Page 77 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH OUR MOTHER’S WILDEST DREAMS

Six weeks before my trip to space, I flew to Oklahoma City.

Kayla and Felicia picked me up, and together we drove fifteen hours east. We shared a hotel room in Bryson City.

It was twenty minutes outside Cherokee, North Carolina, the first of two stops on the speaking tour we’d planned.

We’d start here, in Cherokee homelands, and make our way back to Tahlequah.

The first event wasn’t scheduled for two more hours, so I suggested we visit Kituwah.

Our mother had once, years ago, wanted to pray there.

In the passenger seat beside me, Kayla threw back her head and cackled.

“Why don’t we wait for our mom to die,” she said, “and then go live out her wildest dreams!”

This time, there was a historical marker in front.

We filed out of the car and sat in the grass, looking out at the mound.

I felt a presence there, the knowledge of so many people dead shifting quickly to who had lived.

I wondered how our mother had experienced this place—after lunch with Brett and Beth, after Duke, after Dr. Carson and the long drive home.

I placed my hands on the ground. Grass peeked out between my fingers.

Kayla and I could finally talk about our mother now, mostly but not entirely without crying.

The day before, in East Tennessee during Kayla’s turn to drive, we had made fun of our mother for the first time since she’d died.

Kayla laughed so hard she cried, till her new SPF-foundation got into her eyes and burned.

She yelled in pain, still laughing, and squinted so hard she could barely see.

It was a relief when she managed to pull over at an exit.

Felicia, lacking context and alone in the back seat, looked at us both disapprovingly.

An ant crawled across my hand. I jerked away, brushed it onto the grass, and looked up. Kayla was squinting at the line of trees in the distance, as if searching for something. Felicia sat between us, eyes closed, praying?

In the parking lot outside the event I called Nadia, who despite her imminent departure to space had decided to start a vegetable garden.

My own mission was scheduled for soon after hers, so we wouldn’t see each other for a while.

Ten minutes into the call, I told her I missed her.

She didn’t say it back, but she left a long silence after I said it.

It felt like a good thing. Nadia talked more about her garden, how much time and money had gone into her harvest of two cucumbers, and Kayla rolled her eyes, making a “wrap it up!” signal as she held open my car door.

Kayla introduced me to a small crowd, from the stage of a school auditorium. It was here that the Tri-Council meeting had happened, where Brett had touched Beth’s leg in an empty classroom. A memory from another life.

During the Q and A, I sat on the steps at the bottom of the stage and leaned into the audience. Someone yelled for me to hold the microphone closer, and I did. Someone asked me how astronauts could sleep in microgravity, and I told them.

Afterward, I handed out pencils and sticker sheets in the lobby. On the sticker sheets, each planet was illustrated in a nod to the diversity of tribal nations. They were woven and beaded, carved into birchbark and whalebone and gourd. Kayla’s doing.

Meredith, of all people, took one set of stickers for each of her children, then introduced us to her husband.

“Oh my God!” Kayla said. She stood up and hugged her. I followed, more slowly.

Meredith laughed. “Yeah, I live here now.”

“How?” The question was for Meredith, but I looked at her husband. He was handsome and smiling. He offered his hand for me to shake. From up on his shoulders, a little boy waved down to me.

Meredith shook her head, eyebrows raised, like even she couldn’t believe her life. “Telling you would take too long,” she said.

Kayla and I gave her a look, pushing, but she held firm.

The younger child started to cry, and Meredith said something to him in Cherokee.

She had really kept learning it, in the years since she’d struggled with it in school?

She knew enough to speak it to her children?

I sensed the jealousy building up in Kayla beside me, and I told Meredith it was so good to see her.

Her husband shook my hand for the second time.

I gave their children extra sticker sheets and greeted the next person in line.

The next day, we drove back to Tahlequah. On the way we circled some streets outside Little Rock, trying to find the house our mother had grown up in. We couldn’t find the address we’d seen on an old envelope. It wasn’t online and no longer seemed to exist. We had no one to ask.

“I should’ve looked them up by now,” Kayla said.

She meant our family, whoever they were. Our mother had had brothers, who like her ought to still be alive. The brothers might have had kids. I thought about our half siblings on our father’s side, four kids in Texas with no context for us, but I hadn’t yet asked Kayla how she felt about that.

