Page 48 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH WHERE HAS THE TREE GONE, THAT LOCKED EARTH TO THE SKY?

Della waited for me outside the restaurant, shivering in her short dress and heels.

It was softly raining, still cold in May.

Had she dressed like this, sleeveless even, to prove something to her parents?

Had she chosen me for the same reason? And if so, why the silver-and-green ring back on her finger? Why the gold cross?

I took her hand. She let me. A tiny burst of hope.

Della wrapped her arms around my waist. I kissed the back of her head, where her hair fell in waves from the undone braids. We walked down the street and across the quad. Della recited her plans for us, as she had on many nights before.

“We’ll have four or five,” Della said, speaking into my shirt. “Stick ’em all in a room at first, bunk beds, since we’ll be starving scientists for a while. You take me on a date every week—no, twice a week—so we don’t kill each other.”

Her voice was muffled. I pressed my palm against her cheek to warm it, but she kept talking. “If we work in Tulsa I could drive the kids to Tahlequah for the Cherokee language preschool they’re opening—is that crazy? Or allowed? I know you’d have to be in Houston, eventually, but—”

“Come here, Dells,” I said.

She giggled, stumbling a little. She’d had no alcohol at dinner.

It was a childlike mode she sometimes liked to step into: in bed at the end of a long day, or when she was desperately sad.

I held her by the shoulders and pulled her to the side, out of the grass, positioning her feet over the grate outside the library.

Della started to say something, but I shook my head. I held her hands and pressed my forehead to hers. “Can we be quiet? Is that okay? Give it a minute.”

I hadn’t told anyone about the grate in the nearly four years since I’d found it.

I had needed it to be mine; a private warmth in a cold place where, in those moments, no one could track me down.

I stood with Della and felt the warmth of her breath in the space between us, the heat from the library blowing softly up our legs. She smiled with her eyes closed.

“Della,” I said, and then lost my nerve.

“Baby,” I whispered, though I had never called her that. I’d been scared she’d laugh at me.

Della gave a soft hum.

“Did your parents stop talking to you?”

She nodded, eyes still closed, forehead bumping against my nose. “But then they started again,” she said matter-of-factly.

“I wish you’d told me.”

“No,” she said, her voice calm. She opened her eyes and took a step back. “It was my private business to figure out with them, which I did. You wouldn’t get it, and you had other things going on.”

“Other things like what, my senior thesis? You think I was too busy like, being interested in space to talk about your parents disowning you?”

“Oh my God, Steph, they didn’t disown me! They came all the way here to watch me graduate.”

“ Oh ,” I said, taken aback. I had forgotten how she loved. She held on for dear life.

I tried again. “I’m sorry you felt like you couldn’t tell me. All that time you must’ve felt—”

What was I trying to say? That she was lonely, lonelier than I had understood?

And yet—she had told my mother she was banned from home. She had told my sister, and even her parents, about her acceptance to PhD programs. What had I done—who had I become—for her to keep the worst and the best of her life from me?

“You don’t have to come to Russia,” I said. “I wouldn’t have even suggested it if I’d known you had a better offer! We can do long-distance, or—I don’t know. I want you to do what’s best for you.”

“You think you know what’s best for me?”

“I think we’re at an age where we can’t compromise on our lives. Not yet.”

She glared at me.

I reached for something she could hold. “I mean, my mom? Her life turned out, like, the opposite of your mom’s, even though they both went all-in on a man when they were young. They both made sacrifices, like I guess you’re trying to do here, but… for my mom it didn’t work out.”

“You’re not gonna hit me, are you?”

Fuck.

I had never told her, or anyone. Had my mother? Had Kayla?

I swung my body away from her and sucked in the cold air. Of course I didn’t want to hit her. I wanted to run.

It occurred to me that the bar, for Della, was so low.

I turned back to face her.

“I didn’t want this,” Della said, gesturing at the grate between us. “This whole conversation! It’s not your life. I knew if I shared stuff, you’d try to tell me what to do.”

“I hope you can learn the difference,” I said evenly, “between the National Guard at gunpoint and like, talking through decisions with people who love you.”

“That’s so unkind. And anyway, I told them no.”

“Told who?”

“The PhD programs,” she said. “Last month.”

“You did what ?”

“We have Moscow.”

Not exactly, I thought. I had Moscow.

Della had told me at the end of March, after all the rejections had supposedly come in, that she wanted a gap year. She wanted it with me. How easily I’d let myself believe in her failure.

“And then what, Della? We should figure out whatever you need, to get your career set up. We can talk to Lucy; maybe she’d use her network to help you find something last-minute, and then we could—”

Della pulled away from me. I felt the cold air at the edge of the grate cut through the sleeve of my oxford shirt.

Della was still wearing my sport coat, still glittering blue waves in the space between the lapels.

I wanted to go back to earlier that evening and who I’d been then—willfully ignorant, and excited to unzip a dress.

“I can’t believe this.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re going to leave me.”

I held my palms open. “I won’t. I wouldn’t—”

“Don’t tell me what to do, and don’t act like you’ve got any clue what’s best for me, and don’t try to decide—”

“Okay, okay,” I said. I stepped off the grate and into the cold. Spikes of wet grass scratched my ankles. “Della, I know, it’s your choice. I love you. I’m sorry.”

“I’m going with you to Russia. I get to choose.”

