Page 52 of To the Moon and Back

In the restaurant, the server returned to our table. Food! Finally! We tore into it. The server stood behind my chair. Looking down at me, she traced the back of my neck with the tip of a finger.

“What else can I do for you?” she asked in Italian. It was coming back to me—the tight jeans, the high heels, the way she’d pushed me off her as she came.

Jason ordered a piece of cake, even as Kayla and I looked at him like, Why are you extending this nightmare? I shouldn’t have been surprised. Jason liked to tell his clients to “get comfortable with discomfort.”

“YOLO,” Felicia sang and ordered a triple sundae.

I smiled sheepishly at the server and shrugged my shoulders like, Wow, Americans, am I right? She looked at me for a moment, ripped half a page from her notepad, and handed it to me. A phone number.

She went back to the kitchen. The double doors swung closed.

Jason said, “All right, all right !” We high-fived. My mother adjusted her napkin-tablecloth at the corner with two fingers. Kayla snorted, and Felicia said, “What’s it say?”

“That’s not for Steph to share with us,” our mother said. She straightened her fork in its place.

“ It’s a phone number ,” I said in a stage-whisper. “ It means she thinks I’m cute. ” I gave Felicia a little bow.

“ Cool ,” Felicia whispered. All she seemed to want, increasingly it seemed, was for people to tell her things.

“That’s enough, Steph,” our mother said, still looking down.

There was an edge in her voice, but I knew her well enough to know it wasn’t (at least, it wasn’t only) that the server was a woman.

It was that the server seemed fun and unserious, a reminder of the kinds of partnership I’d given up on.

If it weren’t for outer space, my mother was convinced I’d be happy by now.

Maybe even married. If it weren’t for outer space, I wanted to say, there’d be no context for me.

Jason argued quietly with Kayla about the use of her phone during family dinner. Kayla said it was for her job. Jason said he didn’t bring couples in arbitration to family dinner, and I didn’t bring moon rocks. “Well, sure. But Steph isn’t an astronaut!” Kayla said.

“Cheap shot,” I said.

Kayla put her phone down, sighed, and stared across the room.

I followed her gaze. The server seemed to be flirting with half the restaurant.

She was good at what she did—a chair pushed in for a little girl, a laughing toss of her hair beside an old man seated at the head of a table.

Her hips were always moving, her chest pressed forward.

Her skirt, shorter than her apron, grazed her thighs.

She seemed, in my imagined idea of her, at ease—in this body in this job in this town crouched under a volcano.

It hit me then that the strangeness of her world wasn’t the sexiness of it.

Or her country, language, family, or job.

It was the acceptance. I imagined her growing up here, staying here, dying here—what Tahlequah could have been for me—and I imagined her content. As if I knew anything about her life.

I wondered if I could do it. Any day now, or at least any month, I’d get an answer from NASA. A door opened or closed. Could I feel at home if this were all there was? Not just in Oklahoma, but on Earth itself?

It was absurd, I realized, that I didn’t have a backup plan.

I came home late that night (after, admittedly, La Grotta) to many voice messages. They were all from my sister.

Kayla said Felicia had run away. She’d been sharing a hotel room with her grandmother, who was asleep and didn’t notice her absence till almost midnight.

Jason left immediately for the police station. Kayla waited in the hotel lobby, filling up the voicemail on my cell. “I have a feeling she went up there,” she said. “Don’t come here. Stay there. Call me if you see her on your fucking volcano, and for God’s sake, charge your phone.”

I found Felicia at the summit, standing over the crater. It was the first place I looked for her, near the observatory where I lived with six other geologists. I’d told her, maybe unwisely, that this was where I went to think.

A plume of steam blew silently up from the side, concealing her slightly. She looked like a person from another world, small but still. The shape of her flickered behind the steam, so she was there and not there and there. I ran to her.

“You could die out here!”

“Don’t be dramatic, Auntie,” Felicia said.

“You could get very, very cold out here.”

