Sever
Sever
Lauren DeStefano
The third and final novel in Lauren DeStefano’s breathtaking dystopian romance series, The Chemical Garden TrilogyTime is running out for Rhine.With less than three years left until the virus claims her life, Rhine is desperate for answers. Having escaped torment at Vaughn’s mansion, she finds respite in the dilapidated home of her husband’s uncle, an eccentric inventor who hates Vaughn almost as much as Rhine does.Rhine’s determination to be reunited with her twin brother, Rowan, increases as each day brings terrifying revelations to light about his involvement in an underground resistance. She realizes must find him before he destroys the one thing they have left: hope.In this breathtaking conclusion to Lauren DeStefano’s The Chemical Garden trilogy, everything Rhine knows to be true will be irrevocably shattered. But what she discovers along the way has alarming implications for her future – and about the past her parents never had the chance to explain.
For
Riley,
Isaiah,
Isabella,
Hailey,
Cameron,
Mary,
Cooper,
Eliot,
and
Raina,
Who have a lifetime
Of roads before them
I must lose myself in action,
lest I wither in despair.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u66aed885-cc32-5ec1-ab01-28c6b766fc91)
Dedication (#u1952c8f8-c638-54f5-8867-e8bd584ce16d)
Epigraph (#u65dee45e-cde5-5ae4-ae51-392af0bc10ef)
Chapter 1 (#u7c98558a-4268-59f3-90e1-88e2c4d5fe77)
Chapter 2 (#u9bb8bfbf-cfd8-55f6-974f-fd882c7f7dc5)
Chapter 3 (#u00b4b3f6-3117-5021-b8e2-657c9b16d1a4)
Chapter 4 (#u57cfb4ed-b274-5463-9e2a-cd59b9ab5d98)
Chapter 5 (#u620c8c62-2e97-5eea-a2a9-7bda93a95e31)
Chapter 6 (#u0864710b-3508-5e32-a1e1-2bced55bdc40)
Chapter 7 (#u04975763-ffb6-5805-ad0b-ec9d40576986)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise for the Chemical Garden Trilogy (#litres_trial_promo)
By Lauren DeStefano (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1
IN THE ATLAS the river still flows. The thin line of it carries cargo to a destination that no longer exists. We share a name, the river and I; if there’s a reason for this, it died with my parents. The river lingers in my daydreams, though. I imagine it spreading out into the greatness of the ocean, melting into sunken cities, carrying old messages in bottles.
I have wasted too much time on this page. Really I should be in North America, charting my way from the Florida coastline to Providence, Rhode Island, where my twin brother has just bombed a hospital for its pro-science research on embryos.
I don’t know how many are dead because of him.
Linden shifts his weight restlessly. “I didn’t even know you had a brother,” he’d said when I told him where I was going. “But the list of things I don’t know about you is growing longer every day, isn’t it?”
He’s bitter. About our marriage and the way it ended. About the way it’s not really over.
My sister wife looks out the window, her hair like light through autumn leaves. “It’s going to rain,” she says quietly. She’s here only at my insistence. My once-husband still doesn’t quite believe she was in danger in his father’s, Vaughn’s, home. Or maybe he does believe it; I’m not sure, because he’s barely speaking to me these days, except to ask how I’m feeling and to tell me I’ll be discharged from the hospital soon. I should consider myself lucky; most of the patients here are crammed into the lobbies or a dozen to a room, and that’s if they’re not turned away. I have comfort and privacy. Hospitalization of this class is reserved for the wealthy, and it just so happens that my father-in-law owns nearly every medical facility in the state of Florida.
Because there is never enough blood for transfusions, and because I lost so much of it when I sawed into my leg in a maddened delirium, it took me a long time to recover. And now that my blood has regenerated, they want to take it a bit at a time and analyze it to be sure I’m recovering. They’re under the assumption that my body didn’t respond to Vaughn’s attempts to treat the virus; I’m not sure what exactly he told them, but he has a way of being everywhere without being present.
I have an interesting blood type, they say. They wouldn’t have been able to find a match even if more people donated their blood for the meager pay the hospital gives.
Cecily mentioned the rain to distract Linden from the nurse who has just sterilized my arm. But it doesn’t work. Linden’s green eyes are trained on my blood as it fills up the syringe. I hold the atlas in my blanketed lap, turn the page.
I find my way back to North America—the only continent that’s left, and even it isn’t whole; there are uninhabitable pieces of what used to be known as Canada and Mexico. There used to be an entire world of people and countries out there, but they’ve all since been destroyed by wars so distant they’re hardly spoken about.
“Linden?” Cecily says, touching his arm.
He turns his head to her, but doesn’t look.
“Linden,” she tries again. “I need to eat something. I’m getting a headache.”
This gets his attention because she is four months pregnant and prone to anemia. “What would you like, love?” he says.
“I saw brownies in the cafeteria earlier.”
He frowns, tells her she should be eating things with more sustenance, but ultimately succumbs to her pouting.
Once he has left my hospital room, Cecily sits on the edge of my bed, rests her chin on my shoulder, and looks at the page. The nurse leaves us, my blood on his cart of surgical utensils.
This is the first time I’ve been alone with my sister wife since arriving at the hospital. She traces the outline of the country, swirls her finger around the Atlantic in tandem with her sigh.
“Linden is furious with me,” she says, not without remorse, but also not in her usual weepy way. “He says you could have been killed.”
I spent months in Vaughn’s basement laboratory, the subject of countless experiments, while Linden obliviously milled about upstairs. Cecily, who visited me and talked of helping me escape, never told him about any of it.
It isn’t the first time she betrayed me; though, as with the last time, I believe that she was trying to help. She would botch Vaughn’s experiments by removing IVs and tampering with the equipment. I think her goal was to get me lucid enough to walk out the back door. But Cecily is young at fourteen years old, and doesn’t understand that our father-in-law has plans much bigger than her best efforts. Neither of us stands a chance against him. He’s even had Linden believing him for all these years.
Still, I ask, “Why didn’t you tell Linden?”
She draws a shaky breath and sits more upright. I look at her, but she won’t meet my eyes. Not wanting to intimidate her with guilt, I look at the open atlas.
“Linden was so heartbroken when you left,” she says. “Angry, but sad, too. He wouldn’t talk about it. He closed your door and forbade me from opening it. He stopped drawing. He spent so much time with me and with Bowen, and I loved that, but I could tell it was because he wanted to forget you.” She takes a deep breath, turns the page.
We stare at South America for a few seconds. Then she says, “And, eventually, he started to get better. He was talking about taking me to the spring expo that’s coming up. Then you came back, and I thought, if he saw you, it would undo all the progress he’d made.” Now she looks at me, her brown eyes sharp. “And you didn’t want to be back, anyway. So I thought I could get you to escape again, and he would never have to know, and we could all just be happy.”
She says that last word, “happy,” like it’s the direst thing in the world. Her voice cracks with it. A year ago, here is where she’d have started to cry. I remember that on my last day before I ran away, I left her screaming and weeping in a snowbank when she realized how she’d betrayed our older sister wife, Jenna, by telling our father-in-law of Jenna’s efforts to help me escape, which only aided his decision to dispose of her.
But Cecily has grown since then. Having a child and enduring the loss of not one but two members of her marriage have aged her.
“Linden was right,” she says. “You could have been killed, and I—” She swallows hard, but doesn’t take her eyes from mine. “I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself. I’m sorry, Rhine.”
I wrap my arm around her shoulders, and she leans against me.
“Vaughn is dangerous,” I say into her ear. “Linden doesn’t want to believe it, but I think you do.”
“I know,” she says.
“He’s tracking your every move the way he tracked me.”
“I know.”
“He killed Jenna.”
“I know. I know that.”
“Don’t let Linden talk you into trusting him,” I say. “Don’t put yourself in a situation where you’re alone with him.”
“You can run away, but I can’t,” she says. “That’s my home. It’s all I have.”
Linden clears his throat in the doorway. Cecily bounds to him and ups herself on tiptoes to kiss him when she takes the brownie from his hand. Then she unwraps its plastic. She settles in a chair and props her swollen feet up on the window ledge. She has a way of ignoring Linden’s hints about wanting to be alone with me. It was a minor annoyance in our marriage, but right now it’s a relief. I don’t know what Linden wants to say to me, only that his fidgeting means he wants it to be in private, and I’m dreading it.
I watch as Cecily nibbles the edges of the brownie and dusts crumbs off her shirtfront. She’s aware of Linden’s restlessness, but she also knows he won’t ask her to leave. Because she’s pregnant, and because she’s the only wife left who so genuinely adores him.
Linden picks up the sketchbook he abandoned on a chair, sits, and tries to busy himself looking through his building designs. I sort of feel sorry for him. He has never been authoritative enough to ask for what he wants. Even though I know this conversation he’s itching to have will leave me feeling guilty and miserable, I owe him this much.
“Cecily,” I say.
“Mm?” she says, and crumbs fall from her lips.
“Leave us alone for a few minutes.”
She glances at Linden, who looks at her and doesn’t object, and then back to me.
“Fine,” she sighs. “I have to pee anyway.”
After she leaves, closing the door behind her, Linden shuts his notebook. “Thanks,” he says.
I push myself upright, smooth the sheets over my thighs, and nod, avoiding his eyes. “What is it?” I ask.
“They’re letting you out tomorrow,” he says, taking the seat by my bed. “Do you have any sort of plan?”
“I was never good at plans,” I say. “But I’ll figure it out.”
“How will you find your brother?” he says. “Rhode Island is hundreds of miles away.”
“One thousand three hundred miles,” I say. “Roughly. I’ve been reading up on it.”
He frowns. “You’re still recovering,” he says. “You should rest for a few days.”
“I might as well get moving.” I close the atlas. “I have nowhere else to go.”
“You know that isn’t true,” he says. “You have a—” He hesitates. “A place to stay.”
He was going to say “home.”
I don’t answer, and the silence is filled with all the things Linden wants to say. Phantom words, ghosts that haunt the pieces of dust swimming in beams of light.
“Or,” he starts up again. “There is another option. My uncle.”
That gets me to look at him, maybe too inquisitively, because he seems amused. “My father disowned him years ago, when I was very young,” he says. “I’m supposed to pretend he doesn’t exist, but he doesn’t live far from here.”
“He’s your father’s brother?” I say, skeptical.
“Just think about it,” Linden says. “He’s a little strange, but Rose liked him.” He says that last part with a laugh, and his cheeks light up with pink, and I strangely feel better.
“She met him?” I ask.
“Just once,” Linden says. “We were on our way to a party, and she leaned over the driver’s seat and said, ‘I’m sick of these boring things. Take us anywhere else.’ So I gave the driver my uncle’s address, and we spent the evening there, eating the worst coffee crumb cake we’d ever tasted.”
It’s the first time since her death that he’s brought up Rose without wincing at the pain.
“And the fact that my father hates him just made my uncle that much more appealing to her,” Linden goes on. “He’s too pro-naturalism for my father’s taste, and admittedly a little strange. I’ve had to keep it a secret that I visit with him.”
Linden has a rebellious side. Who knew. He reaches out and tucks my hair behind my ear. It’s done out of habit, and he jerks his hand back when he realizes his mistake.
“Sorry,” he mumbles.
“It’s all right,” I say. “I’ll think about it.” My words are coming out fast, bumbling. “What you said—I mean—I’ll think about it.”
2
CECILY HANGS out the limo’s open window, her hair flailing behind her like a ribbon caught on a hook. Bowen, in his father’s arms, reaches out to catch it. I’m astounded by how much he grew while I was away. He’s a teddy bear of a boy—stocky and friendly and apple-cheeked. He was born with dark hair and beaming blue eyes that have since gone hazel. His hair has lightened to a coppery blond that I imagine mimics Cecily’s when she was a baby, which we’ll never know for certain. He has her defiant chin, her thin eyelashes. With every day that passes, prominent traces of Linden dissolve from his face.
He is beautiful, though. And Cecily is mad for him. I’ve never seen anyone love anything as much as she loves that baby. Even now, though she’s facing the sky that rushes past, she’s singing a lullaby for him. I recognize it as a poem from a book in the library on the wives’ floor. Jenna used to read it aloud.
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire …
The sun is setting, making the world orange. I rub my fists over my knees, uneasy. I can’t believe Vaughn let us use the limo for this. Maybe he’s trying to stay on Linden’s good side, to manipulate him by being contrite and reliable. I keep expecting the driver to turn on us and take me back to the mansion. But he has taken us so far into the countryside that I’m beginning to let go of that fear. It’s been minutes since we passed any buildings. There’s only grass, and the occasional lone tree that comes and goes like an explosion.
Cecily interrupts her song to ask, “Where are we?” and lean back into her seat.
“Someplace rural,” Linden says. “It’s hard to say. I never knew the street names.”
Cecily reaches for the baby, and then holds him over her head, blowing absurd-sounding kisses on his belly; his giggles make her grin.
“It’s this turn,” Linden tells the driver. “Off the road. Follow the tire tracks.”
Even the limo, with its smooth ride, jostles over the uneven terrain. And a few minutes later we’ve come to the only thing in sight: a two-story brick house that looks as old and stable as the mansion, but much smaller. Surrounding it are half a dozen tarps arranged like black car-shaped ghosts. There’s a dilapidated shed and a windmill. The roof is covered in reflective panels.
Cecily crinkles her nose and turns to Linden. “We can’t leave her here,” she says. “It looks like a junkyard.”
“It’s not as bad as all that,” he says.
“There’s tinfoil on his roof!”
“They’re solar panels,” Linden amends patiently. “So he doesn’t have to use so much electricity.”
Cecily opens her mouth to object, but I say, “It’s only for a couple of days. It looks fine.” I don’t mention that, while this is a step down from the luxuries of the mansion, it’s as nice as any of the homes I grew up near. And solar panels aren’t uncommon in Manhattan at all, where many can’t afford electricity.
