Page 65 of To the Moon and Back

“See,” I said, “I thought we were out here really talking to each other. Like at least part of this family stood a chance.”

She said nothing.

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Car accident. Not crash , silly me. How’d you know something happened in a car?”

Mom closed her eyes.

“Was there a funeral? A death certificate? I don’t know, a body?”

She kept her eyes closed a long time.

I’d let myself think she was ready to talk. She wasn’t. We sat there. Here I was again, gentle-parenting her.

Then the alarm clock radio, Felicia in her new fluffy slippers, the pouring of cereal into bowls.

Midway through the day, as I passed Mom in the kitchen with a laundry basket on my hip, she looked up. “I thought he’d died in a car accident,” she said. “I guess I was wrong.”

I downloaded Instagram. Sandra, now vice president of corporate alliances for Subway, held a copy of The New York Times up to the camera.

The newspaper was open to a headshot of Della Ericson about the size of my fist, accompanying an article too small to read.

The caption said many things like “SO SO SO PROUD” and “Warrior!!!”—I skimmed over a wall of text to see that Della had published an op-ed.

Something in support of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was once again being challenged in court.

After that I spent an hour scrolling through posts about the thirty-meter telescope and the protests building momentum on Mauna Kea.

I deleted the app. On my way to pick up Felicia from school, I stopped at a gas station and bought today’s issue of the Times .

Then I deleted Instagram, downloaded Instagram, deleted Instagram, cut up a pear so Felicia would deign to eat it, and left the rolled-up newspaper in its plastic bag on the table.

We had spaghetti for dinner. When we’d all filled our plates, Mom slumped down at the head of the table like she’d been walking for days. “I want to talk to you two about our family,” she said. Her face was serious, almost scolding.

Felicia glanced at me across the table, the look she sometimes gave me when she thought she was in trouble. She wasn’t. I shook my head.

“Okay?” I said. I felt protective of Felicia, and wished Mom had cleared this with me before bringing it to the dinner table.

“When you weren’t around,” Mom said, just a little bit of bitterness in her voice, “I had a lot of time to think about things. And then when you told me David had died—”

“Who’s David?” Felicia said, still chewing.

“Your grandfather,” I said.

Felicia almost choked. “I have a grand father? On your side?”

Mom sighed into her dinner plate. She might have been rethinking the decision to include a kid.

“It’s okay,” I said. I reached across the table to touch my daughter’s hand. “Felicia, you had one. Now he’s dead. Mom, keep talking.”

She did, but slowly. “A couple of years ago I started thinking about how I’d raised you and Steph. What kinds of stories I’d told you, what I hadn’t told you, that kind of thing.”

I’d waited so long for her to talk like this. Now I wanted her to cut to the chase.

“And, well, like I told you in that email. I talked to some researchers at the Heritage Museum. I kept going back, and I even made some friends there.”

“And?” I asked.

Mom shot me a warning look. “And then I went to the archives. Turns out our family is in there.”

“Cool,” Felicia said. While the food on my plate was getting cold, Felicia had taken and eaten seconds.

“Some of what’s in there I already knew,” Mom said. “From what my mother had told me.”

“Like what?” Felicia said.

“Like how we got to Indian Territory. I told your mom about that when she was a kid. Remember, Kayla?”

“You told me your great-great-great whatever helped sell the homelands,” I said.

“I said he sold the land to save people’s lives . He said he was willing to die for his belief that the treaty was what was best for his people.”

“Wow,” I said.

“But then he took his payment and hid out in Texas, while other treaty-signers were being assassinated by their fellow Cherokees for treason.”

I nodded. Felicia’s eyes were wide.

Mom continued. “Later on, when the tribe was split between Union and Confederacy, we have ancestors who fought with the Cherokee Confederates.”

“What are the—” Felicia started.

“I’m going to tell you everything later,” I said. “I promise.”

“There’s something else I didn’t tell you about,” Mom said, talking too fast. “On my grandfather’s side—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. I was so tired.

“Yes?” Mom said. Her plate, like mine, was untouched.

“Mom,” I said. “Thank you for this burst of honesty.”

She looked hurt.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Thank you, for real. I just… still don’t get it? I think it’s important to me to know why.”

“Why, what?”

I lowered my voice. “Why you told us the stories that you did.”

Mom deflated. She picked up her fork, finally, and spun spaghetti around it. Then she dropped it. The click of metal on a plastic plate.

“The people in our family didn’t stay long in one place,” Mom said.

“There was the move to Indian Territory, and Texas, and back to Indian Territory, and Arkansas, and then—oh, before all that, some of the white people on my mom’s side of the family?

They came from a man from Ireland who settled in the Nation.

No clue about your father’s people, though. And, anyway, with all these people—”

She stumbled. Felicia looked lost, almost bored.

“Mom,” I said, harshly. The more she added to the conversation, the blurrier each piece of it became. If she kept going like that, heaping on more people and more time, none of it would matter in the end.

“I just wanted you to be safe,” she said.

I wasn’t sure what that meant.

“And home,” she added. “I wanted you and your sister to know this land had a story that could hold you.”

There was a long silence. Felicia asked to be excused, and I nodded.

That word, “safe,” it was wrapped in the cloth of the story she’d never tell me. My dad, and that night. I thought he’d died , she’d said, only now I didn’t believe her.

I realized there was more to learn. Stories to pick up and squint at—maybe to be scared of?—and decide to pass down anyway. Maybe there was no purity to yearn for, no better time or place. I had always hoped for—assumed, even—something better than this.

