Page 49 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH SUPERNOVA

A supernova lets out more energy than our sun ever has, or will, in its lifetime. It’s a large explosion in the universe, a sudden burst of light.

In a Type II supernova, my favorite, a star runs out of fuel. Heavier elements accumulate inside of it—the heaviest at its core, with gradually lighter elements layering toward the surface. There’s a certain mass that the core will reach, which we call the Chandrasekhar limit.

When a star’s core reaches and surpasses the Chandrasekhar limit, it will implode.

The first recorded observation of a supernova came almost two thousand years ago, in 185 CE. It was visible to the naked eye for eight months, and described by Chinese astronomers as a “guest star.”

In 1054 CE, Chinese and Korean astronomers recorded another remnant of a supernova—the Crab Nebula.

A star’s explosion so bright that, for a full month, they could see it during the day.

I was taught in college that Native people recorded it, too, that there were cave paintings of the supernova found in the American Southwest. It was a popular story, based on a paper, which was based on two photos of one cave wall taken in 1955.

When the story was disproven, I was twenty-seven years old.

I was at a conference in Maryland, chosen partly for its proximity to my girlfriend’s childhood home.

I would meet her parents that night, in a window I had open now that both my college and my grad school advisers had bailed on me.

I imagined them getting drinks together anyway, commiserating over what a pain I was to work with.

At the conference, the man seated next to me raised his hand and called the whole thing depressing. How disappointing to tell his students that the cave paintings were just a head with a horn, or a knife, or a Hopi kachina.

Native people would have seen it, though, even if they hadn’t painted it.

They were still here, in the world. There was a strange new object in the sky.

And then there wasn’t. No explanation, no data, just the mystery of it.

I think of my ancestors, wary eyes on a foreign light. I would have been terrified.

I dated the physicist from Maryland longer than anyone since Della.

I hadn’t meant for it to happen. A real relationship, someone with the power to hold me down.

She was a postdoc at Berkeley. An intended one-night stand with the same need for time alone as me, the same acquaintances as me (to her they were friends), and the same devotion to her work.

She was like me in many ways, but with the gift of flexibility.

“Just two years on the job market,” she always said, “and if no one hires me, I’ll teach high school.

” She refused to fall into what she called “the hell of sunk-costs academia,” which to her meant moving constantly for a job few people could get.

The physicist pursued me so slowly, and so diligently, months passed before I knew I’d been caught.

By then, she had adjusted to my schedule.

We spent our days in our respective labs, before reuniting in the library.

We’d type into the evening, across from each other at a long glossy table till our fingers were sore and cold.

Then we’d jog the six blocks back to my apartment and reward ourselves with dinner and sex.

Once, in the loose and extravagant way I sometimes talked in bed, I told her that I had changed. That she had changed me. “I used to think I was incapable of love,” I said like an idiot.

The physicist selected a ring with an emerald, lab-grown, and I bought it with my stipend.

For months I carried it in the large white pocket of my lab coat and touched it throughout the day.

When Prop 8 passed, and I’d missed the brief window in which our wedding would have been real, the physicist said it hadn’t been my fault.

We’d get a domestic partnership, she said, and no one could stop her from calling it a marriage.

While I was pacing alone in the lab one evening—late to meet the physicist for our second anniversary, ring box sweaty in my palm as I practiced my speech—my colleagues Alicia Soderberg and Edo Berger made an important scientific discovery.

They caught a supernova in the act of exploding, using data from NASA’s Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission X-ray space telescope. No one had ever done that before.

I, too, had access to data from NASA’s Gamma-Ray Burst Mission X-ray space telescope, data that I ignored, data that was making its way across the fucking monitor four feet behind my fucking back as I practiced (practiced!) getting in a half-kneel and pulling out the ring box in one smooth fucking gesture.

Alicia and Edo alerted teams around the world.

The Hubble Space Telescope in low Earth orbit, the Gemini South telescope in Chile, the Lick Observatory in California, the Keck I telescope in Hawai’i—all of them moved to record the event.

Because of Alicia and Edo—who were in love, by the way, and engaged to be straight-people real-married, and watching the supernova together over dinner—we would forever know what X-ray pattern to look for.