The limo stops, and I open my door quickly, afraid of sleeping gas or locks or snakes that could come slithering through the vents to strangle me.
It’s early evening now, and without civilization for miles I can see darkness stretching toward me from every direction. The stars are bright, splayed across every shade of pink and blue, tracing a lone, oblong cloud.
Linden comes up beside me, follows my gaze skyward. “When I was little,” he says, “my uncle told me the names of all the constellations. But I could never find them.”
“But you know which one’s the North Star,” I remind him. I remember that he told Cecily about it, and she was discouraged by his lack of romance.
“Right there,” he says, following the line of my arm as I point.
“That’s the tail of Ursa Minor,” I say, moving my finger along the corresponding stars. “It’s my favorite because I think it looks like a kite.”
“I actually see it,” he says quietly, as though astonished. “But I thought Ursa Minor was supposed to be in the shape of a dipper.”
“Well, I think it looks like a kite,” I say. “That’s how I’m always able to find it.”
He turns toward me, and I can feel his breaths, so faint and unassuming that they only move the finest hairs around my face. I don’t dare take my eyes from the stars. My heart is pounding. Memories rush through me. Memories of his fingers unbuckling my shoes, inching under the strap of my red party dress. His lips on mine. The darkness of my bedroom swimming with ivy and champagne glasses the night we came home late from the expo. Snow dusting his shoulders and his dark hair the night we said good-bye.
Cecily slams the car door, snapping me back to reality. “If Rhine is staying here tonight,” she says, “I am too, to make sure she doesn’t get murdered by whatever lunatic runs this place.”
I open my mouth to chide her for being so rude. To say that Linden’s uncle was nice enough to let me stay, and that asking for anything more would seem ungrateful. And also to point out that she’s barely as high as my shoulder, and how exactly would she fend off a lunatic if I couldn’t?
But the words won’t come out. The thought of my only remaining sister wife going back to that mansion is making my palms sweat. She was safe when Vaughn kept her oblivious, but now that she’s seen the workings of his basement and she understands what he’s capable of, I worry for her safety.
“My uncle isn’t a lunatic,” Linden says, and opens the car door again to pull out the suitcase that was sliding around the floor on the way here.
“Why does your father hate him so much, then?” Cecily says.
Linden’s father is no judge of who is or is not a lunatic, but I don’t say this either. I lean back against the trunk of the limo because I’m starting to feel light-headed, and the stars are throbbing, and Linden is right, I do need to rest before I venture into the world again. Everywhere I look, there’s nothing. The world is so far away. All that effort, all those miles undone. I was in Vaughn’s basement of horrors for more than two months. Two months that felt like ten minutes. Gabriel must think I’m dead. Just like my brother thinks I’m dead.
But there has been so much sadness, so much disheartenment, that my body has worked up a defense mechanism to keep me from thinking about it. My head goes numb, and my bones start to ache. Hurricane winds spiral in my ear canals. A sharp pain has streaked my vision with a lightning bolt of white.
Cecily and Linden are talking—something about what counts as eccentricity versus insanity, I think, and the conversation is getting terse as they interrupt each other. Linden is a creature of saintlike patience, but Cecily has a way of wearing anyone down.
“You okay?” Cecily asks me, and I realize that they’ve moved a couple of yards ahead of me, toward the house. Linden turns to watch me, Bowen’s diaper bag slung from his shoulder, and a suitcase in his hand; he packed some clothes for me from my old closet.
I nod and follow after them.
Nobody answers when Linden knocks on the door. He knocks harder, then tries looking into the only visible window, which has its shade drawn. “Uncle Reed?” he calls, and knocks on the glass.
“Does he know we’re coming?” I ask.
“I told him last week when I visited,” he says.
“How often do you come out here?” Cecily says, wounded. “You never told me.”
“I’ve kept it secret. …” Linden trails off, mouthing something to himself as he tries to see around the window shade. “I think I see a light inside.” He knocks again, and when there’s no answer, he opens the door.
Cecily cradles Bowen’s head protectively, and casts a pensive stare into the darkness. “Linden, are you sure?” But he has already gone in ahead of us.
I follow him, my sister wife shuffling close behind and gripping the hem of my shirt.
It’s so dark that I can barely make out Linden’s shape as it moves ahead of me. It’s a long hallway, the wood creaking under our feet, and there’s the smoky smell of cedar and must. Then there’s a faint orange light flickering in a room at the end of the hall.
We gather at either side of Linden in the doorway. We’ve come to a kitchen—at least I think that’s what it is. There’s a sink and a stove. But rather than cabinets there are shelves cluttered with things I can’t make out in the darkness.
There’s a small round table, upon which a candle flickers in a mason jar. A man is seated there, hunched over something that looks like a giant metal organ. Its wires, pipes, and gears are the arteries, and it’s a mechanical heart, bleeding black oil onto the table and the man’s fingers.
“Uncle Reed?” Linden says.
The man grunts, working some intricacy with a pair of pliers and taking his time before looking up. He sees me first, then Cecily. “These are your wives?” he says.
Linden hesitates. But he doesn’t have to answer, because the man returns to his work rather unceremoniously and adds, “I thought you said there were three of them.”
“Just two,” Linden says, with so little emotion it gives me pause. It’s as if Jenna never existed. “And this is my son,” he adds, taking the baby from Cecily’s arms. “Bowen.”
The man—Reed—pauses, astonished by something. But then he only grunts. “Doesn’t look like you,” he says.
Cecily plays with a light switch on the wall; it doesn’t work. “Please don’t touch anything,” Reed says, and wipes his hands with a dingy rag that only spreads the oil around. He moves to the sink, and the faucet shudders before it spits out an unsteady stream. I can’t be certain in the candlelight, but I think I see flecks of black in the water. Reed mutters curses.
Then he pulls a cord over his head, and bleary light fills the room from a bulb that swings from the ceiling. The shadows jump back and forth, animating jars and pipes and senseless pieces that fill the shelves. There’s a refrigerator in one corner of the room, but there’s no electrical hum to it, no indication that it’s on.
Reed comes closer, inspects the child in Linden’s arms. Bowen’s eyes are dazed, transfixed on the swinging bulb. “Nope, nothing like you,” Reed reaffirms. “Whose is he?”
“He’s mine,” Cecily says.
Reed snorts. “How old are you? Ten?”
“Fourteen,” she says through gritted teeth.
I get a whiff of something heady and smoky when Reed moves to stand before me. It’s making my eyes water, but I’m just grateful that he looks nothing like Vaughn. He’s not as tall, and he’s a little overweight, and his gray hair is as wild as waves breaking on rocks. “I thought you were dead,” he says to me.
I must be worse off than I thought, because surely I just imagined that. But then Linden says, “That isn’t Rose, Uncle. Her name is Rhine. Remember I told you the other day?”
“Oh, right, right,” Reed says. “I’m bad with names. I’m usually much better with faces.”
“I’ve been told I look like her,” I offer.
“Doll, you could be her ghost,” Reed says. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“She can’t be a reincarnation of Rose,” Cecily says, indignant. “They were both alive at the same time.”
Reed looks at her like she’s something he just stepped in, and she inches closer to Linden’s side.
“Tell me,” Reed says, turning back to me, “because my nephew’s story was confusing. You’re running away from him, and he’s helping you?”
“That’s one way to put it,” I say. “But I’m not running away. Not really. I’m looking for my brother.” A lump is forming in my throat, caused by Reed’s stare and his smell and the interrogating hue of that light. “The last I heard, he was in Rhode Island. He’s gotten into a—situation, and I need to find him. I won’t be any trouble in the meantime.” My words are coming out one atop the other, fast, and Linden puts his hand on my arm, and for some reason it calms me.
Reed looks me over, his mouth squished to one side of his face like he’s thinking. “You have too much hair,” he says. “You’ll have to tie it back so it won’t get caught in the machines.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I say, “Okay.”
“I told him you would help out a little,” Linden says. “It won’t be anything arduous. He knows you’re recovering.”
“From the car accident. Right,” Reed says. I don’t know what story Linden fed him to explain my injuries, but judging from his tone he doesn’t believe it, or care to. “There’s a room upstairs where you can put your things. My nephew can show you. The floors make a terrible creaking, so I’ll have to ask you not to walk around at night.”
That’s apparently our cue to leave, because he turns his attention to the contraption on the table. Linden herds us down the hallway.
“Oh, Linden,” Cecily whispers, her words almost lost to the creaking of the steps. “I knew you were mad at her, but you can’t be serious about leaving her here.”
“I am doing Rhine a favor,” he replies. “And she can take care of herself.” He looks over his shoulder at me. I’m two steps behind him. “Can’t you?” he says.
I nod like I’m not at all unnerved by this new cold side to him. Not cruel like his father. Not warm like the husband who sought me out on quiet nights. Something in between. This Linden has never woven his fingers through mine, never chosen me from a line of weary Gathered girls, never said he loved me in a myriad of colored lights. We are nothing to each other.
Reed may have forgotten my name, but he apparently remembered that I was coming, because the spare bedroom is lit up by three candles—one on the nightstand, two on the dresser. They and a twin bed are the only furniture in the room. There’s a cracked mirror on the far wall, and my reflection drowns in the darkness of it. Rose’s ghost. I almost expect it to move independent of me.
Cecily drops the suitcase and the diaper bag on the floor, and a cloud of dust bursts from the mattress when she sits on it. She makes a big show of choking on it.
“It’s fine,” I say, shaking out the pillow.
“I’m afraid to even ask if there’s a bathroom I can use,” Cecily says.
“At the end of the hall,” Linden says, rubbing his index finger along the bridge of his nose; it’s something I’ve only seen him do when he’s frustrated with his drawings. “Take a candle with you.”
After Cecily has left the room, I sit on the edge of the bed and say, “Thank you, Linden.”
He looks at his reflection in the mirror. “My uncle won’t ask any questions, if you don’t,” he says. “About why you aren’t staying at home with me, that is.”
The silence is tight and unnatural. I grip the blanket in my fists and say, “Are you and Cecily going back there?”
“Of course,” he says.
He still won’t believe me about everything that happened in the basement. About Deirdre. I vaguely remember whispering about her in my medicated delirium, and about Jenna’s body hiding away in some freezer. He rubbed my arm, whispering words that sounded like moth bodies flying into glass windows. Nonsensical things I tried to cling to. Maybe, lying there, I was so pitiful that he felt no choice but to love me. Now he says I can take care of myself. Now I’m the liar trying to destroy the perfect world his father set up for him, who ran away, broke everything. And it’s getting late, and it’s time to part ways.
But the words come out of me anyway. “Don’t go.”
He looks at me.
“Don’t go,” I say. “And don’t take Cecily back there. I know you don’t believe me, but I have a terrible feeling that—”
“I can take care of Cecily,” he says. “I would have taken care of you, too. If I’d known you were so worried about my father.”
Bowen has fallen asleep against Linden’s chest, and Linden shifts him to the other arm. “My father thought that if you didn’t want to be married to me, he could have you. It’s because of your eyes. He wanted to study them, and he took it too far. He can be that way.” His eyebrows knit together, and he looks at his feet, struggling to make sense of what he’s saying, to force logic where there is none. “He isn’t the monster you think he is. He just—he gets so into his work that he forgets people are people. He gets carried away.”
“Carried away?” I spit back. “He drove needles into my eyes, Linden! He murdered a newborn—”
“Don’t you think I know my own father?” he interrupts. “I’d trust him before I’d believe anything you say. You couldn’t even do me the dignity of telling the truth.”
There was a night, months ago, when I almost did. It was after the expo. I was half-drunk, my hair sticky and perfumed and teased, the bed tipping under me. He climbed over my body, and he kissed me. I could hear tree branches murmuring to one another in the moonlight. And Linden said, so close that I could feel his breath on my eyelashes, But I don’t know who you are. I don’t know where you came from. His eyes were bright. I wanted so badly to tell him, but something about that entire night seemed so beautiful, so bizarre, that I didn’t trust it with my secrets. Or maybe I just wanted to play along, to wear his ring and be his wife for a little while before the magic took the light from the moon.
Now I say nothing. There’s no brightness in his eyes for me.
“If you didn’t love me,” he says, “you should have said it. I would have let you go.”
“You might have,” I admit. “But not your father.”
“My father has never been in charge of what I do,” he says.
“Your father has always been in charge of what you do,” I say.
He looks at me, and I stop breathing. Something comes surging up behind his eyes, some argument of love or vengeance. Something that’s been building every second I’ve been away. And I want it, whatever it is. Want to hold it in both hands like his leaping heart that’s been ripped from his chest. Want to warm it with my body heat.
He says, “When Cecily comes back, tell her I’ll be waiting by the car.”
Then he’s gone.
“I don’t want to leave you here,” Cecily says when I relay the message. “This place looks like it could give you cancer or something.” She’s remembering that word, “cancer,” from a soap opera Jenna used to watch. It’s a disease that was eliminated from our genetics.
“I don’t think cancer was something you could catch,” I tell her.
“That’s my point,” she says.
We must be making too much noise, because Reed bangs on the ceiling.
Cecily huffs and sits on the bed next to me. After a few seconds she puts her arm around my shoulders and stares at her stomach. At four months along she’s already looking tired and swollen. Her cheeks and fingertips are flushed. Her face and hair are damp from where she’s splashed herself with cold water, something she does after a bout of nausea.
“Have you been sick a lot?” I ask her.
“It’s not so bad,” she says softly. “Linden takes care of me.”
I’m worried about her. I wonder if it has even occurred to her or to Linden that she hardly had a rest between pregnancies. Vaughn surely knows how unsafe this is, and he allowed it, which worries me even more. I’m scared that she’ll enter that dark hall, descend the stairs, and be forever in Vaughn’s clutches. I think she’s scared too, because she doesn’t move. I don’t know how much time passes before Linden comes looking for her.
