Moon Trees
Amanda Baldeneaux
You could boil crawdads on Pluto, compared to the moon where it’s cold. Aurelie’s mother had said that while explaining the impact of darkness and depth on thermometers over paper plates brimming with boiled mudbugs, potatoes, and corncobs to congregants at their church’s annual picnic. She was dead now. Aurelie hadn’t been surprised that the moon was cold. To a child the moon is a gray thing, distant and dust dry, a nightlight that always burns out.
Aurelie told her elementary school classmates at show and tell that the moon is colder than Pluto. Not all of the moon, just the craters – the deepest ones – where the sun's longest fingers can’t reach. The moon scalds and freezes. The freeze tunnels down to its core.
The moon is a teenager, Aurelie Waltz thought as a grownup, its surface searing or cold. It orbited the body that’d born it, fighting the planet’s call to come home. She told her own daughter, when Hazel was young, that the moon is lassoed by gravity, that it bucks and tugs at the hold. She told how the moon isn’t solid, that its surface is riddled with holes.
Like an apple with worms, Hazel had said.
The moon is memory, Aurelie knew, now.
Aurelie’s mother had reached for the moon, literally, and died trying. Aurelie had wanted to be an astronaut too, before the explosion. Afterward, she preferred just to look at the moon, but even that took time to come round to. For the sake of her own safety, Aurelie gave up all ambition after her mother died. Better stagnant than dead. Nothing really exists without motion, though, and eventually, everyone needs money. Especially single mothers.
Aurelie couldn’t revisit her earlier dreams of space travel, though; she had her own daughter to think about. Aurelie knew firsthand that a mother blowing to bone shards was not an ideal situation for a young girl to grapple with, so for Hazel’s sake, Aurelie contented herself with a telescope and textbooks, with a commemorative tree planted in her deceased mother’s honor.
Aurelie’s daughter, Hazel, didn’t appreciate that Aurelie had worked hard to avoid the same fate as her mother in order to give Hazel the childhood she deserved: a deathless one; one without international headlines and a failed NASA mission and a shuttle exploding over Cape Canaveral
Aurelie took extra care to not end up like her mother – a highly decorated Air Force pilot and astronaut – actively working to not achieve anything until every chance for a scholarship, internship, or other life-building opportunity passed. Despite all the effort Aurelie had taken to not amount to much while a teenager herself, Hazel didn’t appreciate what Aurelie had given up to secure her place in the shadows of the world’s attention. But that was teenagers: unappreciative. Unreachable; the tunnels of their ears clogged with headphones and hubris. That didn’t stop Aurelie from trying to reach her, though. Hazel was her daughter, an errant satellite, and Aurelie – after realizing everything needs a path, even asteroids – chose a career teaching astronomy and physics to other people’s teenagers, before she realized how cold as the moon they could be.
The town of Crater Pond, where Aurelie lived and raised Hazel, was not as cold as the moon. Although, like the moon, the town and all of its houses balanced on top of a network of tunnels. The crater of the town’s namesake blew into existence some 50,000 years ago, when a meteorite survived the friction and heat of Earth’s atmosphere and smashed into the woods of what later became Crater Pond. The Earth had been a teenager, then (still was, by most accounts), and friction and heat were two other things planetary and human teens liked to give off. Aurelie appreciated that the Earth had been a teen mom to the moon. Aurelie had been a teen when Hazel came, too.
It took another 25,000 years for the ground water to slowly seep up through the compacted soil and fill the bottom-most basin of the crater’s center – creating Crater Pond – which became the town’s moniker in the mid 1800’s, when miners came sniffing for the hypothesized cache of sulfur and metals inside.
The miners were gone now; there’d been no precious metals or minerals to find. The meteor, and everything on it, incinerated upon impact with earth and its atmosphere, vaporizing anything worth digging up. The same thing happened to the Venture shuttle when it exploded at the edge of the atmosphere with Crater Pond’s hero, Donetta Waltz – Aurelie’s mother – on board.
The tunnels the miners carved out remained. Wounds were like that. Aurelie often wondered where all the dirt that once filled them had gone. The same place as her mother’s body, she figured. Dust was like that.
The tunnels still wound beneath the town of Crater Pond like wormholes. Old oak beams from the thinning timber woods that once covered the hillscape where the meteor hit prevented the whole municipality from sinking in on itself and deepening the crater’s pit. There was no such scaffolding for a girl whose mother was blown to space dust when the Venture shuttle malfunctioned. That didn’t stop young Aurelie from trying to find such a buoy, though, in parties, stolen bourbon, and boys.
When Aurelie visited her grandparents in Crater Pond as a child, her mother told her the surface of the crater’s impact radius resembled the moon: pockmarked and funneled with the entries and exits of abandoned mines. Most of the town’s mines had been left as they were when abandoned in the mid-1800’s, chain link fencing posted up around gaping entries to keep kids out and allow city workers with keys in to check the integrity of the old supports. Sometimes, metal beams were sent down to reinforce what time and water had begun to rot.
Aurelie snuck down into the mines with her friends after her mother died. Her father had moved her to Crater Pond so Donetta’s parents could help with her raising, but they didn’t live long after that. She was sixteen when she first starting smoking with friends in the mines, and by her later math, already pregnant with Hazel, though she didn’t know it, at the time. The kids lit pilfered cigarettes and wiped dried clay off their pants, pretending they liked it down there in the dark.
