Page 68 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH EMERGENCY CONTACT

In a small hospital outside Miami, a nurse said I was fine. I would be fine. After all, I was alive! It was early morning. There were blue wires dangling from stickers on my chest, and an IV port in my hand.

I asked to see my leg. A little roughly, the nurse pulled back the sheet. It was all there, bandaged, held straight in a black brace. Rows of Velcro pulled tight across it.

“You’re alive!” she said again.

I asked her about Nadia. The other girl? She was alive, too.

Could I see her? No. She’d had surgery. She would need time to recover.

I fell back asleep. When I woke, my leg hurt. The nurse gave me a pill and said I’d be discharged soon. I said my leg hurt, and she said I was alive. I asked her about the rest of the crew, and she said they were in their own hospital rooms, with their own families.

“What about my family?” I asked.

The nurse sighed and unhooked a clipboard from the foot of my bed. “Your emergency contact was your sister, right? Kayla Palakiko?”

I nodded.

She squinted down at her notes. “We called her yesterday, and she had us confirm that you were stable. She said she trusts we won’t discharge you until you’re safe to find a ride home.”

Huh. Was “almost killed by shark” not enough to merit a visit? Or a text?

I lay in my bed, propped up on pillows and hurting.

I listened to the voices of Nadia’s parents in the room beside mine.

Nadia hadn’t woken up from surgery, but they were already there.

I imagined the call from NASA, the panic and concern, the rush to the airport with only their phones and wallets.

Maybe they’d bought their tickets at the counter.

Now they sat in her room. They laughed and talked loudly with harsh, warm Brooklyn accents.

I smelled pizza. Like they were at a party, chatting away, and Nadia would join them soon.

I was doing it again, I realized. Sinking into myself, feeling sorry for myself, getting myself ready to run. I knew why my sister hadn’t called me. Hadn’t I wanted—back when I’d thought I was on my way out—to do better?

I had lived. I pressed the button on my bed for the nurse, who was less gruff with me when I explained what I’d like help with. She left and came back quickly with the wheelchair, but also a blanket, a red Jell-O cup, and a plastic spoon. She helped me out of bed.

As the nurse wheeled me into Nadia’s hospital room, both her parents stood. They looked down at me, each of them holding one of Nadia’s hands as she slept.

“I’m Steph,” I said. “I’m friends with Nadia. Is it okay if I join you for a little?”

“Ha!” said her mother. “Look who the cat dragged in!”

“Imane, please,” said her father. He sat down in an armchair by the bed. He was big and tall, slumped over the edge of the bed in an oatmeal-colored fleece. “When your daughter wakes up, she’ll kill us.

“Let’s try again,” he said, turning back to me. “Hello, Steph. I’m Jim. Good to meet you.”

“Hi,” I said. “It’s good to—”

“You know you’re famous in her emails,” said Nadia’s mother. Jim had called her Imane. “Why pretend we don’t know who you are?”

Imane looked older than Jim, but I wondered if that was a sign of her illness. Her hair was gone, her head was uncovered, and she was very thin. Her eyes narrowed, aware I was assessing her for frailty.

“Not infamous, right?” I said. I laughed awkwardly.

“Come here,” Imane said, patting the space beside her.

I nodded, lowering my eyes, and wheeled myself up to the bed. Nadia looked serene, eyes closed, sheets pulled up over the shoulder that had been operated on. She wore a blue medical hairnet, and I badly wanted to push her curls back from her forehead.

If I were alone with Nadia, I’d want to hold her hand. I’d tuck her blanket a little higher under her chin. I’d want to sleep here, in the armchair by her bed, and wait for her to be okay. She didn’t have to love me back. In fact, she had a girlfriend! But she did have to be okay.

“She’s okay,” Jim said. Gently, from the other side of her bed. He must have seen my worry.

I let out a breath.

“She scared the shit out of us, too!” he said, lightly rubbing Nadia’s good shoulder. “Not sure how I feel about her launching into space now, ha ha ha. But she’s out of the woods. So that’s something.”

Wordlessly, still looking at Nadia, her mother patted me twice on the hand. My IV port was there, and I winced.

“Want some pizza?” Imane said.

I was a little scared of what Nadia had said about me in her emails. Did Imane know I’d messed up as a friend, a girlfriend, or both? I almost wanted to defend myself. Something like, “I was the one with the tourniquet!” or “Nadia forgave me on the wet porch last week!”

But it wouldn’t be simple like that. Not with Nadia, and not with Imane. But pizza was a start.

I stayed. The three of us sat close together, using the edges of Nadia’s hospital bed as a kind of table for our paper plates.

We talked, mostly about Nadia. They wanted to know how truly great an astronaut she was, and was it true that—as Jim had always suspected!

—she was the best that NASA had ever seen?

“The smartest and the funniest and the most beautiful,” Imane said, “yes?” At that part, most beautiful , Imane stared down at me like she was holding a gun to my head. I held back a laugh.

“No offense,” Imane added, almost smiling. “It’s not so bad for you. You could still be—maybe?—their number-two astronaut.”

For once, I didn’t correct this with “ascan.”

I wanted to know about the night Imane and Jim had been arrested together, how long it had taken them to know they were in love.

Was it true that they’d been friends first, in the space between jail and elopement?

Or had they been more like comrades in the anti-war movement?

Imane broke down in laughter, finally, covering her face and shaking her head.

It was like I’d asked about a long-past mission to another planet.

Jim leaned in even farther across the bed, still holding Nadia’s hand, and launched in.

He told it like his favorite story, like the central text of his life.

Around eight p.m., a different nurse came in and wheeled me backward out of the room. Nadia hadn’t woken up yet, and Imane didn’t seem to know what to do with me. But Jim smiled, and waved, and said to come back in the morning. I did.

On the afternoon of the second day, I was discharged.

Aziz and Tom (who had freed themselves from the sea without a scratch) brought a duffel bag to my room with all my clothes.

Somehow, they’d been acquired from the hab by mission control.

I changed out of my hospital gown in the bathroom, lifted my crutches from their place against the wall, and made my way back slowly to Nadia’s room.

Jim had fallen asleep in his chair, but Imane came to the door.

She nodded at me, almost approvingly, and let me in.

On the morning of the third day, Imane told me I could leave for Oklahoma if I needed to. “That’s where your family is. Right? They must be anxious for you to visit. You should send your mother a picture of your leg! We always like to know whether or not they had to amputate.”

I told her I would book a flight to visit them, just as soon as Nadia was okay. Only after I said it did I realize both parts were true. I would wait for Nadia, and I would go home.

Imane smiled, for real this time, and asked for help with her crossword.

Jim woke, left the room, and came back with a paper bag of biscuits and three cups of coffee.

That afternoon, when Imane was starting a book of crosswords I’d found in the gift shop and Jim was telling me what was wrong with youth protest movements these days and I was nodding along, trying to be agreeable without being fake so that both her parents might respect me if things went south with Daryan and I stood a chance with their daughter someday, Nadia woke up.