Nah smiles a little. “Not a bad thing. I saw Mom. Twice.”

“In a dream?”

Nah has very vivid dreams. We used to draw pictures of them when we were little.

“No. After the wave, I saw her doing yoga in her room—fish pose. And then I knew she was dead. She didn’t say anything, but I knew. And then she came to my room after I found Dad’s emails. And she was doing a headstand.”

I open my mouth, but she shakes her head before I can say it. “I wasn’t high. This was real.”

Today I will suspend my disbelief. I will let there be a mystery. And I will not think about why Mom didn’t visit me.

“It was just those two times?” I ask.

She nods. “But when I woke up here, I realized something. The headstand—her legs were in the same pose as the Hanged Man.”

“That sounds scary.”

“It’s not. In tarot, the Hanged Man is dangling from a tree the way we used to on the jungle gym when we were kids—from his knees, not his neck. He’s just hanging out. And he seems, like, enlightened. The card is all about looking at the world from a different perspective.” She takes my hand. “Astronauts are the most badass Hanged Men, I think.”

“Hanged Women,” I correct. She smiles a little, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. It never reaches her eyes anymore.

“I think Mom was telling me I need to look at the world in a new way. She couldn’t give me a reading, so she became the reading.” Her eyes slide to the window, the snow. “I just don’t know how.”

And I realize: I don’t know, either.

“All the things I don’t understand—about people and feelings and how to be human … You seem to know already, in your bones,” I say. “I bet if you just meditated a few times upside down or closed your eyes and listened to the wind, you’d have your answers. For me to find anything out, I need to be in a space suit in zero gravity. And to get there, I have to acquire several advanced degrees and have the most dangerous jobs known to humankind. After beating out thousands of people to get those jobs, I have to live four hundred kilometers above Earth—just to figure out what you can in your bedroom.” I squeeze her hand. “So who’s really the genius here?”

“I’m not a genius,” she says.

“But you are. In your way, Hannah, you’re brilliant. I might know how to be an astronaut someday, but you know how to be a human today.”

Nah’s hand goes to the little diamond around her neck and she takes in a shuddering breath. I can see the missing in every Karalis splotch on her face.