Chapter 12
ELI
The kids are fearless.
I know this because I've watched Sofia Martinez fall nine times in twenty minutes and get up ten.
The math doesn't work and that's the point.
Sofia gets up before she's fully finished falling.
The getting-up and the falling are the same motion, a continuous loop that doesn't seem to bother her because nobody has told her that falling is something to be afraid of.
I'm at the Decatur rink. Ren Briggs runs a youth hockey program here on Saturday mornings: eight- and nine-year-olds in borrowed helmets and oversized gear, skating with the beautiful chaos of children who are learning a new language with their bodies.
The team requires community service hours and I signed up for this because the other options involved public speaking and formal wear and the ice is the one place where my body knows what it's doing even when the rest of me doesn't.
Ren is quiet. Not the defended quiet I carry or the managed quiet Nikolai maintains. Ren's quiet is settled. The quiet of a man who found the room where he fit and stopped looking.
I'm helping four kids work on crossovers. The mechanics are simple at this level: weight on inside edge, push and glide. Sofia gets it immediately, her crossovers fierce and tidy for a nine-year-old. Two others are improving. The fourth is Marcus.
Marcus is wearing a Mars Santos jersey that hangs past his knees. Marcus is more interested in talking than skating.
"Do you know Mars?" he asks, attempting a crossover with more enthusiasm than technique.
"Yeah. He's on my team."
"Is he nice?"
"He's nice in a quiet way."
"Like Nikolai?"
I almost trip. Marcus does not notice because Marcus is nine and nine-year-olds do not track the micro-expressions of adults who have just been ambushed by the name of their boyfriend in a suburban rink.
"You know Nikolai?" I ask, keeping my voice level.
"He came to the rink last month with Mik. He helped me with my stopping. He's really tall." Marcus executes another crossover. The arms are doing something ambitious. "He doesn't smile much but his eyes smile. My mom says some people smile with their eyes instead of their mouths."
Marcus's mom is correct. Nikolai smiles with his eyes. The eye-smile is the underneath's version of the fraction-of-a-smile, and Marcus, who is nine, identified it in one visit.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" Marcus asks.
The question arrives the way children's questions arrive: without subtext, without weight, with the same casual curiosity he'd bring to asking my favorite color. Marcus does not know the question has teeth. Marcus does not know the question is the question I have been circling for years.
"No," I say.
"A boyfriend?"
"Sort of."
The words exit my mouth before the grin can intercept them.
The words are two words and they are the first time I have said anything resembling this truth to anyone outside Ava and Nikolai.
The words are small and they are enormous and they are hanging in the air of a suburban rink between me and a nine-year-old in an oversized jersey.
Marcus shrugs. "Cool. My friend Jaylen has two dads. They make really good quesadillas."
He skates away. The crossover he attempts features an arm motion that can only be described as celebratory.
I stand at the boards. My hands are on the railing.
The railing is cold under my palms. The rink is full of children falling and getting up and I am very still because the two words I just said have rearranged something in my chest that I was not expecting to be rearranged by a conversation about quesadillas.
Sort of. Not "yes." Not "his name is Nikolai and he cooks pasta at ten-thirty and his hands are more honest than his words.
" Sort of. The hedge. The performance's last foothold in a sentence that was otherwise honest. I said "sort of" because "sort of" preserves the ambiguity that the grin requires, the escape route that the performance maintains, the space between the truth and the told.
But the told happened. The told was "sort of" and "sort of" was enough.
A nine-year-old heard it and the nine-year-old's response was quesadillas and the quesadillas were the culture and the culture was: this is not remarkable.
This is a fact about you that is as interesting as your favorite color and as important as your stopping technique and now let's get back to crossovers.
The kids don't care. They have never cared. The kids live in a world where two dads make quesadillas and a man can have a "sort of" boyfriend and the "sort of" is not a crisis. The crisis is the adult's. The crisis is mine.
The session continues. I work with the kids for another hour.
