The Lucy Variations

by Sara Zarr

  “We’re giving Will a fair chance at this, because Gus likes him so much. But I’m not totally convinced by his methods yet. Gus seems to be practising less than ever.” She looked towards the hall, where Grandpa Beck was still on the phone. “The showcase is so soon,” she whispered. “Then after that the Swanner, and his schedule is filling up.” She chewed on her pinky nail. “I’m thinking about pulling him out of school next year, but that’s a whole different conversation.”

  What did she want? Reassurance? “Gus will be ready,” Lucy said.

  “I hope so. I thought, since you seem, lately, to be expressing more interest in what Gus is doing.” She stopped, as if that had been a complete sentence.

  “You thought what?”

  “That you could keep an eye on things here. Make sure Gus keeps to his schedule. Note if you think there’s any way Will is falling short. If you think—”

  “I’m not going to monitor Will, Mom. Or Gus.” Lucy stood and shouldered her bag. She practically had toticthink— step over her mother’s feet to get out.

  Her mother took hold of her arm. “You’re his big sister.”

  “Exactly. And Dad is his dad. Get him to be your spy.” She pulled her arm free.

  Her mother got up so fast, Lucy felt the air behind her move. “You never appreciated it, Lucy.”

  There it was. Right out loud.

  They were in the hall now. Grandpa Beck had gotten off the phone and stood, grimly attentive. Lucy almost bit her tongue just to save them all the drama. It was old news. Nothing was going to change. No matter what she did on her own, with Will, or with anyone else, it wouldn’t fix this.

  But then, maybe because they were all about to be separated by a hemisphere, Lucy asked what she’d always wanted to ask her mother. “Did you?”

  Because, of course, her mom had been in exactly the same position when she was in high school. Playing to make Grandpa Beck happy. Placing in competitions. Travelling, performing, being somebody. And, just like Lucy, she’d quit.

  Grandpa wouldn’t describe it that way. He’d always said that Lucy’s mother simply didn’t have the innate talent that Lucy and Gus did. That she’d reached her potential and made the smart decision to move on, because why do it if you weren’t destined for greatness? Only, she hadn’t moved on very far. She was still trying to be Grandpa Beck’s perfect daughter.

  She folded her arms now, making a shield. “I did my best.”

  “So did I,” Lucy insisted.

  Grandpa Beck stepped forwards. They had her surrounded, with no access to the stairs unless she walked straight through one of them. “You could have kept going,” he said, the old fire in his eyes. “You could have won it. The Prague. And everything after.”

  She stared at him as she had at dinner the other night. “And what’s the point of winning if you don’t have a life? If you’re miserable? If you miss important things that happen to the people you love?”

  “You weren’t miserable,” he said, ignoring the allusion to Grandma.

  Lucy laughed. He really believed it. He really thought he knew better than she did how she felt. “I just hope you don’t do this to Gus,” she said. “He still loves to play. But maybe not for ever.”

  Grandpa Beck drew his eyebrows together. “Has he said something to you?”

  “No, but…” She gave up. He’d never change. He’d never see.

  “Think about what I asked, Lucy,” her mother said, and stepped aside.

  “I don’t

  have to think about it. I said no.”

  She headed up the stairs, her mother’s voice following her: “I’ll be calling you to discuss this from

  the airport!”

  “Go ahead!”

  She didn’t have to answer her phone, and she didn’t have to see either of them for nearly a whole week. And right now she didn’t care if she ever saw them again.

  Lucy and Gus ate at the kitchen island while Martin cleaned up. He’d made night-before-Thanksgiving spaghetti; the sauce came from a jar, the Parmesan from a can, and the garlic bread was store-bought.

  “This is the best food ever,” Gus said, licking around the sides of his ice-cream sandwich – dessert from a box.

  “Gee, thanks,” Martin joked. “Why did I spend two days slicing and dicing for tomorrow if you’re happy with a bottle of Ragú?”

