The Unquiet (11 page)

“She remembered an appointment and couldn't stay,” I tell Cecily, who looks disappointed to see Edith waving at her before leaving the café.

“Oh,” she says. I can almost see her mind turning. She bites her bottom lip. “Who was that girl, Lira?”

I sit at our table and set down both of our mugs and a croissant. “You think you're the only one who has friends?”

She gives me a look and then looks toward the exit Edith disappeared through. “Please. I
know
I'm the only one who has friends. So, who was she, already?”

I am still thinking about the look on Edith's face. The fact that she didn't deny my accusation. I reach inside my pocket and feel around for whatever she dropped inside. I find a a silver watch, but before I can study it, Cecily nudges me, and I force myself to refocus on her. “You've started with the questions again,” I say. “If I had a dime for every question you asked, my head would have exploded by now. And that's not really something to be proud of.”

“Well, if I don't ask them, how will I ever learn?” And then a stream of liquid shoots from her mouth and across the table at me. She sniffs her mug, scans the menu again. “What?” she says, outraged. “This isn't coffee.”

“H
ello? Anyone there?”

Every few weeks I knock on the flower shop door, and no one answers. The man does not unlock it, and there are no signs of life inside. I press my face to the glass for several minutes and wait. Sometimes another cottage girl or boy, man or woman I do not know will be there already or will arrive just after me. The older they are, the less friendly. I remind myself that not everyone has a grandfather who insists on frequent laughter like mine does, or a little sister who will tug on your lips early in the morning until you wake because
you
were
sleeping all wrong.
We all have different roles.

But the guy I am standing with at the flower shop door today defies the norm. He is wearing a suit and shiny leather shoes that make him seem like an old rich guy even though he can't be that much older than I am. In one hand, he is holding a skateboard, but he looks uncomfortable. As if he doesn't even know what to do with it. I stare down at those shoes and think that Da has never owned anything so expensive. We do not live in gutters or shelters, but we are not rich either, especially this season with the orchards. Sometimes the wind blows the wrong way or it doesn't rain and our fortunes are set for that season. This season the ratty sweater I am wearing, the old jeans, Da's old coat all reflect that.

The guy has a scowl on his face that I don't think can be removed even with surgery. He tries to force the flower shop door open in my wake, apparently thinking it hasn't opened because I was not strong enough. And then, when I softly say, “Hello,” he turns to look at me as if I were crazy.

He has bags underneath his eyes; he obviously doesn't sleep much. I take a step back because of the way he looks over my old clothes, my frayed scarf, the woolen gloves Gigi gave me last year. I can tell that he finds me unimpressive,
yet still I force myself to make conversation. “I guess it's an evaluation day.”

“Look, please stop talking, okay,” he snaps. His breath is laced with whiskey; his voice reminds me of scraping sandpaper.

“Okay.” I don't take it personally. I walk around to the back of the shop, where weeds and thistles grow side by side and on occasion a rat scurries past my foot. There is what I think could have been a garden at some point, but it is overrun now. A large metal shed sits right behind the building; it's even more crowded with plants than the flower shop itself. They cover every inch of the shed, including the windows. Anyone who did not know what they were looking for would assume that this was all there was. But I push past the plants, can feel the man following me to the back, where underneath a small wooden table I feel around for the lever of a hatch. The first time I came here I could not find it. Today I yank it open and enter. There is a ladder to climb, but it is so dark. At some point you have to let go and hope that you're as close to the ground as possible.

The air inside the hatch is dank, depressing. It is different from with the plants. Down here every breath seems to echo infinitely, and yet there is no air at all. Each time you hit
the ground you wait for some midnight monster to pounce, to devour you. It never happens, but I find myself holding still all the same, wishing we could do this upstairs instead. Wishing that we did not belong in the dark so much.

