The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr Read Free Book Online Page B

still played at least a little.”
    “I don’t. I told you.” She went up three more steps.
    “Never?”
    He was still on her heels. She spun and found him directly on the stair beneath her, which put them eye to eye. “Are you going to follow me all the way to my room?”
    She felt like she could cry. The stupid smell of brownies, Gus looking happy, Will’s toast on Sunday night.
The wonder of beauty.
Gus and Will at the piano, creating joy.
    All conspiring to remind her that she’d once loved all of this. With her whole heart.
    Writing a boring English paper would never be a substitute.
    Will put his hand on the railing. “Sorry. I only wanted to apologize.”
    “I said don’t worry about it.”
    He lifted his hand and held it in the air between them, his fingers shaping something, a word, maybe – something he wanted to say but couldn’t. She watched his hand, watched his mouth, waiting to see what would come out. While she waited she noticed: one ear appeared to be placed slightly lower on that side of his face. Crooked nose, crooked ears, the smaller eye.
    “What?” she finally asked.
    “You
never
play. You. Lucy Beck-Moreau. Never play.”
    Her vision went watery. She shook her head. “Never.”
    “That makes me sad.”
    What could she say to that? It was a compliment and a judgement, and it made her sad, too. The tears were about to come, so she turned her back on him and got all the way up to the bottom of the attic stairs before he said more:
    “Do you want to? Ever?”
    She could laugh. She could tell him to leave her alone and be mad that he’d asked. Or stand there on the step and explain the complicated emotional mechanism by which the idea of playing again had become all wrapped up with giving in to her grandfather and missing her grandmother and betraying herself.
    But.
    What do you want, Lucy? What do
you
want?
    She wiped off her face but didn’t look back at him. “I don’t know.”
    Maybe. Maybe
.

 
    The morning of her first performance in Prague, Lucy had woken up with a headache and a stiff neck and something weird in her lower back. Stress. Wincing, she got on the hotel-room floor and did the stretching and yoga moves Grace Chang taught her and deep breathing to get calm.
    She was ready. She’d been working on the piece for more than three months; time enough to learn it, memorize it, and make it her own. But she rarely
felt
ready when the moment came.
    The stretching helped, but she had trouble stilling her mind. She’d been in plenty of high-pressure situations before, and normally she could summon the combination of fierce determination and deep serenity that made her a winner. Even in the last year or so, when she wasn’t so much feeling the love, at go-time she could pull herself together and execute.
    She tried meditating; that sometimes worked.
    Think one word
.
    The word she kept landing on:
win.
    Which didn’t exactly help.
    This particular competition seemed to mean even more to Grandpa Beck than usual. Maybe because Lucy’s mom had applied for it a bunch of times back when she’d tried to have the kind of career Lucy did. Maybe because he was getting older and would probably have to cut back on his travel before the next Prague came around. It wasn’t held every year.
    She was getting less relaxed, not more.
    Come on, Lucy, a word. A neutral word.
    Table, banana, muffin…
    Banana muffin.
    She was hungry. She got up off the floor, rolled her neck again, did a few toe touches, and went out into the main part of the suite. Both her dad and grandfather were awake; Grandpa dressed and standing by the window, looking out onto the city. Her dad sat on the sofa where he’d slept, still in his white hotel robe. “Did you order breakfast?” she asked him.
    “Not yet.”
    She picked up the folder of hotel services and dropped herself down next to him to look at the menu. “Can I? Grandpa,” she said over her shoulder, “what do you want?”
    He didn’t turn. To the