Liesl sat very still. For a moment she was so still and white Po was actually frightened, though he had never once been frightened of a living one before. They were too fragile, too easily broken and dismantled: They had bones that broke and skin that tore and hearts that gave up with a sigh and rolled over.
But that was the problem with Liesl, Po realized. She seemed in that moment, as she sat there with her thin blanket bunched around her waist, to be like a glass thing on the verge of breaking. And the ghost did not want her to break.
Bundle must have felt it too. Po saw the fuzzy animal shape grow fuzzier and then sharper, fuzzier and then sharper, as it tried unsuccessfully to merge with Liesl. This was the other problem with living ones: They were separate, always separate. They could not truly merge. They did not know how to be anyone other than themselves, and even that they did not know how to be sometimes.
“I must take his ashes to the willow tree,” Liesl whispered suddenly, with certainty. “I must bury my father next to my mother. Then his soul will move Beyond.” She looked directly at the place where Po’s eyes should have been, if Po were not a ghost, and again Po felt the very core of its Essence shiver in response.
“And you must help me,” Liesl finished.
Po was unprepared for this. “Me?” it said unhappily. “Why me?”
“Because you are my friend,” Liesl said.
“Friend,” Po repeated. The word was unfamiliar by this point. Something tugged at the edges of Po’s memory, the faintest of faintest recollections of a bark of laughter, and the smell of thick wool, and the sting of something wet against its cheek. Snowball fight, Po thought suddenly, without knowing where the words came from: words he had not thought of in ages and ages, in so long that millions of stars had collapsed and been born in that time.
“All right,” Po said. It had never occurred to Po that it would ever have a friend again, in all of eternity. “I’ll help you.”
“I knew you would!” Liesl went to throw her arms around the ghost and nearly toppled over, as her arms passed through nothingness and then back on herself. Then, all at once, she seemed to collapse from within. She slumped back against the pillows. “But it’s no use,” she said despairingly. “How am I supposed to bury my father by the willow? I’m not allowed to leave the attic. I haven’t left the attic in months and months. Augusta says it’s too dangerous. I must be kept here, for my own protection. And the door is locked from the outside. It’s only ever opened twice a day, when Karen comes to bring me my tray.”
Karen was one of the servants Augusta, Liesl’s stepmother, had hired with Liesl’s father’s money. Karen trundled up the winding stairs twice a day, sometimes with as little as a tiny strip of the smallest, toughest meat—usually the scraps from Augusta’s meal—and a thimbleful of milk.
Augusta had not seen Liesl herself in all thirteen months that Liesl had been in the attic, and although Augusta had three servants and had her hair done every other day, she was always complaining that Liesl ate too much and they couldn’t possibly afford to feed the little Attic Rat any more than they were already giving her.
Po was silent for a bit. “What time does she bring up your tray?” the ghost finally asked.
“Before dawn,” Liesl said. “I’m usually asleep when she comes.”
“Leave everything to me,” Po said, and Liesl knew then that picking Po to be her very best friend had been the right thing to do.
Chapter Ten
KAREN MCLAUGHLIN DID NOT LIKE TO GO TO THE attic. She disliked climbing three staircases, and then another set of tiny wooden stairs, to get from the kitchen to the door, particularly when she had to carry a tray with her. But more than that, she disliked seeing Liesl. It gave her a shivery feeling—the girl with her pale, pale face and enormous blue eyes, the girl who never cried or shouted or made a fuss about being locked in the attic but only sat there, staring, when Karen came in. It gave Karen the creeps. It was just not right.
Even Milly, the cook, said so. “It ain’t natural,” she liked to say, as she poured a bit of hot water over a bouillon cube for Liesl’s soup, or pounded a piece of fat and gristle with a large hammer so Liesl would at least be able to get her teeth through it. “Little girls ain’t made to be locked up in attics like bats in the belfry. It’ll bring bad luck on us all, you wait and see.”
Milly was always saying, too, that something should be done, though her declarations never went further than that. Times were hard, jobs were few, and people all over the city were starving. If the servants in Augusta Morbower’s employ had to deal with the specter of a pale, small child who lived in the attic—well, there were worse things.