by RJ Crayton
“It’s OK,” Josh said, though he looked a tad crestfallen. “Maybe tomorrow?”
Elaan smiled. “Absolutely.”
Josh glanced at the computer. “Looks like my books are downloaded. Did you need to use it?”
“Yep,” she said. “I’ve got some pleasure reading and some class work as well.”
He disconnected the e-reader and turned to her, his eyebrows squished together. “Class work?”
“Yeah, I told you.” She took the cord from him and connecting her e-reader to it. “Or, I thought I told you. You know Nina is a professor at the University of Maryland. Anyway, she said me being stuck here shouldn’t mean I should stop learning. She said I could get a leg up on college by doing independent study in early childhood education and she’d supervise it for me. Hopefully, when everyone is well uptop, I’ll have a leg up on my degree, with a couple of courses of credit.”
Josh stared at her as if she were an alien. “You really think it will get better up there, that our dads’ vaccine will work, that life will go back to normal?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “Otherwise what would be the point? We can’t think everyone up there is doomed. There are more people up there like you and me: people with immunity. And there are people in scientist housing that are working on a way to stop this disease. It’s taken longer than they thought, but I don’t think it’s impossible. I want to keep going, to prepare for my life like it’s going to continue in good ways. Growing older, getting married, starting a family, living life. I know that maybe I’m simplifying by thinking life will be exactly the way it was up there before, but I have to believe in something.”
He nodded, but it looked more for show. He wore a scowl, as if her words had soured him.
“Josh, don’t tell me you’ve given up on them figuring this disease out, on figuring a way to keep people from getting sick,” she said.
He shook his head. “I didn’t say that,” he muttered, looking at the floor. “I’m just not as hopeful about what life will be like after this is over. I’m not sure what we’ll find uptop.”
“Well, that’s OK,” Elaan said. “I’ll be hopeful for both of us.”
He offered a solemn nod that lacked any heart. Elaan reached out and touched his hand. “I know it’s sometimes hard to be down here and not miss it up there,” she said, gently rubbing his hand. “To not miss the world we used to know. I miss it too, but if we pretend like this is all there is, like down here is the only future we have, we won’t find that cure or get back uptop. We have to plan for the future, Josh. We have to see it in our mind’s eye.” She half smiled; she sounded like her mother. Those were the words her mother used say to her when Elaan was younger and got discouraged at not succeeding at something. “You have to see it in your mind’s eye, plan for it, practice,” her mother would say. That was classic Shonda: set a goal and make it happen by sheer force of will.
God, she missed her mother. So much.
Josh squeezed her hand. “You alright?”
Elaan looked at his hand on hers, enjoying the warmth of his touch. Enjoying the closeness of being here with him, the desire to say what was on her mind. That she’d been thinking about her mom, but she flashed back to that look of pity he’d had this morning, and she didn’t want that. “I’m fine,” she said.
Josh released her hand, then glanced up at the wall clock. “I need to stop in the lab and check in with my father,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
He turned and walked out.
Chapter 6
After Josh left, Elaan filled her e-reader and headed back to her room. She wanted to sit down with a book and lose herself for a moment. She wanted to forget that she was underground because the world uptop was quickly succumbing to a deadly virus. She wondered if the world had succumbed. Was that why they’d stop getting news broadcasts and food?
No, she couldn’t think like that. She’d seen the men in charge here, and she’d gotten to know Greg and Nina Sterling pretty well. Nina more so, but Nina wouldn’t marry a jerk. Greg had to be telling them the truth that it was just a worker who’d gotten sick. They’d stopped food deliveries because of the possible contamination. Being down here was still a good thing. It was safe. It wasn’t a tomb.
