The Unquiet (7 page)

One Year Later . . .

M
y grandfather sends me into town once a week with a box of apples and apricots on my bicycle. No matter how early or late I leave, Cecily insists on coming with me, her lip bitten in concentration as she rides over the bumpy road on the tricycle she should have given up two years ago. “It's good for me to know,” she says in her serious voice, “everything you do in the city so that I can take over when I'm older. Right, Lira?”

I nod in agreement. She looks pleased with herself. “Someone has to take care of the trees,” she adds.

My grandfather, Da, has been putting all sorts of ideas in her head about the family legacy, about how the well-being of the orchards will fall to us one day. Some afternoons he gets the sudden urge to walk us both through the trees and vines again, make us take everything in while he watches, as if within twenty-four hours we might have forgotten what apples look like, what unripe grapes feel and taste like. As if he can teach us to love his life, his job, his orchards as much as he does. I neglect to mention to Cecily that since I am barely fifteen, it's very unlikely that she's going to take over anytime soon. “You look ridiculous,” I yell instead, turning back to laugh at her. “You're going to have to learn to ride a proper bicycle soon, because that thing is going to give out on you. Just look at the rickety wheels.”

She makes a face and pedals faster, although that gets her nowhere. Sweat trickles down from the sides of her pink helmet from the effort. “I don't get in your business,” she growls, “so why are you getting in mine?”

“You're six,” I say. “I'm
supposed
to be in your business.” I wave back at the fishermen by the river who are readying their boats. The river is only a few minutes from the orchards, easily visible to those passing by on the road and often filled with fishermen who have done this job all their
lives. Some afternoons they bring back something for us. “For your grandmother,” they'll say.

“Well, I'm old enough to mean what I say,” announces Cecily. She sticks out her tongue, licks her sweaty upper lip, and I laugh again. Her hair is matted to her forehead, and I slow down. For my efforts, when she reaches me, she rides her tricycle directly into me. We both go flying into the grass on the side of the road, apples and apricots sprayed everywhere. “No, no, no,” I groan. I jump up and immediately begin picking them up in case a car comes. If Da were here, he would cry. “An apple is worthless,” he would say, “if it has a single bruise on it. I am the best orchardist for miles, Lirael. People respect me. People expect the best from me.” His thumbs would press against his eyes to hide the tears; he would clear his throat as if it were itchy. And I would remember how small he is, how stooped his back gets when he walks, how old and wrinkly and breakable he is.

I squint over at Cecily. “You saw that on television, didn't you?”

“Of course not. If I did
half
the things I saw on the television, Lira,” she says cheerily, “you would be dead. Race you.” And then she is gone, dust from the road billowing up in her wake. I wipe the fruit carefully on my dress before
putting it back inside the boxes. Cecily pedals as fast as she can. She couldn't beat me if I was walking, much less riding my bike, but she doesn't let that stop her. She turns back to grin at me, eyes wide, voice squeaky. “I'm winning, I'm winning. Oh, my God, I'm actually winning.”

“No, you're not. I'm coming to kick your butt,” I yell.

But I let her win. Not just because she is my sister but also because there is no sorer loser in this world than Cecily. I let her win because it is the thing to do and because suddenly I am tired of having to smile, having to make conversation. It happens. Sudden moments like these when I am heavier than usual. Despite myself, I turn my eyes up to the sky much more frequently these days. I am waiting for something. I just don't know what. But then I think that maybe I am remembering what I did, not waiting, and my head hurts.

I let her win because I have never forgotten that I am not really her sister.

A lot can happen in a year. A body can grow taller, bonier; eyes become bigger, grayer; hair darker, longer. I am her but harsher around the edges in a way I am convinced she would never have been.
This
, I tell myself,
is not weakness
. It is the subtle reintroduction of myself, the old me, in a way no
one but I will know. My old self wasn't enamored with food, didn't care about her appearance so much, didn't care about pleasing everyone else. That is what I tell myself when I look in the mirror. Secretly I am afraid that I might be about to fall apart.

