The Variables (6 page)

Dating was awkward. Each and every time she attempted to engage in that teenage rite of passage, Lucy couldn’t understand the attraction of muddling through social interactions like bumbling idiots. The boys never talked, or if they did, they were uncultured jerks who approached her acceptance of a cheap dinner as permission to paw at her once the sun went down.

Ethan had once told her she needed to date different guys.

But Lucy didn’t think Ethan’s track record seemed worth emulating. After all, Anna’s idiocy was so evident that Lucy often theorized about what Ethan got out of that particular relationship. The suspected answer painted an unflattering portrait of her brother and of love in general.

Unlike Salem, Lucy hadn’t romanticized the idea of falling in love. She hoped it would happen to her, and longed to be someone’s chosen one, but she understood that desire was fleeting. It was easy to slough off the absence of a boyfriend.

But now she had Grant.

It was surreal.

Unexpected.

Natural, even.

Maybe it was because of their shared history, maybe it was because they didn’t have to second guess intentions, but everything about being Grant’s girlfriend felt easy. He grabbed her hand while they walked down the sterile corridors of the System, and he wrapped his long fingers around her waist. Her heart fluttered each time and she’d look at him, really look at him, and think,
this guy likes me.
They laughed together, played together, and talked in hushed tones during quiet hours about the future.

The future. Being in love masked the question marks and gloom most of the time. Now they relished the idea that there was a future together, no matter how uncertain that future looked.

Not so long ago, two sweethearts in their senior year of high school would have much to think about. Would they go to college together? How would they handle jealousy and time apart? Were they a burden on each other’s schoolwork? Did their parents approve of the burgeoning love?
 

Those were not the dark worries that clouded their conversations.

Instead, they discussed their days inside the System. At worst, they discussed a bleak future ruled by a police state under Huck’s watchful eye. At best, they discussed their ever-growing ennui.

“I agreed, Lucy,” Grant said to her as he laid with his back against the floor of the King family apartment, tossing a spongy miniature football into the air. He missed and the ball bounced off his hands, clumsily hitting the furniture until coming to a rest by Lucy’s feet. She kicked it back to him, frowning. “Don’t look at me with that pout. You know that I can’t take it back,” he said. “I promised him. And I think he needs me, you know? I think he likes having me there.”

Lucy grumbled and shook her head. “I fought hard to get you out of that lab.”

“We lied to get me out of that lab.”

Her eyes darted to the ceiling, then to the door, as if she expected the guards to descend upon their fraud like rabid dogs. “Hey...you just can’t...Cass said...”

Grant sighed and sat up. “Okay, okay.” He palmed the football and then tossed it under his left elbow, aiming for Lucy, but he missed by a foot, the ball careening into one of the dim table lamps where it knocked the shade askew. He shrugged and offered her a sheepish grin. “I want to help your dad. I like working with him in the lab, okay? It gives me something to
do
...I grew up on a farm, Lucy. I’m accustomed to being made to feel useful. I hate being holed up down here, but if I am? Might as well learn a trade.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lucy raised her eyebrows. “You think in the future, scientists doing studies on human tissue will be a lucrative profession?”

“Will there be professions on the Islands?” Grant asked, changing the subject.

Lucy hummed and shrugged. She didn’t know anything about the Islands.
 

“I’m kinda excited. About the Islands,” Grant continued. “Anything is better than this, right?”

“I’m sure that’s the point,” she replied.

Grant looked wounded. He crawled over to his abandoned football and grabbed it in his right hand, bringing it up into the air, letting it drop, and catching it with his left hand. Then he repeated the process, the ball falling into his hands with soft thuds. When he tired of the game, he let the football roll away, and he crawled up onto the King’s couch next to Lucy. She rolled her head over to him and smiled a tight-lipped smile.
 

“You’re grumpy,” Grant whispered.
 

And Lucy couldn’t fully deny it, but she sighed and turned her body to face him, tucking her bare toes under his legs. Grant draped an arm over her knees and leaned back against the couch. His coarse blond hair stuck straight up at his crown. She loved that cowlick, and she loved how it gave the vague impression that Grant was still a rambunctious child, too concerned with living his life to comb his hair.

