Lyra’s messages accumulated in the cold basin of my inbox. They flurried steadily for a few weeks and then stopped, compacting into dense slush. I didn’t open any of them, but I heard the little chimes my computer sang when each email arrived. Lyra thought I was angry with her. Maybe I was. I hadn’t been sleeping, probably wasn’t making much sense. The cells of my father’s cancer multiplied in my dreams. 

—

Lyra Jarlsson was my pen pal. She was the first baby born in space, and she lived up at the International Space Station because her bones were too spongy for Earth. Uninterested in the surrounding cosmos, she ran a YouTube channel where she reviewed different flavors of astronaut ice cream. Lyra was made of miracles. One of them was this: Her parents’ eyes were Norwegian blue, but hers were a perfect black. When she filmed videos in front of a window, it looked like her irises were snipped clean from the dark that curtained her. 

“Can you wave to me?” she asked a few months back. 

“Wave?”

“Yeah. We’re about to pass over Texas.” 

I glanced out the window. It was a cloudy night and only a few stars poked through the gloom—freckles faded by winter. 

“I’m waving,” I lied, and rolled over in bed to face the wall. 

“I see you,” she said. “I like your hair today.”

“Thanks. Braided it myself.”

My hair was loose and uncombed, snarling in tangles across my pillow. When we were kids, I was jealous of Lyra. I thought she must know everything, living up so high. 

—

My father went on one Mars mission too many, and now dark masses tore through his skin like spores. Radiation does that sometimes. By nature, Dad was a militant optimist. Grim prognoses didn’t deter him. Neither did my warnings against experimental treatments. 

“Listen,” he said, “when it’s your turn to be sick, you can do whatever you want, and I won’t say a thing.” 

Five months of chemo had yielded no results, so he was pivoting. He wouldn’t tell me anything more than that. I scoured the apartment for clues and came up empty. No strange pill bottles nested in his pajama drawer, no glow-in-the-dark residue phlegming the sink. It was a treatment that tracked no dirt.   

“Whatever you’re doing is a bad idea,” I told him back when it started. 

“Is there any more rotisserie chicken?” he asked.

“Some.” 

“Can you dehydrate it a little? It tastes better that way.”

“Does not,” I said. “You’re just nostalgic.”

Dad missed being in space, and I didn’t blame him. In a rocket ship, there was always something to look at. Here, there was just the spiky Houston skyline, only visible from the bathroom window. Dad spent a lot of time in bed watching documentaries about old wars and drinking quarts of pulpy orange juice. His newly bald head was rubbery in the lamplight. Every time I looked at him, I searched for his eyebrows. I was always surprised to find them missing. 

—

Lyra was the current record-holder for the longest consecutive time spent in space: 22 years, plus nine months. Her conception was intricately planned and somewhat immaculate. When you live a life without precedent, everything that happens to you is extraordinary. Each physical exam Lyra took produced revelatory data. Her first toddling steps, taken while tethered to a treadmill, were globally broadcast, garnering over four billion views. Many people believed she would usher in a new era of peace. To them, Lyra represented a humanity that transcended geography. Her nursery alone had been designed by engineers from twelve countries, and she was educated in fifteen languages. Her allegiance was simply to Earth. 

“You ever feel like you’re in The Truman Show?” I asked her once.

“Not really,” she said. “Truman didn’t know he was being watched. I’ve always known.” 

We were playing online chess. As Lyra spoke, her digital knight lunged sideways at my rook. She was attacking my pieces like they owed her money. 

“When are your parents coming to see you?” I asked. 

“Mum’s coming up sometime in July,” she said. “I think she’ll stay till the fall. Then my dad’s gonna come up in December. He’s doing some new research or something.”

I tried to stall the advance of her bishop. “You think Lilly is gonna visit soon?”

“Probably not,” said Lyra. “She’s still too little. You’ve got to be a certain height before they’ll let you in the shuttle.”

I felt sorry for bringing it up. Lyra adored her little sister and wanted nothing more than to meet her in person. Lilly had been born back on Earth—in Oslo—just a few years ago. It was an arrival that Lyra initially resisted. When she first found out her mother was pregnant, she called me in a rage.

