“Productive?” Dan asks.
“Can’t tell. Maybe.”
“Maybe’s better than not at all. A good day’s work for a nice Clueish boy.”
- - -
There’s a jogging path in downtown Cleveland that runs along the marina on Lake Erie. It curves around the Great Lakes Science Center and along the back side of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where the memories of those who are notorious for rebellion far hipper than Lev’s are immortalized. Lev jogs past it every Sunday afternoon, wondering what it must be like to be both famous and infamous, yet more adored than hated, more admired than pitied. He shudders to think what type of museum exhibit would feature him, and hopes he never finds out.
It’s relatively warm for February. Temperatures in the forties. Rain instead of snow that morning, and a dreary afternoon drizzle instead of flurries. Marcus runs along with him, winded, his breath coming in puffs of steam.
“Do you have to run so fast?” he calls after Lev. “It’s not a race. And anyway, it’s raining.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“You could slip and lose control—there are still slushy spots.”
“I’m not a car.”
Lev splashes through a slush puddle, splattering Marcus, and grins while his brother curses. Years of fast food and endlessly hitting the books in law school has left Marcus not exactly flabby, but certainly out of shape.
“I swear, if you keep showing me up, I won’t run with you anymore. I’ll call the feds back in. They always keep up with you.”
Ironically, it had been Marcus’s idea that Lev begin an exercise routine once he was released into his brother’s custody. In those early days of recovery, when his blood was still poisoned, just getting up and down the stairs in Marcus’s town house was a workout for Lev—but Marcus had the vision to see that the rehabilitation of Lev’s soul was closely tied to rehabilitating his body. For many weeks it had been Marcus pushing Lev to cover just one more block. And yes, when he first began, there were G-men escorting him. At first they escorted him everywhere on his Sundays out, perhaps to show that there was no leniency to house arrest. Eventually they began to trust the tracking chip and allowed Lev to be out without an official escort, as long as either Dan or Marcus was with him.
“If I have a heart attack, it’ll have your name all over it!” Marcus calls from farther back.
Lev was never a distance runner. Once upon a time, he was all about baseball; a real team player. Now a more individual sport suits him.
As the rain gets heavier, he stops, only halfway through the run, and lets Marcus catch up with him. They buy Aquafina from a die-hard vendor outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who’ll probably still be selling bottled water and Red Bull as the world is ending.
Marcus catches his breath as he drinks, then mentions casually, “You got a letter from Cousin Carl yesterday.”
Lev holds his reaction inside, giving no outward indication that this is any big deal. “If it came yesterday, why are you telling me today?”
“You know how you get.”
“No,” Lev says a bit coldly. “Tell me how I get.”
But Marcus doesn’t have to, because Lev knows exactly what he means.
The first letter from Cousin Carl was a complete mystery at first, until Lev realized it was a coded message from Connor. With the possibility that Lev’s mail is being monitored by one government agency or another, it was the only way Connor could get him a message and hope that Lev was clever enough to figure it all out. One arrives every few months, always postmarked from someplace different, so it can’t be traced back to the Graveyard.
“So what does he say?” Lev asks Marcus.
“It’s addressed to you. Believe it or not, I don’t read your mail.”
When they arrive home, Marcus hands the letter to him but holds it out of reach for a moment. “Promise me you won’t go into some black-hole brooding funk where you sit and do nothing but play video games for a week.”
“When do I ever do that?”
Marcus just gives him his “Are you kidding me?” scowl. Fair enough. Being under house arrest leaves Lev with little to do to occupy his time. But it’s true that hearing from Connor always gets him thinking, and thinking gets him spiraling, and spiraling sends him to places it would be better not to go.
“It’s a part of your life you need to leave behind you,” Marcus reminds him.
“You’re right, and you’re wrong, “ Lev tells him. He doesn’t try to explain himself, because he’s not even sure what he means, except to know that it’s true. He opens the letter. The handwriting is the same, but he suspects it’s not Connor’s, to prevent it from being analyzed and linked to him. The paranoia that engulfs them has no end.
Dear Cousin Levi,
A belated birthday card for you. I know fourteen means more to you than to most, what with the things you’ve been through. The ranch has been busy. The big beef companies keep threatening to take us over, but it hasn’t happened yet. We got a business plan that could save us from that, should it come to pass.
Hard work since I took over the ranch, and not much help from the neighbors. Wish I could just up and leave it, but who could handle these ranch hands but me?
We know of your current situation, and how you can’t come visit. Wouldn’t want you to. A lot of mad cow going on around here. Best to stay away and hope for the best.
Take care, and say hello to your brother for us. He’s almost as much of a lifesaver as you.
