She shakes her head. She’s looking at the floor. “No you won’t,” she says. “You’re keeping him for yourself. I’ll only get in your way.”
I don’t know which hurts more—that she thinks this of me, or that I realize there may be some truth to that.
“Pen …”
“Don’t.” She stands and is already climbing the stairs as she says, “I’m going to bed.”
I start after her, and when we reach the door to her landing, she turns to face me. Her eyes are dull. I hate to think I’m the cause.
“Wait,” I say.
“Why?” she says, shouldering her way through the small opening in the doorway. “You wouldn’t wait for me.”
14
Last year, my betrothed asked me to marry him, as we lay in the grass musing over shapes in the clouds. I laughed. I told him that of course I would. We were promised to each other, weren’t we? He said, “Pretend we aren’t. Will you marry me?”
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
I THINK ABOUT DAPHNE’S SLASHED WRISTS and Judas in the trees and Pen’s words. We’ve argued before, but I can’t remember the last time she looked so wounded. I can’t remember the last time I felt like such a terrible friend. I’m sneaking out behind her back to meet with an accused murderer and a girl who talks to ghosts.
The floorboards creak above me as my brother moves about his office. Insomniacs, the pair of us.
I get out of bed and climb the staircase to my brother’s and Alice’s apartment. I use my copy of the key to open the front door so my knocking doesn’t wake Alice. She’s a light sleeper, always on high alert in case Lex breaks something or hurts himself or has an episode. My father has bitterly said that Lex is the child she’ll never have. He hasn’t forgiven Lex, and, like my mother, has trouble just looking at him. But he finds excuses to come upstairs because he adores Alice, wants to make sure she’s okay. Even Alice’s parents don’t visit anymore; they’re too embarrassed to be associated with a jumper.
The apartment is dark, but the sparse furniture makes it easy for me to navigate to my brother’s office. Softly I knock on his door.
As he paces about the room, the transcriber’s wheels follow the sound of his voice, spitting out a reel of paper with his words printed onto it. The clattering sound of the transcriber comes to a halt, as do his murmurings.
“Lex?” I whisper.
He opens the door, and it’s a devastating shame that he cannot see the paper lantern moon that shows from the open window. Alice was right; it does seem as though I could reach right out and touch it.
“Morgan? What’s the matter?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” I say. “Sorry to interrupt your writing.”
“I needed to stop anyway,” he says. “None of the pieces are fitting right. Sometimes you have to ignore it until it decides to be agreeable again.”
He sits in his favorite corner, turning the broken clock around and around in his long fingers.
I sit across from him and close my eyes. I pretend his darkness is the same as mine. I do my best to ignore the presence of the moon that eavesdrops at the window.
“What is the story about?” I say.
“Terrible things,” he says.
“Ghosts?” I say.
“Ghosts aren’t terrible,” he says. “They aren’t real. They’re a fantasy we’ve concocted to tell ourselves this life isn’t the only one we get. Even at their worst, ghosts are doing us some good.”
For someone with such a vivid imagination, my brother is prone to fits of logic.
I draw my knees to my chest, and in the darkness of my eyelids I try to find the courage to ask what I’d like to know. I pretend that my brother and I are in the same place, that we’re riding the train in an oval with no set destination, chasing the thoughts we never shared even with each other.
What comes out isn’t a question, and as I’m saying it, I realize it’s because I’ve known this for a while. “You and Dad have seen things the rest of us aren’t supposed to. That’s why you’re so obsessed with terrible things.”
Lex says nothing.
“You’ve seen others like the irrational woman who used to live downstairs, and the infants that aren’t strong enough, and the people who have reached dispatch age.” I pause. “And Alice.”
After a long moment, he says, “Especially Alice.”
I think I’ve made him angry with me, and that he’s going to shut me out, tell me to go back to bed, and then tomorrow carry on as though none of this ever happened.
What he says is, “So?”
“So,” I say, feeling a little bolder now, “is that why you went to the edge?”
When he doesn’t answer right away, I open my eyes and see his cheek in a patch of moonlight. We have the same round face. Right up until his incident, he looked young. Now he’s so much older, like a man who somehow exceeded his dispatch date. I understand why my mother has such trouble looking at him; it’s impossible not to search for traces of that youth.
“You’re full of questions tonight,” he says, pulling at a loose thread coming from his sleeve. He’s forever tugging at his shirts, winding threads around his fingers. I’ve heard Alice complain about all the mending she’s left to do.
“I don’t mean to be,” I say. “I mean to stay out of everyone’s way, but sometimes I can’t stop … asking. I never seem to run out of things I want to know.”