THE BEDS FILED DOWN THE sleeping hall of the orphanage like neat, straight bones. Each night the girls washed their faces and hands and walked silently into the hall, hair braided into a scrawny rope that fell over the left shoulder, identical nightgowns made from stiff twill donated by a generous High-Kith lord and sewn by us. The babies, I told Sid, had crib mates. Sometimes I would pass the infants’ wing and see them heaped together like skinny puppies. I longed for it. I could remember when I, too, had slept like that. I know it seems astonishing that I could remember being so tiny, but I did. I remembered how the play of shadow and light from the slats of the crib fell on the nameless baby who breathed shallowly next to me, who would never be named. A shadow fluttered over her chest. A dark moth, I thought, though I had no word for moth. Surely it would fly away. I nuzzled closer to her, closed my questing hand around her socked foot.
But one morning when I woke she was gone. A different baby lay in her place, less sickly. She could pull herself to her feet and bite the wooden rail of the crib and howl. This one lived. We slept together until we were four, and separated as they always separate toddlers. We were put into different beds far away from each other. In that first year of separation, I would try to catch up to her during our chores. I’d trip over my learning feet. None of us learned to walk quickly. We had spent too much of our first years in cribs.
Fourth years learned to clean. Easy tasks. I washed tin plateware in tepid water. Cup was my first word. I swept corners of rooms and never cried at spiders. I rarely received corrections. Even when I did, the slaps were never cruel.
I would call to my second crib mate. Her name was hard for me to pronounce and I had no words for what I wanted to say, like friend or sister or love. She did not recognize me. Unless she did, and ignored me. People say that they forget faces, but I never do. How can you forget a face? I understood, soon enough, that the first baby in my crib had died, because I never saw her face again, and I had looked.
I don’t want you to think that I was lonely. I was surrounded all the time by people. I was busy, because our work required more attention when we became fifth years, then sixth, and seventh. We carved shells into buttons and learned to operate machines that punched holes through the blank disks. It was only later that I didn’t like the work we were made to do in the orphanage. When I was much older we had to prepare tortoiseshell. This meant holding the live tortoise while prying the scutes from its back with a hot knife. I often lost my grip on the animal because of the blood. The tortoises gasped and squirmed. I remember things too well. I always have. I remember doing double work beside Helin because she couldn’t bear what we had to do and I could.
The tortoiseshell, after it was boiled in salt water and pressed flat with a hot iron, was beautiful. Its mottled brown glinted with gold. The flakes were carved into combs or buttons or decoratively set in furniture. We were told to be proud of what we did. It was for the High Kith.
But we are the tortoises, I said to Helin under my breath.
Our mistress lashed Helin’s palm for it. I protested. She did nothing wrong, I said. It was me. I was the one who whispered.
But she listened, the mistress said.
The more I tried to argue that I should receive the punishment, the more the mistress punished Helin.
You think it is unfair that she is punished for what you did? the mistress asked me once she stopped and sent Helin back to work. She said, This is how the world is. The sooner you know it, the better.
Her eyes had a hard polish to them. She was Half Kith like the rest of us.
This is sometimes how I see Helin in my mind, I told Sid. Her left palm lifted to the level of her face, head bowed, thin shoulders twitching at the fall of the slender baton in the mistress’s hand.
It was because I let you do my work, she later said to me, wrapped hand cradled to her chest. The mistress saw me let you.
I think Helin meant to comfort me, to take blame when I believed she bore none, but I felt all the more guilty. I could tell, from her tight face and skittish eyes, that she felt guilty, too. Maybe this was what the mistress had meant: that there is no possible way to understand fairness and guilt when your world has already determined a set of rules that don’t make sense.
Helin said she liked that I saw things no one else did, but this was no great asset of mine, and I did not share the fact of them with Sid. The visions were something I had learned to ignore: a shimmer of a fountain in the orphanage’s bare brick courtyard. As a young child, I’d go to the fountain and open my mouth to taste. My tongue touched only air. I’d look again. Nothing. No fountain. No curved jets of fresh water flowing from marble fingertips, gathering in a pool at the sculpture’s marble feet, a mosaic puzzle of colored tiles below the surface.
I’d realize that all the other girls were staring. They avoided me. Of course they did. The orphanage, while plain, with whitewashed interior walls, was a vast structure amply able to hold us all, with space enough for us to avoid one another if we wished.
For Helin, though, the things I saw were a source of pleasure. Like books, I suppose. Or theater, for the High Kith. To her it was an appealing strangeness. A difference from the daily work and fatigue and bland, wholesome food. Harmless, she said, and I came to believe this because I trusted her. They are dreams, she said, except that you have them while you are awake. I will tell you what’s real.
She always did. She never laughed.
A wasting sickness came to the orphanage, I told Sid. Purple shadows under the eyes were the first sign, then a rash all over the body, rough red dots on the face. The signs were obvious. We all soon knew the symptoms and what came next. Dizziness. Lack of appetite. Dry, cracked lips. Oozing eyes. Many girls died, especially at first, and although no Middling or High-Kith doctors would enter the orphanage for fear of contagion, medicine was delivered that eased and sometimes cured the plague.
One night, at dinner, I glimpsed red speckles on the pale underside of Helin’s light brown arm. It’s nothing, Helin said, and shifted her arm away.
After we were supposed to be asleep in our own narrow beds, I went to hers. I touched her cheek. You’re warm, I said.
I’m not, she said.
I will get the nurse, I said.
No, she told me. I’m just tired. I want you to lie next to me.
She shifted over to make room. We were both small enough to fit together in the bed. It was wrong, what we were doing. If we were caught there would be trouble. Girls are not meant to sleep with girls, we had been told. Boys do not sleep with boys.
Yet I was a child, and I remembered the comfort of a crib mate. I longed for it. Her skin was fiery with fever. When I told her so, she told me that wasn’t true. She told me that I was imagining things. She had promised to explain always what was real and what wasn’t, and I shouldn’t worry, she insisted. Stay with me, she said. I just want to sleep, she said, and it felt so nice, so comforting to hold her, that I fell asleep even before she did.
When I woke up, she was cold and hard. A balloon of fear rose from my belly to my mouth.
She was gone. That was what the mistress said when she came running in response to my cry. She pulled me from the bed. The sheet tangled in my legs. Was she feverish? the mistress demanded. I don’t know, I said. Why didn’t you call to someone during the night? she said. I don’t know, I answered, but I did know. It was because I was incapable of seeing something for what it truly was.
The mistress was not unkind. I wasn’t punished for sleeping in Helin’s bed.
I had to be sequestered, of course, out of fear that I too would come down with the wasting sickness. But I never fell sick.
This much I told Sid, but I didn’t tell him about the grief clenched tight in my chest. How loneliness was a bone caught in my throat. How sometimes I remembered Helin’s shallow breath on my face. I wondered what I had been dreaming, in my unforgivable sleep, when she breathed her last breath.
But I could not have been dreaming. If I had, I would remember the dream like I remember everything else, like I remember her.