Page 71 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH ON LEAVE

Three days passed, the longest I’d been in my mother’s house in years. After the hab, the protest camp, and the chaos I’d brought to both, after the shark, the hospital, and how scared I’d been until Nadia woke up, time moved slowly here.

No one in the house woke at dawn to work out.

No one tried to optimize their time or beat their personal best. They just did things, one after another, because they had to or wanted to.

My mother made coffee and went to her job at a bakery.

Kayla drove Felicia to school, then sat at the table with a notebook she said was for “figuring out her life.” I didn’t know if that meant a job, maybe, if she was looking for a normal kind of job, but I didn’t push her on it.

I called Nadia every morning, refreshed my email way too much throughout the day, and fought my insurance company over covering the physical therapy I’d start soon in Houston. I even felt bored.

A few times I made scrambled eggs. As a family we went to the movies and the grocery store, and sat on the stoop until the mailman came.

We chatted with him, briefly. Felicia got very into the art of building bonfires, the controversy of log cabin vs tipi, and three nights in a row we had firepit time in the backyard after her homework was done.

We made s’mores. My mother told us stories about our family, some of them strange and dark, and when I seemed surprised by this Kayla looked at me seriously across the fire.

“We’ll take you to the archives before you leave. ”

This sounded almost ominous. Like I had missed something, which I likely had. But it was the first thing she’d said to me, to me alone, since my first morning here.

Nadia had run out of patience on the topic. “Steph, duh! Stop telling me your sister won’t talk to you!”

It was election day, and we were on the phone.

Kayla and I had voted absentee. Felicia’s school was closed.

For the first time since landing in Oklahoma, she’d been invited to a friend’s house.

I’d called Nadia from the front stoop, my crutches splayed out across the steps, while Kayla accompanied our mother to the polls.

“I just can’t tell if it’s on purpose?” I said. “Maybe it’s a coincidence that we’re never alone. ’Cause of our different schedules.”

“Oh my God, Steph. It’s not a coincidence. You have no schedule. She has no schedule. You called the police on her.”

“Yes, but she doesn’t know that?”

Nadia laughed. In the background, I thought I could hear her parents bickering. “For the last time, she knows ,” Nadia said. “You can keep speculating to me—wait, no, I’m over it, don’t do that!—or you can apologize. It’s so, so stupid that you haven’t apologized.”

“I know,” I said, to end it, because Nadia was right, even if I wasn’t ready to say it. Despite our rocky start, she was the closest friend I’d ever had. I wished I could have met her sooner, or even just made more space for friends.

For the rest of our call, Nadia talked about Daryan. Truly, I didn’t mind like I’d thought I would. I liked being close to Nadia and knowing her well. She liked it when I followed her through her thoughts, as she tried to tame the world into a sensible long-term plan.

“I don’t know,” she was saying. “Before our shark situation, I’d felt so sure about Daryan. Wait, I don’t want you to think I’m crazy. We’ve met once ; I wasn’t gonna propose or anything. I just mean that things have a good shot if you’re both aligned on your goals and values.”

“What you’re saying isn’t crazy, Nadia,” I said, smiling into the phone. “It’s just lame.”

“Good. So, I had a good feeling about Daryan, and Daryan had a good feeling about me—”

“What does our shark friend have to do with this?”

“I can’t believe you blinded him,” Nadia said.

“He was eating you!”

“See?” Nadia said. “Exactly my point. You and me, we almost got eaten. And, like I keep reminding you, they’re announcing mission assignments in February. To space. We do our PT exercises—and I mean we do it like it’s our job, which it kind of is?—it could be one of us.”

“It’ll be me,” I said. “But I don’t see how this changes things with Daryan? I’m sure you can find time to do both physical therapy and dating.”

Nadia groaned into the phone, like she couldn’t believe I didn’t get it.

“The issue is not my schedule,” she said.

“It’s that… I’m okay with some degree of mess now?

I thought I needed to find someone who was fully formed and self-actualized and wanted, like, exactly what I wanted. Down to the tiniest detail.”

I stayed quiet, listening. I had felt something similar for a long time.

“And then, shark attack!” she said, with a small laugh. “Maybe life is a mess. Maybe people are a mess and they need to just grow into each other. Maybe I can chill out now.”

Kayla pulled into the driveway and let our mother out. She looked happy. She was carrying donuts in a red, white, and blue paper bag.

“Hear, hear,” I said. “Maybe I can chill out, too. And Nadia?”

“Hm?” she said.

“It could still be Daryan,” I said.

For the first time in the Daryan conversation, which I’d otherwise experienced as only half-real, I felt a small pain in my chest. I wanted it to be me. But, in a feeling so new and stupid it made me almost sick with myself, I wanted Nadia to be happy.

“Thanks for saying that,” Nadia said, her voice low. “Who knew you could be so mature?”

“I love that you think you’re funny,” I said.

My mother walked up to the stoop, put down the donuts, picked up my crutches, and held out a hand to help me to my feet.

“Really,” Nadia said before I hung up on her. “I wouldn’t have seen it coming in a million years!”

I did my PT exercises on the couch, stretching and bending my leg with a giant rubber band.

The physical therapist at the hospital had told me not to call it the “bad” leg but the “affected” leg, which I’d rolled my eyes at before taking to heart.

I made eggs for lunch for the three of us, again.

I asked Kayla if we could go out together before Felicia came home from her friend’s house, just us two. Kayla said she was busy.

Our mother, increasingly nervous about the election results, dragged a giant plastic box into the living room.

It was the first of “several boxes, actually” of our old belongings, and she asked if now was a good time for us to sort them into keeps and giveaways.

I hopped on one foot to the bathroom, crutch-less, nearly falling, and closed the door behind me.

On the toilet, my affected leg stretched out over the rim of the bathtub, I refreshed my email four times.

At the top of the inbox, newly arrived, was a message from Della.