The Unquiet

  “I don’t have any doubts, Jack.”

  “Yes, you do. And they’re only going to get worse.”

  “Okay,” I say. I want to leave. This is not what I need. Not after leaving Edith and Gray and the farmhouse behind.

  “Have you ever been back?”

  I’m not really sure what I am asking. Where? I am asking, but he shakes his head.

  “After a while,” he says, “the two sides of a coin start to look exactly the same. You can’t tell whether you’re looking at two heads or two tails. You accept whichever side you’re standing on.”

  I sit on the bench and pull my legs up against my chest, stare off into the distance, watching the children play. I am convinced now that it’s not a good idea to have this much time to think during a war, to ask questions, to witness the world. Look at what happened with Edith. The best kind of war is one fought with one’s eyes closed. A war where you hold a gun and you don’t know where you are shooting.

  But no. That’s not right either. There is nothing brave about that kind of war. Only cowards fight it.

  “You should try to eat more,” he says quietly. “You should try to . . . hide the way you feel. Do everything you can to keep it from them. If you seem weak in any way, it’s only a matter of time before they kill you, no matter what your handler says.”

  I know, I think, which surprises me. Even still, I hear Madame’s whispered threat every night before I fall asleep. “Weak, weak little girl.” Maybe I have never stood a chance. I picture Miss Odette behind her desk. What do her smiles really mean?

  Nobody lies better than a handler, not even a sleeper.

  “I don’t even know the way I feel,” I confess.

  “Tell me,” Jack says. “Did you stop eating after you killed her?”

  I don’t meet his eyes. “I’m just thin, is all, Jack. There’s no crime against that. Leave me alone.”

  “It’s strange,” he says, “who we become when we’re not being who we’re supposed to be. Sometimes you’re walking along on your merry way, and you think you’re happy until you meet someone. And suddenly it occurs to you, for the first time, how lonely you are. How you don’t want to die alone after all. Suddenly all your plans are shot to hell.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please don’t go getting any ideas.”

  I hate how carefully he watches me. I hate how transparent I apparently am. I feel like I am standing outside my skin. “I’ll bet you weren’t always this sad,” he says to the ground after a while. “You were probably very different before they brought us here.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Maybe not. But I’d like a friend at the end, and I haven’t got much time left. Just a friend, nothing more. So, if I can get clearance from both our handlers, will I see you again?”

  “No,” I say, and stand abruptly. The last thing I need is another friend problem, and a dying one at that.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  “I said no.”

  He rubs his knees again. “Meet me at the café down the street this time next week. There’s more hope than you think. I’ll tell you all about it.”

  I walk away, but then I come back because I have left my scarf behind. I snatch it out of his hand, but I suspect my fury doesn’t even reach my eyes, that my eyes are as blank as they ever are.

  “I have a feeling that we are meant to save each other,” he says softly, letting the scarf go. “That’s all.”

  “From what?” I say.

  I don’t look at him as I walk away. I don’t wait for his answer.

  Nothing is ever that simple.

  Chapter 31

  At my next meeting with Miss Odette she beams at me. “Good news,” she says. “I have an assignment for you.”

  I flinch even before she elaborates. When I first became a Safe and she explained assignments to me, I secretly hoped that I would never have one. I prefer my life the way it is, but I cannot tell her that. Instead I force myself to return her smile. I sit in my chair stiffly while she explains that whenever sleepers are sick or need assistance in some way, another sleeper is assigned to them. “For however long you are needed, of course,” she says, and an invisible noose tightens around my neck.

  It’s like I’ve switched one terrible friendship for an even worse, mandatory one.

  I arrive at the café early the following day. I sit by a window so I’ll see when he’s coming and I can show him: You cannot force someone to be your friend. I have it all planned out. I won’t smile; he’ll say things I will not respond to. I cannot imagine what he might have said to Miss Odette to convince her that someone like me should be assigned to him.

  When he finally hobbles inside the café, I have ordered my second cup of coffee and a brioche. The brioche is only half eaten, and he notices that. I imagine he thinks he knows me from that half-eaten brioche, can feel his judgment leaving marks on my skin.

  He offers me a smile as he sits. “Thank you for coming,” he says. As if I had any choice in the matter. When he takes off his hat, his hair sticks up at odd angles. He orders a bowl of soup from the waitress and stares out the window. “Where did you just come from?”

  I cross my arms and lean back. My voice is monotonic. “I delivered a bottle of poison to a man who lives with his wife and his three children in an apartment a few blocks from here. Last week I delivered a gun to the same guy. I assume he is not using the poison on the same people.”

  “You don’t like me, do you?” he asks.

  I shrug.

  He leans forward, fascinated. “Why don’t you like me?”

  I sigh and make a show of looking at the time. “I can tell you’ll get me in some kind of trouble.”

  “So you think if you’re mean, I’ll leave you alone? Is that your tactic?”

  I tap my fingers on the table without answering.

  He stares at my face for a moment, as if I were an open book that he was reading. Then he leans forward, his tone conspiratorial. “Do you want to know who we’re killing when we deliver whatever they send us?”