Aurelie’s father, Hal, would have had a heart attack if he’d known where she was. His coping mechanism for dealing with Donetta’s death, though, was to treat Aurelie like she was twelve, not sixteen. If Aurelie said she went to get frozen yogurt with her friends and stayed there till morning, testing each flavor for sale in the tubs, he believed her. If Aurelie said she’d spent the night with a girlfriend, watching movies and painting their nails, he’d believed her.
Aurelie kicked herself, later, for not seeing it then: her father’s gradual slide backwards in time, a retrograde motion looping him back to before the explosion, when the variables of life were calculatable and secure.
In the mine with her fellow delinquents, Aurelie shone flashlights down long, hollowed hallways where miners spent years searching for the metals that would make their lives whole. Aurelie felt camaraderie, there. She’d spent the past year digging through her mother’s jewelry box, pushing Donetta’s clothes back and forth on their hangers in her parents’ closet, spritzing Donetta’s perfume behind each of her ears. She didn’t know what she was looking for. Something biological – a torn hangnail, white flakes of dander – that could be remade into the woman who couldn’t even be salvaged from the few pieces of twisted metal that fell back to the earth from the Venture’s demise.
Hazel came on the cusp of Aurelie’s seventeenth birthday, and Aurelie didn’t feel like she came out of the darkness of those sagging old tunnels until she finished community college just before thirty. Now, she had two bodies to care for: Hazel’s, sixteen now herself, and Hal, Aurelie’s father, who Aurelie’d transferred to a nursing home at the start of the school year.
Aurelie untied the bib from behind Hal’s neck and dusted crumbs off his shirt. In his early sixties, Hal Waltz was the youngest resident of the memory care ward in Oak Wood Village. His dementia first announced its presence when Aurelie still worked nights as a custodian at Crater Pond High School, wiping down white boards and replacing the industrial sized toilet paper rolls in every one of the campus’s forty-odd bathroom stalls while Hazel slept in a crib at home.
The losses began with names, anger erupting into smashed iceberg heads at the grocery store when Hal couldn’t recall the name of the farmer who supplied the greens for the chain. A lost key threw him into a rage that scared both Aurelie and Hazel, just ten at the time. When Aurelie was young, her father had never shown anger beyond a lifting of eyeglasses to rub at his forehead. He did that a lot, with Aurelie. She knew she disappointed him from the moment Donetta died and on out.
It’d been a relief, in a way – Aurelie, daughter of a national hero – shooting her future down in flames to become a teen mom. Aurelie knew she’d never live up to her mother, and failing everyone’s expectations outright just got her over that awful hump sooner. She’d lived with Hazel’s dad for a while, a GI from the Air Force base two hours north. They’d fought all the time and he wouldn’t change diapers, so Aurelie moved back in with her father and the GI moved to Virginia for a three-year assignment. He visited, sometimes, when his new wife let him.
Hazel was a junior, now, and driving herself all over town with the car she bought from tips and a two dollar hourly wage at her job at Meteor Burger. She had a boyfriend. Aurelie worried about Hazel becoming a teen mother, too.
“Looks like you had peaches today, daddy,” Aurelie said, wiping yellow crust from Hal’s shirt. Before Donetta died, Hal managed branches of Johnny Apple’s, a supermarket chain that allowed him to transfer from city to city as the Air Force reassigned Donetta to new bases every two to three years. After she died but before going into the Village, Hal moved from store management to supply chain, buying produce for the Johnny Apple’s fresh product aisles from the hundreds of farmers who filled the plains and cleared woodland for miles outside Crater Pond. Even after leaving the back offices of oversized super marts, Hal wore crisp shirts every day, driving all across the county to order bushels of radishes and lettuce and pears. Donetta had ironed his shirts before she died. She said she didn’t mind the domesticity of it, she liked the hiss of the steam off the iron. It warmed her. Space would be cold.
Hall kept the habit after, filling in the space Donetta emptied like an object pulled into orbit by the gravity of a teenage Aurelie’s needs.
After a day of contracting produce in poundage, Aurelie could tell where Hal had been by the hue of the dirt on the hem of his pants and the colors of the half-moons of fruit rinds and vegetable peels stuck under his nails: orange for a day testing sugar pumpkins, pink for picking out apples, and celadon green with black flecks of dirt for digging up stalks of leeks, their concentric circles like the rings ensnaring a cylindrical planet.
A planet is an astronomical body that clears its debris field, sweeping all the meteors, space dust, and ice chunks up in its path. A planet absorbs all the debris into itself, fortifying its own body with the things that fall in its way. Aurelie had liked to think of her dad as a planet, sweeping up all the best parts of the country to sell in the stores to fill refrigerators and fruit baskets in homes. In the nursing home’s community dining room, with a salmon-pink plastic tray on the placemat in front of him, Hal had shrunk from a full-size planet to a moon, a small version of himself collecting food scraps and art supplies from the supervised rec room – trailing them, not clearing them.
“He had a moment, today,” a nurse said, plucking the napkin from his lap. “Asked about Hazel.”
“Did he know how old she is?” Aurelie helped Hal back to his chair away from the table and stand.
The nurse shook her head. “Said she cried all night, but that her momma would calm her. He said Hazel had a good momma, just like Donetta.”
Aurelie looked into Hal’s eyes for recognition. His black pupils hung wide in the whites, like mine tunnels or moon caves. No one knew what sat at the bottom of all the moon’s caves; some had ice. Others were mysteries, dark blips on maps. Aurelie had seen an MRI scan of her father’s brain once lucidity disappeared; black matter dotted the print of his brain, pinpointing the exact places his memories had fallen into holes so deep they were irretrievable. Science could go to the moon, but it could hardly map the darkest parts of a terrestrial brain.
