Madame had strong arms.
And she never changed her mind about anything, even if the little boy did.
It was only a dream. Purely a figment of my imagination. I told myself that afterward, even as I ran back to the bunkers, even as I pulled the blanket over my head and shook and cried and was afraid. All nothing. Because when you lived in the cottages, there were some things you should tell yourself you didn’t see—like a woman digging a small grave among the trees in the dark.
When the tree incident happened years later, Madame threatened me with those words: “Lirael, never again. Do you understand me? The things you think you know, the things you think you should do, always ask yourself: Am I following protocol? At the end of the day, it is the only thing that will save your life.”
But that’s not true. Sometimes three simple words—I hate you—work just as hard and just as well on the right people. Friends, real friends, the kind that shape your bones and claim little pieces of your soul, are liabilities, even if only for the fact that you are constantly worrying about them. Because when Madame said those words to me that night, I knew she could just as easily walk over to Edith’s bed, Gray’s bed, Alex’s bed the following night and ask them to come with her. She would say, “Do you think you can stop being friends with one another, the four of you?” Edith would probably shake her head like Solomon. I wasn’t sure, but it was a possibility, and I was afraid of it. That we might end up dying for one another.
I was ten years old then.
I blink out of that haze now and find Edith staring at me oddly. I want to say: Do you remember what I told you that night? The night you told me Gray was suspicious of the way Alex and Margot died? I know she does. I clutched her arm until she winced with pain and leaned in close and whispered urgently in her ear: “Tell him never to tell anyone. Never to let them know he knows. Tell him to always follow protocol.” I made her promise to tell him this. I never once suggested that he might be wrong; the thought did not occur to me. I knew we lived with a woman who was capable of anything.
But I don’t ask.
Instead I say, “We? Who is we?” She doesn’t understand, so I add, “You said ‘we’. You said ‘I and the others.’ Who are the others?” She doesn’t answer; she just blinks at me, but it’s too late. I already understand what she isn’t yet sure she wants me to know. Here we are, paranoid and afraid we are being followed or watched. “You’re all still friends,” I whisper. The shock of it makes my voice hoarse.
“She remembered an appointment and couldn’t stay,” I tell Cecily, who looks disappointed to see Edith waving at her before leaving the café.
“Oh,” she says. I can almost see her mind turning. She bites her bottom lip. “Who was that girl, Lira?”
I sit at our table and set down both of our mugs and a croissant. “You think you’re the only one who has friends?”
She gives me a look and then looks toward the exit Edith disappeared through. “Please. I know I’m the only one who has friends. So, who was she, already?”
I am still thinking about the look on Edith’s face. The fact that she didn’t deny my accusation. I reach inside my pocket and feel around for whatever she dropped inside. I find a a silver watch, but before I can study it, Cecily nudges me, and I force myself to refocus on her. “You’ve started with the questions again,” I say. “If I had a dime for every question you asked, my head would have exploded by now. And that’s not really something to be proud of.”
“Well, if I don’t ask them, how will I ever learn?” And then a stream of liquid shoots from her mouth and across the table at me. She sniffs her mug, scans the menu again. “What?” she says, outraged. “This isn’t coffee.”
Chapter 21
“Hello? Anyone there?”
Every few weeks I knock on the flower shop door, and no one answers. The man does not unlock it, and there are no signs of life inside. I press my face to the glass for several minutes and wait. Sometimes another cottage girl or boy, man or woman I do not know will be there already or will arrive just after me. The older they are, the less friendly. I remind myself that not everyone has a grandfather who insists on frequent laughter like mine does, or a little sister who will tug on your lips early in the morning until you wake because you were sleeping all wrong. We all have different roles.
But the guy I am standing with at the flower shop door today defies the norm. He is wearing a suit and shiny leather shoes that make him seem like an old rich guy even though he can’t be that much older than I am. In one hand, he is holding a skateboard, but he looks uncomfortable. As if he doesn’t even know what to do with it. I stare down at those shoes and think that Da has never owned anything so expensive. We do not live in gutters or shelters, but we are not rich either, especially this season with the orchards. Sometimes the wind blows the wrong way or it doesn’t rain and our fortunes are set for that season. This season the ratty sweater I am wearing, the old jeans, Da’s old coat all reflect that.
The guy has a scowl on his face that I don’t think can be removed even with surgery. He tries to force the flower shop door open in my wake, apparently thinking it hasn’t opened because I was not strong enough. And then, when I softly say, “Hello,” he turns to look at me as if I were crazy.
He has bags underneath his eyes; he obviously doesn’t sleep much. I take a step back because of the way he looks over my old clothes, my frayed scarf, the woolen gloves Gigi gave me last year. I can tell that he finds me unimpressive, yet still I force myself to make conversation. “I guess it’s an evaluation day.”
“Look, please stop talking, okay,” he snaps. His breath is laced with whiskey; his voice reminds me of scraping sandpaper.
