Page 51 of To the Moon and Back

My involvement was a dumb idea. In half a year, NASA would come to a decision on my candidacy.

Until then, I wasn’t allowed to update my CV, or even add references.

I had to stay out of trouble. If all went well, and I were chosen, I still wouldn’t be at Kayla’s protest. I’d be at Johnson Space Center in Houston, or maybe off training in some extreme location.

I’d read about missions in the wilderness, the ocean, and the Arctic Circle.

“Come on, Steph,” our mother said. “You can skip the workout to make time for your sister, can’t you? You know, a sibling is the one person in the world who knows you from childhood to death.”

Felicia looked up from her coloring page. “I don’t have any siblings. And I don’t want anyone to die. Elisi, how old are you?”

“Young. She had a baby in high school,” Jason said.

“Jason!” Kayla said. He shrugged. They’d had a baby in college.

“It’s not a secret,” our mother said. “And it’s not just me who will die. By the time you die, Felicia, we hope your parents will have been dead a long time.”

Jason looked wearily across the table. “Felicia, this is all a long way off. You’ll be very old, even older than your Elisi and your Tutu. And you don’t need a sibling; you’ll have your husband and kids.”

“Will she, now?” I said.

“I haven’t seen my brothers,” our mother said, “in… oh… maybe thirty-three years? Or my parents. Or my grandparents.” She spoke slowly, as if realizing it now. “Well. I’ve just got y’all.”

Kayla and I looked at each other, worried. Since when did our mother talk like this? Sure, she loved telling stories about our distant ancestors and the legacy they’d left behind. But the recent past was off-limits and always had been.

“What was your grandma like?” Felicia said.

Our mother looked surprised at the question. “Well…” she started. “My grandparents on my mother’s side were very poor. It was the Depression—”

“That’s when the stock market crashed,” Jason said to Felicia, who nodded seriously like she had been there.

“Yes. Like I said, they were poor. They took my mother to some distant cousins in Arkansas and left her in a barn. Then they went back to Oklahoma.”

“ What? ” said Felicia.

“Now that I think about it, she was around your age.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jason said under his breath.

Kayla nudged him to be quiet. “Say more, Ma.”

“My mother grew up and she married a soybean farmer, not Cherokee, and she spent our whole childhood talking about how our life was beneath her. We knew Greek and Latin , that kind of thing. While she herself had a sixth-grade education! She meant her ancestors, whenever she said we. ”

“You mean she talked about the seminary,” I said. Like you did.

There was a small accusation in my voice, which she didn’t pick up on. I couldn’t believe how her story had shifted. She had been just like her mother, so prideful. What had changed for her, in the time since I’d left home?

“Yes, the seminary,” she said. “But the Greek and Latin part came up a lot. Usually when our dad would hit her and leave the house to cool down. Then she’d—”

“When your dad would what ?” Kayla said. This was new information to both of us, but it wasn’t a shock to me. Unlike Kayla, I remembered Texas.

“Hit her,” she repeated, “and leave the house to calm down. And then—”

Jason waved a hand across the table. “Hannah, I’m so sorry—but should Felicia be hearing about domestic—”

Kayla shushed him, hard. She stared at our mother across the table, waiting.

“Okay. So.” Our mother cleared her throat. “When that happened, she’d sit us kids down and tell us who we came from. Indians in ball gowns, Indians with pianos, that sort of thing.”

“But why’d your dad hit your mom?” Felicia said.

“All this, when all you’d asked was what my granny was like!

” Our mother laughed at herself. The sound was forced, her smile tense.

Her old impulse to smooth things over. “I’ll tell you.

There was one time when my father kicked us out, and my mother drove us kids to Oklahoma. That’s when I met my granny.”

Kayla looked at me. Maybe for help? I shrugged.

“I remember the storytelling kicked up that summer, from both of them. They made sure we learned our history. My mother seemed very forgiving about having been left in a barn, or maybe just glad to have somewhere to go. I read. I ate well. It was lovely.”

“Huh. Then what?” Felicia said.

Kayla shook her head, guessing at what might come. She put an arm around her daughter.

“My father found us. My mother swung the door open all the way, like he was an old friend. I think my granny knew she wouldn’t see us again. She went straight to bed that afternoon and wouldn’t come out to say goodbye.”

Then, like an afterthought, she added, “That was in the 1970s. She’ll be dead by now.”