“They want a kid who can do all the normal things,” she said bitterly. “But they’re the ones who made me like this. I could’ve been normal too.”

“Maybe it was an accident,” I said. “This new baby, I mean.”

“An accident?”

“It happens.” 

“Do you know how old my mother is?” said Lyra. “This was no accident.” 

“The baby’s not really gonna impact you, though,” I reasoned. “It just means your parents won’t spend as much time at the ISS. Which you wanted anyway.” 

Lyra couldn’t argue with that. We were both sixteen at the time, and just a few weeks before, she’d complained that her father hovered too much during her physical therapy. He also interrupted her first kiss with a young Australian astronaut.  

“The kid will just be another person for you to talk to,” I continued. “Another friend.”

Her expression soured. “I have enough of those,” she said. “My fans are already my best friends.”

 “I thought I was your best friend.”

“All my fans are my best friends,” she said graciously. 

To Lyra, fans and friends were somewhat conflated. She was in constant dialogue with the people who watched her videos, swapping jokes and stories and secrets in the margins of the internet. It was an endless well of affirmation. All the comments on Lyra’s YouTube channel were carefully monitored by ISS staff, and any negative feedback was filtered out before she could read it. Lyra didn’t know this, of course. Because she was so isolated, her doctors were concerned that digital harassment could be profoundly damaging. Lyra’s mother told me this in confidence. 

“Most people write nice things to her anyway,” she said. “But she needs to be protected from the bad parts.” 

I bristled. The more Lyra’s head bloated with praise, the less I liked talking to her. “I think she could handle it,” I said. “It’s just part of life, right? You take the good with the bad.” 

“She’s a sensitive girl,” her mother insisted. Her Scandinavian accent was stronger than Lyra’s, and her words sing-songed together. “For now, she’ll take the good.” 

—

Dad and Pop got divorced when I was six. I don’t think it was very upsetting for me. They both kept saying that it wasn’t a big deal, and for the most part, I believed them. On our last outing as a united family, we went to the toy section of Target. 

“Pick whatever you’d like,” said Dad.

“Anything but a Barbie,” Pop amended. He’d read somewhere that Barbie dolls were damaging for young girls’ self-esteem. 

I selected a massive stuffed unicorn with purple wings and named it Watermelon. I was going through a phase where I hardly ate anything else. 

“Good choice,” said Pop. 

With my limited capacity for logical thinking, I assumed that my parents splitting up was the price of Watermelon. It seemed like a fair trade. Once the dust settled and the lawyers cleared out, Pop was left with the split-level ranch in Pearland while Dad moved into a NASA-owned apartment complex in Houston. Whenever Dad was off-planet, I stayed with Pop, but when Dad had two feet on the ground, I was shuttled back and forth every weekend. To be part of a family is to be in endless negotiation. 

Pop always maintained that he divorced Dad because they were better as friends. If this was true, they were operating under a very generous definition of the word “friends”—they could barely sit through my high school graduation together—but I never voiced my doubts.

“I always wanted a kid,” Dad once said to me, “so, I just assumed I’d want a partner, too. And I did love your Pop. But sometimes the things you want don’t all fit together.”

I was living with Dad now because his place was closer to my job, and I couldn’t afford to move out yet. It also gave me an excuse to hover a little, monitoring his condition from the corner of my eye. I had to do this carefully. If Dad caught me watching him too closely, he fumed and pouted. His positivity was rivaled only by his pride.

“I wish you would just tell Pop,” I said to him one night. 

“He’d tell me it’s my own fault,” said Dad. 

 This was probably true. Pop had never approved of Dad’s career. A scrupulous architect, he could trace a fallen roof shingle all the way back to a flaw in the building’s foundation. He passed judgements on people the same way. His fingers were often spackled with graphite, which ended up smeared across his face and arms—a smudgy echo of Dad’s disease. 

“He’d still want to help,” I argued, “even if he was upset. I want to help, don’t I?”

