Vessel

7

SHOULD I EVEN be driving? Catherine gripped the wheel as she drove in alone to JSC the next day, focusing on the things that were real: the firm steering wheel against her fingers, the sun coming through the car window, hot against her skin despite the fierce air conditioner.

For the past eighteen hours, Catherine had been clinging to reality like a life preserver. She focused on sensory input as much as possible, trying to ground herself in things that were unmistakably real, like counting the mile markers on the side of the highway as she drove. Watching them reassured her that she wasn’t losing track of time. As far as she knew, the loss of time hadn’t happened again, but the constant vigilance to try to prevent it was exhausting. Especially since she had no idea how to prevent it. She found herself checking her watch every few minutes, making sure the time that had passed felt like the right amount of time.

It had been worse last night. David let Aimee go out with friends after dinner. On a school night. She didn’t get home until eleven, and every minute she was gone seemed to stretch, further distorting Catherine’s sense of time.

Focus on the steering wheel and the warm sun. Let everything else go. And don’t tell a soul.

She wasn’t sure what would happen if she did, but she couldn’t bear the thought of going back to isolation, of losing the freedom she’d so desperately yearned for while she was in quarantine, and, before that, all those years alone…

She still hadn’t decided what to tell Dr. Darzi when she sat down in her office for her therapy appointment. Compared to the rest of JSC, Dr. Darzi’s office was warm, homelike. In a hive of squared-off, sharp-edged scientific minds, clinical surroundings, and industrial buildings, hers was the one place that was soft and quiet. The overhead fluorescents stayed off in favor of incandescent lamps, and the cinder-block walls were covered in peaceful artwork and soft fabric hangings. Catherine often wondered if her male counterparts were comfortable in these surroundings.

Still, Catherine had liked Dr. Darzi from the start. She didn’t dress or act like most of NASA’s administration, favoring long, flowy skirts and dresses, and wearing her tightly coiled black hair short. She didn’t take any bullshit from anybody, Catherine included.

“It sounds as if you’re settling in well at home.” Dr. Darzi sat across from her in a wingback chair while Catherine perched on the edge of a love seat, not quite able to relax.

“It’s good to be back with my family,” Catherine said. “David and I are… we’re in this weird place where we’re getting reacquainted, but it’s going okay.”

“And with Aimee?”

“It’s amazing,” Catherine said. “She’s great. I just… have to keep reminding myself that she’s not a little girl anymore. And David’s a little more lenient than I would be.”

“Are you feeling out of control?”

“No, it’s not that,” Catherine insisted. “I just… want her to be safe.”

“Of course you do, but it’s also natural to want to reach out and grab on to what we’re certain of, what we know we have control over.” Dr. Darzi peered at Catherine over her glasses. “There’s an awful lot in your life that you can’t control right now.”

Did she know? How could she know? Suddenly the draped office felt suffocating. “I don’t feel out of control,” she lied. Was that it? Did she want to be controlling at home to make up for everything else?

Dr. Darzi didn’t answer.

“I don’t— I mean, I’m not, necessarily. I mean, no more out of control than anybody else, right? Things are going great here. I’m fine. I’m settling in, like you said.” The longer Catherine lied, the more desperate she felt, needing to believe it herself. Maybe more than she needed Dr. Darzi to believe it. She stopped trying and went quiet, staring at her hands.

The silence spun out until Dr. Darzi said, “Sooner or later you’re going to have to talk about you, Catherine. Not your family. Not your job. You. I know you feel like you abandoned Aimee and David, but you were abandoned, too, in a way.”

“Me? By who?”

At first Catherine thought Dr. Darzi wasn’t going to answer. Instead, she asked, “How long did you know Commander Gidzenko?”

“Ava? We met in training.”

“And the rest of your crew?”

Catherine realized where the doctor was going. “They didn’t abandon me. They died.”

“You lived with them for three years. Trained with them for how long before that?”

“I don’t know, several years.”

“The six of you experienced something no one else has ever experienced. Ever. You lived together like a family. And now you’re the only one left.”

