None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1)

by Laura Giebfried

  I was still sitting at the piano when my father returned home. He wordlessly told Karl to leave the room; I could hear his footsteps fade away to the other side of the house as he retreated. I hung my head over the keys so that my hair fell forward and shielded my eyes, but I could see him shaking his head at me even so.

  “I can’t believe you,” he said quietly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Your own mother’s funeral – and you wouldn’t even go.”

  I swallowed rather than attempt to explain it to him. His expression folded.

  “Why would you do this?” he said. “Are you trying to punish her for what she did?”

  “No.”

  “Is it me, then?” He stepped over to the piano and threw his gloves down atop it: the leather smacked the wood with a sharp noise and I flinched away from it. “Is that what this is? You’re trying to get back at me for taking a job away from home?”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “Then what is it, Enim? What is all of this?”

  “All of what?”

  “This!” He threw his hands down to indicate to me, and I instinctively slid further down the bench away from him. “This – you! You’ve been pulling these stunts for months now to try and get my attention: first with not eating, then that thing you lit on fire, then the grades, and the fights – I hardly recognize you anymore!”

  “I’m not doing it on purpose,” I said. My voice was low in contrast to his.

  “You are! That’s the only explanation, and I won’t have it! I can’t take it!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize – just change!”

  The words rang harshly through the old house. He didn’t understand that I would have been different – that I had tried. If it was possible, I would have stopped the thoughts in my head, and the hollowness in my chest, and the aching in my bones. I would have stopped the music from playing so consistently, and the images that rose behind my eyes when I tried to sleep. I would have been different. I would have been anything.

  “Jesus, Enim – I can’t put up with this! I can’t watch you do this to yourself!” He pulled my arms down so that he could look at me, and my wrists were thin and weak in his grasp. “You were perfectly normal before this!”

  I looked away from him so he couldn’t see behind my eyes. There had always been something unsettled lying just beneath my well-ironed clothes, and even now that it was hidden so poorly, he still couldn’t see it.

  “What’s this about really?” he said. “Is it because you know about the illness? Is it because I didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you acting this way? What is it?”

  “I don’t feel right. I just – I just don’t feel right.”

  “You’re out of sorts, that’s why. You haven’t eaten all day, you’re stressed –”

  “No, I don’t feel right. I don’t ...”

  My hand skimmed my skull with short, jerky movements as I tried to explain it to him. I couldn’t let him know, but I couldn’t let him not know, either, and the diametric pleas screaming inside my head made it impossible to speak.

  He released my arms and took a step back from me.

  “You’re not sick, Enim. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  He forced the words to be calm as though that would make them true. My eyes were sore and my shoulders ached from shaking, and I propped my arm up so that I could lean my head against it. The keys threw out notes at random beneath my elbows.

  “You won’t be like her, Enim. You won’t.”

  I wished that I could tell him the truth, or anyone the truth. I wished that I had the type of regard for him that I had had for my mother, or for Jack, or for Beringer, but the ability to trust him wouldn’t rise high enough to let me take hold of it. I was someone else than who he saw, and he would never be able to help me.

  “You’re just very stressed, Enim. I don’t blame you – this has been a hard year, and I know the situation wasn’t ideal. But I’ve already spoken with my company and they’ve agreed to have me transferred back by the end of the month. This is all over now: you don’t have to worry anymore.”

  He stepped forward again and took me by the shoulders to right me. As he looked at me with carefully-placed concern and straightened my head, it was as though in the hopes of sliding something back into place.

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly. The room was so disquieted that it quivered all around us, but I forced myself to be still. “You’re right – I’m just stressed. I’ll be better.”

  He squeezed my arm and gave a tight-lipped smile.

  “Good. That’s good. We’ll put this all behind us, and everything will be just fine.”

  He clapped my shoulder and stepped away from the broken piano. As he left the room, I felt as though I was watching him go through a thick expanse of water. It was murky as I stared up through it, like I was standing on the ocean floor watching him linger close by on the surface; and though he was so close to me and I could hear him, it was still too far away to reach and too muted to understand. And he could have reached down to me to pull me up, if only he knew that I was hidden there just out of sight.

  I watched him pull away from the house in a taxi the next morning with a mixture of sadness and relief. I had waited so long for him to return, and yet now that he had promised to do so I felt no different. If anything, the thought of returning to someplace other than the old house that had haunted me so greatly was just as suffocating as ever, if only because it meant that my mother was truly gone from the place and would never return again.

  “Ready to go?” Karl asked, his voice pulling me away from the window. The bright white of the snow stung my eyes, and I had to blink several times to adjust to where he stood in the shadow of the staircase.

  “Yes.”

