On your first birthday away, I got you a plant incubator. I wrapped it in jungle-green paper and tied it twice, with an organic silk band the color of wild strawberries. I put it beneath our bed, a corner sticking out, pushing up the dust covers, for you to find when you returned. Mission Control was still saying that it was only a matter of time.
On your second birthday away, I got you a photo album full of prints of Kira. I’d annotated them, so you’d know what our little girl had been up to while you were gone, so you wouldn’t be estranged. I particularly liked the image on page three, eighteenth of June, where she looks at the sky, pointing to where your ship would be, if it were there.
On your third birthday away, I got you a lifetime subscription to the Science Channel. The gift card came with a piece of authentic, non-charred redwood, which I didn’t think you’d like, but it was reclaimed, so I thought you’d forgive me, and we could watch the shows together.
On your fourth birthday away, I got you an archive grade video-frame, rated to last a hundred years. The edges were real Thuringia cherry, carbon negative, stained a dry-earth brown. On it I hard-coded recordings of the protests when the Space Agency announced that they would close your mission window – tens of thousands of strangers carrying placards with your name on them, depositing piles of printouts of eProtest signatures on the Senate steps.
On your fifth birthday away, I got you a pair of white stay-ups, my size, the kind you always liked to see, that made you look at me with that spark in your eyes when you got home from a mission. I put your gift in the back closet, wrapped with a midnight-black band, long enough to wrap around both our shoulders.
On your sixth birthday away, I got you a memorial plaque of the President’s signature on the No Serviceman Left Behind Act. I thought you would appreciate the irony, him being so set on the idea of small government, self-sacrifice and personal responsibility. I thought we might laugh about it together, sharing a glass of red wine and talking politics into the night. Instead, I drank that wine alone after Kira had gone to bed.
On your seventh birthday away, I got you a hardback collector’s edition of The History of the Decade, thinking that you might need a few facts to help you adjust when you got back. You missed the whole debate on regulating AR, the virtual protest movement, and distributed democracy. Also, the book had wonderful flat images of the Great Plains in the last, great blooms before they turned to desert. We’d always talked about going there when we had time.
On your eighth birthday away, I got you ten binders full of letters that I’d received, from physics and mathematics professors, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Breach Drive Research Group at MIT, and, of course, Mission Control. They’re all sorry, but they’re all working on the problem, and they all have theories, but nobody has any answers.
On your ninth birthday away, I went to Paris, like you’d promised we would do after you got back. I wanted to save it, but with the new restrictions on civilian travel, and the French plans to encapsulate the city in a climate dome, and Kira’s grudging willingness to travel anywhere with her un-cool mom, I thought you wouldn’t mind.
It was very hot, a wet heat that felt worse than it might have been. The wine was served cold, a sparkling mix of white and red the color of wild strawberries, and maybe I drank too much and maybe I got into one argument too many with Kira. I recorded it all for you.
On your tenth birthday away, I got you a copy of the open letter I sent to the Agency when they declared you dead and sent me a widow’s pension.
All the big news feeds published it, and it went giga-viral for over three hours. The President, the new one, promised a retraction, but the pension keeps coming.
On your eleventh birthday away, I got you a full transcript of the mission logs. They’re all blackened out, even the page numbers obscured. Everybody’s afraid, and nobody knows anything.
On your twelfth birthday away, I got into a screaming fight with your daughter. She called me a stinking wino, the ungrateful brat.
On your thirteenth birthday away, I got you a study. You’d always wanted one, but we never had the room. Kira’s books are still on the shelves. I hope you don’t mind.
On your fourteenth birthday away, I got you a stone. We have an old family plot up north, where my parents are from. It used to be a quiet, green spot. Now it’s mostly dust, but my relatives live nearby and my niece still tends the plot. I put the official mission dates on your stone, and another one, blank, next to it. I always wanted to be near you.
On your fifteenth birthday away, I forgot to get you anything, and ended up giving you a suicide letter, which I shoved into an empty wine bottle. I considered throwing it in the river, but ended up rolling it beneath our old bed instead.
On your sixteenth birthday away, I got you a poem. I titled it “One Year Sober,” and in it I listed all the reasons I remembered why I used to love you, and all the reasons I had to stay alive. It was pretty bad, but if you don’t like it, screw you seven ways to hell.
On your seventeenth birthday away, I got accepted to an advanced physics class at MIT. It might be because of you, or a guilt thing, I don’t care.
On your eighteenth birthday away, I got a perfect score on my particle physics exam. It’s amazing what you can do when you have a mission, no friends, and the personal email addresses of half the physics professors in the world.
On your nineteenth birthday away, I ran an ultramarathon in support of the UNIPCC Climate Restoration Fund. You wouldn’t recognize me now, I think. I’ve lost weight and my skin is the color of old parchment from all the sun. Maybe you’d like it. I wonder what you look like.
On your twentieth birthday away, I got you a mixed bag of desert grass seeds, non-GMO but very hardy strains. I carefully unwrapped your plant incubator, and put the bag inside. The jungle-green paper was dusty, and a bit faded, and brittle, a piece flaking off when I peeled away the tape. The glue wouldn’t take, but I put a new piece of tape over the old one, keeping it all together. You can do a lot with a little, if you really try.
On your twenty-first birthday away, I found a crate of red wine when cleaning the garage. I meant to throw it out, but opened a bottle instead. I went to work hammered and yelled and cried until security booted me off campus.
I miss you so damn much.
On your twenty-second birthday away, I defended my thesis. Half the auditorium applauded, the other half looked stunned. I got six offers of positions on the tenure track and turned them all down in exchange for keeping my cubicle on campus, and free access to the Breach Drive Research Group’s labs. And no salary. At least my widow’s pension is coming in handy. I’m coming, honey, you just hang in there.
On your twenty-third birthday away, I got into a fistfight with one of your old flight mates. He’s moved on to the administrative track, become an associate professor funded by the agency.
He called me a crazy bitch and said my research was crap, stealing money from real work. I tore into him with fingers and nails. I don’t care about the insult but he said he’d shut my research down. I wish I’d learned to fight proper.
On your twenty-fourth birthday away, Kira called. She’d seen me on one of the crank conspiracy sites, from a conference presentation I’d given where I’d shown my alternative equations, stated that it was possible to recreate an unstable or crashed breach without even going into space, as long as you had a clear line of projection to the Lagrange point where your original breach happened. Of course the site had only shown the part where I’d said that the current theories were all wrong. Yet she’d called.
I expected her to yell at me. All she said was “Mom, how can I help?”
On your twenty-fifth birthday away, we held a conference in our living room. We figured we’d get half a dozen kooks, outliers, and renegades, too obstinate or too independent to care about their reputations. Instead, we got people from the agency, the JPL, the BDRG, half a hundred universities. There wasn’t enough space to let everyone into the house so we spread out our bed sheets in the dry grass and served cold potato salad from gallon-sized buckets. Nobody complained, everybody argued. Mostly they argued about money, and where to build the damn projector.
On your twenty-sixth birthday away, I forgot all about you. I think I was busy re-learning to calibrate a spectroscope, or possibly crashed out on an army cot in our improvised lab. But I’m not sorry.
Because for your twenty-seventh birthday away, I grew you a rose the color of wild strawberries. I cut it and put it in a vase before going to the launch pad. I put the vase on the windowsill by the door, so that it will be the first thing you’ll see, when we come home together.
