering in hell because they hadn’t accepted Jesus.

Aaron stepped out of the men’s restroom just then, looking appropriately somber, and I threw my hand to my face, faking a coughing fit while Steph patted me hard on the back.

I wiped my tears on my sleeve and kept my shit together the rest of the tour, only crying a little bit and for the right reasons, in the right places, when other people around me cried, too.

But in the privacy of my own body, standing before a pile of the shoes of children, I left my faith.