Chapter 9 #2
Now that he had her here, he thought about all the things he’d said he wanted to know about her when she was just a face on his computer screen.
He wanted to know if she talked with her hands when she told stories, he’d watched her at the reception, and she did talk with her hands.
He’d wanted to know what she smelled like, she smelled like flowers on a spring day and laundry fresh out of the dryer, two of AJ’s favorite scents.
He wanted to know a gesture that made her uniquely her, he saw that whenever she smiled, her nose crinkled a millisecond before.
He now also knew the pattern of her breathing, the gait of her walk, and the cadence of her speech, all of which only made him more intrigued by her.
She broke the silence, startling him out of his internal dialogue. “Have you ever thought about changing your life?” Poppy asked, looking around as if the walls themselves might have the answers she was searching for. “I’m talking about everything. Starting over from scratch.”
“Yes,” he answered honestly.
Her head spun towards him, his answer clearly shocked her. “You have?”
“Yes.”
“Why? When? How?”
He answered her first inquiry. “I used to think that I was helping people. But when the lines get blurred and you see that it’s not that simple, then it becomes something you can’t unsee. Like a stereogram.”
“A stereo-what?”
“A Magic Eye picture.”
“Oh, right.”
“I don’t want my life to be something I can’t unsee,” he explained.
“That was unexpectedly poetic.”
There was nothing poetic about cybersecurity.
“Have you ever wanted to start over?” he reversed the question. In his experience, people typically asked questions they themselves wanted to answer.
She bit the inside of her cheek as her fingers twirled the fray on the pillow. “I have…I mean, I do. I had a very specific goal for my life, and it turns out that goal is not going to happen. So I’m just sort of recalibrating my life.”
AJ could tell there was a great deal of sadness behind her statement.
Not just sadness, but a kind of grief, an awareness that the life she’d wanted had slipped, quietly and irretrievably, through her fingers.
He watched her for a moment, letting the silence stretch, disturbed only by the faint click of the kitchen clock and the hissing of rain on the porch.
He didn’t know how to comfort people, not in the way that television made it seem possible, with a spontaneous, perfect string of words that would patch over any wound or a hug that fixed things.
But he had read, in a book about negotiation, that sometimes the best approach was to validate what someone was already feeling. Not to fix, but to witness.
He straightened, then tipped his glass toward her, a careful, deliberate gesture. “To change,” he offered, and although he spoke softly, the words seemed to echo off the books and walls and glass canisters of her little world.
She clinked her glass gently against his. “To change.”
Poppy drank, and when she set her water down, her hand lingered on the rim for a second longer than necessary, as if she needed the chill to ground her again.
AJ watched her, trying to catalog every detail, how she closed her eyes for half a second after swallowing, how her thumb circled the condensation ring, and how her breathing sometimes caught as if she needed to remind herself to exhale.
He felt a warmth inside his chest, one he recognized from being around Frankie, or (rarely) his mom, or (on the rarest occasions) Niko.
But this was different, because Poppy was not family, and yet she was letting him in, letting herself be fragile in front of him.
That trust was a new language, one he wanted to learn how to speak.
He found himself asking, not as a conversation filler but as a true inquiry, “What were you like as a kid?” The question hung in the air, unthreatening but impossible to evade. She blinked, not expecting it, but didn’t shrink from the answer.
“I was…loud,” she said, a self-deprecating smile tugging at her lips.
“Obnoxiously so, according to my teachers. I got called ‘spirited’ a lot, which is code for ‘you make the adults tired just by existing.’” She laughed, and the laugh was real, not one of those manufactured ones people used to fill silences.
She told him about how her mother would work two and three jobs just to keep their apartment, and sometimes Poppy would stay up late waiting for her, constructing elaborate blanket forts and refusing to sleep until she could crawl in beside her mom and tell her about her day.
“It was just me and my mom. I had a neighbor, Miss Carol. She made sure I had clean clothes and my homework done. My mom tried to be there, she used to say, ‘We’re a team, Popsicola. You and me against the world.’”
AJ nodded, absorbing, not interrupting. He saw that her gaze flicked to the fridge, where a photo of her and her mother, arms around each other and faces frozen in mid-laugh, held a place of prominence.
The resemblance was striking, but the difference was in the eyes, her mother’s had a few wrinkles surrounding them, as if she’d learned to expect less from life, while Poppy’s retained a kind of stubborn hope, a refusal to capitulate to disappointment.
“My dad…” she started, faltered, then tried again.
