The Unquiet

  We agreed because we did not want them to see what we were doing. What we were planning. Whom we were choosing.

  I stare at the reflection the bus window passes back to me. I remember the girl I see from when she was younger, but no good is left. Not in her eyes, not in her hands, certainly not in the syringe in her bag. In this moment she is so empty I’m surprised to recognize her at all. The girl in the reflection says: I don’t think you can choose who deserves to live or die, not in this situation. I think you just choose your side, and you stay with it no matter what happens. And you have already chosen your side.

  I open my bag, stare down at the syringe. I do not know what the clear yellow liquid it contains is. I do not know what it will do. Those things are not my job to know. Those things are not my concern. I look up again and wear my face.

  Not everyone has the option of weakness.

  I have been gone only an hour, but it is already beginning to get dark when my bus stops. I return to the bakery and find Cecily curled up on a table. “Sorry,” the baker’s wife says. “She got bored with baking about five minutes in and decided to sit by the window and wait for you.”

  I stuff Gigi’s medicine inside my coat pocket. I pick Cecily up, press my face against her soft hair. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “Can we not—”

  “Not tell anyone about this?” she whispers back, her voice groggy. “Da says you’re not supposed to leave me alone.”

  I groan. “I said I would be right back.”

  She looks pointedly at the clock on the wall and then back at me again. “Right back” means fifteen minutes to Cecily, and not a minute more. I can imagine all the ways she will play this up and how Da will fall for it. “I’ll buy you anything you want,” I tell her.

  “Good,” she says, and then she leads me toward a candy shop that’s just across the road. “Because I already know what I want. And it’s going to cost you plenty.”

  This time, on our way home, I let her ride ahead of me in the growing dark, hoping she burns all the energy from her sugar high before Gigi sees her like this. One look from her, and Da will have my head. Cecily rides more slowly this time around so that I keep bumping my bike into hers. And she rides in zigzags along the road. There are always very few cars on this road, and especially today with the news. People will be glued to their radios and televisions, but I am still wary, still looking over my shoulder.

  “Where do you go all the time?” Cecily says. “And how come you go without me? Da says you’re not allowed to have a boyfriend until you’re at least fifty, you know. Were you with your boyfriend?”

  I shake my head and sigh, reach forward and ruffle her hair. “You ask so many questions. What’s up with that, huh?”

  “I want to know what you do when I’m not with you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she says softly, suddenly near tears, and I already know the answer. “Because I want to know what Mama would have done if she was here, and Gigi says you’re most like her. And I want to know what that means because . . . well, just because.” She bites her lip, and I know she’s thinking very carefully about her next words. When she finally settles on them, she frowns at me. “Mathieu says that the reason why Mama died while she was having me was that I’m bad luck.”

  “That is,” I splutter, my fingers tightening around my handlebars, “the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my life.” Now it’s my turn to study her. “Wait. Is this why you got into those fights at school? Because Da thinks you’re mad.”

  “Meh,” she says evasively. “Boys are stupid.” She rides in her zigzag way again, and I think it’s all forgotten, but when I catch up to her again, she asks, “Is Gigi going to die because of me, too?”

  I frown. “I thought that dumb boy Mathieu was supposed to be your best friend.”

  “I know, right?” She smiles at me. I’ve stumbled upon the right thing to say for this moment and breathe a sigh of relief. But then she adds, viciously, “Dumb boy,” and barks a short laugh. Mathieu had better watch his back. My sister might be six years old, but in a way she is much older, much tougher than she seems. In that way she is the version of Lirael that Gigi was referring to. The type of girl who is strong even when she is weak. She, not me, is the most like her mother already, even now, even this young.

  When a set of headlights flashes ahead of us, my first instinct is to pull us down onto the grass, let the car pass. But it’s Da in his truck, come looking for us. He yells at me for keeping Cecily in the city so late, especially after the announcement that the Silence is over. “Who knows what is going to happen next?” I say nothing back. Finally he stops, catches me staring out at the sky, catches me not being who I should be. For months all I have done is complain loudly about the whole Silence thing, the way she would have. About the way everyone seems to have stopped living. “Let’s pretend it’s not even out there,” I said, yet here I am looking up.