“I’m not
grumpy
. That makes me sound like an insolent teenager. I’m
worried
. And there’s too much to worry about right now without you deciding to go work for my father. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that you forgot he was trying to kill you.”

“But he didn’t.” Grant shrugged, as if that was the only thing that mattered.

The door to the King apartment burst open in a whoosh of sound and activity. Galen entered first, holding the hand of Harper, whose hair was neatly wrapped into two bursting topknots. He looked at Grant and Lucy and rolled his eyes.

“Were you kissing? Please tell me you weren’t kissing,” Galen mumbled as he swung his hand free of Harper.

“Ewww, kissing,” Harper repeated and then promptly stuck her thumb into her mouth, sucking away, her index finger curling around her nose.

Maxine entered next, her body laboring under the weight of a sleeping Teddy. The young child’s head was tucked up on to Maxine’s shoulder; his mouth agape, his left eye open ever so slightly. Lucy had readied a retort at her younger brother, but refrained from using it as her mother emitted a death stare, hushing them all with one sweep of her narrowed eyes. When she thrust her chin out toward the bedroom door, Galen opened it and Maxine carried the child inside. Lucy could see how delicately she set him down across the comforter, and how she wiped his forehead with the back of her hand, and bent down to give him a kiss.
 

When her mother reappeared, she stood outside the door like a sentry, her hands on her hips.

“Nobody wake that child.” She pointed a wagging finger of warning at Monroe and Malcolm who lurked in the doorway. Then she turned her attention to Galen. “Not a peep. Not a breath. Don’t go near that room, think of going near that room, tell me you forgot something in that room. Don’t laugh. Don’t talk. As a matter of fact, why don’t you all go read a book. Forever.”

Then with an exhausted sigh, she walked over to the couch and plopped herself down next to her daughter, and closed her eyes. Galen spread himself out on the floor, and he stared at the ceiling. The twins pointed back down the hall, communicating some previous question, and then when they realized their mother was too far gone to answer, they disappeared anyway, shutting the door noiselessly behind them. Maxine looked up half-a-second later and acknowledged their absence with a subtle head nod.

When it felt safe enough, Lucy put a hand on her mom’s shoulder and whispered, “Can I go see him now?”

Her mother sighed a second time. “There’s no use, Lucy,” Maxine answered. “Nothing has changed.”

“I thought you said he wanted to see Teddy. He didn’t talk to Teddy?”

Grant pulled his arm off of Lucy’s knees, and she automatically pulled her feet out from under his leg. She swung herself around to face her mom. She waited. Maxine shook her head.

“He didn’t say
anything
?” Lucy asked, aware of how her voice was rising, trembling. Her mother had no reason to lie, and yet Lucy thought Maxine had to be leading her astray. How could Ethan be so cold?

Maxine parted her lips, but they were so dry that they stuck together, her skin pulling upward and tearing. She ran her tongue over the dryness to moisten them and swallowed. “He was tender toward the child,” Maxine recounted. She looked near tears, but she steeled herself with a sniff. “He picked him up. Held him. Cried over him. Teddy talked and Ethan listened...honestly...it was the most we’ve seen. But when it was time to go, he turned to the wall. He wouldn’t look at me. Harper. The boys.”

Galen cleared his throat for attention. But the room ignored him. Harper sucked her thumb to a rhythm in her head.
Suck-suck
rest.
Suck-suck
rest.

“Did you tell him? Did you tell him Teddy
needs
him?” Lucy asked her mother.

Maxine went rigid. She rolled her head over and stared at Lucy, unblinking. “Ethan has been through a trauma, that is clear. But let’s not muddy the water. Teddy,” she paused, as if saying his name caused her a great amount of emotion, “does not
need
Ethan. The boy needs
us
. Stability. Love. Compassion. A big family to love him and play with him and care for him. Your brother is offering him none of those things. Teddy had a fit when we left that room. He kicked, screamed, yelled unintelligibly for Ethan and for his mom. I had to sit with him in a dark room of the hospital wing until he calmed down. If that’s what seeing Ethan does to him, then I don’t want Ethan near that child.”

Teddy’s outburst was just one of many since he had arrived at the System.

