The Forgetting

by Sharon Cameron

  “Just a routine inspection. Nothing to be concerned with,” Tessa says from the hallway.

  Oh, it’s something to be concerned with. We don’t have routine inspections. At least we didn’t yesterday.

  “Who ordered it?” I demand.

  Tessa says, “Council vote. We—” Then I recognize one of the voices from down the hall, from my mother’s room. I should have known. I start a march to the hallway.

  “Ah, wait … ”

  I push past Tessa and down the hall. She doesn’t try very hard to stop me.

  Liliya’s voice is coming through Mother’s open doorway, telling people what they can and cannot do, and when I burst inside I can see it isn’t doing any good. Arthur of the Metals is going through my mother’s clothes, shaking them out, inspecting each piece, while Anson the Planter is bent over my mother. She looks like she’s sleeping.

  “Don’t touch her!”

  I didn’t know I was going to yell; it just happened. Liliya closes her mouth, and Anson looks up, startled.

  “No harm meant,” he says. His voice was always like that, so calm and reasonable, even while he’s cutting a tether.

  I go and sit on the floor beside Mother, as if I’m guarding something instead of Reese, and Anson decides not to fight that any harder than Tessa. He goes to help Arthur. Mother is sleeping soundly, no sign of any staining on her sleeve, so unless they’ve inspected her arms, the wound is hidden. I wonder if Liliya has given her one of the sleeping tonics we saved from the doctor.

  I take Mother’s hand. I don’t know what I’m doing. I should have stayed in Jin’s garden. They cannot search my pack. But I also can’t stand the thought of Anson touching my mother. I think he might be the one who made her this way.

  Liliya comes and leans against the wall at the foot of the mattress, hands behind her back, quiet for once while Arthur reaches up and runs his hand over the top of Mother’s cabinet. Anson shakes out one of her tunics. This is horrible. Violating. Could that really be the man who held my hand on the bridge, telling me where the water went? What are they looking for?

  And then I feel a touch on my leg. I see Mother’s hand, her unwounded arm stretching out from beneath the blanket. Her eyes are open, and she’s smiling. She whispers something, not words, just sounds, gibberish. It’s frightening. Arthur turns around.

  She begins to say it again and Liliya starts talking, loud. “How much longer is this going to take?” My sister marches up to Anson and Arthur, hands on hips, pulling their attention away from Mother. And now I think I know where Genivee learned this tactic. “If you’ll tell me what you’re looking for maybe I can help. Because the two of you are making a mess … ”

  Mother is on her side now, smiling at me. She says the gibberish words again, and then I realize what’s caught her attention. She’s brushing her fingers over the metal around my ankle, exposed now that my leggings have drawn up while I’m sitting. How much of that sleeping tonic did Liliya give her?

  “Don’t worry, Mother,” I whisper, trying to keep her quiet. “They’ll be gone soon, I promise.”

  “We’re done now,” Arthur is saying. Liliya backs off, Anson nods to me, and the two men file out, moving away down the hall. I stand, Liliya beside me.

  “They’re going to yours,” Liliya whispers. “What are they going to find?”

  “Nothing,” I reply. And I hope it’s true. They’ll have to be thorough to find my hiding hole. I don’t know how thorough they’re being. Mother’s fingers brush my ankle again. “Are they searching us? Personally?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I can’t be searched.”

  “Neither can I.”

  We look at each other, and then away. “What are they looking for?”

  “I don’t think they’re looking for anything,” Liliya replies. “I think they were looking at Mother. Who did you tell about her arm?”

  No one. Not even Gray. “Anyone who came past our window could have seen. You left the curtains wide open.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, we might have been busy trying to keep Mother from killing herself while you were running around all resting and leaving your bed empty!”

  Liliya let her voice rise just a little that time, and Mother mumbles something from her mattress. “Because I dare,” she says, smiling.

  I glare at my sister. “She’s not even making sense. How much sleeping tonic has she had?”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Nadia. It was a bad day.”

  “Could you have stopped this?” I mean the search. The inspection.

  “And how could I have stopped this?”

