The Unquiet

  Julia and I turn to look at her. “But his brother is responsible for the deaths of half the people in the movie.”

  Edith stuffs her mouth with popcorn. “I just don’t see the relevance in all that. The way I see it, only one thing really matters when a girl has to choose between two guys, and it is this: Does he have good teeth or does he not? Only one brother in this movie is even remotely worth considering, and I can’t believe they’re trying to sell the other one to us because he’s a nice guy.”

  Edith delivers all this in a deadpanned way that makes our eyes water.

  We eventually lower our voices but only because the usher walks into the room and eyes us suspiciously. Whenever the movie lights up his face, he looks like some kind of bogey monster. Julia keeps making noises like she’s deeply affected by the movie. Small gasps, with her hands clutching at her throat. Edith and I copy her until our shoulders shake with laughter.

  A man dies; we laugh. His wife breaks down at the funeral; we laugh larder.

  The usher frowns at us a moment longer before he leaves. He cannot do anything about the fact that we all are clearly mad.

  When he is gone, we laugh until everything hurts. We are not laughing for any good reasons. We just laugh because we can. It tastes like rebellion in my mouth, and I am afraid of it. The fact that I can laugh. That I choose to be here doing these things, terrified of what might happen if we are caught, yet still laughing. I hold a shaking hand to my chest and feel how fast my heart beats. “Stupid, stupid,” it says.

  Afterward I cannot even remember what the film was about.

  The others are more carefree. They laugh as though they’ve known this game a long time. I will never fit in, not in the way they want me to. It doesn’t help that I am the youngest, that I know the least about life, that I do not go out to clubs or parties like they do. I do not have rich parents or an expensive school. In a way I am less than they are, but then Edith links her arm through mine and whispers, “I’m glad you came,” and I can tell she means it in a way I still do not understand. I do not question it. It is hard but not impossible to turn my mind off just this once.

  The three of us agree to ride separately and meet up with the others. I ride my bike, and Edith catches one bus while Julia catches another, yet we’re all headed for the same destination.

  But when we reach the farmhouse, the others are waiting, quiet. Roberta stares down at the ground, as if there were something interesting there. “What’s wrong?” Julia asks, her eyes wide.

  It’s Robbie who answers. “I had an assignment today,” he says, and his voice actually sounds shaky. He clears his throat a couple of times. “A bunch of sleepers.”

  I frown at him, then at Roberta, Gray, Davis. I realize that they all are afraid of something. This makes me so terrified I cannot move. Edith opens her mouth to make an argument. “But, Robbie,” she says carefully, “this isn’t your first time—”

  Robbie shakes his head. “You don’t understand. The address I was given. It was right where they were staying. It was a place like ours. They were . . . meeting there. Like us. Some apartment in the city.”

  It’s as if he is slapping us in the face with icy water. The idea that there are others like us, bending the rules like us, that they died for it. I can barely stay standing, and Julia actually collapses onto a chair. This is our warning. Probably the only one we will get. We have to stop this now. We have to say good-bye.

  Miss Odette said that all sleepers needed to be ready. What if they are checking on us all, to make sure we are? What if the end of the Silence means more for sleepers like us than just more missions?

  They could be watching us right now.

  It’s a long time before I find my voice. “What should we do?” I half whisper, and I am hoping, hoping, that someone says this is over. The farmhouse, the meetings. Someone else, not me. Because now we know for sure that meeting like this is the most dangerous thing we could be doing. Any second now the door could burst open. Any second now a round of bullets that will erase us.

  All it takes is one moment of carelessness. That moment might even have happened already.

  But no one says it.

  Not a single one of us.

  Instead Robbie says, “But those kids were not Safes. They had a lot of surveillance on them.” It sounds like something heavy is pressing down on his throat.

  “Okay,” Edith says. “Okay.” She sounds even worse than Robbie. “Then they were nothing like us. So we have nothing to be worried about. Right?”

  We all nod our heads without actually looking at one another.

