Gagged (33 page)

“You’re not here for him,” I say. “You’re here for her.”
 

Lucy comes to us. She hugs her brother. Caspian acts like he has no idea what to do with a hug and accepts it like a tackle. She gets her arms around him before he can raise them, and then he’s too much taller than her to use them once pinned. She releases him, and finally his hand goes to her shoulder, then to her back. That’s when Lucy goes to me and hugs me even longer. I let her. In my ear, she whispers, “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
 

We look toward the room’s front. There’s no casket. Beside an ornate urn, I see a large photo of a stern-looking man propped on an easel surrounded by flowers. Not just white flowers. There are reds and oranges and even some purples. Caspian’s flowers with life bled back into them as they mourn a death.
 

Lucy says, “I’m so happy you came. Do you think I did a good job with the arrangement?”

Caspian nods, unsure how to respond. He’s watching the front-of-the-chapel display as if his father might rise from the ashes. As if the big man on my arm were only a kid, stripped of his armor.

Lucy takes Caspian’s other arm. She begins to lead, but he’s slow to follow.
 

“Come on,” she says. “I want you to see something.”

She leads him forward. I’ve got his other arm, both of us looking like aides bolstering a drunkard. The way I felt in Caspian’s bindings, that’s how he looks now. I tug his sleeve, and Lucy slips a few paces ahead, seemingly oblivious that she’s lost him. I whisper, “Are you okay?”
 

“No.”
 

“Please, Caspian.”
 

“For Lucy.” He swallows, seeming to suck up his courage.
 

“For Lucy,” I agree. “But for you, too.”

That look is still on his face. So my hand goes to his cheek, and he looks down at my touch.
 

“Caspian,” I say. “Trust me.”

Lucy’s ahead of us, looking back. Caspian gives me a tiny, still-uncertain nod, and we keep moving down the aisle, past soberly dressed mourners who barely acknowledge Caspian even though I assume he must know at least some of them. There are even some children here. A boy and a girl — dressed in white rather than black. Neither seems to acknowledge where they are. Kids being kids, laughing and playing quietly in their seats despite the mood.
 

When we reach the front, I see that Lucy has scoured her father’s past for pictures. There’s a long display that doesn’t seem to faze Caspian at all. Photos of the man at work, photos of the man beside a dour-looking woman I assume must be Caspian and Lucy’s mother, photos of a sober man next to his straight-faced son at various obligatory times of honor, like the one of teen Caspian in a cap and gown, his father in a suit beside him, neither touching, the older man’s face somehow full of disapproval and judgment.
 

Lucy points to a photo near the back. A string of them, I now see, that must have been from an earlier part of this family’s blighted history. From a happier time, perhaps, when the straight faces in the pictures were still wearing smiles.
 

It’s as if I’m seeing the photos through my own camera’s viewfinder, the way I first really saw Caspian White. These pictures are as true as the sour ones. Real moments captured forever in their truest essence, same as the shots I capture with my own penetrating lens.
 

“I found it,” Lucy says, smiling at her brother, eyes rimmed with moisture. “Do you remember thinking we’d lost it? Caspian, do you remember that day?”
 

A family gathered with arms around each other. A man in his midthirties with short and thinning hair, his arm encircling the waist of a woman with a brighter face than in the other pictures, actually smiling. The photo was taken at Disneyland, with Sleeping Beauty’s castle in the background. Goofy and Mickey Mouse have both ducked into the photo at the edges, and the kids, seeing this, are laughing.
 

A girl of maybe four.
 

A boy of about six, with deep blue eyes.

Caspian reaches out. He doesn’t just touch the framed photo; he picks it up. He raises the frame almost reverently as his knee goes to the floor, as his forearms rest on the railing and he just stares. And stares.
 

My hand on his back.

I say, “I’ll give you a minute.”
 

Without turning, Caspian says, “Don’t you dare.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

C
ASPIAN

T
HE
CEREMONY
IS
BEING
HELD
inside the church. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to pretend, for anyone including Lucy, that I’ve come to bid a fond farewell or forgive him. If there’s a God, my father is going to Hell. I’m furious with him. But it’s not just what he did to me that I hate. It’s not just what he did to my sister or to our mother, who is her own issue, who isn’t even here because she’s losing her balance, preparing for that ill-advised move back to our roots in Inferno Falls. What bothers me most is what my father did to himself. I almost wish there hadn’t been any good times, because then this would all be so straightforward and I could hate him without feeling anything else. But there were good times. And they ended without explanation, rotted from the inside like fruit gone bad.

I don’t know what broke my father. I don’t know what suddenly made him snap, and wither from a petty tyrant to a ruined bastard.
 

Maybe it was my grandfather, who bullied him the way my father bullied me.
 

Although according to stories I’ve heard, my great-grandfather bullied my grandfather, too.
 

Lucy’s hand is on mine as I see Aurora across the lawn, playing with the kids we saw earlier, both of whom were too rowdy to sit still for a manufactured farce of sorrow. She looks like a child herself, her face bright like an angel’s.

“She’s good with children, isn’t she?”
 

I barely hear her. I’m watching Aurora and the kids. They’re young, the boy a bit older, maybe four and six. The parents aren’t around; they must have asked Aurora to watch them. The trained eye can spot a teacher. Can spot someone who actually cares about children the way they deserve — not just for their own sake, but for the sake of their impact on future generations.
 

I wonder what would have happened, if my grandfather had been kinder to my father.
 

And I wonder what will happen now, with me. Now that our family’s destructive cycle seems to be finally broken.
 

I look up at Aurora.
 

Thanks to her.
 

“Who are those kids?” I ask.
 

“Amelia’s children.”
 

“Who’s Amelia?”
 