“Okay.” I don’t take it personally. I walk around to the back of the shop, where weeds and thistles grow side by side and on occasion a rat scurries past my foot. There is what I think could have been a garden at some point, but it is overrun now. A large metal shed sits right behind the building; it’s even more crowded with plants than the flower shop itself. They cover every inch of the shed, including the windows. Anyone who did not know what they were looking for would assume that this was all there was. But I push past the plants, can feel the man following me to the back, where underneath a small wooden table I feel around for the lever of a hatch. The first time I came here I could not find it. Today I yank it open and enter. There is a ladder to climb, but it is so dark. At some point you have to let go and hope that you’re as close to the ground as possible.
The air inside the hatch is dank, depressing. It is different from with the plants. Down here every breath seems to echo infinitely, and yet there is no air at all. Each time you hit the ground you wait for some midnight monster to pounce, to devour you. It never happens, but I find myself holding still all the same, wishing we could do this upstairs instead. Wishing that we did not belong in the dark so much.
After a moment a flashlight flickers on to reveal a dark hallway and the man standing next to me. I open my mouth to say thank you, but he shoves me out of the way. My elbow slams into the wall so hard that for a moment I can’t feel my arm. Angry Guy doesn’t apologize, but now I am so mad I want to kick him. He walks past me, and I yell after him. “I’m sure everyone you meet cowers in front of you like some baby, idiot,” I say. “You and your cardboard face. But I’m not one of those people.” I cover my mouth, horrified. Normally I would never say anything like that.
“What?” asks the man, sounding surprised and annoyed to hear me still talking to him, but it is already over. I am walking away from him.
At the end of the hallway there is an office, and inside it sits Miss Odette Abernathy, my handler. She is behind a desk, but she has large headphones over her ears, and her eyes are closed. She smokes her cigarette halfheartedly, and her head bobs to the music. When I tap on her desk, she jumps. “Oh, Lirael,” she squeaks. “I’ve done it again, haven’t I? Gone and lost track of the time.” She scrambles to rearrange her desk, but all this
means is that her papers go flying. The room is already littered with all sorts of things—papers, empty soda cans, half-eaten chocolates. I do not know where the man in the suit disappears to. I imagine that he has his own handler to see, though I have never seen the person inside the office next door.
I sit on the chair in front of Miss Odette. She is not the old woman I had imagined she would be. All my life, at the orphanage, in the woods, all the people who have watched over me have been alternating versions of Madame—the strong, calculating types. I was shaking in my boots my first time here. But Miss Odette is tall and bubbly, with red hair and a pale, freckled face. She is not much older than thirty. She seems like the kind of person who could not hurt a fly, but then again, that is what we are meant to think. When she smiles and says, “You can tell me anything,” I almost believe her. She hands me a blank piece of paper to fill out while she does other things. Checks my blood pressure, takes a sample of my blood, makes me step out of my clothes and spin around for her. On the piece of paper I answer the same questions about my life: the most significant things that have happened this month, how they have made me feel, how they have not made me feel. About the fishing trip with Da, the way Gigi’s bones seem to be shriveling right inside her skin. Afterward Miss Odette flutters back to her desk, fumbles around for her glasses. She slides them only halfway up her nose as she reads my answers. She says nothing for so long that I rest my chin on her desk.
Finally: “Well. You certainly have a very interesting family, Lirael. I just love reading about them.” Her voice is high-pitched when she says this. Her eyes twinkle, and the smile on her face is huge, like a teacher compensating for being older than her student. She asks me more questions about my life. Some of them are hypothetical―questions like: What would you do if Da died today? How would you feel if Gigi was killed? What about Cecily? To all these the answer is the same: nothing. Secretly I think about what I said to the guy in the suit. I think about how out of character it was for me. But when the tests and questions are over, Miss Odette reaches beside her desk and retrieves a freshly printed page. On it, a graph and more numbers than I can understand. “You are doing well this month, Lirael,” she says. “Keep up the good work.”
“Thank you,” I say.
She retrieves a black bag from underneath her desk and hands it to me. When I open it, there are weapons inside: three guns, a few more knives, some rope, some wire. “They will become necessary in the coming months,” she says. “I am also advising my sleepers to train whenever they can. I understand that it is more difficult now than it was at the cottages, but we need our sleepers to be especially strong now.”
She means now that the Silence has ended.
“Yes, miss,” I say, and stuff the weapons inside my messenger bag.
She also gives me a small plastic case with enough blue and white pills to last me another month. The blue pills, I know from the cottages, is why she can print those graphs out. Madame told us that we were taking them only so that she, and one day our handlers, could print out these graphs and “monitor our levels.”
“There must always be a perfect balance,” she said, “in order for every sleeper to be at their optimal.”
It is the white pills that keep us at our optimal. That is why Miss Odette takes my blood sample. To make sure they are working well. Miss Odette smiles. “I will see you next month, Lirael,” she tells me.
I breathe a sigh of relief when I am out of her office.
I was not punished. Despite what I said to the man in the suit. Despite stepping out of the character of Lirael for that moment and becoming someone I did not recognize. Maybe there are limits, but they are pushable limits. I think about the watch Edith slipped into my pocket at the café. About her breaking the rules by staying friends with other sleepers.
There must be small ways in which I can rebel.
