In Place
They told her the order came down at 7:14 in the morning.
She learned this later. At 7:14, Gloria was asleep on the couch because she hadn't been able to use the bed properly in months — something about the angle of it, the way it faced the door. The couch faced the wall. The wall didn't have a door.
JJ called at 9:02.
Gloria knew it was JJ because she had a system. One ring, hang up, call again. They'd worked it out back in January, back when everything needed a system.
She answered on the second call.
"It's over," JJ said.
Gloria didn't say anything.
"The executive order was overturned. Special election, 2 AM last night. It passed. Gloria. It's over."
She looked at the wall she was facing. It was the same wall she'd been looking at, on and off, for three hundred and sixty-seven days. She had memorized every crack in the plaster, every faint watermark from the upstairs neighbor's shower, the way the morning light moved across it from left to right. She knew this wall the way she used to know the road to the beach — instinctively, completely, without having to think.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?" JJ's voice broke a little. "That's all you—"
"I heard you." Gloria sat up. Her back cracked. It always cracked now. "I just don't know what to do with that."
[JJ's note: I didn't know what to say to her. I had rehearsed this call in my head for weeks, imagining what I'd tell her, how she'd cry, how we'd both cry. I didn't expect her to sound so calm. I didn't understand yet that calm was how she'd learned to survive.]
Tom and John came back from Vancouver two days later. They knocked the way they always had — three knocks, pause, two more — and Gloria watched them on her phone screen for a long moment before she unlocked the door.
Tom was thinner. John had grown a beard.
They both looked at her like she was a thing they'd been afraid might not exist anymore.
"Mija," Tom said, and that was all he got out before he was crying.
Gloria stood in her doorway — one foot on the inside, one foot on the threshold — and let him hold her. She looked over his shoulder at the hallway. The same hallway she'd watched through cameras for a year. The same hallway where she'd heard boots, once, and pressed herself flat against her own door and stopped breathing.
It looked ordinary. That was the strangest thing.
On the morning of Day 367 — officially — JJ sat with her on the couch and they made a plan.
"You don't have to go far," JJ said. "We could just go down to the courtyard. Stand by the tree for a minute."
"I know."
"Or we don't go at all. Not today."
"I know."
Gloria looked at the corner of the room. The bike was there. It had always been there, the whole time — a road bike, well-used, a basket on the front, the helmet still hanging from the handlebars where she'd left it on November 7th. She had not touched it in three hundred and sixty-seven days. Some months, she'd covered it with a sheet because looking at it was a specific kind of hurt she didn't have a name for. Lately, she'd uncovered it. She wasn't sure why. Maybe just to prove she could look at it without flinching.
She was still working on that.
"I want to go outside," she said.
JJ looked at her.
"Not to the beach. Not yet." Gloria stood up, and her knees protested, and she ignored them. "Just outside. Just to see what it—" She stopped. Tried again. "I want to see if it smells the same."
[JJ's note: She asked me this question once, around Day 200. She'd asked: "Do you think it still smells the same out there? The air?" I told her of course it did. She wrote in her journal that night: "JJ said yes but JJ hasn't been inside for a year. JJ doesn't know." She was right. I didn't know.]
The door opened.
Gloria stood in the doorway for a moment — longer than she needed to, longer than made sense. JJ stood a step behind her and didn't say anything, because JJ had learned, over three hundred and sixty-seven days, that the most useful thing she could do was wait.
The courtyard was ordinary. The tree they'd planted the year the building went up, the same cracked concrete path, Mrs. Ndiaye's potted plants lined up along the walkway. A bicycle — someone else's, not hers — leaned against the far wall.
The air was cold and smelled like January and like car exhaust from the street and like the orange tree in the corner that nobody ever picked from.
Gloria breathed in.
Her eyes filled, which surprised her. She hadn't cried in a long time. Around Day 120 she had cried so much and so consistently that she thought she'd used it all up. She hadn't expected to have any left.
She stepped off the threshold.
Her right foot touched the concrete path.
Then her left.
She stood there, two feet on the ground outside her apartment, in the cold January air that smelled like exhaust and oranges, and she thought about the beach. She thought about the particular way the road dipped just before the parking lot, the way the salt hit you before you could even see the water. She thought about the last time she'd ridden it — November 4th, three days before she'd locked the door. She hadn't known it was the last time. She hadn't said goodbye to any of it.
You never know when the last time is the last time. That's either a tragedy or a mercy. I keep changing my mind about which.
"Hey," JJ said softly, from the doorway behind her.
Gloria turned around.
JJ was smiling, the way people smile when they're trying not to cry. She was holding the bike.
"You don't have to," JJ said. "Not today."
Gloria looked at the bike. At the basket. At the helmet, which had a small crack in the back she'd never gotten around to replacing. She looked at the cracked concrete path, at the gate at the end of it, at the strip of gray sky visible above the roofline.
Three hundred and sixty-seven days.
"Maybe not to the beach," she said.
"Okay."
"Maybe just—" She reached out and took the handlebars. The rubber grips were cold. They felt exactly the same as they always had, which was somehow shocking, that something could feel exactly the same. "Maybe just around the block."
JJ wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, very quickly, like she hoped Gloria hadn't seen.
Gloria had seen.
She put on the helmet anyway — the cracked one, the one she'd have to replace, but not today — and she walked the bike through the courtyard gate, and she stood on the sidewalk for a moment, and she looked both ways.
The street was ordinary. Cars. A woman pushing a stroller. Somewhere, someone was playing music too loud. The same. All of it, still the same.
Maybe, she had written at the end of her journal.
That's something, right? Maybe?
She got on the bike.
She rode.
Gloria's asylum case was approved eleven weeks later. She still lives in the same apartment. She rides to the beach on Sundays, when the weather allows.
The journal she kept during those 367 days is what you've just read a piece of. She gave me permission to share it. She said: "Tell them it happened. That's all. Just tell them it happened."
It happened.
— JJ Reyes