  “I thought you had connections.”

  Liliya doesn’t answer. She’s staring at the floor. I wonder if she went to Rhaman’s flogging, and what she thought of her understanding—or whatever it is she has with Jonathan—after that. I can hear the two men talking with Tessa and Genivee now. I think this means they’re already done with my room. I let go of some fear. As long as they don’t count our stores. “Nadia.”

  My eyes dart to my sister. That was not a usual Liliya tone. She drops her voice to a bare whisper.

  “If you had to, could you get Mother over the wall?”

  I blink. “What makes you think I could get over the wall?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “Never mind.” And there’s that fear again, an ugly emotion passing across her face. What could be making Liliya so afraid? And what, after all this time, makes her think I go over the wall? I haven’t been since I went with Gray, in the last of the sunlight. I look down at Mother’s dreaming face. I don’t think I could get her to make the jump, climb the ladder. Not quickly, anyway. But the fact that Liliya is asking frightens me more than anything else that’s happened.

  We both hear the front door open, Genivee talking nonstop to whoever will listen to her.

  “Here,” Liliya says quickly, reaching right down the front of her dress and coming back up with a cloth bundle. If I tried to store something there, it would fall to the floor. She puts the bundle in my hand. “Take it,” she says, “and don’t squeeze. It’s still soft, and I’m not getting you another.”

  Beneath the cloth is a piece of clay like a misshapen stone, which is confusing until I realize the clay is in two pieces. I open the lump like a book and inside is the perfect impression of a key. I decide I don’t want to know what Liliya had to do to get this, but one thing is as clear as freshly cleaned glass: She’s willing to risk a lot to get rid of me.

  “I’m going to go check the storeroom,” Liliya says.

  I listen to her walk away. For a few minutes during the search, it had felt like Liliya and I were on the same side. A team. Like before the Forgetting. Like the entries in my book, when we were a family. Right now I feel every bit of what I have lost.

  I sit down beside Mother’s mattress. She has her eyes closed again, her hair a streaked cloud of dark smoke on the pillow.

  “Mother,” I whisper, “who is Anna?”

  She smiles, eyes still closed, and says the gibberish words again. What can she think she’s saying? I take her hand and put it on the metal around my ankle.

  “Have you seen this before?” I don’t know why I’m asking these things. I know she can’t remember.

  “Nadia,” she says, very softly.

  I lean forward, straining to hear. Her expression has changed, drawn, as if in pain.

  “She’s gone,” she whispers. “The bed is empty.”

  “Who, Mother?”

  “Nadia,” she says again. “Her book is wrong. It’s not Nadia’s book.”

  I know, Mother. But it was only ever the book that was wrong. Not the daughter. Never the daughter.

  After the search, I ran the back way to Jin’s with the impression of the key, and when Gray opened the door, before I could say a word, before he said a word, I realized something important, something I didn’t expect. I was the face he’d wanted to see at the door.

  NADIA THE DYER’S DAUGHTER
/>   IN THE BLANK PAGES OF

  NADIA THE PLANTER’S DAUGHTER

  BOOK 1

  I sneak into the alley behind the wheelmaker’s, coming up to the glassblower’s workshop from behind. It’s been ten days since I went running to Jin’s with those two pieces of clay, the impression of Jonathan’s key in their center. Gray had sat listening to my breathless explanation while Jin tottered about getting tea. It was clever of my sister, I’d thought. A way to steal a key without stealing it. Gray held the pieces of clay in his hands, studying them. There’s little to no extra metal in Canaan, no good way to shape one key out of another, even if one of us had the skill. Then he’d just grinned, shrugged a shoulder, and said, “I’ll make it. Out of glass.”

  We’ve both been to Jin’s every day since then, there’s no thinking we won’t, and I’ve replaced much of Jin’s tea. The light is gone and so it’s easy now to avoid the streetlamps, to slip over from the Archives and up the garden stairs unseen. In the garden we talk about nothing, and we talk about everything, except the secrets I want to keep, sometimes with blankets and lately with a fire. He makes me laugh, prods me about going to the festival, which I will not do, and if I can stand it, we talk about the Forgetting, trying to find some characteristic, some circumstance or hidden fact. Then we ignore each other in the street. I’ve seen Gray walking twice with Veronika.