“Ready to go?” He stands in the doorway, mostly in shadow.
“I’m staying the night,” she says.
They have some sort of conversation with their eyes. A husband-and-wife thing—something I could never quite get the hang of. Cecily wins, because Linden picks up the diaper bag and says, “I’ll be back for you in the morning, first thing.”
A few minutes later, through the window, we watch the limo drive out of sight.
The mattress is lumpy and hard, and Cecily, who is back to snoring the way she did in her later trimesters, spends the night thrashing and turning. She kicks me so many times that I eventually take a pillow and settle on the floor. But every position on the hard wood aggravates the recovering gash in my thigh. In my dreams, it bleeds and seeps through the floorboards, and Reed pounds on the ceiling because blood is raining down on his work. The engine on the table comes to life. It pulses and breathes.
In the darkness Cecily whispers my name. At first I think it’s part of my dream, but she persists, increasing in frequency and intensity until I say, “What?”
“Why are you on the floor?” I can just make out her face and arm leaning over the mattress, tangle of hair coming over one shoulder.
“You were kicking,” I say.
“I’m sorry. Come back up. I promise I won’t anymore.”
She makes room for me, and I cram in beside her. Her skin is sticky and hot. “You shouldn’t wear socks to bed,” I tell her. “They keep heat in. Last time you were pregnant, you always got feverish at night.”
Her legs move under the blanket as she kicks her socks off. It takes her a while to get comfortable, and I can tell she’s trying not to disturb me, so I don’t complain as I’m knocked around the mattress. Eventually she settles on her side, facing me.
“Did you get sick earlier, when you went to use the bathroom?” I ask.
“Don’t tell Linden,” she says, yawning. “He’s squeamish about that stuff. He worries.”
That’s to be expected after what happened with Rose’s pregnancy. But it’s not as though I can tell her that. And soon I find, despite my worries, that I’m exhausted enough to fall asleep.
Just as I’m beginning to dream, she says, “I think about those other girls in the van with us. The ones who were killed.”
My dreams fade away from me, and I wish desperately that they’d return. Even a nightmare would be welcome over that memory. It’s not something my sister wives and I ever talked about, the odd and horrific thing that bonded us to one another. I especially wouldn’t expect to hear about it from Cecily, who has always wanted to be the happy housewife.
“I just wanted you to know that,” she says. “I’m not a monster.”
I turn my head to look at her. “Of course you aren’t.”
“You called me one,” she says. “The day you ran away.”
“I was upset,” I say, pushing the sweaty hair from her face. “But what happened to Jenna isn’t your fault.”
She draws a shaky breath, closes her eyes for a long moment. “Yes, it is.”
Here is where I expect her to cry, but she doesn’t. She only looks at me. And it strikes me again how much she’s grown in my absence. Maybe she had no choice. There were no sister wives to console her, the father-in-law she trusted had only been using her, and it’s not as though she could explain any of this to her husband.
I struggle for words of comfort, but nothing feels sincere enough. And no matter what I say, Jenna is still gone, and so are the other girls that were Gathered, and the girl Silas and I found lying in a ditch. Cecily still won’t live to see Bowen grow, and my brother has spiraled out of control in his grief, and I’m no closer to finding him than I was last year.
I am entirely powerless.
“The whole time we were married, I treated you like you were too small to understand what was happening to us,” I say. “But I felt small too. I couldn’t control the way things were any more than you could.”
“You looked so confident,” she says. “I envied you from the day we were married. I’ve decided I’m going to be more like you.” She says it with conviction. “I’m going to be stronger.”
The last thing I am is strong.
“Get some sleep,” I whisper.
“Rhine?”
“What?”
“I told Linden to believe you. I told him it’s true that Housemaster Vaughn is doing awful things downstairs.”
I feel hope. Linden might not have any reason to believe me, but he’ll listen to Cecily. Even if it’s just to humor her so she doesn’t go hysterical on him. “You did?”
“He wouldn’t listen at first,” she says. “It was while you were in the hospital. But I begged him to go and see for himself.”
“Did he?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “But—when he came back, he said there was nothing down there. A few of Housemaster Vaughn’s chemicals and things, lots of machines and attendants working on them, but no bodies. No Deirdre. He says you must have been hallucinating, or making it all up.”
Hope swims away, leaving me with less than nothing. “But you saw those things too,” I press. “Did you tell him that?”
Now she’s the one brushing her fingers through my hair, trying to console me. “I only saw what was happening to you,” she says. “I wish I’d seen more. I wish I’d seen Deirdre, or Rose’s domestic, what was her—”
“Lydia,” I say.
“Right. Lydia. I wish I could prove it.” She’s talking to me in that hushed, cooing tone usually reserved for her son. Trying to lull me to sleep, or compliance.
And then I realize why.
“You don’t believe me,” I say.
“Oh, Rhine, Housemaster Vaughn did such terrible things to you. You were so delirious, and so sick. Maybe there’s a chance some of it—”
“It was real,” I say, sitting up. “It was all real.”
She sits upright herself, facing me in the darkness. She’s frowning. “There was nothing down there, Rhine.”
“He hid them, then,” I say. “The bodies. The domestics. If Gabriel were here, he’d tell you the same thing.”
Cecily straightens her posture, hopeful. She wants to believe me. “Did he tell you there were bodies down there?”
“Not exactly,” I say.
“What did he tell you?”
My stomach sinks. I collapse back onto the pillow, defeated. “Not much,” I admit. He was so high on opiates at first, and then it was one problem after the next, really. “He didn’t have a chance.”
Cecily lies beside me, rubs my arm reassuringly. We both go silent. I struggle to cope with the fact that I am the only one who saw what Vaughn kept in the basement. But even worse than that, I want to believe what Linden and Cecily do, that none of it really happened. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe Deirdre really did get sold to another house when I left, and Adair and Lydia too. Maybe they’re comfortable and safe, and I’d conjured Deirdre up to cope with the loneliness as I lay strapped to that bed. She visited me often.
I start to make a list in my head of all the things I know. Vaughn killed Jenna; he admitted as much. Rose’s body was in the basement that day the elevators gave out. I saw her. I recognized her nail polish, her blond hair. There was a tracker in my leg. Deirdre told me about it. Didn’t she? I think of all the attendants who came to work on me while I was in the basement. In my memory they all have the same blank expressions; they’re all voiceless, uncaring. Deirdre was warm. She spoke gently, made me feel safe, which was a bizarre thing in that place.
The list collapses in on itself, words and memories jumbling into a bloody mess. It’s so frustrating the way the pictures keep on changing.
In the end it’s Cecily I reach for. At least I can be certain she exists. Her skin is sweaty and warm as I scrunch up the sleeves of the nightgown she borrowed from me. I worry about how overheated she gets, like there’s a fire inside her. I think she drifted off to sleep and I woke her, because she mumbles something nonsensical before opening her eyes. “You don’t have to believe me,” I tell her. “You just have to believe that Vaughn is capable of those things.”
“I do,” she says. “Linden doesn’t. I think he chooses not to. He’s sensitive, you know?”
She strokes my cheek with the side of her hand—a repetitive, wispy motion. Like little ghost kisses.
“I thought Housemaster Vaughn wanted to do good things and save us all,” she says. “I was wrong. And admitting that meant admitting he won’t find an antidote and none of us has much time. You said you have to find your brother—so you should go do that. And Linden and I have Bowen, and this baby. I want to spend as much time with them as I can. I want to be with them until the end.”
These are all things she wouldn’t have dared to say last year. But now she’s unflinching. Her voice doesn’t even catch when she adds, “If all those things you saw are real, there’s nothing we can do about them. We have our own lives to take care of, and there’s only time to do so much with them.”
What she says is terrible and true. She grabs my hand. We squeeze each other’s fingers, and I wait for her to realize the magnitude of what she’s said. I wait for her to squish up against me and sob. But from the reason in her tone, I sense that those words have been in her for a long time. That while I was away, she had plenty of time to get used to them.
And when the sob does come, several minutes later, it’s mine.
My sister wife has already fallen asleep.
I dream of Linden in the doorway. He looks at me a long while, the green in his eyes changing every second. “The stars do look like a kite,” he admits. “But everything else you’ve said is a lie.”
In the morning I awaken to Cecily jumping from the bed, her feet crashing onto the floorboards like baritone notes, to get to the window. “Quiet,” I tell her, cringing at the sudden light when she yanks the window shade, forcing it to recoil with a slurping noise.
“No, no, no. You have to hide,” she tells me. Panic in her eyes. The sound of an engine purring under the window.
I stagger to my feet, every muscle sore, and walk to the window. And outside is the limo, a figure standing beside it waving us down. Linden said he’d be here to collect Cecily in the morning, but as my grogginess subsides, I realize that Linden isn’t here.
Vaughn is.
3
“STAY HERE,” I say, hurrying to put on a pair of jeans under my nightgown.
“Wait!” Cecily calls after me as I’m running down the stairs.
“Stay!” I tell her.
Outside, the early morning air is cold, and I hug my arms for warmth. Dewy grass clings to my bare feet as I move toward him. He smiles. “Ah, so she awakens,” he says. His voice disrupts the gray sky. A burst of blackbirds rushes past.
I maintain my distance, keep my tone neutral when I ask, “Where’s Linden?”
“Your husband had an early meeting with a potential contractor,” he says. “He sent me for you and Cecily.”
“Sure he did,” I say, bracing one foot behind me to take a step back.
“You’re still angry with me,” he says. “I understand. But, Rhine, darling, you’re such a fascinating creature. You should be flattered; before you came along, I was sure I’d seen everything. I couldn’t help but get carried away.”
Carried away. I laugh humorlessly, a cloud bursting from my open mouth.
“Let’s just be honest with each other. If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead,” he says.
“Thanks to you, I almost was,” I say. “What will you do if I refuse to go along this time? Burn down this house?”
“While I do think a fire would be an improvement, no. The choice is entirely your own,” he says, sounding sincere. “I thought you and I could put this sordid mess behind us. How does resuming first wife status sound?”
I open my mouth, aghast, but no words come. How did he even find me here? The tracker has been removed from my leg. Did Linden really send him here after me? I know he’s angry, but I don’t believe he’d do anything so venomous.
The screen door slams behind me, and then I realize it. Cecily. Vaughn can’t trace my steps anymore, but she is still his property. How does it work? Is there a computer somewhere that spells out our location on a digital map? Or some kind of beeping device that sounds an alarm when we’re nearby, like a metal detector hovering over coins? My parents used to have one of those; it was often how my father found scrap metal to build things with.
She moves to stand beside me, coiling her arm around mine. “She isn’t going back,” she says.
“You don’t want your sister wife to come home?” Vaughn says. “But you’ve been so lonely. So lonely, in fact, that you were sneaking down to visit her every time I left the house.”
She draws a deep breath. She’s scared, though she’s trying not to let on.
“Don’t go with him,” I say into her ear.
The screen door slams again, and I catch a whiff of smoke. Reed has a cigar in his mouth. Grease and brown splotches stain his white shirt. “Nobody was going to invite me to the reunion?” he says to Vaughn. “You can’t have it both ways, Little Brother. If I can’t come onto your property, you can’t come onto mine.”
“I’ve just come to collect something that belongs to me,” Vaughn says. “Put something decent on, Cecily. Run a brush through that hair, and let’s go.” She’s still wearing one of the nightgowns that Linden packed for me, the unbuttoned collar dipping over her shoulder.
“I’ll leave when my husband gets here,” Cecily says. “Not before then.”
“You heard the kid,” Reed says.
Vaughn opens his mouth to say something, but the sound of a baby crying interrupts him. And the words he was going to say turn into a grin. Cecily stiffens.
Vaughn opens the passenger door and says, “Come on out and talk some sense into your keeper.”
Elle, Cecily’s domestic, steps out of the car. She’s holding Bowen to her chest, and his face is red and wet with tears. Cecily reaches for him immediately, but Vaughn steps in her way. “It’s chilly out here, darling,” he says. “And you’re pregnant. You don’t even have the sense to wear a coat. What makes you think you can get by without me to supervise your prenatal care? You’ve already missed your vitamins this morning.”
“He’s right,” Elle says a bit too softly. She’s looking at the ground, and her words sound rehearsed. She’s smaller than Cecily—nine, maybe ten years old, and of all our domestics she’s always been the most timid. I’m sure it was no challenge for Vaughn to intimidate her.
Cecily purses her lips together, composing herself. I think she’s trying not to cry. “You can’t keep my son from me.”
Vaughn laughs, taps her nose the way he did when she was a newlywed, when she adored him because she didn’t know any better. “Of course not,” he says. “You’re the one who’s been away from him.”
She steps past Vaughn, and he grips her forearm when she tries to reach for her son. I see the strain in his arm from the force of holding her. Her jaw swells with spite. He has never grabbed her before; he’s always been able to command her with his serpent’s charm. “Come home, or don’t,” he says. “But know that I won’t allow my grandson to stay here in this cesspool.”
He looks at me and adds, “As always, the invitation is extended. It wouldn’t be home without you.”
“Whose home?” I mutter. I take a step back, into the choking smog of Reed’s cigar. He says nothing, standing on the top porch step. This isn’t his battle.
Cecily looks at me with the same regret as on the day I told her our father-in-law was responsible for Jenna’s death, when snow was falling between us. And my heart breaks the same way it did then. “I have to go,” she says.
“I know,” I tell her, because I realize it too. She has Bowen and an unborn child to care for, and a husband to love. I have my brother and Gabriel to find. Cecily and I can’t keep each other safe. We have to let go.
