The Unquiet (8 page)

“Y
ou're going to leave me here again, aren't you?” Cecily asks as I pocket the money from the boxes. But she is already shrugging out of her coat and into an apron that the baker's wife hands her. We have an arrangement. The baker's wife looks after Cecily while I run errands and buy Gigi's medicine. She tells Cecily that today they are going to make croissants, which is an intricate process that only little hands can properly accomplish. “I'll just turn the radio up a little,” she says with a wink, “and then we can start.”

She is a short, round woman with dark, wispy curls and
reminds me of my grandmother when she was better.

I offer her a grateful smile as I turn to leave.

“It's almost as if there's nothing out there but emptiness right now,” a crackly voice is saying on the speakers as I reach for the door. “All the folks listening who have lived as long as I have will agree that it has never felt quite like this before. Like we are alone in the world . . .”

The topic of conversation on the radio is always the same: the Silence, the possibility of war, the waiting. Most people roll their eyes now. At school I once watched a film about the beginning of the Silence. That initial panic has ebbed away. And they roll their eyes a little more every day, stare up at the sky, and
dare
them, whoever is out there, to come with their bombs and their missiles.
Beg
them to come. Anything but this waiting. Anything.

They have no idea what they are asking for.

“Be good. I'll be right back,” I say, and step out of the shop, pull my coat tighter around my body. Even though there is a pharmacy nearby, I make my way right across town, taking the paths least trodden, avoiding people and their familiar faces. All sleepers exist in a state of paranoia. Always afraid that we are being watched. That the people here suspect us.

I am always looking. Backward and forward and sideways.

A woman is sweeping the front of her shop. I walk right into her pile of dirt.

“Sorry,” I say quickly, but she swats at me with her broom anyway. It's all done rather good-naturedly because to her she has known me for years and I go to school with her daughter.

I saw a girl from the cottages once, one afternoon when I was running errands for my grandfather in the city. She did not notice me; she was walking with her friends, laughing, hands waving in the air animatedly. She was older. I wondered for a moment whether I had just conjured her up because I had run out of people to imagine seeing. But then I realized that we all grew up together so that we would be dispersed into a world close together. Even now we are a unit, a team. Since then I have seen more of us from the cottages, some who offer me a quick, friendly smile, some who look right through me. I have to confess; I am a lot more enthusiastic to see them, eyes always flickering about, always hoping. I overheard my handler say that over the last year people are moving through the cottages faster. That per the instructions of our government, there are no longer eight- to ten-year learning curves. As if some sort of invisible deadline were pedaling up to meet us.

A small flower shop sits on a dirty, lonely side of town, lost among the older forgotten buildings. The walls are skewed; they intend to cave in slowly and hope no one notices. When I knock on the shop door, a short, bespectacled man peers out at me before opening it. He is thin, made up of sharp, angular edges, has a pointy mustache, and reminds me a bit of a praying mantis. He says nothing to me, just holds the door open. Inside his shop there are so many plants that it is nearly impossible to move. He glares at me when I knock a flowerpot over, and even though I straighten it before I reach the counter, his scowl does not go away. His radio is blaring in the background. The air inside the flower shop is musty, as if the plants are competing with us instead of helping us, and the blinds are drawn, too. I pretend not to mind.

The man bends, reaches underneath his counter, and retrieves something wrapped in a frayed cloth. I know even before I unwrap it what I will find. The piece of paper with the writing on it. The syringe. The phone. I know he is watching, so I force my hands not to shake as I pick up the paper and read it. The rest I tuck away inside my messenger bag. A year ago I knew nothing about Safe status. I thought it was this simple: you took over your alternate's life after killing her, you lived exactly as she would have. Sometimes you would
be given an older sleeper who was ill to look after until he was better, and that was it. But then I met my handler, Miss Odette. Now I know that you receive Safe status when you have been watched in your new life for long enough to determine that you are in an optimal location, optimal lifestyle to do more work for our people. More work does not always mean a syringe. Sometimes more work is a gun to deliver. A knife. A nail in the road to cause a car accident. Sometimes more work is carrying a bag of groceries to a seemingly abandoned building and leaving it there. Groceries like bread and milk, like medicine, for the ones still in the cottages, the ones like us. Sometimes work is good and work is bad, and I think that the consequence of failing either is to be sent back to the cottages to be a Madame, where little children and their bedtimes and burying bodies that hang from knotted trees become one's job.

The good thing is that Safes are no longer watched, at least not as rigorously as those who are not Safes. When I first left the cottages, they were everywhere. People following me. People listening in on every conversation I had on the streets. People pretending to read newspapers whenever I walked by, even though they knew I could see them. They weren't really trying to hide from me. They wanted me to know that they
were there, that they were everywhere. But now it is quiet. I am mostly on my own. I have had a year to earn it.

I come to the flower shop once a week. I come in the mornings or afternoons to retrieve my missions, and then I fulfill them at night, when my family is asleep.

“Is there a problem?” the man says, breaking through my thoughts.

I blink back into the present, having read the string of numbers on the piece of paper. “Do I have a time frame for this?” I ask.

“By tonight, if possible,” he says. “Midnight.” He usually gives me a week.

I think of Cecily waiting for me, and my heart sinks. I can't do it now. And it'll be a few hours, at least, before I can sneak out of the house and ride back to the city. “I might be late.”

The man says nothing, and I sigh. I am supposed to be able to find a way to fulfill the mission without compromising myself. I take the lighter he offers me and burn the piece of paper right in front of him and then leave. But I trip over the same pot again, and this time it shatters. Soil pours everywhere, including on me. The man curses and runs to clean up the mess. I only catch little bits of what he is saying,
“. . . clumsy people . . . stupid little girls . . . do not want any of your help . . .” He bends with a dustpan and brush. I shake my shoes free of clumps of soil.