After a moment a flashlight flickers on to reveal a dark hallway and the man standing next to me. I open my mouth to say thank you, but he shoves me out of the way. My elbow slams into the wall so hard that for a moment I can't feel my arm. Angry Guy doesn't apologize, but now I am so mad I want to kick him. He walks past me, and I yell after him. “I'm sure everyone you meet cowers in front of you like some baby, idiot,” I say. “You and your cardboard face. But I'm not one of those people.” I cover my mouth, horrified. Normally I would never say anything like that.

“What?” asks the man, sounding surprised and annoyed to hear me still talking to him, but it is already over. I am walking away from him.

At the end of the hallway there is an office, and inside it sits Miss Odette Abernathy, my handler. She is behind a desk, but she has large headphones over her ears, and her eyes are closed. She smokes her cigarette halfheartedly, and her head bobs to the music. When I tap on her desk, she jumps. “Oh, Lirael,” she squeaks. “I've done it again, haven't I? Gone and
lost track of the time.” She scrambles to rearrange her desk, but all this means is that her papers go flying. The room is already littered with all sorts of things—papers, empty soda cans, half-eaten chocolates. I do not know where the man in the suit disappears to. I imagine that he has his own handler to see, though I have never seen the person inside the office next door.

I sit on the chair in front of Miss Odette. She is not the old woman I had imagined she would be. All my life, at the orphanage, in the woods, all the people who have watched over me have been alternating versions of Madame—the strong, calculating types. I was shaking in my boots my first time here. But Miss Odette is tall and bubbly, with red hair and a pale, freckled face. She is not much older than thirty. She seems like the kind of person who could not hurt a fly, but then again, that is what we are meant to think. When she smiles and says, “You can tell me anything,” I almost believe her. She hands me a blank piece of paper to fill out while she does other things. Checks my blood pressure, takes a sample of my blood, makes me step out of my clothes and spin around for her. On the piece of paper I answer the same questions about my life: the most significant things that have happened this month, how they have made me feel, how they have not
made me feel. About the fishing trip with Da, the way Gigi's bones seem to be shriveling right inside her skin. Afterward Miss Odette flutters back to her desk, fumbles around for her glasses. She slides them only halfway up her nose as she reads my answers. She says nothing for so long that I rest my chin on her desk.

Finally: “Well. You certainly have a very interesting family, Lirael. I just
love
reading about them.” Her voice is high-pitched when she says this. Her eyes twinkle, and the smile on her face is huge, like a teacher compensating for being older than her student. She asks me more questions about my life. Some of them are hypothetical―questions like: What would you do if Da died today? How would you feel if Gigi was killed? What about Cecily? To all these the answer is the same:
nothing.
Secretly I think about what I said to the guy in the suit. I think about how out of character it was for me. But when the tests and questions are over, Miss Odette reaches beside her desk and retrieves a freshly printed page. On it, a graph and more numbers than I can understand. “You are doing well this month, Lirael,” she says. “Keep up the good work.”

“Thank you,” I say.

She retrieves a black bag from underneath her desk and
hands it to me. When I open it, there are weapons inside: three guns, a few more knives, some rope, some wire. “They will become necessary in the coming months,” she says. “I am also advising my sleepers to train whenever they can. I understand that it is more difficult now than it was at the cottages, but we need our sleepers to be especially strong now.”

She means now that the Silence has ended.

“Yes, miss,” I say, and stuff the weapons inside my messenger bag.

She also gives me a small plastic case with enough blue and white pills to last me another month. The blue pills, I know from the cottages, is why she can print those graphs out. Madame told us that we were taking them only so that she, and one day our handlers, could print out these graphs and “monitor our levels.”

“There must always be a perfect balance,” she said, “in order for every sleeper to be at their optimal.”

It is the white pills that keep us at our optimal. That is why Miss Odette takes my blood sample. To make sure they are working well. Miss Odette smiles. “I will see you next month, Lirael,” she tells me.

I breathe a sigh of relief when I am out of her office.