“But we weren’t like that,” Catherine protested. “Ava and I were close, yes, but the others, they were just my coworkers.” Sure, your coworkers, like Tom. The guilt was like a gut punch.

“Catherine?”

“I’m fine.” She tried to smile, and felt it falling flat.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Catherine closed her eyes for a moment and took a breath. “Doctor, am I ever going to get my memory back?”

Dr. Darzi sat back in her chair, crossing her legs. “It’s hard to say. I know that’s not what you want to hear. Retrograde amnesia is tough to treat in the best of cases. You went through an enormous emotional trauma; it was six years, and for all we know you could have experienced some sort of physical trauma as well. Plus, we knew ahead of time that traveling through ERB Prime can have some effects on memory.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know it would be like this. Did Iris Addy ever get any of her memory back?”

Dr. Darzi flinched so imperceptibly that Catherine wondered if she’d imagined it. “Iris Addy was a special case.”

“The stories say she came back hearing voices,” Catherine pressed.

“Are you hearing voices?”

Catherine thought about the moments when she heard Ava’s voice in her mind, as clear as if she were standing right next to her. But that felt different somehow, more like grief, like she was trying to keep Ava with her. She shook her head.

Dr. Darzi put aside her notepad and leaned forward. “The astronaut screening program isn’t perfect, and sometimes things slip past the tests. Yes, Iris Addy came back with some issues, and yes, some of those issues were similar to yours. However, she refused to let NASA help her with them. Our hands were tied.” She smiled. “You, clearly, aren’t making the same mistakes she did.”

“Well, I’m trying not to.” Catherine tried to return the smile, though she couldn’t help but hear a faint warning in the doctor’s words.

“Memory loss is upsetting and disconcerting, I know. What you’re experiencing is normal, Catherine. You just have to give yourself time to recover.”

“But how long?”

The doctor laughed, but gently. “It’s been little more than a month since you got home. I promise you, you’re making great progress. If I see a problem, I will tell you. All right?”

“Yes. Okay.” Catherine didn’t feel any better. Dr. Darzi wasn’t seeing the things she was. Dr. Darzi didn’t know everything.

“What are you afraid of, Catherine?”

“What am I not afraid of,” Catherine said with a laugh. “That list would be a lot shorter.”

Dr. Darzi didn’t laugh, but kept looking at her with patient brown eyes.

Catherine sighed. She wasn’t getting out of this, not unless she wanted to spend the rest of her session in silence. She couldn’t make the words come out at first. “What if something went really wrong up there? What if… what if the reason I can’t remember anything is that I’m the reason it went wrong?”

Admitting that took all the willpower she had, and she held her breath waiting for the response.

“That’s a normal feeling.” Dr. Darzi folded her hands on her lap. “Something did go wrong up there. Very wrong. As the sole survivor of a tragedy, you’re going to feel guilty. You’re going to look for reasons why you were the one who survived when no one else did. For some people, this manifests as a drive to find their purpose in life, for others, it’s proof they were somehow responsible for the tragedy.”

Despite Dr. Darzi’s reassuring words, Catherine couldn’t help remembering how badly she’d wanted to hurt Cal and the engineer when they’d found her in the archives. Not just hurt them—destroy them. And then there was the missing time…

“I… there has to be some reason I survived and they didn’t. Any sort of destruction of the Habitat… I would have been there, too. Or else, someone would have survived with me if we were on an expedition when it happened.” Catherine fumbled along, trying to explain the fear that had been hovering in the back of her mind. “If it was some sort of sickness, what are the odds that I was the only one to survive? And I suppose there’s a chance that I just took off and left them behind, but… I think the five of them would have been able to stop me.”

Dr. Darzi put aside her notepad again and looked at Catherine seriously. “When we go through trauma, afterward we try to make sense of it. We look for signs, for some pattern to show us the meaning behind what happened. But Catherine, often there is no meaning. Bad things just happen.”

“But… since I’ve been home, I’ve… I’ve had thoughts. Frightening thoughts. About hurting other people. Not my family,” Catherine was quick to reassure her. “It’s like… like it’s someone else having those feelings.”

