Honey Girl(69)

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.”