Christmas at Aunt Hillary and Uncle Francis’s home in Elmhurst was a family tradition, but more fun when her father was alive and the two of them could roll their eyes at all of Aunt Hillary’s crazed Jesus and Santa crafting. Sometimes Bitter Phil would roll in too, and he’d drink too much and tell awkward family stories that made her mom and Aunt Hillary uncomfortable but were pretty fascinating. The dramatic possibilities at Christmas were endless.
One year, Mireille’s mother gave everyone in the family silver star charms that she had carried with her into space. Each star was engraved with the recipient’s name, and the code number for the mission. “Merry Xmas to my crew member” her mother had written on every card, in her precise block-letter handwriting. Everyone had made a big deal over them, especially Mireille’s cousins. Mireille did not think something having been in space conveyed some sort of amazing status upon it, although she was devastated when, years later, she’d lost the charm. So devastated that she had not been able to tell anyone about it until after her father’s death, when her mother mentioned that she’d found her dad’s star inside his tennis bag. Inside an old manicure set, apparently, so the star obviously hadn’t meant that much to him. Mireille had cried, and told her mother about losing her star, and her mother had said, “Do you want your father’s?”
It was a thing about her mom. If you told her that you liked her sweater, she’d offer to give it to you.
It would be, Mireille thinks, impossible to explain to someone just what exactly was wrong with her mother’s email. Perhaps it’s only the usual end-of-the-year taking stock, but Mireille feels a certain pressure to solve this problem of her mother. Perhaps it’s that ever since the fake launch she’s been haunted by the idea that her mother will go to Mars and she will die on that trip, and the sense that, if her mother dies before she solves the problem of her mother, it will never be solved. That can’t be her story. Her mother cannot be the story of her life.
Her mother would tell her that she holds the power of her own feelings. She always has a choice of how to feel. If that is true, then where is her power? Where is her power? Mireille holds the star around her neck so tightly that the well-worn spokes cut into her palm.
In fact, the one person who completely understands the inadequacies of the letter is the sender. Helen had sent the letter to her daughter with the full knowledge that it would fail, as she had always failed, to give her daughter what she needs. Helen had brought her daughter a star from space, but it wasn’t what her daughter wanted either.
YOSHI
The hours Yoshi spent sleeping on the International Space Station were the most sensual experience of his life. Cradled in the arms of microgravity, cupped by the sweet hand of orbit, held like a child in a womb—well, no. His mother’s womb could not have been as wonderful. His mother had been the enthusiastic attendee of a jazz exercise class for the entirety of his gestation and though his mother loved to dance, whatever connections her mind and body found in each other remained mysterious and untranslatable to onlookers. It cannot have felt as good.
Yoshi misses sleeping at microgravity, but thinking about this serves no purpose and he will not mention it to the others. It was important not to mentally rehearse minor grievances, or make lists of the things one missed. They all keep their complaints to themselves, except for when Sergei gives collective voice to them, which lets them all laugh and relieves those little draughts of tension that arise in their confinement.
Beneath his water-filled sleep mask, Yoshi keeps his eyes closed. He tries to remember his dream for his journal. His dreams on Primitus are very strange, slow-moving epics. Rather than try to describe them in full, he chooses instead to focus on one particular aspect. He recalls trying to describe to Helen the smell of vanilla. He’d explained it incorrectly: as something tart. Possibly the word tart was important. In Britain, a prostitute might be called a tart. Perhaps the word was a derivative of sweetheart? He will not tell Helen this dream, obviously. It is disconcerting to be told that you were in someone’s dream, and in no way does he think of Helen as a prostitute.
“Everything you say matters,” Yoshi’s father had once said to him. “Whenever you say something, you are now the person who has said that.” There were good and bad aspects to following this advice, but on the whole it was good.
Yoshi has come to see that one of the most important qualities he brings to the mission is a kind of mental fluidity. If Sergei is direct, and Helen is dogged, then Yoshi is flexible. He fits. He fits in. A universal donor.
Yoshi sits upright and takes five deep breaths. He removes his sleep mask, which had glowed intermittently throughout the night in dark violet, to aid in digestion. He will not look at the Primitus systems screen yet—studies have shown that it is not a healthful choice to attend to work before standing.