She shivered at the thought. Josh’s uneasiness had rubbed off on her. It was throwing her into a negative space. She shook her head, trying to dislodge all the bad thoughts from her brain as she walked from the library back to her apartment. When she arrived at their unit, she found her father sitting on the sofa, staring at the empty wall across from him. She took a deep breath and tried not to show how worried she felt. His eyes weren’t focused on anything, his cheeks seemed to droop and he generally seemed shell-shocked. “Hey, Dad,” she said.
Her father turned to her. This time he smiled. He looked like himself when he smiled. He waved her over. “I need to talk to you,” he said.
Her stomach dropped. Needed to talk to her? Needing and wanting were completely different things. Wanting to talk could be bad; needing to talk was definitely bad. She swallowed and walked over to him. For some reason, her mind shifted to her conversation with Nina. Had her father been so irresponsible that he’d be kicked out of the scientist housing?
She sat beside him, steeling herself for the worst. “Are you in trouble?”
Her father opened his mouth, crinkled his brow. “Um, no,” he said. “Why would you think that?”
She shrugged. “It’s just that you haven’t been doing the work you’re supposed to and today Nina asked me about you, if you were alright. She told me I could confide in her if you needed help.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, scowling, with a low anger in his eyes. “Nina shouldn’t have talked to you about me. And regardless, I’m fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Then why was she asking? Do you think they’ll ask you to leave if they….” She paused, trying to figure out what to say. She couldn’t say the obvious — if they thought he was losing it, if they thought he had lost it, if they thought he was insane and unfit. She looked up at him and said, “If they think you’re not well?”
“No,” he said, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him. “I’m the director of this project, Elaan, and they’re not going to ask me to leave. I have every confidence in that. Dr. Wells and I, despite my setbacks, are still doing important work.”
Elaan nodded, trying to believe her father, but was still worried. He hadn’t been doing much of anything as far as she could see. Not if Lijah was going up there to help Wells, and not when he didn’t show up for lab duty.
“Listen, honey, I don’t want you to worry. I know it’s hard being down here, and people have been a little more stressed since the food deliveries stopped. But don’t worry. I happen to know for a fact that they’ve got a plan in motion to fix it.”
“You mean Greg going uptop?” she said.
Her father squinted at her in surprise.
“Nina told me,” she said. “She asked me not to say anything.”
Her father pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow. “Seems Mrs. Sterling has been saying a lot of things she shouldn’t have today.”
“She’s not bad, Dad,” Elaan said. “She just wants to help. I believe that.”
He sighed. “Still, she shouldn’t have told you about General Sterling.”
“Why not?” Elaan asked, her voice rising slightly. “People will notice he’s gone. Why shouldn’t people know?”
Her father sat back, nestled into the sofa, and laughed. “Oh, Elaan,” he said. “Ever since you were little, you were a ‘why’ girl. Everything with you was a ‘why.’ It’s a good trait to have. Keeps your mind sharp, but I must admit, when you have answers you don’t want to give, people like you are frustrating.”
Elaan frowned at him. She didn’t want to be frustrating. She was going to apologize for asking, but her father started speaking again.
“Even though this is your home, it’s a military installation first and fo
remost. Greg left, but there is supposed to be a very small circle of people who’ve been informed, because he’s going to be back first thing in the morning. They don’t want people to know. Especially as this is a quarantine area. They don’t want people to think he’s getting special treatment to leave and come back, to possibly bring the disease back with him.”
Oh. Elaan hadn’t thought of that. People would think he was getting special treatment. And they’d be right. “Why does he get to come right back? Shouldn’t he face an eighteen-day quarantine to make sure he hasn’t contracted the disease?”
Her father smiled. “This is why we don’t want people to know. There are alternate entrances to the facility, different from the one most people arrived through. It’s a backdoor of sorts, and it leads to the quarantine communication tower. Presuming there are no signs that the area’s quarantine has been violated, he should be able to safely enter the communication tower, get more direction about the food, and then come back. If it does appear the quarantine area has been breached, then he’ll have to remain uptop for eighteen days without symptoms before returning.”