But at the kitchen table I held that word out for all the world, “safe,” on the old wooden table and in the space between us.

I sat with Mom while the sun went down. When we did the dishes, too dark to see through the window over the kitchen sink, I watched our reflections move together across the glass.

A week later, Felicia had a half day at school.

Mom and I picked her up, passed a sandwich to her in the back seat, and drove an hour to the archives.

Mom wanted us to see it. At the entrance she took her time chatting with her friend at the front desk, and Felicia raced across the room to a wall of metal filing cabinets.

I hurried to catch up, but she didn’t need my help. Mom had already told her what to look for. A wide, shallow cabinet was labeled Cherokee Nation. In it, microfiche. We found my great-great-grandmother—Felicia’s great-great-great—in no time at all.

Andromache Bell Shelton. “Ann.” She was born in Georgia in 1831 and was about four years old during Removal. She was the daughter of Jane “Jennie” Martin Bell and John Adair Bell, who was one of twenty signers of the Treaty of New Echota.

Ann wrote many, many letters, sent from Texas to wealthy relatives in Indian Territory. “I think that’s why she made it into the archives,” Mom said. She joined us at our desk, skimming the writing on the screen.

Ann’s letters were about, often, what she felt she deserved. Her own school in the Nation, where she could work as a teacher. Help and security, through her family and Cherokee political connections who were sometimes one and the same. Ann asked her relatives, over and over again, to send money.

The Nation was fast dissolving. Being dissolved. Ann wrote about her early career as a teacher, the struggle and thrill of it, and then it ended. Cherokee schools were shut down by acts of Congress.

Mom put her hand on my hand and asked to switch chairs with me. She sat in the middle, Felicia and I on either side of her, and clicked through the many pages. A kind of fast-forward button on the microfiche. She was looking for something, I thought, she had already once found. “Here,” she said.

Ann wrote, again, about trying to move her family back to the Nation from Texas.

She was frustrated by the need to plan and save for it carefully.

How impossible it felt. “In this age,” she wrote, “things are different to [a] long time ago. Each one of us has to take care of No. 1. We can’t be as generous as when we had slaves to work for us. ”

I sat in my swivel chair in the archives; Felicia no longer spinning, my mother silent for once in her life. All of us bent over a wooden table, our sleeves rolled up to our elbows.

I looked at Mom, her hand still on my hand. I felt tempted to shake it off.

“I knew,” she said. “My mom told me when I was a kid, once. Like a sidenote, I guess, to the Trail of Tears? I remember exactly the way she said it, that someone ‘went with them’ to Indian Territory.”

“Mom—”

“I know. I decided ages ago not to pass it on. Let that part of the story end with me. I thought that made me better than my mom was.”

She had given me something I didn’t know what to do with. There were no instructions. I felt sick with it, almost angry at her for choosing to tell me. My daughter would have questions I couldn’t answer.

When I was Felicia’s age, I’d taken comfort in the clear answers of my mother’s stories. Brett had tried to question them, sure, but it had felt good to have an outline of the kinds of Indians we’d been. That maybe, I had thought, we could be again.

“I thought I could start fresh when we came to Oklahoma,” Mom said.

“I didn’t want to account for all the history I’d been told.

Not unless it could help guide you, or unless it was part of the greater Cherokee story.

But I’ve been alone a long time now—not just scrambling through your childhood, I mean. I’m starting to realize my mistakes.”

“Like what?” Felicia said. “What mistakes?” I wasn’t sure if she understood. Sometimes she was direct for the sake of directness.

“I built a story to serve you,” Mom said. She looked at me. “You come from people whose lives were preserved in this room. That’s not true of the people they enslaved, who I don’t know a thing about.

“But, with my not-telling, I threw them out of the world. I told you a story that was only for you, that left them nameless and ageless and kinless.”

The drive home felt long. No one talked. Mom had insisted on driving, and I stared at the road in front of us and tried to take in what I knew.

I remembered an old story about my grandfather, how Mom’s white dad got her a plastic dreamcatcher as a joke.

He’d bought it on a road trip, at a gas station.

My grandfather thought my grandmother’s family had been, but no longer were, Indians.

As in “wild.” My grandmother insisted she had come from scholars.

Sitting beside Mom on the highway, her taking us home again, I counted the years since she’d seen her own parents. Thirty-three? More time without them than with.

It was getting dark, a weird blue-purple that made me wish I hadn’t quit painting. Sun and moon both fit in the wide glass of the windshield. I thought about the two stories Mom had been offered, Indians or scholars.

I thought about what we had been. Racist, and strategic, and violent, and manipulative, and hopeful. We were running, constantly, with blinders. And when we weren’t running we were like people on steamboats, charging forward on an engine of our choice, churning up muddy waters.

The crops were planted by a person we enslaved.

The treaty was signed for a profit. The seminary taught mostly what we’d need in the coming white world.

My great-grandfather left his daughter in a barn, my grandfather locked his daughter out of the house, and my father drove from one life into another.

And my great-grandmother stayed, and my grandmother stayed, and my mother stayed, until she didn’t.

I felt I was home before I saw it. The jostle of gravel under the wheels.

Mom opened the car door and turned off the engine and it smelled like fall, like campfires.

The woods I’d tried to memorize as a kid, before I’d tried to draw them.

Mom told me to go on in without her. I told Felicia we could talk if she wasn’t too tired.

If she had questions. We could go walk through the leaves.