“Where did she go?”
Twist, again. The compact doesn’t close right. A corner of the paper sticks out.
“She’s in her room, changing clothes. She got al dirty from hiking.” Bram’s voice sounds steadier now. He’s covering for me, without even knowing why. And he’s doing a good job of it, too.
I hear footsteps in the hal and I open the compact back up, slide the corner in.
I twist, a muted snap takes place. At last. With one hand, I unzip my plainclothes; with the other, I put the compact back on the shelf. I turn my head as the door opens, surprise and outrage on my face. “I’m changing!” I exclaim.
The Official nods at me, seeing the smudge of dirt on my clothes. “Please come into the foyer when you’re finished,” he says. “Quickly.”
My hands sweat a little as I pul off the clothes that smel of forest and put them in the laundry receptacle. Then, in my other plainclothes, stripped of everything that might look or smel like poetry, I leave my room.
“Papa never turned in Grandfather’s tissue sample,” Bram says in a whisper once I come back into the foyer. “He lost it. That’s why they’re here.”
For a moment, curiosity overrides his panic. “Why’d you have to change your clothes so fast? You weren’t that dirty.”
“I was dirty,” I whisper back. “Shh. Listen.” I hear murmurs of voices in my parents’ room, and then my mother’s voice, raised. And I can’t believe what Bram told me. My father lost Grandfather’s sample?
Sorrow cuts through the fear inside me. This is bad, very bad, that my father has made such an enormous mistake. But not only because it might mean trouble for him, and for us. Because it means that Grandfather is real y gone. They can’t bring him back without the sample.
Suddenly I hope the Officials find something in our house after al .
“Wait here,” I tel Bram, and I go into the kitchen. A Biomedical Official stands near the waste receptacle waving a device up and down, back and forth, over and over. He takes a step and begins the motions again in a new spot in the kitchen. I see the words printed along the side of the object he holds. Biological Detection Instrument.
I relax slightly. Of course. They have something to detect the bar code engraved on the tube Grandfather used. They don’t need to tear the house apart. Perhaps they won’t find the paper after al . And perhaps they will find the sample.
How could Papa lose something so important? How could he lose his own father?
In spite of my instructions, Bram fol ows me into the kitchen. He touches my arm and we turn back toward the hal way. “Mama’s stil arguing in there,” he says, gesturing to our parents’ room. I grab Bram’s hand and hold it tight. The Officials don’t need to search my father; they have the Detection Instruments to tel them where to look. But I guess they have to make their point: My father should have been more careful with something so important.
“Are they searching Mama, too?” I ask Bram. Are we al going to share in our father’s humiliation?
“I don’t think so,” Bram says. “She just wanted to be in there with Papa.”
The bedroom door opens and Bram and I jump back out of the way of the Officials. Their white lab coats make them seem tal and pure. One of them can tel we are frightened, and he gives us a smal smile intended to reassure. It doesn’t work. He can’t give back the lost sample or my father’s dignity. The damage is done.
My father walks behind the Officials, pale and unhappy. In contrast, my mother looks flushed and angry. She fol ows my father and the Officials into the front room, and Bram and I stand in the doorway to watch what happens.
They didn’t find the sample. My heart sinks. My father stands in the middle of the room while the Biomedical Team berates him. “How could you do this?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. It’s inexcusable.” His words sound flat, as if he has repeated them so many times that he has given up any hope of the Officials believing him. He stands up straight, the way he always does, but his face looks tired and old.
“You recognize that there is no way to bring him back now,” they say.
My father nods, his face ful of misery. Even though I am angry with him for losing the sample, I can tel that he feels awful. Of course he does. This is Grandfather. In spite of my anger, I wish I could take Papa’s hand but there are too many Officials around him.
And I’m ful of hypocrisy. I did something against the rules today, too, and what I did was intentional.
“This may result in some sanctions for you at work,” one of the Officials says to my father, in a tone so mean I wonder if she wil get cited herself.
No one is supposed to speak this way. Even when an error occurs, things aren’t supposed to get personal. “How can they expect you to handle the restoration and disposal of artifacts if you can’t even keep track of one tissue sample? Especial y knowing how important it was?”
One of the other Officials says quietly, “You ruined the sample belonging to your own father. And then you didn’t report the loss.”