Elaan tried to digest all her father had told her. But it didn’t quite add up. “Why is he going to a communication tower to get direction about the food? Don’t they have communication systems down here?”
Her father sighed. “They do, but they haven’t been receiving any messages since the food deliveries stopped. They were told about a possible food contamination and nothing more. Ever since then, there’s been radio silence.”
“Why?”
“They don’t know,” her father said. “They suspect there’s a malfunction of one of the relays in the comms tower. The tower is supposed to be a quarantined area. It’s manned by a three-man crew that works twelve-hour shifts. The men follow a pretty decent rotation, with each getting twenty-four hours of rest after a shift. However, the third man is able to go on as a replacement if one of the other two gets sick—like a regular illness or flu, not Helnoan. Greg thinks they had to pull the crew from the comm tower because of personnel issues and that a circuit or something has blown. His plan is to go uptop and reset it, so he can talk to headquarters.”
“And then what?” Elaan asked.
Her father shrugged. “Presumably, they get a message to headquarters and make arrangements to get more food deliveries. But that’s all I was told, Elaan. Greg seemed to think he could handle this, and I trust his judgment.”
Elaan tried not to get too worked up, but she didn’t like what her father was saying. It seemed bad. What if Greg still couldn’t communicate with the right people?
“Don’t worry about this,” her father said. “We’re all fine for right now, you in particular. The government wants you safe. They need data from immunes, so they won’t let anything bad happen to the people in this facility, especially you. Besides, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“It’s not?” she asked, feeling a bit blindsided by his shift in conversation. If the food wasn’t what he needed to talk to her about, what was it he needed to say?
He looked down at his hands and took a deep breath. Then he looked at her again, and she noticed the edges of his eyelids were puffy. He must have been crying earlier. “I wanted to see how you were doing today, you know, because it’s her birthday.”
God. She didn’t want to lay out all the pain she was feeling right now. Not for him. Not for anyone. Instead, she smiled. “I’m fine, Dad.”
“It’s been almost four months,” he said. “And I’m not fine. I miss her terribly. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I still roll over and say, ‘Shonda, remind me to….’ whatever it is that’s on my mind that I know I’ll forget to do tomorrow. But, she’s not there in the bed, and I don’t realize it until the words are halfway out of my mouth. That’s when I remember she’s gone, and she’s not coming back.”
An overwhelming gust of sorrow flooded her. It was as if it sucked her breath out and was trying to pull her under so she would drown in it. Elaan closed her eyes, forcing the sorrow out, or at least locking it away for a moment. “Dad, I miss her, but I’m trying to just move on. I don’t want to spend all day feeling sorry for myself, or thinking about how much I miss her.”
She opened her eyes and wiped away the few teardrops that had worked their way up despite her efforts to suppress them. “I’ll be OK, Dad. And so will you.”
He smiled. “That’s nice of you to say, Elaan.” He put an arm around her shoulder and drew her close to him. “Now, what about your brother? How is he doing?”
Elaan shook her head. “I don’t know, Dad?” she said. “He doesn’t miss her at all, and that probably makes me as sad as the fact that she’s gone.”
Her father looked down at her, his face a pool of understanding. He seemed, in that moment, like his old self, a Father Knows Best type who could solve any problem she could throw at him. He wrapped his arm around her and she leaned on his shoulder. “Your brother loves your mother, and his anger is just about the circumstances that took her.”
“The circumstances?” Elaan said, confused. “Why would that matter? She’s gone and the circumstances that took her are the same ones that took so many other people.”
Her father nodded. “Yes, they are, but he was in quarantine afterwards—”
“So was I,” she said, cutting him off. “I don’t hate her.”
“But you were never able to get sick, Elaan,” her father said. “Your brother was not born with immunity the way you were. His mother could have killed him. She got sick, and she exposed him to a virus that could have left him dead, and your brother feels angry about that.”
“Angry that she exposed him to a virus he never got?” Elaan huffed. “That’s stupid. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Grief rarely does, Elaan.”
