~~~~~
That you end up in places where you didn’t expect to end up during the course of your life is an understanding that most adults reach at some point in time. If that was a prerequisite for having reached adulthood, then Kyle McKee had reached the point (under that philosophical requirement) where he was most definitely an adult. Where he was was not a place that had ever found itself featuring in his childhood predictions of where his life would be going. It wasn’t as though he had intended to grow up ignorant of everything outside his little sphere, but he was willing to guess that he had never counted on being as obsessive about following all of the little details that turned into the bigger picture.
It was hard to remember what he had once upon a time thought that his life would entail. He was rather disconnected from what he had been like back before a long list of things. What he knew from Lia because he knew Lia because he knew Connor because Connor was Connor because Anna was Anna because Anna had taken the job she had taken because he lived with Anna because their parents were gone created a long, long list that got so convoluted that he couldn’t find his way back to how he used to think back when he was still in the before of that long list of happenings and people coming into his life. He was too different for the way things had looked back in that time to come clearly or easily to him any longer.
He had lost something along the way that he didn’t know how to define, or, he sometimes reflected, he had gained something instead. He wasn’t sure which it was. It might even be a strange mixture of both. The important part was the outcome -- that being his inability to walk through his days in the same manner in which the people who surrounded him seemed to do so. He found himself frustrated at times as to why others never seemed to notice things that were now so obvious to him.
He had found himself having fantasies of running around shaking random people he met on the street and screaming in their faces demanding to know when they were going to wake. He would never actually do that, of course, but there were days when he wondered if that wasn’t a course of action that was warranted. He didn’t know why certain headlines didn’t seem to jump off the screen for most of the people that he encountered when, from his perspective, they might as well have been dancing off the page in flashing neon. Casual mentions of various legislative activities, whispers of various organizations’ doings, and various notices of the actions of education and business institutions were never simply any of those things for him these days.
They were all pieces of a web that he could see as clearly as he could see his hands in front of him. Threads ran from one to the next, and the more tightly woven the web seemed to become the longer that he looked. It was . . . he would use the word disconcerting, but he only used that word because Lia had suggested it to him on one occasion. He hadn’t found it necessary to find a word of his own to use. He didn’t know whether his seeming disconnectedness from those around him was a natural consequence of knowing the things that he knew or whether it had happened to him because he had allowed Lia to teach him the patterns and connections that had become apparent to her.
He couldn’t get away from them. It was almost like being infected. Scratch that -- it was exactly like being infected. Once she had traced the first few of them for him, he was seeing them everywhere that he looked. It was, as Lia had suggested, disconcerting, but he found that he could not regret it. He didn’t want to not know. He didn’t want to be one of the people wandering around ignorant of what was happening. He wanted to know. He wanted to be pulled out of his ignorance. He didn’t want to be taken by surprise. He wanted to be able to fight back. He wanted to try.
That was actually rather difficult to do -- which was probably to be expected. Connor and Anna wanted him well out of things, and he actually understood that in a way that he never had before. It was easy to understand their reluctance when he knew exactly what it was from which he was being protected. He wouldn’t choose this nagging trapped feeling that they were running out of time and no one was even paying attention as a burden to place on someone else. He got that. He got that Anna looked at him and still saw a child that had already had to deal with more things than any reasonable person would want to place on a child.
He knew exactly what Anna was thinking. It was easy to know what Anna was thinking. She wanted him to have normal. She had been trying to give him normal for a very long time. He couldn’t be angry at her for that (even though there had been a time in those early days after Lia had seemingly disappeared into the ether when he had done a decent job of being rather angry with pretty much everyone and everything). If he had the power to pull Lia out of the middle of this, then he would want to do it in a heartbeat. She, he knew, wouldn’t thank him for it, and he wasn’t going to be thanking Anna and Connor despite his understanding of their motivations either.
Sometimes, it wasn’t about what you wanted. Sometimes, you didn’t get to make the decision to protect the people you cared about the way that you wanted. Besides, it was all a moot point. You couldn’t pull anyone out of the middle of knowing. Once you knew, you knew. There was no going back from that. Adding on being blocked from knowing what was going on with the only people you knew understood what was happening as well as you did (and that you knew were pushing back) accomplished nothing but an increase in your level of frustration.
