Page 69 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH REMEMBER THE SKY THAT YOU WERE BORN UNDER

Two flights, a rented car, and a drive at night to Tahlequah from Tulsa. I was lucky to have injured my left leg and not my right. I hurt, but I could drive.

On the highway I pictured Nadia’s face when she’d woken up, how her eyes had widened in surprise as she looked from Imane to Jim to me.

How she’d smiled. Later, her parents left us alone in the room, for some completely made-up reason that involved Imane wiggling her eyebrows and nudging Nadia’s good shoulder, and Nadia groaning in response.

Nadia waited to speak till they’d closed the door behind them.

“So you stayed,” she said.

“Um, yes,” I said. I realized, too late, the intensity of the gesture. The night before, after I’d been discharged, her parents had asked a nurse to bring up a third cot for me.

“Wow,” she said. “You didn’t have to do that. I mean, I didn’t think you would—”

“Oh God, please don’t worry about it,” I said. “I just wanted to know you were okay. I care about you, but I was just on my way out? To go see my family, but—yeah, I care. And you have a girlfriend and that’s really good. I’m so happy for you. I respect that so, so much.”

Nadia fell back on her pillow and laughed. The sound was surprisingly strong and deep for what she’d been through, and I had missed it.

“Calm down,” she said, still laughing. Over the hospital blanket she touched my hand. “I’m glad you stayed. Call me tomorrow so I know you made it home?”

I got to my mother’s house around four in the morning, though I hadn’t warned her I was coming.

When I knocked on the door, each light in the house turned on, one room at a time.

In the doorway Felicia ran at me. I dropped my crutches and my duffel and put my arms around her, only letting go to limp to the couch.

“What’s wrong with you?” my mother said.

“ Elisi! ” Felicia said, tugging at her hand. She turned to me. “She meant to say, ‘I’m so sorry your leg looks all messed up. What happened?’?”

“If I told you,” I said, “there’s no way you’d believe it!”

“Shark attack,” said Kayla, expressionless. She stood apart from us, half in the kitchen. She was wrapped in our mother’s blue quilt.

“Very funny,” our mother said.

That surprised me. I thought, even if she had no plans to visit me, Kayla would have told our mother. But I was here now.

“Like I said, you wouldn’t believe it.” Carefully, I pulled my sweatpants up my left leg. A bandage was wrapped from my thigh down to my knee, layered under a brace. Peeking out the edges were bruises, dark purple splotches down to the ankle.

Kayla winced.

Felicia leaned in so close, her nose bumped the Velcro fastener on my brace. “Cool!” she said.

I laughed and kissed her on the head. “Right?” I said.

“You should really be resting,” my mother said.

I shrugged. “It hurts! But I’m alive. The whole crew is. Also, I’ve got four more days of medical leave.”

“Oh. And you decided to come here, I guess, of all places.” She looked like she was holding in a smile.

“I thought this might be where the party was,” I said.

The toaster dinged in the kitchen, and Kayla muttered something about waffles. She hadn’t hugged me, and hadn’t even said hello. But she had started, apparently, making us breakfast.

“And,” I added, quieter now, “I wanted to be with you.”

The look on our mother’s face then—it was like her heart exploded. A sudden burst of joy, of life, and then she caught it and pulled it back into a small smile. It struck me then how much time she must have spent as a mother, how much of her motherhood, pretending not to feel things.

I moved toward her, still limping, and brought her into me with both arms. I hugged her like I’d wanted to the moment I’d come home. I held her as close as I could.

When I let go, she went straight for the kitchen.

She piled all the waffles on a plate, poured cups of milk and placed them on a plastic tray.

She carried them into the living room and all three of us followed her, holding in our hands syrup and whipped cream and a full coffee pot that Kayla must have started before I’d stepped into the house.

She had known it was me. Felicia had taken the blue quilt.

She wore it like a cape now, trailing behind the rest of us. We were a parade.

In the living room, my leg propped up on the coffee table in front of us, we ate.

We sipped from mugs and wrapped ourselves up close together.

All the blankets were out now, running over this shoulder and onto that lap.

Had it really been this easy? All this love just waiting for me, where I’d started, and I’d only had to knock at its door?

It was quiet, comfortable but quiet, and I could feel that my life had finally caught up to me. It was time.

“Mom?” I said. “I’ve been trying to understand something, if you’re okay to talk about it. Why did you stay with our dad?”

“Steph!” Kayla said. “Oh my God!”

“I just meant—”

“Ma, you don’t have to answer that,” Kayla said.

“But Kayla, you sent me his obit. You’re telling me that wasn’t a request to talk it through?”

“You didn’t freaking text me back! You didn’t give a shit until right now— who cares why—and then you woke us all up to cater to you?”

“A shark was trying to eat me !”

“For two weeks? What, one toe at a time?”

“I find this tiring,” our mother said.

Kayla and I looked at each other. Felicia seemed genuinely thrilled. It was a wonder no one had sent her back to bed.

“I’d been thinking we should talk about this,” our mother said, “even before you all suddenly descended on this house.”

Then she waited, long enough that I thought she might be stalling. Kayla glared at me, like this was proof I had pushed her too far.

Our mother put her mug down on the coffee table and cleared her throat. “There’s a hundred good things I could say about your father—”

“What the hell , Mom!” I said.

“Shut up, Steph,” Kayla said.

“—and a hundred more I told myself,” she continued, “to explain the things he did. When I met him, he had one of the saddest stories I’d ever heard. Sadder than anything that had happened to me before that point. I used to think that was real important.”

