The Unquiet (12 page)

And then he puts the truck into gear.

We do not speak to each other. I do not ask where we're going. We drive out of the city and toward the trees. It is always toward the trees. Somewhere deep inside a forest Gray stops the truck. “Do you want to come in?” he asks, gathering the food in his arms.

“I'll wait here,” I say, and wrap my arms around myself. Somewhere in the distance a light flickers on and I hear
children squealing. I imagine how excited they are about the smallest things—the bags of tea, the biscuits, the bread rolls that are just as important to inhale as to eat.

Some of them, a few boys who want to pretend to drive Gray's truck while he is not looking, wander this way. I think about cowering and pretending not to be here, but in the end we're all just staring at one another through Gray's open door. “Oh,” one boy says eventually, backing away, disappointment written all over his face. “Sorry, ma'am.”

I force myself to smile and wave them inside. “Hurry up. I won't say a word about this to anyone,” I say. “Not even him.” I'm sure he knows already.

They give me Cecily's grin and climb inside. A tubby boy with red hair and freckles flashes his gapped teeth at me. He stutters when he talks. “Do you know how to play ISA, miss?”

His friends nudge him. “Don't be stupid, Frederich. Of course she doesn't
know
how to play ISA. It's for boys.” And then they talk over one another, trying to teach me the game. ISA stands for International Space Adventure. Another boy named Gavin, who isn't here, came up with it.

That is all I hear.

The steering wheel turns to the left and to the right. I cannot picture all the places we're going to. From imaginary
adventures in London to the forests of Brazil, driving against the wind. The good guys chasing the bad guys turn into the bad guys chasing the good. I must fall asleep in the middle of their game, because when I wake up, three faces are peering over me and they do not belong to children. Edith's is one of them, but Gray's isn't.

“He dropped you off. Said you fell and bumped your head,” Edith says. I can tell from her voice that she does not believe it. I stand up and pretend that my head does not hurt, that I am swaying because I want to.

We are still on the edge of the city. In a small lonely house on a dark road that has all its windows barred. It is their weekly film night, and there are seven of us altogether. Gray (who isn't here), Edith, a boy and a girl both named Robbie. The girl explains that her name is Roberta, but everyone calls her Robbie. Better that, she says, than Robin, and makes a face. I am surprised to see Julia, though she feels like a stranger to me now, as though we never really knew each other. I didn't realize Edith was her friend. Her skin is still pale, her face still soft and shy, and there is almost something frailer about her blue-green eyes. Because of this, everyone bet against her ever making it onto the yellow bus, but she did. I remember Davis, too, who steps forward and holds out his hand for
mine. “Oh,
you
,” I say in a voice that makes everyone laugh.

He clutches his chest and sighs. “Thirty seconds into this, and you've already hurt my feelings. If it's your math victories you're thinking of, don't worry. I haven't even learned to spell properly yet. Madame would be horrified if she knew the kind of life I was leading, grammatically, that is.”

“I doubt she'd be impressed if she knew anything about your life, Davis,” Edith says.

He shrugs. And then he does the strangest thing. He hugs me. This is so unlike Davis that I don't know what to do with it. Especially because before I opened my eyes, I heard him ask Edith, “So, this is who you meant? Are you sure we can trust her?”

“Yes,” Edith said.

The group disperses back to a small couch in front of the television. I stare at them. We assumed as children that we were the only cottage in this region. That there was one Madame, one set of examinations. But the world must be peppered with cottages like ours and with others who trained at the same time as we did—perhaps even in the very same woods as we did—and were released into our world, too. It is strange to be standing in the same room as them—the two Robbies.

I clutch my side until I see Edith watching me. “What happened?”

“It's nothing,” I tell her, and drop my hand.

I look around. It's not a very nice house. A small heater blasts at full force, but even then it is freezing cold. There are things that need fixing and smells that have no real origin; they just make up the air. Dirty cups fill the kitchen sink; food brims over in the fridge; even the toilet croaks. There are two bedrooms, the kitchen, and the living room. Outside, I find a garden that grows tall and appears untended except for a vegetable patch in the corner. We are on a large farm, and somewhere in the near distance there is a chicken coop and somewhere else, a cow. Edith points everything out proudly and holds my hand. Everyone's even wearing varying shades of gray—gray shirts and shorts, jeans, some of the girls even with their hair in ponytails. It is like a regression to the things that made us feel safe, the old things of comfort. But even so there is fear here. I hear it in the things that are not said and in the things that are. Fear of being found and all kinds of attempts to disguise that fear. The cherry red curtains hung up against the boarded windows that will never see sunlight. A vase of fresh flowers on the table. A pile of magazines in a corner of the room. A radio underneath the couch. A large
collection of books, of games and even a small typewriter. But there is no telephone, and it is dark, and they only ever come here at night or early in the morning when no one will notice.

