“Not the box.” Mat laughed. “Your apartment. I mean, if it’s really STÄDA 2.0, I think it would be good for Marketing to take a look. See how STÄDA lives and breathes in the real world so we can bring that angle to our next ‘Yes, And’ meeting.” He put air quotes around real world.
“Oh,” Ava said, staring straight ahead. The sun and moon were side-by-side. She felt winded. Did he want to see her things, or did he want to see more of her? Had he read her mind? Now was her chance. For once, she could let someone in. She was having trouble locating enough oxygen to breathe.
“Forget it,” he said. “Sorry I asked. That was out of line.” He rubbed the back of his head again, looking embarrassed, not meeting her eye.
“No,” she said. She hadn’t prepared herself for his actually asking to come up. She swallowed. She had to walk Brutus. There were only a few units before she was scheduled to fall asleep. “It’s okay that you asked,” she said. “It’s just that I have plans, so it won’t work tonight.”
“Of course,” Mat said. “That was crazy short notice anyway. I’ll see you in the morning.” She sensed the regret in his smile, and her chest ached.
Upstairs, through the window, Ava watched his car pull away. The exhaust lingered above the pavement before dissipating. The days were getting shorter and colder. Every evening after Mat dropped her off, Ava felt an intensifying combination of exhilaration and disappointment.
She wished she could talk to Andie. She wanted her approval, and she wondered what Andie would make of this crush, though she already knew the answer.
Ava had discussed her occasional attraction to men with Andie, although early in their relationship she’d resisted, in part because the attraction was opaque, even to herself. She had also kept quiet for fear of seeming overly complicated or burdensome. It was simpler to ignore men—the outliers in the schema of her romantic attraction—and she felt obligated to, though she wasn’t sure why. She sometimes felt insecure around Andie’s friends because her experience had been different from theirs. She had come out more recently, and her story was less fraught, without the strife of puberty or the fear of losing her family’s support.
But Andie had smiled at Ava’s confession. They were lounging on Andie’s Easygoing Sofa, and Andie pulled her in tightly, Ava’s back against her chest. “Do you want to tell me about it?” Andie asked plainly, though the question contained all the electricity of a command.
So Ava described the attraction. As she spoke, Andie undid the top buttons of Ava’s shirt and slid a warm hand inside. “What else?”
Ava continued, walking Andie through the mechanics of her fantasy. She told her about how the anonymous man might pin her to the bed, and the way he might feel pressed against her.
Andie unbuttoned Ava’s jeans and reached for her hand, fitting it snugly inside, before bringing her own hand back to Ava’s chest. Ava pressed down, carrying out her own steady rhythm.
“And then what?”
Ava’s entire body was charged. Andie held her tightly, her mouth against Ava’s neck. She continued until her heart was pounding and she was pinned between Andie and the abstract person, who had no face and no name, who was just a series of attributes that might have made a man.
Ava revisited the fantasy often, but after the accident it was difficult to remove Andie from the frame or re-create the electricity of the moment. But lately she could not deny that Mat had begun to stand in for the other figure.
Now here she was in her kitchen, with no plans. How many weeks had she watched him pull away from her apartment? She felt like a toy train coming to the end of its course, only to begin the exact same one again.
Enough, she thought.
She clicked on Brutus’s Curious Leash. “Let’s go see Emily,” she said. “Would you like that?” Brutus barked once in approval.
The evening was brisk and invigorating. Ava had no idea how she would say what she needed to say to Mat. But she wanted to convey to him the fuller picture of her life. Andie was only an ex because she was dead. She would have to tell him that. She had trouble inviting people into her life. So much trouble that she hadn’t done it since the accident. She would explain this to him too.
She would tell him about how she’d once had friends, but they’d looked at her with such pity after the accident that being around them had become exhausting. She could feel the friends editing what they said around her, as though the words family, fiancée, parents, and car would offend her or send her into a dark place.
