Page 73 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH EVERY AUTHENTIC GOOD ON EARTH

There was a long, narrow window in the hospital room door. I couldn’t bring myself to open it. On the other side of it was another world.

In that strip of glass was my mother. Her eyes were closed. There was a long tube in her mouth. Small, narrow pieces of striped, white tape. A gray hospital blanket was tucked under her arms.

In a plastic chair beside the bed, my sister sat. She held our mother’s hands in hers. I pressed my forehead to the glass. Then I lifted my crutches from their place against the wall, opened the door, and stepped through.

Kayla gasped and looked up. Her eyes were red. Maybe she’d thought I was a doctor, someone who could help. She sighed back into her chair, small again.

“What happened?” I whispered.

She looked at our mother and back at me. She shook her head.

I shouldn’t have asked for more. She had said it all already, in a frantic and terrified voice message I should have listened to right away, when I’d first stepped out of the café.

Instead, I had sat in the car and called Nadia.

The forty-fifth man of forty-five men had just been elected president, and he’d called for a “shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Nadia’s mother was scared, Nadia was scared, and I’d stayed with her on the phone till she felt ready to hang up.

Only then did I listen to Kayla’s voice message.

Kayla had taken Felicia to school. The drive home had come to include the gas station and the grocery store, and even a few minutes alone on a shaded bench in a park.

It was hot outside, unseasonably miserable, and despite this our mother had gone for a walk before her shift.

It was part of an exercise routine Kayla had started with her, another fresh start.

The mailman found our mother on the side of the road. He picked her up off the ground and drove her to the hospital in his truck. After she was admitted, he called Kayla from our mother’s phone. A nurse took the phone from him and said it was a heart attack.

This hospital smelled just like the hospital in Florida. I was struggling to process that I was here. “Where’s Felicia?” I said.

“Her friend’s mom picked her up from school,” Kayla said. “She said goodbye over the phone.”

The word sent a jolt through me. “Wait.”

She looked at me blankly. Our mother lay between us.

“Just, wait. I don’t know the details here. What have they tried already? What if—wait—”

“I wouldn’t let them do it without you,” she said. Soundlessly, she was crying.

The meaning of it, and where we were, and what would happen to our mother—what had already happened to our mother—it pressed down on me. All of it had already happened. I’d been sitting in a wooden chair by a wall made of glass, drinking coffee with my first love.

There had been the ambulance and the operating room and the waiting room.

A doctor and a social worker in a closed, peaceful part of the hospital with a small fountain on a desk.

My sister, sitting alone on a couch. The doctor leaving.

The social worker staying. A practiced, loving explanation of the brain without oxygen.

A practiced, loving meditation on quality of life.

A practiced, loving period of waiting through a stranger’s despair, a fatherly kind of patience, like he will never in his life have another place to be. A decision. Many signatures on pages.

I took the chair from the other side of the bed and pushed it slowly across the room. What are you doing , Kayla hissed, and with my unaffected leg I kicked the chair into place beside her. I fell into it, my crutches heavy across my lap.

If our mother had been with us truly, if she had even a chance of that, I would have sat on the other side of the bed. My sister and I could each take one hand, could each lay our heads on her chest like two children before sleep. But I was needed as a sister. A better one than I had been.

We sat with the sounds of the machines. A nurse came in, looked at the screen, and dispensed something.

She talked softly about keeping our mother comfortable.

She said a priest was on his way. When he arrived, we would begin.

I didn’t know how many minutes or hours that left us, or how we were meant to use them.

When the nurse was gone, I asked what was up with the priest. He’d apparently been summoned through some kind of miscommunication. Maybe a computer error? Our barely Protestant mother didn’t qualify for what he offered.

Kayla shrugged. “Whatever. I didn’t ask for him.” But she made no effort to stand up, to tell the nurse to tell the priest to stay home.

I wondered if maybe Kayla had asked. A priest would bring something from the Holocene, this flash of time with all our recorded history. He’d bring a story of comfort outside ourselves, whether or not we believed in it. We were in a current with so much else.

I thought, like I imagined I would forever, now: this was something our mother would have liked.

Kayla leaned her head on my shoulder. I kissed it and tried not to cry.

More time passed. Light faded out slowly through the slits in the drawn blinds.

