The Variables (31 page)

The library was well stocked, and the books came from a variety of places—the Library of Congress, the New York and the Boston Public Libraries, the Codrington Library of Oxford, the British Library, the Abbey Library of St. Gallen, and others from around the world: Russia, China, Canada, and Germany. The lights were dimmed and people milled about in reverence for the new collections displayed at Kymberlin. A sign outside the thick mahogany doors, which were no doubt lifted from some place of cultural and social significance, claimed that library tours of the other Islands would begin after the move-in phase was completed. For now, everyone was isolated to their own Islands. Kymberlin would hold her captive.

Still, the library was breathtaking both in scope and majesty. She knew now that everything here had been brought to this place in the last month by Huck’s stealthy army. Wearing suits to protect them from cholera, dysentery, the gelatinous slime of the rapidly decaying bodies, the men and women moved like ghosts through the empty cities. Anything of value was saved and everything else would be left to the elements. Over time nature would take back the earth, while humans lived on inside their manmade quarantine.

Lucy looked for the quietest section of the library and settled into a chair that had a small plaque on the arm boasting that it originated from the “Former Vatican of Vatican City.” She hadn’t wanted to read Grant’s letter while moving from one place to another, she hadn’t wanted to give him flyby attention. Grant deserved every second of her undivided devotion; he deserved respect. When she was certain that no one else was around, Lucy dug her finger under the lip of the sealed envelope and pulled Grant’s letter free.
 

Dear Lucy,
he had written:
I don’t know what to say right now. Nothing sounds right. And you know I’m not very good with things like this...because I’ll probably just turn it into a joke. Not like a stupid joke, like that one I told you in Cass’s skylight room, when your hair smelled like lemon and I thought if I didn’t make you laugh then I was going to lose you. (Do you remember that joke?)
She remembered the punchline: call him anything you want because he won’t be able to hear you. She only remembered it because of the way Grant giggled when he told her, and how she felt simultaneously embarrassed for him and more in love with him. His single dimple had been so deep that she had to resist an urge to stick her finger into the divot.

I know, I know. You think that’s me being all exaggeratory. I don’t think that’s a real word. I’m sorry I’m not good with words. If it IS a real word, then see? I’m smarter than you give me credit for.

Before I get to the real reason for this letter, I want to tell you all the things about you that I think are wonderful. Isn’t that a good idea?

I love the way you blush when you’re embarrassed.
She blushed.
And I love how you give whatever you have to the people you love. And you’re not afraid to sacrifice everything for someone...or stand up for them. Someone like me.

And you’re funny. Your little sarcastic moments make me smile.

You’re the strongest person I know. You never waver. You’re stronger than I am. It’s a fault of mine that I want to please people. When I think about how determined you are, it makes me want to be the man that you deserve. A fighter. You deserve a fighter.

So, Lula, it comes down to this. I don’t think I’ll ever be safe in this world, and it scares me. I think I’ll spend my entire life being looked at as some outsider who conned his way into the future by the fortune of some happy accident. (You are the happy accident, btw.) So, when you leave me down here, I can’t help but be afraid...I won’t be able to help thinking that every time you aren’t here to save me, my hours are numbered. You know all those damsel in distress stories you hate? I hate to break it to you, but I think I’m the damsel in distress. Doh. Plot twist: role reversal. And the truth is, I don’t think I’m capable of saving myself. That’s the sad part.

How many times will other people save me before I will feel safe? Is it bad that you are what makes me feel the most secure? A life with you is all I want. It’s all I need. I can’t wait to see you again on the Islands. It has to be soon, Lula. It will be soon.

Okay. I didn’t want this letter to be sad. That’s why I wanted to tell you all the reasons why I loved you. (I remembered another one. Your realness. Honesty. The way you roll your eyes when you get annoyed.) But this thing is too damn gloomy. It’s just because I’m going to be stuck without you for a long time and any life without you is a life absent of hope and laughter. And you make me feel like there is a future for us. Maybe a real one. With kids.