“He came over once a month. He’d show up with a present from the Dollar Store, spend an hour or two with me, then have ‘date night’ with my mom, stay the night, and then he’d disappear the next day.
When I was really little, I used to think he was some kind of secret agent.
Like, maybe he had a really important job, and that’s why he couldn’t be around.
” Poppy’s fingers twisted the frayed edges of the pillow in her lap.
“Then when I was eight, I found out he had a whole other family, a real family, and we were just…I don’t know, whatever we were.
” She said it lightly, almost as a joke, but AJ detected the bitterness under the sugar. “What about you?”
“My dad was amazing. He was my hero, and he died when I was six. He was a firefighter, and one day he went to work, and he didn’t come home.”
“I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine how hard that must have been.”
“I didn’t talk for almost a year.” AJ never shared this information with anyone before, apart from therapists. He had no idea why he felt compelled to share it with Poppy.
“Oh.” Poppy appeared genuinely concerned. “How did you…what made you start to talk again?”
A warmth spread through his chest. “Frankie. She was on a mission. Every day after school, we’d go out in the woods behind the cottage, and we’d look for my voice because she thought me losing my voice was literal.
We’d look under my bed, in closets…everywhere.
She was so patient, so positive, and so supportive, telling me not to worry or be scared because we would find it. She just made me feel safe again.”
“So that’s why you didn’t speak, because you felt unsafe?”
“In high school I was diagnosed with Asperger’s and retroactively with selective mutism,” he explained.
Again, not something he shared with people because he felt everyone was on a need-to-know basis and no one needed to know.
“Then as an adult my diagnosis changed to Level 1 Autism Spectrum Disorder.”
“That is so…”
AJ waited for her response. Whenever people discovered that information, from whatever sources they did, some people took it well. Others did not. Typically, he could care less. But this response mattered to him. He found himself holding his breath, waiting for her reaction.
“…amazing,” she breathed.
“Amazing?” he repeated.
“Yes!” She nodded enthusiastically. “You don’t have a neurotypical brain like everyone else, like I do. I mean, how bo-ring. Your brain is an entirely unique world that you get to live in.”
AJ could see that she meant every word she said sincerely. He’d never had anyone respond to his diagnosis the way she was. With so much unabashed enthusiasm.
“Sorry.” She put her hands over her chest. “I’m so sorry. Is that rude?”
“No.” He shook his head. He loved when people were authentically themselves, and he could see that’s exactly who Poppy was being.
“Oh…” Her expression changed as if something was dawning on her. “Is that why your aunt said you don’t like to be touched?”
“I also have sensory sensitivities.”
“Okay, I thought you had a germ thing, like Howie Mandel.”
“No.”
“So, is it just touch, the sensory sensitivity?”
“No. It’s sound, touch, smell, taste, light…anything can be too much and overstimulating.”
She exhaled with compassion that AJ could feel radiating off of her, something that he’d never experienced before.
“I’m so sorry. One of my patients, a kid who routinely had to get full CT scans, had sensory processing disorder, it was absolute torture for him.
I did everything I could, dimmed the lights, and was able to get him a special lead apron, several different fidget toys, special headphones and playlists, worked with his therapist on new stimming techniques to help him cope with the procedure.
It got bearable, and he was a rock star, but it was still just miserable for him. ”
AJ couldn’t imagine a kid having to face going into a machine making those noises, surrounding you, and having to stay perfectly still. He could see from Poppy’s face the empathy she had for her patients.
“I’ve never talked about him, about that, to anyone outside of work,” she admitted.
“I’ve never told anyone about my childhood.”
Poppy glanced down at the pillow, then back up at him. AJ thought she was going to say more, but instead she stood, picked up the glasses, and walked to the kitchen. He followed behind her.
After she rinsed them out in the sink and put them in the drying rack, she turned and took a breath. “Can I ask you something…personal?”
“Yes.” She could ask him anything that wouldn’t be against the law for him to tell her, and he’d answer her. His life, to her, except for the top security clearance, was an open book.
“Have you had girlfriends? I mean Frankie told me that you’ve dated people, hot people, but I’m talking about relationships.”
“Yes, I have.”
“How long was your longest relationship?”
“A year and a half.”
“Wow, okay… so then with the sensory issues, can you…” Her cheeks turned red, and she licked her lips again.
He couldn’t be absolutely certain what she was trying to ask, but there was a very high probability he had the right guess.
“Can I have sex,” he stated bluntly.
“Sorry.” She shook her head. “It’s none of my business.”
“It is if you want it to be.”
AJ really hoped she wanted it to be her business.