  But I can’t look down. My neck is frozen.

  Cecily tells him she thinks I am coming down with something and nudges me conspiratorially. Our boyfriend, our secret. She doesn’t say it, but I let her think better of me. Let her share our imaginary little thing.

  Chapter 16

  My first duty as her, as me, happened two days after I arrived. I accompanied Gigi to the clinic not just because she was feeling ill but also because she suspected that whatever the doctor had to say, she would not want Da to hear. She didn’t want me to hear either, but I had been the one at home when the doctor had called to confirm her appointment. Gigi thrives on secrecy when it comes to her family. Always their happiness before hers. I’d known this before. I’d known it since I was nine years old, sitting there in my bunker, but it was still the sort of thing that made me nervous now.

  The clinic was white, and the smell of it reminded me of some sort of perfumed bleach. It was very small, not as flashy as all the others in the city, but Gigi had been coming here for so long she said she couldn’t remember her last doctor’s name. The paint outside the building was peeling, the window rattling, and it was so hot that the secretary kept fanning herself with the files of patients she was flipping through. The radio was on, but the signal was so bad that there was more static than music. We chose a corner of the room to sit in, and I thought about Gigi’s loyalty. I don’t know how many times I sat in the training room, watching footage of Gigi doing or saying kind things, comforting everyone else. All through our training we’d been taught to expect the unexpected, to create margins of error for the people we were learning about. Not everyone would be exactly what they seemed all the time. But Gigi was. She was exactly what I had learned my grandmother would be.

  Sitting in the waiting room, I listed all her qualities in my head as I had done during training, as I had done during my exam. I knew her whole history: That she’d grown up in a free-spirited sort of family, but she’d been good and innocent right up until the moment she met my grandfather, and as she liked to say, it was all “shot to hell” after that. She married Da and lost a son before she had my mother, and that was the most difficult part of their marriage. Once she had my mother, Gigi devoted herself to being a mother and wife. I sat there in that waiting room, counting all those things I knew, a lot of which the real Lirael would never have known because she’d had no file to read. She could never have been objective about the people she loved; she had to love them in spite of whatever they were and weren’t.

  Despite the fact that the clinic was half empty, we sat in the waiting room for hours. Every few minutes the secretary would sing off key in what she must have thought was her quiet voice, and every few minutes the old man sitting across from us would mutter, “May the good Lord take me now,” or “May the ground open up and swallow me now.” He was very dramatic about it, and Gigi and I were trying really hard not to lock eyes in case we started laughing.

  When they finally came for us, Gigi stood. “Wait out here,” she told me, and I complied. But once she came back out, I pep
pered her with questions. Her hands were shaking even though her eyes were dry, and I studied her face, perhaps even too long. She kept waving me off dismissively each time I asked what she’d been told.

  Then we walked past an ice-cream parlor, and she said, “Let’s go inside.”

  “But you hate ice cream,” I said.

  She tsked and ushered me inside. We sat on stools so tall that our feet no longer touched the ground. I ordered a banana split. The moment it arrived Gigi leaned forward, a deep crease between her brows. “That banana is brown,” she said, not exactly quietly, her lips curling.

  I shrugged. “Sometimes it happens.”

  I knew this was an insult to my grandparents. They held the world to the same standards they held themselves, as far as food was concerned. A browning banana. It was the equivalent of poison to Gigi. “You have to call that waiter back,” she said. “This is unacceptable. Your grandfather would never allow this.”

  I made a show of holding the spoon to my lips. “Only if you tell me what the doctor said.”

  But she said nothing, just looked away. I ate the ice cream, brown banana and all. She ate her vanilla scoop, both of us hating it, neither of us telling each other the truth.