  We tell ourselves that we are much more careful.

  In the end the most frightening thing isn’t the fact that we might die from this. It’s the fact that we know it. And yet we blow that knowledge away from ourselves like feathers.

  What weight will this choice carry?

  I am terrified of the answer.

  In the end maybe the brave ones are also the foolish ones. Maybe only fools are ever truly brave.

  At first our list consists of silly things. We sit outside in the trees and spin bottles and plant kisses on each other. Me on Julia. Julia on Davis, and he acts like he has died and gone to heaven.

  “Does this mean we’re in a relationship now?” Davis asks, fluttering his eyelashes. “Me, you, Lira, what do you say?”

  “You watch way too much television,” Julia says, laughing.

  Robbie and Gray are a lot more reserved than the rest of us. That makes sense; they have seen and done worse things as Safes than we can imagine. Instead they watch over us like sentinels. They scare me a little with how serious they are. Once, I offer Gray a small smile, just to see if he will return it, and when he does, he looks as though he doesn’t smile often. It’s one of those dark, miserable looks. Davis is the opposite. We have to beg Davis to put his clothes back on. We have to beg Davis to stop drinking.

  Then we have chocolate milk shake contests that cause brain freezes, laced with some special ingredient Julia won’t reveal. We run back into the house and make them, and then I hold my head and whisper, “Oh, God, it’s almost worse than dying.”

  “Almost?” Davis slurs, milk shake all over his shirt. “What do you mean almost? Are we standing in the same room right now?”

  “Um,” Julia squeaks, “is it also supposed to cause temporary blindness?”

  My eyes snap open, and we’re all squinting at Julia. “Wait,” I say. “We don’t know the consequences of what all these things we’re going to do are? I thought you did the research.”

  She nods, but she’s rubbing her eyes like they’re about to fall out.

  I laugh, but Roberta doesn’t find it so funny. “What exactly is next on your list, Julia?”

  “Well,” Julia says, blushing, “the bridge is—”

  “Okay, I’m gonna stop you right there,” Roberta says, holding up her hand. “It’s dangerous enough that we’re meeting like this. Am I the only one who thinks we shouldn’t be doing things that involve blindness and bridges and possibly never waking up again tomorrow morning?”

  We all raise our hands, and Julia coughs. “But that’s the whole point.” She sounds young and mousy as she looks around the room at each of us, as if we’re back at the cottages and she’s trying to become one of us again. I want to hug her, and this surprises me. I want to tell her that there is no us, or if there is, she is more of a member than I will ever be. When Roberta suggests rethinking the list altogether, Julia’s shoulders fall, but she hasn’t given up yet, and underneath her breath she adds, “Gray found us some motorcycles. They’re outside.”

  The motorcycles. That’s how Roberta loses her battle. One by one we make our excuses and shuffle outside as quickly as we can, heels clicking in excitement. I have never ridden a motorcycle before, and the rule is this: one of us rides the thing while the other tries to stand on it without falling. “You’re being really stupid,” Roberta hisses when she hears this plan. “Let’s say we
find out that we’re not invincible tonight. Then what?” She doesn’t wait for an answer; she storms back inside the house and from the window watches us put on our helmets. I stare after her. It’s strange because she seems like a tough sort of girl, with her cropped hair and the stud in her nose, but she looks horrified at the prospect of riding with us. We leave her at the farmhouse, and although we don’t go far, we go far enough that the noise of motorcycles and raucous teenagers will not wake anybody up.

  Nothing is more terrifying than standing unprotected, willing your body to stay upright, to defy gravity. Nothing more than staring danger right in the eye; it makes my cheeks hot and my palms sweaty. But in this moment, standing here on the motorcycle, I do not feel any more afraid than I do on a daily basis. Robbie is driving, and at first he goes slowly, but I say, “Faster,” and then again. Faster, faster, but still nothing. It is the same as waiting to die in those bunkers when we were children, not knowing which ones of us would disappear before we could become our alternates. Still, I fight for it, shutting my eyes and holding my hands up. I am trying to muster the feelings I’m sure a normal teenager would have. I am trying to prepare myself, trying to miss someone, anyone, but I am still me. I am me, and I can tell when the others are done that they feel the same.

