The Lucy Variations

  “Only a few more times. Then I’m officially finished with the retainer.”

  Then Lucy told her about Temnikova. She made it into a story, because if she thought too hard about the idea of death, as in not being alive, as in being done, she might lose it. So she lingered on the CPR details Reyna would appreciate. “Mouth. To. Mouth.”

  Reyna shuddered. “Ew. I can’t believe you came to school today. That seems like a totally believable reason for skipping.”

  “Because staying home is so much fun?”

  “Yeah, maybe not. You guys need to move out of your grandfather’s house.”

  “Never going to happen,” Lucy said. “And anyway, it’s half my mom’s, too.” She finished her food and ran her tongue over her teeth, checking for lettuce. She pictured the back of her mother’s head in the car that mornin Cr t and g. Blonde chignon. No stray hairs allowed. Competent and in charge; someone who would have executed CPR perfectly. Temnikova wouldn’t have dared die. “I think my mom blames me for not being able to resurrect Temnikova.”

  “Your mom has issues.”

  “Understatement,” Lucy said. They’d never been the “best friends” kind of mother and daughter, but the last year, especially, had been…tense.

  “Well, it’s better than living with a cheater and embezzler.”

  “At least your dad smiles more than once a week.”

  “He’s an orthodontist.” Reyna squashed what was left of her lunch into a ball. “That’s not a smile. That’s advertising.”

  After school Lucy fast-walked back to CC’s and got coffee for her and a piece of chocolate-chip pumpkin bread for Mr. Charles. She wanted to talk to him one more time, to be double sure he wasn’t mad. In the CC’s bathroom, she redid her hair clip and tried to see herself through Mr. Charles’s eyes. He liked her. She knew he did. But how did he see her? Older than sixteen, the way the paramedic had? The way practically everyone in the music world had? Which…not that it mattered. As long as he didn’t lump her in with all the other students.

  She wrinkled her nose at her reflection, and against the overpowering lemonesque smell of the bathroom’s plug-in air freshener.

  So what.

  Crushing on a teacher. Sort of pathetic.

  When she returned to his room, he wasn’t even there. The lights were out. She tried the door; it was still unlocked. What an eerie, dead thing an empty classroom was. Lucy quickly found a Post-it on Mr. Charles’s desk and jotted:

  Good morning. I bet you this pumpkin bread I’m on time today.

  – Lucy

  She stuck the note to the bread and put it in his in tray.

  At first Lucy didn’t hear her mother’s knock. She had her laptop hooked up to the good speakers, blasting a little Holst – decent homework-doing music. In the middle of a decrescendo, the knocking came through loud and clear.

  She turned down the music and opened the door. Somehow her mother looked as perfect and beautiful as she had in the car that morning, nearly fourteen hours ago.

  The playlist jumped to Mussorgsky, and it sounded ominous as her mother came into the room. “I want to talk about yesterday,” her mother said. “Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

  “I told you.” Lucy sat at her desk and stopped the music, to type a few words into her English paper.

  “Tell me again. Maybe I missed something.”

  Her mother went over to the bed and perched on the edge of it, forcing Lucy to turn in her chair, away from the laptop.

  What was there to miss? Temnikova died.

  Still, Lucy rerecited the facts, from Gus calling out to the moment the paramedics showed up. Wh Fo;

  “How long before Gus actually dialled nine-one-one?”

  “Was she breathing at that point?”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “Like what?” Lucy asked.

  “Anything, Lucy. Anything at all.”

  She would have loved to be able to tell her mother something she wanted to hear for a change. That Temnikova had meaningful dying words about Gus or had thanked the Beck-Moreaus for changing her life.

  “No, Mom. She died. It was fast.”

  “It seems like if you’d called nine-one-one a few minutes sooner…”

  “Mom. They said there was nothing anyone could have done.” Probably.

  “Why didn’t you call me right away?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said.

  “Did you even think about it?”

  Like you thought about calling me about Grandma? Like that? “She was dead. And whether you found out right away or later, she’d still be dead.”