“Mom’s sister-in-law.”
 

“I don’t remember her. Or the kids.”

“Cousins,” Lucy says. “If someone is related but you can’t figure out how, just call them cousins.”

We watch for a while in silence. I don’t know how I feel. But I definitely feel something.
 

Lucy breaks the quiet between us.
 

“I talked to Bernie,” she says.

“I’ll get him in line on Monday. We have a meeting.”
 

“It’s not that.” She still has her hand over mine, and in the silent seconds that follow, I can tell she’s trying to convey something important. To weigh an issue in need of attention. And when I look up at Lucy, I realize what she’ll say before she opens her mouth.
 

“He told me about the Einstein Project. I’m proud of you, Big Brother.”
 

Her smile is annoyingly knowing. I ignore it, picking apart a leaf I’ve grabbed from the lawn.
 

“Bernie has a big mouth.”
 

“He also told me that you’ve been working on it for about six months.”
 

“It’s a big project.”
 

“Starting about the same time requests started going down, looking into a girl named Aurora Henley.”
 

“Don’t go drawing conclusions.”
 

But of course she’s drawing conclusions. Plenty. Looking at me while I’m trying hard to be moody, smiling like an asshole.
 

“I don’t like people prying into my business, Lucy.”
 

“Yes. And you’re fierce. You’re angry. You’re the Big Bad Wolf.”

“Einstein is just another profit center. It was wise to diversify.”
 

“Mmm-hmm. So why is Bernie having so many problems integrating it with GameStorming?”
 

“Because he’s an incompetent dick.”
 

“Right. Not because the codebase is entirely different. Entirely rewritten.”
 

“Lucy, that’s none of your business. It’s confidential.”
 

“For now. But unless I’m mistaken, the
whole point
of open source is that the code isn’t proprietary or confidential at all.”
 

“I’m not yet convinced it’ll be open source.”
 

“Bernie says you’ve already borrowed a lot of open-source code to build the module.”
 

“Bernie is talking out of school.”
 

“Appropriate,” Lucy says, “because how long can it really be before the whole thing is talking
in
schools?”
 

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
 

She hugs me hard, coming at me from the side. I don’t participate; I’m still disassembling this leaf.
 

“Thank you, Caspian.”
 

“For what?”

But rather than dignifying me with a response, she stands and walks toward where Aurora and the kids are all playing. Judging by the self-satisfied glance she tosses back over her shoulder, Lucy seems to think she’s won our encounter by default.
 

Bitch.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

E
IGHT
M
ONTHS
L
ATER

C
ASPIAN
LOOKS
ALMOST
COMICALLY
UNCOMFORTABLE
as we sit side by side at the ballroom’s prime table, a few feet in front of the stage. He’s been honored many times but never like this. In the past, it’s been an internal job: Caspian’s people throwing some sort of a PR event to celebrate their greatness. That’s how it was when GameStorming HQ broke ground, when the company merged with LiveLyfe, when Caspian was declared San Francisco’s Man of the Year. He’s also had a bunch of magazine-style awards — everything from
Top 30 Under 30
to
Sexiest Man Alive
— but those were still thrown by someone kissing his ass, held with an air of yes-of-course-I-deserve-this. He could accept those honors with a raised chin and a superior smirk, having crafted his own brilliant future.
 

But this is different.
 

Now he’s this year’s Future Pioneer.
 

He didn’t apply. He didn’t nominate himself, didn’t have someone in the company nominate him, and honestly would prefer not to have been nominated at all. I keep pointing out the irony: GameStorming’s biggest and most important accomplishment, and the company’s CEO would have swept it quietly under the rug if I hadn’t insisted. If I hadn’t goaded Caspian into discussing it over dinner with Jasmine and James, convinced him to let Jasmine tape it, convinced him to let her write her article after all, then sell different versions to every big-name magazine and newspaper and TV and Internet outlet there is. It’s not even that Caspian is humble. If there’s one thing he’s not, it’s humble. It’s that he’s somehow embarrassed by doing good things and proud only of accumulating assets.

The Einstein module of GameStorming — bringing gamified research into schools at all levels — wasn’t supposed to exist. But then he got an idea just over a year ago, and began.
 

Einstein wasn’t supposed to be open source. But rather coincidentally, about the time I entered his picture but well before he entered mine, he got the idea to make it open source so that other educators could adapt and use it in new, amazing ways.
 

And most recently, Einstein was supposed to be a profit center for Caspian’s company. I was fine with it. Encouraged it even. Caspian once told me that anything worth doing should only be done for the right price, and I agreed. So when he decided to just
give
the module away for educational uses, I protested. But Caspian corrected me on his earlier dictum. He told me that he didn’t say things should be done for the right amount of money — but for the right
price
.
 

And he told me,
You already paid the price.
 

And I said,
Not today.
 

So he ripped off my dress. Spread my legs. After he came and I came, I pointed out that the idea of sex-as-payment was repugnant between a girl and her fiancé. Especially between a
pregnant
girl and her fiancé. So he made me pay some more. Just a bit. But he promised that once the baby came, we’d soundproof the bedroom, so we could punish each other all we wanted.

Or maybe not.
 

Seeing his face, I asked him what he meant, if his fetish was losing its luster.

And he told me,
You’re my fetish now
.

The speaker is still praising Caspian. Telling the gathering how greatly the man they’re honoring tonight has changed the face of education. The face of the world and the face of the future. Because Caspian didn’t just release GameStorming into schools free and open source; he also spent fifty million dollars to purchase tablets for students in some of the most underserved cities, with more to come. When I asked about this, he told me the company could afford it. The money had been earmarked for another addition to the GameStorming building. I’m still not sure if he was joking.