The Unquiet

  “How was work?” she finally groans, opening just one eye. She thinks I’m a waitress at a café.

  I ignore her question. “I thought we agreed that you would sleep on the couch and I would sleep here. In my room. And I thought we said that you would drop Cecily at school today.”

  She stares at me, as if she has no idea what I am talking about. And then she jumps up from my bed and rushes into the bathroom, where she stays for an hour. Cecily, who does not hide her hatred, turns up the volume on the television to drown out the retching sounds. “I have bad ears,” she explains apologetically when Aunt Imogen screams for the noise to stop. “My teacher says that you might need to take me to the doctor to get me checked. You know what a teacher is, right? It’s that person at that place called school that I’m supposed to go to every day.”

  “Lirael, make her stop,” Aunt Imogen says.

  I shake my head. “But it’s really not that loud, not for me at least.” I frown. “Are you feeling okay, Aunt Imogen?”

  The bathroom door slams again, and Cecily pretends to walk past me, but our hands meet in the air in a secret high five. Our aunt is predictable. She dresses quickly and storms out of the apartment. We don’t know where she goes. “Thank the Lord!” Cecily shrieks, and bolts the door quickly behind her and turns down the television and opens the curtains. We both know, though, that later tonight our aunt will return with tears, with promises and that eventually it will be Cecily who breaks first, who says, “Gigi said she was family,” as if that means something. Da is gone. This is the best we get now.

  I go to the flower shop more frequently than ever before. I told Miss Odette that I wanted more and more jobs, and she was only too happy to give them to me. Now, no matter when I go, there is always a mission, always a delivery. Today I stand in front of a knitting shop until a man I do not know walks up to me and says, “It’s a pretty day, isn’t it?” He gestures around to all the melted slush, which contradicts him, and I pass him the piece of paper with a name on it. These Safes are the worst ones, the ones who kill anything and anyone without blinking. I can see it in his hollow eyes. If I pick up tomorrow’s newspaper or maybe the one the day after or listen to the radio, I will hear of someone who died or is in the hospital under strange circumstances, with the same name as on my paper. Some important politician, some lawyer or professor. But I never do. Those things matter even less with me now.

  My only interest in newspapers is in the hangings. In the past year and a half there have been fourteen different instances, and those are just the ones reported. They are less frequent these days, once every few months, but I am still uneasy. Something is happening behind our backs. Something that even Miss Odette cannot explain to me. Whatever that thing is might one day get me killed.

  I walk home feeling as though I am being followed. Once I walked around my block three times before entering my building. I train every night when Cecily is asleep. My gun is always ready, and then for weeks nothing happens. The newspapers are empty, and I think, Maybe it’s okay.

  Then the following day there is another story about two people and their red ribbons, found hanging.

  The rest of the world believes in serial killers.

  But what I believe is worse.

  I see Gray again a few weeks later. I am sitting alone on a bench in a small park when he walks up to me, and this time he meets my eyes immediately. At first I think he’s only here to say hello, but then he says the words: “It’s a pretty day, isn’t it?” As I pass him the note, I don’t know why I am surprised. I knew this was his job. He stuffs the note inside his pocket, nods at me. He is eighteen now, closer to nineteen than not. Right away I start to notice things about him that I compare back with the cottages and with the last time I saw him: He is taller; his voice is deeper; his eyes have grown dimmer, no longer full of that fire from when Alex died. There is an underlying confidence about him, as if he understands the world perfectly now, and his place in it. I hope that I look exactly the same way.

  “Thanks,” he says, his voice a quiet rumble.

  By the time I realize that he was waiting for me to say something, acknowledge him in some way, I am standing alone. I try to name the last look he gave me for days and for weeks. Shame. Shame was written all over Gray’s face, and that baffles me. What is there to be ashamed of? Did we both not turn out the way we were meant to? Maybe there is a rule about the ones who take lives and the ones who only help do it, but then which one of us is the better person? The one who provides the knife and the name or the one who uses them?

  In my mind, Gray leads to Edith. What happened to her plan after I left? Were they all part of it?

