The Unquiet (13 page)

T
he birds poke incessantly at the ripe apricots through the tree nets. The really dedicated ones manage to eat a few, but for the most part they are unsuccessful. It is that time of the year when everything is out in full force, from birds to worms to mischief-seeking squirrels. The fruit pickers are here, too: little boys sent from our neighbors for the few coins they will earn while their brothers are in the city. They come after school and climb the trees and crowd the ladders with small arms and full baskets. Lately they come also for Da's stories, the things he says about when he was a little boy, adventure
stories involving ships and wicked pirates that almost certainly could never have happened. But the little boys don't notice. Even the ones who are too young to help, who listen from the base of the trees, stomping fallen fruit with their boots. “Tell us the one about the swordfight,” they yell up, and Da begins his story.

“Well, once upon a time . . .”

“God, if I have to hear that story again,” Philip says, climbing down his ladder with a basket of fruits. We are working on the same tree.

“We can't both go,” I tell him solemnly. “And you're the one who has to stick around. You're taller.”

He laughs. “See you later, Lira.” He loads up the truck with the baskets, and then he drives to the city to see how much he can sell at the fresh food market. There are also orders to be filled locally, houses to make calls on. Mrs. Eckles wanted two boxes of peaches; Mr. Danon wanted four. Normally I go with him, but I am renetting the trees to keep the birds away. When the day is over, Da drives us home with several boxes of fruit.

My bones are so tired they hurt. I am shrugging out of my clothes and halfway up the stairs when I realize that we have company. That the voices speaking in the living room
belong to Gigi and someone else. Someone who cannot be here. In my shock I forget all about my half-buttoned clothes. I enter the room just as Julia stands, shy smile on her face. She looks relieved to see me, but when my mouth falls open and stays that way, her smile fades. She shuffles her feet and says, “Um, hi.”

“Why are you being rude?” Gigi chastises me after too long a moment. “Your friend has been waiting hours to see you.”

I say nothing. Sometimes, when I am extremely tired, I see things, shadows in the corners of my eye, tricks of light that turn into a girl or boy shape, that laugh and play hide-and-seek on the walls. But Julia's shadow does not fade away. The look of irritation on Gigi's face does not dissolve, and so I have to face the truth: there is another sleeper in this house. Another person like me, and that makes me more uneasy than I can say.

My
friend,
I think.

Hours
, I think.

It occurs to me to be embarrassed, especially when Da enters the house and begins making a fool of me. “You say you are Lira's friend?” he asks, for the second time in the span of a minute, and when Julia nods, his face breaks out into a smile.

“We don't get to see too many of her friends,” Gigi explains, making things worse.

“Lira works too hard,” Da says. “Doesn't do much of the things a girl her age should be doing.”

Julia laughs. There is sympathy all over her face when she finally turns to look at me. I understand that the expression on her face is saying, “I have come to save you from these crazy people.” “That's actually why I'm here,” she tells my grandparents. “I was wondering whether Lira might be interested in coming on a hiking trip with my family tomorrow. Just for the weekend.”

“A hiking trip?” Da says, pretending to think about it. He actually looks like he wants to come, too. To make sure I go, to make sure it happens. He doesn't bother to ask me before offering his consent.

“But I haven't finished the netting,” I remind him.

“Philip will do it.”

I finally have the calm of mind to scowl at him like I should.

Julia can never be my friend, not in public. She cannot be some random girl I met in the city; it's too dangerous. Someone would recognize us together, but in front of my grandparents we pretend that is exactly what we're going to
do. Walk around in public together like normal teenagers. Her “family” is everyone at the farmhouse. This invitation is from them, too, not just her. Still, I find use of my legs only when it's time to escort her outside. We both pretend not to notice the way Da moves to the window and gently opens it. “Lighten up,” Julia says. “If I'd known you'd look like that—”

“You wouldn't have come?” I ask.

“I would have brought a camera,” she says.

“Is this really possible?” I ask. “A whole weekend?” It's one thing to disappear for a night without our handlers finding out. Two seems impossible.

“Gray and Robbie are taking care of it,” Julia says.

I want to ask about this secret protection Edith refused to tell me about, but Julia shakes her head in warning. I remember that Da is listening.

“Don't worry, Lira.” Julia hugs me. “Dress warm, and come prepared to do crazy things.” She lowers her voice so Da won't hear and pulls me away from the window. “We're making a list,” she says, “of all the things that people our age do that seem to make them the happiest. I've been investigating, and after it's finished, we'll do everything on the list. We have been planning this weekend for ages.”

She hesitates, glances back at my house. “You trust us,
right? I mean, you trust me? You know that I am your friend? I know we were never close, but . . . well, I hope you don't hate me.”

She's talking about the way I just reacted.

“I'm glad you came,” I say, and wave when she drives away.

I am lying.

“Don't you want to know where I met her?” I ask Da at the dinner table.

“A
friend
, Lira,” he says, ignoring my question.

“Maybe she can finally talk some sense into you and change those clothes you insist on wearing,” Gigi says.

I don't ask: “What's wrong with what I'm wearing?”

“She's probably going to be a terrible influence on me,” I warn instead.

Gigi beams at Da. Cecily is the one who asks the question I know they are thinking: “So, when can she come for dinner?”

I roll my eyes at how normal we are being.

I ride my bike into the city early the following day because Edith and Julia want to go to a movie together before we go hiking. It is not about what we see but the act of doing
it. This is the first thing on our list. The cinema is small and musty, and the film we've chosen interests no one. At first we are disappointed by the emptiness of the room, but then we begin to see the bright side. We yell things at the characters from the front row and predict how the movie will end.

The movie does not match our mood at all. It is a quiet, somber film, but for once we can't afford to be those things, not today. We whisper-shout out our opinions during the really poignant moments of the film. “Okay, I know they're about to kiss and everything,” Edith says, “but I really think she should think about dating his brother for a minute.”