She paused and looked hard at Felicia, who was holding a waffle in two tight fists. “I hope you know it isn’t,” our mother said. “Don’t you go thinking so little of people who suffer, like they don’t have a choice how they treat you. Okay?”

Felicia nodded. She bit into the waffle.

“I’m preaching to the choir,” our mother said. “Young people are smarter these days.”

“Your parents kicked you out when you got pregnant,” Kayla said, “so you didn’t want to abandon our dad… ’Cause you knew how painful that was. Right?” Her voice was bright almost, clipped, like this could be tied up nicely and put away.

Our mother didn’t answer. She turned to me. “I’ve wondered if you remember that night, Steph. I hope not.”

“Which night?” Kayla said.

“You do, though, don’t you? Is that what all this is about?”

Reluctantly, I nodded.

“Remember what ?” Kayla said. There was alarm in her eyes. “Steph, what’s she talking about?”

Our mother started to cry. There was a time that would have scared me, and she would have left the room. I’d been a kid afraid of adults with big feelings, and I had barely let her have them.

Now I leaned my head on her shoulder, and her breathing slowed. She wiped her eyes and cheeks with the corner of the quilt and tucked it back around Felicia’s shoulders. She picked back up her mug—heavy, red, chipped on the rim. She held it to her chest, close, even though it was empty.

“Kayla,” she said, “do some of us need to go back to bed? That’s your call.”

“No,” Kayla said. She leaned Felicia back against her chest and laid her palm over her head.

“All right, then.” Our mother took a long breath. “We were in your father’s car, all four of us. You two were in your booster seats, thank God, and your father was mad—

“No,” she said, interrupting herself. She held out a hand between us, stopping me before I could start. “It doesn’t matter why. What matters is that he got mad, and we were driving along this ridge—”

“He drove off it,” I said.

“ No ,” Kayla said.

“He did,” our mother said. “He meant to.”

I waited for her to continue.

“Kayla, you didn’t seem to remember? I hoped, maybe… if I didn’t let it turn into a story, Steph might manage to forget it, too. So I said nothing.”

An old anger came back to me. I’d long since learned that my silence protected my sister—and that my mother wanted that from me. But she hadn’t had the guts to ask for it. She shouldn’t have put that on a child.

I tried to calm myself down. I worried that, at any point, our mother might walk out of the room.

“We left him there,” I said. “I thought that meant he’d died, or was about to? Wait, Mom—Kayla must’ve shown you the obit. Right?”

She nodded.

I remembered the blood, pooling, and the twisted shape of our father’s body. The way our mother took us up in her arms and ran.

I’d been certain he was dead, even as I’d been certain that he wasn’t. That he was, somehow, chasing me.

“So, the story in the obituary. When he lost his leg,” Kayla said. She spoke slowly, putting it together. “That was the night of the car—”

She had almost said accident . I was furious for her.

Kayla tried again. “That was the same night we left?”

Our mother nodded.

“Steph, how long have you known?”

I didn’t want to say it. But she knew.

Always .

Kayla pressed her face to the top of Felicia’s head.

“Excuse me,” Felicia said, so young and polite. So desperate to stay. “Why’s it matter so much that you left him in the car? Dead or alive, like, either way? It sounds like you didn’t need to take him with you.”

“Honey,” Kayla said, “I think leaving him there means your elisi didn’t think she could stay. Not for the paramedics, or the police, or any of the people we wait for when someone is hurt.”

Kayla looked at our mother, checking her work.

“I didn’t trust that I could leave him,” our mother said, a shake in her voice. “If I didn’t go right then .”

Felicia slumped back against Kayla’s chest.

“If we’d stuck around another hour,” she continued, “with the police report, and the ambulance, and the chance of him waking up… I know I would have stayed for good.

“So I left him to die. That’s what I thought I was doing—what I was willing to do—when I ran.”

Kayla gently moved Felicia off of her and stood up. She walked to the kitchen with two mugs in her hands, and I listened to her wash them. Eventually, she came back to us.

Our mother began again. She answered questions, filling in details from that night. How she’d carried us through the woods and up to the highway. How she called from a pay phone outside a gas station. Then she hid in the trees, watching the cars that passed.

Our mother talked about the middle-aged woman who picked us up on the side of the road.

She’d looked long and hard at the wild state of us, but asked no questions and drove fast. She turned back toward Dallas, two hours out of her way.

She was Choctaw from Durant, but her sister lived with a Cherokee boyfriend in Tahlequah.

She said she’d heard they liked it there “well enough.”

The Choctaw woman dropped us off outside the house we’d been renting. Our mother wouldn’t even go inside. She put us directly into her car, which she had packed with clothes and food and money months before. Just in case. She drove us to Oklahoma.

In Oklahoma, now, our mother put her hands over our heads.

“I was always gonna get you out,” she said. “I always, always, hoped I would.”

I closed my eyes. I thought about starting over.

I might not make it to space. For once, the thought did not scare me. Whatever came next, I wouldn’t be alone. I never had been.

I opened my eyes and let myself feel stillness. The warmth of my mother’s palm, and the bright, fruity smell of Felicia’s shampoo. The yellow light that hung by the window in the kitchen, like a sun to our small world. Between two fingers I twisted a blue thread loose at the end of the quilt.

Our mother had come here looking for our nation and ancestors, for the purity of a story to save her. Or to tell her who she was and then forgive her for it. It didn’t exist.

But hadn’t we lived? Hadn’t she taken us home? Here we were, together. Starting everything, even ourselves, even meeting ourselves and one another, finally, and all over again.