Chapter 37: The Unopened Phone

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a Chapter in which the one who stays away is perfectly happy about it, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry up a very long staircase. What is the loudest thing in an empty house? Not the clock, and not the wind in the gravel. It is a phone that has stopped ringing.

Hadjer Lotus had not left her room since the night before, and the room had not asked her to.

It was a very good room. It had a window seat, a rug thick enough to lose a shoe in, and a shelf of books arranged by the color of their spines, because she had once needed something to arrange. There was not one living thing in it, and there had not been for years. Her father had replaced the lawn beneath her window with gravel the year she turned six. The plants on her sill were silk. She dusted them herself, which was the only gardening she was allowed.

Around seven, somebody had knocked twice on the door and left a tray in the hall. That was the family’s way. Her father had always been better at leaving things outside doors than at opening them, and she loved him for it, and had never once said so. The tray had gone cold. On it sat a bun with a little paper flag stuck in the top, and on the flag, in his square handwriting: Eat, sweetheart.

She did not eat.

She sat on the floor with her back against the bed, and her phone lay on the blanket above her head, face down, like something she had sent to its room for being rude.

The first buzz had come at eleven forty-two the night before.

Are you okay?

She had read the banner before her eyes could be stopped. Then came I’m fine, by the way, and she had pressed her face into a pillow, because it was the kindest sentence anyone had ever sent her, and she had not earned it. Then Please answer. Then, at twenty past midnight, Sorry. Not sorry? I don’t know what for. Sorry anyway, which was so exactly like him that a sound escaped her that was half a laugh and half something else, and she had turned the phone over and said the word she had been saying ever since.

Later.

The messages had come on every app she owned, and on two she had forgotten. There was a social network with a cat for a profile picture. There was an email with a subject line and the single word Hello in the body, and nothing after it, as if he had sat in front of the screen and found that every other word was too heavy to lift. There was even a message from a game account she had not touched since he made it for her, under a name she did not recognize until the second line made it obvious.

She told herself later eleven times. It is the most generous word in the language, and she knew, even as she said it, that it was a lie. She did not want to check later. She wanted to forget that there was a later at all. Because if she opened one message, she would answer it, and if she answered it, he would answer back, and she would be sitting on a porch again with her hands in her lap, and the boards turning gray around her shoes.

So she kept the phone face down. She kept her hands in her lap. And every time it buzzed, she stared at the ceiling, as if the ceiling were a difficult subject she had been asked to revise.

It was not the buzzing that was the trouble. It was what came between the buzzes.

She had a shelf in her head. She had built it years ago, out of necessity, and it was the tidiest thing she owned. On it were the things she had done, each one labeled and turned to face the wall. There were nine of them. A hamster called Biscuit. A goldfish who had never been named, because she had learned by then. A canary, who had lasted an hour, and a kitten, who had lasted a day and whom she was not going to think about.

Last night, on the porch, she had reached up for a new label and found that the handwriting on it was already his.

She could see it whenever she shut her eyes. The red on the back of his hand. The way he had looked at it, politely, like a boy handed a menu in a language he did not speak. The porch swing, gone gray. Her own shoes, gone gray. And her own voice, calling for Carter, cracking down the middle.

She had run. That was the part she kept returning to. Not the poison, because the poison was only a fact about the weather, but the running. He had been lying on the boards with a snake around his throat, and she had been standing there thinking about herself.

So, let’s make it smaller, she thought.

It was a thing she was good at. It began at about nine o’clock, the way a lie begins, with a single reasonable sentence.

It was his choice. That was true, as far as it went. Nobody had forced him to sit near her. He had stayed for hours, and he had said nothing, and he was twelve, and old enough to leave. She held the sentence up to the light. It was true, and it was also hollow. He had stayed because she had let him. She had liked it. She had liked having someone to talk to so much that she had stopped looking at the boards.

It’s fine. He’s mended. Carter had healed him, and the snake had healed him, and he had even opened his eyes. She tried to put this on the shelf, and the shelf refused it. She had seen Carter’s face afterward, gray as paper. A thing that has been mended is not the same as a thing that was never broken.

And then, around ten, with a little shiver of relief, she found the third one.

He’s better off.

She said it aloud, to the window. It had a lovely sound. He’s better off without me. I’m doing him a kindness. It was the nicest lie of the three, and it came with a little glow of nobility, like a coat fresh from the cleaners. She stood inside it for almost four minutes.

Then she heard how it sounded, and took it off at once.

A lie that you tell yourself is a coat made of tin; it keeps out no weather and locks the cold in.

That is what the bad guy would say, she thought. The bad guy always says it is for the best.

She sat very still. A girl who lies to herself so that she can feel less like the villain, she realized, is already doing the villain’s work. It is merely a more private kind of cruelty.