Felicia’s mouth hung open.

Our mother waited, maybe for something specific, but none of us knew what to say. She excused herself for the restroom. Kayla and I exchanged glances, a question. Neither of us followed her.

I wasn’t surprised by what I had learned.

It made sense to me that our messed-up family came from messed-up family.

Children could be left to raise themselves in barns; fathers could be left half-dead in cars.

All this to say nothing of the ground under their feet, the Earth alone and vulnerable in space.

Kayla looked confused, turning over pieces that didn’t fit. I realized, with annoyance, that this new information would only reinforce her interest in googling our father. She would want to know more than she should.

“Mom?” Felicia said. She sounded a little scared.

“Auntie Steph!” Jason said. He did a little drumroll on his daughter’s shoulders, and she relaxed back into his hands. “Tell me about this volcano drill.”

Jason had a stabilizing presence, a talent for subtle redirection. I thought of how he’d talk softly to the younger guys in college, calming them. This was probably most relevant to his time in Kosovo, where diffusing conflict had been life-or-death. But strangely, now it made me think of Brett.

“At this point,” I said, “Felicia knows more about the drill than I do.”

Felicia smiled faintly. She needed a distraction.

“Take it away?”

Felicia explained the drill I’d help run in the morning. The service part of my research fellowship was in zone 1—an area where the highest number of people would be killed in an eruption.

No town in the region had ever successfully planned an evacuation. It was like moving mountains, my supervisor said, ha ha ha, to get the government to authorize and fund a drill.

“So,” Felicia said, “helping people run away before Vesuvius explodes—”

“Erupts,” I said.

“—erupts, is like the same as Auntie Steph’s future job, which is getting a few humans onto Mars. That’s so they stay alive, when everybody else in the world gets burned up by an asteroid.”

“Oh, honey,” Kayla said. “Have you been having bad dreams?”

“That is not my job!” I said. “Even if I were an astronaut, even if I were chosen, that would not be my job!”

“Maika‘i, e ku’u kaikamahine,” Jason said, beaming at Felicia.

Recently he’d been learning short phrases in Hawaiian, especially praise.

Kayla smiled at this, though I knew it made her jealous.

She hadn’t been good enough at Cherokee to pass it on.

In the background of photos on Kayla’s Instagram page, there were small Hawaiian flashcards on the walls that I had never commented on.

“Osda,” our mother said in Cherokee, belatedly. She was back from the restroom with her lipstick reapplied, having collected herself. But her voice sounded tired, like sharing so much truth had taken something from her.

Felicia didn’t respond. She knew only a handful of basic Cherokee words, and I wasn’t sure that was one of them. She leaned on my arm. “Auntie, they’re gonna hire you. I know it. That’s gonna be your job.”

The night before, or rather very early that morning, a taxi driver had asked me what my job was.

After dropping off my family at their hotel I’d gone to La Grotta, a club in Ercolano where I sometimes went to pretend I wasn’t myself.

At La Grotta, I often lied about my life and let Italian women explain volcanoes to me.

Twice I’d had sex in the restroom, the painted wooden door clicking rhythmically against the lock.

I’d learned to do that in my twenties, to periodically have sex with rootless girls who couldn’t plan past next week.

Now, at thirty-three, it was starting to get old.

Sometimes, I’d see them again. It was a small town.

Someone who’d asked me to hit them in bed would later sell me socks in the open market or pass a cup of espresso across a counter.

Once I recognized a woman in an alley in the early morning, a baby strapped to her chest and two small children holding her hands.

Most of the time, they didn’t recognize me.

I told the taxi driver I was an astronomer and a geologist. Yes, yes, it’s extremely rare to be both. Yes, I went to school for a long time.

“So you’ll be here for the drill,” said the taxi driver, and I said yes, and he laughed.

“You are going to be disappointed,” he said.

“Disappointed?”

“People here…” he said. “You have to understand me. We live on the ruins of people who lived where we live, who died where we live. So, we laugh.”

“But if you’d cooperate—I mean, the evacuation plan could save thousands of lives in the long-term, if people would just—”

The driver stopped on the side of the road.

“Listen, bella,” he said, the meter ticking out its little paper behind him. “You know what happens if we try what you say? We let you do your drill, we think about it, we prepare. Then we wake up, we look around. We see we are walking on bones.”