The Unquiet (9 page)

“Meh,” she says evasively. “Boys are stupid.” She rides in her zigzag way again, and I think it's all forgotten, but when I catch up to her again, she asks, “Is Gigi going to die because of me, too?”

I frown. “I thought that dumb boy Mathieu was supposed to be your best friend.”

“I know, right?” She smiles at me. I've stumbled upon the right thing to say for this moment and breathe a sigh of relief.
But then she adds, viciously, “Dumb boy,” and barks a short laugh. Mathieu had better watch his back. My sister might be six years old, but in a way she is much older, much tougher than she seems. In that way she is the version of Lirael that Gigi was referring to. The type of girl who is strong even when she is weak. She, not me, is the most like her mother already, even now, even this young.

When a set of headlights flashes ahead of us, my first instinct is to pull us down onto the grass, let the car pass. But it's Da in his truck, come looking for us. He yells at me for keeping Cecily in the city so late, especially after the announcement that the Silence is over. “Who knows what is going to happen next?” I say nothing back. Finally he stops, catches me staring out at the sky, catches me not being who I should be. For months all I have done is complain loudly about the whole Silence thing, the way
she
would have. About the way everyone seems to have stopped living. “Let's pretend it's not even out there,” I said, yet here I am looking up.

But I can't look down. My neck is frozen.

Cecily tells him she thinks I am coming down with something and nudges me conspiratorially.
Our boyfriend, our secret
. She doesn't say it, but I let her think better of me. Let her share our imaginary little thing.

M
y first duty as
her
, as me, happened two days after I arrived. I accompanied Gigi to the clinic not just because she was feeling ill but also because she suspected that whatever the doctor had to say, she would not want Da to hear. She didn't want me to hear either, but I had been the one at home when the doctor had called to confirm her appointment. Gigi thrives on secrecy when it comes to her family. Always their happiness before hers. I'd known this before. I'd known it since I was nine years old, sitting there in my bunker, but it was still the sort of thing that made me nervous now.

The clinic was white, and the smell of it reminded me of some sort of perfumed bleach. It was very small, not as flashy as all the others in the city, but Gigi had been coming here for so long she said she couldn't remember her last doctor's name. The paint outside the building was peeling, the window rattling, and it was so hot that the secretary kept fanning herself with the files of patients she was flipping through. The radio was on, but the signal was so bad that there was more static than music. We chose a corner of the room to sit in, and I thought about Gigi's loyalty. I don't know how many times I sat in the training room, watching footage of Gigi doing or saying kind things, comforting everyone else. All through our training we'd been taught to expect the unexpected, to create margins of error for the people we were learning about. Not everyone would be exactly what they seemed all the time. But Gigi was. She was exactly what I had learned my grandmother would be.

Sitting in the waiting room, I listed all her qualities in my head as I had done during training, as I had done during my exam. I knew her whole history: That she'd grown up in a free-spirited sort of family, but she'd been good and innocent right up until the moment she met my grandfather, and as she liked to say, it was all “shot to hell” after that. She married Da and lost a son before she had my mother, and that
was the most difficult part of their marriage. Once she had my mother, Gigi devoted herself to being a mother and wife. I sat there in that waiting room, counting all those things I knew, a lot of which the real Lirael would never have known because she'd had no file to read. She could never have been objective about the people she loved; she had to love them in spite of whatever they were and weren't.

Despite the fact that the clinic was half empty, we sat in the waiting room for hours. Every few minutes the secretary would sing off key in what she must have thought was her
quiet
voice, and every few minutes the old man sitting across from us would mutter, “May the good Lord take me now,” or “May the ground open up and swallow me now.” He was very dramatic about it, and Gigi and I were trying really hard not to lock eyes in case we started laughing.

When they finally came for us, Gigi stood. “Wait out here,” she told me, and I complied. But once she came back out, I peppered her with questions. Her hands were shaking even though her eyes were dry, and I studied her face, perhaps even too long. She kept waving me off dismissively each time I asked what she'd been told.

Then we walked past an ice-cream parlor, and she said, “Let's go inside.”

“But you hate ice cream,” I said.

She
tsk
ed and ushered me inside. We sat on stools so tall that our feet no longer touched the ground. I ordered a banana split. The moment it arrived Gigi leaned forward, a deep crease between her brows. “That banana is brown,” she said, not exactly quietly, her lips curling.

I shrugged. “Sometimes it happens.”