You were, Kyle reflected somewhat morbidly, supposed to get homesick for home when you went off to school. You weren’t supposed to find yourself homesick for clandestine information dealing happening in your living room. Lia had eased that sense of frustration at being cut off somewhat for him. She was, he thought, less frustrated than he was. She gave every appearance of it anyway (but what could you really know about a person’s emotions when your only interaction consisted of typed words on a page). That was a thought he always chose to dismiss. He didn’t want to dwell on it. It made him agitated. He knew Lia. He had spent time uncountable exchanging ideas and thoughts and opinions with her through the only medium currently available to them.
The fact that if he stopped to let himself ponder the fact that that medium didn’t allow him to actually see her made him uncomfortable was not a reason to think that those conversations didn’t matter. They mattered. She was his best friend. That mattered above all else. She knew the things that he couldn’t bring himself to tell his sister. He knew the fears that she had never shared with anyone else. A lack of in person interaction didn’t change that. It didn’t make it any less real. It was just a reason to cherish the memories of evenings spent doing homework on opposite ends of the couch that had gradually become evenings spent doing homework sitting with their arms brushing together as they reached to turn pages. It was a reason to close his eyes and think of dance lessons in his living room and laughing over spaghetti dinners and rolling their eyes at each other in amusement as Anna and Connor did something else to display just how oblivious the two of them were to what was so obvious to the two teenagers sitting across from them.
He couldn’t have her in person now, but he had had her in person in the past. He would have her in person again someday, and it would be better because they hadn’t lost any time -- not really. They had been using it wisely. They were learning each other. They were being each other’s best friends without the distraction of being distracted by each other (which was an awful muddle of words that he was not capable of untangling, but he knew what he meant by it). He held on to that on the days that everything seemed to get to him -- the fact that there was a countdown clock until Lia would be back. School wouldn’t last forever. Her being underage wouldn’t last forever. Her sister might control and manipulate and nudge into place many things, but Lia wouldn’t be one of them forever.
He hadn’t always been clear sighted about that fact. He had gotten a little (okay, so it had been a lot) caught up in shock when there had suddenly been no Lia in his life with no way of knowing what was happening or where sh
e had gone. It had made for an unexpected entrance into his senior year of high school. He had noticed that most people seemed to go through their final year of high school in one of three ways. The first group rushed through everything. They were trying so hard to get at what came “after” that they missed out on everything that was going on in the “now.” The second group seemed to be stuck on the fact that it was their last time to be doing so many things that they clung on to each “milestone” so tightly that he wondered if they actually enjoyed any of it while they were despairing over “the end.” There were some people that seemed to strike a balance -- they made their plans for the future as appropriate, but they didn’t let it interfere with the fact that they were still living their lives as they were.
He, for a solid chunk of his own senior year, had belonged to a group of his own. In retrospect, he liked to label it as the far too emotionally disturbed to actually notice that you were in your senior year group. It was a little wordy, but it did the job. Lia had made a smart aleck comment about her tendency to be verbose rubbing off on him, but it had been followed by a change in the tone of her questions and comments that had told him that the description had bothered her. He didn’t want her to think that it was her fault. It wasn’t, after all. His reactions were his own, and he was willing to own them.
Nothing that had happened had been her fault. She hadn’t asked for her sister to be mentally unstable. He never said that to her though; it was a thought that he reserved for his private venting of his ire against his best friend’s older sister. Bashing Meredyth was not something that Lia chose to participate in during their conversations, and he had quickly learned not to try to start it. He respected how he thought she must feel on the subject; he didn’t want to think about what it would be like to have Anna turn on him in such a drastic fashion.
He had, however, spent the rest of his senior year doing a lot of senior type things that he probably wouldn’t have bothered with if left to his own devices just because he wanted to keep her from thinking that she was having any sort of a negative impact on his life. He had gone to games and went bowling with his casual friends and spent a second prom night with Shelby Cross. It was safe enough. She was fun and laid back and didn’t get all caught up in expectations that a prom date was anything other than a prom night date. Lia had demanded pictures (even though she couldn’t keep them), and he had obliged even though it brought up somewhat awkward memories of how she had come to see the pictures from his junior year prom.