My father passes his hand over his eyes. “I was afraid,” he says. He knows the seriousness of the situation. He doesn’t need them to tel him.
Cremation occurs within hours of death. There’s no way to get another sample. It’s gone. He’s gone. Grandfather is real y gone.
My mother presses her lips tightly together and her eyes flash, but her anger is not for my father. She is mad at the Officials for making him feel worse than he already does.
Even though there is nothing to say, the Officials do not leave. A few moments of cold silence pass during which no one says anything and we al think about how nothing can save Grandfather now.
A chime sounds in the kitchen; our dinner has arrived. My mother walks out of the room. I hear the sounds of her taking the food delivery and placing it on the table. When she walks back into the room, her shoes make stabbing, serious sounds on the wood floor. She means business.
“It’s mealtime,” she says, looking at the Officials. “I’m afraid they haven’t sent any extra portions.”
The Officials bristle a little. Is she trying to dismiss them? It’s hard to tel . Her face seems open, her tone regretful but firm. And she’s so lovely, blond hair winding down her back, flushed cheeks. None of that is supposed to matter. But somehow, it does.
And besides. Even the Officials don’t dare disrupt mealtime too much. “We’l report this,” the tal est one says. “I’m sure that a citation of the highest order wil be issued, with the next error resulting in a complete Infraction.”
My father nods; my mother glances back at the kitchen, to remind them that the food is here and getting cold, possibly losing nutrients. The Officials nod curtly at us and, one by one, they leave, walking through the foyer, past the port, out the only door in the house.
After they depart our whole family sighs with relief. My father turns to us. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.” He looks at my mother and waits for her to speak.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says bravely. She knows that my father now has a mistake logged against him in the permanent database. She knows that it means Grandfather is gone. But she loves my father. She loves him too much, I sometimes think. I think it now. Because if she isn’t angry with him, how can I be?
When we sit down to dinner my mother embraces him and leans her head on his shoulder for a moment before she hands him his foilware. He reaches up to touch her hair, her cheek.
Watching them, I think to myself that someday something like this might happen to me and to Xander. Our lives wil be so intertwined that what one of us does wil affect the other down to the ends, like the tree my mother transplanted once at the Arboretum. She showed it to me when I came to visit her. It was a little thing, a baby tree, but stil it tangled with things around it and required care to move. And when she final y pul ed it out, its roots stil clung to the earth from its old home.
Did Ky do that, when he came here? Did he bring anything with him? It would have been difficult; they would have searched him so careful y, he had to adapt so quickly. Stil , I don’t see how he couldn’t bring something. Secret, maybe, inside, intangible. Something to nourish him. Something of home.
Feet pounding, fists clenched, I hit the tracker running.
I wish I could run outside, away from the sadness and shame in my house. Sweat trickles down the front of my gymgear, through my hair, across my face. I brush it away and glance back down at the tracker screen.
There’s a rise in the curve on the tracker screen: a simulated hil . Good. I’ve reached the peak of the workout, the most difficult part, the fastest part. The tracker spins below me, a machine named for the circular tracks where people used to compete. And named for what it does—tracking information about the person running on it. If you run too far, you might be a masochist, an anorexic, or another type, and you wil have to see an Official of Psychology for diagnosis. If it’s determined that you are running hard because you genuinely like it then you can have an athletic permit. I have one.
My legs ache a little; I look straight ahead and wil myself to see Grandfather’s face within my mind, to hold it there. If there’s real y no chance for him to ever come back, then I am the one who has to keep him alive.
The incline increases, and I keep pace, wishing for the feeling of climbing the hil earlier that day when we were hiking. Outside. Branches and bushes and mud and sunlight on the top of a hil with a boy who knows more than he wil say.
The tracker beeps. Five minutes left before the workout ends, before I’ve run the distance and time I should in order to keep up my optimal heart rate and maintain my optimal body mass index. I have to be healthy. It’s part of what makes us great, what keeps our life span long.
Al of the things that were shown in early studies to be good for longevity—happy marriages, healthy bodies—are ours to have. We live long, good lives. We die on our eightieth birthdays, surrounded by our families, before dementia sets in. Cancer, heart disease, and most debilitating il nesses are almost entirely eradicated. This is as close to perfect as any society has ever managed to get.