Lyric’s parents lived in a converted barn in the Lake Champlain islands of northwestern Vermont. Marley, standing in Lyric’s old bedroom in the early morning, looked out the window up a long, snowy field that inclined to a distant crowd of white-blanketed pines. Snowflakes drifted across their field of view, patiently gathering to blur and cover the lone trail of footprints Marley had left while wandering out at twilight the day before.
Just across the lake, in upstate New York, Marley was scheduled to interview an aggrieved Constitutionalist town supervisor for the streaming show. Lyric’s parents, whom Marley had met at the funeral, had more than once urged Marley to come visit them, but even knowing they’d be doing an interview less than 20 miles away, they had hesitated about calling. If Marley hadn’t dragged Lyric along, first to the Scotty Ross interview, then to shelter with the Louvre, Lyric would still be alive. That was a fact.
If Lyric hadn’t distracted the soldiers, though, then all of the Louvre people, along with Marley and Gene and Audrey, would have been captured or worse. There wouldn’t have been a reunification plan to promote, nor anyone who could help it reach the Cascadian government and the American people. Cascadia might have been overrun by the Americans, or the war might still be sowing ruin these years later. Those, too, were facts. As hard as it was to accept Lyric’s death, it was even harder to accept what might have happened if she hadn’t let herself be seen. The question of what should have happened was a knot in Marley’s chest they couldn’t untie.
Marley made the bed, even though Lyric’s parents, Wendy and Pete, had a bot that would have done it. They opened the door as quietly as they could, but Wendy and Pete’s doors had antiquated iron latches rather than usual doorknobs, and Marley couldn’t open them without clanking. They crept down the pale green, vine-patterned rug that ran the length of the hallway, past the room where Callum, Lyric’s much-younger brother who was home from college for the winter break, slept.
What Lyric had told her parents about the two of them, Marley could only guess. There had never been time for them to formally sort out where they stood with each other, but something between them had sprung up fully formed, and clearly Lyric had shared something about Marley in the short time they’d known each other.
Pete and Wendy had sent Marley a letter not long after Lyric’s death. It had been days before Marley could bear to bring it up on their lenses, and at the time, it seemed unreal. Lyric’s parents said they had gotten the sense that Lyric and Marley had a special bond. They talked about Marley’s loss as if it resided in the same district of grief as their own, something that made Marley feel anxious and embarrassed. It seemed greedy to claim that kind of grief when others were more rightly entitled.
After the funeral, Marley wrote back, and then Pete, the busybody of the couple, had kept up the correspondence. In the end, Marley felt they had to visit.
Wendy could stand next to Marley and look out the window at the falling snow, saying nothing, as she had when Marley arrived late the previous afternoon. Pete, who was in his late sixties, was constantly in motion whenever he wasn’t asleep, as he and Wendy were right now. Marley was grateful for to not have to face their kindness for a little while.
The main room of Lyric’s childhood house combined kitchen, dining room, and living room in one. It had a high, sloped ceiling supported by rough-hewn beams; skylights; and walls made of old barn board. A bank of tall windows looked out onto a meadow, where naked pear trees caught snowflakes in their tangled branches.
The autokitchen, contained mostly in a pantry off the main room, was an old model with separate baking and dishwashing units of bleary glass chambers and white baked enamel. An add-on from at least a decade ago, with windows that were still clear, added two more chambers and jutted into the open central room. Marley accessed it through their lenses, set quiet mode on, and requested green tea and a bowl of leftover dhal from last night’s dinner. Inside one of the chambers, pale shapes stirred. Invisibly, a microwave hummed.
A clank from the hallway made Marley turn in time to see Callum, wrapped in a thick, brick-red bathrobe, step into view. He was slim, darked-haired, and blind, his blue eyes fixed on a point far beyond the walls of the house.
“Marley,” he said, by way of greeting. His voice was beautiful, but dark, like a tea-colored creek steeping the shadows out of long-fallen leaves. Though he didn’t speak much, Marley was fairly sure he blamed them for Lyric’s death.
“I have an interview in a little while,” Marley said.
“The town supervisor,” Callum said. “What do you think she’ll say?”