  Her mother nodded and dropped her hand on top of the pile of Lucy’s blankets. “I wish you’d make your bed. The whole room looks neater when the bed is made.”

  “So I’ve been told.” She turned back to her homework.

  “Grandpa wants to start the process of hiring a new teacher as soon as possible. To keep Gus on track for the showcase and the Swanner. I’m tempted to call Grace Chang, but I know Grandpa would have a fit.”

  Lucy stopped typing. “You can’t call Grace.” It would be like inviting an ex-boyfriend over to maybe date someone else in the family.

  Grace had been her Temnikova. Only not sour and scary. She was a mentor, teacher, guide, and sort of like a cool aunt. A cool aunt Lucy’d abandoned.

  “Call someone at the Academy,” she said.

  Lucy and her mother locked eyes. They both knew that would never happen. Grandpa Beck had an ancient feud with the Symphony Academy having to do with the performing career Lucy’s mother was supposed to have had when she was Gus’s age and never did. Grandpa blamed the Academy, her mother’s teachers there, the system, anti-Beck bias, the seventies, and of course her mother – everything and everyone but himself.

  “We’ll find somebody.” Her mother stood. On her way out, she stopped to touch Lucy’s head. “You should dry your hair before you get in bed.”

  “I like it natural.”

  “It would look so much better with—”

  “I like it natural.” Lucy jerked her head away and rolled her chair back.

  Her mother’s arm dropped. “Don’t stay up too late.”

  “I have a lot to do,” Lucy mumbled.

  Her mother opened her mouth, closed it. Then folded her arms and paused in front of the picture that hung by Lucy’s door: Lucy, age thirteen, getting her fifth-place prize at the Loretta Himmelman International. Excellent placement.

  The whole week, actually, had been a dream. They’d gone to Utah for the competition, a Komp.

  Lucy’d made instant friends with another girl in the competition, Madchen. She’d come all the way from Bavaria, and her English wasn’t great, but the two of them had run around the hotel together between events. One night they’d had a sleepover in Madchen’s room, and Madchen’s mother let them take the bed while she slept on a roll-away mattress and talked them to sleep. Her voice had been hypnotic, precise, musical, speaking low as Lucy and Madchen drifted away, the hotel pillows smelling faintly of bleach.

  It was probably the last time she felt happy at one of those things. Maybe her happiness had come from the family being together without Grandpa’s anxiety over every little detail, and the way he’d never let anyone forget the competitive aspect. Or maybe it was that Lucy loved the programme she’d prepared, especially the Brahms. The Rhapsody in B Minor. Her mother had wanted her to do something showier, and Grandpa nearly fired Grace Chang over it, but Lucy and Grace wanted to prove she could be expressive as well as technical.

  Madchen and her mother had come to hear Lucy play and smiled through it even though Madchen’s piece that morning hadn’t gone well.

  Maybe it was all of those things.

  Her mother stopped staring at the picture, and bef

  ore leaving said, “Try the silk pillowcase I bought you. It helps with the frizz.”

  By the weekend Lucy’s mother and grandfather had accepted that Temnikova was dea
d and it was no one’s fault. They turned their attention to plotting what, or who, would be next for Gus and did it mostly behind closed doors.

  Lucy was anxious to know what was going on but didn’t ask. She knew her grandfather would think she had no right to be involved or even have an opinion. Not any more. Of course she did have one, and always would, especially when it came to Gus. She wanted someone good for him. Not just musically. Someone he could look up to, the way he used to look up to her.

  But her family had no reason to listen to her, so she avoided it all as much as she could by holing up in her room to work on her next paper for Mr. Charles.

  They were studying short stories. Each student had to choose a writer, read at least five of his or her stories, and write a paper on that body of work. It would account for a big chunk of their fall-semester grade, and Lucy wanted to impress Mr. Charles. After a little googling in the wee hours, she’d discovered he’d gotten a special award at Harvard for a critical paper he’d done on a writer named Alice Munro. So Lucy picked her.