“He sang a little, today,” the nurse said. “Some bars from an Elton John song.”
“He liked ‘Rocket Man,’” Aurelie said.
“That was the one.”
Aurelie walked Hal back to his room, a small dorm with a hospital twin bed, his armchair from home and a TV. She’d put a typewriter on a desk by the chair, but so far it sat untouched, the paper she’d loaded behind the ready ribbon bleaching even brighter white than its original shade. She sat Hal in the chair and straightened his hair, then handed him a contraband chocolate bar for dessert. She checked her phone. Hazel should be headed home from volleyball, and Aurelie wanted to be sure she walked in the house on time. She resented that Hazel made her leave Hal sooner than she’d like, but Aurelie couldn’t be trusted alone at that age with a boy, why should Hazel?
Donetta’s face smiled from a framed photo on top of the television. An American flag hung behind her and she balanced her fish-bowl round helmet on her knee, the sun visor drawn. In the white astronaut’s suit, Donetta looked like a marshmallow to Aurelie, even now. Aurelie preferred the orange flight suits and navy-blue coats to the tin foil-looking space gear that hid the shape of her mother somewhere inside the balloon of thermal protection.
“Remember mom?” Aurelie tapped the photo with her black-polished nail. “Remember Donetta?”
Hal squinted at the photo. “On the moon,” he said. He folded his hands on his chest.
“On the moon.” Aurelie kissed his forehead and collected her purse. After Donetta died when the shuttle exploded just after leaving the launchpad and broaching the edge of the atmosphere, Hal told Aurelie that Donetta went to live on the moon. On the moon she could watch them always, from the place she most wanted to be. She was setting up house, he said. Warming the craters with steam.
At 15, Aurelie was too old to believe that her mother had traded in earth for the moon, but she still went along with Hal’s insistence that they build model rocket ships together each month, stuffing the nose cones with letters to mom. They’d been living in Florida when the shuttle exploded, and moved back to Crater Pond, where Hal and Donetta grew up, after the funerals and memorials for everyone on board the ship concluded, and plaques were placed at the base of the launch site.
After unpacking in the new house, NASA delivered a tree to the Crater Pond city council: a six-year-old sweetgum they’d grown in a lab from a seed Donetta had potted in a mixture of compost, black soil, and a scoop full of moon dust collected during a previous mission’s lunar landing. The seed had orbited the moon for ten days with Donetta after planting, one of over 100 tree and plant species grown to test the quality of moon dust for growing.
Crater Pond council, with Aurelie and Hal, planted the tree and its moon-dust flecked root ball in the middle of Crater Pond Common to commemorate Donetta McConnell Waltz, USAF. The sweetgum still stood, raining sweetgum balls like miniature moons down on cars and the sidewalk each fall. Most of the wild sweetgums around town – the ones without the luxury of irrigation – had died of thirst and heatstroke in the increasingly dry, hot summers. The city cut them down. Donetta’s tree, a “Legacy Moon Tree,” was named after the first generation of tree seeds flown into space by Stuart Roosa on the Apollo 14 mission in 1971 and that were later planted throughout the U.S. The Legacy Moon Tree had the benefit of the Crater Pond Common sprinkler system, but the water wasn’t enough to counter the heat; the tree shrank every year as the top branches died and city workers cropped it closer and closer to the trunk. Business owners who complained that the tree ruined parking spaces outside of their storefronts submitted a petition on the City Hall website to cut it down. Parents complained about the nuisance of sticky, spiked sweetgum ball rain that left little mines in the grass for bare feet to step on and nicked the paint of parked cars beneath its canopy. Aurelie resented her neighbors’ advocacy to throw the whole tree out and the city’s overzealous pruning; she didn’t need her mother’s memory shrinking smaller than it already had.
“It’s not a reflection on your mom,” Aurelie’s fiancé, Will, told her the first time the city sheared the top of the tree’s canopy down to the trunk. “It’s to keep it healthy.” Will sat on the Crater Pond city council and could have stopped the butchery.
“There’s a petition to remove it,” Will said. “You can sign up to speak at a council meeting about it. You get three minutes, just like anyone else.”
“I will,” Aurelie said, and she did sign up. The tree’s fate was now an agenda item on the next Monday’s city council meeting, and Aurelie had been practicing her three-minute speech for a week.
“Tell them to stop chopping it up before then,” Aurelie said.
“An arborist does all the city’s trees,” Will said. “The tree itself isn’t any smaller. Just the branches.”
Perspective in the human mind is a tricky thing, Aurelie knew. Humans had been trying to suss out why the moon appears larger on the horizon than when perched at its zenith since the Babylonians, and probably even before then. The 11th century mathematician Ibn Al-Haytham suggested the moon looms large as it rises because of how we perceive distance. The Ebbinghaus Illusion suggested humans see the moon larger as an object of comparison, its looming disk gargantuan against the terrestrial backdrop of pitched roofs and treetops. They were both wrong; science has no clear explanation why the moon seems to rise ginormous out of the landscape and shrink as it ascends into the sky. Aurelie had an idea, though.
Children see their parents as giants, larger than life who dominate the landscape and the world. Aurelie thought the same of both her parents – the decorated astronaut and the traveling fruit buyer. As she grew, though, they shrank both physically and in her perception, deflating from the giants her childhood mind had cast them as into humans – average in both the death of one and the struggle to carry on in the other.
