Perfect Ruin (8 page)

“I’m sorry,” I say, pouring the tea and bringing it to her. She sets down her needlework. She works from her own patterns, and this one is of a cloud, and coming from the cloud is a peculiar flash of what I presume to be light. I run my finger along the strip of yellow.

I envy her talent for inventing strange and beautiful things the rest of us can’t see. But I don’t ask her about it; I think my questions frustrate her. Or, my lack of understanding frustrates her. She has one like-minded child, and he’s on the verge of being declared irrational. Maybe he would have been by now, if Alice weren’t so patient.

“The bread looks done,” I say.

“Bring half upstairs for your brother and Alice. Tell her to be sure he eats something. He’s getting too thin.”

I don’t know how she knows this; my brother lives right upstairs, but they never visit each other. The sight of him in this state is too much for her. Instead I’m their messenger, and most of my mother’s messages are simply food.

Dutifully, I wrap half of the bread in a cloth.

My brother’s door is locked again, and when I knock, it takes a long time for Alice to answer. She’s still in her work clothes and her shoulders are drooping with exhaustion. She sees the bundle in my hands and gives a weary smile. “Come on in,” she says, “but try to be quiet. He had a rough night and today isn’t very much better.”

On the kitchen table is the bag with the hospital logo that gets delivered to my brother every third week. It’s still glued shut. He even opposes the headache elixirs our mother is so fond of, notwithstanding the fact that she began taking them after his incident.

“Again?” I frown. It’s been several weeks since he had an episode, and I hoped they were going away for good.

“I wish he’d stop being so rock-headed,” Alice says in a low voice. “I was up with him at dawn and he won’t take a thing to ease the pain.” She takes the bread from my hands and breathes deep the warm aroma as she unwraps it.

“Where is he?” I say.

“His office. The door’s open. Step lightly and enter if you dare.”

She’s already slicing the bread. I doubt she’s eaten today; when Lex is having a rough time, everything else fades away from her unless she’s reminded.

I find my brother hunched on the floor in a corner of his dark office, wrapped in a blanket and shivering.

“What are you doing here, Little Sister?”

Worrying is what I’m doing.

“Can I come in?” I say.

“If you don’t touch anything.”

The transcriber is off; its rolls of paper stream out into a cavernous world of things he has imagined each night as I’ve slept in the room below. The smell of ink and the smoke of overheated wires are still in the air.

I step over and around his latest novel and kneel in front of him. The clock at his feet has a faulty second hand that goes forward and then back, and it is always twelve fifteen. He just likes the sound it makes; he carries it all around the apartment. If it’s silent he begins to feel as though he’s disappearing.

I put my hand over his fist. His knuckles are white with strain, his skin dry and cold. He drops his forehead to his knees. “Where does it hurt?” I say.

“Deep within the bones, there’s marrow,” he says. “And it’s like the marrow has begun to expand, and my skeleton is splintering slowly from the pressure.”

I want to wrap my arms around him. I want to give him my warmth and soften the marrow and make him better.

But he would push me away, remind me that I don’t understand. I suppose it’s hard for him to believe I’ll ever be more than a child. The last time he saw me, I was thirteen years old.

All I can do is be still and not ask too many questions, not tell him how he scares me, never bring up all his years as a runner when he was so alive, and especially not talk about the medicine on the table. He’ll die before he lets another elixir or tonic pass between his lips or get shot into his veins. Not that the pharmacy knows that; it’s part of the king’s policy that jumpers take the required medication in order to be considered nonthreatening to society. Alice will eventually pour them down the drain and report back to the pharmacy that she administered them to her husband in the correct order.

“Mom was working on an interesting sampler,” I tell him. “It was”—I pause, trying to think of the right way to describe it—“color shooting out of a cloud. Sort of in a zigzag.”

He’s got his eyes squeezed shut. “A zigzag?”

I draw the shape on the back of his hand with my finger and repeat it several times. “It was strange. I wonder if she saw something in the clouds.”

“She probably just thought it up.”

“How do you do that?” I say. “How do you know something that doesn’t exist to be known?”

Alice knocks on the doorframe. The smell of baked bread and warm vegetables permeates from the plate in her hand. “You need to put something in your stomach, love,” she says. “You can argue if you like, but your sister will hold your arms if I have to force this down your throat myself.” She winks at me.

“My stomach—” he begins.

“Is a cavern of fire, or whatever other poetic nonsense. I know,” she says. “But this will help. Here.” She sits beside me and sets the plate on his knees, forcing him to hold it. She stares him down, and even though he can’t see it, he knows, and he eats nearly half the slice.