Vaughn releases her, and she comes at me, hugging me with so much force that I stumble. I wrap my arms around her. “Take care,” she murmurs into my ear. “Be brave, okay?”
“You too,” I say.
She lets go of me when Bowen’s cries jump up a few octaves. Vaughn escorts her to the car and waits until she has climbed inside, before instructing Elle to hand her the baby.
Cecily clings to her son, but watches me over his wispy curls. Her lower eyelids have gone pink, a wavering line of tears tracing them. We know how unlikely it is that we’ll ever see each other again. If Linden had come to collect her, at least we’d have had time for a real good-bye.
Vaughn climbs in beside her and closes the door, and I’m left staring at my own reflection in the darkened windows. Until even that is gone.
Reed steps beside me, and together we watch the limo get swallowed by the horizon. He offers me a puff of his cigar, but I shake my head, letting the numbness take over my head, welcoming the pain into my bones. Waiting for this sadness to disappear like both of my sister wives.
“Don’t feel bad, doll,” Reed says. “My mother never cared for Vaughn either. Though, bless her soul, she did try.” He claps my shoulder. “Better get washed up. There’s work to do.”
The water trickles from the showerhead; it runs bleary and chunked with rust. But it’s not very much worse than what I was used to in Manhattan, and I’m able to get reasonably clean by not standing directly under it and splashing myself when it’s at its clearest. I take extra care with the gash that runs along my inner thigh, the skin pinched together with stitches.
When I go through the suitcase Linden packed, I find that he left a roll of gauze and a bottle of antiseptic in one of the inner pouches by my toothbrush, where I’d be sure to see them. He was still thinking of me, caring for me in that passive way of his. Everything is neatly folded too. A lesser husband would be angry after what I put him through, would hope the wound became infected and the entire leg fell off.
I dress the wound, and try to roll up the rest of the gauze as neatly as I found it, but I can’t duplicate Linden’s meticulousness.
Remembering what Reed said last night about the machines, I tie my hair back with one of the many rubber bands hanging on the doorknob. Rubber bands on doorknobs, and bolts and rusty nails in glass jars, stacked into pyramids in corners. The entire house is a sort of machine, as though gears are turning between the walls.
The downstairs hallway smells like fried lard, becoming more pungent when I reach the kitchen. “Hungry?” Reed asks. I shake my head.
“Didn’t think so,” he says, pouring grease from a frying pan into an old can. “You seem birdlike. Even your hair is like a nest.”
Maybe I should take offense, but I don’t mind this image of me he’s painting. It makes me feel wild, brave.
“Bet you never eat,” he says. “Bet you drink up the oxygen like it’s butter. Bet you can go for days on nothing but thoughts.”
That gets a smile out of me. I can see why Vaughn wouldn’t like his brother, and why Linden would.
“So,” he says, turning to face me. “My nephew tells me you’re still recovering. But you look recovered to me.”
Linden did say his uncle wouldn’t ask many questions, and he hasn’t. But he has a clever way of getting answers with carefully worded statements.
“I am,” I say. “Mostly. I’ll only be a day or two, and I can be useful in the meantime. I know how to keep a house running. How to fix things.”
“Fixing things is good,” he says, walking past me. I follow him down the hallway, out the front door, into the breezy May air. The grass and the bright weeds of flowers sway on the wind like the hologram that came from the keyboard as Cecily played. A stop-motion drawing in colored pencil, unreal.
It’s gotten warmer since this morning, and there’s the almost plastic smell of grass. I think of Gabriel, how this time last year he brought me tea in the library and read over my shoulder. He pointed to the sketches of boats on the page of the history book, and I thought that it would be nice for us to sail away, the water dividing endlessly in the sunlight. Breaking in half and then breaking in half again.
I push back my worries. I’ll come to find him soon; that’s all I can hope for.
Reed shows me to the shed beside his house, which might have once been a barn. It’s enormous enough. “Even things that aren’t broken can be fixed,” he says. The darkness smells like mold and metal. “Everything can become something it’s not.”
He looks at me, eyebrows up, like it’s my turn to say something. When I remain quiet, it seems to disappoint him. His fingers flutter over his head as he presses forward.
It’s hard to see. The only light comes through gaps in the wooden planks that make up the walls.
Then Reed pushes on a far wall, and it swings open. It’s a giant door, and at once the place is flooded with sunlight. Awkward shapes around me become leather straps, guns mounted up by nails, car parts hung like carrion in a butcher shop. The floor is nothing but packed dirt, and there’s a long worktable covered with so many odd things, I can’t make sense of them.
“Never seen anything like it, I bet,” Reed says, sounding pleased with himself. I get the sense that he takes pride in being perceived as mad. But he doesn’t seem mad to me. He seems curious. Where his brother unravels human beings, weighing their organs in his bare palms, prying back eyelids, drawing blood, Reed unravels things. He showed more care with that engine on his table last night, more respect for its life, than Vaughn ever showed with me.
“My father liked to make things,” I say. “And fix things. But woodworking, mostly.”
I don’t know what’s making me talk so much. In the almost year I spent at the mansion, I don’t think I revealed so much truth about myself as I have this morning.
I’m homesick, I suppose, and talking to a total stranger is my way of dealing with it.
Reed looks at me, and I catch the green in his eyes. He’s like his brother there. They both have that distance, living in the world their thoughts create. He stares at me a long time and then says, “Say ‘ridiculous.’”
“What?”
“The word ‘ridiculous,’” he insists. “Say it.”
“Ridiculous,” I say.
“An absolute ghost,” he says, shaking his head and dropping into a seat at his worktable. It’s really an old picnic table with attached benches. “You look just like my nephew’s first wife. You even have her voice, and ‘ridiculous’ was her favorite word. Everything was ridiculous. The virus. The attempts to cure it. My brother.”
“Your brother is ridiculous,” I agree.
“I’m going to call you Rose,” he says with resolution, picking up a screwdriver and working the back off an old clock.
“Please don’t,” I say. “I knew Rose. I was there when she died. I’d find it creepy.”
“Life is creepy,” Reed says. “Kids rotting from the inside out at age twenty is creepy.”
“Even so, my name is Rhine,” I say.
He nods for me to sit across the table from him, and I do, avoiding a gray puddle of something on the bench. “What kind of name is ‘Rhine,’ anyway?” he asks.
“It’s a river,” I say. I upturn a bolt and try to spin it like a top. My father used to make them for me and my brother. We’d spin them at the top of the stairs, and crush our shoulders together as we watched them jump down one step to the next. His always got there first, or else mine slipped through the banister and fell away. “Or it was a river, a long time ago. It ran from the Netherlands to Switzerland.”
“Then I’m sure it still does run there,” Reed says, watching the bolt spin away from my fingers and promptly collapse. “The world is still out there. They just want you to think it’s gone.”
Okay, maybe he is a little bit mad. But I don’t mind. Linden is right. Reed doesn’t ask many questions. He spends the rest of the morning keeping me busy with menial tasks, never telling me what it is I’m doing. As near as I can tell, I’m disassembling an old clock to make a new one. He checks on me sometimes, but spends most of the time outside, lying flat under an old car, or climbing inside to start its engine, which only splutters and creates black clouds through the tailpipe. He hides away in an even bigger shed farther back, higher than the house and more makeshift, as though he built it as an afterthought, to cover what’s inside.
But I don’t ask about that, either.
4
IT’S LIKE THAT for the rest of the day, and the next day, and the next. I don’t ask questions, and neither does Reed. He places tasks before me, and I do them. One piece at a time. Never knowing what I’m assembling. I watch him, too. He spends a lot of time under cars or in that lumbering shed with the door closed.
I never have much of an appetite, and the safest things to eat in his kitchen are the apples, anyway, being that they’re the only things I recognize. They’re not the ultrabright green and red fruit I got used to in the mansion. They’re speckled, flawed, and mealy, the way I grew up thinking they should be. I’m still not sure which way is more natural.
On my fourth morning, when I climb out of bed, I notice that the dizziness and the flecks of light are gone. The pain in my thigh has dulled, and the stitches have started to disintegrate. “I think I’ll leave tomorrow,” I tell Reed while we’re sitting on opposite sides of his worktable. “I’m feeling much better.”
He’s taking a magnifying glass to some heap of machinery—a motor, I think. “Did my nephew arrange for transportation?” he asks.
“No,” I say, tracing my finger around the rim of a mason jar filled with screws and grime. “That wasn’t part of the agreement.”
“So there was an agreement,” Reed says. “Doesn’t seem like it. Seems like you’re just making it up as you go.”
Story of my life. There’s no real way to counter that, so I just shrug. “I’ll be all right,” I say. “He knows there’s no reason to worry about me.”
Reed glances at me for a moment, his forehead creased, eyebrows raised, before he returns to his task. “The fact that you’re here says he’s worried about you,” he says. “Doesn’t want you anywhere near his father, that much is clear.”
“Vaughn and I don’t exactly get along,” I say.
“Let me guess,” Reed says. “He tried to pluck out your eyes for science.” He says that last word, “science,” with such exaggerated passion that I laugh.
“Close,” I say.
He stops working, leans forward, and stares at me so intently that I can’t help but look back at him. “It was no car accident, was it?” he says.
“What do you keep in that shed?” I counter. Since we’re asking questions.
“An airplane,” he says. “Bet you thought they were extinct.”
It’s true there aren’t many airplanes. Most people wouldn’t be able to afford traveling that way, and most cargo is transported by truck. But the president and select wealthy families have them for business or leisure. Vaughn, for instance, could afford one if he wanted. But my guess is that what Reed calls an airplane is a patchwork of different parts, and not something I’d want to board.
I look at the table. He answered my question; now he’s waiting for me to answer his.
“Vaughn was using me to find an antidote,” I say. “Something about my eyes being like a mosaic, or something. I don’t know. It’s hard to follow him.” And at the time, I had so many drugs running through me that I thought the ceiling tiles were singing to me. Those days were so vivid at the time, but now, looking back, the memory is a shadow at the end of a long corridor. I can’t remember much of anything.
“Doesn’t sound like something my nephew would allow,” Reed says. “Don’t get me wrong, the poor boy is as oblivious as a rabbit on a lion reserve, but still.”
Animal reserves are a thing of the past, but somehow this comparison feels right.
“He didn’t know,” I say. “And when I told him, he didn’t really believe it was as bad as it was. He still won’t. So we’ve decided it’s best to”—I pause, looking for the right words—“part ways. He and Cecily have the new baby coming, and I need to find my brother.” And Gabriel, but that would require even more explaining, and I’m already starting to feel exhausted and achy just thinking about what’s been said so far.
The dull aching becomes a stab of pain in my temple when Reed asks, “Then, why, doll, are you still wearing his ring?”
My wedding ring. Etched with fictional flowers that don’t begin and don’t end. More than once I’ve thought about cutting into it with something sharp. Making a line, severing the vines just so they stop somewhere.
“Can I see your plane?” I ask. “Does it fly?”
He laughs. It’s nothing like Vaughn’s laugh. There’s warmth in it. “You want to see the plane?”
“Sure,” I say. “Why not?”
“No reason not to, I suppose,” he says. “It’s just that no one’s ever asked before.”
“You have an airplane in your shed, and no one has ever asked to see it?” I say.
“Most people don’t know it’s there,” he says. “But I like you, not-Rose. So maybe tomorrow. For now, we have other things to do.”
That night I lie in Reed’s yard. It stretches on farther than I can see, empty, aside from the tall grass and the bursts of wildflowers. I lie on the dirt and think, There is where the orange grove would be. And over there, the golf course, with its spinning windmill, its lighthouse gleaming. And farther down would be the stables, abandoned now, where Rose and Linden used to keep their horses. And here, where I’m lying, would be the swimming pool. I could coast on an inflatable raft as imaginary guppies flicked their bodies around me in glimmers of color.
I thought I’d left that place behind me. But it keeps rebuilding itself in my mind.
Something rustles nearby and I turn my head, watching the grass move. I get the terrible sense that it’s trying to warn me.
I sit up and hold my breath, trying to listen. But a gust of wind is rolling through. I think it’s saying my name. No, that voice didn’t belong to the wind, though it would make more sense than the truth.
“Rhine?”
I lean back on my arms, tilt my head all the way to see the figure standing behind me.
“Hi,” I say.
The moon is full and beaming like a halo behind his head. His curls are his dark crown. He could be a sort of prince.
“Hi,” Linden says. “Can I sit?”
I collapse onto my back, liking the way the cold earth feels against my skull. I nod.
He sits next to me, careful to avoid my hair that’s splayed around my head like blood. A bullet to the forehead, boom, blond waves everywhere.
“Didn’t think you were coming back,” I say, focusing on the kite in the stars. I look for other kites, or people to fly them.
Linden lies beside me. All I can think is that he’s going to get grass stains on his white shirt. He’s going to dirty that lovely hair. I feel like he’s trying to prove a point that he can be like me—not so neat and perfect.
“I didn’t send my father, the other day,” he says. “I didn’t know he was going to do that.”
What he doesn’t say is that his father probably tracked my whereabouts using whatever device he implanted in Cecily. Linden saw for himself the one that had been implanted in me.
“Thought you said you knew him so well,” I mumble. Without looking back, I can feel his stare.
“He was trying to spare me,” Linden says. “He knew how difficult it would be for me to see you.”
“So you were spared,” I say. “Why did you come back?”
“My uncle called me this afternoon,” he says.
“I didn’t know you even had a phone,” I say. Somehow this feels like a violation, a reminder that while Linden treated me as an equal during our marriage, that was only part of the illusion. I was always a prisoner.
“He told me you were leaving,” Linden says. “He said you just planned to walk off and leave everything to chance.”
“Something like that,” I say.
“That’s not much of a plan,” he says. “What are you going to do for money? Transportation? Food? Where will you sleep?”