And maybe they were right. But they treated her like she carried an infectious disease—as though by simply knowing Ava, by being around her, her friends might also find their whole lives stolen in a few dark seconds.
She would tell Mat about how slowly, over time, the friendships had frayed and then disintegrated entirely. She was left with Brutus and an apartment that she bought with the combined savings of her parents, which could have bought her a bigger place in the city, if she had wanted that. But she didn’t want anything bigger than was absolutely necessary, so she bought the studio in cash.
And she’d tell him that the transaction had left her with a good amount of savings. She didn’t even need to work, really. But the work instilled her life with meaning, and the thought of leaving STÄDA paralyzed her.
She rounded the park and approached Mat’s apartment building. Ava had driven by it during all its stages; she’d seen workers pour the foundation only a few months before. And now it was tall and shiny, its glassy facade unlike that of any building nearby, with balconies jutting from each floor. She ran her finger down the list of last names by the buzzer. It was dark. She would apologize for lying to him about having plans, and the dogs could play. Maybe they could even eat dinner together somewhere. No, she thought. That would be too much. It would be so unlike Ava to suggest dinner that the idea would draw unnecessary attention to itself. An apology was fine, a short walk around the park with the dogs. She found his name and apartment—12F—and rang his bell. She considered turning around to go home. There was still time to leave. She looked at her Precise Wristwatch for no good reason, and at that moment the buzzer crackled. “Hello?” Mat’s voice said uncertainly.
“It’s me,” Ava said. “Um, Ava, I mean. And Brutus.”
The static ended abruptly, and soon Mat was opening the door. He popped his head out, looking perplexed. “Did you forget something in my car?” he said.
“No, no,” Ava said, although it would have been a good out. “It’s just—” She was shivering. She wished he would invite her into the lobby. Brutus whined at her feet. “I wanted to apologize,” she said, looking down at her boots. Her breath came out in a white cloud. “I lied to you when I said I had plans tonight.”
“Oh,” Mat said. His face softened. He studied her expression. “Okay. No problem. That’s totally okay. I know sometimes it’s just nice to decompress after work. And not hang out with”—he was rubbing the back of his head again—“your boss.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s not that at all. We would love to see you and Emily. A do-over.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked at Brutus. “Right now?” He smiled up at her. “It’s actually maybe not a great ti—”
“Mat?” A woman showed up behind him. “Who is it?”
“Ella,” Mat said. “This is—” He cleared his throat, which had gone hoarse. “This is one of STÄDA’s best engineers, Ava Simon. And Ava, this is Ella, who—”
“I’m sorry,” Ava said. She tugged on Brutus’s leash, and he stood. “I’m very sorry for disturbing your evening.” She could barely look at Ella, but she got the picture. Tall, with narrow shoulders and thin arms. She had a tattoo of a bird on her triceps. Ava felt a bolt of shame course through her as she turned to go.
“Wait!” Mat said, but she’d already begun walking away, and she wasn’t going to turn around now. How could she have thought it was acceptable to show up at her boss’s home, prepared with her life story, expecting hi
m to have no plans and no . . . girlfriend?
Was she upset about the girlfriend?
No, she thought, winding her way back through the park. It’s just . . . he should have mentioned the girlfriend to her. But no, that wasn’t right either. Why should he have? That wasn’t her business. After all, she hadn’t told him the full story about Andie. Some things were better kept private. And yet—she had to admit—she had thought, somewhere, that there was something between them.
She wanted to cry from the humiliation. She could not ride with him to work in the morning—or any day, for that matter, ever again.
She was walking so quickly that Brutus had to trot alongside her. It’s actually maybe not a great time. She was so caught up in her spiraling thoughts that she almost didn’t notice the bracelet lying by the curb near her apartment. A streetlamp had lit it up. She crouched to see and pushed Brutus’s face away from it so she could get a better look. She picked it up and turned it over in her palm: it was a yellow bracelet. Grooved into the rubber was the word outgoing. It was Mat’s. It must have fallen out of his car.