I am not sure at what moment we both freeze and look at each other, at what moment the radio becomes more important than his precious pot, his precious flowers.

The announcer on the radio is speaking excitedly. Voice high, as if he just really wants to burst into tears.

“The Silence is over,” he says, “and has been for some time.”

The flower shop man lets go of his brush, and I straighten. We both stand there, frowning at each other as we listen.

Apparently a few months ago, the presidents from our planet reached out to the presidents here, and they have been having conferences—about relocations, about vaccinations, about science.

“There might be no war after all,” the man on the radio says, voice still shaken. “Everyone might be safe.”

After this announcement the radio goes silent. It is just me and the flower shop man again. But we say nothing to each other. I shake the remaining dirt from my clothes and shoes and leave the man to clean his shop. Outside, I hold the phone to my ear, dial the number that was written on the
paper, and a voice answers. I used to think it was automated, but now I think that someone is on the other end and that his voice is muffled by some kind of computer. That voice gives me the name of the man the syringe belongs to, his location tonight, and how to reach him. When I hang up the phone, I destroy it. I catch a bus back to the bakery. It is faster than walking back. I ignore everyone on the bus, marveling at the joyous news, at the possibility that the Silence is finally over. The old talk about how they have missed their alternates. They tell their grandchildren how wonderful it is to know your other self, to know all the best and worst possibilities of yourself. Because one is always better than the other.

“Wait till you see, Annie,” a white-haired woman in front of me says, her voice loud and crackly. She squeezes her granddaughter's hand, wipes a tear from her eye with the other. “You will love your other Grandma Josephine. And she will be so happy to finally meet you, but not nearly as excited as the other Annie.”

This
Annie's eyes are wide. Her little blond head bobs with either excitement or terror or both.

Everyone is telling stories like these. For them the end of the Silence means everything will go back to the way it once was.

I want to tell them all
no.

Our people have come too far already; they don't know what we have done to them. What we will continue to do.

We are the worst versions of them; we never truly believed in this idea of two worlds to begin with. Forty years ago our first star disappeared, and no one thought anything of it. Then people started to disappear, vanished into thin air right before our eyes as if they had never been. And then buildings and trees, and massive holes appearing in the ground, causing earthquakes. Some days the sun would come out, touch us, and on others it would hide away. There are cold patches on our planet now. Places where the ocean has frozen over. Places where it never stops snowing. These are not stories that we had to be told. I lived in that world for six years.

We didn't agree to the Silence because we wanted to think about how to fix things. We agreed because we did not want them to know the truth: that our planet was collapsing on top of us. That the universe was literally choosing between every man and woman in the worlds, and ours was the one chosen to go, to die, to disappear.

We agreed because we did not want them to see what we were doing. What we were planning. Whom
we
were choosing.

I stare at the reflection the bus window passes back to me. I remember the girl I see from when she was younger, but no good is left. Not in her eyes, not in her hands, certainly not in the syringe in her bag. In this moment she is so empty I'm surprised to recognize her at all. The girl in the reflection says:
I don't think you can choose who deserves to live or die, not in this situation. I think you just choose your side, and you stay with it no matter what happens. And you have already chosen your side.

I open my bag, stare down at the syringe. I do not know what the clear yellow liquid it contains is. I do not know what it will do. Those things are not my job to know. Those things are not my concern. I look up again and wear my face.

Not everyone has the option of weakness.

I have been gone only an hour, but it is already beginning to get dark when my bus stops. I return to the bakery and find Cecily curled up on a table. “Sorry,” the baker's wife says. “She got bored with baking about five minutes in and decided to sit by the window and wait for you.”

I stuff Gigi's medicine inside my coat pocket. I pick Cecily up, press my face against her soft hair. “I'm so sorry,” I whisper. “Can we not—”

“Not tell anyone about this?” she whispers back, her voice groggy. “Da says you're not supposed to leave me alone.”

I groan. “I said I would be right back.”

She looks pointedly at the clock on the wall and then back at me again. “Right back” means fifteen minutes to Cecily, and not a minute more. I can imagine all the ways she will play this up and how Da will fall for it. “I'll buy you anything you want,” I tell her.

“Good,” she says, and then she leads me toward a candy shop that's just across the road. “Because I already know what I want. And it's going to cost you
plenty
.”

This time, on our way home, I let her ride ahead of me in the growing dark, hoping she burns all the energy from her sugar high before Gigi sees her like this. One look from her, and Da will have my head. Cecily rides more slowly this time around so that I keep bumping my bike into hers. And she rides in zigzags along the road. There are always very few cars on this road, and especially today with the news. People will be glued to their radios and televisions, but I am still wary, still looking over my shoulder.

“Where do you go all the time?” Cecily says. “And how come you go without me? Da says you're not allowed to have a boyfriend until you're at least fifty, you know. Were you with your boyfriend?”

I shake my head and sigh, reach forward and ruffle her
hair. “You ask so many questions. What's up with that, huh?”

“I want to know what you do when I'm not with you.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she says softly, suddenly near tears, and I already know the answer. “Because I want to know what Mama would have done if she was here, and Gigi says you're most like her. And I want to know what that means because . . . well, just because.” She bites her lip, and I know she's thinking very carefully about her next words. When she finally settles on them, she frowns at me. “Mathieu says that the reason why Mama died while she was having me was that I'm bad luck.”

“That is,” I splutter, my fingers tightening around my handlebars, “the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my life.” Now it's my turn to study her. “Wait. Is this why you got into those fights at school? Because Da thinks you're mad.”