63

Marianna.

He'd said he'd call after the debrief. Debriefs run long after wins—I know this now, I know so much useless beautiful trivia now—so I told myself not to expect anything before ten. Very mature. Very reasonable.

By nine I had showered, changed into the good sleep shirt (the good sleep shirt! for a phone call! he can't even see—okay, it was a video call, he could see, that's exactly why), checked my hair in my phone camera twice, hated it, given up, and rearranged the two paper airplanes on my windowsill so they'd be... I don't know. Visible? In the background? I moved them a quarter inch to the left and then felt so stupid I moved them back.

Twenty-three years old. A licensed healthcare provider. Staging paper airplanes for a boy.

At 9:14 the screen lit up with his name, and I let it ring twice so I wouldn't seem like I'd been holding the phone.

I had been holding the phone.

"Hi," I said, and it came out breathless, which, great, terrific, off to a strong start.

"Hi." He was in his hotel room, lamp on, hair still wet from the shower, in a gray T-shirt I'd never seen. He looked loose in a way he only gets after a race, like someone had unlocked all his joints. "You watched."

"Barely. Had it on in the background. Wasn't really paying attention."

"Derek texted Patrick that you crouched in front of the TV for forty minutes."

"DEREK—" I closed my eyes. "Derek is a snitch and I hope his coffee machine wins their war."

And then Duane laughed.

Not the exhale. An actual laugh, short and low and real, and it went through me like warm water, and I thought: oh no. Oh no, I would do genuinely humiliating things to hear that sound again.

"It was a good race," I said, recovering approximately none of my dignity. "You made everybody else look like they were driving school buses."

"The car was good today."

"The car. Sure. The car crouched in the tunnel and threaded the hairpin—"

"You know the corner names now."

I stopped.

"Some of them," I said. "A few. For work."

"For work," he repeated, and I could hear him not believing me, and I could see him not believing me, which is the problem with video calls, there's nowhere to hide, he could probably see me blushing through the screen and four time zones.

"Your brother was in the garage," he said, taking mercy on me. "He gave me a message for you."

"Oh no. Is it about my rent—"

"He said he's proud of you." Duane's voice shifted—quieter. "That you're doing something real. His words. He said, 'Tell her. She actually listens to you.'"

I looked away from the screen. At the wall. At nothing.

"He could've texted me that," I said, when I could talk.

"That's what I said."

"What did he say?"

"He said, 'You've met her, right?'"

A laugh burst out of me, wet around the edges. My family communicates like spies passing notes through embassies, and somehow this ridiculous man in a hotel in Montreal had become our courier, and somehow that made it better, not worse. Some things you can only hear secondhand.

"Duane."

"Yes."

"The thing you did. After the flag. You touched your visor." My heart started up again, the trip-and-catch. "What is that?"

He went quiet. On the phone I'd never have known if he was thinking or dodging. On video I could see him deciding—looking at me, actually looking, the way he does that makes me feel like the only channel he gets.

"My way of marking something," he said. "When something matters. When I want to remember it."

"What were you remembering?"

"Marianna."

"What?"

"You know what."

I did know. I knew it in my stomach and my hands and my dumb tripping heart, and I sat there on my brother's guest bed grinning at a phone screen like a lunatic, and he watched me do it, and neither of us looked away, and for a good five seconds nobody said anything and it wasn't even slightly awkward. It was the opposite of awkward. I don't know the word for the opposite of awkward. I'm going to need it a lot, I think.

"Go to sleep," I finally said. "You have media in the morning."

"You go to sleep."

"That's not—we can't both—someone has to hang up—"

"You first."

"Duane Richter, are you doing the you hang up thing? You? The man who answers texts with one word?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Hang up."

"You hang up."

I hung up—laughing, actually laughing alone in a dark room—and then immediately texted him: You lost the game, by the way.

The reply came in four seconds: I never lose.

Then, right after: Goodnight, Marianna.

I held the phone against my chest like a fourteen-year-old. There's no clinical way to say that. That's just what I did.

Jill called at ten, as threatened.

"Tea," she said. "Start with the tea and leave nothing out."

So I told her. The tea. The floor-sitting. The stitches and the forehead kiss. The paper airplane hitting my window at two in the morning. I could hear her getting quieter and quieter, which for Jill is like watching the ocean drain.

"Say something," I said, when I finished. "You're scaring me."

"I'm just—" She stopped. "Mari, do you hear yourself right now?"

"What do I sound like?"

"Happy," she said. "You sound happy. Like, dumb happy. You've told me the story of a man giving you tea for eleven minutes."

"It was really good tea—"

"You sound like someone turned a light on in you," she said. "Not a big light. A lamp. In a room that's been dark for so long you forgot there was a lamp."

I looked at the windowsill. The two airplanes—his perfect one, my terrible one—sitting side by side where I'd staged them and un-staged them, glowing a little at the edges in the streetlight, like they were in on something.

"Don't make it a thing," I said.

"It's already a thing. It's the best thing." Then her voice changed. Went soft and careful, the voice she almost never uses. "Can I ask you something?"

"You're going to anyway."

"When's the last time somebody took care of you?"

And just like that, all the flutter in my chest went still.

Not gone. Just still. Like a bird that heard something.

The bar down the street was playing something slow. The airplanes glowed on the sill. And I sat there in the dark with the phone warm against my ear, running back through it—the boyfriends, the jobs, the years of handling everything myself and calling it independence—looking for the answer, and finding the answer, and not being able to make my mouth say it.

Jill waited. She's good at waiting. It's her superpower and her weapon.

"Goodnight, Jill," I said, finally.

"Goodnight, babe," she said, gentle, letting me off the hook. "Water your lamp."

"That's not how lamps work."

"You know what I mean."

I did know.

I lay down. The airplanes stood watch on the windowsill.

And I fell asleep with my hand over my sternum, right where the flutter lives, holding it in place.