She did not cry. She was not a girl who did. She looked at the silk plants on her windowsill instead, and she made herself think the true thing, the whole of it, in a straight line.

I am dangerous to stand next to. That is not a lie, and it is not a punishment. It is a fact. I cannot stop it. But I can change what I am when it happens.

She was ten years old. She was not strong. She had a passive that wilted lawns, and a father who loved her enough to pave over a garden, and a phone she was afraid of. She had spent a day being sorry, and being sorry had cost nothing, and had bought nothing, and had done no good to anyone.

Stronger, she thought. The word came out of her like something put down on a table. Not so I can hurt anyone. So that I can be careful. A strong person can stand in a room full of glass and not break a thing.

She would learn the edges of the passive. She would level. She would find whatever counters it, or make it, or ask someone who knew. And one day she would walk up the path to a boy’s porch, and sit down beside him, and nothing at all would go gray. It was not a lie. It was a plan, and plans, unlike lies, cost something to make.

It was the first thing she had felt all day that was not shaped like a stone. It was small. It was a lit match in a very large room.

She was still holding it when she noticed that the phone had gone quiet.

She had not meant to notice. That was the unfairness of it.

All day, she had hoped that the buzzing would stop. She had hoped, in a small, mean, honest corner of herself, that he would give up, and forget her, and be fine. And somewhere in the course of her thinking, without announcing itself, it had.

She pulled the phone down off the blanket. The lock screen showed a single line of gray notifications. The last had arrived at 4:12 that afternoon. She had not read it. She had not read any of them. But she knew roughly what it said, the way you know the shape of a stair in the dark: it was long, and it began with her name, and it ended before she let herself see the end.

It was now twenty minutes to nine.

He’s stopped.

It was exactly what she had wanted. She sat there with the phone in her hands, and found that it was the opposite of what she had asked for.

Because why had he stopped? There were only two reasons, and she did not like either. One was that he had finally given up on her, which was kind, and sensible, and what she had hoped for, and which turned out to feel like falling down a flight of stairs. The other was worse, because it did not have a face.

What if the cough came back?

She had left the snake with him. It was the only thing she had that mended anything, and she had left it on a porch, and now she did not know whether it had stayed. Carter had been gray. Carter might be asleep. And the boy, the foolish, polite boy who said I’m fine, by the way, would never in his life have told anyone that he was not.

Her thumb hovered over the first message.

It was very close. It was one touch.

She turned the phone over and pressed it flat against her chest, like a hot water bottle, and held it there until her hands stopped shaking. She did not open it. But something in her had started to move, like a stiff joint, and it would not be talked back into stillness.

It’s my fault he’s in any of this.

It was not a new thought. But she had spent a day avoiding it, and it came in now with the force of a thing that had been waiting at the door.

The Game had been hers before it was his. She had brought it to his street, in a manner of speaking, and he had walked into it after her, in his sneakers, without once asking whether he should. He was in danger now. He was a target, and he was in debt, and a collector spoke of him in the voice of a teacher discussing a clever pupil. All of it had come, indirectly and unfairly, from the simple fact that he had been standing near her.

And he had still stood between her and things much larger than himself. Not once. Several times. He had never asked for a receipt.

She wished, with a force that frightened her, that she were strong enough to do the same. She wished it was a thing she could do, rather than a thing she could be sorry for. She wanted to be the one standing in front, for once. She wanted, at the very least, to undo it: the cough, the gray, the red. If she had a healing ability, a real one, strong enough to take back what her passive had done...

The snake’s glow had been a patch. A beautiful, frightening, borrowed patch. What she needed was a whole healer: someone, or something, that could mend him faster than she could harm him. Then she could sit beside him, and it would not matter. She could sit beside him for as long as she liked.

For ever, she thought, and was so embarrassed that she put her face on her knees, though she was entirely alone, and it was only a thought.

Healers were rare. Everyone knew that. It was one of the few things about the Awakened world that nobody ever argued over. A good one could be traded for a house. A great one was kept somewhere with a locked door, and a name nobody said.

Her father had not found one. He had not found anything, yet, to counter her passive either. But she knew that he was looking, and she knew exactly what he was looking for. A healer, or something that healed. Nothing else. It was the only thing worth asking for, and it was already almost too much to ask. Healing Ghost Items were so absurdly rare that most people went their whole lives without seeing one. Magical healing items of any kind were nearly as scarce, and the few that surfaced were sold before the ink had dried on the notice. And healing Abilities were rarer still. She had met exactly one in her life, and he had been gray as paper afterward.

