How I Live Now

4

I didn’t mean to sleep practically a whole day and a night but I did. And when I woke up I thought how strange it was to be lying in someone else’s bed thousands of miles from home surrounded by grayish light and a weird kind of quiet that you never get in New York City where the traffic keeps you company in a constant buzzy way day and night.

The first thing I did was to check my phone for messages, but all it said was NO NETWORK and I thought Oh boy so much for civilization and felt a little freaked out and thought of that movie where they say No One Can Hear You Scream. But then I went over to the window and looked out and there was the slightest bit of pink light over to one side where the sun must have just started coming up and a totally quiet gray mist hung over the barn and the gardens and the fields and everything was perfectly still and beautiful and I stared and stared expecting to see a deer or maybe a unicorn trotting home after a hard night but I didn’t see anything except some birds.

After a while I was cold and got back under the blankets.

I felt too shy to come out of my room, so I stayed there and thought about my old home which unfortunately led to thinking about Davina the Diabolical, who sucked my father’s soul out through his you know what and then got herself knocked up with the devil’s spawn which, when it pops out, Leah and I are going to call Damian even if it’s a girl.

According to my best friend Leah, D the D would have liked to poison me slowly till I turned black and swelled up like a pig and died in agony but I guess that plan flopped when I refused to eat anything and in the end she got me sent off to live with a bunch of cousins I’d never met a few thousand miles away while she and Dad and the devil’s spawn went on their merry way. If she was making even the slightest attempt to address centuries of bad press for stepmothers, she scored a Big Fat Zero.

Before I could work myself up into a full-blown attack of hyperventilating, I heard a tiny noise at the door and there was Piper again, looking in, and when she saw I was awake she gave a little happy squeak like a mouse cheer and asked Did I want a cup of tea?

OK, I said, and then Thank you, remembering to be polite, and I smiled at her because I still liked her from yesterday. And off she drifted just like the fog on little cat feet.

I went to the window again and looked out and saw the mist had cleared and everything was so green and then I put some clothes on and managed to find the kitchen after discovering some pretty amazing rooms by mistake, and Isaac and Edmond were there eating marmalade on toast and Piper was making my tea and seeming worried that I’d had to get out of bed to get it. In New York, nine-year-olds usually don’t do this kind of thing, but wait for some grown-up to do it for them, so I was impressed by her intrepid attitude but also kind of wondering if good old Aunt Penn had died and no one could figure out a good way to tell me.

Mum was working all night, said Edmond, so she’s gone to bed but she’ll be up for lunch and then you’ll see her.

Well that answered that, thank you Edmond.

While I drank my tea I could see Piper squirming around wanting to tell me something and she kept looking at Edmond and Isaac who just looked back and at last she said Please come to the barn Daisy. And the Please was more like a command than a request, and then she gave her brothers a look like, I couldn’t help it! And when I got up to go with her she did the nicest thing, which was to hold my hand and it made me want to hug her, especially since Being Nice to Daisy hadn’t been anyone’s favorite hobby lately.

In the barn, which smelled like animals but in a nice way, she showed me a tiny black and white goat with square eyes and little stubby horns and a bell around its neck on a red collar and said his name was Ding and he was her goat but I could have him if I wanted and then I did hug her because Piper and the sweet baby goat were exactly as nice as each other.

Then she showed me a bunch of sheep with long tangly coats and some chickens that lay blue eggs and she found one in the straw that was still warm and gave it to me and even though I didn’t know what to do with an egg straight from a chicken’s bottom I thought it was a nice thing to do.

I can’t wait to tell Leah about this place.

After a while I was feeling pretty shivery and told Piper that I had to lie down for a little while and she frowned at me and said You need to eat something because you look too thin and I said Christ Piper don’t you start it’s only jet lag, and she looked hurt but Jesus, that old broken record is one I don’t need to hear from people I hardly even know.

When I got up again there was soup and cheese and a huge loaf of bread in the kitchen and Aunt Penn was there and when she saw me she came right up and put her arms around me and then stood back and looked at my face and just said Elizabeth, like it was the end of a sentence, and then after a while, You look just like your mother, which was obviously a gross exaggeration since she was beautiful and I’m not. Aunt Penn has the same eyes as Piper, all serious and watching you, and when we sat down to lunch she didn’t give me any soup or anything but just said Please Daisy, help yourself to whatever you’d like.

I told them all about Dad and Davina the Diabolical and Damian the devil’s spawn and they laughed but you could tell they felt kind of sorry for me, and Aunt Penn said Well Their Loss is Our Gain, which was nice even if she was just being polite.

I tried to study her without being too obvious because I was hoping to get some kind of clue from the way she looked and acted about the mother I barely ever got a chance to meet. She made a point of asking me lots of questions about my life and listened very carefully to the answers like she was trying to figure something out about me but not in the way most adults do, pretending to listen while thinking about something else.

She asked how my father was and said she hadn’t seen him in many years and I told her he was fine except for his taste in girlfriends which was totally un-fine, but he was probably feeling lots better now that I wasn’t around reminding him about it day and night.

She smiled a funny kind of smile just then like she was trying to keep from laughing or maybe crying, and when I looked at her eyes I could see she was on my side which as far as I’m concerned made a nice change and I guess had something to do with my mother being her younger sister who died.

There was a fair amount of arguing and talking at lunch and except for talking to me she didn’t get too involved but kind of observed, and overall I’d have to say that the main feeling you got from her was that she was a little distracted, I suppose because of the work she was doing.

A little later when all the others were talking she put her hand on my arm and said in a low voice just to me that she wished my mother were here to see how I’d turned into such a vivid person and I thought Vivid? that’s a pretty strange word to choose, and I wondered if what she actually meant to say was Screwed Up. But then again maybe not because she didn’t seem like the type to sit around thinking up ways to be bitchy, unlike some people I know.

After looking at me for a few seconds more she put her hand up very gently and pushed the hair off my face in a way that for some reason made me feel incredibly sad and then she said in a regretful grave voice that she was sorry but she had to give a lecture in Oslo at the end of the week on the Imminent Threat of War and had work to do so would I please excuse her? She would only be gone a few days in Oslo and the children would take good care of me. And I thought There’s that old war again, popping up like a bad penny.

I didn’t spend much time thinking about the war because I was bored with everyone jabbering on for about the last five years about Would There Be One or Wouldn’t There and I happen to know there wasn’t anything we could do about it anyway so why even bring the subject up.

It was when I was thinking things like this that I sometimes noticed Edmond looking at me in his odd, listening kind of way and sometimes I looked back at him doing the same expression myself just to see what he’d say. But mostly he just smiled and half closed his eyes and looked more like Wise Dog than ever and I thought to myself If this kid turns out to be thirty-five I won’t be a bit surprised.

So that was pretty much all that happened on my first conscious day in England, and so far I was finding Life With My Cousins more than OK and a huge improvement over my so-called life at home on Eighty-sixth Street.

Late that night I heard the phone ring somewhere in the house and I wondered if it was my father calling to say Hey I made a mistake sending my only daughter away to another country because of some scheming harpy’s ruthless whims, but by that time I was too sleepy to bother getting up and wandering around looking for a keyhole to listen at. So as you can see, that old country air must be doing me tons of good already.