Page 29 of To the Moon and Back

“I’m sorry I made you feel like this was a game. I told you I’m not as experienced as I seem, and…” She turned back to a whisper. “Well, I think I could get better? Like if I were a girlfriend, officially, I think I could be a good one?”

“ One thing , Steph,” I said. She was still talking about herself. It was hard to be firm with her, and I almost never tried.

“Okay. Sorry. Here’s something—You left home a little after I got there.”

Home and there meant Oklahoma.

Steph continued. “But the thing is, I remember you. We’d just moved; it was a crazy time for my family—” She stopped herself, took a breath.

“And anyway, the tribe had a fundraiser for your family. A cookout? I was shy, but I saw you. You ran around in the grass with my little sister and a bunch of other kids, till my mother took us home.”

I smiled. I ran my finger along the edge of the terrarium between us.

I didn’t have that memory, but I wanted to. If I went back to Oklahoma and Matthew didn’t care, Steph would still be happy to see me.

I felt the warmth of her body in the dim light beside me. She was a window, a way back to a place I had lost.

A female cuckoo bird will lay eggs in the nest of some other mother, so some other mother will care for her young.

After the female cuckoo is gone, the cuckoo hatchlings drop the other mother’s eggs from her nest. The cuckoo hatchlings, as the survivors, are the sole focus of the surrogate’s parental energy.

My own adoption was desperately wanted, with medical bills and paperwork and lawyers. And if my biological mother did let me go and move on, if she didn’t think I was worth any great investment in parental energy, did it matter? With all the many pulls on my heart, I told myself it could not.

On the couch in the basement of the nassie house, Steph sat beside me. The plane flew into the second tower.

They played it over and over again. We fought about changing the channel. We changed the channel, but it was everywhere.

The day passed. Our friends joined us. Sam put his arm around my shoulder. Steph stared at him, unhappy over the wrong thing, and then the news zoomed in on the face of a firefighter. His eyes tracked downward as a person fell to the ground. Steph left to call her sister.

On ABC, Peter Jennings looked like he’d been crying. He said he’d just checked in with his children, and that they were very stressed. “If you’re a parent and you’ve got a kid in some other part of the country, call ’em up.”

Dad called me long-distance from Utah. I left the basement and took my cell phone outside.

I sat in the grass, in the sunlight, while he told me that everything would be okay.

He said he had missed me like crazy over the summer, and hoped I’d come home for Christmas.

He told me not to be scared. He said I was the light of his life.

Kin selection means doing what it takes for your genetic material to survive. Survival means being passed on.

According to kin selection, tadpoles are more likely to eat each other when they’re third or fourth cousins than when they’re siblings or first cousins.

Red squirrel mothers will adopt related, but not unrelated, orphaned pups.

Matthew has a biological need to take care of me and see me be safe in this world.

And yet, in the brief hours I thought the world would end, I wanted nothing more than to bury my face in Dad’s thick-sweatered shoulder. I knew no safer place.

Many hours after the second tower fell, Sandra said, “Sorry if this is weird. But I ordered pizza? We still have to eat?”

The pizza was late, and cold. But in a fit of generosity, Sandra had ordered enough for everyone.

It was delivered by an old man in a gray sport coat.

He owned the restaurant. “Oh, I sent them home,” he said, when Sandra asked about the high school kids who did deliveries.

“Just in case,” he added. He looked up at the sky, for what couldn’t have been his first time that day.

Back on the couch, Steph slid closer to me. I felt her arm against my arm, the warmth, the weight. I didn’t move.

After dark, Jason came over from his dorm. He was the only nassie who hadn’t spent the day in the basement. He turned off the television and told us to go to bed.

“What about war?” said a freshman boy. “They could draft all the guys here.”

Sam made a sound I couldn’t interpret. Annoyance? Exhaustion? He stood up and stomped up the stairs.

“It doesn’t work like that,” said Jason. “Go to bed.”

Later I went to Steph’s room, without the telescope. I didn’t knock. She sat alone on her bed, doing nothing, looking for something outside her window. I’d rarely seen her without a textbook within reach, or a binder. She looked scared.

“We’re together now,” I said. “Officially, publicly, all of it.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

“I’m going to tell my mom and dad.”

Steph nodded. I didn’t think she understood what a big deal that was, because she didn’t have any follow-up questions. She didn’t even seem surprised. But that was okay. People were dying in the rubble, buried, and would be for days. We did not need to talk about my parents.

“If that happens again,” I said, “you can put your arm around me. People will deal.”

Steph looked terrified.

I shouldn’t have said it could happen again. I didn’t mean that. We’d seen images on TV that we shouldn’t have seen, that we would never forget. No one had been there to stop us, to protect us.

I ached for my parents.

“Come here,” I said.

I got into Steph’s bed and pulled her in beside me. I took off my shirt and put her head on my chest. I wrapped her in my arms. We slept like that, my hands in her hair.