Page 61 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH CONTINGENCY

After Allison declared the end of my career, I imagined each life I might have had. I remembered each time I had loved or been loved, or felt myself pulled closer to Earth. Each time, I had run. I’d thought I had to.

Nadia came to my quarters in her daytime uniform, despite the late hour. A small whiteboard was tucked under her arm, and she’d erased our treadmill records. She sat on my bed with her shoes on, which she wouldn’t stand for in her own quarters. She motioned for me to sit on the floor.

Nadia lectured me on the consequences of what I had done, and what we as a crew were now up against. How hard she had worked to get to this point, and what she had sacrificed.

She told me her mother had cancer. Her mother had demanded, in a letter Nadia found in her box on the first day of our mission, that Nadia see this year through.

She would not allow her daughter to give up on her dream.

If Nadia did try, upon reading the letter, to quit the mission, her mother said she’d lock her apartment door and refuse to see her.

“My God, Nadia, I had no id—”

“Stop.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Nope.” Nadia pulled out the whiteboard and a blue marker, which she pointed at my face. Her hand shook. “There is nothing I want less in the world right now—”

A sharp breath. Her hand on her hip. “There is nothing I want less than to hear you talk about my mom. I mention her prognosis only because I hate you, and I want you to feel as bad as you can.”

“I do. I’m sorry. I just—”

“No.”

I nodded.

Nadia turned and bent over the whiteboard. She started writing, silently at first. Eventually, she asked whispered questions, logistical in nature. She made lists and took more notes.

Plan A. Plan B. Plan C. None would work. It was hard to convince Allison of anything.

“Think harder; this is your life,” Nadia said. Hands out, exhausted. “ My life,” she corrected, a catch in her voice. I wanted to talk more about her mother, whose life made this scheming stupid in comparison. I knew I couldn’t.

I could not make sense of my own life, I realized, without my mother in it. I should have emailed her over the many months of the mission so far. I wasn’t sure why I’d been afraid to.

The marker fell and began to bleed onto my sheets.

I lifted the corner of my mattress and showed Nadia the notebook that held my camp log. The pages were full, folded over and scratched out. Scribbled details were everywhere. Names, positions, dates, and plans.

“Plan D,” Nadia said, when she’d flipped through enough to understand. “Provide Allison with replacement data.”

Well after midnight, Nadia moved to leave. At the door she paused, letting out a long sigh. She waved her hand over the cardboard box, still taped shut, that sat on the floor at the foot of my bed. “That’s so dumb,” she said. “I’ll never understand what you’ve got against your mom.”

I couldn’t sleep. Nadia’s plan wasn’t enough.

I was grateful to have kept good data. It served a practical purpose, filling in any gaps in my hab log.

Allison could answer questions of group cohesion with each crew member accounted for.

She could quantify when I was absent, confirm that it was only a small number of hours across months, and decide for herself that its impact on our experiment would be marginal.

But Nadia’s plan didn’t prove loyalty or clarify how far I’d go for my fellow crew members in space. I would do whatever it takes.

I made up my mind on an alternate plan, a terrible one, and then I told myself: you have no choice .

I had whispered something similar on long nights in Moscow, missing Della soon after I broke up with her.

But it hadn’t been true. There had been no need, I now knew, to leave her the night before her graduation.

To do it silently, cruelly, in the way that I had.

That thought, waking up and showing itself all these years later, shook me.

After breakfast and back in the storeroom, I gave my camp log to Allison. She held it carefully between just her thumb and index, like it would tear. Or like she didn’t want to touch it.

“You can use this,” I explained, “as confirmation against your own hab data. It’ll tell you exactly how many minutes I was gone, how many times, and then you’ll know if that margin of error is enough to necessitate informing the research team.”

“You want me to lie,” Allison whispered. “Not just me, but the crew. You’re asking us all to trust each other, forever, our whole careers—to put everything on the line. For you ?”

I nodded.

“Steph, honestly. You’re killing me. Except for maybe Nadia, who, if you ask me, might be a special circumstance, do you reckon you’ve made friends here?”

I was right. The camp log wouldn’t be enough. I felt sick. I could smell the two of us, cramped in the dark storeroom, three days since our last permitted shower.

“I’m asking for something big,” I said, steadying my voice. “I understand that. I can’t ask you all to make a sacrifice for me without making one myself.”

Allison looked at me, unimpressed. I thought of Kristen, the little girl in the photograph Allison kept in her cubicle.

This year without her mother, a whole year staying with her grandparents in Houston—that time had to count for something.

I had to bet on Allison wanting that for Kristen, as badly as I wanted space for myself.

“I have information on an incoming threat to the crew’s safety,” I said. “I know who’s organizing it, and the names of most of the remaining protesters. I know when it’s scheduled to happen, down to the hour. I might want to share this information with mission control. For the sake of the crew.”

Outside the storeroom, at a desk under a porthole, Allison picked up the direct line.

She watched me. Not like I had proven her wrong. She watched me like I was broken.