Page 60 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH ALTERNATE

After what everyone insisted on calling “the attack,” mission control would not repair our water tank.

They would not move up our water resupply date.

They knew we had thirty gallons of emergency water in the storeroom.

They thought rationing under stress could provide helpful data, and encouraged us to document the experience in our hab logs.

We stopped cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry. We stopped exercising, to try to stop sweating. Our composting toilet couldn’t function on the little water we poured into it, and the stench was unbearable.

I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake hating myself, missing Nadia, weighing the chances I would still go to space. How could I have let myself risk that? What had I wanted, bad enough to be so weak?

I had chosen Nadia. Before that, I had chosen the chance that my sister might like me.

After dinner on the third day, Jed and Aziz tried to rally people to play dominoes. I started for my quarters. Allison caught my elbow at the foot of the stairs and pulled me into the storeroom. “We need to talk.”

“About what?” I said. The storeroom was dimly lit and as small as the bathroom, four square feet of packed floor-to-ceiling shelves. We were surrounded by cans of protein powder and mashed potato flakes, a far cry from the space ice cream I’d yearned for as a child.

Allison folded her arms over her chest. Her uniform was ironed but dirty. “About what, Commander ,” she corrected.

“About what, Commander?”

“About your future with NASA. I realize how much a mission assignment matters to you, and that’s a dangerous place for you to be.”

“Oh. I think I’m entitled to want things, though.”

“Of course you are,” she said. “We all are. I had a baby at the Air Force Academy! You think I didn’t study up on the protocol to make that workable?”

I knew this, of course, but the details of it felt irrelevant to my life.

Every day at what was noon in the hab, twenty minutes before her daughter was due home from school in Texas, Allison recorded and sent a video from her desk.

From the vague outline I knew, Allison had gone from a small-town childhood to flying planes to being a single mother at NASA. She had been to space.

Allison wasn’t done. “The thing is, if I hadn’t made commander, I would have been satisfied in the service. And if I hadn’t gotten pregnant, I still would have been satisfied. I would have brought myself to a place of satisfaction—with an alternative outcome.”

“Respectfully,” I said, “it sounds like you got everything you wanted.”

“Respectfully, Steph, you’re in deep shit.

I’m trying to help you. We call it PACE—primary, alternate, contingency, emergency.

It’s supposed to apply to setting up backup comms systems, but I use it for my life, and frankly, you should, too.

Having Kristen on my own wasn’t my primary plan, but I had an alternate and contingency in mind as circumstances changed. I had to be okay with that.

“You cannot want a mission assignment this much , to the point that you lose sight of everything else. If I report your unauthorized contact—”

I leaned back against a person-sized bag of rice.

“—and you better realize what even the idea of not reporting would do to my career, my moral code, and my identity as a serviceman. If I report it, you will have sabotaged us all. Months of work behind us! The sacrifice it was for Adisu and me, who both left kids behind? A year of their lives, invalidated! ”

The room was too hot. I needed air. Do not cry .

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I was. Not as sorry as I needed to be, or as sorry as I knew I would be later. But it was a break from feeling bad for myself.

I couldn’t believe what I had done. I had no idea what I might do next.

Allison shook her head. “Yeah, well. I don’t know if I’ll report it. I should. I almost definitely will. But let me be clear—I absolutely can’t recommend you for a mission in space.”

It was like she’d knocked the wind out of me. The cans on the shelves blurred into each other. I stumbled past her to the door. Air. The rest of the crew laughed in the other room. Dominoes clicked against each other.

“I can fix this!” I said. “I messed up, I know, but I was loyal to my crewmates. I swear. I kept my suit on for my walks and maintained physical distance. I never missed a minute of scheduled time with the crew, I completed all assigned tasks, and I—”

Allison put a hand on my shoulder. Her brow was knit in worry, like my mother’s had so often been.

“This isn’t about loyalty , Steph.” Her voice was different, loose, like she’d let a layer of her learned accent fall.

“We’re accountable for the survival of a future crew on Mars. And you’ve compromised that work.”

“Allison, please—”

She pulled her phone out of her pocket and read from the small screen.

“Successful astronaut candidates may not have a history of poor or unstable work or interpersonal relationships or personality traits that interfere with functioning cooperatively with others. This may include personality traits such as self-centeredness, lack of concern for others, arrogance, entitlement, lack of empathy, insensitivity…”

She paused and looked up. “Do I need to continue?”

It was from the handbook, the section on medical standards for astronaut selection. I had read that page many times over the years, pausing over each disqualifying trait. Is this me? I’d ask myself, certain it was.

“You won’t be assigned a mission,” she said. “I need you to prepare yourself for that outcome.”

I stepped out of the storeroom, almost falling toward the air lock. The crew looked up at me, concerned, from their little circle on the rug.

“Hang on,” Allison said.

I turned.

She held a large cardboard box she’d pulled from a shelf in the storeroom, taped shut and labeled in black marker: STEPH!

It was what Allison called a care package. What I’d called our emergency breakdown boxes. I was the only remaining member of the crew who hadn’t yet asked for theirs.

“Here,” Allison said. “Take this, open it in your quarters, and cool off.”

It was heavy in my arms. Beside the air lock, I adjusted my grip and ran a finger against the rough yellow of my hazmat suit. It hung on the wall, a shade dirtier than the four beside it, and I knew I hadn’t imagined it. I understood Adisu had known for some time. My suit smelled like campfires.

From the age of five, I’d imagined my footsteps on the moon. I’d only meant to run at first. To get as far away as possible. Then to be chosen, to stand on safe ground and belong. It occurred to me, looking out the porthole: I may never know more than this world.

Sprawled out across the floor, my crewmates seemed content.

Even tired, frustrated, unshowered—they were laughing, reaching their hands across the circle and setting dominoes into place.

They were at ease with one another. I turned toward the darkness that had chased me through childhood, where the world blurred and my ears turned the voices around me into a long, slow hum.

Where I was totally alone, like I could reach out forever and never touch another person.

I sat on the floor next to Jed and put the box down behind me. Jed smiled and patted me on the arm, the first gesture of forgiveness. Either he or I felt alien and far.

I fell back into myself. I’m pulling up wild onions and Kayla’s eating them raw, dirt-dusted.

I’m cutting holes in a cereal box to watch the eclipse, and Kayla’s standing proud-chested beside me, insisting she’ll stare at it straight-on.

I’m holding my head, shaking, remembering what Kayla doesn’t know.

But Kayla is there anyway, wrapping me in blankets and squeezing me tight. She won’t let go till I’m okay again.