I was not punished. Despite what I said to the man in the
suit. Despite stepping out of the character of Lirael for that moment and becoming someone I did not recognize. Maybe there are limits, but they are pushable limits. I think about the watch Edith slipped into my pocket at the café. About her breaking the rules by staying friends with other sleepers.

There must be small ways in which I can rebel.

But this is not a dangerous thought for me to have; unlike Edith, I have no intentions.

T
he following week it is time for a flower shop visit, but Da is taking forever putting his fruit together. By the time he has the basket ready for me, it is late afternoon, and he forbids Cecily from going. I am wearing my coat when he changes his mind and forbids me as well. “Leave it till tomorrow,” he says. “They can bake their pies then.”

I blink at him in surprise. It is almost dark. The flower shop man will be expecting me. But Da is in one of his overprotective moods, and there is nothing I can say to change his mind. I try everything. “But we can't disappoint
them,” I say. “You always say they're counting on us.”

“And they'll still be counting on us tomorrow, Lira,” he says, flipping through his newspaper.

So I decide to make everyone a cup of tea. I go upstairs and run my fingers underneath my mattress until I find the hole inside it. From there I retrieve the sleeping pills. I sit with Da until he announces that he is going to bed, and then I help him upstairs to where Gigi is already fast asleep. I wait until the house is quiet; then I wear my dress, my only good dress, on what has to be the coldest evening of summer and bike all the way to the flower shop, shivering.
Of course the dress was a bad idea,
I tell myself. Seeing Edith looking so put together inspired an improvement, but tonight I'd rather be warm. The sidewalks are sleek and shiny, an illusionary pool. Twice my bike skids out from beneath me and into the road, and I pick myself up as a car swerves and honks. By the second time there are wet patches on my dress, my hair is matted to the side of my face with mud, and my skin is covered in goose bumps. Only then do I become aware of the emptiness of the sky. No stars, no moon, an uncomfortable blackness, the kind that comes before something explodes. Now that I think of it, I wish I could remember the weatherman's words on the radio in the kitchen this morning. I had been
distracted by Cecily, by Aunt Imogen on the telephone.

The slinky silver watch Edith slipped into my pocket before she left the café is still with me one week later. I don't know why I have not thrown it away. When I got home after the café, I was planning to drop it in the trash can, but when I reached inside my pocket, I found a piece of paper there as well, with an address written on it in Edith's neat handwriting. “If you're coming, turn this on, make sure the second hand is moving,” the note said. “It throws the trackers, and they won't know where in the city you are. Please come (any night this week). XO, ―E.”

Now the watch is in my pocket, and the address has stayed in my memory. It is the perfect time. Da, Gigi, and Cecily are all fast asleep.

But I am not going.

I said this immediately when I read the note and then again when I reread it tonight. I said it when Aunt Imogen called us all into the kitchen this morning to tell us her big news: that she'd found a man to take her traveling all around Europe for the next year and she was leaving in a week. It was going to work this time because her standards were much higher and her expectations much lower. She wasn't expecting much of the world, she said, but she'd heard
someone say at a church that life happens only once. But then she could not recall whether she'd read it in a book instead, because she suddenly did not remember ever setting foot in a church, unless being in love with someone who had counted. While she spoke, Gigi sobbed, and Da glared at her, but Aunt Imogen barely noticed either of them.

I am not going.

I said it again this evening as I slid the dress on, thinking of how silly it looked on me, frumpy in places it shouldn't be because I am not the right height, not the right size, not the right anything. A green dress with an intricate lace design that is lost in all the material catching on the wheel of my bike. I told myself that I owed the flower shop man a visit, but that was it. That was the only place I would go.

I stare now at my reflection in front of the glass of a boutique store after I've just picked myself up from the pavement, and my answer is firm this time.

Even if I was planning on going to Edith's address after the flower shop, I cannot go now. Not looking like this.

It is completely dark. I ride to the flower shop, expecting to find no one there, but the man opens the door and frowns at me. “You didn't turn up today,” he says. “I was beginning to think that you were dead.”