But this is not a dangerous thought for me to have; unlike Edith, I have no intentions.
Chapter 22
The following week it is time for a flower shop visit, but Da is taking forever putting his fruit together. By the time he has the basket ready for me, it is late afternoon, and he forbids Cecily from going. I am wearing my coat when he changes his mind and forbids me as well. “Leave it till tomorrow,” he says. “They can bake their pies then.”
I blink at him in surprise. It is almost dark. The flower shop man will be expecting me. But Da is in one of his overprotective moods, and there is nothing I can say to change his mind. I try everything. “But we can’t disappoint them,” I say. “You always say they’re counting on us.”
“And they’ll still be counting on us tomorrow, Lira,” he says, flipping through his newspaper.
So I decide to make everyone a cup of tea. I go upstairs and run my fingers underneath my mattress until I find the hole inside it. From there I retrieve the sleeping pills. I sit with Da until he announces that he is going to bed, and then I help him upstairs to where Gigi is already fast asleep. I wait until the house is quiet; then I wear my dress, my only good dress, on what has to be the coldest evening of summer and bike all the way to the flower shop, shivering. Of course the dress was a bad idea, I tell myself. Seeing Edith looking so put together inspired an improvement, but tonight I’d rather be warm. The sidewalks are sleek and shiny, an illusionary pool. Twice my bike skids out from beneath me and into the road, and I pick myself up as a car swerves and honks. By the second time there are wet patches on my dress, my hair is matted to the side of my face with mud, and my skin is covered in goose bumps. Only then do I become aware of the emptiness of the sky. No stars, no moon, an uncomfortable blackness, the kind that comes before something explodes. Now that I think of it, I wish I could remember the weatherman’s words on the radio in the kitchen this morning. I had been distracted by Cecily, by Aunt Imogen on the telephone.
The slinky silver watch Edith slipped into my pocket before she left the café is still with me one week later. I don’t know why I have not thrown it away. When I got home after the café, I was planning to drop it in the trash can, but when I reached inside my pocket, I found a piece of paper there as well, with an address written on it in Edith’s neat handwriting. “If you’re coming, turn this on, make sure the second hand is moving,” the note said. “It throws the trackers, and they won’t know where in the city you are. Please come (any night this week). XO, ―E.”
Now the watch is in my pocket, and the address has stayed in my memory. It is the perfect time. Da, Gigi, and Cecily are all fast asleep.
But I am not going.
I said this immediately when I read the note and then again when I reread it tonight. I said it when Aunt Imogen called us all into the kitchen this morning to tell us her big news: that she’d found a man to take her traveling all around Europe for the next year and she was leaving in a week. It was going to work this time because her standards were much higher and her expectations much lower. She wasn’t expecting much of the world, she said, but she’d heard someone say at a church that life happens only once. But then she could not recall whether she’d read it in a book instead, because she suddenly did not remember ever setting foot in a church, unless being in love with someone who had counted. While she spoke, Gigi sobbed, and Da glared at her, but Aunt Imogen barely noticed either of them.
I am not going.
I said it again this evening as I slid the dress on, thinking of how silly it looked on me, frumpy in places it shouldn’t be because I am not the right height, not the right size, not the right anything. A green dress with an intricate lace design that is lost in all the material catching on the wheel of my bike. I told myself that I owed the flower shop man a visit, but that was it. That was the only place I would go.
I stare now at my reflection in front of the glass of a boutique store after I’ve just picked myself up from the pavement, and my answer is firm this time.
Even if I was planning on going to Edith’s address after the flower shop, I cannot go now. Not looking like th
is.
It is completely dark. I ride to the flower shop, expecting to find no one there, but the man opens the door and frowns at me. “You didn’t turn up today,” he says. “I was beginning to think that you were dead.”
He does not ask for an explanation, and I do not offer him one. I follow him to the counter, pretend not to care about the flat tone of his voice. Why should it bother me that the flower shop man would not care if I was dead? Why should it bother me that I can think of only three people who would, and it is only because they are either too old or too young and innocent and do not know any better?
I read the instructions on the piece of paper and open my mouth, but the flower shop man beats me to it. “Tonight,” he grunts, pushing an envelope my way. “You’re usually here earlier. Was about to call it in.” And then he starts to shut down his store right there in front of me. I have no choice but to leave. I go to the nearest grocer’s and buy everything on the shopping list. I load it all onto my bicycle and pedal to the warehouse, but even before I reach it, I can already tell there is going to be a problem. A group of angry-looking kids stand in front of the building, smoking and drinking around a garbage can fire. They spot me just as I am turning around, but before I can pedal far, someone catches up to me: someone with cold, dry hands, who lifts me right off the bike and throws me. This time when I hit the ground, it really hurts. I stare up at the black sky, gasping for breath. Forever seems to pass this way.
Sometimes I forget that there is bad in this world. I mean, I know there is, but when I think of bad things, I think of us. The cottages, the sleepers. I picture us with horns, with blood dripping down our faces like vampires, with our knives and guns and porcelain smiles. I do not think of them. Wanting things they cannot have. Taking things they do not want.
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