  Sunday afternoon she was taking notes on a Munro story when Gus came up to visit, a book in his hand, asking if he could read in her room.

  “As long as you’re quiet,” Lucy said.

  He lay on his stomach on the floor, a pillow from Lucy’s bed tucked under his arms. She sat nearby, also on the floor, typing a few sentences now and then.

  In every assignment she did for Mr. Charles, she tried to find that perfect balance of sounding smart without coming off like a know-it-all. She didn’t want to be like Bryan Oxenford, who sprinkled his papers with esoteric words a No;

  “Can I ask something?” Gus said.

  “You just did.”

  “Do you think Temnikova went to heaven?”

  “Sure,” she said absently. “Why not.”

  “So you think there is a heaven?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then why’d you say Temnikova went there?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “What about Grandma?”

  Lucy swirled her finger on the touchpad. They didn’t often discuss Grandma, and she didn’t feel capable of it at the moment. “I don’t know, Gus. She never talked about that stuff.”

  “So? Not talking about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

  “I know,” Lucy said. “Now let me work.”

  After a few minutes of quiet, Gus said, “Can I say something else?”

  “No.”

  “I think maybe they got somebody,” he said. He didn’t look up from his book. His finger rested on the upper corner of the right-hand page, ready to turn it but on pause.

  Lucy immediately knew what he meant. “You’ve been meeting people?” she asked, surprised.

  “No.”

  “They’re not going to hire someone you haven’t met.” She deleted a sentence on her screen and considered how to reword it in a non-Oxenford way.

  “I heard them talking.” Gus rolled over and sat up, his book still open. “They were in Mom’s office. Dad was in there, too.”

  Lucy moved her laptop aside. Surely even her grandfather wouldn’t pull something like this. Gus should have some say in who he worked with; he wasn’t five any more. “What did you hear, exactly?”

  “I kind of heard the whole thing. I sort of put my ear to the door.”

  “You kind of sort of spied?”

  “His name is Will something,” Gus said. “Grandpa heard about him from one of his symphony friends.”

  “Did you get a last name?”

  “I forget. But I remember Brightman Quintet.”

  Lucy pulled her computer back onto her lap and commenced googling. Gus had to have misheard, about the hiring, anyway. Maybe he’d gotten the name right but the context wrong. Briteman Quintet, she found, not Brightman. She followed a link and scanned it quickly. “Will R. Devi?”

  “Yeah.” He set down his book and crawled over next to her, and they read through a screen of links about Will R. Devi. Pianist, violist, teacher. Judge of a few well-known competitions. Host of some local public television show about young musicians that had been cancelled a couple of years back.

  “You weren’t on that,” Lucy said to Gus. “If he was anybody, you would have been on that show.” Or she would have.

  They found more stuff about this Will person: articles and blog entries and whatnot. Then, their mother announced herself outside Lucy’s door. “Lucy? Is Gus with you?”

  “Yes,” she said. Her mother came in. She wore a grey wool pencil skirt and tights, riding boots, a red sweater, and matching red lipstick. Her hair was down but brushed back. “Why so fancy?” Lucy asked. Sunday typically meant jeans or upscale yoga outfits.

  “We’re having company for dinner. I’d like you two to dress.”

  A formal dinner, on a Sunday night, with virtually no notice? Lucy looked at Gus, who asked, “Who’s coming?” As if they couldn’t guess.

  “Their names are Will and Aruna Devi.” Here, her mother looked down and picked a piece of non-existent lint off the arm of her sweater. “And be on good behaviour, Gus. You start working with Will on Tuesday.”

  Lucy glanced at Gus, hoping he’d say something like: You decided? Without me? But she knew those were her thoughts. Gus was still sweet and agreeable and mostly unquestioning. He said, “Okay,” and got up to follow their mom downstairs.

  After they left, Lucy stared at the door. Temnikova’s death hadn’t changed anything. Decisions were made the usual way: Grandpa Beck steamrolling over everyone, aided by her mother, her dad standing off to the side letting the whole thing happen.