“Happy now, dearest?”

“Ecstatic. How do you feel?”

“Wretched.” But he says it with a bit of a smirk, and she wipes his lips with her sleeve.

I wonder if their marriage was always destined to be this way. I wish they could have had a happier go of things, but then, it doesn’t seem as though they’re wanting for anything more.

Except a child. But nobody talks about that.

Alice tries to coerce Lex to get into bed, or at the very least the couch, but he is immovable. She relents and brings him a pillow so that his neck won’t get stiff. And it isn’t long before he tells us to go away so that he can be with his thoughts.

Alice tells him that she’ll be back with more food later.

When Alice has left and I’ve begun to follow her, Lex says, “Forget who you are.” I pause in the doorway. “That’s the answer to your question,” he says. “Forget who you are and what you think is there, and you’ll discover things that don’t exist to be known.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“Me either, Little Sister, but there you have it.”

In the kitchen, Alice is rinsing plates at the sink, and all the muscles in her hourglass figure glide as she performs the most menial of tasks. Her burden of eyelashes flit up and down as she watches the water go down the drain. She is everything I’ve grown up wanting to be, and as the sunset steals through the curtain, it sets her hair ablaze with auburns and golds. She’s unbreakable.

I want to tell her about Judas, and Ms. Harlan’s card still stowed in my pocket. I want to ask her what I’m supposed to do about these fears I have of the edge, and how I’m supposed to be complacent within the train tracks when the world within them stops being enough. But she seems tired. My brother gives her so many reasons to worry, and I don’t want to give her more. I take a rag from the counter and dry the dishes.

“Have you given any thought to your festival of stars gift?” she asks me.

“Not very much,” I say, hoisting myself onto the counter once the last dish is dry. Alice goes about putting them into the cabinet beside me.

She puts her hand on her hip and studies me. “I still remember your sixth festival.”

“My only request that year was for my front teeth to grow in so I didn’t look like a building with broken windows.”

She pinches my knee. “If I recall correctly, you also wanted a bowl of frosting.”

My childhood is one long, muddled memory of bright blue happiness. Internment seemed bigger then, and the space on the other side of the tracks infinite.

“Maybe a necklace, then?” Alice says. “I saw one in the artisan shop that reminded me of birds in flight.”

“That sounds lovely,” I say. I stare at my lap. “Though, it feels wrong to ask for anything with all that’s happened recently. I’d just like for there to be peace again, so we could all stop being so frightened.”

Alice sits on the counter beside me. “You
are
getting older, aren’t you?”

I lean against her and she wraps her arms around me. “Oh, Morgan,” she sighs. “What’s to be done?”

We’ve always been alike, Alice and I. We’re fixers and messengers and helpers, and when things are greater than we can manage, we can’t rest until all is right again.

Pen is sitting on the stairwell as I’m returning to my apartment. “There you are,” she says, arranging her pleats as she stands. “I’ve been thinking about our friend the murderer.”

“Not so loud,” I hiss, tugging her toward my apartment and ushering her inside. “You’re going to get us both declared irrational.”

My mother is still curled on the window ledge with her sampler, but her head is bowed and she’s snoring quietly.

“I thought we agreed that sort of talk would stay in the cavern,” I say.

“It will,” Pen assures, repeating the cross gesture over her heart. “I didn’t say
what
I was thinking, just that I was thinking. We should go back there and discuss it in more detail.” She raps on the wall with her knuckle. “Walls have ears. Rocks don’t.”

“Now?” I say. “It’s dark.”

“No, no. He’d be expecting that. We have to go when he thinks nobody would catch him. Like tomorrow afternoon.”

“We’ll be in academy,” I say.

“Exactly what he’ll be thinking,” she says.

“We can’t just walk out the academy door in the middle of lessons,” I say.

She tugs the ends of my hair. “Don’t think doors,” she says. “Think windows.”

I
BURY MY FACE IN THE CURVE OF BASIL’S neck. I’m breathing in his smell of bottled redolence and crisp linen, telling myself that one day I’ll be the one in charge of it. It’ll be my job to keep his shirts pressed, to buy the soaps he likes.

He breathes in, and it sends a ripple through me. This is absolutely where I belong.

Why is it easier to realize this when we aren’t face-to-face? Lately he looks at me and I avert my eyes. He says the sort of things he’s always said, and my cheeks go warm. But when we’re like this, standing on the shuttle, every dip and muscle of my body fits against him. In fewer than three years, we’ll be married, and I hope I have all of this confusion settled by then.

