Page 76 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH WHAT WE WERE

A week later, Kayla gently asked me to leave.

Jason would be staying with her and Felicia for a few days, to help them move furniture before his new job started in Tulsa.

The bunk bed, finally, had to go. My sister said there’d be no room for me in Oklahoma.

Not in that house. Literally no beds, once Jason arrived.

“This is just the push you need,” Kayla said. She was laughing. We both were. I went back to Houston.

Nadia picked me up from the airport. Her arm was out of its sling, my leg was out of its brace, and in the parking lot we both jumped up and down, showing off, waving our mostly healed body parts in the air.

She bent down and tried to lift my bad leg with her bad arm, just for the bit, but we both screamed in pain and fell back laughing into the car.

When we could breathe again, she turned the key in the ignition, grabbed my head in her hands, and kissed me hard on my forehead.

It was completely over the top, a kiss one cartoon character might give to another.

Clearly intended not to give me the wrong idea.

“Jim says hi,” she said. Her parents had always gone by their first names, encouraging her to question hierarchies from a young age. Felicia had thought that was amazing.

“What about Imane?” I said. We both knew Imane was harder to please.

“She doesn’t say hi,” Nadia said, pulling onto the highway. “She says you’re a distraction from my work here, and bad at crossword puzzles.”

“Am I?”

“I don’t know; I’ve never seen you do one.”

I laughed. “So I’m a distraction .”

“Impossible,” she said. She was almost smiling, but her voice was firm. “Don’t take it personally.”

I decided to settle in. On the first day Aziz was free to help me, I assembled my bed frame. I stopped sleeping on a mattress on the floor. I bought a cactus, and started sending postcards to Felicia. I subscribed to a newspaper.

Together, Nadia and Aziz and I protested a travel ban against people from seven Muslim-majority countries. We protested the border wall and the deportation of immigrants. We protested our country pulling out of an agreement on climate change mitigation.

Every other weekend, Nadia went to visit her parents in New York. Sometimes she went to Boston, to see Daryan. I went to work, harder than ever.

Then, in February, Nadia was assigned a mission to the International Space Station. Six weeks later, I was, too.

I was undone. Like all my life I’d been building myself up for this moment, and it was here, and I was not who I’d expected to be. Now I was taking myself apart again, looking at the pieces, putting them back in a different order. I would go to space. And I held so many other things in my heart.

One morning I got up when it was still dark out, just to pee.

Then another morning, just to turn on the space heater at the foot of my bed, and then again to boil water for tea.

I found myself awake on purpose, every morning a little earlier.

I stirred hot milk and Ovaltine, the kind my mother once told me her mother liked, in a chipped red mug taken from the house I grew up in.

I sat on my balcony, even in winter, wrapped in blankets as the sun came up.

I allowed myself to sit still. To pause and wonder and question my life.

I had been too rushed for this before, and too afraid of my own thoughts.

It wasn’t enough, I realized. The trip to space. I had finally been chosen, just when I’d realized it wasn’t about me.

Since I was a child, I’d been fighting for space. No one had shown me how to get there, which I’d thought made them obstacles to beat my way past.

Now I knew that wasn’t true. My mother had given me the telescope and kept me safe as best she could. Brett had learned the Cherokee words for astronomical bodies, even as they were still being developed, just to gift them to me.

I had played down the fact of my people.

I’d had shame at first, like being Indian would limit me.

I’d have to arrive in spite of it. Or maybe I’d have to use it, taking advantage of the stories people told themselves about us.

I had acted like my ancestors at the Seminary, how they’d armed themselves with English and calculus and bustles under their dresses.

When I was older, and I had changed but so had the world, I had thought I wasn’t Indian enough .

But this was what we were. What, for now, one of us was. Mine was one story of many, as Brett had tried to teach me—one thread of a history that wasn’t over. Before I went to space, I wanted to share it.

On the news one morning in March, I saw the new president on a lawn in a long navy coat.

He was touring the home of former president Andrew Jackson, signer of the Indian Removal Act.

At the time of Jackson’s death, on the grounds of the Tennessee plantation I now watched on my laptop, one hundred and sixty Black people had been enslaved.

Fifty thousand Native people had been removed to Indian Territory, freeing up twenty-five million acres for white settlement and slavery’s expansion.

The new president hung Andrew Jackson’s portrait in the Oval Office. He said he was “a big fan.” Andrew Jackson was “an inspiration.” The new president laid a wreath on Andrew Jackson’s tomb.

In my apartment in Houston, somewhere between eastern and western Cherokee land, I stared at my screen, thinking. It was the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of Andrew Jackson’s birth, and I remembered his legacy. I wanted to be with my people.

When I was growing up, I’d been so sure I didn’t have people. I’d never even bothered to look.

Eventually, dozens of phone calls. A grant application, a map, a proposed schedule of events.

I asked myself what I was doing, why I was doing it, if I was powerful and what was the point.

A memory, the nights my mother had planned a summer camp for me.

A call to my sister in the early evening, how quickly she had said “yes.”