Now, because of Alicia and Edo, hundreds of supernovae would be discovered annually, exactly at the moment of their explosion.

I didn’t know that yet. I only knew I was late.

I ran several blocks to the restaurant in a wrinkled and sweaty blazer, my lab coat stuffed into the bottom of my backpack.

The physicist stood up to kiss me. She wore a new black dress with dozens of tiny pleats at the waist, the neckline plunging to meet it.

I wanted so badly to run my finger along the hem, to follow it down from the neck to its end.

I wanted to skip dinner, take her home, and hold up her breasts in my hands.

Her wineglass, mostly empty by the time I’d arrived, glowed yellow under rows of string lights.

Like she’d caught the stars in the bowl of her glass.

The physicist didn’t say I’d made her wait, though I had. She had a small Star Trek paperback with her, clearly secondhand, which she tucked carefully into a soft leather clutch.

She said she’d been offered a job at Yale. She was leaving. I did not ask her to marry me. I found out about the supernova four hours after it happened, on space.com.

The physicist moved out. I spent two months of that winter in bed.

I let my phone die and didn’t charge it. I ate crackers and peanut butter, only crackers and peanut butter, alone in a room with towels duct-taped over the windows. I put the engagement ring on my tongue and spit it out and threw it in the air and caught it. I slept.

My PhD adviser found my sister’s Facebook account online. She left a comment on a recent selfie Kayla had posted. My adviser meant well—she always meant well—but we frustrated each other. The selfie she chose to comment under had six hundred likes.

The comment said she hadn’t seen me in seven weeks, that no one in the department had, and that she was concerned. It said (for the world and theoretically NASA to see) that I could be “erratic.” A word Kayla would needlessly repeat to me, and which I would never forget.

Kayla wrote down my adviser’s phone number, and swiftly deleted the comment.

Within six hours she was on a plane from Boston to California, leaving Jason—a third-year-associate—to scramble for twelve-hour days of childcare. Kayla found me where the physicist had left me, back in January—in bed, dark-eyed and dangerously underweight.

“Oh, Steph.”

I didn’t move.

“Steph, oh my God, what happened.” She stood at the door, near tears.

“Alicia Soderberg saw the birth of a supernova,” I croaked.

I realized this was a ridiculous thing to say, that the whole situation was ridiculous. I started to laugh.

My sister did, too, lightly, humoring me—but then she stepped carefully into the room. She looked around at it, at me. She sniffed and made a new sound like oh , then a crack in her voice.

“It’s okay,” she said, running her eyes slowly from ceiling to floor. “Wait. Wait. I’ll be right there.”

My sister dropped her duffel bag outside the door. She tore the towels from the windows and opened them. A shock of cold air.

She turned on every light she could find, plugged in the electric kettle, and proceeded to clean my entire apartment while I watched. Two months of laundry and two months of dishes. I heard the vacuum and then the swish of the mop in its bucket. From the bathroom came the sharp smell of bleach.

Finally, Kayla took off her shoes. She crossed the room to my bed.

My sheets were still dirty. I was dirty. Kayla fell onto the mattress and held the mess of me against her body. She cried so quietly I only knew it from the wet on my shoulder.

In the shower she scrubbed my skin. She was businesslike somehow, even though she was wearing my swim trunks and sports bra. I was naked. I held my face to the tile wall. I couldn’t look at myself, at my body and what I had done to it.

Kayla filled my kitchen with groceries. Pre-cooked meals. Vegetables, washed and cut and put away in new glass containers. From a chair she had placed by the window I made the faintest of jokes about my hard-won abs, how easily they’d disappeared, and she sucked in a breath. “Steph, no ,” she said.

I understood I’d again disappointed her. “The abs were a project for space,” I said.

“You need another project,” she said. “A fresh start.”

“Huh?”

“Think about it. Space has never been good to you.”

I sat up in my chair, ready to fight her on this, but I was so tired. I lay my head on the windowsill. Outside, on the sidewalk, a man in a big fleece jacket carried a toddler in a little fleece jacket uphill in some kind of structured hiking backpack. They disappeared into the fog.