I wanted to tell Kayla I was sorry for what I’d done in Hawai’i, that I’d been an idiot for leaving it till now.

But I couldn’t bear to talk about myself.

Instead I sent her to the cafeteria. She hadn’t eaten all day, except for a cup of tea the social worker had brought her to hold while they talked.

I promised Kayla nothing would happen without her. I would stay.

Alone with my mother, I sobbed into her lap. I wrapped my arms around her waist and held her hands. I had almost forgotten the feel of them.

Together we had run, sure that a dead man chased us.

But when we made it to Tahlequah, my mother had turned to me. And I had turned away. I had thought, I now realized, too much about my father. All that time, he had lived. I had feared—I had cared about—the wrong thing.

The door opened. Kayla brought me a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Behind her was the priest. The social worker, the doctor, and two nurses. The nurse mouthed to us across the room, It’s time.

I looked around, confused, both hands full and no idea how to change this.

The social worker stepped forward, touched my shoulder, and introduced himself.

He took the coffee and the sandwich gently from me and put them on a small table at the foot of our mother’s bed.

Kayla, crying harder now, took my hands in hers and brought them back to our mother’s.

There were questions from someone in the room. Did we understand what was going to happen and did we consent, was this my sister’s signature, was this my sister, was this my mother, and so on. Kayla must have heard this before, in the room with the small fountain and the cup of tea.

This time, I answered for us. I found a thread of focus; I borrowed a voice that was old and calm, that could be here and do this. This left Kayla some minutes to whisper in our mother’s ear and tuck back her hair.

The priest was very young. He prayed. He said, “… for in meeting You, after having sought You for so long, we shall find once more every authentic good which we have known here on earth, in the company of all who have gone before us…”

I thought about how I didn’t believe in heaven, and our mother wasn’t Catholic, and the part about “lovingly accepting Your will” made me want to throw my chair out the hospital room window and scream, because our mother should have had better health insurance, should have gone to the doctor more often, should have gotten her heart checked earlier, shouldn’t be dying in what my sister said our mother said was the happiest or at least the truest time in her life.

Then I thought about the holy oil on our mother’s forehead, the gentleness of the young priest’s soft and quivering hand, the image he spoke into the room of our mother now with her mother, our mother who we held in our arms. I tried to hold that image in my mind, our mother in the company of all who had gone before her.

The mercy of what you want to hear, at the moment you hope to hear it.

In a chair in a room beside my sister, beside our mother, I felt the presence of others. All the people we had come from, people we only knew to look for in stories she had heard and held and told us. Little pieces of life.

Our mother’s breathing slowed. A terrible sound, small gasps I felt someone should shield us from.

My little sister sobbed and shook against my chest. I held her. This was something I could do. I had been trained for this, in a way, to stay steady in a rocket as it hurtled through space. Even if it spun out. Even if it killed me. I could be very still and carry her through.

Hours later in the early morning, in what would be the last moments of my mother’s life, a memory washed over me.

It was the third and last night of the school play, the third and last time my classmates were dragged from the mountains to Indian Territory.

Each night, as my character, I would fall on the edge of the stage.

Broken, scared, unsure if I had what it took to start again.

On the last night, I felt this as myself.

I forgot my lines. Meredith squeezed my hand.

I tried to look out at the crowd, for the comfort of Brett or my sister, but the spotlight shined in my eyes.

So bright it hid everyone behind it, like a flashlight in the dark. Like a quasar.

I remembered my line and said it. We all held hands and sang. The audience clapped. Meredith and I kissed inside the curtain after the rest of the cast had gone, and then she told me it was over.

For a long time, I stayed where she left me. I was invisible, wrapped in the pitch-black of the backstage curtain. I felt alone in a starless space. I gripped the thick fabric in my fists and held it tight.

I was the last to leave the auditorium, and the janitor had to unlock the back door to let me out. I’d told my family I’d ride home with a friend, which meant Meredith. Almost an hour had passed since the curtain call. I would have to walk.

But my mother was waiting for me in the parking lot behind the school, alone, leaning against the door of the old car that had brought us here.

Just a look at me, at whatever it was she could see within me, and her arms opened wide.

She folded me into her chest, the world gone dark in the warmth of her neck.

Small stars on the backs of my eyelids, a peach-sized universe.

For a moment, my feet lifted just above the ground.