Liesl & Po (10 page)

Part II
Narrow Escapes & Excitable Sparrows

Chapter Eleven

WHEN LIESL FIRST STEPPED OUT OF THE HOUSE,
she drew a sharp breath, and Po had to urge her forward.

“Come,” the ghost said. “Before we are discovered.”

So Liesl followed the two shadows—the larger, person-shaped shadow and the smaller, animal-shaped shadow—down the path and through the iron gates and out onto the street. But there again she had to stop, overwhelmed.

She said, “It’s so big. Bigger than it looks from the attic. I had forgotten.” She didn’t mean just the street, of course. She meant the world—roads, intersections, lefts and rights, twists and turns, choices.

Over the months Liesl had watched several baby sparrows hatch and grow in the little nest just outside of the attic window. She had always been particularly fascinated by the birds’ first teetering steps to the edge of the roof: awkward, ungainly, and childlike, they looked like toddling children. And then suddenly the baby sparrows would launch into the air as their parents twittered their approval.

She had always wondered at the bravery of it. The sparrows jumped before they knew how to fly, and they learned to fly only because they had jumped.

Liesl felt a bit like a baby sparrow, standing in the cold, dark, empty street, with the city spread all around her and the world spread all around the city: as though she was perched in the bright, empty air with nothing to hold her.

“Where to?” Po asked Liesl.

They needed to find the train station, Liesl knew, because trains led out of the city of Dirge, to places of willow trees and lakes. Her head was full of birds. She pictured the men she had often watched from her window, striding toward the city center, their greatcoats flapping behind them like crow wings. Important men going important places, carried back and forth by great, chugging trains. She imagined them in her head; she mentally retraced their footsteps.

“This way,” she said to Po, and pointed.

Bundle led the way, followed by Po. When the two ghosts had already crossed the street and melted into the shadows on the other side, Liesl found that her legs still wouldn’t move. She thought,
Forward!
She thought,
Jump!
But nothing happened.

Po, noticing that Liesl was still standing there, frozen, returned to her.

“What are you waiting for?” the ghost asked.

“I—” At the last second, Liesl could not tell Po she was scared. “I forgot to say thank you,” she said finally.

Po flickered. “Thank you?” it repeated. “What is that?”

Liesl thought. “It means,
You were wonderful
,” she said. “It means,
I couldn’t have done it without you
.”

“Okay,” Po said, and began skimming away again.

“Wait!” Liesl reached out to take the ghost’s hand and felt her fingers close on empty air. She giggled a little. “Oops.”

“What is it now?” The ghost was barely controlling its temper.

Liesl let out another snorting laugh and covered her mouth to stifle the sound. “I wanted your help crossing the street,” she said. “I keep forgetting you aren’t real.”

“I’m real,” Po said, bristling. “I’m as real as you are.”

“Don’t be mad,” Liesl pleaded, and as Po floated off, she put one foot in front of the other without even noticing it. Step, step, step. “
You
know what I mean.”

“I just don’t have a body. Neither does wind or lightning, but they’re
real
.”

“It’s only an expression, Po.” Liesl had crossed the street. “Sheesh.”

“Light doesn’t have a body,” Po continued, and up ahead, Bundle yipped and skipped and turned full circles in the air. “Music doesn’t have a body, but that’s real. . . .”

“For someone with no body, you’re very
touchy
, you know.”

A lone guard, returning from a long, cold shift at the residence of the Lady Premiere, heard voices and, pausing at the entrance to his building, saw a pretty girl carrying a knapsack and a wooden box, babbling happily to herself while beside her shadows shifted and swayed.

The guard thought,
Such a shame, when madness strikes in one so young. But that’s the way of the world now.
And then he stepped inside and closed the door.

The girl and her ghost-friend continued down the street, moving toward the center of the city, arguing, while Bundle slipped and slid and floated beside them.

They argued and walked, walked and argued, and got farther away from Highland Avenue, and #31, and the attic.

Perhaps that was how the sparrows did it too; perhaps they were looking so hard at the peaks and tips of the new rooftops coated with dew, and the vast new horizon, that they only forgot that they did not know how to fly until they were already in midair.

Chapter Twelve

MO DID NOT GIVE MUCH THOUGHT TO THE PRETTY,
babbling girl he had seen in the street. He was distracted.

