“I’ve had my agent bump back the deadline three times,” Grace points out, even though, of course, Jenny already knows this. They’ve talked about it dozens of times. “Everyone has been more than accommodating and understanding.”
“Grace, what if we pull out one of your journals. We can sit, look over all your early notes for the book, brainstorm some new ideas together, and—”
“It’s too late for all that,” she acknowledges. “Even if I started tonight—really sat down, focused, forced myself to write a crazy amount of pages every day—I won’t be able to do it.”
“Then just ask them for a few more weeks, Grace,” Jenny suggests. “Nothing dramatic. Even a couple of spare days might help give you the space you need to—”
“It’s not about time anymore.” Grace closes her computer. “It’s about me.” She sets it on the arm of the couch, rubs her face. “I used to write to find answers to my problems. If I felt lost about something, I wrote until I stumbled upon a conclusion. If something hurt, I wrote until some of the pain went away. But this book, I can’t even get the first real sentence down.” Her words begin to quiver, but she pushes through anyway. “It’s supposed to be about a happy young family. A couple. A baby. A house full of laughter and light. But every time I sit down to write about them, there’s just ... nothing. I can’t see them. Hear them. I’m so far removed from their world that they don’t even feel real. I’m just faking it. I hardly even remember the person I was—where my heart was at—when I came up with the concept.”
She feels it then, a sensation forming in her belly, then swelling and moving up her throat. A tidal wave of emotions—a whole, unforgiving spectrum of them—rises in her. Every loss she’s felt—this week, these last six months, the past few years—comes out in a heavy, guttural sob.
“What do I do, Jenny?” Grace begs. “Please just tell me what I’m supposed to do.”
“You do in real life what you haven’t been able to do on the page,” Jenny says and wraps her arms around Grace’s body, pulling her in closeand letting her cry against her chest. She hugs her friend tighter. “You contact your agent, and you tell her the truth.”
Grace wakes up on the couch, even though she doesn’t remember closing her eyes. She bats her lids open slowly and sees that the light in the living room has dimmed. The TV is still on but muted now, Jenny’s snack plate and Grace’s empty seltzer can cleared away.
“I ordered dinner,” Jenny says from the kitchen as she uncorks a wine bottle. “I looked through some of the stuff in the welcome basket and called a pizza place up the street.” She pulls two of the old blue drinking cups from the cabinets and pours. “In the meantime, how about some wine?”
Grace rubs her face and sits up, though a bit too fast. A wave of nausea washes over her, the weight of the whole day crashing back in. She nods, twists her body, and drops her feet to the floor. Jenny passes her the glass. Grace takes a sip, but it doesn’t go down quite right. She sets it on the table, then grips the edge of the couch cushion, like she needs it to steady herself.
“I admit it’s not the best quality,” Jenny says, thinking that Grace’s reaction is meant as a joke about the wine’s too-sweet taste. “Though I probably should have assumed that when I grabbed a bottle sitting on a table along with a sunscreen display.”
Grace blinks and pulls herself to standing. “Sorry.” She does her best to swallow the feeling down. “I think I’m just kind of dehydrated from the last few days.”
Jenny quickly moves back to the kitchen. “I’ll get you water. And a fresh seltzer. Come sit. I’ll bring you both.”
“I will,” Grace states, already moving toward the hallway. “I think I’m just going to go wash my face.”
Inside the bathroom, Grace lets the water run cold over her wrists, then cups some in her palms and splashes it over her cheeks. Although the queasyfeeling doesn’t disappear, in time, it starts to settle into something tolerable. From inside the small under-the-sink vanity, she pulls out a washcloth, wets it, then takes a seat on the closed toilet and lays it on the back of her neck. For a moment, she lets the dampness work its way into her skin.
Her gaze shifts down. The Band-Aid barely hangs on to her skin. She peels it off and sees that her heel is still red. She takes the washcloth from her neck and places it on her foot, then reaches into the narrow nook beside the toilet and the sink for the pharmacy bag from yesterday.
She unfolds the brown paper, hardly even remembering what she bought, and places each item on the sink ledge. A box of Band-Aids, already opened. Alcohol wipes. A tube of ointment. She almost stops there, unscrews the cap, and dabs the gel on her raw skin. Instead, her hand dips back into the bag, aware from the weight of it that something else still lingers at the bottom.
Initially, when she pulls it out and sets it with her other purchases, Grace hardly even thinks twice. She’s removed nearly this exact box—soft blue with bits of pink in the design and a clean white font—countless times these last few years. It takes a minute for it to hit her. That in her overwhelmed state from seeing Carol and hearing her news about Birdie in the pharmacy aisle, she inadvertently tossed a pregnancy test into her basket.
Once she realizes that it’s there, Grace freezes. She just sits, looking at it, trying to retrace her steps and remember how it ended up in her bag. She reaches for it slowly, as if her hands are moving through water, and unwraps the protective plastic layer, then peels one end open, wondering if this was truly a mistake on her part—a random slip—or if it was a most unusual and blatant sign. If maybe a quiet voice deep inside her on some level already knew.
“Grace?” Jenny says through the door. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” She slides the plastic tester out from the packaging. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
Everything that comes next is muscle memory. The right angle to hold it. The way to carefully lay it down flat, never shaking it or moving it too much. The correct amount of time to wait, which isn’t long butfeels like an eternity—the reason her impatience always wins and she looks too soon.
Even though it’s only been a minute, the timing seems to be just right. The answer Grace has waited for is there. Not faded. Not uncertain. Not metaphor. Not memory. Not maybe.
It’s present.
Two lines, as strong and blue as the ocean.
A new story.
A new future.
A new version of herself that, until right this instant, she had no idea she was already in the process of becoming.
Twenty-Nine
