Gathering Blue - Lois Lowry [46]
"We need a tool," Thomas murmured, looking around.
Remembering something from her own quarters, Kira went to the bathroom. As she had guessed, a thick hairbrush with a wooden handle lay on the shelf beside the sink.
"Try this," she said, and handed it up to the tyke.
Smiling broadly, the little singer reached up and thumped the brush handle on the ceiling.
Thomas lifted her down and put her back into the bed. "That's it, then," he said. "If you need us, that's the signal, Jo. But never just for fun. Only if you need help."
"And we'll come to see you too, even if you don't thump," Kira added. "After the tenders are gone." She tucked the bed covers around the tyke. "Here, Thomas. Put this back, would you?" She handed him the hairbrush.
"We must go now," she told Jo. "But do you feel better, knowing that you have friends up there?"
The tyke nodded. Her moist thumb slid into her mouth.
Kira smoothed the blanket. "Good night, then." For a moment she sat there on the bed, feeling a vague memory of something else that should be done. Something from when she was a small tyke, like this, being put to bed.
She leaned down toward the little girl, intuitively. What was it that her mother had done when she was small? Kira put her lips on Jo's forehead. It was an unfamiliar gesture but felt right.
The little girl made a small contented sound with her own lips against Kira's face. "A little kissie," she whispered. "Like me mum."
Kira and Thomas parted in the upstairs corridor and made their way separately back to their own rooms. It was late, and as always they were expected to work in the morning and needed sleep.
As Kira prepared for bed, she thought about the frightened, lonely tyke below. What songs were they forcing her to learn? Why was she here at all? Ordinarily an orphaned tyke would be turned over to another family.
It was the same question that she and Thomas had discussed the day before. And the answer seemed to be the conclusion they had reached: they were artists, the three of them. Makers of song, of wood, of threaded patterns. Because they were artists, they had some value that she could not comprehend. Because of that value, the three of them were here, well fed, well housed, and nurtured.
She brushed her hair and teeth and got into bed. The window was open to the breeze. Below, she could see the half-completed constructions that would soon be her dyeing-garden, firepit, and shed. Across the room, through the darkness, she could see the folded, covered shape on top of her worktable: the Singer's robe.
Suddenly Kira knew that although her door was unlocked, she was not really free. Her life was limited to these things and this work. She was losing the joy she had once felt when the bright-colored threads took shape in her hands, when the patterns came to her and were her own. The robe did not belong to her, though she was learning its story through her work. She would almost be able to tell the history now that it had passed through her fingers, now that she had focused on it so closely for so many days. But it was not what her hands or heart yearned to do.
Thomas, uncomplaining though he was, had mentioned the headaches that afflicted him after hours of work. So had the little singer below. They be stuffing new things into me, the tyke had whimpered. She wanted the freedom to sing her own songs as she always had.
Kira did too. She wanted her hands to be free of the robe so that they could make patterns of their own again. Suddenly she wished that she could leave this place, despite its comforts, and return to the life she had known.
She buried her face in the bedclothes and for the first time cried in despair.
17
"Thomas, I've worked hard all morning, and you have too. Would you take a walk with me? There's something I want to see."
It was midday. They had both