Sincerely,
Cousin Carl
Lev reads the letter four times, trying to parse out the various possible meanings. The Juvies’ looming threat to take the place out. The difficulty of running a sanctuary without enough help from the resistance. Lev’s daily life has grown so distant from that underworld of desperate souls, hearing about it is like listening to ice crack beneath his feet. It makes him want to run—anywhere. Run to Connor, or run away from him. He doesn’t know which direction, only that he can’t stand running in place. He wishes he could write back but knows how foolhardy that would be. It’s one thing receiving a random letter from a generic “cousin,” but sending one to the Graveyard might as well be painting a target on Connor’s back. To Lev’s frustration, communication with “Cousin Carl” can only be one-way.
“How are things on ‘the ranch’?” Marcus asks.
“Troubled.”
“We do what we can do, right?”
Lev nods. Marcus is no slouch when it comes to the resistance. He volunteers time pulling AWOLs off the street and getting them to safe houses, and gives a healthy share of the money he makes as a legal assistant to the cause.
He hands Marcus the letter to read, and Marcus seems as bothered by it as Lev does. “We’ll have to wait and see how it all shakes out.”
Lev paces the living room. There are no bars on his window. Still, they might as well have put him in solitary for the sudden claustrophobia he feels.
“I should speak out against unwinding,” Lev says, dispensing with all their coded talk. There’s nobody listening anymore anyway. Now that his life has settled into this reclusive version of normal, surveillance feels like a nonissue. The Juvey-cops have better things to do these days than to keep their eyes on a kid who’s not doing anything but hanging around his brother’s house, trying to disappear.
“If I speak up, people will listen to me—they had sympathy before, didn’t they? They’ll listen!”
Marcus slaps the letter down on the table. “For a kid who’s been through as much as you, you’re still so damn naive! People don’t have sympathy for you—they have sympathy for the little kid who became a clapper. They look at you like you’re the one who killed him.”
“I’m tired of sitting here and doing nothing!” Lev storms into the kitchen, trying to distance himself from the truth in Marcus’s words, but Marcus follows him.
“You’re not doing nothing—you still have your weekend ministries with Dan.”
The thought of it just makes Lev furious. “That’s my punishment! You think I like being partners with the Juvey-cops? Keeping kids in line for them?” If there’s one thing he knows, it’s that Connor would never do the Juvies’ dirty work.
“You’ve done more than anyone to change things, Lev. It’s time for you to have your own life, which is more than you could have hoped for a year ago. So if you want any of it to mean anything, live your life, and let the rest of us take over.”
Lev storms past him again.
“Where are you going?”
Lev picks up a headset and game controller. “My head. You wanna follow me in there, too?”
In a moment, he’s losing himself in Firepower and Magic—a game that takes him far from his life and memories—but even so, he knows Marcus has indeed followed him into his head. And so have Connor, and Risa, and Mai and Blaine, and Cleaver and CyFi, all fighting for space. He’ll never lose them, he’ll never leave any of them behind, and he’s not even sure he wants to.
- - -
Everything changes the day the Girl Scout comes.
It’s a frigid Monday morning, after another Sunday of ministering to divisional-risk kids and jogging in spite of the cold. Dan, whose car has ignition issues, stayed overnight rather than being stranded on the road on a Sunday night. He cooks breakfast while Marcus gets ready for work.
“You know I’m against unwinding, but the ADR is a little too antiestablishment for me,” Dan tells Lev as he serves up scrambled eggs. “I’m too old to rage against the system. I just whine at it.”
Lev knows he does a little more than that. He speaks out against unwinding to anyone who will listen—something Lev is not allowed to do and, according to Marcus, will do no good anyway.
“I’ve been approached by the resistance, of course,” Dan says, “but I’ve had enough of organizations for a while, no matter how good the cause. I prefer being a free-agent rabble-rouser.”
“So . . . ,” asks Lev, “what do you think I should do?”
The former pastor ponders the eggs that tenaciously cling to his spatula. “I think you should clean your room. I’ve seen it, and it appears to be unwinding itself into God knows what.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.” He puts down the spatula and sits beside him. “You’re fourteen, Lev. Most fourteen-year-olds aren’t actively trying to fix the world. Cut yourself some slack and try dealing with normal fourteen-year-old things. Believe me, compared to saving the world, cleaning your room will be a vacation.”
Lev picks at his eggs. “Back before everything happened, my room used to be spotless.”
“That’s not necessarily a good thing either.”
Marcus comes to sit at the kitchen table just as the doorbell rings. He sighs and looks at Lev, who has just finished eating. “Can you get it?”
Lev figures it’s Darcy, his state-appointed tutor—because even former terrorists must know their quadratic equations. She usually doesn’t come this early, though.