I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
“This is why Reed was stalling, isn’t it? He wanted to talk to you before I left.” I suppress a cry of frustration. “Please just let this be my problem,” I say. “Not yours.”
He’s silent after that. The silence adds a foreign element to the air, polluting the moonlight, making my throat tight, the crickets extra loud. Planets are leaning in to listen. And finally I can’t take it anymore. “Just say it,” I tell him.
“Say what?”
“Whatever it is you want to say to me. There’s something ugly in there you’ve been wanting to let out. I can tell.”
“It’s not ugly,” he says gently. “Or angry at all, really. It’s more of a question.”
I prop myself on one elbow to look at him, and he does the same. There’s no hostility in his eyes. There’s no kindness, either. There’s nothing but green. “That night, at the New Year’s party, you said you loved me. Did you mean that?”
I stare at him a long time. Until his face disappears, and he’s just a shadow.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “If I did, it wasn’t enough to make me stay.”
He nods. Then he gets up, dusts the backs of his legs, and offers his hand to me. I let him pull me to my feet.
“Don’t leave tomorrow,” he says. “Please. Give me a chance to figure something out. If I just let you go, Cecily will be livid.”
“She’ll be okay,” I say. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“Then think of it as doing me a favor,” he says. “I’d like for Cecily to not be angry with me.”
I hesitate. “How long?”
“A couple of days, maybe less.”
“All right,” I say. “A couple of days. Maybe less.”
His lips waver, and I think he’s going to smile, but he doesn’t. The last time I saw him, he was brimming with words and thoughts, anger and intensity. I could feel them humming inside him. But now they’re all gone. I wonder where he put them. I wonder if he shouted them into the orange grove with the supposed ashes of his dead wife and child. When he opens his mouth, all he says is, “If you’re going to be out here, you should really wear a sweater. I packed one for you.”
Then he turns to leave. The limo is idling in the distance.
“It wasn’t all a lie, Linden,” I burst out when he’s a few yards away. My voice is weak, getting smaller with each word. “Not everything. Not all of it.”
He climbs into the backseat, giving no indication that he believes me.
5
REED SITS across the kitchen table, watching me as I turn the apple in my fingers. Maybe he’s right about my never needing to eat. I can’t remember the last time I had a real appetite. Even the delicacies served to me on the wives’ floor wouldn’t appeal to me right now.
I keep my eyes down. I don’t want Reed to see my defeat. I don’t want him to see that Vaughn has had a victory over me, because almost all of my misfortunes can be traced to that man. Being separated from my brother. Losing Jenna. Watching Cecily go with tears in her eyes. Leaving Gabriel to fear the worst. Linden’s coldness toward me. I keep staggering forward because I have to, but what Linden said last night is true: It’s not much of a plan.
“Are you going to eat that, or submit it for fingerprint analysis?” Reed says.
I set the apple down neatly, and tuck my hands under the table.
He tilts his head, watching me. He’s eating some sort of deep-fried stew. The smell is repulsive; some of it drips onto his plaid shirt.
“Okay, then,” he says. “No food today either. So what will sustain you?”
“Oxygen,” I say softly.
“You need to spice it up with something,” he says. This is his way of making conversation. I think he feels sorry for me.
“A question, then,” I say.
He sets his spoon into the bowl with authority. “All right. Go for it.”
I look aside, thinking of how I want to word this. “You and Vaughn don’t seem anything alike,” I begin. “I guess my question is—was he always this way? You said your mother didn’t really care for him.”
Reed laughs gruffly. “He was quiet all the time. I don’t mean like he was being polite or solemn. I mean like he was planning something.”
“He’s still like that,” I say. I try to imagine Vaughn as a child or even as a young man, but I can’t. All I see is a version of a young Linden with blackness where his eyes should be.
“But he didn’t have much purpose until his boy died,” Reed says. “That’s when he reprogrammed the elevators so that only he could access the basement. I never knew what was going on down there.”
“Did he used to let you visit?” I ask, thinking of what Reed said a few days ago about Vaughn not allowing Reed onto his property.
“I used to live there,” Reed says. “When our parents died, they left that house to both of us. Our father was an architect, and it was an old boarding school he’d reconstructed. That’s why it’s so enormous. You’d think, with all that space, there’d be room for both of us. But we seemed to get in each other’s way. We both like things just so.”
“Linden’s grandfather was an architect,” I say quietly, more to myself than to Reed. It makes me happy to know Linden inherited that brilliance. It skipped his father and buried itself in him, like it knew he would do better things with it.
“Linden takes after him in a lot of ways,” Reed agrees. “Vaughn hates when I point that out. He likes to pretend he’s the only family that boy’s got. Won’t even talk about Linden’s mother, or Linden’s brother that died before he was born. It’s one of the things we butted heads about. My brother and I were already walking a fine line with each other, but I suppose the last straw was when Linden fell ill.”
I raise my head at that. Linden told me about a time when he was very sick as a child. He could hear his father’s voice calling him back to consciousness, but he was too scared to answer. He’d made the decision to let go, but he survived anyway.
Reed stares at something over my shoulder, his pupils turning to pinpricks. “That poor boy,” he says distantly. “I really thought it was the end of him.”
“What was it?” I ask, and he snaps back to attention and looks at me. “What made him so sick?”
“I can tell you what Vaughn said, or I can tell you what I think,” he says.
I press my eyebrows together. “You think Vaughn was responsible?”
“Not on purpose,” Reed says. “I don’t think he meant to harm him. But I think he was running some experiment that went haywire. I called him out on it, and he asked me to leave.”
“So you did?” I ask.
“I did,” he says. “I’m better off with my own place anyway. I would have liked to take my nephew with me, but Vaughn would have had my head for it. There’s nowhere I could take that boy where Vaughn wouldn’t have found him.”
“I know the feeling,” I mumble.
“Look at that,” Reed says. He slaps his palms on the table, rattling the bowl, startling me. “You asked for an answer to one question, and you got an entire story. Feeling sustained yet?”
In answer I take a bite from the apple.
“Finish your breakfast and then tie that hair back. I have a new project for you.”
“New project?” I say before taking another bite.
“A cleaning project,” he says. He drops his bowl into the sink and then winks at me. “I think you have a knack for making things shine.”
Once I finish the apple and throw the core into the compost pile that Reed started just outside the kitchen window, and swat away a good deal of flies, Reed leads me past the usual shed and keeps going toward the bigger one.
“What I’m about to show you is top secret stuff,” he says. I can’t tell whether he’s kidding. “I wouldn’t want anyone coming out here chopping it up for parts.”
He fiddles around with a padlock, somehow coaxing it apart without a key. Then he pushes the door open, moves aside, and makes a flourishing gesture with his arm for me to enter first.
It’s dark until he flips a switch, and tiny bulbs strung along the ceiling and walls illuminate the space.
“What do you think, doll?” Reed says.
“It’s … a plane. In your shed.” I can’t hide my astonishment. He told me it would be here, and here it is, yet it still surprises me. It’s rusty and mismatched, but it has a body and wings, and it takes up almost the entirety of the shed. “How did you get it in here?” I ask.
“Didn’t,” he says. “Most of it was already here. I figure it probably crash-landed forty, fifty years ago and was abandoned. So I decided to fix it up, see if I could make it fly. Of course the weather proved to make things difficult, so I built this shed over it.”
The whole thing sounds too absurd for him to have made it up. “How will you get it out?” I say. “How will you even start it without being poisoned by the fumes?”
“Haven’t gotten to that part yet,” he says. “But no matter; she’s not ready to fly.”
I stare at it, and for some reason my shoulders shake and I start to laugh. It’s the first real laugh I’ve felt in days. Or weeks. Or months, maybe. Reed is either a genius or completely mad, or both. But if he’s mad, then I am too, because I love this airplane. I’ve never seen one up close before, and the stories I’ve heard never prepared me for the power such a magnificent thing implies. I want to climb inside of it. I want it to carry me up, the grass getting greener and greener the farther away it becomes.
Reed is grinning when he tugs the handle of the curved door. It looks like it once belonged to a car and was melted into shape. With a horrible rusty noise, it opens from the top, like a curled finger rising to point at me.
The door opens to a small cockpit. There are monitors and buttons and what appear to be two half-circle steering wheels. “The supply room’s in the passenger cabin,” Reed says, pointing me to a curtain that serves as a door.
The passenger cabin is all beige and red, like a mouth. It seems almost human. When I was bedridden in the mansion, Linden read a story to me that was about a scientist named Frankenstein who created a man from the body parts of the dead. Somehow Frankenstein gave this creation a pulse and made it breathe. I imagine it must have looked like this odd assemblage of pieces.
The plane is a lot bigger than it looks from the outside. The ceiling is high enough that Reed, who’s taller than me, can nearly stand up straight. There’s some room to walk around. The seats are red, mounted to the wall. There are four of them, in pairs of two, facing each other. The carpet is beige and stained, like the walls.
What Reed calls a supply room is actually a closet. Opening its door reduces the passenger cabin by half. “Needs to be organized,” Reed says, standing at the curtain that separates the cockpit from the passenger cabin. He watches as I open one of the cabinets. Shoe boxes tumble out at me and spill their contents onto my shoes. “I was thinking that’d be your job.”
It’s easy, repetitive work. Sorting medical equipment apart from the dehydrated snacks and labeling their boxes. Reed works on the outside of the plane. I hear him banging parts into place and smoothing them down, trying to blend all the pieces together. He says he’s going to paint it when he’s done. He says it’ll be beautiful. I think it already is.
I open another box, and it’s full of cloth handkerchiefs. I recognize them immediately. They’re exactly like the ones at the mansion: plain white, with a single red sharp-leafed flower embroidered onto them. Gabriel gave me a handkerchief with this pattern, and I kept it for the remainder of my time at the mansion. The same flower that marks the iron gate.
“Oh, those?” Reed says when I ask him about them. He doesn’t look away from his work. He’s sitting on one of the wings, pressing down a sheet of copper and using a screwdriver to mark where the screws will go. “I thought they’d make good bandages; put them with the first aid stuff.”
“Where did they come from?” I ask.
“They used to belong to the boarding school,” he says. “A ton of things were left behind when my parents bought the building—handkerchiefs, blankets, things like that.”
“But what kind of flower is it?” I say.
“It’s a lotus,” he says. “Doesn’t look exactly like one, if you ask me, but that’s the only logical thing it could be. The school was called the Charles Lotus Academy for Girls.”
“Charles Lotus? As in, his name was Lotus?”
“Yep. Now get back to work making things sparkle. I’m not letting you live here eating up all the apples and oxygen for free, you know.”
The rest of the day is a malaise of chores. I pack the handkerchiefs away and bury them at the bottom of all the medical supplies. I don’t want to ever see them again. It’s my fault for hoping they symbolized something important. For believing anything that comes from the mansion could mean anything good.
I take a shower and go to bed early. The sky is still pink, undercooked. I bury myself beneath the blanket. It isn’t very thick; I shiver most nights, but right now the blanket feels like the heaviest thing in the world. It comforts me. I don’t just want to sleep; I want to be crushed down until I disappear.
In the morning there are voices. Something hissing and spitting on the griddle. Footsteps are pounding up the steps, and a voice calls after them, “Wait!” but the footsteps don’t comply. My door is pushed open, and there’s Cecily. The sunlight touches every part of her, making her into an overexposed photograph. Her smile floats ahead of her, a double bright line. “Surprise,” she says.
I sit up, trying to force consciousness back into my brain. “What are you—How did you get here?”
She hops onto the edge of my bed, jostling me. “We took a cab,” she says excitedly. “I’d never been in one before. It smelled like frozen garbage, and it cost a ton of money.”
I rub my eyes, trying to comprehend what she’s saying. “You took a cab?”
“Housemaster Vaughn has the limo,” she says. “He’s at some conference for the weekend. So we came to see you.”
“We?”
“Me and Linden.” She frowns at me. “You don’t look well,” she says. “You didn’t contract sepsis from this place, did you? It’s so filthy.”
“I like it here,” I say, collapsing back onto the pillow, pretending not to notice that it reeks of mustiness. I wonder who slept here before me. They probably died last century.
“It’s worse than the orphanage was,” Cecily says. She pats my leg as she stands, and heads for the door. “Anyway, get up, come downstairs. We brought you things.”
I take my time about getting dressed after she goes. I’m in no hurry to see the emptiness in Linden’s eyes when he looks at me.
I guess I’ve forgotten to brush my hair, judging by the way everyone looks at me when I enter the kitchen. And Cecily kindly informs me that my shirt is inside out.
“She hasn’t been eating,” Reed says apologetically. “I tried waving the fork around her head and everything.”
I drop into a chair opposite Linden. He’s holding Bowen, who is reaching for the things on the shelves. He wants the jars that have caught the morning light; I think he believes they hold little pieces of the sun.
“Of course she hasn’t been eating,” Cecily says. She stands behind me and gently works the tangles from my hair. “She doesn’t want to die.”
Reed lights his cigar and bumps Linden’s shoulder with his fist. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be blessed by the presence of your wives.”
Cecily drops my hair. She reaches across the table and snatches the cigar right out of Reed’s teeth and squishes the ignited tip into the table.
“What the hell!” Reed snaps. The house rattles. Bowen stops reaching.
“I’m pregnant, you moron,” Cecily says. “Don’t you know anything about gestation? And in case you’re blind, there is also a five-month-old baby sitting right next to you.”
Reed stares at her, aghast. And then he narrows his eyes as he stands and leans forward across the table, until his nose is an inch from hers. And I really think he’s about to strangle her—Linden tenses, ready to stop him—but Reed only growls and says, “I don’t like you, kid.”
She presses her hand to her chest. “Break my heart,” she says, spins around, and makes her exit.
Reed rescues the smoldering cigar and tries to relight it, grunting with each failed spark. “Will never know what you see in that one,” he says to Linden.