***
“My physics class is launching their rockets in the morning,” Aurelie said. “I made a G class to shoot off first. You might be able to see it if you look out the front window in the activity room at 9:00AM.”
“How’s the weather?” Hal scratched at overgrown whiskers beneath his ears.
“Clear,” Aurelie said. “No wind.”
“Black powder?”
“Composite engine,” she said. “We’ll shoot them from the common outside the campus. Be sure to look west.” She uncapped a pen and wrote the time down on a sticky note and the words “ROCKET LAUNCH” in all caps beside it. “I put a letter to mom in the cone,” she said. “Do you want to add one?”
Hal scrunched his brow. “Who?”
Aurelie stuck the note to his mirror. “Goodnight, Dad.”
“Don’t set your room on fire,” he said. “Don’t play with matches.”
“Yes sir,” she said, buttoning her coat. “You’ll never forget that, will you?”
“Moon dust,” Hal said. “Gray ash.”
***
After Donetta died and before Aurelie got pregnant, she took to burning herself in her room. Aurelie’s therapist told Hal it wasn’t necessarily meant as self-harm, so much as bridging a connection to Donetta, who was seared by heat before the rocket exploded. Her colleagues tried to tell Aurelie that the crew would have passed out before the explosion, that Donetta never felt a thing, but Aurelie didn’t believe it. Taught to hypothesize before she could read, Aurelie wanted to know what “searing” felt like. After all, she’d been the one to tell her mother how proud she was that her mom was an astronaut, that she was the only mom she knew who went into space. Maybe if she hadn’t, Donetta never would have accepted a place on the Venture mission. Maybe she’d still be alive.
Aurelie closed the car door quietly in the driveway, both wanting and not wanting to catch Hazel’s boyfriend in the house unsupervised. If she caught him, she’d have reason to ground Hazel from seeing him. But then she’d have to fight with Hazel, which were fights no one could win. She unlatched the door and stepped inside – empty. Hal’s coat still hung on the hook just inside the door. Aurelie and Hazel moved into Hal’s house from their second story apartment when he went into the memory care ward at Oak Wood. Aurelie hadn’t had much to bring over, some IKEA furniture, a few pots. She’d given away all of Hazel’s baby things years ago and most of her father’s belongings were far better quality than hers, so they came with little besides clothes, bottles of hairspray, toothbrushes, and yearbooks, the dust they’d collected in the apartment’s orbit.
Shower water sounded in the back bathroom. Aurelie surveyed the mess she’d made on the dining room table: balsa wood cones, launch rods, tools, and a tangled parachute. The large G class rocket, painted the Crater Pond High School colors of silver and blue, sat upright in the center, ready.
“What’s for dinner?” Hazel stepped into the hallway wrapped in a towel. She combed her fingers through long, wet hair.
“Same as last night,” Aurelie said. “There’s plenty left.”
“Can’t we get pizza?”
“Are you buying?” Aurelie began packing the launch pad into a plastic tub. “Maybe tomorrow, after the game. Done your homework?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Excuse me,” Aurelie said. “I assigned two worksheets on static stability and safety codes this morning.”
“I did them at lunch.” Hazel wrapped her hair into a bun on her head.
“Great, then you can work on your science project.”
Hazel huffed. “I don’t have time for that, mom.”
“It’s a ten-thousand-dollar scholarship to the winner,” Aurelie said. “You haven’t even picked a project.”
“I don’t like physics.”
“So pick, literally, any other subject,” Aurelie said. “Robotics. Astronomy. Malacology.”
“I don’t even know that is.” Hazel crossed her arms. “I have to get dressed.”
“Will is a chemical engineer,” Aurelie said. “He could help you think of something if you don’t want my help.”
“I don’t need Will’s help,” Hazel said. “I don’t want it.”
“You don’t have to call him ‘dad,’ Hazel,” Aurelie said. “But you can’t pretend he doesn’t exist.”
“I’m leaving in two years,” Hazel said. “I don’t need to ‘build a relationship’ with him.”
“I decided to marry him in less time than that,” Aurelie said. “You’re going to live with him.” She taped the lid of the tub closed. “And I don’t know how you’re going to college unless you start applying for some of these scholarships. You could win this science fair, if you tried. You’re smart.”
“Will is rich.” Hazel chewed on her thumbnail.
“You won’t talk to him, but you’re fine asking him to pay your tuition?”
“That’s what rich dads do, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Aurelie said. “We’re normals. I paid my own way.”
“Through community college.” Hazel bowed her shoulders, her fighting stance.
“With a baby,” Aurelie said. “I don’t recommend you try it.” She slid the box under the table and sorted her tools. She didn’t want to say more; she didn’t want to blame Hazel for being born years before she’d been wanted.
“I could live with dad,” Hazel said. “My real dad.”
“Sure,” Aurelie said. “He lives in a one-bedroom apartment with his wife and a two-year old in temporary base housing in Korea, but ok. You’ll love it. They have plenty of space for a 16-year-old with no ambition.”
“I get it,” Hazel said. “Dad doesn’t want me.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Whatever.” Hazel disappeared into her room – Hal’s former guest room – and slammed the door. The blue rocket fell over.
“Dammit,” Aurelie said, checking the body. A small bend creased the thin aluminum of the fin.