“Better. I couldn’t sleep, so I hailed a taxi. It took me halfway, and then I walked.”

“In the dark?”

“I’m fine.” Felicia leaned over the metal barrier. She wore hiking boots and a puffy winter coat, unzipped. The edge of her bathrobe blew over her knees in the wind, exposing cartoon-stamped pajama pants.

There were no stadium lights over the volcano, no streetlights or taillights. The sky was lit with stars, in a way that once might have shocked me. My niece’s face was bright in moonlight, her shoulders dusted in snow. I pulled her into me.

“I said I’m fine, Auntie,” Felicia said. Her voice was muffled against my coat. “Seriously, let me outta here!”

I stepped back, still holding her by the shoulders. “You’re standing over a volcano in the middle of the night. What am I supposed to think?”

She looked at me like she was ancient, like she couldn’t believe she had to deal with this. “You’re supposed to think I wanted some time alone?” she said. “There doesn’t have to be something wrong with me for me to want some time alone.”

I watched her, shivering over the edge of the volcano’s rim, her arms crossed tight over her chest. Where had she heard there was something wrong with her?

Felicia was twelve and I was thirty-three, and I hadn’t seen her in far too long. I had let myself miss years, and only remembered her as shy. Now, though, she seemed almost comfortable. Like she was on her way there. I was impressed.

Every four hours of every day, a timer dinged on my phone and I checked for an email from NASA. With every sound of the timer I was a child again, waiting for Exeter, watching my mother carry water to the mailman.

“It’s not gonna blow, is it?” Felicia pointed down into the crater, a drop of steep rock without the rolling pool of lava she’d been expecting. Everyone expects it. As geologists, we’re in the business of letting them down.

“You see that?” I pointed to a fissure in the rock, a hundred meters below us. Steam rose from it.

“That’s it?”

“That’s the part for us, yes. Everything else is hidden underneath, like magma.”

She didn’t ask what type of magma, though I’d hoped she would. We were quiet. It was cold. Who knew how long she’d been out there?

I ran my arm up and down her shoulder, pulling her against my side. “We’ve gotta go call your mom,” I said. “She’ll have a heart attack.”

I put my gloves on her hands and picked gently at the fleece material, guiding her fingers through. I put my hat on her head, the blue knit one her mother had given me in San Francisco, in a story Felicia didn’t need to know.

She looked up at the sky. “I wanna come with you tomorrow,” she said, “for the evacuation drill.”

I imagined Felicia getting sick, getting frostbite, getting the tip of her nose amputated in the little hospital at the base of the volcano. Kayla saying, Why didn’t you call me, why’d you let your phone die, why’d you let her stand out there in the snow? What is wrong with you?

How unwomanly I’d built myself, uncaring maybe, shaping myself to slip unobtrusively through the men in my field.

Some of it was overkill—the wide cargo pants and orange fleece vests, the decision to laugh at a colleague’s crass joke.

I knew there were women who fought for the right to avoid what I’d done.

I wasn’t the first or the only. Sally Ride had passed two years before, the first American woman in space.

Only in her obituary did we learn she was gay.

I was out at work, but quietly. I knew the way I dressed and acted confused some people, in a way that didn’t bother me. I wasn’t hiding. I just wasn’t sharing, either.

Felicia pulled on the sleeve of my coat. “You should come live with us,” she said.

“Ha! I live here !” I pointed down the path, toward the observatory.

“You have a fellowship here. Before that you were in Japan, and before that California, and before that you were at college when I was being born. Also—no offense?—my mom says it’s one in a million you’ll be an astronaut.”

“Whoa, there! Kid!” I put on an exaggerated Russian accent, like she and her mother hadn’t just hurt my feelings. “How do you forget my time in Russia?”

“You’re crazy,” Felicia said. “I never wanna have to move again.”

Felicia had been eight when her family moved to Hawai’i.

Kayla wrote many long Instagram captions, linked to even longer blog posts, about how they’d wanted to center their indigenous values over the big money Jason was up for as a future partner in Boston.

