Time passes strangely when you don’t have a routine or a grand plan.
Grace spends her mornings in the groves. Sometimes it’s her and Mom. She talks about the things Grace did not notice during her sporadic visits in the years before. The changes to the fresh market, the weird yuppies that have moved to downtown Southbury, Mom volunteering at the yearly circus that’s put on by the fire station.
“What do you do?” she asks, peeling a small, bruised orange she’s saved from the ground. “Walk the tightrope?”
“Look,” Mom says. She puts down her basket and picks up three, four, then five oranges. “I was the opening act.” She laughs and starts to juggle.
Sometimes it’s just her and Kelly. They don’t talk much. Thankfully, he knows not to ask about school or jobs or her summer in New York.
Sometimes he asks about her favorite planet (Venus) or if she’s ever seen Halley’s Comet.
“That only comes every seventy-five years,” she says quietly. “The last time was 1986.”
“Oh shit,” he says. “I could have seen that.”
“Probably. What were you doing in 1986?”
He gives her a mysterious smile. “That’s a long story, Grace Porter. You up for another lap around the groves?”
She finds herself spending chunks of time in therapists’ offices. The first one is an older white woman named Barbara-Jean Marie, who wears a long denim skirt and Skechers and baubles for earrings.
“So, tell me a little about yourself, Grace,” she says, hands tucked under her legs. Her gold-rimmed glasses make her eyes look huge.
Grace fiddles with the frays in her jeans. Her foot taps an anxious rhythm. “You can call me Porter if you want,” she mumbles.
“Porter?” Barbara-Jean Marie crosses her legs. “That’s your last name, isn’t it?”
She shrugs. “Colonel—my dad—he’s military. Guess it just kinda stuck.”
“Ah,” Barbara-Jean Marie says. She writes something in her notebook. “So, from a young age you were exposed to the imperialistic ideals of the American military regime. Talk to me about that.”
The fifty-five minutes drag in silence. Barbara-Jean Marie’s pen hovers, and Grace stares resolutely at the clock.
The second therapist is a Black man named Davis Redman. He has flower-adorned crosses on his walls, and gospel music plays softly in the background. He hums along with it, reaching out for Grace’s hands. She lets him, only because she is not sure what else she is supposed to do.
“You feel that?” Davis asks. “That’s God right there, Miss Porter. You hear that? That’s God.”
“Okay,” she says.
He releases her hands. He’s wearing an Easter-blue suit and white shoes. “Have you ever been to church before? Real church, the kind that has us sisters and brothers speaking in tongues, stomping our feet, singing in His name?”
The last time Grace went to church, it was an Easter Sunday, perfect for Davis Redman’s suit. Maw Maw shoved her into a scratchy lace dress from JCPenney with a little shawl over top. Grace kicked the pew the whole service, while the pastor hollered and yelled and sang along with the aunties in the choir. She didn’t understand half of it, but she understood the eye Maw Maw gave her if she kept kicking that damn pew. She understood the stale strawberry candies were to keep her quiet and still.
“Not in a long time,” she decides to say.
Davis Redman shakes his head. “That’s where a lot of the youth have gone astray. I believe with the power of talk and prayer, you can heal.”
Grace scrunches her nose. She hasn’t prayed in even longer. “I don’t think that’s what—”
“God!” Davis Redman shouts, and Grace jumps. “God can fix all, if you let him. Can I get an amen, hallelujah?”
Grace leaves. She sits on the curb and waits for Mom to pick her up. She’s late, of course, but Grace lets the apologies wash over her. She spends the rest of the day in her room, pretending to be asleep.
The third therapist is a Black woman named Heather Huntley. Her office is homey: a desk, two lounge chairs, potted plants along the wall, a yellow-orange lamp. She has some photos on the bookshelves of her and a huge, hulking dog. Her dark skin gleams under the light, and when she shakes Grace’s hand, she smells like cocoa butter. Her black box braids hang over one shoulder and are adorned with little plastic jewels.
“Nice to meet you, Grace,” she says, and Grace figures being called by her given name isn’t actually a sign she should walk out and forget the whole thing. “How are you doing today?”
She sprawls across the chair. “I’m okay. Can I just get some things out of the way first, though? I’m a lesbian,” she says, holding Heather Huntley’s eyes the way Colonel taught her to. “I’m not religious, so I don’t think praying it away will work. I call my father Colonel because he was in the military, and it’s probably a little fucked-up, but it’s stuck now. While we’re on the subject, I don’t want to talk about the inherent imperialism in America’s military-industrial complex.” She pauses. “At least not here. I could probably talk about it somewhere else. I don’t want you to think I don’t find the discussion important.”
Heather raises her immaculately arched eyebrows. She makes Grace feel grungy and unkempt in her oversize T-shirt and ripped denim overalls and backward BARNARD cap.
“Noted,” she says, sitting back in her chair. “Anything else you want to get off your chest?”
Grace mirrors Heather’s position in her chair. “I have a doctorate in astronomy that I’m trying to figure out what to do with,” she says. “The thought of spending the rest of my career doing research with a bunch of privileged people who don’t understand me and days filled with racial microaggressions makes me want to scream. I want—I don’t know exactly what I want.” She huffs and crosses her arms. “Oh yeah, my mom said to mention that feeling out of control in situations makes me feel extremely anxious.” She thinks about the anxiety that makes her scratch at her skin, makes her want to bury it deep in her marrow where it can’t get to her anymore. “I also probably have a perfectionism problem?”
“Well, I’m glad you mentioned it,” Heather says. “That’s probably important for me to know.”
Grace shrugs.
