There wasn’t a body for the funeral, so Ten’s mother buried his childhood instead. She gathered drawings he’d made in first grade, a stuffed bear named Neil, baby shoes, and told the funeral home to put them in the casket. There was no one to stop her, Ten’s father hadn’t been in the picture since Ten was three years old, and no other children. If there had been anyone to stop her, they wouldn’t have been able to anyway. Ten’s mother was nothing if not as determined as her son.

When they’d called her, told her he was gone, she’d said, “no, shit. I just watched it on TV.” That is not to say she didn’t sob, didn’t fall to the ground screaming. But she did those things alone. As she always had. She hung up on the program director, stared at a photo of Ten on the wall. In it, he was eleven and dressed as an astronaut for Halloween. He’d stayed in the costume all night, used a walkie talkie to call downstairs to her, “mission control, I’m heading to bed. Over.”

“Copy, Astronaut Walker. Goodnight. Over.”

After the funeral, there was an absence that she couldn’t quite understand. Ten had been gone for months before his death, the mission carting him across worlds. But the new absence that replaced that one felt more distinct. There was no coming home, no phone calls late at night when he couldn’t sleep and called her because he knew her insomnia would mean she too was up. They’d talk on the phone as they both traced trajectories across the floors of their respective homes. She looked up old footage of interviews with him. Finally, another manned mission to Mars. How he’d glowed with excitement.

She’d read once a theory about the less people in your life who knew you well, then the less you existed. As if being perceived by others was what granted you sustainability. Her husband long gone, and good riddance, and the friends who had drifted away from her. But she had still held firm, been herself, as long as her son was alive. She caught herself examining her skin while taking a bath, memorizing the sight of her veins in her hands, the scars and wrinkles that showed a life lived. She was not vanishing and it seemed somehow absurd.

It had been a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two, when the doorbell rang and she went to answer it expecting another person from some local church just checking in. Instead, it was Pedro. He’d been Ten’s closest friend since they’d started in training together. She’d met him a few times, always liked him. He was a quick to smile man, generous with his laughter.

“Hi, Mrs. Walker,” he said and smiled. Though, his smile felt more forced than usual. She wondered then how he must have felt, losing a friend who was also a colleague. To lose someone who was doing something he so easily could have been doing instead.

“Pedro. A surprise,” she said, beckoning him inside.

“A good one, I hope.”

“A good what?”

“Surprise?”

“Of course.” She paused, recalibrated to soften her voice, “of course, it is. How is your wife?”

“She’s good. She wanted to come as well, but her work has been…” he gestured to the air, a waving motion of his fingers that said more than he could have.

They walked through to the living room and sat down. “Work gets like that, no matter what you do, doesn’t it?” She’d been a journalist. Had tracked leads with the best of them, written stories she was proud of, and had still never felt better than when she retired from it. From the constant need to move, to understand, to seek.

Pedro peered around the living room, his eyes falling on the photos of Ten. She saw him swallow hard. Was this the first person he lost? “Can I get you something to drink?”

He shook his head. “No, thank you, I just wanted to stop in, say hello. At the funeral, I didn’t want to bother you.”

He’d been there, of course, and had enveloped her in a hug. But she had not been much of a talker that day. She studied Pedro’s face and went through the questions in her head that she might have wanted to ask him: did he think Ten had understood the risks? What was his favorite memory of her son? Would Ten have known what was happening? How much would he have felt? Instead, she asked, “how is your work?”

He seemed surprised by the question. “It’s…it’s going. I’m not currently on crew for anything, so easy days, I suppose. And, how are…sorry that’s a stupid question. Here’s another: how have you been keeping yourself busy?”

She laughed. “I haven’t. The days blend and I’m still here, though, and that’s something.”

As if the tension broke, after having gotten it out of the way, they both relaxed in their seats and began to talk about other things. Not of Ten, not directly. But about his mission, what it had been trying to do, what it could have done.

After Pedro had gone, she sat back on the couch and thought about his question. How have you been keeping yourself busy? When Ten had been alive, she hadn’t had hobbies exactly. She’d kept up the house, read books, worked in the garden when the weather was right, sometimes gone to the beach to sit on the shore and watch the water roll in and out. What was living a life if not dwelling inside it?

When she was a journalist, one of her beats had been interviewing astronauts. She wondered sometimes if that was what had made Ten want to be one, if she could find blame for his death in that. Mostly, though, the interviews had been boring. After they returned from missions, everything they said was a reiteration of whatever the astronauts before them had said. She had longed for one of them to say something surprising, how much they hated their crew, got bored of staring at Earth from far away, anything to stop the canned responses of how much they were in awe of the view.

Maybe it was the conversation with Pedro, maybe it was the way she tried to dream of Ten every night and couldn’t, he used to be in her dreams so much, but when she stopped in the café on her walk the next day, she took a photo of a poster advertising the local astronomy club chapter. She’d always wanted to know more about the stars. Wanted to be able to point to a constellation if anyone asked her, say that one there, that’s my favorite.

The next meeting was the weekend after, and she made herself go. It was strange how her house, empty for years of anyone but her, had come to feel somehow even emptier. It felt to her like an echo rather than a sound.

The meeting was held at the local library, in one of the tiny event rooms that she’d always passed by and wondered if anyone actually used. She got there early, an old habit of going to interviews always at least twenty minutes ahead so she could see how people arrived. She’d always believed it told her something about the person, whether they strode in with confidence or snuck in.

Only one other person was already there, a man her age or just a little younger, seated in the back row of chairs. She had planned on sitting in the back, for when she inevitably would want to duck out early, and wasn’t about to let his presence stop her so she sat down a few seats away from him. He nodded at her, and she nodded back.

Minutes passed before he broke the silence. “Your first time at the club?”

The sentence sounded silly aloud and she almost laughed but held her ground. But then he laughed, “that sounded strange, didn’t it?”

She chuckled. “Yep, it did. It is, though. My first time. You?”

“No, been here a couple times. Didn’t recognize you. I’m Tom,” he leaned in his seat and stretched out a hand to shake hers.

“Yvette,” she said and shook his hand.

“Nice to meet you,” he said. “Actually…Yvette Walker?”

She startled slightly. “Yes.” Braced for what she thought the inevitable next comment would be.

“We met, once, long time ago. I was just back from a station mission.”

She let out a slight bit of breath. “Oh, I interviewed you?”

“Yeah. Many a moon ago.” He smiled. “So, I guess, nice to meet you again.”

“You, too.” She looked around trying to find something else to say, to relieve the room from falling back into silence. She gestured to the empty chairs, “does it normally get a good turnout?”

He pondered the question for a moment. “Yeah, there are some regulars, I think. Sometimes more faces. Everyone always comes at the last minute. Funny for a club where catching a meteor shower might mean being out at a certain time.”

“Most people, I’ve found, tend towards the late or almost.”

“The almost. I like that,” he said. As he spoke, a few people walked into the room. They waved at him as they made their way to the front seats, and he waved back.

She shifted her attention to the front, where someone was now setting up a computer to project onto the front wall. The meeting’s agenda appeared. She regretted coming as soon as she saw it. The planned efficiency.

The meeting stretched before her. The first speaker talking over notes from their last meeting. Someone talked about some newly discovered extrasolar planet. Then one gave a presentation on astrophotography. He projected photos behind him: the stars so bright and clear, the rings of Jupiter. She didn’t realize that she’d leaned forward in her seat, staring at the images displayed, until she almost bumped her chin into the head of the man in front of her. She wondered if Ten had pressed his face against the windows of the ship. Had he seen anything of the planet he crashed into? The dust, the sky so unlike Earth’s. It must have been something to take it all in.

At the end of the meeting, the leader mentioned that there was a meteor shower the following weekend. They’d reserved a section of a park to view it. A sign-up sheet was passed around, and she found herself delighted by the old-fashioned way of cataloguing who would go. She added her name. Somehow, despite her decades of life, she’d never seen a falling star.

Blame light pollution or her own near-sighted eyes, but Ten had once run in from the front yard. He was maybe ten and he’d told her to come quick. She’d run out, thinking something was wrong. Instead, he’d grabbed her hand and pointed to the sky. “I saw a shooting star, Mom!” She’d looked at the night, the blue undisturbed by anything falling. “I guess it’s fallen all the way now, but I wanted you to see it.”

“Did you make a wish?” she’d asked.

“Yes! I—”

“Shh. Don’t tell me. That’s the way you break a wish,” she’d said, smiling down at her son. He’d covered his mouth with one hand, as if to keep the words from forcing their way out but kept his other hand holding hers. Her boy.

She left the meeting, the man next to her, Tom, waved as she went.

At home, she went back through her old clippings, still kept in a file on her computer even after all that time and found the interview with Tom Brooks. In his much younger photo, she could see the tea leaves of his older face. The interview was short, she’d interviewed his whole crew. Only one quote from him, talking about the food on the station. She felt less bad about not remembering him. After a while, crews had all melded together in her memory.

On her way to bed, she passed by Ten’s old room. The one he had stayed in when he visited her. She peeked in: she’d buried so much that the room was more bare than it once was. It still felt like him, though. There was his window seat, too small for an adult, where as a child he’d sat there watching the stars at night when he couldn’t sleep. Her insomnia passed to him. Maybe that’s why he never came to her in her dreams, unable to sleep and meet her from wherever he was.

The week passed. She woke up and ate and took her walks and everything remained the same. She’d buried a needle in the groove of her life long before. When the night of the meteor shower arrived, she drove to the park and stopped her car in the parking lot. The sky was so dark, she wasn’t sure she’d see anything. Clouds high up.

The park had a hill in the center of it, where everyone was to meet. She made her way towards it. The clouds began to shift as she got closer, a sliver of moon peeking out, some stars. A few people were already sitting on the grass, so she found a spot away from them. It had been a long time since she’d sat on grass. It was cold and wet, clinging to her skin. Itchy.

“May I sit here?” Tom asked. “I’m a back of the classroom kid, too.”

She nodded.

He took a seat next to her, and she was pleased to see he also grimaced with the crouch and then soft landing onto the grass.

“Getting older’s a bitch, huh?” she said.

He laughed. “I was hoping the dark hid my expression.”

“I found my old interview with you. You didn’t tell me much.”

“Yeah, I was never a talkative astronaut. Everyone else always said things much prettier than I could.” He pulled up a few blades of grass, rubbed them between his fingers.

“That’s overrated,” she replied. “You go on many missions?”

“No. I went to the station that once. Was picked for a Mars mission. But I aged out. Everything takes so fucking long in space.” He gestured to the night sky, as if to blame that. She noticed a flash of light arcing among the stars. “I was supposed to be on Crew Two, the one after Ariadne and then, of course, well, it pushed everything back quite a few years.”

“That must have been terrible. To lose people you worked with.”

Tom half-nodded. “It was.” He took a long pause. Long enough that she counted two more flashes of light. “Not as bad as losing a son. That’s a hell of a loss.”

She had wondered if he knew, recognized her name in some way other than as the person who once interviewed him. She didn’t say anything, just half-nodded as well. So, he continued, “I never thought about dying before that. Well, you know, dying up there. Plenty of things to be afraid of on Earth, but space seemed…different, I guess.”

“A lot of ways to die in space, too,” she said.

He laughed, “right? But. My dad died when I was a kid. In Afghanistan. He was a soldier, and I picked a job that was stupidly dangerous in another way.”

“Your poor mother.”

He paused a long time, “my poor mother.”

They sat in silence for a while, watching the stars falling around them. The lights that shimmered and shook across the night sky before disappearing.

“How was the view from up there?” she asked.

He turned to her, “honestly? It wasn’t anything special. I like it better from down here, you can see everything so clearly.”

She laughed. What a sound out there in the dark. The dark broken occasionally by shooting stars. Meteors burning up as they entered the Earth’s atmosphere bursting into light. They didn’t feel it. She hoped they didn’t feel it.

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Chloe N. Clark is the author of Every Galaxy a Circle, Collective Gravities, and more.

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