Page 52 of Rookie Mistake
The sentence sits in my chest like a stone.
"He's managing. You're performing. He's not-telling. You're grinning. He's protecting himself by controlling information. You're protecting yourself by controlling the surface. The mechanics are different. The fear is the same."
"That's not..."
"It's exactly the same, Eli. You walked into a kitchen and told him that managing and handling are different and you were right. But you've been managing your own crisis for a week. The article. The headline. The comments. You put the grin back on and you handled it by performing the handling and the performing is your version of his not-telling. You both got scared and you both retreated behind your walls and the walls are different materials but they're the same height."
I sit on the cold couch in the cold apartment. The morning light is thin through the windows. The apartment has no reading lamp because I never bought one because I was never here because I was at Nikolai's, where the lamp is amber and the couch is warm and the quiet is shared.
"So what do I do?" I say.
"You go first."
"Go first how?"
"You fell in love with a man who is terrified of being known, and you are terrified of not being enough. Those two fears are going to keep crashing into each other until one of you decides to stop being afraid first."
"Who should go first?"
"The one who's brave enough. Which, historically, is you. You came out. You told the team. You said the word. He's still letting a man from three years ago decide how much of himself he's allowed to show. You have to go first because going first is what you do. Going first is the speed. Going first is the dramatic option at the right time."
The hockey metaphor. Ava, who does not follow hockey, has absorbed enough of my vocabulary to deploy it. The deployment is accurate. The dramatic option at the right time. Nikolai's lesson, returned through Ava's mouth.
"He hurt me," I say. The sentence is quiet. The sentence is the underneath. "The not-telling hurt. Not because of Alexei. Because the not-telling means he looked at me and saw a risk instead of a partner. Three months and he still saw a risk."
"Three months is not three years. Three years of damage does not dissolve in three months of love. The love is real. The damage is also real. The two things exist in the same person and the person is doing his best and his best, right now, is not good enough, and the not-good-enough is the thing you both have to survive."
"When did you get this smart?"
"Law school. Also therapy. Also being your sister for twenty-two years, which is its own form of advanced education."
"Ava."
"Yeah?"
"What if I go first and it doesn't work?"
"Then you went first and it didn't work and you survive it the way you survive everything: by being faster than the thing that's chasing you. But it's going to work. You know how I know?"
"How?"
"Because he put the teaspoon back."
"What?"
"The teaspoon. In the mug. You told me about the teaspoon weeks ago. The teaspoon that he stopped correcting. The teaspoon that stays. If he were really retreating, the first thing he would do is put the teaspoon away. The teaspoon is still in the mug, Eli. The wall is up but the teaspoon is in the mug. That's the data."
Mars-language from Ava. Teaspoon-as-data. The teaspoon that I mentioned once, weeks ago, in a phone call about domestic details, and that Ava stored and is now deploying at the exact moment the data is needed.
"How do you know the teaspoon is still in the mug?" I ask.
"Because if he'd put it away, the putting-away would have been the first thing he did and the first thing he did would have felt wrong and the wrong would have made him put it back. Because the teaspoon is not the old model. The teaspoon is the new one. And the new model is stronger than the old one even when the old one is screaming."
I close my eyes. The cold apartment is quiet. Ava's voice is warm.
"Go first," she says. "But not yet. Let the game happen first."
"What game?"