That was the day that not being able to see her face to face had hit him the second hardest. He wanted to be able to look her in the eyes when she insisted that he “not miss out” on the experience. He wanted to know that it wasn’t just words, and she wasn’t just being Lia. He wanted to know that there wasn’t any misty eyed regret that he was going off to participate in a teenage ritual that she was never going to get to be a part of (or at least not officially, their impromptu facsimile version was a memory that he shrugged off or dwelled on by turns as the mood struck him).
The day that he had been hit hardest by not being able to see Lia face to face was the night that she had admitted what exactly was happening to her at that boarding school where her sister had her locked up after begging for a promise that he wouldn’t tell Anna or Connor what had been done to her. That night had hurt. Mostly, because it was painful to know that he couldn’t do anything to stop it, and he couldn’t even sling an arm around her shoulders to comfort her. There had been several times in his life that Kyle had been more or less helpless against what was happening -- losing his parents being the obvious example. That night had been the first time in his life that he understood what it was to be both helpless and alone. There was no Anna to go to (as per Lia’s request). There was only himself and his inability to fix something that needed fixing, his inability to help someone who needed help, and his sense of letting someone down that defied any attempts at rationalization and the application of logic. Kyle wasn’t good at dealing with helpless. He wasn’t good at letting things remain unfixed.
School was an emotional dichotomy that way. He was frustrated at being cut off from information about what was happening and what was being done to counter it. He was simultaneously comforted by the logicalness and order of what he was doing. Machines made sense. You took the broken ones apart, you replaced what couldn’t be repaired, and you adjusted what was in need of adjustment. You fixed them. They weren’t complicated. They didn’t leave you feeling helpless. There was only broken and not broken, fixed and not fixed, and the steps you took to take something from one to the other.
He lasted until Thanksgiving break before he couldn’t take it and confronted Anna about what being cut off from knowing what was going on was doing to him. She wouldn’t be Anna if she wasn’t stubborn, but she also wouldn’t be Anna if she didn’t make worrying for him an official pastime. The later won out (with a little assistance from an appropriately timed layer of guilt administered to Connor, not entirely fair, but effective), and Kyle’s never entirely included but aware out on the fringe inclusion in what they were up to that had degraded into an almost complete shutting out had become a full-fledged induction into partnership.
It would have been a bit much in the area of information overload if Lia hadn’t already pointed out so much of it to him. He hadn’t mentioned that. Lia had asked him not to, and he had agreed (like he generally did) even though her explanation that she didn’t want Connor and Anna to have anything else to worry about made no sense to him. She hadn’t offered much in the way of elaboration -- she had merely stated that she was a potential security risk, and they didn’t need to fret about how much of one she actually was. It made no sense to him (except that it showed that the could be drugged out of her mind at any point possibility weighed on Lia more than she openly admitted).
It didn’t matter what Lia knew or didn’t know. It wasn’t like she was going to tell on them. He watched the way that Lia fed little pieces of information to Anna or Connor as if they were random for three or four weeks before he ever saw Anna give a sign that she knew that Lia knew exactly what she was doing. She had looked up at him one Saturday afternoon and given him a wink.
“She’s hit on the Masterson connection to SB 408,” she had said with a smile. “But this time, I actually got there three whole days ahead of her.” There was nothing else. His sister had just gone back to work. He had tried to say something; he still wasn’t sure what would have come out of his mouth because Anna had been faster.
“It makes her feel better, Kyle,” she had said. “If doing it this way helps her feel better about the whole debacle of her nasty piece of work sister, then let her. She needs to be in control of something.”
“In control of something.” Those words echoed in his head for a long time. That would definitely make sense to Anna in a way that it probably wouldn’t for a lot of other people. He found himself, again, tempted to spill the details about just what that nasty piece of work sister had done to his friend, but he refrained. Lia was right. They couldn’t do anything about it (and had it ever taken a long time for him to get to the point that he agreed with Lia’s assessment of that fact). She felt badly enough that she had told him; he wasn’t going to spread the helpless, inadequate feeling any further and make her regret telling him even more.
