“That’s all right.” Hob smiled. “You don’t have to tell me that.”
“I don’t remember,” Linnet whispered.
“I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast this morning,” Patrik said. “An apple, maybe? A hat? A belt buckle? No, that can’t be right…”
Linnet smiled shyly. She stroked her doll’s snarled hair ten times before she began to speak.
“The bad men found us in the morning,” she said at last.
Hob’s pen scratched across the page.
“Mama said to be quiet,” Linnet continued, “so I was, like playing fox-and-rabbit, but then Will sneezed right when the bad men were walking outside our door.”
“Can you tell me who Will is?” Patrik asked.
Linnet’s mouth screwed up into a mean little bow. For a long moment, she didn’t speak.
Then, “My brother,” she said.
The words hit Eliana like a punch to the jaw. Suddenly Linnet wasn’t Linnet; she was Remy, frail and tiny, telling a story he should never have had to tell.
The skin on Eliana’s wrist began to itch, right where the old refugee woman had touched her.
Don’t look at them.
Don’t look.
She shot out of her chair, ready to storm for the door. She didn’t have to listen to this. She wouldn’t listen to this.
But Simon grabbed her arm, held her fast. He said nothing; the icy look on his face was enough to stop her in her tracks.
She glared at him, fuming. She could start a fight, kick herself free, put a stop to story time and give this poor girl a show.
Instead she settled back onto the hearth beside Simon. He wanted her to listen, for whatever malicious reason he’d concocted? Fine. She would listen. And, later, she’d make him regret it.
“The door was already smashed,” Linnet was saying, “because we had a party with Mama. She said, Let’s have a mess party.”
“A mess party?” Patrik whistled low. “That sounds fun. What is that?”
“That’s when you make your house dirty instead of clean,” Linnet explained.
“That sounds like the best kind of party I could possibly imagine.”
Linnet bit her lip. “We set fire to the garden and let our animals go loose, and then Mama… She smashed the windows with an ax. It made her cry, doing it, because Papa loved those windows.”
Hob glanced up, his face soft. “Why did he love them?”
Linnet shook her head slowly—back and forth, back and forth. “Because,” she whispered after a moment, “I painted them.”
Eliana looked away, toward the dying fire. The air in this place was stale, sour. Too many people with unwashed bodies and rotting hurts. She breathed in and tasted death on her tongue. An ill knot was expanding in her belly, forcing its way up through her chest.
Her mother’s words returned to her: If you don’t learn to tuck away that sick feeling, it will consume you.
She closed her eyes, clenched her fists. The fire was too near, too hot. Her skin crawled from it; the heat siphoned all the air from her lungs.
She should never have left her bed.
“Why are you making me stay for this?” she asked, her voice tight and low.
“Because I can,” Simon replied and then downed the rest of his drink.
“We tore up our beds and our pillows.” Linnet was whispering faster now. “We made red dye from berries and painted the walls. Mama said…Mama said…”
Patrik glanced at Hob. “Maybe we should stop for now—”
“No!” Linnet flung away her doll. It hit the wall and dropped to the floor. “Mama said it had to look real.” She gasped a little, like her own words were choking her. With nothing now to hold on to, she clutched the table’s edge, stared fiercely at it. “Mama said it had to look like people died there. We were hiding, and the bad men came, and Will sneezed, because he sneezes when he gets excited, and I was crying. I couldn’t help it. Mama said…hush. She held her hands…over my mouth—”
The girl was having trouble breathing. She looked around, wild-eyed, and then, before Eliana had time to prepare herself, Linnet scrambled off Patrik’s lap and ran to her.
She slammed into Eliana’s front, threw her arms around her neck, and buried her face in Eliana’s braid. She clung there, her little bird’s body trembling like it was ready to crack. Her breath came in frantic gasps against Eliana’s ear.
“Mama said…” Linnet whispered, over and over. “Mama said hush. Mama said please be quiet…”