“I’m sorry,” I say, standing and scooping the ashes into my hand, and then dumping them into the sink. “She’s just sort of an acquired taste.”
Reed bellows with laughter. “Acquired taste,” he says, clapping his arm around Linden. “See now, this one, I like. You’re letting the wrong one get away.”
Linden’s cheeks go pink.
Cecily returns with a backpack slung over her arm. It also bears the lotus embroidery on one of the front pockets. She grabs my shoulders and guides me back into a chair, then sets a foil container in front of me and opens the lid. I’m hit with a blast of sweet-smelling steam. The head cook’s berry cobbler, topped with giant crumbles of sugar. Cecily presses a plastic fork into my hand and says, “Eat.”
Linden says, “Let her be. She can take care of herself.”
“Obviously she can’t,” Cecily says. “Look at her.”
“I’m fine,” I say, and to prove it I take a forkful of cobbler. Some small, distant part of me acknowledges that it’s delicious, rich with fat and nutrients I’ve been in need of. But a more frontal, prominent part of me is having a hard time just getting it down my throat.
Cecily resumes working on my tangles.
The silence is tense, and Reed breaks it by saying, “Well, I hate to leave a party. But I’ve got work to get to.” He makes a production of sticking a fresh cigar between his teeth as he heads for the door. “Help yourself to anything you’d like.” He eyes the cobbler and then looks at me with his eyebrows raised. “Though, it looks like you’ve brought your own supplies.”
Floorboards creak under his feet as he walks down the hall. As soon as he’s gone outside, Linden says, “Cecily, that was incredibly rude.”
She ignores him, humming and setting my hair neatly against my shoulders like she’s laying down an expensive dress. I’m glad my sister wife is here. She’s a chore sometimes, but she comforts me. I want to lean against her and let the weight I’ve been carrying fall away. But a part of me is angry that she has returned. I already said good-bye to her, accepted that we had no choice but to part ways. I don’t want to have to say good-bye again.
I can feel Linden frowning at me. I can’t bring myself to look at him.
“You’re not eating,” Cecily fusses.
“Leave her alone,” Linden says.
The tension is too much. Too tight. I feel myself bursting, but somehow my voice is very soft when I say, “Yes, why don’t you? Why don’t you both leave me alone?”
I look up at Linden, then Cecily. “Why did you come back?”
Cecily tries to touch my forehead, but I lean away from her. I stand up and walk backward toward the sink. Their stares are strangling me somehow.
Cecily looks at Linden and says, “Do you see?”
“See what?” I say, and this time my voice is a little louder.
Linden swallows something hard in his throat, composing himself, readying that diplomatic tone of his. “Cecily,” he says, “why don’t you take Bowen outside? It’s a warm day. Show him the wildflowers.”
It unnerves me that she agrees easily to this. She gives me a frown as she goes, and then sings something to Bowen about daffodils.
“I’m sorry,” Linden says after she has left us alone. “I warned her not to smother you. She’s just been worried about your well-being.”
I know this. Cecily worries. It’s her way. She’s the youngest of all Linden’s wives, yet she has always loved to play mother hen. But Linden is the practical diplomat in this marriage. He should be reminding her that I’ll be gone for good. And sure, she’d argue with him. She’d slam a few doors and refuse to speak to him for a while. But how long could that really go on? Locked up on that wives’ floor by herself, the loneliness would make her forgive him soon enough.
“You shouldn’t have brought her here,” I say. “You shouldn’t be here either. We both know there’s nothing to figure out. You’re only prolonging our good-byes.” And I don’t add that every day he keeps me here is another day my brother thinks I’m dead and is capable of destruction. And still I can’t bring myself to escape in the night, behind his back. Not again, especially after all he’s done to help me.
He looks at the wall over my head. I can’t read his expression. He opens his mouth to speak, but only a fraction of a syllable makes it out. I concentrate on a crack in the linoleum floor that looks like the apex of a leaf.
“I can’t believe the things you told me about my father,” he says. “You understand that, don’t you? I can’t side against him.”
He seemed to be on my side while he was carrying me away from his father’s clutches and trying to stop the bleeding. He seemed to be on my side when he slept in the chair at my bedside and told me he wouldn’t let his father cross the threshold of that hospital room while I was inside it.
But the upsetting part is that I do understand. While Vaughn controlled my sister wives and me with gates and holograms, he controlled his son with something deeper than blood or bones. Vaughn is Linden’s only constant. How can Linden have any choice but to love his father, to believe there’s good in the man who raised him?
I’m no one to judge. There is no number of buildings my brother can destroy, and no number of lives he can claim, that would undo my love for him.
I nod.
From somewhere very far away, in a world where there’s only green and deeper green, Bowen shrieks with laughter.
“I’ve brought some things for you,” Linden says. “I was going to bring more of your clothes, but I thought they’d only weigh you down if you were traveling. So I packed a first aid kit and some bus fare. You should be careful about letting anyone see that you’re carrying money.” He laughs, but it comes out more like a cough. “But you probably know that, don’t you?”
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say. Then, thinking better of it, I add, “But thank you.”
He gets up and pushes his chair back against the table, then Cecily’s chair, then mine. “You and Cecily can share the bed. I’m going to sleep on the divan in my uncle’s library. I’ll set up Bowen’s bassinet in the bedroom, but you won’t have to worry; he mostly sleeps through the night.”
“You’re really staying the weekend, then?” I say.
“It’ll be good for Cecily,” he says. “She’s been stir-crazy lately.” He lingers in the doorway for a moment, his back to me. “It’ll give both of you a chance for a proper good-bye. It’ll help her to let go of you.”
6
CECILY STANDS at the bedroom mirror, frowning. Her shirt is rolled to her chest, and she dusts her fingers over the pink ribbons of shining skin that run up her stomach. “Horrible, aren’t they?” she says. “Bowen stretched me out as far as I could go.”
I’m sitting on the bed, staring at the book I’ve taken from Reed’s library. He doesn’t have as many books as his brother, and they’re all tattered and old. I get the sense that he inherited the rejects of the collection. Some of the history books have pages ripped away, and passages that are blacked out. There was a book about the discovery of America—I was drawn to it by the image of a ship on the cover—but the pages were filled with furious notes calling the text a lie, theories scrawled in smudged, sloppy lettering I couldn’t read. I didn’t want to read it anyway; I just wanted to look at the ships and try to remember Gabriel’s fingers in my hair.
I turn the page, staring at yet another photograph of a cargo ship. Gabriel would have something to say about it, I’m sure. He would know how fast it could move across the water. This ship looks burdened by the weight of its cargo, though. I bet that if I stowed away, it would be easy for me to hide among those towering crates, but it would take me months to reach Gabriel. It would be torturous, feeling myself drag across the water so slowly.
But slowly would be better than not at all.
Cecily is still going on about how she’s lost her youth, and how her body will never be the same, but how happy she is to be a part of it all. Some kind of miracle, reinforced hope. I don’t want to look at her naked stomach, which is starting to take the shape of an upside-down question mark; her knuckles and cheeks and feet are always bright red. She gave birth to her first child with difficulty, fazing in and out of consciousness, crying when she had the strength, white from blood loss. I don’t want to think about her going through it all again. The whole thing terrifies me.
But it’s unavoidable. Since Cecily arrived with her son, this room has smelled like a nursery. Powder and some indeterminable sweetness that lingers on infant skin. It has taken over the room like it has taken over her life. The child here is no longer her.
“Aren’t you tired?” she asks, falling onto the bed beside me and kicking off her socks before getting under the blanket. “Don’t you want to change into your pajamas?”
“Not yet,” I say. “I think I’ll read for a while. I could go somewhere else if the light bothers you.”
“No, stay,” she yawns, and rests her head on my knee and closes her eyes.
Within minutes she’s breathing that disquieting pregnancy snore that makes me worry. We were brought to Linden as breeding machines, and Vaughn saw no greater opportunity than in the most naïve among all the girls to tumble from that line: Cecily. I’ve no doubt that’s why she was chosen. He saw that determination in her eyes, that vulnerability. She would do anything, anything to belong to his son after a lifetime of belonging to no one at all.
What is happening to her? What does it do to a young girl to birth two children in less than a year’s time? There’s a rash across her cheeks; her pianist’s fingers are swollen. In sleep she clings to my shirt the way Bowen clings to hers. The way a child clings to its mother.
I rake my fingers through her hair as I go on flipping the pages.
I’ve gone through all the pictures of boats a second time, never bothering with the words, when there’s a soft knock at the door. I know it’s Linden. Reed never comes upstairs at night. In fact, I’m not sure where he sleeps, or even if he does.
“Come in,” I say.
Linden inches into the room through the slight gap in the doorway. His presence is barely there. He looks at Cecily and me, and I feel like a model in an unfinished portrait. The Ashby Wives. There were four of us once.
“Is she asleep?” Linden asks.
“I’m awake,” Cecily murmurs. “I had a dream we were ice-skating.” She sits up, rubbing her eyes.
“I wanted to see how you were feeling,” Linden tells her, looking right past me. I’m nothing—candlelight on the wall. “Did you need anything to drink? Are your feet sore?”
She says something about needing a back rub, and I take my book and slip out of the room just as easily as Linden slipped in.
I’ve memorized which floorboards in the hallway don’t creak, thereby leaving Reed undisturbed as he toils about his mysteries below me.
The window is open in the library, and the books and walls and floorboards are all cool with the night’s breeze. I hear crickets as though they’re in the shelves. The stars are so bright and unobstructed that their light fills the room, making everything silver.
I replace the boat book and run my fingers over the spines of the other books, not really looking for anything. I think I’m too exhausted to read, anyway. There’s a pillow and a blanket on the divan, and it looks inviting, but I don’t feel right about getting into the bed Linden has made for himself. I focus on the book spines.
“My uncle used to let me pretend they were bricks,” Linden says, startling me. He eases a thick hardcover from the shelf, hefts it in either hand, and then places it back. “I liked to build houses out of them. They never came out exactly like I’d planned, but that’s good. It taught me that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.”
For some reason I’m finding it difficult to meet his eyes. I nod at one of the lower shelves and say, “Maybe it’s because in your mind you don’t have to worry about building materials. So you’re not as limited.”
“That’s astute,” he says. He pauses. “You’ve always been astute about things.”
I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a compliment, but I suppose it’s true. So much silence passes between us after that, with nothing to sustain the atmosphere but impassive crickets and starlight, that I become willing to say anything that will end it. The words that come out of me are, “I’m sorry.”
I hear his breath catch. Maybe he’s as surprised as I am. I don’t look up to see what his expression is.
“I know you think that I’m awful. I don’t blame you.” That’s it—all I have the courage to say. I fidget with the hem of my sweater. It’s one of Deirdre’s creations, of course. Emerald green embroidered with gold gossamer leaves. Since having my custom-made clothes returned to me, I’ve been sleeping in them. I’ve missed how comfortable they are, how getting dressed into something that fits every angle and curve feels like rematerializing into something worthwhile.
“I don’t know what to think,” Linden says quietly. “Yes, I’ve told myself that you’re awful. I’ve told myself you must be—that’s the only explanation. But my thoughts always go back to the you I remember. You, lying in the orange grove and saying you didn’t know if we were worth saving. You held my hand then. Do you remember?”
Something rushes through my blood, from my heart to my fingertips, where the memory still lingers. “Yes,” I say.
“And about a thousand other things,” he says, pausing sometimes between his words, making sure he has them right. I get the sense that words are not sufficient tools for him to build what’s going on in his head as he stands before me. “While you were gone, I tried to take all of those memories and turn them into lies. And I thought I’d done it. But I look at you now, and I still see the girl who fed me blueberries when I was grieving. The girl who was in a red dress, falling asleep against me on the drive home.”
He takes a step closer, and my heart leaps into my mouth. “I try to hate you. I’m trying right now.”
I look at him and ask, “Is it working?”
He moves his hand, and I think he’s going to reach for a book on the shelf above me, but he touches my hair instead. Something in me tightens with expectancy. I hold my breath.
When he pushes forward, my mouth falls open, expecting his kiss even before it comes. His lips are familiar. I know the shape of them, know how to make mine fit against them. His taste is familiar too. For all the illusions and colors and sweet smells of that mansion, and of our marriage, he has always tasted like skin. His breaths are shallow. I’m holding his life against my tongue, between my rows of teeth. He’s offering it up.
But it doesn’t belong to me. I know that.
I draw back, gently step out of his hands that gripped my shoulders and were just edging their way to either side of my throat.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
One of his hands still hovers near me, a satellite. I imagine what it would be like to tilt my head into his open palm. The flood of warmth bursting through me.
He looks at me, and I don’t know what he sees. I used to think it was Rose. But she’s not here with us now, in this room. It’s just him and me, and the books. I feel like our lives are in those books. I feel like all the words on the pages are for us.
I could kiss him again. I could do much more than that. But I know it would be for the wrong reasons. It would be because my family is far away, or else dead, and because I miss Gabriel; in my dreams he’s something small I dropped into the ocean, and I wake knowing that I might never find him again. But Linden is here. Brilliantly here. And it would be too easy to make him a substitute for all those things, to take advantage of his desire for me.
But then logic sets in. Logic and guilt.
I won’t hurt him the way I did before, manipulating his affections while I worked for the freedom I wanted.
He seems to understand. His fingers close into his palm, and he lowers his hand from my side.
“I can’t,” I say again, with more certainty.
He steps closer to me, and my nerves bristle like the long grass outside. Everything is rustling with expectancy.
“We never consummated our marriage,” he says softly. “At first I thought you only needed time. I was patient.” He presses his lips together for a moment, thinking. “But then it didn’t matter so much. I liked just being with you. I liked the way you breathed when you were asleep. I liked when you took the champagne glass from my hand. I liked how your fingers were always too long for your gloves.”
