How I Live Now Read online

  Piper asked if this was where we were going to have to live now and I said I guessed it was for the time being but that once we were settled we'd come up with a plan for getting back together with Edmond and Isaac and she looked more cheerful at that thought and you could tell she was making an effort to make me feel OK about our situation and she said Isn't this a funny place you've ended up in Cousin Daisy, and I said You mean here in Reston Bridge and she said No Here in England with Me.

  And then I looked so far into her eyes that I could practically see out the back of her head so don't ever say I'm not related by blood to the whole telepathic gang of them and I said PIPER: I would have to be buried alive in a ditch and stamped on by elephants before I would ever think that being anywhere with you wasn't a good thing SO THERE. Then Jane McEvoy called up that there was some food ready and we found ourselves tramping down the stairs like somebody else's well-behaved children and Piper and I just looked at each other and burst out laughing because we'd gotten so used to being in a world without any sign of adults.

  Secretly I was wondering whether these people were going to take care of us or whether we were still all on our own, only now in a slightly different form.

  16

  When Major McEvoy came home later that night I accosted him the second he stepped through the door, demanding that he say whether Edmond and Isaac had been moved somewhere else and if so where.

  At first he just looked stunned like maybe he'd forgotten he had a fifteen-year-old daughter and then he smiled a little and said I don't think we've been properly introduced, I'm Laurence McEvoy and I thought OK, I can play the Let's Be All Polite Game too and I said very sweetly like the well-brought-up girl I am AND I'M DAISY and I WANT TO KNOW WHERE MY COUSINS ARE.

  He smiled a little and looked at me in a searching kind of way for a minute, maybe trying to figure out whether I was planning to overthrow the English government with the information I wheedled out of him, and then, I guess remembering that I was just a kid all on my lonesome caught up in the war and we were more or less on the same side, he relaxed a little and he said They've been moved too, to a farm just outside of Kingly which is a Fair Distance East of Here and I'm sure you'll see them again All in Good Time.

  I was kind of taken aback by his willingness to breach the Name, Rank and Serial Number stuff and tell me where they were and after that I didn't know what to say except possibly How 'bout showing me exactly where on a map and leaving me the car keys in case we decide to go see them in the dead of night and never come back.

  I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.

  Of course in order to survive Piper and I needed to have a plan, and I was the one who was going to have to make it because Piper's job was to be a Mystical Creature and mine was to get things done here on earth which was just how the cards were dealt and there was no point thinking of it any other way.

  Our major plan, which we didn't even have to discuss, was to get back together with Edmond and Isaac and Osbert by hook or by crook. So far, I was pretty hazy on the details.

  I did, however, get so far as to find a Road Map of the British Isles hanging around the house and look up Kingly and Reston Bridge and what I discovered was that good old Major Laurence McEvoy had told me the truth and Kingly was pretty much straight east of us and not that far from Aunt Penn's sequestered house, though a little farther away from Reston Bridge than was totally convenient given the current difficulty in securing a taxi.

  The extremely good news was that our very own swimming and fishing river near the house was a branch of the same one that the bridge in Reston Bridge went over and I figured navigation-wise that was a big plus.

  It's probably best to say up front that maps are not what I'm good at. So I did what every other sensible New Yorker has been doing for years in the Public Library, I tore the page out and hid it in my underwear. And from then on I always kept it with me Just In Case.

  We went to bed early that night and pretty much every other night because without electricity and with even candles getting pretty scarce, there wasn't much point in sitting around in the dark. I didn't much like being in this boy's room with the stupid bimbos on the wall and I know Piper wasn't wild about it or being away from her brothers either.

  Before she fell asleep she said Daisy—

  And I said Yes Piper?

  And she said, I always wanted a sister and if I had one I would want her to be like you.

  She paused.

  Though I always thought she would be called Amy.

  I laughed a little then and said It's all right with me, you can call me Amy if you want Piper, but she looked a little hurt and I stopped joking around and said, I practically am your sister now Piper, and that seemed to satisfy her on the subject and she didn't say anything more about it.

  I didn't tell her that I had never wanted a sister, in actual fact had spent most of my recent life desperately NOT wanting a sister, but that was only because of the circumstances in which I was likely to get one and besides I never imagined how much I could love someone like Piper though having said that there probably isn't another person anything like Piper this side of Kingdom Come.

  She asked me what was going to happen to us and I told her I didn't really know but that nothing could hurt us when we were together. I asked her Do you know what invincible means? And she nodded because she's read more books in nine years than most people read in a lifetime and I said Well, as long as we're together that's what we are.

  Then she said in a croaky voice Mum must be so worried about us, and there was something in the silence that followed that sounded so desolate that I went and sat beside her on the bed and stroked her hair over and over and tried not to think about Aunt Penn's whereabouts or whether she was dead or alive. But you had to admit Piper had a point because if I were their mother, war or no war, I'd be half dead with worry by now not having any idea how all my children were doing or even if they were still alive.

