My Mother Will Not Be Returning to Jupiter Anytime Soon

When she was initially detained, we thought it would be a quick fix. My mother never has her proper papers on her. Not ever. Because she’s an engineer, she was one of the first contractors allowed to set foot on Saturn, and they spent seventeen weeks preparing her. According to her, most of that preparation involved having the correct papers on you when you reached the midway station. It was something like eight or nine pieces of paper that you had to have on you.

My mother brought two and forgot the rest.

She’s so effervescent that somehow she gets away with everything, but everything takes longer. I’ve never seen her complete more than one errand in a day. Projects for her job always go over schedule and over budget. When I needed a permission slip signed for school, I would just forge her signature. My father put up with it until one day she forgot to bring home dinner, and then he just lost it. It wasn’t just the dinner. We had plenty of food in the decompression pantry. It was the fact that this was a pattern of behavior, and after twelve years, he realized it wasn’t going to change.

My mother, Kela, took the divorce in stride. What she didn’t take in stride was the fact that my father was the one who had gotten the family access for Jupiter, and that meant, if she wanted to stay, she had to do a lot of paperwork and submit it in a timely fashion to the colonization committee. I told her she should just move back to Hyperion since there was no way she was going to be able to accomplish something as complicated as acquiring living status approval when Jupiter was already on the verge of electing a politician who was running almost entirely on an anti-immigrant platform.

“I’m not an immigrant,” she said, “I’m from Earth. Earth colonized Jupiter. I have a right to be here.”

Her logic was not sound, and her excuses when she missed the first application deadline were flimsy. She mentioned handling the divorce, but my father, Greg, had opted for advanced mediation--something that was only available on two planets so far. My mother was “handling” nothing as far as the divorce was concerned. She merely had to sign documents when necessary, and my father had taken to forging her name on those the same way I had written her name down when my teacher wanted to take my class to visit Despina. Frankly, I’m not sure whether or not my mother even remembers how to write her own name anymore.

I began assisting her with the process. It was that or watch her be shipped off the planet, and while she was a prominent stress factor in my life, she was still my mother, and I worried how she would fare without me or her soon-to-be ex-husband looking after her. I once asked her how she’d gotten through engineering school. There was no way she had ever turned in a paper on time or finished a test before the bell.

“The Dean was in love with me,” she said, “Honestly, Rai, if I can give you any advice, it’s learn to be lovable. I’m not downplaying intelligence, but at the end of the day, people being madly in love with you is going to get you a lot further than punctuality.”

I knew she was downplaying her own genius. My mother was a pioneer in shuttle infrastructure, but she had a very old-fashioned sensibility that caused her to dismiss her more illustrious achievements in favor of playing up her beauty. That was why my father had to be the one to get us family access when someone of her stature should have been able to do it with virtually no hassle. Her request for access was shoddy and, upon reading it, it seemed as though she was trying to flirt with whomever would be reviewing her request from beyond the page. She was rejected, and now she was mired in bureaucracy and marital dissolution.

Luckily, my friend Jo Portskirt’s uncle was a lawyer, and he managed to get my mother a work visa since she was one of the managers of the Livable Atmosphere Endeavor that was two years along on a one-hundred and five year timeline. Despite me being the one who saved her, she clucked like a self-satisfied hen when I told her the news.

“I told you I would get it straightened out,” she said, taking the bill for the mediator my father had asked me to deliver to the hotel room she was staying at and tossing it in the trash, “You have no faith in me, Rai. You’re just like your father.”

With someone like Kela in your life, there’s never any real peace. Just a series of reprieves amongst the chaos. Still, her detention came so soon after she’d been granted a visa, even I assumed there had to be some kind of mistake. She had gone on a work trip to Hippocamp, and when she returned, they stopped her at the midway station and transported her directly to a holding cell in Crater 5. My father was teetering on the edge of a breakdown. Even with their divorce finalized, he still cared about my mother a great deal. Speaking with her on the phone, he begged her to ask as many questions as possible so that when she had a meeting with Jo’s uncle, he could hit the ground running. True to form, she didn’t appear to be all that worried.

“Crater 5 is nowhere near as bad as they’d like you to think it is,” she said while the line crackled, indicating someone was listening to the conversation, “I’m finding the food to be perfectly seasoned and the linens are washed daily. I’m just going to pretend I’m on a little vacation until Mr. Portskirt sets things right.”

Mr. Portskirt, as it turns out, was not going to be able to set things right. The visa he’d secured for my mother expressly forbade travel outside of Jupiter even for work purposes unless permission was granted by one of the three Travel Liaisons on the planet. Booking an appointment with them to explain the purpose for your travel usually took somewhere between two to three months. Even though my mother was working on creating a better atmosphere, rules were rules. Her trip had violated the terms of her visa, and she would be sent back to Earth immediately.

During my last phone call with her, she seemed to be suffering from some kind of cold. Another interpretation would be that her philosophy of the Universe bending to her whims had finally collapsed, but her words were still attempting to hold up the falling columns of her vanity.

“I won’t be on Earth long,” she said, the sound of someone barking orders in the background, and then what seemed to be a steel door slamming shut, “I’ll get a lawyer there since Mr. Portskirt is clearly an amateur, and I’ll be back before you know it.”

That phone call was twelve years ago. At first, my mother did her best to stay in touch, but communication and relationship maintenance is just another project, isn’t it? Even when you have the best intentions, there’s a certain amount of work involved, and once you begin to think of it the same way you do all the other work in your life, it falls victim to the same traps. I’ll call next week. I’ll work on getting that visa reinstated. I’ll send a text. I’ll ship a birthday present.

The death of a spouse, even a former spouse, can help get you an expedited, albeit temporary, visa. You receive a few days to travel to Jupiter, attend any services that are being held, and even spend up to a week with family to help them grieve. The form for the visa is barely a page long. After you fill it out, you attach a photo of the death certificate, and the visa is granted almost instantaneously. When I called my mother to let her know that my father had passed away as the result of a lung disease triggered by poor air quality due to atmospheric erosion, I let her know about the form and the dates of the funeral.

“I’m so sorry, darling,” she said, “Of course, I’ll come back for it. Just fill out the form for me, would you? You can sign my name the way you used to when you were little, and then forward me the approval.”

I didn’t bother telling her that I would not be doing that. That I had already decided she needed to do this for me. That I needed her to be a mother long after actually needing a mother. That her making the effort in a timely fashion would mean that not only was she capable of getting here, but that once here she would be a comforting presence. She would hold me while I cried. She would stroke my hair and make me food and tell me how much my father adored me. I needed her to write her name. I could no longer do it for her.

Needless to say, I didn’t tell her any of that. I simply said that I loved her, and then I hung up the phone. I emailed over the empty form, and a PDF copy of the death certificate that she would need to attach. A one-step process would be asking too much. A form and an attachment?

Well.

I might as well have asked for the moon.