Perfect Ruin

2

YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO WALK ME ALL THE way to the door,” I say as Basil and I stop in front of my apartment. His building is within reasonable walking distance, but I’d hate to be the reason he isn’t home when his little brother arrives from classes.

“Are you feeling better?” he says. “Your knees have stopped shaking.”

I nod, stare down at my hand when he drags his fingertip over my knuckles, our clear rings catching the light. We had to wear them on chains around our necks until last year, when they finally fit us. When we’re married, the jeweler will open them and they’ll be filled with our blood—mine in his ring, his in mine. I don’t think about what it will be like to marry him; according to my mother, I don’t think about the things I should be thinking about now that I’m two months past my sixteenth birthday. But I do look at my ring and wonder if the blood drawing will hurt. Alice says it doesn’t.

“I can be here in the morning if you’d like,” he says. “To walk you to the shuttle for the academy.”

I feel my cheeks swell with a smile and I can’t meet his eyes. “No,” I say. “It’s out of your way, and anyway Pen will be with me. I’ll meet you there.”

He touches the sharp crease of my uniform sleeve, runs his hand down the length of my arm. Something within me stirs. “All right,” he says. “See you tomorrow.”

“See you.”

I watch him enter the stairwell, and as he goes, I notice the flushed skin at the back of his neck.

The apartment door opens, and my mother, wearing an apron stained with flour, ushers me inside. She was listening at the door.

“You should have invited him to dinner. There’s plenty,” she says. And, “You’re late. Did you miss the train?”

“There was a problem with it,” I say, shrugging my satchel over the back of a kitchen chair.

“A problem?” She sounds only mildly concerned as she opens the oven and considers the state of the casserole.

“It stopped, and then it had to go backward.”

She closes the oven door and looks at me, eyes narrowed in concern.

“It started going the right way again eventually,” I say, unknotting my red necktie. With the anxiety I feel today, the tie is starting to have the effect of a noose.

“But you’re all right?” she says. “Nobody was hurt?”

“There were medic lights up ahead, but I didn’t get a good look.” I don’t want to worry her; she’s been doing so well lately. It has been a while since she’s gone through an entire prescription. “I’m sure it’s fine,” I say.

She stares at me a moment longer, face unreadable, then blinks to free herself from whatever it is she’s thinking. “Here,” she says, fitting me with oven mitts and thrusting a covered dish into my hands. “Take this upstairs to your brother and Alice.”

“Mom, if you keep feeding them, Alice is going to think you have something against her cooking.”

“Nonsense,” she says. “I just worry. She knows that.” She’s already opening the door for me; she can’t have me out of her kitchen fast enough. Usually she loves my company after class; she lets me nibble on mini fruitcakes and she asks about my lessons. She used to ask about Basil, but not so much since he and I started wearing our rings; she says it’s important for betrotheds to share secrets with each other.

“And tell your brother I expect that dish to come back empty,” she calls as I’m entering the stairwell.

She has unrealistic expectations. My brother can live on ideas and water for days. His apartment is directly above ours, and his office is over my bedroom. I hear him at all hours, but especially late at night, wearing down the floorboards, and I know he’s whispering his novels into the transcription machine. If I listen closely, I might hear his indistinguishable murmurs, Alice asking him to come to bed.

My brother is frequently irritated by my visits, especially if I’m under our mother’s orders to bring him food. He says he’s too old now to be treated like a child. But when he and Alice married, they applied for an apartment in this building, so he must not mind being near our parents too much.

I knock on the apartment door, and from the other side I hear Alice cursing. When she opens the door, her hair is falling out of a cloth tie, and water and flower petals are spreading out on the kitchen floor. She’s holding shards of the unfortunate vase in a dustpan. There are always flowers in her apartment, and Lex is always knocking them over.

Meekly, I hold up the covered dish. “From my mother,” I say.

“Lex!” she calls to the closed door at the end of the hallway. She steps aside to let me in. There’s no answer and she paces to the door and knocks angrily.

The windup metal vacuum discus is repeatedly knocking into the corner, trying to find its way out. The copper is scuffed, the gears whining for their efforts.

Alice goes back to picking up the shards. “You try getting him out of there,” she says. “Maybe he’ll come out for you. He’s holed up in there so often that I’m starting to forget I have a husband.”

As she gathers the shards, I watch the red blood in her band.

I set the dish on the stove before heading down the hallway—my mother’s instincts were right; the stove hasn’t been turned on.

I stand outside the door to my brother’s office, ear pressed to the door. I never know what he’s writing. He tells me that when I was a baby, he would read his earliest manuscripts to me—he would whisper them through the bars of my crib until I stopped crying in the bedroom we shared, and he could finally go to sleep. He won’t tell me what the stories were about. “They were gruesome, brutal,” he’ll say. “But you didn’t understand. You’d smile and go to sleep.”

Now I can’t hear what he’s saying to his transcriber. I knock. “Lex?”

His murmurings stop. I hear him shuffling around, but I don’t ask if he needs help. Words like “help” have been banned from his apartment like Internment has been banned from the ground.

The door opens, and I’m hit with the smell of burnt paper. Through the darkness I can just see, on a table in a far corner, a long strip of paper trailing from the transcription machine to the floor, curling into and around itself like hills and valleys. Wisps of smoke are rising from the exposed gears.

“You’re supposed to use that thing for only an hour at a time,” I say, frowning. There are bags under his eyes and he’s staring through me with eyes that used to be blue like mine. But they’ve faded since his incident. They’re gray, bloodshot, and they tell a different story from the rest of his youthful face. He could be my twenty-four-year-old brother or he could be a hundred.

“What happened?” he asks me.

“Mom sent me up here with dinner. She’s going to send me right back up here if I don’t convince you to eat. You just have to take a bite; you know she can tell if I lie.”

“What happened?” he asks again. He always knows when I’m uneasy.

“Nothing,” I say. “There was a problem with the train. Come out and eat something.”

“I was in the middle of a thought. Just leave it on the table.”

“You’re going to break that machine,” Alice yells from the kitchen. I’ve never understood how two people who are so clearly in love can act as though they hate each other at the same time.

Lex relents, though, closing the door behind us and feeling his way along the wall toward the kitchen. Alice has mopped up the water and flower petals. The apartment is kept sparsely furnished, which is Alice’s doing. This is her way of helping Lex in secret; she’s always a step ahead of him, quietly making sure he’s safe.

In a rare feat of accomplishment, I’ve convinced Lex to eat some of the casserole. He has just taken his first forkful, and he’s just about to complain, when the door bursts open.

My father is standing in the doorway, red and out of breath. Sweat stains the collar of his blue patrolman’s uniform.

“Dad?” Lex and I say at the same time. Lex is gripping Alice’s arm. He’s always worrying she’ll disappear.

My father needs a moment to catch his breath, but then he seems relieved. “Morgan—” he wheezes. “Your mother told me she sent you up here alone—she didn’t know about the king’s order.”

“What order?” Alice asks, pouring him a glass of water from the tap. He shakes his head, doesn’t accept.

“What is it, Dad?” Lex says. “You’re making everyone panic.”

“Morgan needs to come back downstairs,” he says. “The king is ordering everyone to be in their own apartments tonight. There was a body on the train tracks.”

Some distant part of me understands, just barely, but another part of me has to ask, “Was there an accident?”

“No, heart,” he says. “The other patrolmen and I have been investigating. A girl was murdered.”