Each dawn the same robin sits on the same wire fence, singing the same song. Night hands over morning in the exact same state it was given. There have been no rearrangements of the clouds, of the stars, no big surprises. Everything in the world is a whisper, and now more than ever, I understand what it means to be a sleeper. Counting time, counting days, always on edge, yet doing nothing. I was trained for much more, but my orders haven't come yet. The worst that has happened is that my grandmother is sick, my grandfather is unhappy with his apricot trees this year, and he is blaming the nippiness of the weather at night, the lack of workers because all the boys over fifteen have run off to the city to sign up to become soldiers, to become men.

It is not just them. Most parts of the countryside are emptier now than they were ever meant to be. The Silence has made people antsy. The possibility that it might not be resolved with simple conversations or negotiations. If the world falls apart, people want to be ready, people want to be
doing something. They're not stupid enough to be completely defenseless, so every once in a while, protests surge around the world, and men and women hurry to sign up for the army, to pledge their allegiance to a possible war, but it won't be enough. They have no idea what they will be up against.

Some people think the Silence will last forever; others, just a few more years. The effort is less halfhearted in the countryside, where the boys are bored, and running away to big cities seems better. In school, before I finished last term, there were empty desks, and the teachers pretended not to notice. People seem to think that in bad times, being surrounded by more people is some kind of defense. Perhaps it is. Perhaps if a rocket falls from the sky and there are ten people standing together, at least one will survive. On any given day on my way home from school, some family was always sitting at the bus stop with suitcases and a look of unease on their faces. They worried about going to the cities to live in cramped apartments and breathe in the polluted air, but they did it anyway. That stopped nearly as quickly as it started, though, and it's gone back to waiting now. Waiting for war; waiting for the Silence to end.

I am still not used to the idea that my life as a cottage girl is over forever. Every once in a while I sense that I am being
watched. Those times are the only reminders of a sleeper world. My fighting muscles are completely useless to my everyday life, and my mind still turns, trying to assimilate new facts of the world that I dare not miss. Like the new things that make my grandmother tired these days, that make Da worried, that make Cecily sad. Sometimes I catch my sister staring at me, and suddenly I cannot meet her eyes. I know I am still living in the cottages inside my head even though I am here. I am guilty of that. Today I have to remind myself twice that the apples and apricots are for the baker's wife and that the money will buy Gigi's medicine for the week. When we reach the shop, we tie up our bicycles, and I have to remind myself that I am not
supposed
to be shy. Da says that I am a good haggler, almost as good as him. I tell myself these things and become
her
.

I get by.

I smile and get by. I'm all alone. Even if I were permitted to, I could never love them as much as they love me—I must be incapable of it, I think, must have lost the ability somehow, somewhere along the road—but we all get by. There is blood on my hands, but it doesn't count if nobody else can see it.

And somehow I have reached Safe status.

I
was nervous to meet them, and then, once I did, I was afraid to know them, to really, truly know them beyond the things that a screen had taught me all those years. Not afraid exactly, but wary, like a girl who suspects her hand might be reaching out for a heap of hot coals. It was bound to burn me. I was bound to mess up. I already had, outside, just moments before with Edith and Gray. I had messed up in the worst way a sleeper could, and I was almost surprised to still find myself alive.

I still am, sometimes.

On My First Night:

My grandfather is an old man with white hair and a full beard. The suspenders make his pants too short, but he likes to see his socks. Likes to make sure that they're the same color and that they match his shoes. There is a long line of stories scribbled on his face that I could trace with my fingers, and the first time I meet him I want to say,
I know you
, and I want to say,
I have never seen you in my life
. Instead I sit down to dinner and pretend because his lined face looks angry. Once the food is served, he doesn't like to wait. He waited twenty minutes for me, yelling my name throughout the house and finally outside. “Where have you been?” he asks with gritted teeth, but I don't answer. He says a prayer, and I dump some mashed potatoes onto my plate without any gravy. Everyone is quiet. I, too, sit in silence, fork at my mouth. When the old man leans forward, suddenly I jump. “All right, Lira,” he says, tenting his hands in front of his face, “I'm just going to say what everyone is thinking.”

I know I am about to be chastened for being late. But before he can begin, a large hairy creature jumps off the top of my head and scurries across the dinner table. Everyone screams. We scramble away from the table, as fast as we can,
splashing food everywhere. No one ever really likes spiders, but nobody reacts like me. Nobody does my strange dance around the room, afraid that something else might fall from my clothes, half screaming, half crying.