  Worse than that, did she ask Gray and Robbie to carry out the hangings?

  I told myself I wouldn’t care, but I am suddenly terrified of the answer. I have to believe that this is the only reason why, the next time I see Gray, I follow him and watch him kill a person without so much as flinching. As if it has become second nature to him. Gray, with the eyes, with the emotions, the same little boy who was kind to animals once upon a time. Afterward he stands outside the building and smokes, staring down at the ground, one bloodied hand stuffed into his coat pocket, the other holding the cigarette.

  Suddenly I understand his shame, although not why he offered it to me like that. Why he let me see.

  No, I decide as I walk away.

  Gray wouldn’t hang sleepers.

  Once I notice Gray, I start to recognize others from the cottages just like him whom I deliver packages to. I must have been seeing them for months without ever realizing it. A girl named Poppy, who had the worst giggling fits at the most inappropriate times. A boy named Bennett with dreadlocked hair. Another boy, named Dylan, who wet the bed until he was ten, who sat with the girls because the boys teased him so. And more, and more, and more. I am sure that there are other Safes like me, who only deliver the names and the weapons, whom I will never know and never remember because we are careful not to be seen. Careful to remain invisible, but we all are here. An invisible network of seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds who grow older and colder and crueler every passing second. Two sides working together, each telling itself that it is better than the other.

  But I am better. I am.

  I think about whoever is out there hunting down sleepers.

  I have to believe that somehow, somewhere there are worse monsters in the world than me.

  Chapter 35

  I go to the farmhouse to prove something to myself. It has been nearly two years since I have been there, since I have seen Edith. I go to the farmhouse because I want to know if it is in the same state I left it. If it is, then perhaps I was wrong. They were not found out. Nothing has changed. I am not sure why this matters, but I cannot talk myself out of it. I have to know. My bike takes me there and not the other way around.

  When I reach the place, I stand a little ways away and nod in relief. Good, I think. I was right. But then I stumble off my bike and run to the bushes. I crouch there for nearly a minute, retching, and I cannot look back. I cannot turn around again to the ruin that has made me right. I crawl backward until I find my bicycle. When I do, I climb onto it and ride back home, back to safety as fast as I can, without turning back once.

  The image of the farmhouse burned to the ground, surrounded by nothing but charcoal, stays with me.

  Seared scraps of clothes hung off broken glass. Shoes littered the ground. A broken pair of glasses. I did not even get close; these are just the things that had been blown by the wind. Closer, I do not know what I would have found. What the blackbirds could have been circling. The fire must have been recent. At most, a few weeks old.

  I tell myself to forget it.

  I tell myself it has been almost two years since Edith or any of them mattered to me.

  But the next time I see Gray, I do not walk away. We stand in front of the bench, and I pretend to fiddle with my coat. I do not know what to ask, so I say, “I went to the farmhouse.” I wait fo
r him to tell me that the fire was their plan, that they’d moved their rendezvous to another place, but he simply stares at me. I look down at the ground, hating that I do not walk away. “What happened?” I say eventually. “Where is the new farmhouse?”

  “There isn’t one.” He glances past me, as if he really wants to leave. “Everyone is dead, Lira.”

  I am not surprised, but it doesn’t hurt any less. My hands clench, and I force them to unclench. I keep the emotion out of my voice. “Everyone?” I say.

  “Julia is fine. I can’t find Edith.”

  My head snaps up. My eyes are full of hope and questions.

  “I think maybe she got away,” Gray says, and he’s still looking beyond me. My hope reflects in his voice. “Maybe she’s hiding. I’m trying to find her.”

  “You weren’t there?”

  “I was working when they came. Julia was at her job, too.”

  “Oh.” This is the longest conversation we have ever had without Edith. “You think this happened because of your plan?”

  He finally meets my eyes. “It was never my plan,” he says through gritted teeth. “I was helping her because she’s my sister, but I didn’t agree with her. I knew what she was doing was dangerous. I warned her.”

  I can imagine one of his arguments with Edith. Nothing could have changed her mind, not about this, not even her brother.