He does not ask for an explanation, and I do not offer him one. I follow him to the counter, pretend not to care about the flat tone of his voice. Why should it bother me that the flower shop man would not care if I was dead? Why should it bother me that I can think of only three people who would, and it is only because they are either too old or too young and innocent and do not know any better?

I read the instructions on the piece of paper and open my mouth, but the flower shop man beats me to it. “Tonight,” he grunts, pushing an envelope my way. “You're usually here earlier. Was about to call it in.” And then he starts to shut down his store right there in front of me. I have no choice but to leave. I go to the nearest grocer's and buy everything on the shopping list. I load it all onto my bicycle and pedal to the warehouse, but even before I reach it, I can already tell there is going to be a problem. A group of angry-looking kids stand in front of the building, smoking and drinking around a garbage can fire. They spot me just as I am turning around, but before I can pedal far, someone catches up to me: someone with cold, dry hands, who lifts me right off the bike and throws me. This time when I hit the ground, it really hurts. I stare up at the black sky, gasping for breath. Forever seems to pass this way.

Sometimes I forget that there is bad in this world. I mean,
I know there is, but when I think of bad things, I think of us. The cottages, the sleepers. I picture us with horns, with blood dripping down our faces like vampires, with our knives and guns and porcelain smiles. I do not think of them. Wanting things they cannot have. Taking things they do not want.

Two boys tug at my clothes, ripping the fabric until it doesn't cover me, while their friends watch and laugh. They promise that it's only a little fun, they won't hurt me.
Only a little fun,
and they
surprise
me all over again.

Why do the biggest mistakes of our lives always look so small before they are made? Why isn't a poisoned road lined with dead bodies or the stench of corpses until you're standing right at the place that will kill you?

The rain starts to fall. It is quiet. My head must have hit the ground hard because a fourteen-year-old girl who looks just like me drops to the ground next to me. I can see right through her like she is layers of nothing but water. She's dead. She's inside my head, but she watches me outside, too. The old man is also here, standing over me, and he says,
Fight. Fight, dammit,
but he is softer in the real world.

“Pretty little thing, ain't ya?” a large boy rasps, and then he sits right on my chest, heavy enough that it's hard to breathe. Everything is spinning.
Come on, come on,
I think.
Get up,
Lira.
All I need is for my head to stop spinning, my body to start functioning again. But the boy sits heavily on me as his friends cheer him on, and I cannot move. Can barely breathe.

This might be what I deserve,
I think tiredly.
For who I am. For what I have done. For all the things I will still do.

Get up, Lira.
I must speak the words out loud because for a moment the boy glances at me. His eyes are blacker than any I have ever seen in this world, their world. The other boys even seem a little afraid of him. He's holding me down, looking me over and smiling as if he has a terrible plan. Then he leans away to put out his cigarette and reach for his zipper, and the pressure on my chest eases. My lungs fill with air, my head clears, and I am me. I am a soldier again.

If I were anyone else, this would be an unfair game. An unfair fight.

But here is the thing:

For all his darkness, my eyes hold no light, none at all.

The feeling returns to my hands, my feet, as if I willed it so. I push the boy, and he tumbles off me in surprise. I am on my feet. We stare at each other, one monster to another. I have lost my green dress, but I know that I will win this.

I am going to kill him.

He must see something of this in my face because he
lunges first. I don't have time to think. My hands scramble around for the first weapon I can find. I pick up the rock and throw it hard without hesitating. The boy howls. There is a gash leaking blood down his forehead.

He stumbles to his feet again and charges at me. He is furious now, and he uses his weight to throw me back down on the ground, but I am ready. When he's close enough, my knees lock around his neck and squeeze until his face is first red, then purple, until he is lying there soundless, and then I stand, ready for the rest of them. Wearing only my underclothes.

For a long moment everyone is silent. And then they make the mistake of thinking that my ability to kill is a fluke. Of thinking that every evil thing in the world looks like them: burly and mean and drunk.

