Page 54 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH DRESS REHEARSAL FOR MARS

There was no one to enter my trip into the log; no one to check my hazmat suit. I knew I shouldn’t be doing this. Upstairs in their quarters, my crewmates slept.

I looked up at the bare, metal staircase. I still had a clean record. I could go back to bed. I’d come so far to get here, and I had so far to go. Was I willing to risk a mission to space?

I was. I now knew—though I’d suspected it before—that Kayla and Felicia were at the camp. Felicia had emailed to ask for dating advice, but it seemed to me bigger things had gone wrong. I finally believed what she’d tried to tell me in Italy. Kayla needed help.

I lifted my suit from its hook on the wall and quietly zipped myself into it.

For as far as the hab’s outdoor cameras could reach, in case anyone thought to monitor them, I needed to follow protocol.

I slipped on my boots and gloves and turned on and off the electric lantern at my side.

I would have to feel my way to the perimeter.

In the air lock, whether out of loyalty or fear, I waited the full five minutes.

I listened closely to my own footsteps, scared. Was I really doing this? What if I got caught? What would I tell them I was doing here?

Twenty minutes later, I made it to the perimeter.

The end of NASA territory and the start of something else.

I closed my eyes, breathing in the chill air that slipped through the stiff fibers of my suit.

I remembered the night sky. Our authorized Mars walks, always scheduled for daylight hours, had kept me away from it since January. I looked up.

Stars, nebulae, and planets, the deep black of outer space. I sat down on the ground and felt the steadiness of the Earth below me, and the possibility of everything above. You are on sacred land.

Behind me, someone ran. I stood and jumped back, nearly tripping on my lantern. I switched it on and held up my hands.

“Don’t shoot!” I said.

Two people stepped into my light. It was the tattooed man, with his little girl beside him. They looked at me and laughed.

“Calm down,” said the man. He reached for the girl and swung her up on his hip. “Look at that, Mahina. We found you an astronaut.”

The little girl, Mahina, hid her face in the man’s neck, giggling. She whispered something. Inside my suit, I felt farther from them than I was.

He kept his gaze steady on me. “What brought you out here?”

“I want to talk to my sister. Kayla Palakiko. If she’s still at the camp? One of the protesters?”

“The protectors,” he corrected. The man squinted, trying to see me through my face shield and hood. “I know about you. Weird you waited all these months to come see her. Weird you people are living in that dome.”

“Are you Kanaka?” Mahina said.

This was when most Native people would clarify that they weren’t from this nation but they were from a nation, when they’d roll out the name of their people. That way you were like them, even when you weren’t.

“No,” I said.

“Stay here,” the man said. He turned partly away, keeping an eye on me as he murmured into a walkie-talkie. He spoke and listened and spoke, and then held it to his daughter’s mouth and let her pretend to transmit a message. Several minutes later, my sister came running at me.

She was frazzled and out of breath, almost shaking. “STEPH! Holy shit! I’m so glad to see you. I mean, I didn’t tell you to come to camp ’cause, like, I didn’t think you’d even consider it, you know? Did they let you out of there? I would’ve asked to see you, but I knew you couldn’t—”

She hugged me. My suit crumpled around me, like an animal crushed in its shell. I looked at her feet. They were dusty, tied up in worn sandals over high, knit socks. That was unlike her.

The man’s name was Mark. He told me this, gruffly, and from many feet away, before leading me and Kayla toward the camp.

At the entrance ( KAPU—You are entering Kingdom Land ), I all but tore off my hazmat suit.

I left it in a plastic crate, where it looked like a discarded tarp.

I didn’t trust these people. Any one of them could take a picture and post it, alerting NASA to their ascan visitor.

Kayla and I sat across from each other, on camping chairs facing a bonfire. I asked where Felicia was.

“Asleep. Or maybe wandering around?” Kayla said.

“Lately she’s into that. And this place is safer than home.

I can let her have her space and not worry about murder, since there’s community accountability and mutual aid and all these traditional teachings that have gotten lost in the postcolonial world.

We’ve built an intentional community here.

Steph, I’m really glad you get to see it. ”

“You know people say that when they mean a cult, right? An intentional community ?”

Kayla laughed. “Steph, we aren’t twelve! You can’t get my goat.”

I looked across the circle, past the black air turned gold around the flames.

The tents were quiet, most people asleep.

In the center of the camp was a kitchen built of poles, ropes, and frayed blue tarps; kerosene sat at the entrance, four huge metal barrels.

I counted sixteen tents, one wickiup, and one tipi before giving up.

The last two were weirdly out of place, and told me there was mainland interest in the protest. Then I wondered what I was assessing, and who I was doing it for.

Kayla grabbed my shoulder and pointed up. “Shooting star!”

“Cool!” I said. “You know, they’re not really stars.”

“Got it,” she said.

“They’re meteors. Tiny dust particles falling through our atmosphere.”

“?’Kay.”

“Where they vaporize, due to the heat of friction with atmospheric gases.”

“Stop ruining the sky.”

“Where’s Jason?” I said.

“ Okay then,” she said. “Why’d you come out here in a fucking hazmat suit ?”

“I was just asking?”

“You weren’t,” Kayla said. “But I’ve got more important things I want to talk through with you.”

