The simplicity of it hit me somewhere unexpected. Four words. You're not in Russia. A fact so obvious it shouldn't have needed saying, and yet hearing it from Cole Briggs on a rooftop in Miami at eleven o'clock at night felt like someone opening a window in a room I'd forgotten had windows.
"No," I said. "I'm not."
We drank. The silence between us had changed over the past two weeks. It used to be hostile, then it was awkward, then it was cautious. Now it was something else. Comfortable is not the right word, because comfortable implies that the tension was gone, and it was not gone. It was very much present, humming between us like a live wire. But we had learned to exist alongside it. To sit in the same space and let the tension be there without demanding that it resolve.
"Tell me something," Cole said. "Something real. Not hockey."
"Why?"
"Because we've been on a road trip for five days and I know your plus-minus and your ice time and your penalty kill deployment but I don't know anything about you. The real you. Not the hockey robot."
"I am not a robot."
"You are a little bit a robot."
"This is offensive."
"It's a compliment. Robots are efficient and reliable. You're like a very well-designed hockey robot with occasional flashes of personality that you immediately suppress."
I should have been insulted. Instead I felt the corner of my mouth pull in a direction I was not authorizing. "What do you want to know?"
"Anything. Everything. Pick something."
I considered this. The safe options were obvious. I could talk about Chelyabinsk, the city itself, the winters, the factories. I could talk about hockey in Russia, the systems and the politics and the old coaches who believed that suffering was a prerequisite for excellence. I could talk about food or weather or any of the surface topics that constituted normal human conversation.
Instead I said something I had never said to another person in the English language.
"I miss my sister."
Cole turned to look at me. Not with pity. With attention. Full, undivided, Cole Briggs attention, which was like standing in a spotlight.
"Katya?"
"You remembered her name."
"You only mentioned her once. But yeah. I remembered."
Of course he did. Cole Briggs remembered things. He collected details about people the way I collected data about opponents, with precision and care and a filing system that organized information by importance. The fact that my sister's name was filed somewhere in his memory felt like a kind of proof. Proof that the conversations in the hallways and the film room and the weight room had registered. That I was not invisible to him.
"She is twenty-one," I said. "She is studying literature. She reads everything. Tolstoy, Chekhov, but also American novels. She loves Fitzgerald. She says The Great Gatsby is about the impossibility of becoming who you want to be in a country that promises you can be anyone."
"That's a hell of a reading."
"She is very smart. Smarter than me."
"You keep saying that. I don't think it's true."
"It is true. My intelligence is narrow. I understand hockey and defensive positioning and how to read a breakout. Katya understands people. She understands why they do the things they do even when the things they do are irrational."
Cole was quiet for a moment. "Does she understand you?"
The question landed like a stone in still water. Ripples moving outward.
"Yes," I said. "She is the only person who does."
Another silence. The ocean was doing its job, being vast and dark and full of things that lived beneath the surface. I finished my vodka. Cole finished his whiskey. The bartender had gone inside, leaving us alone on the rooftop with the city below and the sky above and no one watching.
"My dad hasn't talked to me in two years," Cole said.