  I meet him halfway. My eyes bore into his, and I will myself not to blink, not to seem as insignificant as I feel. “What I want to know, Jack,” I say with venom in my voice, “is why they allow people like you to exist when a war is coming. Weakness is such a nonsleeper quality. Honestly I’m surprised you’ve managed to skate by this long.”

  After I’ve said this, I wait. But he doesn’t leave like he’s supposed to. He looks at me steadily.

  My shoulders deflate. Now what am I supposed to do?

  “Let me tell you a secret, Lirael,” he whispers, leaning in even closer. “I don’t care about the war or the world.”

  “That’s treason,” I warn him.

  “Of course it is. That’s why I’m saying it. Because no one can stop me now.”

  “Of course they can stop you,” I say, frowning. “You’re still alive.” I hate that word, they. It implies somehow that we are apart from them. The truth is that if I were ordered to kill Jack at this moment, I would not hesitate, nor he for me. They is really only we.

  We sit in silence for a while longer, and then Jack says, “I was trying to think of something we could do together, and I decided to write that play. Or maybe a short story. Something interesting anyway. That’s better than learning to skateboard, right? I figure we could meet here once a week. I’ll write; you’ll edit. Does that sound good?”

  A man strums a guitar in a corner of the room and sings a wistful song about birds and the color of the sky. “What sounds good,” I mutter, “is you finding another sleeper for this.”

  He ignores my lack of enthusiasm. And when we both leave the café, he still hasn’t changed his mind. The next time I see him, he’s carrying a typewriter that he says he’s owned forever and some notebooks. Inside the books are stories he started a few years ago but never finished. Now that he’s had time to think about it, he tells me, he is e
namored with the idea of writing something down.

  “You can never print it,” I say.

  “I don’t need to print it. But it would be mine, you know? Not something they made me do.”

  I watch him speak, hands waving about animatedly. I have never heard of anyone having a midlife crisis so young. But even as I think that, I remember the farmhouse and realize that I know the feeling. Of wanting to be someone else, somewhere else, for a little while.

  I begin to feel sorry for Jack again. But feeling sorry for him and enjoying sitting here with him are two different things. He hands me the notebooks. Tells me to flick through them. “Which idea do you think I should work on?”

  I flick to a random page with as little interest as I can muster, and eventually he has to select a story without me. He chooses one about a man who transforms into a dog. He turns to his typewriter, eyes narrowed with concentration, and I look away. I don’t have the strength to tell him that it’s the trying—trying to be different, trying to change what we are—that eventually hurts us.

  Somehow time passes like this. One week becomes two, becomes a month, without my being aware of it. One month of listening, of pretending not to care.

  “So. The next time you see me, I’ll probably be in a chair,” Jack says suddenly one day. I blink to find him sitting across from me, holding a walking cane this time because his legs hurt. He has told me things I have not heard, asked me questions I have not answered. I have to calculate in my head to realize that I have been assigned to him for three months now. Three months of insults, of eye rolls, of cafés. My coldness is nothing like how the real Lirael should be; we both know it. I am the crueler version of her, but Jack bears it. Smiles despite it.

  His persistence makes me sad. And it makes me tired of ignoring him. “What do you say about me in your reports?” I ask, cutting him off in mid-sentence.

  “That you’re doing a spectacular job,” he says.

  I rest my chin on the cushion of my palm. “Why?”

  He looks embarrassed for a moment before offering me a wry smile. It almost makes him handsome. “I’m a bit of a masochist, I suppose.”

  “I’ll bring my sketchpad next time,” I say. His eyes widen in surprise. He was in the middle of telling me something about the latest chapter of his great book. “I paint better, but I think I can draw a couple of dog pictures. To go with the finished product. Okay?”

  This is as close to an apology as I can manage.

  He nods.

  I ride my bicycle home with a few pages from his story. Since the cottages I’ve hardly read any books. I hide his story inside the mattress of my bed where I keep my pills and pore over it by flashlight when everyone has gone to bed until my hands are stained with red ink.

  “What did you think?” he asks the next time I see him.

  I hand back the pages. “That you should never have quit your day job. And that maybe you’d be better at the skateboarding thing than this.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” he says, and then he laughs and continues typing.

  Frost coats the leaves at night even though spring was supposed to have begun weeks ago. Gigi says this does not bode well for the trees, that it is a bad omen, the promise of a short summer, a long, cold winter. Da reasons that dooming things with words is the omen, and so they spend the morning arguing about who is right. This is nothing new. I eat as much toast as I can manage before I’m outside in the sun, apron drawn over my clothes. Since we cannot afford more, I use my paints sparingly. This is nothing like the cottages, when we were encouraged to engage in as many hobbies of alternates as we could. When some mornings my brushes would be dripping with paint long before anyone was awake.

  I sit on the veranda. Cecily is at school, and it is just me, hours after I have finished my own schoolwork. When I dip my brushes in the paint, my fingers itch in a way they haven’t in a long time, but today nothing comes out right. No proportions, no colors, no slant of light can explain whatever it is I am trying to say.