  As it was a weekend, there was no hurry to get back to Bickerby; yet the idea of either of us spending a moment longer in the house seemed too unbearable to consider waiting for the weekend to pass in silence, so we made the drive up the coast at the usual hurried pace. I watched the house fade away into the backdrop of wintry snow with the knowledge that it would be the last time I did so, and my chest pressed harder against my ribs until I was sure that they would break. The long stretches of ground still partially covered in snow was a constant reminder that she was lying beneath it somewhere dark and cold, and that she was all alone.

  By the time Karl pulled into the port hours later, my face was throbbing with the effort to keep my expression intact. I swung open the door before he had fully stopped and grabbed my bag with a hurriedly spewed goodbye to prevent anything that he would or wouldn’t say and made my way to the ticket booth. The next ferry wouldn’t be in for an hour or so, and my already cold hands were rattling like bones in the chill.

  From my spot on the shore, the ocean swelled all around me. It was a horrible sight and yet I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. It was such a deep, dark blue beneath the white sky that it looked as though the world had been cut into two: one where I was, and one where she would remain. And even if I were to cross the ocean towards the horizon in the hopes of reaching the spot where her world began, I knew that I could never get to it. I could never get to her, because she was gone. Yet no matter how many times I told myself as much, it didn’t become any more real.

  When the ferry pulled into port, I wrenched myself from the shore and curled myself up in a low seat by the side. The wound puncturing my chest was stinging in the air; if it didn’t close, it would infect every part of me. With my face pressed into my arm, I drew up the image of her in her white dress and focused on it so intently that when I opened my eyes again she was imprinted before me in the sky. I gazed at her with a yearning unmatched by anything that had ever been felt, but the sentiment was unrequited: she couldn’t feel me – not anymore. And yet, as the ferry reached the island and the horizon faded into earth, I knew I would feel her there forever.


  Ch. 19

  I made my way up the stairs to the residence building with slow, heavy steps. The bag on my back seemed much too heavy for what it contained, and my head throbbed from either a lack of sleep or coffee. As I reached the third floor and started towards the fourth, the door above me opened and a clattering of footsteps rang out through the stairwell.

  “Perfect timing.”

  I halted at the voice and raised my eyes from my feet. Trask was standing at the top of the stairs staring down at me with a strange mixture of glee and revulsion.

  “I saw you from the window,” he informed me as he started down the stairs. “Thought I’d take the opportunity to have a little chat before your boyfriend showed up. Do you have a minute?”

  I had barely opened my mouth to respond when he reached out and grabbed me. Twisting my arm so that I couldn’t escape, he forced me around so that I was hanging half-over the banister. Only his grip on my forearm and his grasp at the back of my head yanking at my hair kept me from falling four flights below. As my ribs hit the metal and the breath was knocked from my lungs, my vision swayed in and out of blackness.

  He leaned down to speak lowly in my ear, pressing my head further down until my toes began to lift off of the floor.

  “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep out of everyone’s way. Got it?”

  My lungs were too compressed to speak and I could only choke in response. Trask tightened his grip on the back of my hair until it felt as though it was ripping from my scalp and then gave me a rough shake; the cement floor below bounded in my line of sight and my boat shoes scraped the step as I tried to keep from flipping over the railing.

  “I asked you a question,” he said forcefully.

  “I – got – it.”

  The door to the floor below us opened and someone came out into the stairwell. Trask released me and disappeared up the stairs. I had barely managed to push myself backwards to keep from falling four flights below when I lost my footing and tumbled down onto the landing. As my head hit the cement, the sound of the other student’s footsteps receded down to the ground floor and left me in a ringing silence.

  I waited a long moment before slowly getting to my feet. My bag had fallen somewhere close by and I struggled to take hold of it in my blurred vision. Then, careful not to lose balance again, I crawled up the stairs and down the hall towards my room.

  “You’re back.” Jack looked up as I entered and gave a partial smile that dissolved into a frown. “Are you alright?”

  “Fine. Just ran into Trask on the stairs.”

  “What?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said, though the persistent pounding in my skull suggested otherwise. “He just wanted to remind me how much he and Julian hate me.”

  “Again? You could report him for sexual harassment if he keeps this up.” He paused to give me another look. “You’d think he’d give you a break, considering ...”

  The statement was lost in the air and he cleared his throat awkwardly. He unfolded his legs and swung them over the side of the bed as he watched me unpack my belongings and put them away, but my mother’s death still hung uncomfortably between us.

  “I told everyone that it was complications from an autoimmune disease that she’d had for a while,” he said. “I thought it sounded fairly convincing myself.”

  “It does.”

  The lie was strangely easing. As far as anyone else had known, my mother had died the previous year. I was grateful that Jack failed to relay their inquiries as to how she had died for a second time.

  “Anyhow, Sanders dropped off some more homework for you,” he said. “Between the new assignments and the ones from when you supposedly had the flu, it was getting hard to see the desk.”