  Their dad hadn’t yet returned from taking Mom and Grandpa Beck to the airport. Before they left he had come up to her room. She’d been lying on the bed with her earplugs in, listening to Kasey Chambers: loud, urgent-voiced, a little pissed off. She hadn’t heard her dad knock.

  He’d stood next to her bed, gesturing at her to take out her earbuds. When she hadn’t he’d reached down and yanked the cord.

  “What? ” she’d asked.

  “Come say goodbye to your mom and grandpa.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I don’t care. Come do it.”

  She’d looked away. Maybe she’d forgiven him for what happened in Prague, but he was no innocent in this mess. “I’ll call her later,” she’d muttered to the wall. Unless he wanted to physically drag her out of her room, he’d have to accept it.

  “Fine,” he’d said, and left.

  She’d lain there and fumed for ten minutes or so, with a trace of guilt and worry. Maybe she’d gone too far. Then she’d thought about her conversation with Will and the promise of his help and friendship, and felt some hope. She had decisions to make about her life. Her life. And she wasn’t alone any more.

  Now, in the kitchen, a wave of something like euphoria came over her. Five whole days without Grandpa Beck’s disapproval and her mom’s judgement and fear. Time to imagine. Time to scheme.

  “Can I sleep in your room tonight?” Gus asked.

  “Hm,” she said, pretending to think. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe I have my own plans.”

  Martin, who’d been massaging something into the turkey, glanced at her. “Plans for an overnight guest in your room? Don’t make me tell on you.”

  “Ha-ha.” She didn’t actually have plans, but she felt like she should, with all this unsupervised time on her horizon. “Maybe tomorrow night, Gus, okay?”

  He pouted. “Maybe I won’t want to tomorrow night.”

  “It’s a risk I guess I’ll have to take.” She gave him a big, wet kiss on the cheek; he squirmed away, but she knew he liked it.

  “I was thinking we could do the ashes thing tonight.” Lucy stared into the closet with the phone to her ear. She didn’t want to sit in her room all night, reliving the fight with her mom. “My stressful parent is out of town, leaving behind my dad, who’s currently MIA. Grandpa, also gone. Martin is spending the night, so he can start the turkey at dawn; therefore, I don’t have to watch Gus. And it’s a hol’s cuiday.”

  “A perfect storm,” Reyna said.

  “Meet me in ten minutes? At the bench.” Her eye caught the ruby-red cocktail dress hanging off to the side with Reyna’s other clothes. “And wear something nice. Like, hot.”

  “You assume I’m available.”

  “Are you?”

  “Well, yeah. I’ll need more than ten minutes to get hot-looking, though. Twenty?”

  “See you then.”

  The dress was a challenge to get into – the zipper was nearly impossible to reach once it hit the middle of her back, but she got it up. When she saw herself in the wardrobe mirror, she let out a laugh. It was so not her. Tight, short, sparkly, red. On the other hand, why not? It could be her. For tonight, anyway.

  The bench at the top of the park stairs across from her house was their old meeting place from childhood. At first because that was as far as Lucy’s parents let her go from home without them; then it became tradition through middle school. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d met there.

  The sun had gone down; the light in Gus’s room on the third floor was on. She thought about him there in his room, reading probab
ly, or he could be thinking about the showcase or about everything they’d get to eat tomorrow. He could be drawing. She hoped it was that, or some other activity at least distantly related to “fun”.

  Reyna’s silhouette came bobbing up the stairs, hair whipping, her arms wrapped around her body. “It’s freezing!” she shouted to Lucy from halfway up. “Let’s get in the car!”

  “Come up here first.”

  Lucy had the container of ashes in her lap, her cold fingers resting on the edges. She thought about holding the gritty remains in her bare hands. Sending her grandmother into the wind.

  “Is that them?” Reyna asked, when she’d reached the top, breathing hard.

  “My share.”

  “Are you okay?” She sat on the bench next to Lucy and put an arm around her shoulder. “Are you sure you’re ready to do this?”

  “I think so. I mean I can’t keep them under my bed indefinitely.”

  Reyna pulled open Lucy’s coat. “Oh my God. What are you wearing?”

  Lucy stood and opened it all the way. “Recognize it?”