“You’re upset?” said Dad, suddenly concerned. 

“Not with you,” I half-lied. “With the situation.” 

 Before he got sick, I had no problem with Dad’s work on Mars. I was proud of him. I thought it was exciting and important, and it was. But I didn’t know that he had walked into this illness with open eyes, or that his choices would leave me in a room without windows. These past months, I had cycled through anger, fear, and apathy like slush caught in truck tires. Underneath it all, I think I was mostly tired. 

“Pop’s fiancé is a doctor,” I said, trying a different angle. “He might know some good people.” 

“Dentists aren’t doctors.” Dad turned the page of his newspaper. “I know what I’m doing.” 

I studied the dark, scaly bubble that had surfaced in the valley of his cheek. I tried to remember what his face looked like without it. 

—

Lyra and I were eight when our correspondence began. Dad befriended her parents at an Astronauts Federation conference in Spain, and they told him that Lyra had no one her own age to socialize with. Dad offered me up as a virtual playmate, and things progressed from there. I was thrilled by the opportunity to contact Space Baby, who I had only ever read about. 

Dear Lyra, I wrote in my first message to her. My name is Harper. I am also eight just like you except I life on EARTH and in TEXAS!! My dad is a astronot and so are your mom and dad. How cool is that. Do you like being in outer space I wish I coud be there to. My dad goes to space allot and also Mars. So anyway write back and tell me if you like being in space and what kind of animals you like my favorite is a dog!! 

She wrote back within the hour. 

hi Harper!!! she said. Thanks for righting to me sometimes I get lonely because of there arent other kids here just grownups and robots. i mostly do homework and I watch lots of tv. Do you like tv too? I like looking at the earth wear everyone lives but I want to eat different kinds of food. What kind of food do you like best? And yes I like animals too sometimes they do tests on mice and they are very soft but they dont live too long. Im so happy were friends. 

My correspondence with Lyra did wonders for my elementary school popularity. Once I started reading her letters to me during show-and-tell, I went from being the girl with big ears and buck teeth to being the girl who was friends with Space Baby. I had Lyra’s permission to share the letters—I want lots more friends too, she said—and eventually, my entire class was on an email chain with her. They spent a few weeks wringing information from her about living in outer space and what it was like to sleep while you were floating. Lyra sent giddy, rapid-fire replies. My notes to her got lost in the blizzard, and she responded to me less and less. 

I was angry and jealous in the way children get angry and jealous. I had been her friend before anyone else, which I thought made me deserving of a little loyalty. We even had the shared bond of being test tube babies. Although my surrogacy was less miraculous than Lyra’s artificial womb, I felt a real kinship with her. But I was sometimes prone to imagining.

As the months went by, my classmates gradually dropped off the email chain, their replies to Lyra becoming sparser, more distant. 

“The Space Baby’s kind of boring,” said the boy whose desk was next to mine.  

“Yeah,” someone else chimed in. “All she talks about is TV.”

When a week passed with no messages from any of them, Lyra video-called me in a panic. I answered immediately. 

 “Where’d they go?” she demanded. Tears ballooned under her eyes in bulging spheres.

“They just got busy,” I said. “Earth is busy this time of year.”

She scowled. “Why don’t they want to talk to me?”

I floundered. “There’s lots of other people who want to talk to you,” I said.

“Like you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like me.”

She sniffed and batted away the tear bulbs from her face. They drifted lazily offscreen. “Other people too, right?”

“Other people too,” I said. “Lots of them.” 

—

From what I’ve seen of Mars, it’s a nice place. Definitely a fixer-upper, but Dad’s done his best. There are labs and greenhouses and a mini ocean that’s growing by the year. Even though people call it the red planet, its sunsets are pale blue. Dad used to send me pictures. I’d post them on my Instagram and use a filter to intensify the color, saturating it into a deep cobalt. I wished it was me who was standing in that strange sapphire light, leaving footprints no one had ever walked in. Whenever Lyra commented on one of my pictures, usually with the starry-eyed emoji, I’d wish she hadn’t seen it.  