  I sighed and sat down on the bed to lean my head against the wall. Had Barker been fit and well, he would have surely suspended me by now. I was even more thankful for his poor health.

  Jack took a stack of papers from the desk to bring over to me.

  “Physics looks pretty daunting,” he said. “And so does Calculus, but you seem to enjoy that half the time, so …”

  “Only comparatively.”

  He gave a sympathetic grimace as he tossed the assignments next to me.

  “Well, I figured if you started them now then you might be able to get them done by tomorrow – then we could actually do something interesting this weekend.”

  The folder was so heavy that it made an indent in the mattress next to me.

  “Jack, there’s no way I can get a week’s worth of assignments done by the end of the weekend, let alone the beginning.”

  “You might.”

  “Five classes times six days of work? Try again. I’ll be lucky if they’re done by graduation.”

  “Nah, only two classes. I did the rest.”

  “You – what?” I stopped midway through sorting through the papers to stare at him in disbelief. “You did my homework?”

  “Everything but Physics and Calculus.”

  “But – but that’s impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t do homework. Ever.”

  He shrugged.

  “Yeah, well, I was excessively bored and I figured we’d never leave the room if you had to do it all by yourself, so …”

  He shrugged again in a very good portrayal of careless nonchalance, though I knew that he was perfectly capable of entertaining himself. As I found the essay that he had written for English and pulled it out, my frown deepened.

  “How’d you write this? We’re reading Jane Eyre.”

  “I read it.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I did, Nim. Not to ruin the ending or anything, but she and Rochester end up together.”

  “But – what?”

  “You’re surprised? I thought it was pretty expected ...”

  “No, not that,” I said. I stared at him with the type of bewilderment that only came as a result of his actions alone and shook my head with a loss for words. After scanning through the other assignments and multiple papers he had written, I managed, “You really did all of my work for English and History?”

  “And Latin.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Latin. I did those assignments, too.”

  I gave him a look.

  “But Jack: you don’t take Latin.”

  “Nope.”

  “And you don’t know Latin.”

  “True.”

  “So how did you do my assignments?”

  “With difficulty,” he said lightly. “And my entire stash of cigarettes. Now I know what you’re always so depressed – those were not happy people. You should have taken French: ils sont centrés sur l'amour.”

  “But how could you do the assignments? They’re in Latin.”

  “They were, yes. Then I translated them.”

  “But how?”

  “I used the Latin-to-English dictionary,” he said with a shrug, and Dictionary poked her head out from beneath the bed at the sound of her name. As I opened my mouth to protest, he cut me off. “And I used the table in the back of the book so that I could mark all the accusatives as direct objects, and all the verbs in the right tense and whatnot. Relax, Nim. I did a good job. Well –” he backtracked, “—it’s passable.”

  “But ...”

  “Nim, the time you’re spending obsessing over this could be used to get the rest of your homework done,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Just read them through if you don’t believe me.”

  I looked down at the assignments that he had done but didn’t bother to read the translation. My throat was tight with gratitude.

  “I ... I don’t know what to say, Jack.”

  “Say you’ll replenish my cigarettes first thing tomorrow,” he said with the usual devious glint in his eye, and I nodded.

  I set to work on the remaining assignments as he headed down to dinner. The hurry to get them done was a welcome distraction from the time spent away from sch
ool, and by the time I had gotten through the majority of the equations I was so tired and sleep-deprived that I drifted off without lingering on any unpleasant thoughts.

  As promised, I made the walk into town the next morning with him. The cold had not let up beneath the white winter sky, and we kept our heads ducked low into our scarves to ward off the chill on our faces. As we crossed through the deserted town to the corner store, the glint of dark blue in the corner of my vision alerted my thoughts back to the ocean, and I unknowingly stopped to stare at it.

  “Nim?” Jack had paused several paces ahead of me. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. No – of course.”

  I hurried to catch up with him and we continued on. Though we had been relatively silent for the entire walk, it was suddenly much more uncomfortable. I dug my hands further into my pockets as I tried to block out the image of my mother lying in the casket and the way her bright blue-green eyes would have shimmered beneath the closed lids in the exact shade of the ocean.

  I ran my eyes over the forsaken island, the muddied snow unsightly beneath the winter light, and took in the sight of the place that we had grown accustomed to living despite hating it, and all at once I wondered what we were doing there. Neither of us had any plans to use Bickerby on a college application, or to walk in line with the rest of the graduates in a few months’ time: we seemed to simply be waiting for a change that would never come.

  I poked my head out from beneath my collar.

  “I’ll be eighteen in two weeks.”

  Jack looked over at me as I spoke.

  “What? Yeah, you will.”

  We stepped over a large mound of snow on the side of the road to get to the sidewalk. I waited until we were on even ground before speaking again.

  “I’ll get an inheritance from my mother.”