There're more of them than me. But I do the best I can to be quick about it, to keep them from drawing any attention to us. I am strategic about positioning myself in the dark so that there will be no memory of me. The ones who remember this will remember only the shadow of a girl.

All this lasts less than a minute. It feels longer. It would be longer, but Edith's brother, Gray, turns up and twists their hands and knees until they scream. As he does this, I put the pieces together inside my head. He is meant to be the receiver
of whatever is delivered to the warehouse today, and I am late. Very late. He must have been waiting. And now he's going to be in trouble because of me.

Afterward he says something, but my ears have stopped working. The words sounds something like “You're usually here on time,” which makes me think that he knows what days I deliver and has been looking out for me. He does a quick sweep of our surroundings, to make sure no one saw us. I am still in my underwear.

“I can, um, carry you so you don't have to—” he says, gesturing with his hands to the wet ground and looking embarrassed.

The look on my face stops him from finishing. “Right,” he says, still not looking at me, and starts walking. “This way.”

I follow him into his truck, where he turns up the heat and rummages around inside the back until he finds something. An oversize sweatshirt, a pair of jeans. “I sleep in here sometimes,” he says, answering a question I did not ask. I pull the clothes on over my frozen body while I stare out the window, not even embarrassed, just numb. My own green dress is lying in tatters somewhere back there by the garbage bin, by the bodies that are no longer moving.

“Are you okay?” he asks. “Are you hurt?”

I shake my head.

He stares at me. “Are you sure? Do you want to talk about it?”

I shake my head again.

He gestures down, and when I look, I notice that there is blood seeping through his shirt, just a drop, so close to my breast.

“Lira,” he says.

“Don't,” I whisper without finishing.
Don't be this person. I don't want you to be.

He understands somehow.

Gray and I sit in silence. “I think we missed one,” he says after a moment, his hands fisted on the steering wheel. My head whirls back to the bin, and I see it. A dark lump, crawling across the ground, possibly going for help. Before Gray can say or do anything, I am out of the car. I walk toward the boy without any feeling or sentiment inside me. I am all monster now, and I do not know whether my fist connecting with the boy's face twice will kill him. But at the very least I owe him a concussion.

When I am finished, I see the watch Edith gave me lying on the ground. I pick it up, hold it tight inside my hand as I walk away.

I climb back into the truck. I know that I should say this is my fault, say I will take full responsibility, say that everything will be all right, but instead I say, “The food. The kids at your cottage will starve.” My voice is barely more than an empty whisper, and Gray looks startled that I spoke at all. He clenches his jaw and leaves the truck again, starts picking up the food. A smashed loaf of bread here. A dented bottle of milk there. But with each thing he picks up he seems to be getting angrier. “Fuck it,” I hear him say eventually. “We'll go buy more tomorrow.”

But I come out and help him put the food together again. The ones that are still good, that are not broken or spoiled. I remember the days we starved. I remember the days Madame would say, “It's not safe for me to go into the city,” and all we would have was a cup of flour. We would sit at the river all day, drinking water until our bellies hurt, pretending that our mouths tasted of apple pie instead. Character building, Madame called it. When we were young, those days—when our characters were still in their infancy—were the worst of our lives.

We do not speak as we load up the truck, but it is understood that we must take the food. There will be no character building, not tonight, not if we can stop it.

We step over the bodies and all the blood. We step over the ones who look like they're only sleeping and the ones who might never wake again. Once I trip over myself in his clothes, which are bigger than I am, but eventually we're back in the truck. And in my hand, covered in dirt and blood, I hold on to the watch Edith gave me more tightly than ever. I know that tonight is supposed to turn me the other way. Make me think that staying out of trouble is the smartest thing, that sticking to routines and protocols are the only things that keep us from breaking. And maybe I will think so tomorrow. But tonight, when Gray asks quietly, “Do you want to turn on the watch?” I know it means I can disappear from this city, from this world for tonight, and so in response I open my hand. I turn on the watch.