—

College didn’t quite work out for me. I blamed it on the fast-paced classes. Dad blamed it on laziness. Pop blamed it on undiagnosed ADHD and sent me off to do the full battery of tests. Nope. 

“So, now what?” Lyra asked me over FaceTime. 

“I don’t know,” I said. “It would be easier if I was good at something.”

“Being good at stuff is overrated.”

She pushed off the wall and ducked into a somersault. Her body sank through the air like she was falling into a vat of honey.

Like me, Lyra was a chronic underachiever. Her tutors hoped she would take up engineering or biology or physics—something that would make her useful to the astronauts she lived with—but apart from her study of world languages, Lyra was a staunchly unmotivated student. She started her YouTube channel as soon as she was old enough to make an account, and she rarely expressed interest in anything else. For all intents and purposes, she was living at the ISS as a squatter. She was still something of an experiment, but the study of her development began to plateau once she left puberty. The last time we spoke, she told me that she felt like a forgotten petri dish.

“I think I’m gonna ask if I can go to Earth,” she said. 

“What?”

 She looked away, studying something I couldn’t see. “I want to meet my sister. She’s learning how to ski, you know. I think it’d be nice to play in the snow with her.”

I thought about Lyra’s rubbery bones, her delicate immune system, her malformed lungs. 

“If that’s what you want,” I said, and began to feel dizzy. 

“I meant to ask earlier,” said Lyra, “but is everything okay with your dad? My parents haven’t heard from him in a while.” 

 “He’s fine,” I said. “It’s just been busy.”

This wasn’t the first deflection I’d made; several other colleagues had reached out—half-nosy, half-concerned—when Dad took his abrupt leave of absence, and I’d placated them all with vague reassurances. I didn’t like lying, but it was easy. All you had to do was believe what you were saying.

—

In my dreams about my father’s cancer, I watch as he is consumed. The noise of the cells dividing sounds like the chime of my computer. Each time one of the spots grows, I feel an identical one forming on my own skin. Sometimes I wake up with scratched arms and blood-streaked sheets. Sometimes I wake up and vomit. 

~

When we were seventeen, Lyra told me in a hushed voice about a guy she’d hooked up with. He was nineteen, sort of a prodigy, and he’d been sponsored by the Free University of Berlin to conduct physics research on the ISS. Lyra said the two of them would talk for hours, sitting at the observation deck and watching clouds spiral across the world. Eventually, they forgot there was a view at all. 

“How does it work in zero gravity?” I asked skeptically. 

Lyra smiled, coy and smug. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” 

Growing up, she had fantasies of someone falling wildly in love with her and giving up their life on Earth to come join her. This meant that she’d spent the past few years putting the moves on almost every new astronaut she met. If she was telling the truth, she was successful about forty percent of the time, which I thought was an impressive statistic. She even had a few passionate fans who tried to go into astronaut training so they could have a chance with her. Unfortunately, they were all eliminated during their psychological evaluations. 

I was less ambitious than Lyra regarding my love life. I didn’t know what kind of person I wanted or what kind of person might want me. I burned through a few short-lived relationships in my first year of college and then retreated into semi-retirement. It wasn’t until Dad got sick that I fell into a casual fling with one of my coworkers. Addie was a little older than me, which meant she always wanted to talk about her mortgage. We worked together in solar power sales, cold-calling into the void from our adjacent cubicles and knocking on people’s doors in fresh-pressed collared shirts. 

Addie wore a mood ring on her middle finger. It was always some shade of purple. 

“What feeling is that supposed to be?” I’d ask her.

“I don’t know,” she’d say. “I think it’s broken.”  

Inevitably, the ring was slipped off, and then I had no way of knowing what sort of mood she was in. I think we ended things more or less happy. 

A small confession: At one point in my tweens, I did think about journeying up in a rocket and becoming Lyra’s space wife. I doodled her dark, dark eyes in the corners of my algebra textbook and watched her favorite show—Cheers—until I could recite entire episodes to her. Then Dad took me to the astronaut training center on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, and I went for a spin in the flight simulator. I lasted twenty seconds before I was shrieking to be let out. 