  “Yowza.”

  “Do you mind? I thought…” She shrugged, not sure how she’d meant to complete that sentence. The dress was uncomfortably tight. She felt like she had to wear it, though, and couldn’t explain why.

  “No, it’s fine. It’s…” Reyna laughed. “Your legs are insane. But now I don’t know if I’m dressy enough.” She stood, too, and twirled to show off her black pencil skirt and a tucked-in polka-dot blouse with a wide belt. Super-high heels. The overall effect was forties pin-up girl.

  “Gorgeous. I wonder if we’d get away with dressing like this at an actual funeral.”

  “I think your grandma would appreciate it.”

  “Let’s take a picture,” Lucy said. She got her phone out of her pocket and they squished their faces together and opened tr awidth="heir eyes wide, so they wouldn’t blink at the flash.

  “Carson needs to see us like this,” Reyna said, after they got in the car. They were driving, aimlessly for now, undecided on where to start. “Text him and see if he’s home.”

  Lucy followed orders, exchanging a few texts with Carson. “He’s home,” she reported to Reyna, “and desperate to escape. His grandmother is lecturing him about his grades.”

  “Let’s take him with us. Is that okay?”

  “Definitely.”

  Carson lived near the waterfront on the Embarcadero. His dad had come from Taiwan in the late eighties with the savings of his entire extended family, bought a run-down warehouse-y building, and turned it into lofts that now sold for more than a million dollars each.

  There was nowhere to park, so Reyna circled the neighbourhood until Carson made it down to the street to meet them. Lucy had to get out to let him in. She’d wrestled off her coat in Reyna’s overheated Mini, so Carson got the full red-cocktail-dress version of her and went speechless for a few seconds.

  “Um, hi,” he said, staring. He ducked his head into the car to ask Reyna, “Should I go up and change?”

  “Just get in.”

  They explained the plan and the occasion to Carson. “Is this legal?” he asked. “Can you just put ashes anywhere, without permission?”

  “Hm.” Lucy hadn’t considered this. “Ask the Internet.”

  He had his phone out before she even finished talking. “Oh, now that you need something from me, you’re happy I’m the Mobile Googling Champion of the Greater Bay Area.”

  “Is that really a thing?” Reyna asked.

  “No. But it should be. Okay, give me approximately seventeen seconds.”

  “Where are we going, Luce? Are we doing Seal Rock?”

  “Yeah. Not yet, though. Let’s do something not funeral-like first.” The lights along the Bay front were pretty, festive. “I know! Pier 39! I haven’t been there since I was, like, twelve.”

  Reyna groaned. “On a holiday? It’ll be crawling with tourists.”

  “About the ashes: this one site says California has all these strict rules,” Carson said. “But it also says they aren’t really enforced, and I quote: ‘Your own moral compass-slash-judgement can be equally right within the reasons of common sense.’”

  Reyna nodded. “Like I always say.”

  “Pssht,” Carson scoffed. “You’ve never said that.”

  “I should have.”

  “‘The reasons of common sense’? Is that even English?” Lucy asked. “So the pier? We’re good?”

  “I can’t walk in these shoes,” Reyna warned.

  “Easy solution,” Carson said. “I’ll carry you.”

  “We won’t stay long,” Lucy assured her. “My shoes are brutal, too.”

  “I’ll carry both of you.”

  Fifteen minutes later they’d made it to the centre of the action. Reyna was right – despiteht &rs the cold, tourists and sailors and college kids crowded the pier, going in and out of shops and restaurants and stopping to watch street performers.

  “What do you think my grandma would say if I decided to be a juggler?” Carson asked as they weaved through the mob. “Like, as my career.”

  “You could try my new strategy with grandparental guilt,” Lucy said. “Ignoring it and refusing it.”

  Reyna laughed. “Since when?”

  “Since now.” Easy to say with Grandpa on a plane.

  “It’s the immigrant thing,” Carson said. “How many generations before the kids don’t have to make all the sacrifice worthwhile?”

