“You busy?” Grace asks.
It’s the middle of the night, and there’s a storm raging outside. Grace follows the familiar path of the house in the dark and finds Mom in the living room surrounded by scribbled-on paper.
Mom looks up, hair clipped back and round, multicolored glasses perched on her nose. There’s a bottle of wine on the coffee table and an empty glass. “Last-minute changes to the seating chart,” she says, gathering the mess up. “You’d think getting married would be easier the second time around. What’s up?”
Grace steps in hesitantly. “Do you have a second to talk?” she asks. It is not just insomnia that keeps her up, but the thought of business unfinished. Of reconnecting with the people important to her, except there is still a girl left. A girl that hunts monsters and blooms roses.
Mom moves her papers aside so Grace has room to sit. “More than a second, kid.”
Grace sits. She plays with her nails, bites her thumb. Tries not to pull at her skin. She left the slime Heather suggested upstairs and wishes she had it. It reminds Grace of quiet mornings in a car with Sani. “I reached out to Professor MacMillan,” she says, “about jobs. About looking into some teaching opportunities.” She takes a deep breath. This is her choice that she made. “I told her I wanted to look in the New York area.”
“Ah.” Mom leans back, surveying Grace. “With your wife, the elusive Yuki.”
Grace plays with some of the tendrils that have come out of her pineapple bun. “I have to—” She shakes her head. “I want to make things right with her. I just left because I was scared. I left her behind.” She looks at her mom. “It feels terrible to be left behind because someone has their own issues to work on.”
Mom swallows hard, pulling her legs up and mimicking Grace’s posture. “A feeling you’re familiar with, huh?”
Grace shrugs. “I just never understood it,” she says. “It felt like you were always on an airplane, off to another place to find yourself. I never understood why you had to go away. Why finding you had to be so far away from me. Why—” It’s hard being this honest. It’s hard opening up your wounds to prying eyes. “Why couldn’t it include me, you know?”
Mom lets out a long exhale and fixes her gaze out of one of the big bay windows. The rain outside swells into a Florida storm where the wind beats against the screen door and the trees look like they might shake apart.
“There’s a lot I could say,” Mom says. “There are a lot of things I’ve said to my therapist that have been long overdue for you to hear. But I don’t want to make any excuses to my kid.” She meets Grace’s eyes. “It was never about you, but you’re right. You should have been a part of it. I was so focused, for a long time, Porter, on being my greatest self, that I didn’t even realize I wasn’t being my whole self. And my whole self includes an amazing daughter that needed to know both her parents were supporting her, and were proud of her, and loved her. That she was not second. You have never been second for me, and I should have done so much more to show you that.”
“Yeah,” Grace says, voice warbling. “Yeah. I needed to hear that, I think.”
“It was a long time coming.” Mom reaches out for her. “You were in good hands, you know, all the times I’ve been away traveling the world. Colonel did a damn good job with you. From the moment you came screaming into this world, he said he’d move mountains to make things easier for you, things I couldn’t always understand. He’d burn down the world for you.”
It’s Grace’s turn to avert her eyes. The rain comes down in a thick, humid curtain. The wedding is soon, and she makes an idle wish that the stormy weather lets up for it.
“I know,” she says softly, squinting through the window. “I do know that.” She is trying to know that and understand it. It does not mean that either of her parents are perfect or that she will always agree with them. It means that all three are on their own journeys, and sometimes the paths will intersect, and sometimes, they will not. “Thanks for saying it.”
“Sometimes we have to say things we should have said a long time ago,” Mom tells her. “We want to make excuses or rationalize or say we had good intentions.” She raises her eyebrows. “What would you say to Yuki if she asked you why you left her behind?”
And isn’t that the big question? Grace is making plans to move back to New York in the next few months. She wants to get to a place where being vulnerable and honest and scared doesn’t feel like she’s at her worst. They are just things that make her up, like the stardust and ashes of the universe. “I think I have to figure that out,” she says. “I wanted to find my way and be better, and I cut her out. She was—she is—a part of it.”
“Well, Grace Porter,” Mom says, “maybe that’s something she needs to hear from you.”
The words stay with Grace. She finds herself curled up on the small nook in front of her bedroom window as night drags on. There will be no sleeping here, not when she feels this buzzing need under her skin. She pinches and pulls at her homemade slime, trying to distract herself from her anxiety, and feels fireflies beneath her skin. This is a habit she is still working to break, like all the other terrible habits she is trying to break.
What would you say to Yuki?
She presses the record button on her phone. Suddenly, Grace finds herself desperate to create that same intimacy she felt the first time she heard Yuki on the radio. Like someone was seeing her, the deep-down, wretched part of her. The part that was monstrous and lonely and pushed aside. “If I could say anything to you,” Grace starts, “I would say that this is scary. Talking to someone you can’t see and hoping they are there, hoping they are listening. That’s terrifying. I don’t know how you do it.” Would Yuki even listen to this? Would she see Grace’s name and swipe this recording right into the trash?
“I’m afraid of a lot of things. I’m afraid of failing. The thought of it makes me feel sick. I’m afraid of not being perfect, which my therapist would say is ridiculous. Nobody is perfect. Not me or you or my parents or our friends. Not the people that rejected me, and not the people that will see that I have claimed the stars as mine. The first class I ever took, I knew astronomy was mine. The same way I saw you that night in Vegas in that overpriced, overcrowded bar and claimed you as mine. My wife, my siren, my lonely, monstrous creature.”
She hopes Yuki will listen.
“I talked to my advisor. I told her I wanted to look at some faculty positions, some teaching opportunities, in New York. Maybe it’s presumptuous of me. You might not even want to see me again, but I—” Her nails dig into her palms. “I’ve spent a long time trying to be the best. The best daughter, the best protégé, the best astronomer. Anything less meant I was doing something wrong. Any deviation from my perfectly crafted plan was wrong, and fuck, how I almost stuck that landing. But then I stormed out of the interview for the job I was groomed to get. For a job I was never going to actually get. And then I married you. How could the great Grace Porter recover from that?
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to say to you. I don’t want to give you excuses or rationalizations or good intentions.” Mom’s words echo in her head. “I was terrified. I was scared. I wanted to be the best, even if it meant working myself into the ground. Even if it meant breaking my back to prove I deserved a seat at a table I had no desire to sit at. Even if it meant leaving you behind. If I could say anything, it would be that I’m sorry. You asked me before I left what best meant for me, and I’m still learning what that looks like. But I know it means I take care of myself. It means I’m kind to myself. It means I support my friends and my family, and I don’t let the guilt take over when they support me back.”
Please be listening, she thinks. “I know it includes your midnight radio show and all the lonely creatures and monsters and stories that come with it. It includes your weird-ass roommates, our friends. It includes you, Yuki Yamamoto, because best for me means being happy and—God—being in love with you.”
Grace feels out of breath by the time her mind catches up with her tongue. She feels like she has run an entire marathon, and the finish line is right there, if only she can keep going for a little bit longer. “Are you there, Yuki? Are you listening? Because there is so much I want to say to you, and I made a promise in a chapel in the desert that I don’t plan on breaking. Till death do us part, we said. That bejeweled priest asked if I, Grace Porter, took you, Yuki Yamamoto, to be my lawfully wedded wife, and by every power I have within me, by the endless and thunderous universe, I do, okay? I do.”
Grace ends the recording and sends it before she can doubt herself. Like how people send their wishes up to the moon and wait for an answer, Grace sends hers to join them. Please be listening, she thinks. I am here. I am here. I am here.