Aurelie built her first rocket with her mother from a kit when she was a child; Donetta loved to dissect engines and learn how they worked. A model rocket kit was the first thing Hal bought after Donetta died, but Aurelie didn’t even want to look at it in the first quiet weeks in the house of two. They’d been living in Florida, but without Donetta, they moved back to Crater Pond. Unpacking the cardboard boxes and unspooling rolls and rolls of wrapped newspaper, Aurelie had pulled out the rocket and set it on the kitchen table, littered, at the time, with bowls and plates and spoons. Once the boxes were unpacked and the table cleared, Hal began to build.
“I wrote a note to your mother,” he said, holding up a sheet of notebook paper at the table. “We’ll send it to her, on the moon.”
“She’s not on the moon, dad,” Aurelie said. "I’m not that naïve.”
“I told her about the new house. Your school. I told her I’m probably not half as good at this mom thing as she was, but I’m trying.”
“I have homework.” Aurelie had stood in the hall where Hazel stood almost twenty years later, no plans to do anything other than listen to music and call her old friends long-distance in Florida.
“Will you sign it?” Hal held out a pen.
Aurelie sighed. “Fine.” She signed the note. She read her dad’s words and stared at the rocket, its thin cardboard tube messily stuffed with the strings and the wires of its guts. She scribbled a note on the paper. “I miss you, mom.” She folded it and handed it back to her dad. That was the first one they built together.
The rocket she’d prepared for her physics students, over two feet tall, almost brushed the pop-corned ceiling when stood on end atop the dining room table. After the first rocket, the models she built with her father grew bigger and bigger, “To get to the moon,” Hal said. Now, Aurelie knew the rockets – real ones – would need to get bigger and stronger over the course of the coming millennium; the moon drifted further away from the earth each day. She stared down the hall at Hazel’s closed door, considering knocking. Hazel was a moon, breaking away little by little each day. Aurelie opened the fridge.
The moon drifted slowly from earth; it could be six hundred million years before it got so far away that it could no longer eclipse the sun. Children came untethered much quicker, as did memories in black hole-ridden minds, and parents who died in their primes.
Aurelie pulled out the pot of yesterday’s lentil soup and a beer. The pot had been her grandmother’s, a stoneware crock bought at a department store in the 1950’s. She poured the beer into a glass cup with “Italy” scrolled across the side; purchased at the Base Exchange store before she was born, when her mom was stationed at Aviano. A cuckoo clock – German – sang from the living room. A Niagra Falls magnet suspended a school calendar from the face of the fridge. Aurelie considered all of the collected things in the house, some bought by her parents, more brought in by her – souvenir shirts, ball caps, signed playbills.
“I am a planet,” Aurelie said. She swept bread crumbs off the counter into her palm.
***
Will dropped a paper coffee cup into a cardboard sleeve and pushed it across the table to Aurelie. He kissed her cheek. “Launch day?”
She nodded. “Hazel said she wants to move to Korea.”
“She doesn’t mean it,” he said. “She’s just threatening.”
“Maybe.” Aurelie sipped the coffee and winced, burning her tongue.
“Maybe it’d be good practice for her, being around a baby.” Will winked.
“I’ve told you,” Aurelie said. “I don’t think I can do it again.”
“Course you can.” Will picked up her hand and kissed the princess-cut diamond on her ring. “It’d be ours.”
“Hazel will be yours.” Aurelie drew her hand back. “You hardly talk to her.”
“She hides from me,” Will said. “I don’t want to force it.”
“That’s what kids do,” Aurelie said. “Avoid things. Teeth brushing, homework. Good parenting is making them do things.”
“You’ll teach me. That’s what you do, isn’t it?” He bit into a blueberry scone.
Aurelie tried the coffee again, forcing it down despite the heat.
“I have something to show you.” He unsnapped his brief case and pulled out a manila folder. “This is the latest count on the petition to remove the moon tree,” he said, spreading the folder open on the table. He tapped on the document. “You see that?”
“And?” Aurelie turned toward a woman struggling to squeeze an infant in a car seat through the door. A toddler trailed behind her.
“I’ve mocked up a plaque that could go in its place.” He set a digital image of a brass plaque in front of her. “That’s more permanent than any tree. Look, it has your mother’s name, her title. It commemorates the tree. No sweetgum balls. Everyone’s happy.”
“You think this would make me happy?”
“I don’t know what you want me to do, babe. This isn’t a dictatorship. I can’t make them save the tree.”
“I’m coming to council on Monday. I’ll convince them.”
“I’m rooting for you.” Will tucked the petition papers and the folder back into his briefcase, leaving the plaque image on the table. “But there’s forces against you. Sentimentality doesn’t concern a guy who has to file an insurance claim for dinged hood from a falling gumball. Just consider it.” He eyed the woman with the kids as she plunged a straw into a box of milk for the toddler. “All of it.”
“It’s not sentimentality,” she said. “I’m not changing my mind on this.”
Will kissed her cheek. “That woman looks older than you,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re worried about.”
“I mean the tree,” Aurelie said.
“I know. Gotta go.” Will tunneled his arms into his coat sleeves. “Good luck with the launch.”
“Thanks.”
“Keep that,” he said, pointing at the plaque picture. “Think about it.” He swept out the door before she could argue.
