Page 74 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH OTHER PEOPLE

I got to putting things in order. The mortgage, the home insurance, and the bills our mother had kept in piles around the house.

At some point I would leave, and Kayla and Felicia would stay.

Jason had agreed to move for Felicia’s remaining years of school.

He’d be joining a small firm in Tulsa, and renting in a small town forty minutes away.

I wanted the house to be nice for them, like their lives hadn’t turned out like this by mistake.

Every room was full of things to be dusted and sorted and given away.

The endless tasks—made slower by my injury—let me feel like I was needed, even in this way I had made up.

I needed to do things for and with other people, and to remind myself that I was part of them.

Everywhere, I now knew, adults walked the earth with a parent dead.

With both dead, even. Orphans! It was unthinkable to me, still.

I said something like this to Nadia over the phone, the second night after my mother died.

Nadia had been discharged and was recovering well in her apartment with her parents on-hand to cook and clean.

My sister was in the backyard, alone by a bonfire and drawing something. I was in bed, barely able to speak.

Nadia said this was fine. She told me to put my phone on the pillow beside my head, which I did, and she did the same on her end. We slept like that.

A few days later she flew in for the funeral.

She didn’t ask permission, which saved us the argument over how she should rest at home.

She simply appeared in the second row of pews, a rare sight out of uniform.

She was dressed formally, in a dark suit that looked new.

Even her hair was different. It had been parted neatly on the left side, then somehow manipulated into ringlets.

Her left arm hung at her side in a sling.

After the grave site and back at the house, Nadia kicked Kayla out of the kitchen with a look.

She reheated casseroles and refilled bowls of chips and French onion dip.

She appointed Felicia her sous chef, tying an apron around her waist (one-handed!).

She taught her to peel vegetables into roses, and they came out so pretty that no one would eat them. Felicia beamed.

The house was crowded with people I’d grown up with and then never seen again.

My old Sunday school teacher, and a grocer I couldn’t remember, and the mailman.

He’d found our mother on the road, after years of summers of her carrying him water.

He told us our mother had learned that from her grandmother, back that one summer she’d spent with her.

Our mother’s grandmother had lived in Bell, a small Cherokee community with no running water till the eighties.

Residents, with the tribe’s support, dug the sixteen-mile waterline themselves.

Before that, when water was something to be hauled in buckets, our mother had learned it was a precious thing to give.

Kayla and I looked at each other, realizing we’d just learned the name of our grandmother’s town.

It was maybe an hour southeast, and just a few miles from Arkansas.

Even Beth came to the house. Beth, whom I’d loved and looked up to before all the drama with Brett.

It all felt ancient and strange, like these were visitors from another planet.

There was so little space to move in the kitchen and the living room, everyone bumping into one another and eating cheese and crackers off paper napkins.

Nadia wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and dumped another bag of chips into a bowl, smiling at me across the room.

Under obviously different circumstances, my mother would have found this fun.

People teased me ruthlessly, about my hair and my muscles and my shark attack.

About what a nightmare I’d been as a kid.

They squeezed my upper arms and pulled me into their chests, laughing loud.

Will, who’d once fired me from my job at the museum, said my mom hadn’t shut up about her astronaut daughter. So why the hell was I always on Earth?

Brett, married to Beth for many years now, sent her home without him. He took the dishcloth from Nadia’s hand and told her to stop working, jeez, go sit down! “Act like you got bit by a shark, why don’t you.”

Brett cleaned the kitchen, took out the trash, left, came back with groceries, and put them away where they’d belonged in the nineties.

The rest of us, Kayla and me and Nadia and Felicia, sat in a row on the couch and watched him. Felicia barely understood who he was. After all these years, I wasn’t sure how to describe to her what he’d been.

I had always believed it was a perfect set of circumstances, pure luck, my mother loving Brett and Brett loving space, which meant Brett could love me.

Brett showing up right when I needed him.

Brett with his beautiful telescope in the leather carrying case with the shoulder strap.

Brett holding my hand when I crawled through the open window, sitting beside me up on our roof, angling the telescope just so and saying, “Ni! Higowatis sgina noquisi wedoho? Ananisdani anaseho.” Me looking up, leaning against him, looking for Venus, finding it.

I said, “Brett? If you give me a minute, I can get you your telescope.” I’d found it during my week of housecleaning. It was in a closet. I hadn’t used it since grad school, when the physicist had bought me a new one.

Brett closed the fridge and faced me. “You should hold on to that,” he said. “It was your mother’s.”

“It was yours,” I said.

“No, it was hers,” he said, shrugging. “She saved up for it. I wasn’t that into space.”

“What?!” Nadia said. I’d told her about Brett. I’d told her about everything.

Brett tossed the empty grocery bags in the cabinet under the sink and sat down across from the four of us. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “It was your mom’s idea. I think she got it from Star Trek ?”

I remembered. It was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. My mother had found it for us. Our show, after Kayla’s bedtime. There’d been popcorn, and sometimes ice cream. Halfway through the first season, she’d finally let Brett move in with us.

“Your mom said she wanted something to share with you,” Brett said. “She said you loved it. And if it helped with all those weird space stories your dad had put in your head? That was something.”

On the couch beside me, Kayla squeezed my hand. It was the first time we’d heard Brett refer to our father. Our father was—for a while, and maybe when we’d most needed it—supposed to be him.

Brett told us everything and answered all my questions.

Yes, our mother had told him about our father.

Yes, all of it, even the parts she wasn’t ready to share with us.

She told him about space, and me, and how I seemed to be adjusting since Texas (not well).

She bought a telescope. She gave it to Brett and told him not to say where it came from.

She asked him to please encourage the space thing.

I remembered the first time Brett had shown me the telescope. For a while I’d been afraid. Bad things could come from men with telescopes.

And then I wasn’t. Then I saw the moon close-up.

Every night, Brett and I would sit on the roof and look up at the sky, shivering in the cold or burning our feet on still-hot shingles.

Every night my mother watched us from her bedroom window.

On the way to his car, Brett called out behind him in Cherokee. Let us, you-plural and I, meet again . Not quite goodbye. I remembered that.

Nadia’s flight home was the next day. Her parents could stay one more week with her in Houston, before they had to get Imane back home for continued treatment.

I understood, better now than I could have only days before, what Nadia had given up to be here with me.

There was no adequate trade for remaining time with her mother.

When I reached for it anyway, I felt the tiny uselessness of my humanity.

I stopped at the gas station for M&M’s and zipped them into the side pocket of her suitcase.

I made her shakshouka for breakfast, which the internet said was Moroccan (or Tunisian or Turkish or Yemeni).

In the drop-off lane at the Oklahoma City airport, I got out of the car.

I limped around it, motioning for Nadia to wait a minute, so I could hug her with both arms.