  I take a deep breath of cold air. “How can I help you find her?” I say it quickly before I can change my mind. Just because I did not choose Edith’s side does not mean that I want her gone. And Gray does not look good. I have never seen him look so lost.

  “You helped me once,” I say.

  He dismisses my words. “You don’t owe me anything, Lirael.”

  “I know. After we find her, we’ll go our separate ways.”

  Chapter 36

  I sit at the café and wait for two hours. Aunt Imogen has vanished again, this time without coming back, and Cecily is alone at home. I order four cups of coffee and a brioche, the first two cups initially for Jack, but he never shows. Since the first time we met, this has never happened. I walk up to the counter and ask the waitress whether she has seen a man in a wheelchair with a typewriter. “He usually sits over there,” I say, pointing, but she cuts me off.

  “I remember him,” she says with a smile. “I remember you, too, but no. Normally he comes two or three times a week. I haven’t seen him for a couple of days.”

  I thank her and leave. Outside, everything is white, but it is not the kind of snow that decides a day. It is just cold enough that we can call winter beautiful, the best season and almost mean it. So Jack could get here. He could, but he probably just decided to stay home. I tell myself this and stuff my hands into my pockets and walk in the direction of the bus stop. Maybe he could no longer stand the sight of me. Dying with someone who does not want to be there is worse than dying alone. Dying in itself is bad enough.

  My job is done.

  So I am surprised when I am suddenly standing outside Jack’s apartment building, out of breath, as if I have been running. What could I possibly be running for? Yet my feet carry me into the building and up the stairs. I find the right door, and then my fingers sting from knocking. My whole hand hurts, and I am thinking about what I should do next when the door opens. A woman stands there, frowning at me. She is wearing thick, square glasses and carrying a half-knitted sweater. “Yes?” she says, looking me over her glasses.

  At first I think I have the address wrong. I back away and apologize, but then I smell the scent I have come to associate with Jack: the scent of medicines, of antiseptic cleaners, and, the worst one of all, of decay. He did not always smell like this. But suddenly this is all I can remember, and it makes me speechless.

  “Yes?” the woman says again, this time less kindly. She pushes the door closed between us a little more.

  I am afraid to ask. I am terrified of the answer and what it might mean. I ask anyway. “Is Jack here?”

  “He doesn’t want any company,” the woman says gruffly. “He’s resting. Who are you?”

  “My name is Lirael. I’m seventeen,” I hear myself answer. “I’m supposed to edit his book for him.”

  As if I were a robot. As if I were interviewing for a job.

  “His book,” the woman says, frowning. Jack did not tell her about me. I look her over. She is wearing socks and dirty sneakers underneath her skirt. Her lipstick is a bright fuchsia color that paints her ghostly. Her hair is as white as the snow outside, her face covered in wrinkles. Everything about her is severe. I wait patiently while she goes inside and asks a question. She comes back only a moment later with the same answer: “He’s very tired.”

  “Okay,” I say, but I don’t leave. I just stand there.

  The woman sighs and goes back inside. I hear voices. “Come back tomorrow,” she says when she returns. “He likes the mornings. He’ll see you then, after— Hey!”

  I push past her and enter the small apartment.

  It is an open space. The kitchen, the bedroom, the sitting room; I can see them all right from the door. Almost every surface is covered with books and papers. Three typewriters sit in one corner; a couple of broken tables, in another. I look around and see stories I know. The stain on the wall from a bottle of ink that Jack decided to leave because it looked like a bird. The broken typewriters all happened during a particularly frustrating time of writer’s block, after which Jack realized that they weren’t exactly cheap to replace. So he moved on to tables. “I’ve broken about ten now,” he told me once. “Tables are good for bad tempers and firewood, and that’s about it.” But I have never really seen his bad temper, not the kind that breaks anything.

  He doesn’t show it to me now from where, covered in a blanket, he is sitting in front of the television. He doesn’t even look my way. I storm over, my hands fisting at my sides. “I thought you were dead,” I say, embarrassed to hear the relief in my voice. “I waited and waited for you today.”