Grief was supposed to make people sad. But instead it had made Lijah angry. Not angry at the world or the unfairness of this disease. Angry at the woman who had died at its hands. No, that didn’t make any sense to her. Maybe her father was right. Maybe she felt differently about her mother because she’d never had a chance of being sick. Maybe the time in isolation made him think about death and dying, and fear it more and hate their mother for making him have those feelings. Maybe the fact that Elaan was immune made Lijah angry with her. Angry enough that he didn’t want her to be happy. Not with Josh, or anyone else.
No, she told herself. She shouldn’t think that way.
“What are you thinking?” her father asked. “You went silent on me.”
“I was just wondering if Lijah was mad at me for being immune?” she said. “He’s been really hard on me lately, and Josh, too. He’s been unduly hostile toward us.”
Her father slid away from her, so Elaan had to sit up, unable to lean on him anymore. She was startled. As she peered at him, she realized he was startled too. “Did you say, ‘us’?”
“What?”
“Did you say Lijah was hostile toward you and Josh, as in you and Josh as a couple?”
Shit. She hadn’t meant to say it like that, so her father would think she and Josh were together, but the truth was, they were heading that way. She shook her head. “I just meant that I think Josh likes me, and for some reason, Lijah seems hostile toward us when we spend time together. But, Josh and I aren’t, like, officially a couple.”
Her father pressed his lips together and knitted his eyebrows. “Well, if you’re not a couple, maybe you should keep it that way.”
“Wait. What?” she said, absolutely confounded at what he’d just said. “That’s nuts. We shouldn’t be together because of Lijah?”
“No, not just that. I mean, if you don’t share Josh’s affection and Lijah doesn’t like it, maybe you should stop seeing him.”
“Well, I do like Josh, so we may be an us.” The phrasing sounded convoluted and immature the moment it left her mouth. Her father was still staring at her, a worried expression on his face.
“I’m sorry,”
he said. “I’ve been too caught up with my own issues to notice what’s been going on here. I’ve been worried about Lijah, when I should have been worried about both of you, paying attention to both of you.”
Elaan cocked her head to one side, wondering what the hell he was talking about. “Dad, I’m not following you.”
He closed his eyes, breathed in, and opened them again. “I always thought Lijah was a lot like me,” he said. “He loves the sciences, he loves labs, and he’s always been a nerd in spirit, if not in looks. You guys both got your looks from your mother. That and skin that doesn’t burn after twenty minutes in the sun.” He smiled. That was an old joke he used to say to them when they were little. He used to claim how envious he was that Elaan, Lijah, and Shonda walked out of the house without sunscreen, while he was left to slather up or face skin cancer. “Well, I was also awkward with girls, and I just assumed that was what Lijah was like.”
“You assumed right,” Elaan said. “Lijah is just like you.”
He closed his mouth, shook his head. “Your mother thought Lijah might be gay.”
Elaan’s mouth popped open. And suddenly, it all seemed to fit. Lijah wasn’t good with girls, and he and Josh were friends first. She swallowed and leaned back on the sofa as the news filtered through her brain. “You think Lijah has a crush on Josh?”
“I don’t know,” her father said innocuously. Something about his demeanor hinted that what he was saying wasn’t true, that he in fact did know. “He never told us he was gay, and your mother thought maybe he was still figuring it out, or had figured it out, but wasn’t ready to tell us yet. Either way, we knew we shouldn’t broach the subject unless he brought it up, that he could tell us in his own time, whenever he was ready.”
Elaan shook her head, still not sure if her father was right. But, it would make sense. It would explain why Lijah was so adamant that she and Josh not get together. Only, it didn’t explain Josh’s secret. Unless Josh was gay, too. But that couldn’t be true, because Josh had kissed her. What if he was bisexual and was interested in both her and Lijah? She cringed. Gross. She didn’t even know why her mind went there.