A smile tugs at one side of my mouth, and I allow it.
“Looking back, those feel like the most important parts. They were real, weren’t they?”
“Yes,” I answer, and it’s the truth.
He touches my left hand and looks at my eyes, asking permission. I nod, and he holds my palm flat against his and then holds my hand between us. His other hand traces the slope of my wedding ring and pinches either side of it between his thumb and index finger. When I realize what’s happening, my pulse quickens, my mouth goes dry.
He slides the ring down my finger, and it hitches on my knuckle, like part of me is still trying to hang on. My body lilts forward, tethered to the ring for only an instant more before letting go.
This was it. This was why I kept wearing my wedding ring, why it never felt right to remove it myself. There was only one person who could set me free.
“Let’s call this an official annulment,” he says.
I can’t help it. I throw my arms around him and pull him tight against me. He tenses, startled, but then he puts his arms around me too. I can feel his closed fist where he holds the ring.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
Minutes later I’m lying on the divan, watching my ankle swing back and forth over the edge like a guillotine. Linden paces the length of the room, tracing the book spines.
I look for the moon through the open window, but it’s hiding behind clouds.
Linden says, “What’s your brother like?”
I blink. It’s the first time he’s asked me about Rowan. Maybe he’s trying to get to know me, now that he knows I’ll give him the truth.
“He’s smarter than me,” I say. “And practical.”
“Is he older? Younger?”
“About ninety seconds younger,” I say. “We’re twins.”
“Twins?” he says.
I hang my head over the arm of the divan, looking at him upside down. “You sound surprised.”
“It’s just—twins,” he says, leaning against a row of paisley cloth-bound books. “That changes the entire way I look at you.” He keeps his mouth open, struggling for the right words.
“Like I’m half of a whole?” I say, trying to help him.
“I wouldn’t put it like that,” he says. “You’re a whole person by yourself.”
I look out the window again. “You know what scares me?” I say. “I’m starting to feel like you’re right.”
Linden is quiet for a long time. I hear his clothes rustling, the chair creaking under his weight. “I think I understand,” he says. “When I lost Rose, I kept going, I still do, but I’ll never be what I was when she was alive. It’ll always feel like something’s … not right, without her here.”
“That’s sort of what it’s like,” I agree. Even though my brother and I are both still alive, the longer we’re apart, the more I feel myself changing. It’s like I’m evolving into something that doesn’t include him. I don’t think I can ever be the person I was before all this.
It’s quiet again after that. It’s a comfortable quiet, though. Peaceful. I feel unburdened, and after a while I start to imagine that the divan is a boat moving over the ocean. Sunken cities play music beneath the waves. The ghosts are stirring.
Someone turns on the light, and my thoughts scatter away as I blink at the brightness. This is one of the few rooms with functioning lightbulbs, though they flicker.
“Linden?” Cecily says.
She’s standing in the doorway, her knuckles white from clutching the frame. Everything about her is white: her face, the quivering misshapen O of her lips, the nightgown that she’s got bunched up to her hips as though she’s unveiling her body to us.
But sliding down her thighs is an abundance of red. It’s pooling at her feet, from the trail of blood that followed her into the room.
Linden moves fast. He scoops her up by the backs of her knees and shoulders. She comes alive with a scream so awful that he has to brace his hand on the wall to keep from falling. She’s whimpering while he’s rushing her down the stairs.
I hurry after them down the long hallway, making footprints in the red puddles and thinking about how small she is, about how much blood it takes to keep a girl her size going, how much of it she can stand to lose. Redness is leaking rivers over Linden’s arms like veins atop his skin.
He says my name, and I realize what he wants. I push ahead of him and open the door.
Outside, the night is warm, sprinkled with stars. The grass sighs in indignation as we crush it with our bare feet. Wings and insect legs make music, which moments before had been lovely through the open window in the room full of books.
In the backseat of the car, which reeks of cigars and mold, I take Cecily’s head in my lap while Linden runs off to find his uncle to drive us.
“I lost the baby,” Cecily chokes.
“No,” I say. “No, you didn’t.”
She closes her eyes, shudders with a sob.
“They’ll know what to do at the hospital,” I tell her, though I don’t believe a word of it. I’m only trying to calm her, and maybe myself. I hold her hand in both of mine. It’s clammy, ice-cold. I can’t reconcile this pale, trembling girl with the one who stood before the mirror hardly an hour ago, fussing over her stomach.
Thankfully, Linden is back soon.
The drive to the hospital is rocky, thanks to Reed’s reckless driving and the lack of a paved road. Linden holds Bowen, whose eyes are wide and curious, and shushes him even though he doesn’t cry. I’ve always thought Bowen was intuitive. He just might be the only child of Linden’s to live.
I feel a gentle pressure around my finger, and I look down to realize Cecily is touching the place where my ring used to be. But she doesn’t ask about it, the bride who has always made it her mission to know everything about everyone in her marriage. She has been eerily silent this whole ride.
“Open your eyes,” Linden tells her when she closes them. “Love? Cecily. Look at me.”
With effort she does.
“Tell me where it hurts,” he says.
“It’s like contractions,” she says, cringing as we hit a pothole.
“It’s only another minute from here,” Linden says. “Just keep your eyes open.” The gentleness is gone from his voice, and I know he’s trying to stay in control, but he looks so frightened.
Cecily is fading. Her breaths are labored and slow. Her eyes are dull.
“‘There will come soft rain,’” I blurt out in a panic. She looks up at me, and we recite the words in unison, “‘And the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound.’”
“What is that?” Linden says. “What are you saying?”
“It’s a poem,” I tell him. “Jenna liked it, didn’t she, Cecily?”
“Because of the ending,” Cecily says. Her voice sounds miles away. “She just liked how it ended.”
“I’d like to hear the whole thing,” Linden says.
But we’ve arrived at the hospital. It’s the only real source of light for miles. Most of the streetlights—the ones still standing, anyway—have long since burned out.
Cecily has closed her eyes again, and Linden passes the baby off to me and hoists her into his arms. She murmurs something I can’t understand—I think it’s another line of the poem—and her muscles go lax.
It takes a few seconds for me to realize that her chest has stopped rising and falling. I wait for her next breath, but it doesn’t come.
I’ve never heard a human make a noise like the cry that escapes Linden’s throat when he calls her name. Reed runs past us, and when he returns, he’s got a fleet of nurses behind him, first generation and new. They rip Cecily from Linden’s arms, leave him staggering and reaching after her. I can’t help but think this attention is due to her status as Vaughn’s daughter-in-law. Reed must have made that clear.
Bowen starts to wail, and I bounce him on my hip as I watch Cecily’s body through the glass doors. The hospital lights reveal the gray of her skin. And, strangely, I can see her wedding band as though through a magnifying glass; the long serrated petals etched into it are like knives. They catch every bit of hospital light, the gleam stabbing my eyes. Then she’s laid onto a gurney that turns a corner, and she’s gone.
She’s dead. We’ll never get her back.
The thought hits me in the back of the knees, shaking me with its certainty.
7
I’M SITTING ON the floor of the hospital lobby, waiting. That’s always the worst part, the waiting.
Bowen has fallen into a quiet lull, ear to my heart. My arm hurts from supporting him. But I can’t think about that. I can’t think about anything. Voices and bodies move past.
The lobby is crowded. The chairs that line the walls are full of the coughing and the sleeping and the wounded. This is one of the few research hospitals in the state; my father-in-law often boasts about it. They take the wounded, the emaciated, the pregnant, or those who are dying of the virus—depending on which cases are interesting enough to be seen, and depending on who is willing to have blood drawn and tissue sampled without being compensated for it.
A young nurse is standing with a clipboard, trying to decide who is in the worst shape. Cecily was hurried down that sterile hallway not because of her condition but because her father-in-law owns this place. They know Linden here; last I saw him, someone was trying to console him as he wrestled away in pursuit of his wife.
I shouldn’t have Bowen in a place like this. His superior genes will promise him a life free of major diseases, sure, but he isn’t completely immune to the germs that are surely hovering around us. He could catch a cold. Someone has to think of his health, and suddenly that task has been placed in my hands, along with his chubby little body.
I raise my head and search for Reed. Eventually I spot him emerging from the same hallway that took my sister wife. Linden is pacing ahead of him, head down, face drained of color. I rise to meet them, and I realize my knees are trembling. And suddenly I don’t want to hear what they have to tell me. I don’t want to return Bowen to his father. I want to take him and run away from here.
Linden’s hands have been scrubbed of the blood. His face is splashed wet. The hem of his shirt is wrinkled, and when he begins twisting it in his fist again, I understand why.
“They couldn’t get a pulse—” he says, and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, hard. “I wanted to be with her, but they pushed me away.”
All I can think is that Cecily was supposed to outlive us all.
But when I open my mouth, what comes out is, “Bowen shouldn’t be here.”
Reed understands. Reed has always understood me. He takes the baby, and he’s so careful with him, even smiles at him.
“She was fine when I kissed her good night,” Linden says.
I should be saying something to comfort him. That was always my role in this marriage, to console him. But we aren’t married anymore, and I can’t remember how to be.
“I don’t want them to dissect her,” I say. I know I shouldn’t be so morbid, but I can’t stop myself. If Cecily is dead, then all the rules are broken. “I don’t want your father to have her body. I don’t—” My lip is quivering.
“He won’t get her,” Reed assures me.
Linden whimpers into his palms. “This is my fault,” he says. His voice is strange. “We shouldn’t have tried for another baby so soon. My father said it would be okay, but I should have seen it was too much for her. She was already so—” His voice breaks, and I think the word he croaks out is “frail.”
In more rational circumstances, hearing the intimate details of what went on between my sister wife and my former husband would embarrass me, but feelings of any sort are miles from me now.
“I need air,” I say.
“Wait,” he starts to say, but I stumble on anyway, until a pair of hands grabs my arms. I stare at the nurse’s name tag, uncomprehending, unable to read. He’s probably younger than I am. There were nurses at the lab where my parents worked too, and it always astounded me how serious they could be, how well they knew medicine.
“Mrs. Ashby?” the nurse asks, his voice too gentle.
I shake my head, eyes on the floor. “Sorry,” I whisper. “No.”
Linden comes up behind me. He says words I don’t understand. And the nurse says words I don’t understand. And I can’t catch any of what’s being said until I hear a cruel pang of hope in Linden’s voice when he asks, “Can we see her?”
I whip my head around to stare at him. He wants to see her? Doesn’t he understand that a body isn’t a person? Doesn’t he understand how awful that would be—how awful it already was to watch her get swept away a few moments ago?
“But it will be a while yet before she’s lucid,” the nurse says. And suddenly—I don’t know why—his name tag makes sense. Isaac. The whole world reemerges from the darkness that had been closing in around me.
My heart starts pounding in my ears, my throat. I try to hang on to what’s being said now.
Somewhere, on a table in a sterile room, my sister wife took in a sharp breath. It happened just as they were drawing the sleeves from their watches to call a time of death.
Her heart forced blood out from her chest, back to her brain, her fingertips, her cheeks.
Cecily. My Cecily. Always the fighter.
A squeaking noise escapes through my teeth, joy and relief.
We’re guided down a hallway, our footsteps echoing around us at all angles like claps.
Linden and I huddle together to see her through the small window in her door. We can’t go in yet. She can’t be agitated. Her body is still working through the shock of losing a pregnancy in its second trimester; all of this is fascinating to the promise of research, which is what this hospital is all about. The doctors want to know everything about the new generations, and such a violent miscarriage invites all sorts of interest. There are monitors recording her heart rate. The nurse is explaining that her temperature will be checked every hour. They’re taking thorough notes on any slight change in her body chemistry.
But I don’t see the intrigue in any of those things. I don’t see more research fodder. All I see is my sister wife, barely hanging on.
There’s a plastic mask over her mouth, misting with her breaths. Her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes lazily rove along the wires that connect the machines to her body. Her heartbeats are small green bursts on the monitor. She looks so alone and lost in her dreams.
I press my hand to the glass, and the ghost of my frowning reflection is superimposed over her bed.
“Will she be all right?” Linden asks. I don’t think he’s heard any of the nurse’s rambling.
“You’ll be able to see her in the morning,” the nurse says.
Old tears still glisten on Linden’s face. His lips move, sending inaudible prayers to phantom gods. The only words I can make out are “thank you.” He takes my hand and leads me to the lobby, where we will wait for the morning light to come and fill Cecily’s hair with its usual fire.
Why did this happen? Any number of reasons. She’s young, the first generation doctor tells Linden. And, superior genes or not, pregnancies in rapid succession can take a toll on a young girl. I can tell he’s being disapproving. So many of the first generations hate what has happened to their children and their children’s children. They look at us and see what we should have been, not what we are.
Doctors speak in impersonal, clinical terms: fetus, infection, placenta, hypothesis, patient. This textbook approach does wonders for taking the emotional edge out of it. The most likely hypothesis here is that the fetus has been dead for days, and, left unchecked, an infection spread through her blood like a wildfire. Eventually her body caught up and worked to expel the source of the problem, and she went into labor. She started hemorrhaging, and, finally, she went into shock. While we were trying to keep her awake in the car, her body was already shutting down. We were inevitably going to lose her without proper treatment. It all sounds so official and possible the way the doctor explains it. Like I’m reading one of my parents’ lab reports.
It’s that simple. It ends there, with no mention of the fact that if she hadn’t mustered the strength to get out of bed and drag herself down the hall, it would have been too late when we found her. How much time would we have squandered, talking about annulments and fraternal twins as she died alone at the other end of the hall? I file that thought as far back into my brain as I can, out of sight.