  I spent the entire time surreptitiously watching my grandmother’s hands, not just because they were still shaking but because they reminded me of my own hands just three days earlier on the yellow bus. My eyes were glued to those hands, so soft. The art of holding a paintbrush to create things, of using our delicate hands at all, had been passed down in the family. It was tradition to express ourselves creatively with those hands, the only way to stay sane, and it showed. We had fingers that could bend in the wrong direction, that could twist and turn to create whatever we wanted them to create, but that day those hands were stiff and frightened. They were the kinds of hands that knew all the things your mind and the rest of your body chose to ignore, hands that understood that something bad was coming.

  Afterward we went shopping for groceries, our cover story, and Gigi bought me an expensive pair of gloves. For the coming winter, she said, but I shook my head. I tried to put it back down. “Gigi, it’s too much.”

  She waved me off again. “Never. I can spoil my granddaughter all I want.” But I knew what she meant. I imagined the words hard in her throat, struggling to find their way out. They were the kinds of words that changed things, the kinds of words that asked too much of you, and it was only once the bus had dropped us on the road and we’d started walking to the house that Gigi said them. “Don’t tell your grandfather about this.”

  We weren’t lying to everyone, exactly. We were just letting them be happy for a little while longer. “It’s the kindest thing that one person can do for another person,” Gigi said without meeting my eyes. I followed her into the house then, and inside my head I was trying to imagine what the real Lirael would do. On the one hand, if her grandmother was sick, she would want to tell her grandfather if only for the fact that it was better that someone else knew. It would be a betrayal, but at least Da could try to do something. On the other hand, if Gigi really was sick, then she would probably do everything in her power to get well, and in the meantime, wasn’t it better that Da still wore that smile on his face? That Cecily never cried at night, even if just for a little while? Which was better? What was I supposed to do?

  I wasn’t sure.

  I wasn’t sure at all.

  In a way this was my first real test in my new family, and I looked back on my training, my eight years in the cottages, and found it completely useless.

  Chapter 17

  I am upstairs in my room when someone knocks on the front door. I open my bedroom door, trying not to make a sound. Then I tiptoe closer to the staircase. I hear Da fiddle with the locks, and then Gigi exclaims happily. I haven’t heard her like that in months.

  It’s their long-lost daughter, my aunt Imogen. Except she wasn’t particularly lost; she just doesn’t like to remember that she has family until she needs something. Or at least that is what Da says.

  I lean over the banister to watch.

  “Daddy, I haven’t seen you in forever. How have you been?” Aunt Imogen exclaims. In a high-pitched voice and strange, unrecognizable accent. She’s slurring her words, too, and her makeup is smudged. Her cheeks are puffy, and her smile keeps wobbling. Actually, she looks as if she has been crying.

  Da says, “What do you want?”

  He is especially not impressed when the front door opens again and more people come inside, most of them swaying like Aunt Imogen. Her friends, she explains, and they’ll be here only a few hours. “They’ve never been on an orchard before. I told them you wouldn’t mind, Daddy. Was I wrong?”

  Da grunts a response I cannot make out. He is probably half hoping she means it because he stands at the edge of the room, waiting. He wants to show them his trees. Show them the ones he planted himself and the ones his father did. But the moment the words are out of her mouth, Aunt Imogen forgets them. She and her friends sit on the couch. They open bottles of wine and eat cheese. They cross their legs and point their toes in some sophisticated poses. They say that they are celebrating the end of the Silence, but all they really talk about is whether their alternates have found happiness with any of the boyfriends they’ve recently dumped. They are loud and raucous, clanking glasses, completely unaware of the time. “Just imagine,” one of them says, “if John is the one I was supposed to spend my life with.”

  Da leaves them there eventually. He helps Gigi up to their room. He’s muttering to her about ungratefulness and selfishness, but I swear I see him blushing with embarrassment. Their bedroom door closes with a slam.

  I stand in the shadows for a long time, staring down the stairs. Aunt Imogen was the person the real Lirael looked up to when she was a kid. She wanted to be just like her. One day her aunt was training to be a teacher; the next she’d decided she was going to be a doctor. Today she is wearing an air hostess outfit, same as all her friends. Her lips are stained with bright red lipstick, and her hair is wild.