I can't even remember whether my alternate is supposed to be scared—of things, bugs, of
giant
spiders. I don't even know whether it is about the spider or a residual effect of what happened outside with Edith and Gray. It's like I am standing outside my own body, watching myself overreact, and I cannot do anything about it. Is that what a panic attack feels like? Where is my courage, my strength?

I am Lirael.

I am the cottage girl again and horrified. I didn't even last five minutes.

The old man is looking for his glasses, but he is too slow. Eventually the little girl stomps on it with her boot. The hairy black thing that becomes a blob of goop because she doesn't stop at fifteen stomps or even twenty. Twenty might not be enough for a thing that big and that hairy.

When it's over, we reclaim our seats at the table. My face is hot and sweaty, my hair sticking to my temples. I clear my throat and pick up my fork. I try to tell myself that this is nothing. That it doesn't matter, but I can feel everyone's
eyes on me as we eat. I force the food down my throat.

It is the old man who laughs first, and then the old woman. The little girl stares at me for a moment before she laughs, too.

They have not seen my failure. They have not recognized this moment for what it really was, with the girl who is not their granddaughter or sister. They think it was perfectly normal.

The old man clutches his belly, and his laughing voice is a loud boom, a contrast with when he talks. “I was going to ask why there were twigs in your hair,” he says. “Seems like you've answered my question. You keep climbing those trees and you're going to break your neck one of these days.” But his chastisement is lost because he's laughing so hard he can barely form words.

Say something, say something,
I think.

“And I suppose you wouldn't notice until dinnertime.”

“Twenty minutes past at the very latest,” he promises.

They spend the rest of the evening falling into fits of laughter. The whole time I am afraid they know, afraid that they can smell it on me, the fear, the blood, the death of their Lirael.
She is right outside in the ground
, the voice inside my head says.
I was not climbing any trees.

I don't want to laugh. But I do. And it sounds loud and sincere coming from my lips.

My heart thumps inside my chest, my hands sweat, and I realize that I am afraid of them. Her family.
My
family. I arrived scared and ugly, only half a person, and now I have to learn how to hide it. I have to get used to it. The strangeness. The fear. The unpredictability of living in the real world.

I wake up every day from Mondays to Fridays, from Saturdays to Sundays, and suddenly one month, two, three, ten months have passed. I am not used to it. The ripple of time. The sound of laughter. No Madame. No cottage children. No sleeper anthems. I am growing old faster behind my eyes. I am aging from the exhaustion of it all. Of pretending.

It was the old woman I met first, with the same shock of white hair as her husband. She was standing at the door, and she said, “Oh, hush,” to her yelling husband, “here she comes now,” and she smiled at me with her crooked teeth. “Dinner is ready, sweetheart,” she said, gesturing to the table, where her husband was glowering.

I met the little girl last and liked her first.

We were praying right after I rushed in, and I opened my eyes and saw her, and she ran her finger across her throat and then quickly closed her eyes again.
You're dead meat.
I liked
her because she expected nothing from me. Because it was enough that she was herself and all I had to do was close my eyes, too.

Months have passed since the beginning of my life. I am still thinking about the spider and how it seemed to say, “Welcome. We intend to make this difficult for you
.
” But time is passing, and the dead girl is still dead. For a whole year she has been dead. . . .

There are other things I am not proud of. Moments I want to peel off my skin. “I thought you liked banana bread?” someone will say, or, “I thought you were never going to wear those shoes again?” Worse moments: “What is wrong with you?” or, “Why are you suddenly like this?” or, “Sometimes I feel like I don't know you anymore.” Or, “Go to your room.”

If there really is darkness in my eyes, then that explains why it is so hard, hard, hard to pretend to have a light shining there. The light can snuff itself out and become dark, but how does the dark become light? How do you start a fire with nothing? I have nothing.

Sometimes.

I wish I were never a cottage girl at all sometimes, in my weakest moments, when I am lying in the dark and there are no snoring voices in bunks all around mine, no schedules,
when I wake up and find that this is the life I am in, this is the present that I was predestined to live.

Sometimes I write my words down; then I burn them or drown them or they never escape the confines of my skull.

And I tell myself that I don't mean any of this.

I am not afraid. I am not weak.

I am not. These things were never said.