“I see. Do you feel threatened by the people you want to hurt?”

“Well, I… yes. Yes, they seem dangerous.”

“Those are called intrusive thoughts, Catherine. They’re not uncommon with PTSD, but they’re just thoughts. Most likely, the people who trigger that response in you somehow remind you of whatever happened on TRAPPIST-1f, and your mind instantly wants to defend you from the danger. Pay close attention to when it happens; try to figure out what those people have in common. It may yield some insight.”

“But—”

“If they continue to trouble you, we can look at starting you on some medication to stop them.”

Catherine fought back a sense of frustration, of not being heard. Finally she admitted, “I’m… still forgetting things sometimes.”

“More amnesia?”

“No, not exactly. It doesn’t feel the same as what happened on the ship.” She’d lost years of her life then, a vast yawning emptiness. Losing an hour here and there couldn’t be the same thing—could it?

Dr. Darzi reached for her notepad again. “I see. What sorts of things are you forgetting?”

Catherine laughed lightly, waving a dismissive hand. She should never have brought this up. “Oh, it’s just silly. Like forgetting that I put something on the stove, that sort of thing.”

“Hmm. What does it feel like when that happens?”

“Nothing, really,” Catherine said. Half-truths were her home these days. She was getting very good at telling them. “Just like… I disconnected for a little bit, distracted.”

“It might be some mild dissociation. That’s also not uncommon with PTSD. Are you frightened by it?”

“A little.” Catherine didn’t tell her about the nearly obsessive way she was watching clocks, or the constant worry that she was living in a moment she’d soon forget.

“Dissociative responses often come in response to a trauma trigger. Can you think of anything that might have happened before you dissociated?”

Had something happened? Before the incident here at Johnson she’d talked to Maggie, and it started with the planetary simulation. “Maybe, yes. But…”

“But what?” Dr. Darzi prompted.

“What if it keeps happening?”

Dr. Darzi sighed. “I wish I could promise you that it won’t, but chances are very good that it will. The good news is, the further you get from the original trauma, and the more work we do here, the less frequent and less severe your symptoms will be.”

“I just… I just keep thinking that if I could remember what happened on the mission, all of this would get better much faster,” Catherine said.

“I know, Catherine. But that may not ever happen, and you need to work on accepting that.” Dr. Darzi’s voice was soothing. “I think our time might be better spent if we start focusing on the here and now. You may never fully recover your memories, but you can—and should—live in the now.”

Dr. Darzi’s words made sense, but something didn’t ring true. “But what if there’s something important that I’m forgetting?”

“Catherine. This is becoming counterproductive for you. It’s time to stop focusing on the past and focus on the present and the future. Trying to relive what happened isn’t going to fix anything. You’re back, you’re alive, you’re a hero. Don’t let your mind trick you into poking holes in that.”

Catherine was growing to hate the word hero. It wasn’t just that she didn’t feel like one. It was that NASA pulled that word out whenever they wanted her to stop thinking about what had happened on the mission. It was like a code phrase: “No, everything is fine, nothing went wrong that we can’t fix, you’re fine, now be fine so there are no loose ends.”

But at the same time, Dr. Darzi was right. There was no way for her to force the memories to come back. All she could do was fix what was happening now.

“I’m trying, Doc. I really am.”

“I know, and you’re doing great, Catherine. This is hard, scary work that you’re doing. The good news is you’re not alone anymore. You have a miraculous second chance here. We’re going to help you make the most of it.”

Catherine stayed quiet, then conceded. “All right. Yes. You’re right. I’ll do my best to stay focused on the present from now on.”

“Great. You’re not going to regret it, I promise you.”

Catherine left the office, hoping against hope that Dr. Darzi was right. But another part of her wondered how she was supposed to focus on the present when she was haunted by the gaping black hole that was her past. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she needed to remember what had happened to her after Mission Day 865. When had they landed on TRAPPIST-1f? What had happened then? Dr. Darzi wanted to know what she was afraid of. She was afraid that the hole in her memory starting on Day 865 would expand, one blank period of time, until there was nothing left of her.