  Julia’s list hasn’t made us normal. It hasn’t made us forget, and it’s only when we’re on our way back that Robbie tells us about Roberta. “You don’t know this,” he says, “but her alternate had a brother who died in a motorcycle accident a few months ago. That’s why she’s being this way.”

  “Dammit, Robbie,” Edith says, slapping his arm. “This is something you tell us before we leave her behind. I thought she was just being her usual controlling self. We have to go get her.”

  “We have to figure out something else that she can do with us,” Julia says.

  I am the one who comes up with the plan. I lead the group to the train tracks near the city where we can hear the howling noise getting closer. The game is this: to come close to something, to that thing, that ending, without letting it touch us. So we press our bodies to the ground in a line, holding hands. Edith on my left, Gray on my right, both of their hands warm and dry in mine. The only part of us missing is Alex. We’re lying there for so long that I’ve almost fallen asleep.

  When the train comes, it will crush me. It will tear me up into a thousand tiny pieces that can never come back together again. It is this feeling I am counting on. I fill my head with it until someone swears and we all scramble out of the way with only a hair’s worth of time to spare.

  But afterward I put a hand to my chest, and it’s beating at its usual steady pace. As if I am not frightened enough. Nothing. Nothing is enough. Why? We ask this question all night. When we think of Madame, we are afraid. When we think of the cottages and all our training, and even now when we remember our examinations. But standing unprotected on a moving bike, waiting for a passing train, all the things that would frighten a normal teenager . . .

  We are desperate now. I know this because just a few hours later Roberta leads us to the bridge. It is a small thing in the middle of nowhere. A crossover landmark, half broken down, with a large river underneath that must run all the way through our orchards. We have to drive nearly an hour from the farmhouse just to reach it, but the drive is worth the isolation it affords us. For a while there is silence as we stare down over the railing.

  It’s terrible because of what the water means to us, because of how much we hate it. Because of what it did to us, all of us, growing up. Being dropped into the ocean as children was bad enough, but after Solomon, and after our living through Madame’s method of conditioning, it is hard to overcome the idea that water leads to death and near-death experiences. Someone tries to estimate how deep the water might be, but the words are just noise in my ears.

  I am not sure at exactly what moment this stops being a contest. I am not sure when it becomes important. I am only aware of my fingers on the buttons of my shirt. I let it fall to the ground, and then I stand there with the others, all of us half naked and shivering. We’re supposed to count to ten and jump together. That is the plan. Edith and Gray are on either side of me. I count, “One, two . . .” but I close my eyes and jump on “three.” We all do.

  Ten seconds are too long to wait to find out, to be afraid, to feel normal.

  I fall too fast to do anything but scream. The moment I hit the water I lose track of everyone else. The river is cold as ice as it envelops my body, but I tell myself that all I have to do to survive it is swim. It is that simple. Swim, and the water will become nothing. I flap my hands until my body begins to move toward the bank. Next to me the others are doing the same, frantically. This is not the same as the train. It is nothing like standing on the motorcycles.

  This is Madame we are fighting against.

  I am relieved when I reach Davis where he crouches and retches on the bank. I lie down on my back and try to catch my breath. My arms and legs are numb, but I don’t care. My heart is beating so hard it might find a way out of my chest. I hear it. I feel it.

  This is what we have been looking for.

  The water will always be terrible. But I am relieved that there was something, that frantic feeling, that loss of calm. It became a different kind of game there for a while, but we have conquered the cottages. Not completely, but enough.

  We stumble back to our farmhouse, collapse inside. We sleep the day away, and then we agree to spend our second night underneath the stars. We toast marshmallows around a fire and make up songs. And now our list consists of books we want to read, of films we want to see, of schools we want to go to. Mostly we’re joking, happy to be around one another. Davis does the naked thing again, and Roberta threatens to cut off all the parts that are offensive to her. Davis swears, not sure whether she is serious, and stumbles back into his clothes, and for a little while all we can do is laugh.