She started braiding her hair like she had as a child, absently, not bothering to untangle the knots. She said we should be able to discuss what was happening without fighting.

“Please don’t make us do Jason’s ‘hearing each other’ exercise.”

Kayla didn’t laugh, which made me worry. “You can’t ignore what’s happening here at camp,” she said.

I looked at her. Looking at Kayla, when she was so young she wouldn’t remember it, used to be like looking at myself. I took care of her, and made her my place in the world.

“You know I have respect for the movement as a whole,” I said, “right?”

“ Here we go.”

“I’m a scientist . Thinking carefully about where we are and where we need to be, analyzing which actions will get us there faster and safer and with the most gained—you can’t ask me not to do that.”

“You assume we’re bumbling around out here,” she said. “You barely know what we’re fighting for, but when you hear ‘Indigenous-led,’ it’s like, Oh wait, that can’t include scientists! Must be a bunch of impulsive, woo-woo activists who don’t really know what—”

“This isn’t the first or last Indigenous-led protest,” I said.

“It’s just the only one I can’t be at. I heard there’s an encampment in North Dakota, at Standing Rock?

If they’re still protesting that oil pipeline after my mission, I’m there.

Go home, wait for me to finish out my mission, and we’ll make a family trip out of it. Mom would die of happiness.”

“You think everything’s about you!”

“You came to my place of work!” I said. “What if you had a real job for once in your life—in, like, an office—and I showed up at your cubicle with twenty people and a fucking banner?”

Kayla’s voice was perfectly, scarily even. “I have a real job.”

“Being a mom, I know, hardest job in the world .”

An old look passed between us, like she was ready to tackle me.

“But if you out me as your sister?” I said. “If I get caught—even just this once, for visiting you, once!—it would ruin me.”

“I appreciate the sacrifice no one asked for,” Kayla said. “But I have a moral obligation to be here.”

“There are other people here, actual Hawaiians, who are leading this. They’d be fine without you. Besides, Felicia wants to go home.”

Kayla picked up a handful of dirt and passed it between her hands. I could tell I’d hurt her feelings, bringing her daughter into this.

I shouldn’t have come.

“Felicia is Kanaka,” Kayla said. “Cherokee, Kanaka, and getting to the age where she won’t tell me what’s going on with her.”

Felicia had said almost the same thing to me in Italy, that her mother kept too much of herself hidden. I wanted to line up the world’s mothers and daughters, shake them, and tell them to talk to each other.

“But I can tell this place is good for her,” Kayla said.

“She’s going to elder talks, hearing these old stories about the volcano and the islands and the ceremonies—all this stuff she comes from.

It’s the kind of traditional stuff Mom doesn’t know, that our family could easily never get back.

You know how little Felicia knows about our side? ”

I shrugged. I could guess at the stories my sister had chosen to pass on. She’d been right there beside me, our mother giving us heroes and Brett cutting them down. I’d let it go; there was more freedom in being a person alone.

But Kayla still looked to our ancestors as fighters, people whose every complexity could be forgiven in their fight to survive.

She had always refused to talk to me about Brett’s caveats to our history, because they didn’t fit into the kind of Indian she wanted to be.

Or—I thought, especially in recent years—the kind she needed to be seen as.

Only once had our mother told a story without a lesson. Without a good ancestor to guide us.

It was the story of her father finding them in Oklahoma, following their car the whole drive back to Arkansas. The grandmother she’d never see again. I still wondered why our mother had allowed herself to tell it to us.

Kayla shook her head. “The stuff Felicia is learning, at least about her dad’s side, it’s giving her a context for who she is. When you have kids—when a person has kids, I mean— nothing matters more than giving them that sense of self.”

“You’re lecturing,” I said.

“I’m staying,” Kayla said.

“Kayla.”

“Think about it. How many millions of dollars are they putting into this, your little dress rehearsal for Mars? As for the real thing, you know the space station is the most expensive building ever made? Just hanging around up there, in orbit! It can’t even go places.”

“Kayla,” I said again.

“The government or whatever, they’re putting so much into you. I read it costs like fifty million to send one person to space. You know how insulting that is to, like, refugees? Repairing one woman’s fistula costs six hundred dollars. Half the world lives on seven dollars a day!”

“I’m not allowed to have goals? Until when, I’ve eradicated malaria? You wouldn’t be on my butt about this protest, if it weren’t for our Indian side.”

Kayla rolled her eyes hard at that, our Indian side , a phrase I’d never said in my life. But we were sisters and I was mad. To question who I was let me question her, too.

“You’re allowed to have whatever goals you want, Steph. I just think the ones you have are selfish, and they disregard the work of everyone who came before you. And I think you’re old enough for people to say that to your face.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. We watched the fire die down, despite the chopped wood ready at our feet.

The sky turned from black to blue. Little bursts of flashlight through tent walls revealed shadows of huddled bodies.

In the distance I saw the hab, its white domed walls almost ghostly in the dark.

Walking back, alone in my rumpled hazmat suit, I thought about what Mahina had asked me. “Are you Kanaka?”

She was a kid. How easy it would have been to say, “Nope, Cherokee.” To let us have that.

Why did I set myself apart, always? Our family and where we’d come from—it was my sister’s first answer for who she was and where she was, what she was doing and why. It was my last answer, or my quietest, like something that dragged behind me on a rope.