She took the letter and put it down for a second. Leave it to Grant to say something so tender and so ridiculous in one breath. She had to wait until her excitement and annoyance passed before she could keep reading. He wasn’t allowed to wax romantic about a future that couldn’t happen. How could he not see it? In the same breath as writing that he would never feel safe, he discussed wanting to start a family? He wanted to tell her that she was brave while communicating that he would never be brave enough? Grant wasn’t dumb; he was wise and fair. It was what attracted her to him to begin with—he wasn’t like all the other guys. But his wisdom had a blind spot when it came to discussing the future. He looked at their time on the Islands as the start of a new chapter, a new adventure. Lucy didn’t have those misconceptions.

After a long second, she picked the letter up and continued.

I love you, Lucy. That’s not hard to say. It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever had to say. You’re easy to love. But here’s the thing...you have to decide what loving me will cost you. You see, you may think it’s stupid, but I just want you to be happy. I know that you see yourself as someone standing up against the powers that be, and I would never ask to take that away from you. If you want to leave, I already told you that I would leave, too. I’ll follow you anywhere. But if it takes me a long time to get to you? If Copia keeps me and you can’t get to me...if they keep us apart? Do what you need to do Lucy, take every opportunity, and leave the Islands without me. You don’t need my permission…I can be an eighteen-year-old kid who recognizes that his girlfriend doesn’t need his permission for anything she wants to do. But even though you don’t need my permission or even my blessing…you just need to know that you can. That I’ll understand. Leave if you need to. I would never hold it against you.

He didn’t just write that. He didn’t just give her the go-ahead to abandon everything they had built together. Leaving the Islands without him was not an option. She kept reading.

I’ll understand, Lula. I’ll cheer you on, even! I just don’t want you to feel like you owe me anything. I’ll spend my whole life trying to get back to you. So, don’t wait for me. If you see a window, climb out of it as fast as you can. I mean it. I’ll be mad if you don’t. Don’t wait for me, Lucy Larkspur King.

I love you. I love you. I love you. Grant.

Lucy looked at the letter and read the last paragraph again and again. She could leave without him? He wanted to have kids with her, but it would be okay if she forged a path toward the future without him by her side? He’d cheer her on for
what
exactly? He loved her, but what did that mean? He liked her blush, but didn’t want her to wait for him. Somehow he had undone all of the effusive compliments from the first part of his letter by missing the most crucial fact of all: Lucy
only
wanted to be with him. Freeing her from obligation to him wasn’t some selfless act of chivalry; it was a gross miscalculation of the type of relationship she thought she had with Grant.

She couldn’t help but think that he had written her a thinly veiled goodbye. Permission to seek a life outside of Grant and Lucy?
 

There was no life outside of Grant and Lucy.

Her parents had lied to her, Ethan blamed her for the death of Teddy’s mother, and Cass betrayed their friendship by keeping secrets. Her younger siblings looked to this life as an adventure, unable to conceptualize the evil that built it. And the people her own age reveled in this false feeling of specialness that Kymberlin was breeding within them. Fools. All of them.

Grant was the only one who saw through it all. He was the only one who knew how dangerous Huck’s world was. And now even he had stamped her with irrevocable aloneness. Without thinking, she tore his letter in half. It felt liberating to hear the paper tearing. Then she held it and looked at the two halves, and she felt so misunderstood. It wasn’t like she could get him on the phone to discuss his wayward thinking—with the heaviest of hearts she had to endure a communication blackout.

Feeling a tightening in her chest, she took the letter and tore it systematically into forty little pieces, careful that no words of import were visible on each tiny strip. Then she wandered around the entire library, from one end to the other, and scattered his note within the pages of the great novels: leaving
say. It’s
among a copy of
Moby Dick
and
normal life
in a collection of Plutarch’s essays. She put
owe me anything
right in the middle of
Little Women
where Amy threw Jo’s novel on the fire. She took
cost you
and pushed it into a Nancy Drew Mystery. And then she took the three final
I love you
s and put one in a romance novel in the paperback section, one in a copy of the Bible—smack dab in the Psalms—and one she tucked into a cushion on a chair stolen from the White House.