Aurelie crumped the photo and stuffed it into her empty cup, then threw both out into the trash. The diamond ring felt heavy on her finger, catching the sunlight like a strobe. She twisted it down, embarrassed by its heft. Her parents had worn simple gold bands. Inexpensive. Hal began wearing his again when the dementia set in, putting it on in the morning and donning a tie as though off to the fields to choose strawberries and carrots and beets. Sometimes he’d be halfway across town before pulling over to the side of the road, no longer sure where he was going. Aurelie hadn’t bought a dress yet for the wedding or picked a caterer. She wasn’t entirely sure where she was going, either. She tried to remember the feeling of love that had first brought her and Will together. He was charming, well dressed. He made her real spaghetti with dough he rolled out himself. Lately, she’d only been mad at him. When he noticed, she asked him to forgive her – she was stressed because of Hal, because Hazel wasn’t applying herself – any number of reasons explained by single parenting and caring for a diminishing elder. She thought of dark tunnels, light lost inside. The coldest places in the solar system. Across the street, the moon set over the roof of the Crater Pond branch of the regional bank. Out on the common, birds flew from a nest hidden between the red and brown five-pointed leaves of the sweetgum tree, shaking spiked balls onto the ground.
Aurelie drove to the high school and parked in the faculty lot behind the football stadium. The marching band practiced for the night’s game as the stadium lights flooded the field. The rows of bright circles reminded Aurelie of the phases of the moon, some full and others crescent-shaped, dependent on her perspective and position in the lot. She hauled the box of parts and the rocket into the school, hoping not to dent it again before launch.
Her first period of the day, physics – Hazel’s class – started in twenty minutes. The student rockets lined the counters flanking the science lab, ready for flight. Aurelie erased the white board and wrote in the day’s lesson plans: rocket launches for physics, quiz for earth science, lecture on vascular systems in biology. The school didn’t offer astronomy as an elective, yet, but Aurelie had half of a year-long lesson plan completed to present to the principals and the board.
She sat at her desk, the wheels screeching against the metal grips as she tucked herself in. Aurelie dug a smashed granola bar and a compact out of her purse. She flipped open the compact, checking her teeth for coffee stains. She lifted the mirror, surveying her scalp for gray hairs. Two new ones. She smoothed them under the outer strands and gathered her hair back into a ponytail. She’d counted six gray hairs on her head since finding the first a year prior. They appeared like new rings around a planet, circling her face like silver ice crystals or dull, gray rock. She checked her face. Trenches had begun to deepen around the corners of her eyes since she hit her late 20’s. She pulled one apart, exploring how deep it furrowed into her skin.
There were other teachers in the school her age having first and second babies. Some had been novice teachers, barely older than the senior students, when Aurelie still cleaned the halls as a janitor at night. She used to clean this lab, back when it belonged to the chemistry teacher who retired after 30 years in the position. He wore the same necktie for every school photo, and the students copied each headshot from yearbooks and hung them in sequence on the wall on the last day before the summer that kicked off his retirement. Aurelie had stopped to study it while mopping spilled saline solution and pencil shavings up from the floor. He’d started teaching as a young man, 20’s or 30’s, and over the course of the photos turned grayer and smaller, his skin folding over on itself and dangling loose over the confines of his collars and tie.
The photos were gone, but other things he’d bequeathed to the room remained: a Peanuts poster, diagrams of frog intestines, and a chart depicting the waxing and waning of the moon. Aurelie left it where it hung when the room became hers. Outside, the setting moon loomed large over the horizon – or so her brain betrayed her eyes into believing – waning gibbous. Aurelie put away her compact. As a baby, Hazel had cried for hours as Aurelie rocked her and shushed her. Without money or childcare, Aurelie had to wait until Hazel began kindergarten to enroll in the community college. They were hard years, tired years, and Aurelie hardly remembered them, because of sleep deprivation or as a survival mechanism, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t think she could do it, the baby thing, all over again. She’d told Will on their first date. He’d forked a meatball into her mouth. She spun the ring on her finger, moving the diamond from left to right. Waxing. Full. Waning.
The bell rang and students filed into the room, filling the stools at the stations with over-long limbs and backpacks brimming with notebooks and swim goggles and tennis shoes and bags of crushed chips. Hazel sat down next to her rocket without acknowledging her mother. At home, Hazel needed everything – car keys, allowance, Spanish help, sandwiches – but at school, she needed nothing. Or, so she pretended. Hazel’s hair hung damp on her shoulders and her lips were pale, uncharacteristic for her. She must have slept in. Aurelie hoped Hazel ate breakfast. She eyed her unzipped backpack, checking for the edge of a lunch sack. Phases, Aurelie thought, and hoped Hazel’s disinterest in learning and preparation would pass.
Aurelie stood and held up the blue rocket. “Before we test this,” she said, “hand in your homework.” She waited at the end of the row for papers to pass forward. She waited for Hazel to procure the white xeroxed worksheets from her bag, exhaling in relief when she did. “Let’s review safety,” Aurelie said, and uncapped a dry erase marker to write.
***
Outside, Aurelie assembled the students on the edge of the Crater Pond common as she set up the launch pad. The students set up their smaller kit-rockets to fire off one by one in rows around Aurelie’s G class. Hazel’s lay on the ground as she scrolled her phone.
“Hazel,” Aurelie said. “Hazel. Phone away or I’ll take it. Get that on the stand.” She pointed at the unadorned rocket. Other students had painted the bodies of their rockets bright colors and given them names. Hazel had written her name on the tube in pen.
“Mom’s gonna ground you,” a boy, Chase Miller, said.
Hazel tore a tuft of dry grass out of the lawn and threw it. The blades blew back on her as she laughed. “Shut up.” She kicked her rocket with her heel.
Across the field, an arborist parked a city-branded truck on the street beside the moon tree. He got out, pruning shears and a ladder in hand.
“I mean it,” Aurelie said. “Stop messing around.”
Hazel slipped the phone in her pocket. “Fine,” she said, and knelt to the ground. She threw more grass at the boy beside her.