“Guess it doesn’t run in the family,” said Dad. He was rubbing my back, waiting for me to stop crying. “It’s all right, honey. You’re an Earth girl. Two feet on the ground, like your Pop.” 

“I don’t want to be,” I said, rubbing my eyes. 

 He patted my shoulder. “Your friend Lyra is a good little friend, huh?”

 My face reddened. “I just wish I could meet her,” I said. 

“Well,” Dad began, and then trailed off. 

I learned from my father that silence is better than empty words. In that moment, I just needed to sit and get used to who I was. 

In the following days, I exorcised my crush on Lyra, blaming my infatuation on boredom and hormones. There’s a difference between loving someone and being lonely. I still haven’t discovered exactly what that difference is, but I do know it exists. 

—

In lieu of replying to Lyra’s email avalanche, I watched her latest YouTube video. She was filming from her bed—a sleeping bag stuck to the wall—and tearing open a fresh pack of astronaut ice cream. It was cookies and cream flavored. 

“Hey, everyone,” she said, and smiled a wobbly smile. “Thanks for stopping by. Today, I’m going to be sampling Space Go’s newly released Cookie Explosion ice cream. If you’re interested in trying some for yourself, you can use the code Lyra119 at SpaceGo.com for 15 percent off your first purchase.”

I knew for a fact that Lyra didn’t need the money, but she accepted almost every promotional offer that came her way. I scrolled through the comments under the video. 

You look sad, someone had written. Are you feeling okay? Love from Brazil!! 

The comment had about 10,000 likes. After staring at it for a few seconds, I liked it too. 

—

“You’ve got some snow coming your way,” Lyra said the last time we talked.”

“Good one.”

“No, I’m serious. I see clouds coming up through the gulf.” 

“It’s just rain. That’s what the weather lady said.” 

“Is the weather lady in space right now?”

“Does snow even look any different than rain?” I countered. 

“Of course it does. Snow moves like it wants you to notice.” 

I opened my bedroom window, surprised when the air did, in fact, feel oddly cold. I wondered why I bothered being surprised anymore.  

“Can you wave to me?” asked Lyra.

 I did. It was too early to see the stars, which meant she could be anywhere. 

“If you came to Earth,” I said, “what’s the first place you would go?”

“I’m gonna have a big meet-and-greet. I want to see my friends,” she said. “You can come if you want.”   

I felt like I’d been slapped. Then I felt hollow.

“You all right?” she asked. 

“Yeah,” I said. “Just tired.”

I hadn’t told her about Dad, and I wasn’t sure why. It seemed too late to bring it up now. Even if I did, there was nothing I wanted to hear. After we ended the call, I wandered into the kitchen and saw Dad sitting on the floor in front of the fridge. Panicked, I dropped to my knees next to him. 

“What happened?”

“Needed a little break,” he said, groggy. 

I looked over at the couch and saw his abandoned blanket nest. It was only about twenty feet away. I helped him up and guided him back to his seat. 

“You’ve gotta tell me what this treatment is, Dad,” I said. “It’s obviously not working.”

He looked up at me with big, tired eyes, and I saw the answer I’d been pretending wasn’t true. I turned from him, gulping down the burn in my throat. 

“You could have tried,” I said. 

Dad tugged on my wrist and pulled me down to sit beside him. I wiped my face on the soft fabric of his T-shirt. 

“Can we please tell Pop?” I whispered. “I can’t do this alone.” 

Dad ran his hand over the top of my head, smoothing back my hair. I felt more than heard his concession—a small, tired sigh deep in his chest. It had been so long since I’d felt relief that I hardly recognized it. 

It did snow that night, very gently. At one point, my father asked me to help him upstairs so we could sit on the roof. Every ninety minutes, the little blip of the ISS would dot across the sky, looping blind and endless. Dad closed his eyes and let the flakes melt on his eyelids. He had no lashes left. 

“It’s a beautiful universe,” he said quietly. “I saw what I could.”

I shivered without feeling cold. 

“God, Dad,” I said. “What am I gonna do with this life