It took an hour to thoroughly displace Grant’s letter from one end of the library to the other—leaving pieces of his words in Ellison, Asimov, Cleary, Seuss, Twain, Brontë, Angelou, and Borges—and when she left the low light and ventured back out into the open and airy tower of Kymberlin, she made a beeline to the elevator and pushed the down button. When the elevator arrived, she pushed the button to the LL and then turned to look around at the people wandering the verandas. Many of them were smiling: families milled around; people laughed and soaked up the sun that beamed down onto them from the glass ceilings.

Huck had been successful.

He’d created a place where everyone wanted to be.

Everyone except Lucy.

The Remembering Room was empty.

The circular room had a large imbedded television against one side, and every other square inch of wall space had built-in bookshelves. On the bookshelves were binders. White binders along one wall. Blue in another section. Purple and green. Black.

Lucy took a binder down off the bookshelf and flipped through its pages. They were filled with laminated news stories. It didn’t take long to figure out the details of this room and the system of the binders: white binders were filled with stories of war and famine. Blue binders were filled with the devastations and aftermath of natural disasters. Purple was abuse against the elderly, children, and animals. Green was filled with stories of greed. Black was murder.

Some of the main stories were familiar to her—she remembered hearing about these miscarriages of justice in the news or about the children locked in the basement and left to starve. Drunk drivers who killed whole families, and kids who got into their parents’ guns, and school shootings and collapsed mine shafts. Whole collections of articles gave way to decades of horrors; old stories of death and destruction that she had never even known about. A little girl had been kidnapped from her front yard in 1952, her body discovered a year later in the underbrush of a park. A cold case, never solved; no one ever brought to justice. Her heart ached for the people whose stories were told in this room. It was a sick memorial of the worst of the world.

“You came back,” Gordy said behind her, unsurprised. Lucy jumped and shut a binder. She slid it back on the shelf and turned to him.

“This is an awful room,” she whispered.

“A necessary room,” Gordy said. “The Islands will be our home for at least 500 years. Generations will come and go here, and my father’s legacy must remain strong in his absence. We must remind people of why...so they don’t question how. That’s always the way it’s been...”

“Propaganda to support your genocide?” Lucy asked, taking a step backward.

“Truth to support a new start.” He looked straight at her. “That’s how we choose to look at it.”

He walked to the center of the room and ran his hand over a glass case. Inside was a collection of news articles on a specific murder. The murder of a girl named Kymberlin Truman. Daughter of wealthy businessman Huck Truman, and his socialite wife, Josephine. Murdered on her college campus by a man suspected of murdering other co-eds over a period of ten years. However, it was nothing but circumstantial evidence to connect the man to the deaths, so he lived his life after his acquittal like a hermit.

“Your sister?” Lucy asked, pointing to the case. She had read the story minutes earlier when she first arrived—walking straight to the shrine of a girl’s life cut short.

Gordy nodded.

“I’m sorry.”

He smiled sadly. “She altered the course of our lives with her rebellion. It started many summers before her murder. Not rebellion like you think…she didn’t rebel against
us
. She rebelled against the world, against hate, against people who are doomed to repeat the awfulness of the past.”

Lucy stared blankly ahead. “I don’t understand.”

“Kymberlin was not fit for this world. She was too good for it. She was a big thinker and she would have done amazing things with her life if someone hadn’t decided to end it. Losing her opened up a hole in my life that could never be filled. She was my best friend. Our siblings are often our first friends and, if we’re lucky, our closest friends. You’d be wise to remember that, Lucy.”

She wondered how much Gordy knew about her relationship with Ethan. She let her eyes wander across the spines of the binders. Hundreds of binders. Maybe a thousand.

“Your dad did all this for her?” Lucy asked.