His practical purpose in being officially included by Connor in their little gang of world domination resisters seemed to be listening to Anna vent. Anna needed some outside perspective on improving her programming, and her list of options was miniscule. He didn’t actually have to do anything. She talked herself into what she needed to tweak or finagle as she explained things to him. Connor, it seemed, didn’t work for that purpose because he was too inclined to ask for explanation of details that got her sidetracked from what she was trying to think about. There was Will, but Anna never seemed overly inclined to talk about anything not strictly necess
ary in front of Will.
Kyle understood that even if Connor didn’t seem to get it. Kyle figured that it had to do with Karen. Connor seemed to subscribe to the viewpoint that more help was better. Anna seemed to subscribe to the viewpoint that help wasn’t actually help if there was no actual help involved. At the end of the day, Karen grated on Anna’s nerves, and neither Will nor Connor seemed to notice. Karen noticed. Karen seemed amused by it, and Kyle thought she sometimes went out of her way to ask Anna questions that she knew Anna wasn’t going to answer just to rile her further.
It was, Kyle felt, really petty on Karen’s part, but he supposed he could be biased because Anna was his sister. Besides, actual pettiness would require that Karen actually knew that she was doing things to be petty, and Kyle didn’t think that she took any of it seriously enough for that to be the case. That, he reflected, might be at the heart of why Anna didn’t deal with her very well. Karen didn’t really believe in any of what they were doing. She may have held her tongue about it when Will was around, but she had no such qualms where Anna was concerned. He got to take a spectator’s seat to how she interacted with just about everybody because Karen’s general response to him was to overlook the fact that he was there. He seemed to have some sort of child not to be bothered with who is part of the furniture in the background status with her.
He wasn’t going to complain about that. He was firmly on Anna’s side -- Karen was annoying. He didn’t know why Will had allowed her to be included when she so obviously didn’t care about what they were involved in doing. He had tried running his thoughts by Lia in an attempt to get some outside clarity, and her only response had been to remind him that Will “wasn’t exactly the poster child for the cause either.” That had taken him by surprise, but she hadn’t offered an explanation. She just told him to watch him, so he did. Maybe it was because he had Lia’s words in his head to color his viewpoint. Maybe it was because he was comparing him to Connor. Was it really fair to expect anyone to be as devoted to this as Connor?
He saw what she was saying. Will did what needed to be done, and that was, well, it. Connor owned the situation. Will deflected anything coming in his direction. Connor was about the big picture. Will was about the long range picture for Will (and Karen). It wasn’t that it was a bad way to view the ongoing chess match against Will’s brother and sister-in-law; it was just different. They were both doing what they could. They were both trying to block their progress. They were both fighting the good fight as it were. They were just doing it for different reasons.
Connor would be fighting this battle as long as there was a battle he could fight. If the day ever came where Will could extricate himself from being one of the players, then he would be gone in the time it took you to blink. In light of that, his tolerance for Karen’s indifference made sense. He wanted to walk one day; it wouldn’t do to have the person he intended to spend the rest of his life with not interested in walking with him. That did bring everything back around to the question of why Karen was even involved in the first place, but Kyle tended to reflect that Will didn’t seem to have had much of a choice. She had just shown up one day and invited herself into the middle of things.
Getting in between Karen and places that she had decided that she wanted to be didn’t seem to make Will’s list of things to do. She might be annoying, but that didn’t make her any less forceful when she wanted something (actually that might be part of why she came across as so annoying, her seeming expectation that Anna would cater to her the same way that Will did). Whatever. He had expended entirely too much time thinking about Karen. If Anna could be gracious (even when she was seething) when she bore the brunt of the annoyance, then he could be gracious while he was mostly ignored.
They all had bigger things to worry about than the fact that Karen was obnoxious, and they couldn’t let her get in the way of actually dealing with those things. They had work to do -- even if he didn’t always understand how exactly Connor and Will were managing to do it. He probably didn’t want to know. Besides, he had a countdown to keep.
Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy Page 37