Beside me, Pen is pushing Thomas against the window. “Must you always tug at my hair?”

“I’m just fascinated by your ringlets, dearest.”

She hugs her arms to her chest and turns away.

Basil chuckles.

Pen clears her throat. When I look at her, she nods at the patrolman standing at the front of the shuttle who is tearing down the page that was attached to one of the windows. He crumples it and stuffs it into his pocket. Then he fixes a silver festival branch that he knocked askew.

I didn’t get a very good look, but I know it was a passage from Daphne Leander’s essay. I’ve reread it several times. I’d know it from a thousand paces away.

Basil sees it, too.

I turn my attention back to him. Back to where it’s safe. “I won’t be able to have lunch with you today,” I tell him. “Pen and I have a literature project we’re trying to catch up on.”

“We’re writing a play,” she says.

“How artistic,” Thomas says. “Ladies, I applaud you.”

Pen rolls her eyes.

The shuttle jolts to a stop. The patrolman is telling us the usual: Keep it moving. Be safe.

The essay sits in his pocket, just another of the many secrets the patrolmen surely keep.

I hesitate.

Pen balances herself on the ladies’ room sink and pushes on the window until it opens out. She frowns. “It doesn’t open very far, but we’ll be able to get through. I’ll go first if you promise not to look up my skirt.”

“I don’t know about this,” I say.

She stops pushing at the glass and stares down at me. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

“We could get caught.” I say.

“And then what? A few demerits? We’re not doing anything wrong, you know. The king is the one letting us all go on in oblivion while a murderer is out there.”

There’s no sense trying to reason. She’s made up her mind. “Stay if you want, but I’m going,” she says pertly. “If I’m brutally murdered by Judas Hensley, it’ll be because you weren’t there to protect me.”

Before I can say a word, she dives through the window.

I hear the swish of leaves as she lands in one of the hedges.

I hoist myself onto the sink and peek outside after her. “Did you die?” I ask.

“Like landing in a cloud,” she says, tugging a leaf from her hair and flicking it away. “You coming?”

I think about Judas’s white hair in the moonlight and his bleary eyes and the words Pen left for him in the cavern: “Are you a murderer?”

I push myself through the window.

Pen reaches up for my hands as I wriggle through and helps me accomplish a slightly better landing. And then we’re both standing outside the academy in the middle of the day, while our classmates are at lunch and our betrotheds think we’re writing a play. It seems as though something should stop us. The god of the sky himself should send a gust of wind in warning. But nothing happens at all.

Pen and I make our way along the stone fence that divides the academy’s property from the university’s, and we step over a shallow river that trickles in a ravine at the base of the woods. If Internment were a clock, the section with our academy would be the six and the section with the park would be the twelve; it’s a short walk.

Everything about this feels wrong, but I don’t stop.

“Basil is going to be hurt if he finds out I lied to him,” I say.

“He’ll get over it. It isn’t as though you won’t still marry him in a couple of years.”

My palms are sweating. My chest feels tight.

By the time we reach the cavern, the seams under my arms are damp with sweat and I can scarcely breathe. Pen looks into the cavern.

“Morgan!” she says. I crouch beside her and follow her gaze.

Her question has been smoothed away, and scrawled in its place:
Yes.

Pen has her hand over her mouth, but by the swell in her cheeks I know that she’s smiling.

I crawl into the cavern. He was here. That’s all I can think. He was here.

“We should ask him something else,” Pen says, wiping away his response.

All I’d like to ask is why he’s lying. But I don’t say that. Maybe I’ll come back and ask him myself.

“We have to go,” I say.

She turns a pebble in her hand, considering. I take it away and set it in the dirt, and continue, “We’ll barely make it back before lunch is over if we leave now.”

“Fine,” she huffs. As we make our way back to the academy, she perks up at the sound of every snapped twig, every rustled leaf. It’s a game to her. Our secret murderer stowed away in the trees, sending us messages.

I would tell her that what we’re doing is wrong, but I like that we have a secret together, like the kinds we had when we were children. It’s been so long since she’s shared any secrets with me.

When we return to the academy, the window to the ladies’ room seems a lot higher than either of us remember, and there’s no sink out here for us to stand on. Pen tries using the hedge, but that proves impossible.

“Okay,” she says, “if I hold my hands out, you could use them as a step and make it inside. Then you can pull me up after you.”

“Or you ladies can enter through the proper door,” Headmaster Vega says from behind us. “I’m more than happy to escort you. It seems we have some things to chat about in my office.”