(The move happened very suddenly, and at the time I worried it meant trouble in their marriage.

Like how people will buy a house or have a baby, as a Hail Mary after things take a turn?

But Kayla never told me anything was amiss, and five years passed.

I decided I was wrong. I needed more examples, better examples, than my father and Brett.)

After the move, Kayla had rebranded from urban Indian to homelands Indian—not her homelands, but Jason’s.

Felicia had, by all accounts, slipped seamlessly into the Hawaiian language school.

It was a perfect fit until, recently, it wasn’t.

She’d suddenly lost her large group of friends and replaced them with two girls with nose rings.

That was how Kayla had described it over the phone, just a week before coming to Italy. “I think she’s gay,” she’d said. “Maybe you could talk to her?”

“I’m not going to ask her if she’s gay ,” I’d said. “Also, what’s the evidence?”

“The nose-ring girls! They’re pretty young to have nose rings. I think they’re gay, too.”

Beside me, Felicia crossed her arms. She seemed cold, but wasn’t ready to admit it.

“You sure you want to stay where you are?” I said. “No moving, ever again?”

“Yeah,” she said, suspicion in her voice. “That’s what I said.”

“There’s a chance you’ll change your mind someday.” I laughed, then regretted it.

She looked at me stone-faced, tight-lipped, like she was too old and too tired to be laughed at.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Felicia shook her head. “We’ve got volcanoes, and universities, and three huge telescopes already on Mauna Kea, even if I don’t really think they should be there… I bet there’s more jobs for you in Hawai’i than most other places. And there’s us.”

“I’ll visit more,” I said.

“I think my mom needs you?”

“Your mom is superhuman.”

“No.” She sounded so much older now. “Mom’s having a hard time. She won’t talk about it, and she tries to look like she’s fine. You should come help her.”

“What kind of hard time?”

Maybe this was about Jason, or her inexplicable curiosity around our father.

Maybe her internet job was as unbearable as it seemed?

She’d done a full one-eighty from her childhood self, a girl I remembered as almost too confident.

I thought her online platform, despite its calls for radical self-love in Indigenous girls and women, had made her kind of insecure.

“I just said she won’t talk about it!” Felicia said. “Nobody tells me shit-all about jack-shit.”

I didn’t laugh. Felicia had a whole world in her, even if she hadn’t learned how to be careful with it. She had taxied herself up a volcano in the night.

“I wish we could rappel down,” Felicia said. She stared into the crater, which was only black.

“We can’t.”

“I know . I’m not dumb.”

I needed to take Felicia inside. To call her mother and say she was safe.

I never told my mother I was gay. Not explicitly. I told my sister over winter break of sophomore year that I was dating Della, and asked her to pass the message along. “I don’t want to talk about it as long as I live,” I said, “but Mom should probably be aware.”

Kayla threw her arms around me. She pulled a few yards of rainbow chevron fabric out of a drawer—she’d apparently been waiting for this announcement—and explained her plans for a jingle dress-turned-jumpsuit piece of “wearable art” that I could already see getting me gay-bashed on a powwow online forum.

She wanted me to wear it in a special coming-out post on her blog.

I said I’d rather kill myself, and she said what kind of message would that send to Two-Spirit youth?

Our mother stayed in bed all weekend. I stomped around the house, mad, while Kayla did the cooking and laundry and dishes.

On Sunday night, our mother came downstairs and boiled three hot dogs over the stove.

Like nothing was different. Or if it was, if there was now something a little bit wrong with me, that was okay.

I wanted to tell Felicia she would be okay, there was nothing wrong with her, these days things didn’t have to be so hard. I hoped it was true. I could make no promises.

I gestured for her to be careful. I leaned over the safety railing and toward the rocky darkness, plumes of steam rising slowly to the sky.

Beside her, bare hands holding tight to the cold railing, I screamed down into the crater.

I turned back to Felicia, expecting her to laugh or to worry, to not understand. But she looked ready. She stepped closer to the edge. We threw our voices down together, and waited for their return.