Even after he had climbed the stairs to his apartment, and removed his coat, and changed into his warm thermal pajamas, and released Lefty from the fabric sling he used to carry her back and forth to work, and poured her a saucer of warm milk—even then, he could not stop thinking about the small, hatless alchemist’s assistant with the chattering teeth.

Mo often felt his brain was like a big tin can, mostly full of air. Ideas tended to bounce around aimlessly there, clattering and making a lot of noise. Causes got mixed up with effects and vice versa, and he was never quite able to puzzle things through. Often he started thinking the beginning of a sentence but got lost by the time he had to reach its end.

Swiss cheese
, his mother had always said of his brain.
Full of holes where things just go dropping out.

But every so often an idea got lodged in the cheesy, melty part of his brain—a stretch of cheese without holes—and when it stuck, it was stuck good and permanently.

The idea that was stuck there now was:
The boy should really have a hat.

Mo wondered whether the boy had found a nice, dry place to spend the night. He hoped so. If he had had more time, he could have told the boy about the gardening shed behind the First Boys’ Academy, and the basement of St. Jude the Divine.

He knew all about the sneaky, hidden places in the city: cupboards and alleyways, rail stations and closets, underground tunnels and abandoned sheds. He had spent years searching the city for Bella, even after everyone had said it was hopeless—even after everyone had said to give up, move on, forget about her. His mother and father had looked for her too, until they had given up as well, each in turn, finally and forever: dying exactly a month apart of twin broken hearts.

A nice, big hat with earflaps. That’d fix him up.

Mo scolded himself as soon as the thought presented itself. The boy was no concern of his, as the tall, thin alchemist with the ugly dripping nose had pointed out to him. His landlady, Mrs. Elkins, always said he needed to learn to mind his own business and stop sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. Curiosity killed the cat and so on and so forth.

“You’re always trying to save everybody,” she had said, frowning at him, when he had once again been late on the rent because he had given his last ten dollars to a beggar on the corner. “Most people don’t want to be saved. Besides, if you keep bailing everybody out, they’ll never learn to paddle on their own.”

She was very smart, that Mrs. Elkins. He
was
a softheaded, silly-hearted fool about people and things in trouble. Everybody had always said so. And one day it would all come to no good. Everybody had always said that, too. It was like the time he had rescued all those stray cats and dogs from the street. What had happened? They’d nearly clawed one another to death, all those wild street animals living in the same tiny two-room apartment, and in the end he’d had to give them all up to the pound when the neighbors complained. He’d had nothing to show for that experiment but a hundred pounds of half-eaten dog food, and fleas in the carpet.

Exactly right; exactly right. Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.

“Fish . . .” Mo said out loud, and then, because he had been reminded, went to his tiny kitchen, found a can of tuna fish on one of the two almost bare shelves above the small gas stove, and opened it carefully so that Lefty, who had eagerly slurped down her milk, would have something more to eat. The cat mewed and twitched her tail and twined herself between Mo’s legs, and Mo said, “Patience, my girl. Be patient with old Mo.”

When the tuna had been placed in Lefty’s saucer, Mo got into bed. His little room was very drafty and he pulled his blankets all the way up to his chin, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to think of dreamlike things: pink elephants; warm water with sunlight glinting off it; a mermaid reaching up to take his hand, saying,
Come, come down with me
.

He heard a series of small pinging noises against his window, and the mermaid vanished. He was alert again. It had started to hail.

Lots of rain and snow coming this week
, the guard thought.
The boy will be cold
and
damp.

A nice, big hat: one that fitted over those floppy ears of his.

It was no use. Mo knew he would not be able to sleep. He pushed away his thin blanket and stood. His room was very bare. There was just the small single bed, and a wooden table, and two chairs, and a narrow closet. Mo went to the closet and pushed aside all three of his uniforms, each neatly pressed, and extracted a small wooden box, with faded pink and blue flowers stenciled all around its side.

Inside this box was a necklace made of seashells (clasp broken), and a small yellow-haired doll (one eye missing), and a single mitten, and a large knit hat, and the smell—faint; faint, but still there—of raspberries.

Mo removed the hat that had once belonged to his sister, closed the box, and replaced it in the closet.