So her father hunted. He had sent cars to places with no addresses. He had made calls at three in the morning, and she had heard them through the wall, in the warm, patient voice that was only ever used on her and on the people who sold him things. He was the kind of man who would buy a whole shop to get one item off the shelf. He had promised her that the moment he found a healer, or anything that would quiet her passive, it would be hers.

She believed him. That was the trouble. She knew exactly what he would say if she asked. He would put down his pen, and kneel, and say Not yet, sweetheart, but soon, I promise, and he would mean it, and it would still be not yet.

She could not tell him why she needed it. The mark on her wrist would close her throat around the words. She could not say Game, and she could not say Arthur, and she certainly could not say I put a boy on a porch. She could only ask for the other thing.

So she would ask anyway.

It was a peculiar thing, she thought, to go and ask for a no. But a no you have gone to hear is not the same as a no you have sat and waited for. The first is a thing that you did.

She got up off the floor.

Her legs had gone stiff. She put on her shoes one at a time, with fingers that were not quite steady, and tied them twice, because the first bow had come out crooked. She looked at the tray in the hall. She looked at the little paper flag.

She picked up the bun, and, for the first time since the porch, she ate.

She did it standing up in the corridor, with the flag held between her teeth. It was cold, and plain, and the best thing she had ever tasted.

It was a good ten minutes before she thought to wonder how she would get there.

Igred had not come to the house all afternoon. Her father had needed him for something, the housekeeper had said, and Hadjer had not asked what. She stood at the end of the drive with her hands in the pockets of her coat, and a long gravel path behind her, and no car.

But there was one other thing.

It stood at the back of the garage, under a gray sheet, where it had stood since her ninth birthday: a small silver bicycle with a brass plate on the handlebars. Her father had given it to her, never quite able to decide whether he was more afraid of her going somewhere or of her having nowhere to go. It did what the yellow buses and the long black car did, only on a smaller scale. It would not cross a country. It would hardly cross a city. But within the district it was as fast as any car, and it folded the road ahead into whatever shape was shortest. The grips were rubber, the saddle was vinyl, and the basket was wire. Her father had checked every part for anything that could wilt.

She had ridden it four times. Riding it meant going somewhere, and she had never had anywhere to go.

She pulled off the sheet. The brass plate on the handlebars rolled its tiny letters over and over, like a departures board the size of a matchbox, and then, as if it had been waiting for her to make up her mind, it stopped on a single word.

NILECORP.

She climbed on.

The bicycle took the last corner by itself, folded the long street in half, and set her down at the edge of the plaza. It was exactly as far as it could go. The tower stood just inside the edge of the district, and she suspected that was no accident.

NileCorp stood at the end of its long glass street, with every light on and one window missing.

She saw that first. It was very high up, near the top, a black square in the mirror where the glass should have been. Below it, the plaza was a wet, glittering mess of fire engines and blankets and small clusters of dripping office workers. A single polite red truck was rolling up its hoses. The air smelled of smoke and sprinklers, and somebody, somewhere, was crying with relief.

Father.

She dropped the bicycle against the railing and was running before she knew it, across the wet stone, in her good shoes, with her badly buttoned coat flapping around her. She had a very clear and terrible thought, and it was not a thought she had time to be ashamed of: If he’s hurt, I have been sitting on a floor all day.

And then she stopped, so suddenly that she nearly fell.

Something had caught her eye. A thing that was out of place, even on a night as out of place as this. She followed the line of the missing window the way you follow a thrown ball with your eyes, down, and down, and down, to the fountain at the base of the tower. It was the fountain that nobody ever sat beside.

Somebody was sitting in it.

He was waist-deep in the water, in a long black coat that had gone shiny and heavy and steaming. His hands were folded in his lap, like a man in church. His beard dripped. A very small orange fish, evidently as surprised as anyone, was swimming in slow circles around his hat. He looked like someone who had been asked to carry something heavy for a very long way, and had finally been allowed to set it down.

"Igred?" said Hadjer.

Her driver looked up.

He saw her standing at the edge of the fountain, with her coat buttoned wrong and her eyes red from a day of not crying. For a moment, his calm face did something she had never seen it do. It tried to arrange itself, and failed.

And a small, astonished, entirely unplanned sound rose in her chest, like a bubble out of deep water. It was a laugh, her first since the porch. She clapped a hand over her mouth, and it came out anyway.

Something that had been shut all day, inside her, opened a very small crack.

"Igred," she said again, and her voice shook. "What happened?"

Her driver gazed at her for a very long moment. He looked at the missing window, and then at the little fish, and then at the girl in front of him, whom he loved like a daughter, and who was about to learn something that no child should have to learn from a man sitting in a fountain.

He cleared his throat, with great dignity, and a faint squelch.

"Well," said Igred.

To mend what you’ve broken, you must go and find whatever it takes, and not stay behind.

TO BE CONTINUED...