I knew this was an insult to my grandparents. They held the world to the same standards they held themselves, as far as food was concerned. A browning banana. It was the equivalent of poison to Gigi. “You have to call that waiter back,” she said. “This is unacceptable. Your grandfather would never allow this.”

I made a show of holding the spoon to my lips. “Only if you tell me what the doctor said.”

But she said nothing, just looked away. I ate the ice cream, brown banana and all. She ate her vanilla scoop, both of us hating it, neither of us telling each other the truth.

I spent the entire time surreptitiously watching my grandmother's hands, not just because they were still shaking but because they reminded me of my own hands just three days earlier on the yellow bus. My eyes were glued to those hands, so soft. The art of holding a paintbrush to create
things, of using our delicate hands at all, had been passed down in the family. It was tradition to express ourselves creatively with those hands, the only way to stay sane, and it showed. We had fingers that could bend in the wrong direction, that could twist and turn to create whatever we wanted them to create, but that day those hands were stiff and frightened. They were the kinds of hands that knew all the things your mind and the rest of your body chose to ignore, hands that understood that something bad was coming.

Afterward we went shopping for groceries, our cover story, and Gigi bought me an expensive pair of gloves. For the coming winter, she said, but I shook my head. I tried to put it back down. “Gigi, it's too much.”

She waved me off again. “Never. I can spoil my granddaughter all I want.” But I knew what she meant. I imagined the words hard in her throat, struggling to find their way out. They were the kinds of words that changed things, the kinds of words that asked too much of you, and it was only once the bus had dropped us on the road and we'd started walking to the house that Gigi said them. “Don't tell your grandfather about this.”

We weren't lying to everyone, exactly. We were just letting them be happy for a little while longer. “It's the kindest thing
that one person can do for another person,” Gigi said without meeting my eyes. I followed her into the house then, and inside my head I was trying to imagine what the real Lirael would do. On the one hand, if her grandmother was sick, she would want to tell her grandfather if only for the fact that it was better that someone else knew. It would be a betrayal, but at least Da could try to do something. On the other hand, if Gigi really was sick, then she would probably do everything in her power to get well, and in the meantime, wasn't it better that Da still wore that smile on his face? That Cecily never cried at night, even if just for a little while? Which was better? What was I supposed to do?

I wasn't sure.

I wasn't sure at all.

In a way this was my first real test in my new family, and I looked back on my training, my eight years in the cottages, and found it completely useless.

I
am upstairs in my room when someone knocks on the front door. I open my bedroom door, trying not to make a sound. Then I tiptoe closer to the staircase. I hear Da fiddle with the locks, and then Gigi exclaims happily. I haven't heard her like that in months.

It's their long-lost daughter, my aunt Imogen. Except she wasn't particularly lost; she just doesn't like to remember that she has family until she needs something. Or at least that is what Da says.

I lean over the banister to watch.

“Daddy, I haven't seen you in forever. How have you been?” Aunt Imogen exclaims. In a high-pitched voice and strange, unrecognizable accent. She's slurring her words, too, and her makeup is smudged. Her cheeks are puffy, and her smile keeps wobbling. Actually, she looks as if she has been crying.

Da says, “What do you want?”

He is especially not impressed when the front door opens again and more people come inside, most of them swaying like Aunt Imogen. Her friends, she explains, and they'll be here only a few hours. “They've never been on an orchard before. I told them you wouldn't mind, Daddy. Was I wrong?”

Da grunts a response I cannot make out. He is probably half hoping she means it because he stands at the edge of the room, waiting. He wants to show them his trees. Show them the ones he planted himself and the ones his father did. But the moment the words are out of her mouth, Aunt Imogen forgets them. She and her friends sit on the couch. They open bottles of wine and eat cheese. They cross their legs and point their toes in some sophisticated poses. They say that they are celebrating the end of the Silence, but all they really talk about is whether their alternates have found happiness with any of the boyfriends they've recently dumped. They are loud
and raucous, clanking glasses, completely unaware of the time. “Just imagine
,
” one of them says, “if John is the one I was supposed to spend my life with.”

Da leaves them there eventually. He helps Gigi up to their room. He's muttering to her about ungratefulness and selfishness, but I swear I see him blushing with embarrassment. Their bedroom door closes with a slam.

I stand in the shadows for a long time, staring down the stairs. Aunt Imogen was the person the real Lirael looked up to when she was a kid. She wanted to be just like her. One day her aunt was training to be a teacher; the next she'd decided she was going to be a doctor. Today she is wearing an air hostess outfit, same as all her friends. Her lips are stained with bright red lipstick, and her hair is wild.

