Page 9 of To the Moon and Back

At the end of the Trail, when our once-rowdy family had been reduced to the two of us, I took my first steps into Indian Territory with an inconsolable Meredith in my arms. She sobbed real tears, all three nights in our school auditorium, and grasped at my chest and my tattered collar as I held her like the baby she had accidentally smothered.

After each performance Meredith would kiss me, the first three kisses of my life. Each kiss was longer than the kiss the night before. The two of us were wrapped in the heavy black cloth of a backstage curtain, like a burrito, while the audience waited for us outside.

On the third night she took my hand in hers and pulled it under her mud-crusted trade shirt, under her bra even, and made the softest sound in the back of her throat, and I thought I’d die to hear it again—I thought this is the meaning of life, making someone make a sound like that, everything I’d done before this had been a waste —and then she left to collect her bouquet of grocery store flowers from fucking Daniel .

I felt downtrodden, like I’d just watched my children all die one by one before my wife ran off with someone else. Hadn’t we been a team? Meredith and I were like the only survivors in a world of regular people. Who could understand the horrors we had seen?

After the play, when we were back in high school and barely spoke to each other except for times like when I, for example, dropped my most sophisticated choice of book on the floor in front of her so she’d stop walking and get down on her knees and hand it back to me, it was like the anguish of our shared past had ruined us and now we were divorced.

I tried to talk about it with her, once. We were worth talking about! We were breaking down the sets.

When Meredith reached for a hammer I reached for it, too, and held my hand so gently over hers. I looked at her with the saddest eyes I could muster. Eyes like, Did you love me? Do you? Will you again? Will anyone?

Meredith laughed and let go of the hammer. “You can have it; I’ll go do props.” Like that was what I wanted from her. A hammer.

“I’ll miss you,” I whispered, “with the play over and all.”

She was supposed to say she’d miss me, too. Then we’d kiss. I had planned this all out in my head.

She said, “Yeah, it was fun!”

Maybe she didn’t realize the chicken sandwich had been from me? Maybe she didn’t get that a chicken was like a bird, which was like a mockingbird—which was a metaphor? I would kill all kinds of animals for her, not just birds, if she ever needed me to.

I tried again. Even quieter, though everyone else was working backstage and being loud. “I like you a lot,” I said. “Might I take you to Chick-fil-A sometime?”

Meredith looked stricken.

“Or, um, to somewhere you pick? Somewhere more expensive? I have twenty dollars.”

It was already a compromise, a far cry from us making out. But it took years to get to the moon landing. Some people worked toward it for so long that by the time it happened they were dead.

I had wanted to ask her to be my girlfriend. Daniel, her boyfriend, would meet her in the parking lot in an hour.

Meredith sighed. She cocked her head like I should follow her, which I did gladly.

Down the red-carpeted aisle to the auditorium double doors, like it was our wedding, only we were walking away from the altar, not toward it.

I followed her out of the auditorium and into our empty classroom, hammer still in hand.

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” Meredith said.

It was weird to be in a classroom alone together, and thrilling.

She sat on the teacher’s desk. I sat in a chair at my same front-row desk from the school day, regretting immediately that Meredith was in charge.

In our theater curtain burrito life, which did feel now like a whole separate life, Meredith had mostly let me lead.

“I have a boyfriend,” Meredith said. “Daniel. You know that. You sit behind him in math.”

I nodded.

“And you’re a girl.”

I raised an eyebrow. I thought, Wasn’t I a girl last week? And also, weirdly, What about everything we’ve been through?

“I don’t want to talk to you at school,” Meredith said. “I get it, you were a boy for the play and you did the method acting thing. As a fellow artist, I respect that.”

I wanted to throw up. I said, “But why did you put my hand on your—”

“ Steph! ” she snapped. “I am not going to tell anyone what you did. But—as someone who cares for your well-being? I think there’s something wrong with you.”

For months afterward, I remembered the play in my dreams.

At bedtime it was like I could put a VHS tape in my brain and fall asleep to an exact depiction of when I had almost been happy. When I had really thought, or had at least almost thought, that I might belong here. On Earth, even. I had tried. I could remind myself of that.

It looked like this:

Meredith fell to her knees at the very edge of the stage and looked out into the darkness of an audience she couldn’t see, into a new life waiting for her in Indian Territory.

“Hold my hand,” she said.

I wiped Meredith’s tears with the end of her woven shawl, the only warmth she’d had through the long, hard winter, and her eyes shone in the spotlight that my sister, dressed in all-black, beamed down on her from the balcony.

“Let us have a child in this new land. Let us put our suffering behind us, and start again, and rebuild a proud nation for the generations to come.”

I knelt beside her. I dropped my forehead to her shoulder, and she held my head and rocked me gently, like I was her baby. I had no shoes, no jacket, no vest—I had given our children all that I had. Still, they had died. “My beloved wife,” I cried out. “Do you really believe we can live again?”

“My beloved husband,” Meredith said. “I do believe that, with all my heart. In fact, it reminds me of a song my dead mother used to sing…”

And then the stage lights went out, and the houselights came on, revealing our classmates and our families come to see us, and the whole ensemble was onstage again, even our three older children resurrected, even the soldiers with their guns stowed backstage, even Andrew Jackson, even our American Girl doll, back safe in Meredith’s arms, and we held hands and sang “Amazing Grace” in Cherokee, and the audience sang along to whatever words they knew, Kayla singing loud, shining the lights bright across the room onto everyone, from way up high in the back, while our mother, alone in the front row, cried in her best dress.