  “My grandfather didn’t exactly sacrifice,” she said. “His family always had money, from way back.” He’d been a kid when his parents came over and had only the faintest trace of an accent no one would notice particularly. “He didn’t have to work for it like your dad did. And the weight of the whole family on your dad’s back – it’s different.”

  “Don’t forget not being white.”

  “Chinese is like the white of San Francisco, though,” Reyna said.

  Carson put his arm around Reyna. “I love you, but that’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard, my little white friend. Anyway, we’re Taiwanese, remember?”

  She wobbled on her heels under the weight of his arm. “This is all very interesting, but these bricks are hell. I’m going to break my ankle.”

  “Let’s get candy,” Lucy said, spotting a display of chocolate in a window that was already Christmas-themed. A family that had been sitting on a bench outside the shop got up. “Grab that,” she told Reyna and Carson. She went in and thought about what she’d get: rock candy, small braided bars of white chocolate, and some pecan turtles. All her grandma’s favourites. It was warm in the crowded shop; she unbuttoned her coat.

  Two guys in navy whites were right in front of her in the long line. They turned and gave her that look, that same look the paramedic had given her the day of Temnikova’s death. She didn’t mind it this time. “Hi,” one said. He looked young and pinkish, his face fresh-scrubbed.

  “Hi.” Lucy smiled.

  “How are you?”

  “Fine. You?”

  “Okay.” He smiled, showing a small gap between his front teeth.

  The line inched forwards. His taller, darker friend said, “His name is Scott.”

  Scott turned pinker and extended his hand. Lucy shook it. “Lucy.”

  “Scott’s girlfriend just broke up with him.”

  Lucy could tell that the friend teased Scott like this all the time, probably intentionally embarrassed him every chance he got. “That was stupid of her,” Lucy said, to be nice, to make Scott feel better.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  An old U2 song came on the store radio. Scott was close enough that she could see the peach-fuzzy hair on his cheek. She felt the song in her veins, and then she was noticing everything: the heavy smell of sugar and cocoa all around them, the man in a San Francisco 49ers knit cap and how he grinned at his young daughter, who had a green ribbon grheain her hair. The way the girl behind the counter, kind of heavy and pimply,
joked with each customer, made them laugh. The wave of cold air that came into the warm shop every time anyone came in or went out.

  Life was…good. And beautiful.

  And Lucy felt beautiful in it.

  “You’ll find someone else,” she told Scott. And without planning to, kissed his cheek.

  “Uh, I think he just did,” his friend said.

  “How ’bout on the lips?”

  Her first thought was: Why not? It was a red-dress kind of move.

  Then she came to her senses. There was impulse; then there was crazy. “You’re next,” she said, pointing to the counter. “In line I mean.”

  They ordered and paid, and Scott turned to her to say, “You want to get a drink?”

  “I can’t. I’m…” Sixteen. “I’m with friends.”

  “Oh. Well, don’t break too many hearts tonight.” He touched his hand to his hat and showed his tooth gap. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “You too.”

  She got her candy and left the shop, smiling to herself, feeling elated, liking the sting of the cold air on her cheeks and the feel of the dress tight against her skin. The world was all possibility. Despite the increasing pain in her feet, she nearly skipped over to the bench to pass out treats to Reyna and Carson.

  “Make a new friend in there?” Carson asked. He wore a half smile that she’d seen before, when he was irritated or perplexed about something, like when he’d gotten a B-minus on a history paper he’d thought was perfect.

  He must have seen her kiss Scott through the shop window.

  “This stuff is kind of nasty,” Reyna said, tentatively touching a piece of rock candy with her tongue. “Like, how are you supposed to eat it? Pointy. I feel like I’m going to break a tooth.” She definitely would have said something if she’d seen, too.

  Lucy sat down. “That’s why it’s called rock candy.”

  Carson leaned forwards on the bench so he could see Lucy and raised his eyebrows, asking a silent question. She shrugged. He bit into a pecan turtle and didn’t say anything else.

  “Let’s go look at the water,” Lucy said. “Maybe this is a good place for the ashes, after all.”