I jump when I realize I am not spying alone.

“You're supposed to be in bed,” I whisper to Cecily.

“So are you,” she says.

Aunt Imogen looks up suddenly. Her face brightens, and she waves. For a moment I don't react; I just stare at her. When her hand falls, I realize I've waited too long to be the girl she knew. The one who loved her.
Get yourself together, you idiot,
I tell myself, and straighten. I walk down the stairs with a false smile on my face. She introduces me to her friends. I feign
wide-eyed excitement when she tells me and Cecily about her adventures on airplanes. The whole time I am thinking,
How would Lirael sit? How would Lirael stand? What would Lirael say now?

Because I don't know.

It's one thing to be a granddaughter and sister; I know Gigi and Da and Cecily like the back of my hand. Everything I studied, every moment spent in front of those screens in the cottages were meant to fool them. But Aunt Imogen isn't supposed to be here. Nothing about her is constant, permanent. Nothing I learned two years ago about her and how to fool her even applies now. She has changed. Her hair—strawberry blond now, no longer brown—and even the way she walks are different. But it is her eyes that make me wary. Two bottomless pits that are not as sure and trusting as they once were. And she is expecting something from me, her niece.

I smile, but I don't want her here.

Everything has been going so well.

I
wake up barely four hours after I put my head down. Four hours since I snuck back into the house, after completing my mission. Da knows early morning is when I am most vulnerable, when my eyes are wild and my body craves sleep. He ignores my guttural groan and hands me a hot flask. “Come on,” he says, a man shape in the dark. “We're going to join the fishermen.” He leaves the room, and that is his mistake. When he comes back a few minutes later, I am curled around the closed flask, reveling in its warmth, pillow over my head, and lost again in that dream of the old man who always finds
me in sleep, who always speaks to me. I have not yet solved the riddle of why I dream about him, though I suppose, in a way, he was my answer to my life as a sleeper. I didn't have a family, so I created one of my own. I know he isn't real, but in my dreams that does not matter. In my dreams I belong with somebody.

We are standing together on a piece of the ocean, standing there as if on solid ground.
Look,
the old man says now, pointing to a memory that replays behind us like a black-and-white movie.
Look. This is your last good moment
. But before I can see it, the man and the movie begin to grow smaller, begin to shrink away from me. And though I try to chase after them, there is no place to go. I am suddenly in a room with four black walls that I slam into with each step I take.

“Lirael,” Da says, yanking the blanket off me and forcing my eyes open. He smells like cigarettes and coffee and sleeplessness, the exact opposite of what I was dreaming about. His voice is deep and strong but chopped in places, as if it is beginning to wear out. He nudges me again, more roughly this time. “I am going to carry you to the river like this, but I expect you won't want Pierre and Philip staring at you all morning in your underthings. Then we'll drown for sure, with Pierre and his rowing skills.”

This time I sit up. I hold the flask to my chest and scowl into the dark. He shuffles through my drawers, pulling out clothes like he has any idea what he is doing. He gets it wrong, of course. Pulls out a shirt that he mistakes for a dress, a torn woolen hat, two left boots, but I am still in no place to find him amusing. My voice is nearly as rough as his, as if I have been screaming all night. “You're only trying to punish me for the other night with Cecily,” I say grumpily.

“Damn straight I am,” he says without stopping. He yanks my curtains apart, lets the first whisper of sunrise on the horizon shine through. He reaches inside his pocket and retrieves a wrapped sandwich that has been smashed into a ball shape. “Breakfast,” he says, but this time does not leave the room. This time he stands with his bent back to me, his breathing harried, as if this has taken all the effort he has and he suddenly finds himself worn out. Da is getting older every day. The orchards are becoming too much for him to bear, even with the workers who have stayed behind to help. I think he is tired. But if he is, he would rather die than admit that to me.

I climb out of bed, shrug out of my nightgown, and find the correct boots. I wish I could reach underneath my mattress and take my sleeper pills. If ever I needed my health to be perfect, it is today, out there on the river, but I cannot risk
Da's noticing. I will have to wait until I get back. I wear the torn hat, the shirt, a pair of leggings, and a coat. I do not comb my hair; I have nobody to look decent for. This is how we both—Da and I—prefer my life, and on this one thing we can agree. I tuck the greasy sandwich inside my coat pocket, grab the flask. I wrap the giant scarf Gigi gave me for Christmas around my neck twice until my mouth is covered.

“I said I was sorry,” I say in a muffled voice.