  Eventually Piper got quiet and I figured she was asleep so I went back into my own bed and started thinking my own thoughts for a while.

  Now that I was away from Edmond I could think more or less in private about all the changes that were jamming themselves into my life and one of the thoughts I had was how you could love someone more than yourself and any worry about getting stuck in the middle of a war and ending up dead was transferred onto worrying about keeping them alive.

  This was all confused by the fact that I loved Piper in a protective kind of way and Edmond in a slightly different way, to put it mildly, and given that I had about as much experience with sex and boyfriends as I did with brothers and sisters, it was pretty strange to find myself suddenly overwhelmed with attention from the world's biggest warehouse of magical misfits.

  And just to complicate matters perfectly, I was starting to feel responsible for their safety and happiness and got panicked at the idea of them being captured or corrupted by the outside world. Now this was a definite shift from where we'd started which was all about them bringing me cups of tea and holding my hand and exactly when the shift occurred I couldn't tell you.

  My head was kind of spinning from trying to clear this up and I wished there was someone I could have asked about it all since I'd never read about any similar kind of situation in all the magazines Leah and I used to buy which I guess either makes me or everyone else on the planet some kind of a freak.

  But for once my fate was crystal clear and wedded to Edmond and Piper's and even Isaac and Osbert's so that was that, and I just had to get on with whatever it required of me.

  This made me not quite as desperate as I had been and if I lay very still I could hear Edmond thinking about me wherever he was and I thought about him back and then the bond between us was complete.

  I guess the difference between Gin and me is that when Gin got shut in the barn she thought Edmond didn't love her anymore but because I could feel Edmond out there somewhere always loving me I di
dn't have to howl all night. Thinking of Edmond like that made the single bed suddenly seem too big so I crept in with Piper who didn't even stir she was so used to it by now and I could hear Jet breathing quietly under the bed.

  And so with all the ducks I had left in a row, I was ready to fall asleep too.

  17

  Piper and I lived with the McEvoys like people living someone else's life.

  Because we were part of an army family we got a much clearer idea of what was happening in England, though a fair amount of it we could have done without knowing due to its not-entirely-cheerful nature.

  We spent a couple of days gathering information from Jane McEvoy who liked to talk and was pretty lonely especially since her son was away at school in the North and hadn't been heard of since the first bombs went off and she was desperately worried that something bad had happened to him which seemed fairly likely to me.

  I went down to get some water late at night and heard her in the kitchen with Major Mac and he was saying he was certain the boy was safe and We'll all be together again just as soon as this bloody mess is sorted. He sounded amazingly calm and reassuring but I could hear an occasional hoarse gasping kind of cry like an animal choking to death in a noose and when I looked through the door I could see Mrs. M shaking all over and him with his arms around her looking exhausted and patting her over and over saying Now now, love, and I decided to live without a glass of water that night.

  The next day her eyes were red but otherwise she seemed OK, and to make conversation she started telling us how proud she was of her husband and that one of Major McEvoy's big jobs was organizing a field hospital for local people because all the real hospitals had been taken over to fix up people who'd been bombed, poisoned or gassed in London. They got shipped out here when the city hospitals ran out of room.

  She said that since most of the people out in the country were only dying of appendicitis, childbirth and ordinary Preexisting Conditions the field hospital was supposed to take care of them while the more Colorful Cases of War Injury got hospitals with proper walls and beds.

  At the beginning, she said, I went to the hospital every day. I read to the patients and played with those poor injured children and tried to make myself useful. But now they'll only let military personnel inside due to the security risk. She looked kind of outraged at this and said As if I'm some kind of danger to those people! and Piper and I exchanged a quick glance and we were both thinking the same thing namely, Only if being unhinged is contagious.

  Later Major M told us you'd be amazed at the number of things that can go wrong for civilians in a war. For instance, he said, let's say a kid gets appendicitis or breaks his leg, there was no telephone to tell someone that the bone was sticking out of his thigh, no petrol to drive a car to the field hospital, if you happened to know where it was in the first place, and a big shortage of antibiotics if you did manage to get the kid to a surgeon somehow and wanted to make sure he or she didn't die of infection a week or so later.

  He also told us about people with cancer who needed expensive drugs and a pregnant woman he knew with RH-negative blood whose baby would probably die pretty much no matter what, and old people, some of whom would die sooner or later of strokes and heart attacks or lack of drugs, and some who already had.

  Another time Major McEvoy started telling us about the farm problems in the area that he was trying to control and they mostly involved cows who couldn't be milked by electric milking machines once the emergency generators stopped working and had to be milked by hand or they could get mastitis and die. Now there's a side effect of war I bet you never considered.

  Once you start thinking about all that stuff that wasn't working it's kind of hard to know where it all ends. Like the incubators for baby chicks not to mention baby humans and electric fences and hospital monitors and those things you use to shock people back to life when their hearts stop and computer systems and trains and airplanes. Even the gas supplies for heat and cooking are regulated by electricity, said Major McEvoy, and how do you think you pump water out of a well?