We're safe here for now, but eventually there will be another house or farm, another secret meeting place.

I sit down in front of the television.

Edith passes me the bowl of popcorn. She smiles at the look on my face and whispers, “We only do normal things here. No sleeper stuff.” I grab a handful of the food, cross my legs, and lean back against the couch, thinking,
We have never done normal things in our lives. We are not normal. We could die for this, this small, small moment, and that's not normal. We are supposed to be soldiers. All seven of us.

I eye the door. I count the steps it would take to reach it. Six, maybe seven. Seven steps to walk away.

“Okay, girls,” Davis says, pushing his hair back over his forehead, “I need your honest opinion here.” He tilts his head toward the television. “If I got a perm exactly like his, would you date me?”

I laugh.

I
go back to the farmhouse three more times before I manage to convince Edith to tell me exactly how their technology works. I am mastering the art of sneaking over after completing a mission. Tonight there was no mission; I just snuck out. My family is already asleep from the concoction I gave them. “It's not enough to tell me that this is safe,” I tell Edith. “I need to know
why
I'm safe. How do we know nothing bad is going to happen to us?”

She hesitates, as if she has to choose her words carefully. We are washing pots and dishes in a bucket outside,
pretending that we are at the river again. That we are younger and it is the old days. The pots are the results of Edith's latest cookbook recipe. It looked good on paper, but when we actually tried to make it, bad things happened. As if to prove the point, Davis leans out the window, holding a chicken leg that is so black it looks painted. He tries to bite into it, but the thing is rock hard. “Mmm, so good,” Davis says, still trying to bite into it. “So, so good.”

“Geez, Davis, we get it,” I say. “You do the cooking next time, okay?”

His eyebrows go up. “You're getting feisty, Lira. I like it.” And then he quickly shuts the window before I can spray him with water.

I can see that Edith is hoping I have forgotten about my question, but I haven't. “I need to know,” I say.

“Okay. There are two types of watches,” she says. She nods toward my wrist. “The one you're wearing is basic. It just scrambles the signal of your tracker so they can't figure out exactly where you are.”

“What's the other type?” I ask.

She reaches inside her pocket and pulls out a small black button. “Put this underneath your mattress when you get home,” she says. “Whenever it's on, the tracker will always say
that you are home, no matter where you are. But remember to turn it off whenever you're actually somewhere you should be. You don't want to overuse it.”

I take the black button. It feels cool against my fingers, like some kind of metal. There is a switch at the back. I drop it gently inside the pocket of my sweater. “I'm supposed to trust that tiny thing with my life?” I ask her, not sure that I am convinced. “What if I forget to turn on the watch? Or the black button stops working?”

She hesitates again.

I frown. “Edith.”

“Lira,” she says, and then she meets my eyes with a reassuring smile. “We have thought of everything. We wouldn't be here, doing this, if we hadn't. Honestly the watches are just our backup method in case things go wrong. We have more secure ways, but they're complicated. And I would tell you everything right now, but the others want to be able to trust you first. So I can't tell you. First you have to trust us.”

I turn back to the dishes, trying to decide whether to leave or not. Does Edith understand what she is asking me to do? Trust goes against everything we believe in.

“What?” I ask when I notice the look she is giving me. “Why are you smiling like that?”

“Do you still have those dreams?” she asks.

I know exactly what she is talking about, but I stare at her as blankly as I can. I don't like how quickly she wants to change the subject. Makes me wonder what she is keeping from me.

“That was how we became friends, remember? You told us you thought you were sick because you could dream when the rest of us couldn't. And you were going to tell Madame in case there was a cure.”

I remember.

Edith talked me out of it.

It was as if all the carriers had arrived in this world and stopped dreaming exactly when I started. They dreamed about nothing but blackness. The old man holding my memories is all I have ever dreamed about.

We were still in our rebellious phase then, still new to this world, still defying Madame. “It'll be our little secret,” Edith said, squeezing my hand. “And anyway, it'll probably go away one day.”

By the time we became the obedient children Madame wanted, we'd also become scared. Of her. Of what she would do to me if she knew. Once we weren't friends anymore, I spent my time at the cottages frightened of what Alex, Gray,
or Edith might decide to say about me to Madame.

But they never said a word.

“You still dream, don't you?” Edith asks me again later when I am leaving for home.