Just as we’d decided to get back on the interstate, Felicia threw up in the back seat.

We pulled over at a gas station, where Felicia took her time washing and drying her shirt in the restroom. I sat in the vomit-smell of the car, sweating, fully ready to die.

I called Nadia. “Well if you died,” she said, “it would double my shot at the next mission assignment. I’d love to beat you to the moon.”

I laughed. Our upcoming missions were to the space station, and public opinion wasn’t hot on a mission to the moon. The same could be said of most missions, even going back to the Space Race.

But at the school visit, just a day before, the kids had talked about Mars like I used to. Like we’d be there, boots on planet, soon.

“Nadia, please. If that happened, you’d be a wreck,” I said. “You’d visit my grave, what, three times a day?”

“In Arkansas? Fuck no.”

“In Houston?”

“Houston?” she said. “I’d get on my knees and bury you myself.”

Late that night, we made it home.

Kayla showed me around the changes she’d made.

The old things I’d cleared out after the funeral had been replaced, with new and different clutter.

There were bright, saturated colors on the walls of every room, like pictures I’d seen of houses in Mexico.

There was art everywhere, framed prints of pieces by artists Kayla admired.

In our mother’s old bedroom, now Felicia’s, Kayla had painted jasmine and hibiscus by a window.

It was the start of a mural, which would cover the wall with Hawaiian plants.

We showered. Kayla boiled hot dogs for a quick and late dinner, ran the miracle of a dishwasher I never thought I’d see in that kitchen, and started pushing Felicia toward bed.

Quietly, while they put fancy serums on their faces side by side at the bathroom sink, I slipped into what had been our bedroom.

It was Kayla’s now, barely decorated in comparison to what she’d done for Felicia’s room and for the rest of the house.

But by the window, where my telescope had once stood on a tripod facing out, something caught my eye.

An easel. Clipped to it were several pieces of paper with uneven edges, seemingly ripped from a sketchbook.

Each held a separate version of the same drawing, either in pencil or in fast, smudged ink.

I couldn’t make out what the drawings were, or what they would become.

Maybe trees, or shadows? But I was so happy to see them.

I had missed my sister as someone who painted, before she had become someone closely watched.

In the morning, I gave a talk at my old school. I went alone. I wanted to know I could do it.

“Don’t make me speak the language,” I’d warned the administrator who booked me, “I can’t remember how.

” I stood in the auditorium where I’d put on plays as a child, where over many years I’d been a singing raindrop, a brick-housed pig, and somebody’s husband—breaking the neck of a mockingbird and roasting it over a fire.

I answered questions from children about how to eat and wash your hair and pee in space.

I answered questions from parents about financial aid and college and careers in the sciences.

I introduced a woman near what I still thought of as my mother’s age, with a white plastic name tag on her shirt.

She was from Cherokee Nation College Resources.

She sat at a long folding table in the back, with flyers and clipboards and free planners for the coming school year.

After the photos and the handing out of stickers, I walked backstage and collapsed into a chair. It was here, still, the heavy black curtain. I grazed the fabric with my fingers.

Brett knocked lightly on the backstage wall.

We watched each other, his hand on the back of my chair. I felt awkward with him, in a way I thought I’d gotten over at the funeral. There we’d been surrounded by other people, the weight of my mother between us.

Behind us, we heard the banging of metal chairs swept out of rows, lifted and stacked against the walls.

“Thank you,” I said to him. Like it was for the event, or the bottle of water left for me on a stool.

“Ahnawake,” he said, “you did good.”

Brett brushed his hand over my head, a leftover gesture from when my hair could be smoothed down. His hand was heavy and warm. I had missed him so much when he had left. And in the years after sometimes, too.

I had missed this father. And, in that way I would never have words for, the one before him.

Brett slipped back behind the curtain. I cried silently in the girls’ bathroom by the auditorium, like I had many times as a child.

I walked out the back door of the building, leaned against the brick wall, and looked out at the parking lot. It was empty. My eyes rested on the place where I’d found my mother after the school play. Where she’d stood, leaning against the closed door of her car, waiting for me.