  I jump when I realize I am not spying alone.

  “You’re supposed to be in bed,” I whisper to Cecily.

  “So are you,” she says.

  Aunt Imogen looks up suddenly. Her face brightens, and she waves. For a moment I don’t react; I just stare at her. When her hand falls, I realize I’ve waited too long to be the girl she knew. The one who loved her. Get yourself together, you idiot, I tell myself, and straighten. I walk down the stairs with a false smile on my face. She introduces me to her friends. I feign wide-eyed excitement when she tells me and Cecily about her adventures on airplanes. The whole time I am thinking, How would Lirael sit? How would Lirael stand? What would Lirael say now?

  Because I don’t know.

  It’s one thing to be a granddaughter and sister; I know Gigi and Da and Cecily like the back of my hand. Everything I studied, every moment spent in front of those screens in the cottages were meant to fool them. But Aunt Imogen isn’t supposed to be here. Nothing about her is constant, permanent. Nothing I learned two years ago about her and how to fool her even applies now. She has changed. Her hair—strawberry blond now, no longer brown—and even the way she walks are different. But it is her eyes that make me wary. Two bottomless pits that are not as sure and trusting as they once were. And she is expecting something from me, her niece.

  I smile, but I don’t want her here.

  Everything has been going so well.

  Chapter 18

  I wake up barely four hours after I put my head down. Four hours since I snuck back into the house, after completing my mission. Da knows early morning is when I am most vulnerable, when my eyes are wild and my body craves sleep. He ignores my guttural groan and hands me a hot flask. “Come on,” he says, a man shape in the dark. “We’re going to join the fishermen.” He leaves the room, and that is his mistake. When he comes back a few minutes later, I am curled around the closed flask, reveling in its warmth, pillow ov
er my head, and lost again in that dream of the old man who always finds me in sleep, who always speaks to me. I have not yet solved the riddle of why I dream about him, though I suppose, in a way, he was my answer to my life as a sleeper. I didn’t have a family, so I created one of my own. I know he isn’t real, but in my dreams that does not matter. In my dreams I belong with somebody.

  We are standing together on a piece of the ocean, standing there as if on solid ground. Look, the old man says now, pointing to a memory that replays behind us like a black-and-white movie. Look. This is your last good moment. But before I can see it, the man and the movie begin to grow smaller, begin to shrink away from me. And though I try to chase after them, there is no place to go. I am suddenly in a room with four black walls that I slam into with each step I take.

  “Lirael,” Da says, yanking the blanket off me and forcing my eyes open. He smells like cigarettes and coffee and sleeplessness, the exact opposite of what I was dreaming about. His voice is deep and strong but chopped in places, as if it is beginning to wear out. He nudges me again, more roughly this time. “I am going to carry you to the river like this, but I expect you won’t want Pierre and Philip staring at you all morning in your underthings. Then we’ll drown for sure, with Pierre and his rowing skills.”

  This time I sit up. I hold the flask to my chest and scowl into the dark. He shuffles through my drawers, pulling out clothes like he has any idea what he is doing. He gets it wrong, of course. Pulls out a shirt that he mistakes for a dress, a torn woolen hat, two left boots, but I am still in no place to find him amusing. My voice is nearly as rough as his, as if I have been screaming all night. “You’re only trying to punish me for the other night with Cecily,” I say grumpily.

  “Damn straight I am,” he says without stopping. He yanks my curtains apart, lets the first whisper of sunrise on the horizon shine through. He reaches inside his pocket and retrieves a wrapped sandwich that has been smashed into a ball shape. “Breakfast,” he says, but this time does not leave the room. This time he stands with his bent back to me, his breathing harried, as if this has taken all the effort he has and he suddenly finds himself worn out. Da is getting older every day. The orchards are becoming too much for him to bear, even with the workers who have stayed behind to help. I think he is tired. But if he is, he would rather die than admit that to me.