Silence: Book One of The Queen of the Dead

by Michelle Sagara

  Brendan Hall bent and stroked his dog’s head. His hand passed slightly through fur, and he grimaced. “Because,” he told his daughter, not looking at her at all, “you’re here.”

  She nodded, and then she reached out blindly for him, and he hugged her. His arms were cold, but she didn’t mind.

  Her mother was in the living room.

  Emma discovered this when she at last let her father fade into whatever world he occupied when he wasn’t with her, and she tried to walk, stiffly, up the stairs. She needed to remove a dozen splinters from her palms, and she needed to change. She probably also needed to burn or dispose of the clothing she was wearing, because it looked as though she’d already tried and had done a truly bad job.

  But when her mother called her name, she froze, one hand on the rail. Petal, always hopeful that any spoken word meant food, came out of the kitchen and tried to tangle his blocky body around her legs. She grimaced, looked down at her clothing, and then turned. “Mom?”

  Her mother rose. She was pale, and she had that I’ve-got-a-headache look. Emma realized belatedly that she’d been sitting on the same spot on the couch that Emma often occupied when she was thinking about Nathan. Or thinking, more precisely, about his absence.

  The headache look, on the other hand, vanished as Mercy Hall approached her daughter. “Emma!”

  Emma started to tell her mother she was fine—because, among other things, it happened to be true—but she stopped. “There was a bit of fire,” she said instead.

  Her mother’s brows rose most of the way up her forehead.

  She glanced at the hall mirror. From this angle she could see only a quarter of her body. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she added quickly. “But I would like to get changed.”

  “What happened?”

  “There was a fire,” she repeated. “We were—we tried to help.”

  “Who is we?”

  “Ally, Michael, me. Eric and his cousin, Chase.”

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  How to answer that? “No. No one was hurt.” Lie. She should have felt guilty; she didn’t. “Let me get changed,” she added. “And showered. And maybe you could help me take these splinters out of my hand before—”

  “They get infected?”

  “Something like that.”

  Mercy Hall folded her arms across her chest, and her lips thinned. But she drew one sharp breath and nodded. “I swear,” she said softly, “It was so much easier when you were two. Then, I had to keep my eyes on you all the time. Now? I never know what’s going to happen.”

  Emma, who had walked away from death and its peace, nodded. Her mother would worry—but her mother always did that. What her mother wouldn’t have to do, not this time, was stand by a grave and bury her only child. She thought of Maria, then, and she turned and surprised her mother: She wrapped her in a tight, tight hug.

  “I am fine, Mom,” she said, when she at last pulled back.

  Her mother’s eyes were filmed with unshed tears. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here earlier—”

  Emma shook her head. “Don’t be,” she said quietly. Knowing that her mother was thinking about her father. And missing him. Emma wanted to call him out then, to call him back—but she had a strong suspicion that he wouldn’t actually listen. He’d always believed he knew what was best for both Emma and her mother.

  But he was gone, at least for the moment; Emma and her mother were still here. They had each other. “I’ll come back after I’ve showered. Maybe you can find the tweezers?”

  Monday at 8:10, Michael came to the door.

  Emma, her bag ready, her hair brushed, and her clothes about as straight as they were going to be for the day, opened the door, waited while he fed Petal a Milk-Bone, and then joined him on the front steps.

  The good thing about Michael was that she didn’t need to apologize for anything. Whatever had happened, they’d both survived it, and he held nothing against her, not even her near death. He did ask a lot of questions, but she answered them as truthfully as she could, often resorting to “I don’t know” because it was true.

  They picked Allison up on the way to school. Allison looked surprisingly cheerful, but it was the kind of forced cheer that hid worry.

  “I’m fine, Ally,” she told her.

  “You’re always fine,” Allison said. “But are you okay?”

  Emma nodded. “Mostly,” she added, mindful of Michael.

  “Maria left you her phone number. She had to get the kids back.”

  Emma winced. “I’m surprised she’d ever want to speak to me again. She almost died there.”

  “You almost died there as well.”

  “Yes, but I can’t get away from me.”

  Allison laughed.

  They made it to school, and when they did, Emma saw that Eric and Chase were waiting for them on the wide, flat steps of the school. Although skateboarding was strictly prohibited, people were skateboarding anyway. Business as usual.

  But Eric came down the steps to meet them.

  “I’m fine,” she told him, before he could speak.

  “You’re always fine,” he replied.

  She glanced at Allison and surprised herself by laughing. Allison laughed as well.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” Eric asked her.

  “Maybe five. Why?” Allison raised an eyebrow, and Emma nodded in response. She stood still, in front of Eric, while Allison dragged Michael through the doors of the school.