She put the bracelet on and examined her wrist. It was too big for her, and she hated the feeling of the rubber against her skin. She took it off, walked to the corner of her block, and dropped it in a metal trash can, where it joined a wet pile of garbage. But walking back to her apartment, she felt a surge of guilt and returned to the can and reached for it, grazing a damp paper cup in the process. Kill me, she said to no one. She shoved it into her pocket and made her way to her building, doing all she could to forget about what had happened—a skill at which she excelled.
13
This was what she could remember:
A steadily beeping machine, casters rattling against the linoleum floor, a man’s voice reciting numbers. Fiberglass ceiling panels, an opaque curtain, her own feet in unfamiliar socks.
She took a mental inventory, repeating the list to herself again, as if the scenery could generate a logic of its own. A beeping machine, casters rattling, a man’s voice, a fiberglass ceiling, an opaque curtain, socks. A beeping machine, casters rattling, a man’s voice, a fiberglass ceiling . . .
She worked quickly to establish the facts, fighting against a heavy fog. Something had happened; she was in a hospital; she would have to let Andie know that she was here; Brutus would have to be fed. Her eyes skipped around a white room.
She tried to say all this, to open her mouth or muster something that could pause the man’s voice, the hurried chatter and notetaking, but she couldn’t. There was a fullness in her throat that felt like something she should be able to swallow away. She gagged and a nurse turned around. “Breathe in through your nose, through your nose. Nice and easy,” he said, placing his hand on Ava’s chest. It was his voice she had heard reciting numbers. The first two pieces of disparate information she was able to place together, like jigsaw pieces from a completely white puzzle. The numbers, the voice, belonged to her nurse.
“You have tubes in to help you breathe—that’s what you’re feeling in your throat,” he said. “It’s going to feel strange, but just try to relax. Shallow, easy breaths, okay? I’ll be right here. Okay?”
Okay? Ava added the word to her inventory. His face swam in and out of focus.
She tried to focus on his features. His sturdy nose and square jaw. His stubble. Machines beeped steadily in dissonant tones. A swarm of nurses, followed by doctors, hurried toward her bed and then brushed past the curtain to the patient beside her. She could just make out their silhouettes, bent over her neighbor’s bed, working quickly. Get him to OR 4, someone said.
“Okay?” the nurse asked again.
Ava nodded, but she didn’t know what question she was answering.
A beeping machine, casters rattling, Ava repeated to herself. Brutus needs to be fed. Tell Andie that Brutus needs to be fed. Okay.
The pain had begun to creep in, reaching parts of her body she had never before had a reason to consider. The space between her elbow joints. The backs of her knees. The bridge of her nose.
What had happened? Eventually she’d be able to tell police officers about the blue pickup truck weaving toward her between the lanes, moving on the highway in a way that it shouldn’t have been. She’d remember the driver’s long brown hair and the unusual current of light that sent a chill through her body and made her hair stand on end. But these details wouldn’t come to her for days. For now she searched her memory, finding only the smell of roasted nuts as she drifted out of consciousness.
She awoke later to a quiet hospital and the same fullness in her throat. The nurse with the square jaw told her she had been falling in and out of sleep for the past several hours. Several hours, she repeated to herself, adding new information to her list.
Something had happened; she’d been in the hospital for several hours; she’d have to let Andie know she was here; Brutus would have to be fed; the machines were beeping; the ceiling was fiberglass; the curtain was opaque; the casters were rattling; she was okay; she was alive.
14
Ava tossed beneath her Sheets while fragmented details of the evening played on repeat like a horrible taunt.
Mat? Who is it? She couldn’t knock the woman’s voice out of her head, but she preferred this to the image of herself: an imposing, foolish stranger standing in the cold. She knew the sharpness of her embarrassment would dull eventually—embarrassment followed rules too—but it would take time—hundreds of units, she estimated—and it kept her awake. Just as she finally fell into a deep, blank sleep, the sun broke in through her windows, and her head buzzed heavily as she fumbled through her morning routine: making coffee, brushing her teeth, dressing, and walking Brutus. It took her half a unit longer than usual.
