Page 41 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH MISSION DAYS

Junior Spring

On the eighth day of the space shuttle Columbia ’s flight, the astronauts tested the ability of bacteria to attach to surfaces in microgravity.

The results could lend support to the panspermia theory, the idea that life had begun somewhere else.

That the earliest, simplest living organisms had been thrown against our planet on the backs of asteroids.

I was in shambles, still, in my constant missing of Della.

It had been eighty-nine days since we last kissed.

She turned twenty-one without me. I sometimes forgot meals.

When I went to visit the baby, and my sister forced me to shower and eat something before I was allowed to hold her, too much hair would collect at the drain.

Several times a week I’d stay up late and read about the Big Bang theory on the internet.

Or the panspermia theory. Or I’d check in on the Columbia shuttle as it orbited the Earth.

I’d see what experiments had been done that day.

I reminded myself that eventually I could be part of that, too. Maybe in space I’d discover something important about the origin of life, or the universe, and Della would understand what I’d been working toward? I didn’t think I’d ever loved anyone so much, or ever would.

On the fifth day of the space shuttle Columbia ’s flight, the astronauts studied microbial physiology. There was concern that bacteria, in space, might become resistant to antibiotics. The results would be relevant for astronauts on long-duration missions.

When I had told Della about this, back in October when she was still in love with me, I’d said the data would be of use on the first manned mission to Mars.

We didn’t have the science, or the funding, or the public support.

To the mission specialists on board Columbia , such a mission must have felt far away.

I told myself they were like the old man planting carob trees, who was asked if he’d live to see them bear fruit.

The carob trees came from a story from the Talmud, which my apparently religious thesis adviser passed on to me.

He’d tell it at least once a semester, when I was impatient and dismissive of the scientists who’d come before me.

“When I was born into this world, I found carob trees planted by my father and grandfather.” You plant the tree and you wait, quietly, as long as you can.

I had told Della I couldn’t wait to follow the Columbia mission, for January, when it would finally launch. “I hope they’re proud of their work coming with us to the next planet,” I said, “should we need to abandon this one.”

Della looked horrified. She said she was late to office hours with Lucy.

On the fourteenth day of the space shuttle Columbia ’s flight, everything stopped.

It was 11:38 a.m. on the anniversary of the Challenger disaster.

Orbiting the planet, experiments were paused and put away, the crew fell silent.

They hooked socked feet into grips on the floor and pulled their hair back with elastic bands.

They pushed their hands into their pockets, as still as is possible in space, as respectful. A moment of silence.

When I was a teenager and had heard of enough witnesses to the live coverage of the Challenger disaster to be some terrible version of jealous, I begged my mother to tell me if I had been one of them.

Had I seen it, maybe on one of the satellite stations set up for schools?

My mother, after years of questioning, finally told me.

In 1986 I was four years old and we lived in Dallas with my father. My father wanted to be at the shuttle launch, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He thought I’d like it, too. He was a person of extremes, my mother said, and would do anything to be loved after whatever he did to ruin things.

My father woke up very early and put me in his car.

My mother and sister were sleeping. He drove seventeen hours straight.

(This was my mother’s guess, after the fact, because he’d put me in a diaper.

I had graduated from them at that point, and on this trip wet myself many times over.) I got a rash on my neck from the seat belt, from sitting in the front when I wasn’t supposed to. So he unbuckled me.

My mother described this whole event to me as “a horrible lapse in judgment,” and said she was certain we wouldn’t have been let into the Kennedy Space Center.

She said we probably parked in a field somewhere; maybe we’d pulled off on the side of the highway.

When the Challenger exploded in the sky, there was no way of knowing if I had seen it.

She hoped not. If I couldn’t remember this, she said, or other things, hard things, from that time, then wasn’t that for the best?

When my father and I returned to Texas, my mother was sitting on the front stoop with my baby sister in her arms. Waiting. Eyes bloodshot, face white, half-convinced I was dead.

I looked up the driving time when I was in college, once there were websites for questions like that. Our trip—my kidnapping, however short-lived—would have taken at least three days. How dare she , I thought, not have called the police.