  I felt a science report coming on titled Electricity, Our Helpful Friend.

  Then there was the problem of burying all the cows and baby chicks and people who died and apparently there were lots of dead things and they were well on their way to becoming a big stinking rotten health problem, but that might have been too much information for me just then, and I thought I wasn't going to eat another hamburger or chicken leg again in a hurry.

  The Good Major was also trying to distribute things like milk and eggs and other farm food so all the occupied people wouldn't die of starvation and one or two other tiny details like that so you could say he had his hands full and then some.

  I guess by a combination of politeness and osmosis I learned more about farming in the few weeks we lived with the McEvoys than I was ever likely to find out in a lifetime on the tenth floor of an Eighty-sixth Street apartment building where the closest you ever got to Agricultural Produce was a corned beef sandwich from Zabar's with a half-sour pickle which I knew perfectly well used to be a cucumber but how it got to be a Pickle on a Plate was anyone's guess.

  Anyway, all this stuff was happening under the rules of The Occupation which never struck me as being entirely clear but as far as I could tell meant you could go ahead and do whatever you liked as long as no one told you not to. I didn't really understand The Occupation because it didn't seem like the kind of War we all knew and loved from your average made-for-TV miniseries.

  When I heard how it happened I was pretty impressed by the cleverness of the guys who planned it, who as far as I understood, basically waited for most of the British Army to be lured into crises on the other side of the world and then waltzed in and cut off all the transportation and communications and stuff so basically they were DEFENDING Britain against its own returning armed forces rather than attacking it.

  Major McEvoy said Think about it as a Hostage Situation with Sixty Million Hostages so I did.

  I've probably missed some important parts of the explanation but that seemed to be the gist of it and whenever anyone went into more detail I found my brain wandering to things like I wonder if he dyes his hair and Whatever possessed them to choose that color wallpaper?

  There were obviously a few military types still left in England, mostly part of the Territorial Army, which sounds pretty impressive until you realize they're a bunch of moonlighting guys who spend a few weekends a year doing basic training and wishing they were one of the Dirty Dozen. Major McEvoy said it was more or less a Known Fact that the whole situation was temporary and by the time the British Forces could get organized again it would all be over and the Occupiers would be History i.e. dead, but I guess the invaders were trying to Make a Point and had never really expected it to turn out happily ever after for them.

  What impressed me was how simple it seemed to be to throw a whole country into chaos by dumping a bunch of poison into some of the water supplies and making sure no one could get electricity or phone connections and setting off a few big bombs here and there in tunnels and government buildings and airports.

  We also found out that The Enemy was one reason there was no gas for anyone, since Major McEvoy told Piper and me that Petrol was one of the first things they took over when all the trouble started. The other reason was that you needed Guess What to pump it out of the ground and into the tank of your car.

  Eleven letters, starts with E.

  I guess it shows the importance of having your own army, even a small leftover piece of an army, because although the Bad Guys snatched up everything they could get their hands on, at least the Good Guys seemed genuinely dedicated to distributing what was left around the place so as few people as possible died from neglect or outright stupidity.

  All in all I felt a little guilty about the fact that while us kids had been living the Life of Riley, a whole bunch of other people had been scurrying around like lunatics trying to keep the Social Fabric from
Unraveling and my personal belief was there were too many problems to think about and not enough people to sort them out.

  In other words, they were desperately short of people to get things done and that gave us a chance to GET OUT and eventually get back to where we belonged. This was obviously our goal, but in the meantime we figured that actually doing something might stop us from dying of boredom, which I was starting to realize was a major killer in a modern war.

  So for all our making fun of Osbert and his passion to join the War Effort I could see now that this was our ticket to getting back home.

  Or at least that was the plan.

  18

  During all this time I was in touch with Edmond. Strange as it sounds, he visited me, not exactly like god visiting Moses or angels telling Mary she's knocked up with the Christ Child, but come to think of it not completely unlike that either.

  I had to be in a certain state of mind—quiet, distracted, sometimes half asleep—and then I might feel a kind of aura, a lightening of the space behind my eyes and I'd know he was there. I could smell his smell of tobacco and earth and something radiant and spicy like amber; could feel the smooth glide of his skin, though I never exactly saw him. Once he had a cough, and his breathing sounded slow and heavy. Another time on a cold night when he kissed me I could feel his body shivering against mine. Sometimes I could just feel his eyes on me, holding me with his quizzical wise-dog gaze, and I would push off with one foot and try to coast for hours on that feeling.

  Once, in a trance that wasn't quite a dream, an image appeared in my head and I knew it was the place he and Isaac were living, and I could see the people living with them, and how they passed the time. Another time I heard the frail scratching cry of a newborn baby and Edmond seemed tired and cheerless and disappeared before I could find out what had happened.