  But this also means the talk has mostly blown by. Gray has another conquest and now he’s moved on, nothing new there, and there are always other interesting topics to keep our neighbors’ minds occupied. Like how Karl of the Books has all but stopped working before the Forgetting, whether Frances the Doctor will cross out her husband before the Forgetting, the unknown reason for the fight between the potter and Nathan the Penmaker, and if this is why Nathan has boarded up his lower windows before the Forgetting. Or the rumors about the harvest not being big enough, or the bloodstains of two curfew-breakers left on the plaque at the water clock. Or the supervisor who was condemned for tearing pages from his books in the Archives. I wonder how he’ll fare, being Lost, living with the people he oppressed. If Jonathan’s goal was to make us afraid, then he’s done it. I sleep with a chair beneath my resting room window. But I’m certain it wouldn’t take much to get the potter’s wife and those other ladies in the baths talking again. Like me, right now, creeping over to Gray’s when his parents aren’t home, just to watch him make a key. That would do the trick. I really don’t know how I let Gray talk me into these things. Well, yes I do.

  I wait for my moment. Hubble Street is busy, half the city that’s of age on their way to the granary to press the honeyfruit and make the moonshine, drunk twice a year, at every first rising of the moons. Or at least every rising we can remember. Moonshine is thick, sweet, and because it gets stronger every day, is best made about a week before the festival, which tends to become a party before the party, with lots of sampling to go with the boiling and bottling. I remember when Mother used to go. It’s where Gray’s parents are now. But I wonder if it will be such a party this time. The buds have grown thicker on the forgetting trees, and yesterday I saw Roberta next door, trying to ink the likenesses of her remaining children in her book. Thirty-seven days to the Forgetting. Eight days until we steal a book.

  The street clears, and I take my moment and slip up to Gray’s door. He has the curtains closed, maybe only one lamp lit, somewhere deep in the house. I’ve barely put my knuckles to the metal before the door opens and he pulls me inside.

  “Sorry,” he says, shutting it quick. “Potter’s wife. Get here safely?”

  He wants to know if I got here without being seen, and the answer is yes, of course. He has his sleeves rolled up, which means he’s been working already. I watch the scars on his right arm become visible as he lights another lamp. Gray’s house is more like Jin’s than ours, two stories instead of one, the roof garden high on the third. But there are the same white walls, the same table with the sparkling metallic top, only Gray’s mother has dark day plants around the windows, waiting for moonlight to make them bloom. And some of the chairs have been moved to the other wall, I see, clustered in a half circle. Just for sitting. For talking.

  “Come through,” Gray says, waving for me to follow. “I need to eat. Have you eaten?”

  We step into the storeroom, where there’s a pot on the countertop flame, bread and a jar of pepper preserves on the opposite side. This room is almost exactly like ours, from the fruit braids hanging from the ceiling to the rows of glass jars and wrapped bread. It smells spicier, though. Gray’s mother must dry different herbs. And I would never eat someone else’s stores during the dark days.

  “Nadia,” Gray says. “You’re forgetting to speak.”

  “Yes,” I say aloud. “I got here safely, and yes, I’ve eaten.” He grins to himself while he slices bread. I think Gray is sometimes afraid that if I don’t speak once, I’ll stop altogether. I lean over the pot. “What’s in here?”

  “Potatoes.”

  “And what else?”

  “More potatoes.”

  I set my pack on the floor between my feet, to free up my arms, and start rooting through his shelves. Gray hops up on the counter beside the bread, his feet swinging. Last sunlight if someone had told me that by the dark days I’d be standing in a storeroom with the glassblower’s son, seasoning his soup, I would’ve called them a liar.

  “Did you hear that Anson the Planter’s house was searched?”

  I set down the little pot of salt, glad that Gray is behind me, where he can’t see my face. That doesn’t make sense. Anson is Council.