Can I pick u up? Mat had texted her.
She ignored it, and shivered inside the subway station, where a steady drip of water fell from peeling iron beams into a murky gray puddle. Her train was late, which meant it would be too crowded to board unless she was standing in the exact spot where the doors opened. She looked at her Precise Wristwatch.
Despite the added time, she knew she’d be able to look as upset as she felt on public transit without fear of unwanted commentary, which was not what she’d come to expect from Swyft drivers. A new episode of Thirty-Minute Machine had been released that morning, and she thought about tuning in with her Peaceful Headphones, but she didn’t want to confront any feelings that might arise from listening to the episode alone, so she simply wore the headphones and listened to nothing at all. She had no interest in feeling sorry for herself. She swiped away another text from Mat without reading it, then wished she had read it, and began ruminating about what it might have said: I’m a complete idiot. I should have told you. I don’t even really like her that much.
She pushed the fantasy away. The first train heaved her to another train, which hissed and stalled its way toward Red Hook. Snow from earlier that week had begun to harden into a gray mound lining the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians to walk single file. They had to leap over slushy gray puddles that had pooled at every corner. Ava avoided the coordinated effort altogether, stepping out into the street, on the receiving end of honks from cars slushing by. She tried to make out the finer details of the skyline across the river, but a low, wet fog hung over it. This weather’s imprecision made it worse than any other kind.
She pushed her way through STÄDA’s enormous rotating glass doors and scanned her key card and waited for an empty elevator. She wiped the cold from her face. She wished she could just stay there, in the elevator, alone, all day. It was roomy and quiet. There was a leather bench, a cup holder, and even an outlet. She didn’t want to see anyone, and she didn’t want to be seen. She even wanted to avoid Jaime, who would be waiting for her near the hand sanitizers with a coffee when she stepped out of the elevator. But to her surprise, the doors opened to the anonymous bustle of engineers instead.
Ava thumbed the rubber bracelet in her pocket, assumed her most uninviting
posture, and walked quickly to her desk. She wanted the bracelet to be far away from her apartment, out of view, out of reach. She wanted it purged from her life, along with everything else that had happened the night before. Her plan was to leave it on Mat’s desk while he made his morning lap around Floor 12.
Jaime was sitting at the Engineering table with his Peaceful Headphones on and his gaze glued to his screen. Even if Ava had wanted to, she would know better than to intrude. She sat at her desk and searched his face briefly for an opening to at least gesture hello, but he gave her nothing.
On the Personality Test, Jaime had scored green—empathetic—across the board. Ava knew that his empathy sometimes swerved into oversensitivity. Andie had once told Ava about a time he’d brought homemade croissants to the office, and how upset he’d been when Andie took one into her morning meeting instead of eating it with him. After the croissant debacle, Andie had left him a perfect origami apology note. Ava tried to think of a similar gesture; she had never been on the receiving end of a mood like this. As she started her computer, her stomach sank at the sight of Mat’s reflection, which drew closer until he was drumming on the back of her Encouraging Desk Chair.
“Good morning,” he said.
She forced herself to look up at him. He held her gaze while he sipped his coffee. His expression was unreadable. Ava’s cheeks burned and she broke the eye contact to look back at her screen. She pulled up the latest rendering of the Very Nice Box and rotated it by dragging her mouse, so that the bottom of the box—which featured a mandatory safety latch in case a child became stuck inside—was visible.
“Did you get my texts?”
“I didn’t check my phone this morning,” Ava said.
“I swung by to pick you up.”
“Sorry,” Ava said. “I should have given you a heads-up that I’d gotten a ride.”
“Weird, I thought I saw you walking from the train,” Mat said. He swirled his coffee cup. Ava was mortified, but Mat didn’t linger on the lie. “You missed a really good T-double-M episode this morning,” he said.
The Very Nice Box Page 9