In the morning we sat on the roof of my building under freshly laundered blankets, our faces angled up toward the sun.

My sister took the blue knit hat from her head and put it on mine.

She folded it over my ears. We drank coffee she’d made with the new French press she’d bought me—ceramic, bright yellow, what small joy—and I decided to try again.

Holding me gently at the elbow, Kayla walked me to a salon.

I got a buzzcut for the first time, and wished I had gay friends (or friends in general) to make a big deal out of it.

Kayla said, “Looks good.” Then she took me to a bakery, where a warm croissant in wax paper was pressed into my hand.

Then to the low gray building of a psychologist. Outside it, on a bench, Kayla and I screamed at each other.

“Oh my God, Steph, you have to go !” she said.

“I literally cannot ,” I said.

“I’ll pay for it! I’ll pay for all of it! However many sessions this lady says it fucking takes!”

“Stop trying to fix me with Jason’s money!”

“How many times must I explain shared assets to you? Domestic labor is labor ! Motherhood is work !”

“I don’t fucking care that you don’t have a job !”

Kayla looked ready to throw me to the ground.

I held up a hand and lowered my voice. “No one’s asked you to pay for this, and I’m not going. Spend it on Felicia.”

“It’s better for me to buy you help”—Kayla took a long, labored breath—“than to fly cross-country the next time you want to kill yourself.”

“I didn’t want to kill myself!”

An elderly couple passed us with a dog. Kayla turned away from me to wipe at her cheek. I’d made her cry. “You know who Mom said wouldn’t get help?”

When I, someday, applied to NASA, as one of maybe twelve thousand applicants, there would be a psychosocial evaluation.

I knew this. I was in the habit, after each annual physical, of checking my body and mind against the pdf of disqualifying illnesses for astronauts.

One of them, on page forty-four: “a presence or history of depressive disorders.” On the bench outside the psychologist’s office, carefully, I explained this to Kayla.

She groaned. She closed her eyes, leaned back, and stayed that way for several seconds.

“Twelve thousand applicants?” she said.

I nodded.

“And when is the next, like, hiring round for astronauts?”

“The last one was in 2004. No one knows when the next one will be.”

“Huh.”

Kayla clearly didn’t think I’d make it. Still, she dropped the issue of therapy.

“At least tell me why you broke up,” she said.

Kayla had met the physicist—once, on a layover—and declared her “good” for me.

She and my mother had been visibly relieved at the very idea of the physicist, with her willingness to take me in and deal with me.

I’d felt like the troubled family dog, finally rehomed.

“She didn’t want to marry me,” I said.

“Bullshit,” Kayla said. “She picked out the ring she wanted. You told me that.”

Kayla was right about the physicist. In the end, she’d been the one to propose that night.

Not with a romantic speech or a ring, but with a just and thoughtful compromise.

After graduation, she said, I would follow her to Yale.

Gay marriage was newly legal in Connecticut.

If I were actually accepted as an astronaut candidate someday (and it killed me, the truth in that word— actually ), she promised to leave her position.

No matter what, even if she were only a year out from tenure.

Even if she had tenure, or a zillion-dollar lab in her name.

She promised to move to Houston, even if she’d never work again.

She had offered to put all this in writing.

In a legal contract, even. A prenup! This last part she added in tears later that night, in a perfect half-kneel in our apartment.

She was shirtless, though we’d already had sex the last time without knowing it.

She was just comfortable like that. She had felt at home with me.

“Kayla,” I said, “not everyone wants your life! I can’t be in a relationship, and I can’t go to therapy. I can’t even turn around for five minutes without missing the discovery of a lifetime.”

My sister stood. She looked exhausted. She was realizing, maybe, what I couldn’t say.

This was not about the physicist. For nine weeks now, since I’d left the physicist sobbing on the floor, I had imagined myself heartbroken. The kind of person who could be heartbroken.

But I wasn’t. After brushing my teeth that night, on my way to bed for weeks, I’d stepped over her body as she sobbed on the floor. I was the kind of person who destroyed herself over missed data from an X-ray space telescope. Over a supernova, the death of a star.