Lela K. is born on a dying planet. When she is three Earth years old, her parents, mindful of the imminent doom they are facing, send her off into the universe to escape the fate they and their fellow citizens will share. They tuck her into an experimental spacepod of their own design, accompanied only by a supply of intravenous nutrients and sedatives, and a glittering sphere the size of her tiny fist. The sphere holds the messages they have crafted to be their memorial: professions of their love, a brief family history, a melancholy reflection on their fast-disintegrating world. They send her out among the stars.
Months later, in the small hours of the night, Lela’s craft touches down outside a bodega in Queens, where a woman named Luz finds her. Luz is single and in her late 40s and adopts Lela without asking a lot of questions because hey, you can get what you always wanted or you can do things the legal way, but it’s pretty rare that you can do both. Lela grows up eating arepas and chicharron that her doting new mother cooks for her at any hour of the day, whenever she even suspects that Lela might be hungry. If Lela did not have a prodigious metabolism, by Earth standards, she would be too heavy to move, but as it is she dances around the apartment like a sunbeam refracting through water.
Lela learns Spanish from Luz, and from the many extended family members who drop by for dinner or late-night gossip. She learns English from school and the television. She speaks both with an accent unlike any her mother has ever heard, a deep, ringing sound like the clap of a church bell knelling from her lips as she says her Ds and Ps and Ts, or her own name, Le-la, ding-dong. Unlike the kids at school, her tios and tias do not comment on this, nor on her granite-gray skin or too-long toes or the mild electric current that runs through her hair, because anyone with eyes can see that Luz is happier than she has ever been, and no one wants to wreck that. Anyway, a family this big has known plenty of weird kids in its day. Plenty of tragedy, too: cousins lost to illnesses for lack of medicine, siblings disappeared into government jails. There are better things to talk about than their sobrina’s peculiarities. They sit in Luz’s kitchen at the big, scarred wooden table, doing crosswords and drinking coffee, peering at phone cards in the dim light, shouting down the line to home: ¿Todo ‘sta bien? ¿Hay bastante comida? ¿Nadie ha desaparecido? Sometimes, in her younger years, Lela asks, “When will you go and see them, abuelo and abuela, all the people on the phone?” Her aunts and uncles answer: nunca, nunca, querida, we can never go back.
The glittering sphere lives in the top drawer of Lela’s dresser. Sometimes she takes the ball and rolls it between her palms, and when she does her parents’ voices float forth. She rations these messages carefully, knowing there will never be any more. Occasionally, Luz sits with her, marveling at the sound of the celestial voices, imagining these far-off people who sent her her little girl. As Lela plays the messages, the words translate in her head into Spanish, or English: Te amamos. We love you. Our planet is splitting apart. Its death is imminent. Pronto, va a desaparecer. Hearing them, she pictures the home where she grew up, or her parents’ faces, though these images grow hazy with the passage of time. Sometimes she pictures only the deep emptiness of space, the punctuation points of stars and planets blazing across the windows of her craft as she left her home planet, before the bottomless sleep of space travel claimed her. The start of all those days of traveling alone, between worlds, having left one place and not yet arrived in another.
***
When Lela is fourteen, her mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. Stage 4, metastatic, little to be done. Lela sits with Luz in the doctor’s office and translates the prognosis and options, wishing all the while there were softer words to use; it feels disrespectful to tell her own mother there is no hope for her. Lela cries on the subway for the entire ride home, while Luz sits quietly and rubs her back. When they get inside, Luz goes immediately to the kitchen and begins to make soup, and Lela’s misery flares into anger.
“Stop cooking!” she says. “You can’t cook when you’re dying.”
Luz slices the plastic wrap from a package of chicken pieces and rinses them in the sink. “We’re all dying, mija. Some of us are just dying faster. We still have to eat.” She assembles her ingredients, washes her hands, sets the soup pot on the range, and presses Lela’s fist tightly against her heart.
A few weeks later, Lela starts attending Maspeth High School. There she has a science teacher, Ms. Penderton, who is fresh out of college. Lela’s previous science teachers have been longstanding professionals hardened in the crucible of the public school system; they have taught her chemistry and astronomy and biology from lesson plans older than she is. Ms. Penderton, on the other hand, is all raw enthusiasm and questionable choices. She is too ill-kempt and awkward to be a secret object of desire among the students, but too young and earnest to project any kind of authority: the worst of both worlds. She stands at the front of the room and clenches her fingers emphatically as she talks about microplastics, rising temperatures, mercury-laden fish, lead in drinking water. She does not even try to hide the raw emotions these problems provoke in her. Most of Lela’s classmates ignore Ms. Penderton or mock her outright, but from her seat in the back row, Lela listens closely. What Ms. Penderton seems to be saying is that this planet is dying. It is feverish and poisoned, drifting toward an inescapable end. Lela stares numbly at the whiteboard. How can she be so unlucky, to have been exiled from one dying planet only to land on another?
October, November, December pass, and Luz is still alive. In February she plans Lela’s quinceañera. Lela knows she’s supposed to be excited, but the only joy she can feel for the event is her mother’s reflected happiness. Lela encourages Luz to pick the food, the music, the dress—a voluminous, hoop-skirted crimson gown that gives Lela’s gray skin a rosy tint. Luz spends the evening of the party sitting in a chair with an oxygen mask strapped to her face, beaming, while Lela and her tios dance. Three weeks later, Luz dies. Lela has no shortage of relatives to sit with her and wipe the green tears from her face, there is no question of her being truly orphaned again, but she has not felt so alone since she sailed through space. While everyone else weeps and cleans and cooks and calls the family in Venezuela, Lela sits in her bed clutching the glittering sphere, listening to the long-ago voices of her parents.
She does what she has never done since she arrived in Luz’s house: rolls the ball until the dispatches play all the way to the end, past the pre-recorded mementos to the messages left while she hibernated through her intergalactic journey. Her parents’ voices jingle and ring, speaking in the bell-like language Lela has all but forgotten: “Lela, baby, we just wanted to say hello. We hope you’re OK.” “Things are difficult here but we’re glad you’re safe.” “We hope you’re going somewhere beautiful, sweetheart.” In the last message their voices are filled with grief and terror and love, a riotous, shivery chiming like the sanctus bell at mass. “Lela,” her parents say, “The world is ending. Right now, ending. We’re all watching it go. We miss you. We miss you. We love you so much.”
She imagines the words pouring into the sphere as she drifted through the black surround of the galaxy, her small, sleeping, child’s body curled in the warmth of the spacepod. She has always been afraid that hearing this message would crush her with sorrow, but instead it is the only thing, right now, that makes her sorrow bearable. She tries to answer, but her tongue won’t make the words. Quickly or slowly, she wants to tell them, everyone’s world is ending.