Heather stares at her. Grace glances at the clock. It ticks down.
“You seem pretty straightforward, Grace,” she says eventually. “So, I’m going to be straightforward with you, too. Sound good?”
Grace narrows her eyes. “Depends,” she says carefully. “What are you going to be straightforward about?”
“You,” Heather says. “I want you to tell me why you’re here. Then we can decide, together, if this will work.”
Grace clenches her jaw. The words force themselves from between her teeth. “I’m here because I want to get better,” she says. “I don’t want to feel worthless just because I’m not working myself too hard.”
Heather tilts her head. “Can you tell me a little about what you mean by getting better? Do you think you’re sick?”
Grace is quiet. Years ago, when Agnes was still a biting, bloody, angry thing, the hospital called her sick. That’s what they told Ximena when she was assigned as her companion. She’s sick, the nurse said. Not just under the bandages, but in the places you can’t see.
Agnes was sick in the places no one could see. No one can see the heaviness that’s settled into Grace’s ribs, either. No one can see the poison and sludge building up in her chest.
She doesn’t know what happens if she lets someone see it all.
“Grace?” Heather asks quietly. “Can I ask what’s going on inside your head right now?”
“I was just thinking,” Grace says, and is surprised to find her voice is hoarse. “I let people tell me what I was feeling for a long time, and I avoided understanding it for myself. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted it to go away.” She stares at her knees. “How do I do that?”
“I don’t know if it ever goes away,” Heather says. “But it can get better. It gets better when you confront it, and hold it up to the light, and start the process of breaking it down.”
Grace looks up. “You know in space, things don’t break down like that.”
“No?”
She shakes her head. “There’s no air to facilitate weathering and disintegration.” She clears her throat. “Maybe that’s—maybe that’s why I was so drawn to it, the universe, all of it. Nothing breaks down. But here, everything does. People do.”
“Is that what happened to you?” Heather asks quietly. “You broke down?”
Grace shrugs. “I think it was hardwired into me.”
“I don’t know about that,” Heather replies. “But maybe that’s something we can work through together.”
Grace sniffs, folding into herself. She is exposed, but she does not run. “You read my intake questionnaire?” she asks. “What do you think?”
“Well, I—”
“Please,” she says. If she is going to do this, she is going to pull out the ugliest things. She is going to hold them up to the brightest light. She is going to take the biggest hammer and break all the shit down. “It’ll help if I just—”
“If you hear what I think?” Heather finishes, and Grace nods. “Okay,” she says. She clears her throat and shifts through the pages in her lap. “Well, first, your relationship with your parents seems complicated in very different ways.”
“Yeah,” she says. “That sounds about right.”
“Well, that’s something we can talk about,” Heather says. “If you want.”
Grace nods, eyes on the papers in Heather’s hands. “Are you going to diagnose me or something?”
“I don’t want to rush anything. There’s plenty of time for us to determine what’s going on.”
Grace presses her face into her knees. It’s not quite her blanket world, but it’s close. “You know how sometimes you just need someone else to rip the bandage off, and then you can do the rest?”
Heather sighs. “This is just our intake session,” she says, “but I think you think you’re sick. I think you’re sad and anxious, and you don’t want to feel like that anymore. I think, for all intents and purposes, you want to get better. But I don’t know what better means for you. Maybe it’s medication. Maybe it’s talking to me. It’s definitely work. It will be hard, daily work.”
There is silence in the office. The clock ticks. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Grace remembers Colonel’s face when she told him something felt wrong. “I don’t feel right,” she said. “It feels like I’m suffocating. I don’t know if I can—”
“You can,” Colonel said, face hard. He stared her straight in the eyes. “You will.”
“But—”
“Porter,” he said. “They recruit you out of high school for a war you got no business fighting in, and they tell you to come home and celebrate. They tell you congratulations and welcome back, and they give you nothing. They tell you to keep a smile on your face, so you do. You hear me? That’s how you survive. That’s how you make something of yourself. That’s how you stick to the plan.” He pushed back from the table, groaning as his leg started to give out. “Congratulations,” he says. “You’re making it through some tough shit. Now you smile. You never let them catch you otherwise. You understand me?”
She understood.
“Yes, Colonel,” she said, and she was left sitting in their kitchen alone. “I understand,” she whispered to a silent room.
In a different room now, she sits in that same silence. Heather waits, carefully putting her papers to the side. Maybe a minute passes. Maybe more.
“Are you okay?”
She unfolds herself and peeks up at Heather. “I don’t want to feel like the world will end if I take a breath. I don’t want to feel guilty anymore for taking care of myself. I don’t want to stay in bed and stare at the wall and blame myself because I didn’t execute some perfectly ordered plan. I want to try to get better.”
“Okay, Grace,” Heather says. “We can work on it. All that anxiety, all that sadness, all that guilt.” She sets her pen down. “You know, it makes sense you’ve been feeling this way. As Black women, we’re conditioned to work twice as hard just to end up in the same place. We’re called strong and fearless. We’re never really allowed to be vulnerable, are we? So, that’s what we’ll work on. We’ll work on being vulnerable and kind to yourself, and that voice that tells you it’s wrong? That you have to keep going past your breaking point? We’ll break it down.”
Things don’t break apart in space.
This is not space.
When she gets in the car, Mom asks, “So how did it go?”
Grace squeezes her eyes shut and cries. She cries at digging her hands in some of that sludge and getting permission to let it go. Clear it out. Break it down.
“Shhh,” Mom says, rubbing her back. “It’s gonna be okay, kid.”
Grace, with everything she’s got in her, wants to believe that’s true.