  “Are you leaving?” Emma asked him.

  “Leaving?”

  “School. You aren’t really a student here.”

  He hesitated and then said, “No. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to stay.”

  This surprised her, but she covered it by saying, “Not if it means we have to keep Chase, too.”

  “I heard that.”

  Eric chuckled, but he looked pained. “You have to keep Chase, too. He’s enrolled.”

  “But—”

  “The old man insisted.”

  “The old man who was going to shoot me? And probably shoot you as well?”

  “That one.”

  “But—but why?”

  “Because he’s decided he’s not going to shoot you. Or me. Well, not for that at any rate. Emma—”

  She looked at him for a long while, and then she smiled.

  His turn to look slightly confused. “What? Have I got something on my face?”

  “No. But you know, you did stand between me and a loaded gun. That’s not a bad character trait in a guy.” She nodded toward the door. “Unless you want to beat my late-slip collection, we can talk about this later.”

  She started up the stairs, and Eric fell in beside her; Chase pulled up the rear. “You realize,” he said, sounding aggrieved, “that you’re forcing me to go to school and listen to a bunch of boring teachers talk about crap that has nothing to do with my life?”

  “So sue me.”

  Eric laughed, and Emma smiled again, less hesitantly. It wasn’t all despair and loss, this whole living business. Sometimes, it was good. It was important to hold on to that.

  On Tuesday night, Emma went to the graveyard. She took Petal, her phone, and Milk-Bones, and she made her long and meandering way through the residential streets, where lights were on in different rooms.

  Petal was, of course, offended by the nighttime excursions of the local wildlife, and Emma caught a glimpse of raccoons when she was almost yanked off her feet because she was foolishly holding the lead. She continued to hold it, however.

  She looked for ghosts, for patches of strangeness in the architecture, but the dead—at least in this neighborhood—were sleeping. And Eric had said graveyards were peaceful because the dead didn’t go there.

  Emma, who was not dead, did.

  She had thought that, with the realization that Nathan was somewhere else, she could give up these nightly excursions, but she’d come to understand that she didn’t go for Nathan’s sake; she went fo
r her own. For the quiet that Eric himself seemed to prize.

  It was a place in which she never felt the need to say I’m fine. She didn’t feel the need to talk, or be interesting, or be interested; she could breathe here, relax here, and just be herself. Whoever that was.

  She found a wreath of flowers standing on a thin tripod, just in front of Nathan’s grave, and she swept a few fallen leaves from the base of the headstone before she settled into the slightly dewy grass. It had started here.

  Petal butted her with the top of his broad, triangular head, and she made a place for him in her lap, scratching absently behind his ears. The sky was clear, and the stars, insofar as any city with profuse light pollution had stars, were bright and high.

  She could pretend, if she wanted, that the entire past week hadn’t happened. She couldn’t as easily pretend that the last few months hadn’t happened, and that hurt more. But…maybe she was selfish. Seeing Maria, meeting her, had left her with the sense that she was not entirely alone; that she was not even the only person to suffer the loss she’d suffered.

  It helped. She scratched Petal’s head, fed him, and looked at the moon for a bit. It was good to be here. It was good, as well, to be home. To be with friends. She rose, picked up Petal’s leash, and began to head there.

  But as she started toward the path, she stopped, because someone stood in the moonlight. There wasn’t a lot of other light here, but it didn’t matter. Emma didn’t need a flashlight to know who it was.

  She walked, slowly, toward him, and when she was a couple of feet away, she stopped.

  She hadn’t expected to see him. Not here, and not for years. Certainly not in the graveyard where she had come for the silence and privacy that he had given her while they were together.

  She wanted to hug him. She was afraid to blink. But his lips turned up in that familiar little half-smile as he waited, as if he knew she couldn’t decide what to do. She wanted to say so much, ask so much. But in the end, because he was dead and she knew it, she held out her hand. He took it, and cold blossomed in her palm, spreading up her arm.

  She wondered what he felt, if he felt her hand at all.

  “Hello, Nathan,” she said quietly.

  “Hello, Em.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michelle Sagara lives in Toronto with her husband and her two sons, where she writes a lot, reads far less than she would like, and wonders how it is that everything can pile up around her when she’s not paying attention. Raising her older son taught her a lot about ASD, the school system, and the way kids are not as unkind as we, as parents, are always terrified they will be

  Having a teenage son—two, in fact—gives her hope for the future and has taught her not to shout, “Get off my lawn” in moments of frustration. She also gets a lot more sleep than she did when they were younger.