Ava led her to her room, which was everything an 8-year-old girl's room was supposed to be, and more dinosaur posters and books stacked in corners and a small desk with art supplies arranged with the particular private order of a child who has a system only they understand. On the wall above the bed was a framed photo Marcus when he was younger, Dana, and a baby who was clearly Ava in the first weeks of being alive. All three of them in what looked like a hospital room and all three of them looking at the camera with the dazed, grateful, overwhelmed expression of a family beginning. Ava sat on the bed and pulled out a library book about the Cretaceous period and showed Victoria the foldout illustration of a T-Rex skeleton with the level of excitement usually reserved for something that was happening. Right now rather than 65 million years ago.
Victoria sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the skeleton and listened to Ava explain the difference between a T-Rex's arms and the arms of a velociaptor and why the size difference mattered and what that meant about how they hunted. "Did you know all of this already? " Ava said. "Not a single word of it," Victoria said honestly. Ava looked extremely pleased. "That's why you should read more," she said.
I think you're right, Victoria said. Ava considered her from the position of a person who has decided something. I like you, she said. It was not a compliment designed to please. It was a statement of fact from someone who didn't bother with pleasantries.
You don't talk to me like I'm little. Victoria looked at this child, this small, direct, opinionated, entirely herself person, and felt something in her chest that thought might be the thing she'd been looking for on on a dirt road in the dark last night. Not the feeling of being seen. That was part of it, but something more specific. The feeling of being in a place that was real, that required nothing performed, that asked only for her presence.
"You're not little," she said to Ava. You're exactly the right size. Ava thought about that. Then she nodded and sat down the book. Good night, she said.
Good night, Ava. She went back to the living room and found Marcus standing in the kitchen doorway holding two mugs. Tea? He said, "She asleep reading about dinosaurs? " Victoria said, "I think she'll be out in 20 minutes. " He nodded. He moved to the couch and sat.
And she sat at the other end and the television was off and the house was settling into the particular sounds it made at night. She likes you, he said. She told me she tells everybody exactly what she thinks. He wrapped his hands around his mug. Gets that from her mother.
Is that a good thing? In a kit, it's extraordinary, he said. In an adult, it's either refreshing or exhausting depending on the day. He looked at her. You're pretty direct yourself.
I run a company. She said you can't afford to be indirect. It came out before she could stop it. She heard it the second it landed. Watched Marcus hear it too.