Page 66 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH DROWN

Tropical Storm Cynthia made an unexpected turn toward Key Largo.

South Florida was evacuating, half of Miami parked in traffic, and here we lay at the bottom of it.

Tom had come to NASA through the air force, where they made him spin upside down and jump out of planes and land on glaciers during ice storms. Being nearly impossible to alarm, Tom checked the levels on our air tanks and brought his radio to bed.

He said we’d go if they told us to, fine, but what we really needed was to get some rest.

In the dream, I was in Star City, preparing for launch on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

The American shuttle program was over. An Orthodox priest in long black robes flicked holy water onto my helmet.

I stood behind a glass wall on a platform in a space suit, shouting something in imagined Cherokee that I couldn’t understand, that no one could, and from the back of the room my father waved to me.

He was in a space suit, too. I was a mission specialist. He was the pilot.

The crowd parted, the glass shattered, and he took one step toward me.

I woke in the hab with a lurch and a gasp, like I’d fallen to Earth from many feet above.

As a child I had a Sunday school teacher who explained this.

She said our souls went up to heaven when we were sleeping.

It was a kind of temporary death, to talk to Jesus about what we’d done wrong that previous day.

She said that if our bodies ever woke too suddenly, our souls would shoot back down into us from the distance of heaven.

It would feel like we were really, physically falling—falling into ourselves—and that was proof of God.

Hearing this, I was terrified. I did not want to die in my sleep. I did not want to talk to Jesus, or to anyone, about all the things I thought might be wrong with me.

It wasn’t until I was maybe eleven, that I finally asked for help.

Brett took me to the library after school and read beside me from a little pile of reference books.

I was not dying, he said. Above my bed was the roof and then the sky, the atmosphere and then space.

Brett said that Jesus, if he was real, would not burden himself with performance reviews.

That falling feeling was called a hypnagogic jerk.

It was experienced by people everywhere.

I remembered this. I lay in my bunk, listening to the hum of the CO 2 scrubbers. I imagined a school of fish swimming past. All three of my crewmates were asleep, stacked under and beside me.

When I closed my eyes again, I pictured us drowning. Every creak or groan was a possible breach. I pressed my forehead and hands to the smooth metal wall, just inches between myself and the ocean. I listened to the little rocks, kicked up from the sea floor and thrown against the coral-covered hab.

Nadia took deep breaths below me.

I was aware of her body close to mine, aware of our shared, sharp-smelling soap from the shower and her legs curled up small on the mattress.

I opened my eyes. Her arm lay across the edge of her bunk, bony at the wrist. Just above that, the scrunched hem of the fleece she liked to sleep in. I reached down and, gently, took her hand.

Nadia’s fingers jerked in surprise. She peeked out from the edge of her bed, looked at me, and squeezed my palm. She pointed with her forehead to the wet porch, and mouthed something like “need to talk?”

I shook my head no.

She shook her head back at me. “We’re okay,” she whispered, neither question nor answer. All of us, maybe, in the storm? Or, in another way, me and her?

Nadia lay back in her bed. I ran my thumb along the skin on the inside of her wrist, where the ulnar and radial arteries ran into her hand.

Adisu had taught me that; we had been that bored together.

Her veins felt warm and fragile under my finger, which ran slow, up and down between them.

It was like I was following a path in the woods behind the house I’d grown up in.

Pacing forward and backward, tracing familiar ground.

I was always afraid to make sudden turns.

For years before we had met, from the time we were children with the same ridiculous dream, Nadia and I had unknowingly been competitors. Then colleagues, then friends. Then almost girlfriends, briefly girlfriends, before I disappointed her.

“I’ve been thinking about what you did,” she’d said, on our third night underwater.

The two of us had been getting ready for bed on the wet porch, the pressurized door shut between us and the men. This time together was the only time we were alone, nightly minutes scheduled for showers and a change of clothes. We lingered. We brought snacks, tucked into our waistbands.

“It was shitty and selfish,” she continued. “And when you ghosted me? Demonic.”

I winced.

“But—how far you went for your rec—I guess some ascans might’ve done the same. Maybe me too. I hope not. Now that we’re so close to making it, I kind of hate that we did this to ourselves.”

“Did what?”

“Space?” Nadia touched her hand to the porthole, like we were already there.

“There’s this guy on Reddit who says the worst thing a person can do is set out to be an astronaut, ’cause they won’t be one.

Statistically, at least, they really won’t.

Like it’s meaningless to try to figure out the right degree program to do for NASA , so we should just build a life we can be happy with and go from there. ”

“Nadia. We specifically? Like, me and you? We might very well be astronauts.”

She held her hands up, exasperated. “We might. But I lost a lot of life trying to get here. Didn’t you? Don’t you hate that for us?”

I thought about her mother. And mine, too, how I wouldn’t be able to call her till after this mission was over. How I’d said that all throughout our last mission, and after it had not called.

Nadia looked at me, expectant. I had a tendency to hide from things, to skirt around them and run. She didn’t. If we left this mission as friends, for real, I couldn’t hurt her again.

“I’m serious,” Nadia said. “Astronauts or not! I want us to be better.”

When she said that to me, the two of us cross-legged, pajamaed, looking down at the light shining over the moon pool, I immediately thought “better,” like harder. Better, stronger, faster, etc.

Nadia leaned her shoulder against mine. She poured M&M’s into my palm, from a small ziplock in the breast pocket of her shirt.

Behind her, in the porthole, a goliath grouper bumped against the glass.

A cloud of small gray fish raced out of sight.

The grouper was bigger than me and likely older.

It could have easily seen the hab’s last thirty years, as well as the people who passed through it: oceanographers, marine biologists, geologists, and hopeful astronauts.

Had Della ever been here, maybe as a grad student? By the time we left Hollis she wanted to be a marine biologist, despite never having been to the beach. I’d never looked for Della online, too scared I’d learn she hadn’t made it there.

Nadia touched my wrist. When she turned her hand over, I saw the flash of color leftover from the candies on her palm, bright reds and blues and greens. And I knew.

“Better” meant kinder.