Julia and I turn to look at her. “But his brother is responsible for the deaths of half the people in the movie.”

Edith stuffs her mouth with popcorn. “I just don't see the relevance in all that. The way I see it, only one thing really matters when a girl has to choose between two guys, and it is this: Does he have good teeth or does he not? Only one brother in this movie is even
remotely
worth considering, and I can't believe they're trying to sell the other one to us because he's a nice guy.”

Edith delivers all this in a deadpanned way that makes our eyes water.

We eventually lower our voices but only because
the usher walks into the room and eyes us suspiciously. Whenever the movie lights up his face, he looks like some kind of bogey monster. Julia keeps making noises like she's deeply affected by the movie. Small gasps, with her hands clutching at her throat. Edith and I copy her until our shoulders shake with laughter.

A man dies; we laugh. His wife breaks down at the funeral; we laugh larder.

The usher frowns at us a moment longer before he leaves. He cannot do anything about the fact that we all are clearly mad.

When he is gone, we laugh until everything hurts. We are not laughing for any good reasons. We just laugh because we can. It tastes like rebellion in my mouth, and I am afraid of it. The fact that I can laugh. That I choose to be here doing these things, terrified of what might happen if we are caught, yet still laughing. I hold a shaking hand to my chest and feel how fast my heart beats. “Stupid, stupid,” it says.

Afterward I cannot even remember what the film was about.

The others are more carefree. They laugh as though they've known this game a long time. I will never fit in, not in the way they want me to. It doesn't help that I am the youngest, that I know the least about life, that I do not go out to clubs or
parties like they do. I do not have rich parents or an expensive school. In a way I am less than they are, but then Edith links her arm through mine and whispers, “I'm glad you came,” and I can tell she means it in a way I still do not understand. I do not question it. It is hard but not impossible to turn my mind off just this once.

The three of us agree to ride separately and meet up with the others. I ride my bike, and Edith catches one bus while Julia catches another, yet we're all headed for the same destination.

But when we reach the farmhouse, the others are waiting, quiet. Roberta stares down at the ground, as if there were something interesting there. “What's wrong?” Julia asks, her eyes wide.

It's Robbie who answers. “I had an assignment today,” he says, and his voice actually sounds shaky. He clears his throat a couple of times. “A bunch of sleepers.”

I frown at him, then at Roberta, Gray, Davis. I realize that they all are afraid of something. This makes me so terrified I cannot move. Edith opens her mouth to make an argument. “But, Robbie,” she says carefully, “this isn't your first time—”

Robbie shakes his head. “You don't understand. The address I was given. It was right where they were staying. It
was a place like ours. They were . . . meeting there. Like us. Some apartment in the city.”

It's as if he is slapping us in the face with icy water. The idea that there are others like us, bending the rules like us, that they died for it. I can barely stay standing, and Julia actually collapses onto a chair. This is our warning. Probably the only one we will get. We have to stop this now. We have to say good-bye.

Miss Odette said that all sleepers needed to be ready. What if they are checking on us all, to make sure we are? What if the end of the Silence means more for sleepers like us than just more missions?

They could be watching us right now.

It's a long time before I find my voice. “What should we do?” I half whisper, and I am hoping,
hoping,
that someone says this is over. The farmhouse, the meetings. Someone else, not me. Because now we know for sure that meeting like this is the most dangerous thing we could be doing. Any second now the door could burst open. Any second now a round of bullets that will erase us.

All it takes is one moment of carelessness. That moment might even have happened already.

But no one says it.

Not a single one of us.

Instead Robbie says, “But those kids were not Safes. They had a lot of surveillance on them.” It sounds like something heavy is pressing down on his throat.

“Okay,” Edith says. “Okay.” She sounds even worse than Robbie. “Then they were nothing like us. So we have nothing to be worried about. Right?”

We all nod our heads without actually looking at one another.

We tell ourselves that we are much more careful.

In the end the most frightening thing isn't the fact that we might die from this. It's the fact that we know it. And yet we blow that knowledge away from ourselves like feathers.

What weight will this choice carry?

I am terrified of the answer.

In the end maybe the brave ones are also the foolish ones. Maybe only fools are ever truly brave.

At first our list consists of silly things. We sit outside in the trees and spin bottles and plant kisses on each other. Me on Julia. Julia on Davis, and he acts like he has died and gone to heaven.

“Does this mean we're in a relationship now?” Davis asks,
fluttering his eyelashes. “Me, you, Lira, what do you say?”

“You watch way too much television,” Julia says, laughing.

Robbie and Gray are a lot more reserved than the rest of us. That makes sense; they have seen and done worse things as Safes than we can imagine. Instead they watch over us like sentinels. They scare me a little with how serious they are. Once, I offer Gray a small smile, just to see if he will return it, and when he does, he looks as though he doesn't smile often. It's one of those dark, miserable looks. Davis is the opposite. We have to beg Davis to put his clothes back on. We have to beg Davis to stop drinking.

Then we have chocolate milk shake contests that cause brain freezes, laced with some special ingredient Julia won't reveal. We run back into the house and make them, and then I hold my head and whisper, “Oh, God, it's almost worse than dying.”

“Almost?” Davis slurs, milk shake all over his shirt. “What do you mean almost? Are we standing in the same room right now?”

“Um,” Julia squeaks, “is it also supposed to cause temporary blindness?”

My eyes snap open, and we're all squinting at Julia. “Wait,” I say. “We don't know the consequences of what all these
things we're going to do are? I thought you did the research.”

She nods, but she's rubbing her eyes like they're about to fall out.

I laugh, but Roberta doesn't find it so funny. “What exactly is next on your list, Julia?”