  “And Karl of the Books, and Nathan the Penmaker, and Gretchen of the Archives.”

  I stir the soup, sprinkle in the garlic leaves. I’m waiting on a new book from Karl, if he’ll ever finish it, a book I’m going to paint numbers on and switch for mine on the Archives shelves. My old book with my old name I’m keeping. I’d never be able to request it, since it isn’t registered to me. But Nathan is where I get my pens, and Gretchen … This can’t have to do with me. No one knows about Anson. But it leaves me disquieted, like there’s something there, invisible. As if I’m locked in a shrinking room that I cannot see. What is it all about? Liliya? Anna? The Forgetting? Stolen books or going over the wall? “This is done,” I tell him.

  “That’s it? All you have to say?”

  I hear Gray jump down from the counter. He reaches around from behind me with a spoon, leaning close to taste the soup. Gray is usually wary with my space, cautious about the way he touches me, as if I might run. Which, I suppose, I might. But he’s not being cautious now. His body is against mine, his face just above my shoulder, where I can see the stubble on his jaw, the length of his eyelashes as they close. He smells like soap and the furnace.

  “Oh,” he says. “It’s actually good. Are you smart at everything?”

  No, Glassblower’s son. I really must not be, because I’m letting myself stand here like this. With you.

  “Here,” he says, setting down the spoon. “Let me fix this before you catch it on fire.”

  I feel him pick up a fallen braid, wind it around my knot of myriad other braids, looking for a place to tuck it back in.

  “How much hair do you have in here—” he begins, then I jump as his front door slams.

  “Gray! Hey, I was going to see if you wanted … ”

  Eshan stops just outside the doorway of the storeroom while Gray goes on very deliberately fiddling with my hair.

  “Hey, Eshan. What were you saying?”

  Eshan looks back and forth between the two of us. “Just … to see if you wanted to run the walls. I need to go … soon.”

  “I have glassblowing today,” Gray says. He gets the end of my braid tucked in. “Sorry. Do you want to go on or wait until tomorrow?”

  Eshan hesitates. I turn now that Gray has released my hair, and there’s a beat of awkward silence. Gray says, “Don’t say anything, Eshan. You know my mother.”

  I don’t k
now what to make of Eshan’s face. It’s like stone in the lamplight. “Whatever you say,” he replies. “I’ll see you at the wall tomorrow.” He walks out and I hear the door shut, not slam. Just a click. Gray goes through the sitting room and drops the bar down.

  “He,” Gray says, coming back into the storeroom and grabbing the soup pot, “is going to punch me in the face.”

  “I thought you were friends.”

  “That, Dyer’s daughter, is exactly why he’s going to punch me in the face.”

  Gray blows out the flame and hops back up on the counter, soup pot and spoon in hand. I’m betting he doesn’t do that when his mother is here. I do the same on the opposite counter, prop my feet up beside him, making a bridge of his black leggings and my blue ones.

  “Don’t look so glum,” Gray says. “I’ll hit him back, of course.”

  “Because you’re friends,” I say.

  “Exactly. And he doesn’t want to run anyway. He wants to drink. He’ll have a bottle stowed away somewhere, mark my words. It’s his one perk for apprenticing at the granary.” Gray eats soup from the pot, somehow managing to do it neatly. “When are you going to tell me about this?” he asks, setting down the spoon to hook a finger beneath the bracelet around my ankle, showing now that I have my feet up. I flinch just a little, not because he touched my ankle, but because I don’t want to answer.

  “What do you mean?”

  His smile goes indulgent. “I mean, where did you get it? Did someone give it to you?”

  I shake my head. He eats soup, watching me. “I found it.”

  “You found it. You know, if I’d found a piece of metal like that, I think I’d have mentioned a little something about it. Just in passing.”

  I make a face at his sarcasm, but the beating in my chest is picking up speed. I don’t want to tell him where I found it. I shouldn’t be wearing it at all. But it was in my book, my first book, and there’s something about it, something solid that says Nadia the Planter’s daughter was real. That I am who I was.