I shrug noncommittally.

She pulls me into a hug.

“Good,” she says with a smile. “It's official then. You're the most normal one of us all. Welcome to the group.”

S
ometimes I'm good. I bake bread just the way Gigi likes it. She smiles at me to show me that she approves, but most afternoons I am too busy looking down to notice. I bite my bottom lip, put all my concentration into it. I knead the dough until my palms hurt, until my fingers are two steps away from becoming bloodied. I tell myself that the bread will be just right because of how much conscientious effort I put into it. And then afterward I come away and realize how small that was, how unremarkable, and how by evening it will already be gone.

Da leaves for the orchards before any of us are awake today. He only ever does this when he is sad about Gigi, and most days I don't blame him.

I help Gigi into the bath and wash her back like I do every day. The very first time I did it, about six months ago, she cried. She said she was sorry, and I said it was okay, so many times that I started to cry myself. She said that she wished her disease would take her quickly. “Death is not,” she whispered, “the worst thing in the world. It's the slow progression of it, the drawing out, that hurts. You're still here, but you're missing out on everything already, cooking the way you used to, baking peach cobblers, sewing new dresses for your grandchildren. Suddenly fingers don't work right, eyes don't see, breathing becomes nearly impossible. The death is simple, but the dying part is like a volcano, simmering quietly underneath the surface for years.” She cries still sometimes. I've never told Da.

Today I tie my hair out of my face and put on the radio, to a channel that plays music all the time. I remember that just a year ago, Gigi was this small, bubbly woman saying “Don't slouch like that, Lira” and “Don't eat that.” And “This is how you make apricot jam” and “Goodness, child, do you intend
to brush your hair today? You look like a rascal. Tell her, Thomas
.
” Everyone in town knows who Gigi is, tales of her baked goods and her jams spreading like wildfire every summer, people pushing wheelbarrows of the stuff away some hot Sunday afternoons. But nobody knows about this part yet, about what has happened, about the last six months. That's the way Da prefers it, I think, but also Gigi. “Not everything needs to happen in front of the window,” she says.

Downstairs Cecily and her friend, Mathieu, are playing with our neighbor's children, Freddie and Rachel. Their mother has dropped them off at our house to be baby-sat while she is in the city. Gigi has that reputation of eleventh-hour kindness, but I answered the door because Aunt Imogen and her suitcases left yesterday. “Gigi's actually in the bath at the moment,” I said.

“Oh,” our neighbor said, holding on to her hat, fighting the wind. “I hope she doesn't mind two more.”

No one notices that Gigi rarely goes out anymore. Nobody knows how bad things are. And that is how my grandmother likes it.

It makes me feel better.

In a way, every one of us, in every world, is a liar. It is what we are built on.

Now Gigi touches my cheek when her coughing fit has subsided. “You're beautiful, you know,” she whispers, and her eyes are glassy. “As beautiful as my Rosie ever was.”

I grit my teeth because I hate it when she talks like this. When her touch is full of sentimentality and her voice is weak. It means she thinks she's closer to the end than ever. It means she thinks that she will finally leave us, end this burden that she has become. Every day with Gigi is full of sentimentalities now. No more of that toughness, of that meanness I could handle so much better. Still, I try. “You're the one who said that beauty is not the most important thing in the world,” I mutter.

“No, it is not. But when one has it, it is useful.”

She holds my chin, and I see my eyes reflected in hers. Pale gray as hers. “Beautiful or not, don't ever waste who you are, Lira,” she whispers fiercely. “Promise me.” And then just as quickly the moment is lost as her wheezing resumes. I can see her fighting for it, that moment, but I don't help her find it again. I can't. When a loud crash reverberates in the walls, I run downstairs, soapsuds still on my arms. I find Cecily sitting at the piano, pressing the same key over and over again, eyebrows furrowed, as if she were concentrating. I know better. Mostly because her friend, Mathieu, has picked up a book
and is pretending to read it. Upside down. Rachel and Freddie sit next to him, trying to look innocent.

“What did you break?” I ask.

“We didn't break nothing, honest,” Mathieu says, eyes wide as coins.

I frown. “Cecily, you're supposed to be the responsible one. You're supposed to be the good example.”

My sister shrugs. Her tone is solemn. “I don't know why. He's the one who's older. He's the one who broke the vase. He's the guest, and he's behaving pretty badly. When I behave badly, I get punished.”

Mathieu gapes at her. “But you told me . . . but you said . . .”

“Don't be
stupid
, Mathieu,” Cecily says, rolling her eyes.