“When your launch pad is assembled, lay your rocket beside it and stand back behind this line.” Aurelie lay a yard stick on the grass and ushered students across.
The arborist popped the ladder beneath the moon tree and climbed, reaching for the dry, dead branches at the top. He snipped the twigs, letting them rain down into the grass. Hazel found a sweetgum ball and threw it at Chase. Aurelie had Chase in Earth Science last year; he’d barely passed. He threw the spikey ball back at Hazel as she dodged, tripping on her launch pad.
“Back up,” Aurelie called. “And knock it off.” She slid the G class down the launch rod, angling it away from the students. She kissed her fingers and touched it to the nose cone, the payload inside a folded letter to her mom. She wouldn’t take it out after the parachute deployed and the nose cone landed. She’d tuck in into a box in the closet with all the recovered cones from the rockets she’d launched with her father, tiny letters tucked inside each one like secret messages bound in a bottle. After launching the first note, Aurelie liked to believe her mother read them before they parachuted back to the ground. The higher they could get the rocket, the more time Donetta had to read the notes. The G class could go upwards of 2500 feet, maybe more. The letter inside was long.
At the moon tree, the arborist climbed the ladder again, a saw in hand. He dug its metal teeth into a thick branch. Aurelie tensed as she unspooled the wire to the launch controller and crossed over the yard stick.
“Everyone back?” she asked. She did a quick head count, checked for pedestrians, and started a countdown. “5… 4… 3…”.
A sweetgum ball struck the blue and silver rocket. It tilted sideways. Aurelie had one second to glance over her shoulder at Hazel and Chase lobbing the seed balls at each other before the rocket began to hiss, smoke pouring out of the body tube’s bottom. It shot off the rod, but the new tilt launched it sideways, toward the school. It cleared the street between the common and the high school’s front drive, sailing over the roof of the administrative offices. A white smoke trail jetted behind its trajectory. Aurelie held her breath. High out of sight, the parachute deployed. It floated back down on the roof of the school. Aurelie felt smoke gathering in her body, too.
“Hazel and Chase,” she called. “You want to kill somebody?”
Chase dropped a handful of balls and grass.
“Principal. Now.” She pointed across the common the same way she pointed to Hazel’s room when she was in trouble.
For seconds, silence descended on the common. Then a car door slammed and Hazel grabbed her bag from the grass. She glared at Aurelie before stomping across the field toward the school. Chase followed, his hands in his pockets.
“Someone’s in trouble with mommy,” another kid called out.
“You can join them,” Aurelie said. The class went quiet.
Beyond the school, the wide arc of the setting moon sunk deeper behind the roofs of the Crater Pond city center. Hazel shrank as she crossed the street and jogged down the front steps to the school’s front entry. She threw open the double doors and disappeared inside. The top crest of the moon dipped below the horizon.
***
Aurelie knocked on the glass window in the principal’s door. School ended an hour ago, and the administration office was dim except for the light spilling out of Principal Brown’s windows. She beckoned Aurelie inside. Outside, the band warmed up in the parking lot before the night’s football game.
“We need to talk about this,” Principal Brown said, holding up the disjointed body and nosecone of the rocket. The parachute dangled between the parts. “Hazel, too.”
“Horseplay, Principal” Aurelie said.
“Cheryl,” she said. “You’re grown, now.”
“Still feels strange.” Aurelie flushed. Principal Brown had been there since before Aurelie moved back to Crater Pond with her dad. She’d disciplined Aurelie for skipping school many times. “They were throwing gumballs,” Aurelie said. “Knocked the rocket after I launched.”
“Good no one got hurt.” Cheryl set the rocket on the desk and slid it across. “I like the colors.”
“Thanks.” Aurelie took the rocket and wound the strings of the parachute neatly around her fingers. She tucked them inside. “I don’t know what to do about Hazel,” she said. “She keeps acting out. She doesn’t care about school. She doesn’t listen.”
“I gave her detention for the next week,” Cheryl said. “That’ll give her some study time.”
“I’ll take anything,” Aurelie said. “I don’t want her to –” she stopped herself.
“I know,” Cheryl said. “But you turned out fine.”
“It was touch and go there, for a few years.” Aurelie screwed the nose cone back into place.
“I remember.” Cheryl leaned back in her chair. “Everyone changes.”
“I’m sorry about the rocket,” Aurelie said. “It was supposed to go over the field.”
“I know.” Cheryl stretched her arms over her head, yawning. “Long day. Let’s call it lucky it was only a little bump. I’m surprised Chase hit it at all. Have you seen him play outfield?”
“No,” Aurelie said. “I haven’t been to a baseball game.”
“It’s the coach,” Cheryl said. “He needs to retire.” She stood and switched off her computer.
Outside, a police car rushed by the school, sirens blaring. A fire truck followed. Cheryl lifted the blinds and peered outside. “What’s this?”
Aurelie stood and leaned next to her to see out. Smoke blew across the common. Down the field, orange flames lifted off the top branches of the moon tree like a sail snapped in the wind. Aurelie grabbed her rocket and rushed out of the office. She dodged the visiting football team’s school bus as it rumbled up the drive. She ran across the common to where the top of the moon tree smoldered and the dried branches burned. A fireman hooked up a hose to a hydrant on the sidewalk and turned on the spray. He doused the tree. Its leaves drooped. The sirens stopped. A police car parked behind the truck. The school resource officer got out of the passenger seat and opened the back door. Hazel stepped out onto the wet sidewalk.