Sofia lands five crossovers in a row and pumps her fist. Marcus tells me a story about his dog, a labradoodle named Biscuit, who is apparently the world's worst swimmer.
Two kids invent a falling competition that escalates until Ren skates over and redirects with the calm authority of a man who understands that children learn through chaos.
I watch them fall. I watch them get up. The speed of the cycle is the thing I want to learn. Not the falling. The getting up. The unselfconscious, fearless, full-body commitment to getting up without first analyzing whether the falling was justified.
After the session, parents arrive. Kids are unstrapped from gear and loaded into cars. Marcus waves from the lobby. "Bye, Eli! Tell Nikolai his stopping technique is really good!"
"I will."
"And tell Mars I scored a goal!"
"I will."
"It went off my shin but Ren says it counts!"
"It counts."
The rink empties. Ren is collecting cones from the ice with methodical patience.
"You're good with them," he says.
The sentence is simple. Four words. But the emphasis on "good" implies something beyond instructional competence.
"Thanks."
Ren looks at me. The look is brief and it contains something I've seen before: in Mik's face during the weight room conversation, in Mars's two-second bar assessment, in Gerald's watching.
Recognition. Not of the specific thing I'm carrying but of the carrying itself.
The posture of a man holding something he hasn't fully set down.
"The kids don't care about anything except whether you're paying attention to them," Ren says. "That's their whole metric. Are you here and are you seeing me. Everything else is noise."
He goes back to collecting cones. The words stay in the air between us.
Are you here. Are you seeing me.
I drive home. Nikolai's apartment. Our apartment, increasingly, though neither of us has used that word. I park. I sit in the car for three minutes.
Sort of.
The words are still in my chest. The words are the smallest possible truth, the tiniest opening in the performance, and the opening was received by a nine-year-old with a shrug and a quesadilla story and the absolute, devastating indifference of a child who does not understand why an adult would find this difficult.
The indifference is the permission. The indifference says: the difficulty is yours, not the world's. The world moved on. The world is making quesadillas. You are the one standing at the boards with cold hands and a rearranged chest.
I go inside. Nikolai is on the couch reading Bulgakov. The reading glasses are on. The soft ones. He looks up when I come in. The look is the Nikolai look: comprehensive, brief, reading.
"How was the rink?" he asks.
"Good. Marcus says your stopping technique is really good."
"Marcus is nine. His standards are low."
"Marcus is the most perceptive person I've met under four feet tall."
I sit next to him on the couch. His arm goes around me. The gesture is automatic now, the muscle memory of three weeks of couch-sitting, and the automatic is the thing. The automatic means the arm doesn't require a decision. The arm goes because the arm goes. The going is the ordinary.
I lean into him. The book is in his other hand. The reading glasses catch the lamp light.
"A kid asked if I had a boyfriend," I say.
His hand stills on my shoulder. The stilling lasts one second. Then the hand resumes.
"What did you say?"
"Sort of."
The pause is two seconds. Nikolai's two-second pause is not Mars's two-second pause (which contains an entire assessment) or Mik's two-second pause (which contains a career of controlled emotion).
Nikolai's two-second pause is the pause of a man processing the word "sort of" and deciding whether to address the "sort" or the "of. "
"Sort of," he repeats.
"I'm working on the full sentence."
His arm tightens. Not much. A fraction. The fraction says: take your time.
I close my eyes. His heartbeat is under my ear. The book is in his hand. The reading glasses are on. The apartment is warm.
Sort of is not the full sentence. Sort of is the first draft.
The final draft is coming. The final draft includes the word "bisexual" and the word "boyfriend" and the word "yours" and the words are mine and the words are ready and the words are waiting for the morning that is strong enough to hold them.
But tonight, sort of is enough. Tonight, his arm around me and the reading glasses and the Bulgakov and the automatic holding is enough.
Marcus's mom was right. Some people smile with their eyes.
Nikolai is smiling with his eyes right now. I can feel it without looking.