“I know,” I said. I pulled her close. I thought of Matthew and her mother and her father, my mother and my sister and myself, everyone who’d broken her trust. All she had asked for, over and over, was to choose her life. Couldn’t I understand that?

“I know,” I said into her neck. “You’re okay.”

I loved her. I thought I had before, but only then did I know it completely. When I clearly saw myself, and what I was capable of. I wanted so much for her.

I touched my lips to her forehead. I squeezed my eyes shut and quieted an aching part of me. A knowing part. We could have children, and breakfast. A small apartment. A kitchen with a window.

I struggled with the key to the nassie house, while Della laughed and tried to loosen my collar and kiss me down my shoulder.

Somewhere in the last half hour, it was like dinner had never happened.

Her parents had sent her a text message.

They were at their hotel. They were sorry.

They couldn’t wait to see her in her cap and gown.

The kitchen was brightly lit and warm, crowded with people I felt a part of. Della shot her hands up over her head and screamed, like she hadn’t seen our friends in many years. “SAM!” she said, jumping into his arms. “You can’t go to Oxford! The Brits are trying to tear us apart !”

I stepped back, hands out in surrender. “She’s been stuck on this most of the walk home. Apparently, we’re all supposed to stay here, in undergraduate housing, forever?”

Sam swung her around once and gently put her down. “Della! No! That’s the daftest bloody thing you’ve ever said!”

Jess rolled her eyes. “Sam is practicing what he believes is British. Because he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and he’s going to Oxford. Did you know he’s a Rhodes Scholar, one of maybe forty in the country?”

“No, I hadn’t heard. Has he ever mentioned it?” April said.

“One of thirty-two ,” Sam corrected, smiling.

“What? Oh my God!” Sandra said. “If only you’d been on, like, the local news.”

He had been. Della laughed. Somewhere between the grate and the house, she had decided to be happy.

“All right, people, lay off,” I said. “The Rhodes is, you know, very cool.”

Sam patted me on the back, harder than needed. “Good on you, mate.”

Jess thrust a stovetop-roasted marshmallow in my face. “Eat this!”

We would never see each other again, or never again all at once.

I wanted to stay in this moment. A dozen friends in the kitchen finding any excuse to stand close, making both pancakes and fry bread, April spraying whipped cream into open mouths while her visiting little cousins sat quietly suffering in the corner on the floor.

Sandra and Nick dancing with a potato balanced between their foreheads, Della riding piggy-back on Jess, then the two of them roasting anything they could find on chopsticks over the electric burner.

This version of Della that was all weirdness and joy and still pausing to smile across the room at me. Still radiantly, undeservedly mine.

Something I tried not to think about:

When the space shuttle Columbia fell to pieces in the sky, and Della’s footsteps pounded down the basement stairs—to find me, to comfort me and choose me—I already knew I would hurt her.

Not yet, but someday. One moment I had wanted a life with her. Then reentry, a penetrated heat shield, the breaking of a shuttle over Texas and Louisiana. Della and I were beginning again, and also we were ending, in the last minutes before she would choose me at all.

Part of it was that I could die in space. I could leave her so suddenly, and our children. I could change the shape of her life in an instant. She had lost people before.

But also, I could hurt her. I had hurt her. Surely I would again. I would never deserve what Della was willing to give me, because Della was willing to give me herself.

I had a clear idea now, after Naugatuck Oyster Bar, of what it would cost her to stay with me. Unexpectedly, I thought about the Cherokee language. I’d forgotten so much.

I remembered the phrase, gvgeyui, how to love her meant to be stingy with her. To love her so much I wouldn’t let anyone use her up. That meant not even me. I had to take care of Della, if Della wouldn’t take care of herself.

I was the first to head upstairs. “Keep having fun,” I told Della. “I should feed Walela.”

I paused in the hall outside the kitchen. I kissed her on the cheek—serious, lingering. “I love you,” I said.

Della took a beer from the fridge. Sam gave me a funny look and led her back to the kitchen table.

Walela waited in a terrarium on our dresser.

My dresser. Over time his home had grown crowded with Kayla’s art projects, mini habitats made of clay and Popsicle sticks.

She still mailed them to us from Boston sometimes, and asked us to send back photos for her blog.

A lizard tipi, a lizard hogan, a lizard longhouse made of tiny sticks hot-glued together.

His tail had grown back, but Della said it was only cartilage.

I dropped a live cricket a few inches from Walela. He peeked out of his white felt tipi. He froze, waiting.

He pounced.

I began to gather Della’s things, to fold them and stack them in better order than I’d found them.

I carried everything across the hall, to the room the college had considered to be hers.

I put clean sheets on her bed and a pillow in a pillowcase, and laid out her red Pendleton blanket.

I turned it down at the corner. Della hadn’t slept there in at least a year.

I filled her steamer with water and placed it, unplugged, on a wooden stool by the outlet.

I hung her garment bag with her graduation clothes over the closet door, everything she’d been so proud and excited to wear.

The cream-colored trade shirt. The wool wrap skirt she’d sewn from a pattern online.

The moccasins she’d carried in her backpack for months, beading just one or two rows a day.

A woven belt she had ordered over the phone, from the gift shop at the museum back home.

I would not cry. I hurried back across the hall and closed my door. I sat straight-backed on the edge of my mattress and waited for Della to see what I had done.