Po shrugged. “It depends. It could mean lots of things. He is still—attached to the Living Side. Waiting for something, maybe.”
“Waiting for what?” Liesl could hardly stand it. She couldn’t stand not to know; she couldn’t stand not to be able to speak to him, and ask. The heaviness pressed down on her chest, and she felt like curling up in a ball, and closing her eyes, and sleeping. But Po was there, watching her, and Bundle was still a soft fold of darkness in her lap, so she didn’t.
Po thought about the man who had shuffled by him in the endless line of new souls, shaking his head, with his hair sticking up every which way as though he had just been rudely and suddenly awakened from a nap. He had been speaking to a soul coming along directly behind him, repeating the same story over and over. That was a thing about the recently dead. They still spoke to one another out loud. They had not yet learned to communicate without words. They had not learned the language of the deepest pools of the universe; the high, unvoiced rhythms of the planets in orbit; the language of being and breath.
“He spoke of a willow tree,” Po said. “The willow tree stood next to a lake, and he spoke of wanting to go there again.”
Liesl’s heart tightened in her chest. For a moment she couldn’t say anything at all. Then she burst out, “So you aren’t lying. You did see him after all.”
“Of course I’m not lying.” Po’s edges flared. “Ghosts never lie. We have no reason to.”
Liesl did not notice that Po had been offended. “I remember the willow tree, and the lake. That’s where my mother was buried. We used to go there, before—before—” At the last second Liesl couldn’t say before my dad met Augusta or before we moved to Dirge or before he got sick or before Augusta locked me in the attic. She had almost forgotten there was a Before.
Now she remembered. And so she squeezed her eyes tight and climbed down the tower of months she had been in the attic, reaching back and back into the rooms of her memory that were dusty and so dim she could catch only little, flickering glances of things. There! Her father leading her into the shade of the great willow tree, patterns of green dancing across his cheeks. And there! Liesl laying her cheek on the velvety soft moss that grew above her mother’s grave. And there! If she turned to the left—if she concentrated hard enough—flaring to life in front of her: her father’s kind blue eyes, the comforting roughness of his arms around her, his voice in her ear saying, “Someday I’ll come back here, to lie beside your mother again.”
“The sun still shined then,” Liesl said. It had been a long time since she had said the word sun. It had a strange, light taste in her mouth.
Liesl had long ago lost count, but the sun had not come out in 1,728 days. One day the clouds had come, as they often had before. Nobody was especially concerned. The clouds would surely break up tomorrow, or the next day, or certainly the day after that.
But they had not broken up for 1,728 days in a row. Sometimes it rained. In the winter there was hail and slush. But it was never sunny.
Over time, the grass had withered into dirt. Flowers had curled back deep on themselves, withdrawing into the ground, seeds that could never bloom. The whole world was a dull gray color, even the people in it—everything the bland pale gray of vegetables that had been boiled into slime. Only potatoes grew with any regularity; and all across the world, people starved.
Even those who ate well—the rich—were starving, though they could not have said for what, exactly. But they woke with a gnawing hunger in their stomachs and chests, hunger so fierce and overwhelming it crippled them, made them bend over with sudden cries of pain, made them almost nauseous.
“It was a long time ago,” Po said.
“Longer.” Liesl felt heavy again. She repeated the word ineffable clearly, three times, in her head, lingering over the gentle slope of the double fs, like the soft peaks of the whipped cream she remembered from her early childhood, and this made her feel slightly better.
“They brought him here today, you know. I heard the servants talking. Through the radiator.” Liesl pointed to the radiator in the corner. Sometimes, when she got very lonely, she lay down there and pressed her ear to the floor, where a small hole allowed a water pipe to pass through between floors. Through it she could often hear two of her stepmother’s servants, Tessie and Karen, conversing in their bedroom below. “They took his body and they turned it into ash, and they put the ash in a wooden box, and Karen got it today from Mr. Gray. They will bury the box in the backyard.” For a moment she was overcome. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she saw two disks of moonlight staring unblinkingly back at her. Bundle was still in her lap, watching her.