  Play this piece, Lucy.

  Wear this dress.

  Come here. This person wants to meet you.

  Make eye contact with one of the judges before you sit down at the piano.

  Hold your head up. You know who you are.

  She knew who he wanted her to be. Not the same thing.

  She put Alice Munro on hold and searched for pictures of Will Devi online. He looked pretty young. Good-looking enough to have his own local TV show but maybe not enough to go national. His face had an odd asymmetry to it, with one eye that didn’t open as wide as the other and a nose that sort of veered off to the left. He exuded a determined warmth that helped offset the imperfections.

  It didn’t matter. He could be the nicest person in the world. It still wasn’t right to force him on Gus. The way they’d forced Prague and the other stuff on her, robbing her of her life, little by little, until quitting felt like the only choice that was hers to make.

  An hour before the Devis were to arrive, Lucy finally peeled off her pyjamas to get in the shower. She had her own giant bathroom – “the spa”, Reyna called it – with a comically enormous tub and walk-in shower with dual heads and a marble ledge to sit on. She propped her right leg up on the ledge to shave, then her left. She felt her big-sister resolve kicking in and was eager to meet Will. If she didn’t like him, she’d definitely say something to her mom even if it got her yelled at or, more likely, frozen out.

  She dried and moisturized and pumped keratin serum into her hair, which she gathered into a subdued ponytail. Some powder, some tinted lip balm. There were perfume samples in her bathroom drawer but nothing she liked. In the closet she vacillated between two outfits. The first: a blue-and-cream polka-dot dress that was sort of fifties-looking; her go-to dress, comfortable and flattering. The other: a simple black sheath.

  The polka dots seemed overly cheerful, given her mood, so she went with the sheath. A jade-green cardigan would pep it up a little.

  She checked the wardrobe mirror. Boring but appropriate.

  The older sister, Soldign not the star.

  She was getting used to it.

  At the last minute, she put on the

  L pendant her dad had given her, then thought, Time to face the music, and laughed at her own stupid joke.

  Voices came from the parlour. Grandpa Beck would be serving cocktails right about now. Lu
cy could picture him, wearing his signature bow tie, his full, white hair brushed back and sprayed with the old-fashioned stuff he got at the barber’s he went to every week. He’d smell chemical from that and also like Chanel Pour Monsieur and gin martinis.

  She slipped into the kitchen first, in search of Martin. Seeing him always helped her feel grounded. Normally he was off on Sundays, but no way would her mother suddenly become a gourmet cook who could handle a dinner party. Instead of Martin Lucy found two guys and a frazzled-looking woman in green aprons, hustling around the kitchen island. “Oh,” she said, just as Martin came up from the cellar holding a couple of bottles of wine.

  He set the wine on the counter and came over to Lucy. “Hi, doll. Do you need something? It’s a little crowded in here right now.”

  “Caterers?” she whispered. “Really?”

  “That was my call,” Martin said. “Apparently they’re vegans. I didn’t know what to make! They don’t even eat cheese, Lucy.”

  “I can’t believe Grandpa knowingly hired a vegan.” He thought vegans were sitting in judgement of everyone else. Vegans didn’t bathe, he thought. Vegans didn’t pay taxes.

  “The old man is full of surprises.” Martin lifted Lucy’s chin with two fingers and studied her face. “You look beautiful. Chic. You’d better get out there and join the fun.”

  They were all in a semicircle, their backs to the doorway. Looking at Wilhelm Furtwängler’s conductor’s baton. Of course. It was the first thing Grandpa Beck showed new guests. He had a whole elaborate story about it, involving a spontaneous flight to Berlin for the auction and the trouble he had getting the huge amount of cash he needed from the foreign bank. Based on where he was in the story now, pretty soon he’d say, I outbid a very good friend of mine, and he hasn’t talked to me since! Followed by hearty laughter, like that was hilarious.

  Also he was somehow able to say “Furtwängler” with a straight face, every time.

  Lucy stared at their backs, feeling like a party crasher.