  I do not know what I am trying to say.

  In the afternoon Cecily sits next to me, her legs crossed. She is drawing her own things, too, although she keeps looking at mine for cues, frowning because a certain blob of red does not make sense where I put it. For a moment I watch her, and I am suddenly overcome with something. I don’t know what. A feeling that should not be inside me. It is uncomfortable, and so I try to get it out. “Hey, Ceilie,” I say softly, “I’m not dying, okay? You don’t have to take over anything for me. You can just you can relax, okay?”

  She nods, but I can tell she’s not convinced. “Da says you got skinny because you wanted to die. I heard him telling Gigi. I heard him say that something made you sad. Was it us?”

  “That’s not . . .” I turn back to my drawing, suddenly afraid. It’s like I am waking up from the wrong dream. I did not realize they had noticed. The difference between me and my alternate. The fact that I arrived with no appetite.

  “Why then?” my sister asks; her shoulders slump from carrying the weight I put there.

  And I fail her without the answer, without the correct words. But the truth is written up there in the sky for everyone to see. Our war. And it is written in the ground, where no one can hear its screams. Her sister. The watery ghost girl who sits by me every single day, who follows me around, still fourteen. Still wearing that green dress, those black rain boots. There when I sleep, when I wake, when I am in the orchards pretending that I am all alone, when I sit at the table with my family. I think of her, and sometimes I cannot keep the food down, and it shows. For every moment she is here, I waste away just a little bit more.

  But no one was supposed to carry the weight of that but me.

  Sometimes I feel broken. I feel like them. Heavy, weighed down by the world. Jack tells me that the secret of living isn’t feeling light but being able to carry that weight and to understand that it was worth it and why. Every time you see her ghost, remember why you had to do what you did. “But once you lose that,” he tells me, “once you forget the meaning of who you are, then you are lost, and there is no hope.”

  When I give him a skeptical look, he adds, “I couldn’t care less about the war. I just care about helping you survive it.”

  Sketching in the café is hard. Everything on the page plays out in black and white; there are no colors to hide behind. But I start to look forward to it every week.

  This, I have decided, is my purpose after all. This, him— not Edith and her friends, not farmhouses and dare lists. I almost drive myself mad sometimes. Afraid that their screens are focused on me in the farmhouse. That they are watching me again, except this time like they would any other subject. In the end I have to let it go and hope that they are not. I have made my choice; I cannot change it. For all his complaining about the world, Jack would never ask me to risk my life the way they did.

  I have reluctantly given up on the idea of being alone. It seems that every time I think, Okay, I am going to try to be alone now, it never works. I never had a father or a brother. I had no mother. No family but Madame. No life but the cottages. I always thought it was something I didn’t care about. Sometimes I think that loneliness is just another word for fear.

  At the café Jack sits at the back with an old chunky typewriter his father gave him, keys clacking away. He prefers this to a laptop. I sit across from him, my fingers bruised from holding my pencil for so long. The first dog I finish makes Jack laugh hard because it looks a little deformed. “If a horse and a bear had a baby,” he begins, but changes his mind.

  Once I get over the insults, I understand his point. I pick up my pencil and try again.

  He sends me home with his pages, and each time I come back with more red marks. For weeks we sit at the café, and neither of us has finished anything.

  “You have an imagination, Lira,” Jack says one afternoon, laughing. “You imagine that I’m going to live forever. You think my hands are going to keep working, but in truth I�
�m losing feeling in them already.”

  I push his chair out of the café and into the world. I lean down and whisper in his ear, “Stop making excuses, Jack.” We eventually agree that he is going to live for at least a century.

  We have known each other for nearly four months when Jack tricks me into visiting a funeral parlor with him. Something about the idea of being handled by someone who does not even know his name, of being put in the ground by someone like that, frightens him. He would rather choose how he goes and when. He doesn’t tell me this in advance, of course. He just asks me to meet him at a “new café” he has discovered on a different street. I am still standing outside the building that says EXQUISITE FUNERALS, in letters far too exquisite for such a gray affair, when he arrives in the taxi.

  “I don’t like this,” I tell him, helping him out. He leans heavily on me for a moment before finding his balance.

  He’s frowning at the building, too. “I don’t like it either. But we’ll do it as quickly as possible, and then we’ll never talk about it again.”

  He chooses a black coffin. He tells the salesman that he wants a simple box, the simplest they can find, and even that is surprisingly harder to find than we can imagine. It seems that people don’t want simplicity when they die. They want something more, something extravagant, exquisite. I don’t understand it. Why? I want to ask the salesman, a round man with long feet, who waddles about the room, waving his hands to the left and to the right. Why, when it is already over, when after a little while only the ground will remember you and even that only for a short time?

  As we walk around the room, I cannot help the feeling that crawls out of my throat and down my neck, down my spine. I shake my head, trying to clear it, but I cannot stop thinking about my life as a sleeper. Is this it? Is this all we get from them, after everything we will give to this war? We fight for them, and then they pay for our coffins?

  It is not enough. To be a sleeper and then to die with nothing, no one. I want more than this.