Chapter 20 Jamie
JAMIE
Icall Becca from my car in the parking lot of my apartment building because the apartment feels too quiet for what I'm about to say and the car feels like a room with an exit, which is what I need right now. A room I can leave if the saying goes wrong.
The saying will not go wrong. I know this.
I know Becca the way I know the ice: instinctively, completely, with the full-body certainty of a person who has been loved by this specific human for his entire life and who has never, not once, received anything from her other than the truth wrapped in warmth.
But the knowing doesn't eliminate the terror. The terror is not about Becca. The terror is about the words. The words, once spoken, cannot be unspoken. The words are a one-way door. I am standing in front of it. The handle is my phone. I press call.
She answers on the first ring. Becca always answers on the first ring for me, which is a courtesy she extends to approximately three people on earth (me, our mother, and her best friend Maya, who is apparently the only other human whose calls merit first-ring status).
"Hey. What's up?"
"Hey. Are you alone?"
"I'm in my room. Why?"
"I need to tell you something."
The silence that follows is three seconds long.
Three seconds is an eternity in Becca's conversational rhythm, which normally operates at the tempo of a caffeinated auctioneer.
Three seconds of Becca silence means she has identified the weight in my voice and has recalibrated her approach from casual to careful.
"Okay," she says. "I'm here."
"I think I like someone."
I have rehearsed this sentence. I rehearsed it in the shower this morning and in the car on the way home and in the three minutes I sat in the parking lot before pressing call.
The rehearsal did not help. The sentence sounds different out loud than it sounded in my head.
In my head, the sentence was a controlled, measured statement of fact. Out loud, the sentence is shaking.
"A boy," Becca says.
Not a question. A statement. Two words, delivered with the calm, certain, completely unsurprised tone of a sixteen-year-old girl who has been waiting for this phone call since her brother was fifteen and who is not going to pretend, for his comfort or anyone else's, that this information is new.
The two words hit me like a wave. Not a crashing wave. A warm one. The kind that lifts you.
"Yeah," I say. "A boy."
The saying of it. The actual, out-loud, to-another-person saying of the word.
"A boy." Two syllables that have been building pressure inside my chest for months (for years, if I'm honest, for the years before the name and the search bar and the Philadelphia hotel room, for the years when the feeling existed without vocabulary).
The two syllables exit my mouth and enter the air and travel through a phone signal to Duluth, Minnesota, where my little sister is sitting in her bedroom, and the syllables do not destroy anything.
The syllables do not end anything. The syllables are a beginning.
"Tell me everything," Becca says.
I tell her. Not everything. Not the search bar or the hotel room or the half-second in the celebration pile.
But the coffee. The glasses. The three hours.
The way Declan listens, which is with his whole body, which is with an attention so complete that it feels physical.
The way his face changes when he takes his glasses off, the professional distance dissolving, the person emerging.
The way I feel when I'm near him, which is the way I feel on the ice: present, alive, operating at a frequency that the rest of my life does not access.
"He's a journalist," I say. "He covers the team. Covered. He's... it's complicated."
"Is he nice?"
"He's..." I think about how to describe Declan to Becca.
Nice is insufficient. Nice is the word for the barista who remembers your order.
Declan is not nice. Declan is specific. Declan is the person who sees the thing underneath the thing and who answers the question you're actually asking and who takes his glasses off when he wants to be honest and who remembered that I drink Earl Grey from a single sentence in a hallway.
"He's the first person who ever made me feel like I could say the thing I'm saying right now."
Becca is quiet for a moment. The quiet is not her processing silence. The quiet is her emotional silence, which is the silence of a girl who loves her brother with the fierce, uncomplicated, load-bearing love of a sibling and who is feeling the full weight of what he just said.
"Jamie," she says. "I've been waiting for this call since you were fifteen."
"You knew?"
"You had a poster of Sidney Crosby in your room. Not because of the hockey."
I laugh. The laugh is sudden and real and releases something in my chest that has been coiled there for years.
The coil is the secret. The coil is the carrying.
The coil is Wes Chen's "alone part" and Mik Volkov's "walls" and Cole Briggs's "bag," and my sixteen-year-old sister just uncoiled it with a Sidney Crosby joke.
"It was a motivational poster," I say, and I'm laughing and my eyes are stinging and the two things are happening simultaneously.
"It was a poster of a man in hockey gear and you stared at it every night. That's not motivation. That's a crush."
"It was a really good poster."
"Jamie." Her voice softens. The joke voice is gone. The real voice is underneath, and the real voice is the voice of the person who knows me better than anyone on earth. "Are you okay?"
"I'm scared."
"I know."
"I'm really scared."
"I know. But you sound happy. And those two things can be true at the same time."
The sentence is so simple and so precisely correct that I sit with it for a moment, in my car, in the parking lot, in the warm Atlanta evening, and I let the truth of it wash over me.
Scared and happy. Both. Simultaneously. The two conditions are not contradictory.
They are complementary. The scared is the evidence that the happy matters, and the happy is the evidence that the scared is worth surviving.
"Does anyone else know?" she asks.
"Mik. Sort of. He didn't ask and I didn't say, but he knows. Cole. I talked to Cole."
"Cole Briggs? The one who kissed his boyfriend on live television?"
"Yeah."
"Jamie. You went to the guy who kissed his boyfriend on television and asked him how he knew. That's not being scared. That's being brave and scared at the same time."
"Is that a thing?"
"It's the only thing that counts. Brave without scared is just reckless. Brave with scared is courage."
My sister is sixteen years old and she just defined courage more clearly than anyone I've talked to, including a Sports Illustrated cover subject and a man who spent eleven years behind a wall and a security guard who sees everything.
"What about Mom and Dad?" I ask.
"Dad will need a minute. He's Dad. He processes things like he watches game film: slowly, carefully, one thing at a time. But he'll get there. He always gets there."
"And Mom?"
"Mom already knows."
"She does not."
"Jamie. She's a nurse. She reads people for a living. She's been reading you since you were born. She knows something. She might not know the word. But she knows the shape of it."
I close my eyes. The parking lot is quiet.
The Atlanta sky is turning purple at the edges.
My sister's voice is in my ear, steady and warm and certain, and the certainty is not the certainty of a person who has all the answers.
It is the certainty of a person who has the only answer that matters, which is: I love you and this doesn't change that and nothing will ever change that.
"Becca."
"Yeah?"
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For answering on the first ring."
She laughs. The laugh is the Becca laugh, bright and sharp and carrying the specific joy of a girl who has been holding a space open for her brother and who is watching him finally walk into it.
"Always," she says. "First ring. Every time. No matter what."
I hang up. I sit in the car for five more minutes. The sky darkens. The streetlights come on. The parking lot fills with the amber glow of a city settling into evening.
I said it. To another person. Out loud. In my own voice.
A boy. I like a boy. His name is Declan. He takes his glasses off when he wants to be real. He remembered the tea. He sat with me for three hours in a coffee shop in Decatur and the three hours were the best three hours I've had since I left Duluth.
The wall that Becca knocked down (the wall labeled "nobody knows") is down. And behind it is not emptiness. Behind it is my sister, laughing about a Crosby poster, telling me that scared and happy can be the same thing.
I go inside. I turn on the lamp. The apartment is warm.
For the first time since I moved to Atlanta, the apartment feels like somewhere I live, not somewhere I'm staying.