“Sorry, Aurelie,” the school’s officer said. “This one and her friends thought it’d be fun to shoot bottle rockets off the school roof.”
Hazel’s chin hung to her chest. “I didn’t mean to,” she said.
A branch of the tree snapped and fell to the ground. The firemen jumped back. Gray ash rained around it.
“That’s probably it for this one,” a fireman said. “Nothing but a lightning hazard.”
Aurelie’s hands hung limp at her side. She worried if she tried to speak, she would cry.
“Mom?” Hazel asked.
Aurelie curled her fingers in and out from her palms, forcing blood flow. The rocket still dangled in her hand. “I’m going home,” she said. “Try not to commit more arson before the night’s over. Or get pregnant. Or whatever else you do that you shouldn’t.” Aurelie strode back across the field. She got her purse and her empty lunch Tupperware and tossed it into a box with the rocket. She carted it across the parking lot to the faculty spots. Light flooded the football field and students crowded the ticket gate. The air smelled like cheap pizza and pretzels. Pot smoke drifted from the other side of the bleachers. Aurelie loaded the box in her trunk. Back in front of the school, the moon rose, swimming in the gold of the setting sun’s wake. Third quarter, half-light and half-dark. Aurelie drove home in silence.
***
The next morning, Aurelie lay in bed as light striped the wall through the blinds. She rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t gone to see Hal and she hadn’t heard Hazel come home. She checked her phone, one message from Will.
“Heard about the tree,” he wrote. “Sorry, babe. It has to come down.”
She stood and pulled the cord on the windows, letting pink sunlight flood in. Between houses, she could see a sliver of Crater Pond in the distance, its waters silver and flat in the sunlight, another illusion.
She pushed hair out of her face – a gray strand with the audacity to hang over her eyes – and staggered into the hall. She pressed Hazel’s door open, the hinges creaking. Hazel lay buried under the covers, her hair in a knot on the pillow. Aurelie closed the door. She didn’t know what she’d do with her when she woke, so better to let her sleep, for now. She went into the kitchen, her body thirsty for coffee.
Hazel’s rocket from school sat on the table, disassembled. A piece of paper curled out of the nose cone. Beside it, a salad bowl. Aurelie peered inside. Sweetgum balls filled the bowl. She tugged out the note from the cone and unrolled it.
“They’re for planting,” Hazel said behind her. “I picked up all the ones I could find. Here.” Hazel held up a pot overflowing with dirt. “I thought we could keep this one in a window.” She set the pot on the counter. She rubbed her hands as if they were cold. “I didn’t go on the roof to shoot fireworks,” she said. “Sam followed me,” she said. “He had them. I went up to get your rocket. I wanted to see what you said to Grandma,” she said. “I thought I could add a note of my own, and we could relaunch it. If it’s not broken. They’d already gotten it, though.” She gestured at the G class Aurelie had left on the floor. “I wrote my own.”
Aurelie held up the curled paper.
“I said all that in my note.” Hazel held her elbow. “But, that’s basically it.” She wrapped her arms around her chest. She shuffled her slippers. “I’m sorry,” she said.
The light in the kitchen brightened from pink to orange. Aurelie picked up a ball still attached to a twig. The red leaf of the sweetgum is five-pointed, shaped like a star. The seed ball is riddled with holes. Inside the tunnels, the cells of future trees sleep, waiting to be woken by water and sun, if they reach it. On the moon, the ice in the tunnels sleep in the shadows, holding secrets no sunlight or human has been able to reach, yet. The coldest place in the solar system – the things we don’t know.
Aurelie swallowed the lecture she’d been planning to give. She ran her thumb over the edge of the leaf. “Some of these have already dispersed their seeds,” Aurelie said. “We have to find one that hasn’t opened, yet.” She poked through the bowl. “This one,” she said, lifting a younger pod. “It’s still closed.”
“Do we plant that one instead?”
“Not yet.” Aurelie got a zippered bag from the cupboard and scooped dirt from the potted seed inside it. She dropped in the ball. “It needs cold stratification,” she said. She stuck it inside the fridge.
“Oh,” Hazel said. “I didn’t know.”
“The moon might be a seed,” Aurelie said. “It’s full of water and holes and the cold.”
“What will happen when the moon melts?”
Aurelie shrugged. She turned on the coffee pot. Outside, the sun rose higher and a flock of geese arced their wings into crescents to slow their descent onto Crater Pond. Each year, the water level of the pond rose a little, the ground water seeping up through the porous rock left by the meteor’s impact and the miner’s tunnels. The water filled the wound in the rock, softening it to soil for seeds. Aurelie handed Hazel a mug and filled it with black coffee. Steam rose from the cup.
“I don’t know what happens when tunnel ice melts on the moon,” Aurelie said. “Sounds like a science project.”
“Ok,” Hazel said. “I don’t even know how to start that.”
“Me neither.” Aurelie added cream to her cup and drank. Outside, the geese honked on the lake, digging through shallows for duckweeds and roots. The sun rose, seeming to grow closer and larger as it sprouted out of the horizon. The moon was nowhere in sight. It would leave earth one day, Aurelie knew; break off to find its way home to the sun. The water would melt, then. The shadows would brighten. Even if earth was a little bit less for its loss.
Amanda Baldeneaux is a writer living in Denver, Colorado with her husband and daughters. She attended the University of Arkansas for creative writing in poetry and is a contributing editor at FictionUnbound.com. She is the recipient of The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in fiction in 2018, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, the Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere.