Leif is very excited today, Lauren tells me while I am untying my shoelaces. The Daily is doing an episode in which the astronauts from Artemis II answer kids’ questions about visiting the dark side of the moon. I tuck my sneakers into the only empty cubby in the front hall storage bench. And we just heard by email that the question Leif submitted will be featured. Lauren digs a pair of red suede flats from another cubby and sits down next to me to strap them on. What was the question? I ask. She says Leif will tell me, then she leaves.
I find him lying on his belly beneath the dining room table, doing homework, he says, though in front of him is just a pale pink sheet of construction paper he is meticulously placing dots on with multiple colors of magic marker. Lauren, I imagine, has slipped a sheet of newspaper under him to prevent any staining of the pale wood floor should a marker bleed through. The galaxy, he says, not seeming particularly excited.
The galaxy, I repeat, distractedly. The test I took an hour earlier confirmed the suspicion I had held for a few weeks, provoked not by my missing period that month, my period never having been regular in my adult life, but by a strange feeling of suddenly not being alone in my body. I hadn’t been surprised by the two lines, thin and blue. I even thought I knew the exact moment it had happened, a few Friday afternoons ago, turned on my side and looking right at Daniel, our eye contact generating the specific kind of pocket of love that under ideal conditions a fetus grows in and a baby is born into. I lie face up on the floor beside the table and settle a palm on each hipbone, my fingertips at my belly button.
What question did you send to the astronauts? I ask. Leif caps a green marker. I wanted to know how they pooped, he responds, making dots now in blue. But my mom said I should ask something else, so I sent how did they feel being so far away. I imagined Lauren having him retry the "this is Leif from Brooklyn” intro, probably pressing the red record button in the voice notes app on her phone at the same time all the other parents with New York Times subscriptions did, recording the questions of their Olivers and Augusts and Janes and Rubys and Lilas from Brooklyn.
Lauren gets home at 11ish, once Leif is long asleep and I have read half a novel and finished two cups of tea. I hear her keys in the front door but still am startled by her appearance in the doorway to the kitchen, her bare feet barely causing the floorboards to creak. The man talked way too much about himself, she says, sounding like so many of my friends reviewing first dates. I laugh and say, obviously, though I am never sure where the women in my life find these kinds of men. I always want Daniel to talk more about himself instead of listening while I tell him everything about me, especially if there is something specific I’m not sure I should or want to tell him. Lauren sighs and shakes her head, then refills the electric kettle before fishing in her flower-printed wallet for four twenties.
The podcast comes out a few weeks later, when I am no longer pregnant. Lauren includes me on the email she sends around with the link. Lots of her friends and colleagues, other parents at the elementary school, respond on the thread. So. Cute. or his little voice.... or smart and emotionally astute!!
I listen to it on a morning walk and draw the same conclusion I always do about space travel, that I don’t trust it, that our work, our future, is on earth.
Not quite lonely, says the astronaut responding to Leif, just pretty darn far away. The other astronauts and the podcast host laugh. Pretty darn far away indeed!
The next time I see him Leif has a homework assignment more recognizable as a homework assignment, what he calls a seasons journal. He has to go to the park, pick something to look closely at for at least five minutes, and write down first all his observations and then all his predictions for how that thing might change with the seasons. He tells me it has to be natural, though. The monkey bars, for example, are off limits.
He chooses the sludgy, greenish pond by the 9th street entrance dogs swim in. We sit on a bench and look at it. It's round, we agree, and vaguely furry, full of algae. In the winter it is ice, he writes down, and it doesn't move. It is dead like rocks. In the summer, it is water, and so, as he has learned, life.