Da doesn't answer, doesn't turn around, just marches toward the door and expects me to follow him. In the hallway he says, “I don't want apologies. I want you to show me that you give a damn. About your grandmother. About your sister.”

“Of course I do,” I say, with as much irritation as I can muster. We don't talk about the fact that sometimes when he can't stand to see how sick Gigi is, he gets sad and moody and stays out until he knows she has gone to bed before skulking into the kitchen, looking for dinner.

We tiptoe down the stairs. The worst fishing days, rare as they are, are when Cecily wakes up and decides that she wants to come along. Even worse is when we make her return and she is furious, but we can bear those days better than when we're halfway down the river and she's bawling her eyes out because the fish we've caught are
dying
.

“Funny,” I say as we pass the kitchen. Da nods toward a couple of buckets in the corner, and I pick them up. “On the days you want to punish me, you think you're a fisherman. Why can't you be an orchardist on those days? Why can't we go pick apples like normal people? I
like
picking apples.”

Aunt Imogen's suitcases are still sitting by the door. They've been there since she arrived two days ago, fresh off her divorce, but I haven't even seen her since that first night. That was what brought her here: the end of her marriage to a man Da specifically warned her against years ago. So he says, but don't all parents warn their children, and are children ever expected to listen?

She goes drinking and sleeps late. Da, Gigi, Cecily, and I barely speak to her. Only Gigi tries. Mainly because of the suitcases. Da says there's no use in investing time in someone who has no intention of staying. She comes, she goes, and she stays out of the way. Sometimes I hear her crying in her room at night.

Once I even knocked. It was what
she
would have done. But the crying stopped, and the door stayed locked.

She comes out now, as if I conjured her up, her hair sticking up in strange angles. “Oh. I thought I heard voices. What's happening?”

Da doesn't answer. I'm the one who says, “I'm being punished.” I hold up the buckets.

Aunt Imogen smiles. “I remember Da taking me on those trips. I don't think I ever caught a single fish, though.” She looks from me to Da and then back again, and there is something hopeful about her voice when she says, “Do you want me to come with you? I can help. I think.”

Before I can say anything, Da snaps at her, “And will you bring your bottle of wine with you? Or perhaps you've found something stronger today. Your mother's missing pills perhaps?”

She looks like he slapped her. She turns around, walks quickly back into her room. Her door slams shut. For me there has never been a more awkward moment. But Da acts like she was never here at all. I know he's angry. Two years ago, Aunt Imogen married some man we've never met. Aside from one postcard, that's the last we heard from her. No phone calls, nothing. When she was younger, she and Da used to be very close.

It's hard to forget all the used-to-be's.

“You used to love to fish,” he says, clearing his throat.

I turn away from the room Aunt Imogen disappeared into. “I was ten, Da. Now I'm lucky if I can get the smell out
of my hair in a week, and you know how Pierre can be. You know how he won't leave me alone.”

Da shrugs, shutting the door behind us. I think he is ignoring me, but then he speaks softly, his reluctant words not meant for my ears. “You're still ten,” he mutters. “You'll always be ten.”

“You're not my father,” I say, which is the obligatory thing I always say to him when I am supposed to be mad. Supposed to be horrified at the prospect of having to spend the day with him. I don't think I have actually had a day in my life I've not wanted to spend with him. Da jokes sometimes that I am a better boy than I ever was a girl; there are certainly no girls who live near us who think that spending the day fishing with their grandfathers might be the best thing that has happened to them in weeks.

“Of course I'm not, and no wonder,” Da says gruffly. “I would have done the whole damn thing better.”

But he kisses my cheek with twitchy lips, and I climb into the truck.

The orchards are full of trees, but I have managed to convince everyone that I am now too old to climb them. I did not break any habits when I came; instead I collected them. The way
she walked and talked and laughed. It was like a filled box that I had to step into, that I had to mold myself to fit, but I could never bring myself to love the trees. The truth is I am no longer brave enough to climb them. I stand on ladders, which I tell myself is a different thing entirely. A ladder will not betray me, not without warning me first at least, and all our ladders are sturdy things. But a tree deceives you into thinking that it is on your side. Once in my dreams the old man said the same thing he always says:
Look.
We were standing at the top of a tree, and for a second we could see the whole world from there. But then my branch snapped. I died in that dream, I think. Even in sleep, I cannot dream a sturdy tree properly. Whenever I draw trees, I draw them with thick unnatural-looking trunks, with branches of steel, three times bound in wood. I must draw the ugliest trees in the world.