  At some point it stops being so funny. It becomes a little sad, but that just means that we try harder to laugh over it. To pretend that nothing is wrong. Robbie wants to be a dentist one day? Okay, ha-ha. Julia wants to teach kindergarten, ha-ha-ha. The worst part is Edith. “I want children when I’m older,” she announces suddenly. “And a husband and a nice job and a pretty house.”

  I immediately stop laughing. Julia and the others still try, almost desperately now, but Edith will not let go of her sudden melancholy. And without knowing what exactly she is sad about, I am suddenly sad, too. She stares down into the flames, watches her marshmallow burn without retrieving it, and says softly, “Do you remember when we girls had the procedure when we first arrived at the cottages, Lira?”

  Everyone looks at me, and I blush. “Yes,” I say.

  “We had it, too, in our cottages,” Roberta says. “Madame said it was a new procedure they’d just started doing. For a special kind of sickness that only affects girls. A sickness we could only get from being around boys.”

  “The boys had an injection,” Davis says. “For some secret disease, too. We figured it out later.”

  Edith touches a hand to her belly. Her eyes are glazed, and I have never seen her like this. “Is there anything they didn’t do to us?” she whispers. She suddenly seems older. Infinitely older, as if there is no touching her and all the wrinkles in the world are not enough to catch up. It is dangerous to be so sad, to be so angry. And it is easy to jump from a small thing like clenched fists to questioning our cause. She continues. “Do you remember Madame said to each of us, ‘Do you want to get better?’ Every single one of us. And we had to say yes or she wouldn’t do it? As if yes means anything to a kid. As if yes counts when you don’t know what you’re saying yes to.”

  “Stop it,” Gray says quietly. I’ve almost forgotten he is here, but then he takes Edith’s marshmallow stick from her and puts the flame out. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  No one says anything for a while. We can’t think of anything to say.

  In the end Edith
attempts to make a joke of it. “It’s just as well, I suppose,” she says. “With how much fooling around went on at the cottages, the world would be overpopulated by now.”

  She forces herself to laugh harder. She acts drunk, but I know for a fact that she hasn’t had anything to drink. Gray keeps frowning at her, and eventually she stands. They walk toward the farmhouse together. Davis tries to follow them, but I stick my foot out as he passes, and he falls. “What did you do that for?”

  “It’s none of our business,” Roberta says, though she has her head cocked to the side, trying to listen.

  Davis sits up and rubs his elbows. “You’re such a bloody spoilsport sometimes, Harrison.”

  I smile. “Thanks.”

  We cannot hear their exact words, but they are arguing. They glare at each other when they return and sit on opposite sides of me. I hold my hands out in front of the fire. I am not cold, but it is something to do while the silence festers.

  Nobody, not even Davis, knows what to say to fix the mood.

  I nudge Edith with my leg. “What’s the silliest thing you’ve had to do since you became a sleeper?”

  My question works. She sits up straighter. “Oh, God,” she says. “That would have to be the time I had to let some idiot mug me. I was fifteen, we were at the farmers’ market, and I couldn’t exactly break his nose. So I had to stand there screaming like I was the weak pathetic human she used to be.”

  We laugh. Davis gives his own exaggerated version of something that happened when he first left the cottages. An incident with a tractor that was harder to drive on their farm than it had been to simulate at the cottages, and all the crops he destroyed in one afternoon.

  Eventually Edith is smiling, really smiling again.

  Still.

  One day we will look back and hate this night.

  More and more I get the sense that we think our lives will be short. Shorter at least than they’re meant to be. That whole children thing. There isn’t going to be anybody in the world like me or Edith or any of us ever again. Right now we are a necessity, but one day they won’t need us anymore. I think about the words Edith did not say. I think about all the Madames in all the cottages.