While Harper had regressed into thumb-sucking, Teddy seemed to adopt different ailments: he’d began to talk in baby-talk, chew recklessly on all his clothes, and often went on hunger strikes against the precious food Maxine diligently procured for him. He wet the bed at night and was plagued by nightmares. Fatigue overcame them all, as it was impossible to sleep while Teddy flailed, besieged by memories of being torn away from one traumatizing life and thrust into another.

He had lost both of his mothers now.

The boy had no one.

Maxine took it upon herself to throw everything into caring for the boy, at the cost of alienating her biological children, who viewed Teddy as one of their mother’s projects.

“I want to see Ethan,” Lucy said and Maxine mumbled something that sounded like consent. “Come on, Grant. Let’s go. Our turn to try.” She rose and patted Grant’s leg.

Grant didn’t move. He looked at Maxine, whose lip was now bleeding. She licked it away. Then he turned to Lucy and grimaced his apology. “I don’t know—Lucy, I think I want to stay here.”

From the floor, Galen thrust his arm up in the air and then stuck out his thumb in hearty approval.

“Wise choice,” Galen replied. “It’s torture down there.”

Lucy knew she could have given Grant a look, a sulk that would have communicated that she needed him. And Grant, without a hint of frustration, would have hopped up and made the trek to Ethan’s hospital room. It would have offered them time alone in the elevator, a chance to steal kisses and lose themselves for a moment when there was no threat of discovery. It was those little pieces of their day, crafted and planned, or spontaneous, that thrilled her. When Grant brought her close, when his lips touched hers, it was the only time she could forget.
 

Or, she realized, it was the only time she let herself forget. There was plenty to forget.

Sometimes she could see her mother looking at the two of them out of the corner of her eye, trying to assess what they were, what their relationship meant. This was no ordinary time; and what could Maxine do if she disapproved? The door to their apartment was perpetually unlocked, and sometimes Grant would slip from his own apartment in a different pod to Lucy’s bedroom. He would lie on the floor and hold her hand; that was all. The first time Maxine found Grant, she made him breakfast and asked him questions about his upbringing, his parents. She didn’t say a word about it, and that made Lucy uneasy.

Six weeks ago, that was unthinkable—bringing a boy into her room, refusing to entertain her parents’ opinions on the subject. But the thought a boy could be caught in her room without reproach was a different thing entirely.

Lucy knew that she couldn’t ask Grant to give up his afternoon to sit by Ethan’s side. She wanted his company, but not out of obligation. Somehow though she knew she couldn’t face the empty coldness that awaited her alone.

“You’re off the hook, then,” Lucy answered. “I’ll take Cass.”

“He is unmoored,” Cass said as they slipped into the hallway, having checked in at the Nurses’ Station and made their way to the guard standing at attention beside Ethan’s door. “Untethered to this world.”

“Aren’t we all?” Lucy asked, but then she frowned when she noticed Cass’s doleful expression. Cass had yet to meet the eldest King sibling. She had only heard the tangential details of his rescue. Somehow though, the Haitian daughter of the System’s architect had already aligned herself with the suffering twenty-year-old. She seemed to understand him and had blindly given him her allegiance.

The guard assigned to watch Ethan’s hospital room was resigned and unassuming. He stepped out of the way as the girls approached, refusing to even acknowledge their presence with a nod or a monosyllabic greeting. Lucy entered, drawing in a breath. The room felt stale, sterile.
 

Ethan sat exactly where he had been the last time Lucy attempted a visit. His room boasted a framed picture of a window overlooking the former Manhattan skyline at dusk. And, like before, Ethan sat in a wheelchair, pushed flush against the wall, his body turned inward to the photograph, as if he were examining the deep purples and pinks of the sky amidst the golden blush of the city settling into night.

He was cognizant, aware, but wholly mute. While Ethan refused to engage in conversation, he sometimes allowed himself to respond to his surroundings with facial expressions. He would let his eyes linger for a beat too long or knit his brows in a flash—but then the looks were abandoned and he’d head back to a glazed, vacant state.

When Ethan’s plane landed from Oregon, he was near death, and the King family was kept at bay, despite Maxine’s incessant pleading. His grotesque stump of a leg suffered further when a surgeon took another four inches off the crude amputation he endured after Lucy had already left for Nebraska. Now, even his knee was gone. The next phase was a prosthetic limb, although the System’s doctors were not optimistic: Ethan’s mobility would be forever limited.