  The woman stands by the door, still trying to decide what to do with me.

  Jack stares at the television without moving. “And you came all the way over here? I’m touched.”

  He is thinner, paler, skin drooping beneath his eyes.

  “Look,” the woman says, walking toward me. Her cheeks are splotchy. “You cannot just barge into other people’s homes like this. This man needs his rest. If you do not leave now, I am going to have to call the police.”

  I look at Jack, waiting for him to tell her he knows me. Jack keeps watching the television, as if I am not here. It is only when the woman walks to the corner of the room and picks up the phone that he croaks out, “Brenda, it’s fine. This is Lirael.”

  Brenda does not look happy as she hangs up the phone. She still eyes me with suspicion as she returns to the table and picks up her knitting again.

  “Aren’t you going to finish your story?” I ask, standing in front of the television screen. “What about the rest of it?”

  “It’s finished,” he says.

  “Good. Show it to me.”

  But he doesn’t respond. I search for the pages myself. I know what I must look like, rummaging around a house that does not belong to me, papers flying about everywhere.

  “Now, look here,” Brenda begins again, picking up after me. “You cannot just come in here.”

  But I ignore her.

  I find nothing. Not a single page. There is no story. Or maybe, after all his hard work, he burned them. It seems like the kind of foolish, poetic thing Jack would do. I am exhausted when I finally give up. Jack turns up the volume on the television and yawns. But all I can see is the way his hands shake. How long have they been that way? Why didn’t I notice?

  He balks when I make my way over to him, pushes my hand away, and says, “Look, this is unnecessary. I finally understand what I am to you. I picked the wrong girl. You can go now and I swear I won’t hold it against you.”

  I swallow. “Jack,” I say.

>   “Don’t apologize. I don’t want your lies. If you won’t tell me the truth, then I don’t want you here.” I have never heard him like this, never seen him like this. All bones, all skin, nothing in between. No smile, no wise words, not even hurt. Just anger. Just coldness.

  I rack my mind and search for a truth to offer him.

  “You look terrible,” I admit quietly. “Worse than you’ve ever been.”

  He nods, and I sit down next to him. I turn around and find Brenda still glaring at me. I cannot tell whether she is a sleeper or not, whether she will report this, but I don’t care.

  We watch the television for an hour. I don’t know how I manage to close my eyes and fall asleep, but when I open them again, the woman is wearing her coat.

  “Jack?” she says, coming to stand in front of him. Her voice is loud and no-nonsense.

  “I haven’t gone deaf yet, Brenda,” Jack says, wincing.

  She puts her knitting inside her bag. “I’ll be back soon. I’m going to buy some more wool.” She doesn’t wait for an answer. It’s probably the first chance she’s had to leave today, and she has decided that I am good enough to look after him until she returns.

  “Who is she?” I ask, once she is gone.

  “Retired nurse,” Jack says. “She lives on the floor below. She basically comes here every day and knits and makes my life hell, and I pay her a fortune for it.”

  I stretch out on Jack’s sofa, pretend not to notice the way he frowns at me. “What brought you back?” he says finally.

  I want to tell him a lie. But instead it’s the simple truth that leaks from my lips. “I missed being your friend,” I say.

  Jack’s eyes widen. I look down, and he fiddles with his hands. We don’t talk like this; at least I don’t. “That scare you?” he asks.

  I shrug, try to seem careless. “Everyone that matters to me dies, it seems.”

  “Everyone dies anyway.”

  I look away, but he leans forward. At first, when he whispers, I think he’s forgiving me, but the only word I catch is bug. My eyes scan the room, and Jack gestures to his cupboards and a large clock on the wall behind his television. There are three of them, he mouths. I nod to show that I understand. When sleepers die slowly, they have to be watched. The things they say to other people matter. The people they say them to matter. By unspoken agreement I help Jack into his wheelchair and take him into the bathroom. It is so small that there is barely any room. I turn on the taps, do a quick check, and find nothing, and then I settle in the bathtub.