The river is not the same thing as a tree. You cannot blame a river for your fear because a river never lies to you. Already, even before you approach it, it is dark. It has no bottom. If you want it to, it will even do you the very worst favor of your life. I remember watching this image in the bunkers: of a girl and her grandparents and her mother swimming in the river, splashing one another with water. The girl is young, eight maybe, and she laughs as if the whole world belongs
to her and that river. She laughs as if she is unafraid of it. That girl, I think, the original Lira, would never squeeze her hands together before entering the river. Would take no deep breaths, nor have to remind herself to be brave.

“It's okay,” I whisper to myself as I climb onto the boat. And I have to keep saying “It's okay, it's okay” as the boat rocks and my knees knock together.

They say that if you conquer the ocean, you can surely conquer something as small as a river or a lake. But I am not nearly so optimistic.

Back at the cottages, the transfer was not the only time when we drowned. Sometimes the older kids would hold our heads in buckets of water, per Madame's instructions, for however long it took for us to nearly die. “This is how tough it is going to get out there
,
” Madame would say when we were coughing on the ground, clutching our chests
.
“This is what the world is going to be like and how it will feel once you leave this place. And what do you know? What do you say?”

“Our Earth first,” we would chant. “Each other first. Soldiers first. Never them. Never them.”

“Good girls,” she would answer, nodding. And just when we found first breath, found hope: “Again.”

“Quick, Philip,” Pierre yells to his son when he spots us,
“go help them.” As if we were incapable of rowing our own boat onto the water. As if because of old age and size, we were puny things with our fishing rods and buckets. Pierre, who I am convinced never bathes, raises a hand and waves at my grandfather, and they exchange pleasantries.

I pretend not to notice either of them. Pretend that the boat, which is really nothing more than a dinghy, is taking all of my attention. Da's teeth glisten in the early light, and he speaks without losing his falsely enthusiastic smile. “Smile, Lirael,” he says. “They always catch more fish than us.”

I shake my head. “It doesn't matter whether I smile or not. Look at this.” I wear my most discouraging face, yet Philip wades into the water, climbs aboard our boat.

He shakes Da's hand, as if they were meeting for the first time, as if they were speaking a secret language, and then smiles shyly at me. “Hi, Lirael. You decided to come today.”

I say darkly, “I wouldn't exactly call it my decision,” and Da elbows me in the ribs. I think how much Gigi likes fish. “But I'm glad I did.”

This basically cements my fate for the rest of the morning.

“There's looters down your way this year, sleeping in the orchards,” Philip says. “Everyone's been complaining about missing things. You and Cecily should be careful about . . .” He
sees the look on my face, and his words trail off. He laughs. “What am I saying? They're the ones who should be afraid.” He wiggles a single eyebrow at me. “So, Lirael, which poor sod have you beaten black and blue most recently? Or have you been good since that school fight with Michael Stanton?”

“We don't talk about that,” I say quickly, but it's too late. Da has already perked up.

“I would like to talk about that,” he says.

“That's probably why we don't talk about it,” Philip says, laughing. “Anyway, she seems pretty reformed now. Hasn't had a bad incident in months.”

I laugh, too, dip my hand into the water and toss a handful at him, and Da gives me his look of approval. Anything for more fish.

“Fourteen,” I say, staring down into the water. This is a guessing game we play.

Philip cocks his head to the side like he's thinking about it.

“Thirty-three,” he says finally. “A little ambition never killed anybody.”

I raise a brow at him. “Your greatest ambition is to catch thirty-three fish today? Really?”

He laughs. “At least I'll never go hungry.”

To his credit, Philip does not look like his father. His clothes are cleaner, his hair less wild, and he certainly has more teeth in his mouth than Pierre. But they have the same objective, and their objective does not interest me. In fact, now that I am being homeschooled and it is nearing the end of summer, I do not know why Philip and I have to spend any more time together. He is supposed to be to Lirael what the kids from the cottages were to me. Somewhere in the world there are old childhood memories of a Philip and a Lirael, running through the orchards together, fishing together. But I look at him and never once see a boy whose head has been held underneath water, who has been beaten until he cannot speak—this not from Madame, but just because Madame was away and the older kids felt like it. The ones assigned to look after us in the bunkers, who didn't have patience. They knew that our trackers would send alerts if something truly terrible happened to us, but no one had to know that we'd been kicked in the shin, punched in the stomach; that was our life, and from that one small simple thing, this Philip can never truly know me. Never understand me. What could we possibly have to talk about?