“I don’t know. I guess I try not to guess, so I can listen better.”
“Mmm,” Callum said. There was an interactive braillescreen on the wall near the bathroom that was connected to all of the house’s devices, and Callum went to this now and pressed some command, tiny bumps on the rectangular, beige buttons raising and flattening under his fingertips. He must not have his earpiece in yet.
When he finished, he turned to Marley and walked up until he was less than an arm’s length away. “It’s weird having you here and not my sister,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Marley said.
“That doesn’t help,” he said. Marley began to turn away, but he reached out with both hands and touched their arms, finding his way to their shoulders, and turned them back toward him. Then he reached around Marley and drew them to him with a hug. Marley tensed at first, almost expecting him hurt them, but then they made themselves relaxed, and they hugged him back, tentatively.
“I hate the word hero,” he said. “It’s a stupid word.”
“But it fits her,” Marley said.
“It fits her,” he said. “She’d probably be pretty pleased with how it came out.”
“Everybody’s confused,” Marley said. “Nobody even knows if the reunification is going to work.”
“Yeah,” Callum said. He finally let go. “I don’t know if you should visit here. It’s hard on my parents.”
“They ...” Marley said, but they didn’t know how to finish.
“They like you,” he said. “And you’re like a link to her. She couldn’t keep in touch with us the regular ways, after she left, and you’re a window into that. You know? So they hardly know her from then, just some paper letters Gia had for them. But it’s a lot on them. It’s a lot on me. You don’t know what she was like here.”
“I wish I did,” said Marley.
“But you don’t,” he said. He walked into the pantry, sighing, and felt in the serving area until he had a good grip on the top tray. He carried it out, with a little bowl of green tea on it for Marley, a bowl of dhal with a spoon, and a mug of coffee swirled with cream. He set the tray down near Marley on the butcher block island that bounded most of the kitchen and took the coffee for himself.
“I don’t know, you visiting is bad and it’s good,” he said. “Maybe you should. Maybe they need it. Lyric probably would want you to. Anyway, I’m not setting rules. I’m just saying.”
Marley nodded, then winced internally, realizing he couldn’t see the nod. “OK,” they said. They slid the tray over to the other side of the island, where they’d be able to sit in one of the tall, worn, wooden seats.
“Do you feel like ...” they began, but again they didn’t know how to finish.
“Like it was your fault?” he said. “Yes. And hers. And it was necessary. I wish you were some kind of an asshole, though. It would feel good to really blame someone. You know, without reservation.”
“I’ll try to be worse,” Marley said.
Callum nodded. “I’d appreciate that.”
The shuttle to the ferry dock would have diverted to the house, but Marley didn’t mind walking the half a kilometer or so to the main road to wait for it. There was no sidewalk or bike path on way, but the road was deserted, and Marley trudged down it while snowflakes settled in their short hair and melted against their face.
Their feet were cold, and they wished they’d thought to get some better snow boots before coming to Vermont in the dead of winter. Apart from that, their mind was calm, even with the interview coming up, even having come so recently from facing Lyric’s family. From the life they’d more or less planned, the life where they were a writer living in a beautiful-if-backwards town, they never would have pictured themself walking down a silent road in the snow far in the East of the United States, headed for an interview that would be seen by hundreds of thousands of people—one where once it was out, you could never take your mistakes back. But then, few things are like writing. There aren’t many aspects of life where you can make mistakes, then go back and fix them without penalty. Even with writing, there’s a point at which you have to stand behind your choices. Marley supposed that was what they were doing.
They reached the main road and crossed it to wait. They stood at the head of a tiny lane lined with pastel-colored houses that led to an open whiteness Marley assumed was part of the frozen-over lake. They waited there for a few minutes as the snow sifted down and settled into the folds in their coat. They were early still, and the falling snow made the world a quiet chamber where Marley’s heart settled as it hadn’t for a long time. The knot was still there in their chest. It might always be there. Even so, they could feel that there was a way to move forward in the world, despite the tugging of everything lost, despite the terrifying uncertainty of everything that might yet go well.
The shuttle appeared now, fading in from a ghostly image in the snow to a solid thing that coasted to a stop just a few yards away. The door opened, and Marley stepped up.