The room is silent for a long moment before chaos erupts and they both are suddenly gone, out of the house. I do not know who chases whom, but I hear them both screaming, making deals about who can fight whom, who is wrong and who is right, who should live and who should die. Mathieu tells Cecily that everyone at school thinks she's strange because she's always talking about
the trees
and all the things Da does to keep them alive, that she should be grateful he even bothers with her. And then they're running again because Cecily says she will break his ears off and he's
laughing at her. Rachel and Freddie chase after them, making a game of it.

I go back upstairs. I help Gigi with her dress, with her makeup, and then she insists she sit outside today, underneath the shade of a tree, breathing in the fresh air. She knits her sweater while I lie on a mat, reading a book, pretending that I am not fascinated by the game that Cecily, Mathieu, Rachel, and Freddie are playing. Pretending that I am not quietly laughing at their jokes, as if I were still a child myself. Fifteen suddenly feels very old. This is how the summer passes away, the same as every other summer and yet different.

Tonight is one of those summer nights when Da does not turn up for dinner. Cecily, Gigi, and I sit around the table and pretend that there isn't an empty chair. “He's not in the orchards, is he?” Cecily sighs. “He's gone to that place
again
.”

“Of course he's in the orchards,” I say automatically.

“Time to brush your teeth,” Gigi says at exactly the same time. And then, as soon as Cecily is upstairs, she throws me the truck keys. She does not meet my eyes when she says, “Go bring your grandfather home, Lirael.”

These are the blue moon days.

I have never told her where I find him. Have never mentioned the pub or the men he drinks with. Have never said
anything about how I rarely have to help him into the car because he's hardly ever drunk. I don't know whether he walks or finds someone to give him a ride. Each time I come he looks deep into my eyes, waiting to hear the news: Is she dead yet? As if some unspoken force whispered in his ear suddenly this morning: “Today is your wife's last day. Run, hide.” I don't know what sort of answer he wants, the good or the bad kind, but he always breathes a sigh of relief.

I do not make him come with me immediately. I find my own booth in the pub and pull out my sketchbook. I am not sure whether this is something I would have liked without the original Lira's liking it first. I just know that it has become a part of me. Sometimes my fingers itch to draw something I do not recognize until it is finished. Today, though, all I want to capture is the way the people in the pub sit, relaxed and laughing, without a care in the world. This feeling of freedom, of choice. That is what I draw.

“That's not how I look,” Gary, the bartender, says. He taps my grandfather on the shoulder. “Thomas, you ought to get this girl a proper drawing job in the city. She'd make you a fortune.”

“Thanks, Gary,” I say, smiling at the bartender. He's good at being kind.

But my grandfather ignores me and I him until he is ready to go. And then we climb into the truck in perfect silence. Except it's not perfect because my mind is spinning with words the dead Lirael would have wanted to say. Words like,
It doesn't count, your telling me that family is important if you run from yours the first moment you become afraid.
And,
Wait until she's dead before you fall apart; why can't you do that?
That's the worst one. The thing I can never say. I rarely ever see my—
her—
grandfather so small, and as we drive back home, he begins to force his shoulders back up, clear his throat as if he has forgotten where he is, but it's almost always too late. He lights a cigarette and smokes it in silence. As we drive back home, he'll usually point at the orchards and say, “That's going to be yours one day,” as if I have forgotten
.

Tonight I don't answer. Gigi is waiting for him in the kitchen when we arrive, and I know to go upstairs immediately. “Thomas,” she says softly. All the lights are out, but she looks tough in candlelight. Tougher than I've seen her look in months; I almost believe that a miracle has happened. That she is well again, but she doesn't move from the chair she is sitting patiently in, and I know it's not because she doesn't want to. I can't help stopping at the top of the stairs, can't help pressing my body against the wall and listening. I do not
know what Da says. Probably something like “If we had more money for doctors . . . if I had done better . . .” his voice cracking, weak.

Because Gigi snorts. I hear her say, “You dumb, dumb man. You think it's your money and your medicines I want on the last days of my life? You think they're the most important thing in the world? When I was without those things, was I dead? Have we ever been unhappy?”

I sit down with my back against the wall. I listen to them cry.
For practice
, I tell myself,
it's all for practice
.

Just before dawn every morning, I sneak out of the house. I practice throwing my knives at the tree trunks in the orchards. I pretend an invisible Ezra is sparring with me, and I break his bones with my hands. I disassemble my guns, clean them, and reassemble them again.

I take my pills, and then I train for about an hour. Then I go home, climb back into my bed.

There isn't anything that I am not ready for.