The Variables

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 pla

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.

Days after he arrived, he awoke in his hospital room with a tray of cooling food next to him and his leg bandaged. Painkillers moved through his body and whatever thoughts he had about his new environment were quickly put aside.

“Where’s Teddy?” he asked first. And the doctor answered that Teddy was safe with Scott and Maxine.

“My friends?” he asked next. “Darla? Ainsley?”

The doctor said that only a child arrived with him on the plane. Then, as if he had been operating under a cloud that had lifted and provided startling clarity, Ethan closed his eyes and bit back both anger and tears.

He had not spoken since.

Lucy didn’t begrudge Ethan for his silence. He was entitled to mourn and grieve in his own way. It wasn’t that she wanted him to snap out of it; she just wanted to know what had happened to Darla. She wanted to know how he had lost his leg. Who had crudely amputated his festering wound? What had he endured in their time apart? What else had he lost?

Crouching at his feet, resting her hands on his whole, uninjured leg, just above the knee, Lucy tried to rouse Ethan’s attention.

“Hey, big brother,” she whispered and then tilted her head a bit to see if he would meet her eyes. He didn’t. “This is my friend, Cass.” She nodded backward toward the tagalong who had positioned herself against the wall, her hands crossed over her body, her trademark braids cascading forward. Cass brought her hand up and waved, even though Ethan wasn’t looking. “Her dad, he’s a super genius architect. Built this place. It’s really remarkable, Ethan. We want to show it to you...there are places to explore.” Lucy couldn’t contain her excitement. “I know I mentioned that last time, but really...there is so much to show you.”