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Lauren DeStefano
The third and final novel in Lauren DeStefano’s breathtaking dystopian romance series, The Chemical Garden TrilogyTime is running out for Rhine.With less than three years left until the virus claims her life, Rhine is desperate for answers. Having escaped torment at Vaughn’s mansion, she finds respite in the dilapidated home of her husband’s uncle, an eccentric inventor who hates Vaughn almost as much as Rhine does.Rhine’s determination to be reunited with her twin brother, Rowan, increases as each day brings terrifying revelations to light about his involvement in an underground resistance. She realizes must find him before he destroys the one thing they have left: hope.In this breathtaking conclusion to Lauren DeStefano’s The Chemical Garden trilogy, everything Rhine knows to be true will be irrevocably shattered. But what she discovers along the way has alarming implications for her future – and about the past her parents never had the chance to explain.
For
Riley,
Isaiah,
Isabella,
Hailey,
Cameron,
Mary,
Cooper,
Eliot,
and
Raina,
Who have a lifetime
Of roads before them
I must lose myself in action,
lest I wither in despair.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u66aed885-cc32-5ec1-ab01-28c6b766fc91)
Dedication (#u1952c8f8-c638-54f5-8867-e8bd584ce16d)
Epigraph (#u65dee45e-cde5-5ae4-ae51-392af0bc10ef)
Chapter 1 (#u7c98558a-4268-59f3-90e1-88e2c4d5fe77)
Chapter 2 (#u9bb8bfbf-cfd8-55f6-974f-fd882c7f7dc5)
Chapter 3 (#u00b4b3f6-3117-5021-b8e2-657c9b16d1a4)
Chapter 4 (#u57cfb4ed-b274-5463-9e2a-cd59b9ab5d98)
Chapter 5 (#u620c8c62-2e97-5eea-a2a9-7bda93a95e31)
Chapter 6 (#u0864710b-3508-5e32-a1e1-2bced55bdc40)
Chapter 7 (#u04975763-ffb6-5805-ad0b-ec9d40576986)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise for the Chemical Garden Trilogy (#litres_trial_promo)
By Lauren DeStefano (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1
IN THE ATLAS the river still flows. The thin line of it carries cargo to a destination that no longer exists. We share a name, the river and I; if there’s a reason for this, it died with my parents. The river lingers in my daydreams, though. I imagine it spreading out into the greatness of the ocean, melting into sunken cities, carrying old messages in bottles.
I have wasted too much time on this page. Really I should be in North America, charting my way from the Florida coastline to Providence, Rhode Island, where my twin brother has just bombed a hospital for its pro-science research on embryos.
I don’t know how many are dead because of him.
Linden shifts his weight restlessly. “I didn’t even know you had a brother,” he’d said when I told him where I was going. “But the list of things I don’t know about you is growing longer every day, isn’t it?”
He’s bitter. About our marriage and the way it ended. About the way it’s not really over.
My sister wife looks out the window, her hair like light through autumn leaves. “It’s going to rain,” she says quietly. She’s here only at my insistence. My once-husband still doesn’t quite believe she was in danger in his father’s, Vaughn’s, home. Or maybe he does believe it; I’m not sure, because he’s barely speaking to me these days, except to ask how I’m feeling and to tell me I’ll be discharged from the hospital soon. I should consider myself lucky; most of the patients here are crammed into the lobbies or a dozen to a room, and that’s if they’re not turned away. I have comfort and privacy. Hospitalization of this class is reserved for the wealthy, and it just so happens that my father-in-law owns nearly every medical facility in the state of Florida.
Because there is never enough blood for transfusions, and because I lost so much of it when I sawed into my leg in a maddened delirium, it took me a long time to recover. And now that my blood has regenerated, they want to take it a bit at a time and analyze it to be sure I’m recovering. They’re under the assumption that my body didn’t respond to Vaughn’s attempts to treat the virus; I’m not sure what exactly he told them, but he has a way of being everywhere without being present.
I have an interesting blood type, they say. They wouldn’t have been able to find a match even if more people donated their blood for the meager pay the hospital gives.
Cecily mentioned the rain to distract Linden from the nurse who has just sterilized my arm. But it doesn’t work. Linden’s green eyes are trained on my blood as it fills up the syringe. I hold the atlas in my blanketed lap, turn the page.
I find my way back to North America—the only continent that’s left, and even it isn’t whole; there are uninhabitable pieces of what used to be known as Canada and Mexico. There used to be an entire world of people and countries out there, but they’ve all since been destroyed by wars so distant they’re hardly spoken about.
“Linden?” Cecily says, touching his arm.
He turns his head to her, but doesn’t look.
“Linden,” she tries again. “I need to eat something. I’m getting a headache.”
This gets his attention because she is four months pregnant and prone to anemia. “What would you like, love?” he says.
“I saw brownies in the cafeteria earlier.”
He frowns, tells her she should be eating things with more sustenance, but ultimately succumbs to her pouting.
Once he has left my hospital room, Cecily sits on the edge of my bed, rests her chin on my shoulder, and looks at the page. The nurse leaves us, my blood on his cart of surgical utensils.
This is the first time I’ve been alone with my sister wife since arriving at the hospital. She traces the outline of the country, swirls her finger around the Atlantic in tandem with her sigh.
“Linden is furious with me,” she says, not without remorse, but also not in her usual weepy way. “He says you could have been killed.”
I spent months in Vaughn’s basement laboratory, the subject of countless experiments, while Linden obliviously milled about upstairs. Cecily, who visited me and talked of helping me escape, never told him about any of it.
It isn’t the first time she betrayed me; though, as with the last time, I believe that she was trying to help. She would botch Vaughn’s experiments by removing IVs and tampering with the equipment. I think her goal was to get me lucid enough to walk out the back door. But Cecily is young at fourteen years old, and doesn’t understand that our father-in-law has plans much bigger than her best efforts. Neither of us stands a chance against him. He’s even had Linden believing him for all these years.
Still, I ask, “Why didn’t you tell Linden?”
She draws a shaky breath and sits more upright. I look at her, but she won’t meet my eyes. Not wanting to intimidate her with guilt, I look at the open atlas.
“Linden was so heartbroken when you left,” she says. “Angry, but sad, too. He wouldn’t talk about it. He closed your door and forbade me from opening it. He stopped drawing. He spent so much time with me and with Bowen, and I loved that, but I could tell it was because he wanted to forget you.” She takes a deep breath, turns the page.
We stare at South America for a few seconds. Then she says, “And, eventually, he started to get better. He was talking about taking me to the spring expo that’s coming up. Then you came back, and I thought, if he saw you, it would undo all the progress he’d made.” Now she looks at me, her brown eyes sharp. “And you didn’t want to be back, anyway. So I thought I could get you to escape again, and he would never have to know, and we could all just be happy.”
She says that last word, “happy,” like it’s the direst thing in the world. Her voice cracks with it. A year ago, here is where she’d have started to cry. I remember that on my last day before I ran away, I left her screaming and weeping in a snowbank when she realized how she’d betrayed our older sister wife, Jenna, by telling our father-in-law of Jenna’s efforts to help me escape, which only aided his decision to dispose of her.
But Cecily has grown since then. Having a child and enduring the loss of not one but two members of her marriage have aged her.
“Linden was right,” she says. “You could have been killed, and I—” She swallows hard, but doesn’t take her eyes from mine. “I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself. I’m sorry, Rhine.”
I wrap my arm around her shoulders, and she leans against me.
“Vaughn is dangerous,” I say into her ear. “Linden doesn’t want to believe it, but I think you do.”
“I know,” she says.
“He’s tracking your every move the way he tracked me.”
“I know.”
“He killed Jenna.”
“I know. I know that.”
“Don’t let Linden talk you into trusting him,” I say. “Don’t put yourself in a situation where you’re alone with him.”
“You can run away, but I can’t,” she says. “That’s my home. It’s all I have.”
Linden clears his throat in the doorway. Cecily bounds to him and ups herself on tiptoes to kiss him when she takes the brownie from his hand. Then she unwraps its plastic. She settles in a chair and props her swollen feet up on the window ledge. She has a way of ignoring Linden’s hints about wanting to be alone with me. It was a minor annoyance in our marriage, but right now it’s a relief. I don’t know what Linden wants to say to me, only that his fidgeting means he wants it to be in private, and I’m dreading it.
I watch as Cecily nibbles the edges of the brownie and dusts crumbs off her shirtfront. She’s aware of Linden’s restlessness, but she also knows he won’t ask her to leave. Because she’s pregnant, and because she’s the only wife left who so genuinely adores him.
Linden picks up the sketchbook he abandoned on a chair, sits, and tries to busy himself looking through his building designs. I sort of feel sorry for him. He has never been authoritative enough to ask for what he wants. Even though I know this conversation he’s itching to have will leave me feeling guilty and miserable, I owe him this much.
“Cecily,” I say.
“Mm?” she says, and crumbs fall from her lips.
“Leave us alone for a few minutes.”
She glances at Linden, who looks at her and doesn’t object, and then back to me.
“Fine,” she sighs. “I have to pee anyway.”
After she leaves, closing the door behind her, Linden shuts his notebook. “Thanks,” he says.
I push myself upright, smooth the sheets over my thighs, and nod, avoiding his eyes. “What is it?” I ask.
“They’re letting you out tomorrow,” he says, taking the seat by my bed. “Do you have any sort of plan?”
“I was never good at plans,” I say. “But I’ll figure it out.”
“How will you find your brother?” he says. “Rhode Island is hundreds of miles away.”
“One thousand three hundred miles,” I say. “Roughly. I’ve been reading up on it.”
He frowns. “You’re still recovering,” he says. “You should rest for a few days.”
“I might as well get moving.” I close the atlas. “I have nowhere else to go.”
“You know that isn’t true,” he says. “You have a—” He hesitates. “A place to stay.”
He was going to say “home.”
I don’t answer, and the silence is filled with all the things Linden wants to say. Phantom words, ghosts that haunt the pieces of dust swimming in beams of light.
“Or,” he starts up again. “There is another option. My uncle.”
That gets me to look at him, maybe too inquisitively, because he seems amused. “My father disowned him years ago, when I was very young,” he says. “I’m supposed to pretend he doesn’t exist, but he doesn’t live far from here.”
“He’s your father’s brother?” I say, skeptical.
“Just think about it,” Linden says. “He’s a little strange, but Rose liked him.” He says that last part with a laugh, and his cheeks light up with pink, and I strangely feel better.
“She met him?” I ask.
“Just once,” Linden says. “We were on our way to a party, and she leaned over the driver’s seat and said, ‘I’m sick of these boring things. Take us anywhere else.’ So I gave the driver my uncle’s address, and we spent the evening there, eating the worst coffee crumb cake we’d ever tasted.”
It’s the first time since her death that he’s brought up Rose without wincing at the pain.
“And the fact that my father hates him just made my uncle that much more appealing to her,” Linden goes on. “He’s too pro-naturalism for my father’s taste, and admittedly a little strange. I’ve had to keep it a secret that I visit with him.”
Linden has a rebellious side. Who knew. He reaches out and tucks my hair behind my ear. It’s done out of habit, and he jerks his hand back when he realizes his mistake.
“Sorry,” he mumbles.
“It’s all right,” I say. “I’ll think about it.” My words are coming out fast, bumbling. “What you said—I mean—I’ll think about it.”
2
CECILY HANGS out the limo’s open window, her hair flailing behind her like a ribbon caught on a hook. Bowen, in his father’s arms, reaches out to catch it. I’m astounded by how much he grew while I was away. He’s a teddy bear of a boy—stocky and friendly and apple-cheeked. He was born with dark hair and beaming blue eyes that have since gone hazel. His hair has lightened to a coppery blond that I imagine mimics Cecily’s when she was a baby, which we’ll never know for certain. He has her defiant chin, her thin eyelashes. With every day that passes, prominent traces of Linden dissolve from his face.
He is beautiful, though. And Cecily is mad for him. I’ve never seen anyone love anything as much as she loves that baby. Even now, though she’s facing the sky that rushes past, she’s singing a lullaby for him. I recognize it as a poem from a book in the library on the wives’ floor. Jenna used to read it aloud.
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire …
The sun is setting, making the world orange. I rub my fists over my knees, uneasy. I can’t believe Vaughn let us use the limo for this. Maybe he’s trying to stay on Linden’s good side, to manipulate him by being contrite and reliable. I keep expecting the driver to turn on us and take me back to the mansion. But he has taken us so far into the countryside that I’m beginning to let go of that fear. It’s been minutes since we passed any buildings. There’s only grass, and the occasional lone tree that comes and goes like an explosion.
Cecily interrupts her song to ask, “Where are we?” and lean back into her seat.
“Someplace rural,” Linden says. “It’s hard to say. I never knew the street names.”
Cecily reaches for the baby, and then holds him over her head, blowing absurd-sounding kisses on his belly; his giggles make her grin.
“It’s this turn,” Linden tells the driver. “Off the road. Follow the tire tracks.”
Even the limo, with its smooth ride, jostles over the uneven terrain. And a few minutes later we’ve come to the only thing in sight: a two-story brick house that looks as old and stable as the mansion, but much smaller. Surrounding it are half a dozen tarps arranged like black car-shaped ghosts. There’s a dilapidated shed and a windmill. The roof is covered in reflective panels.
Cecily crinkles her nose and turns to Linden. “We can’t leave her here,” she says. “It looks like a junkyard.”
“It’s not as bad as all that,” he says.
“There’s tinfoil on his roof!”
“They’re solar panels,” Linden amends patiently. “So he doesn’t have to use so much electricity.”
Cecily opens her mouth to object, but I say, “It’s only for a couple of days. It looks fine.” I don’t mention that, while this is a step down from the luxuries of the mansion, it’s as nice as any of the homes I grew up near. And solar panels aren’t uncommon in Manhattan at all, where many can’t afford electricity.
The limo stops, and I open my door quickly, afraid of sleeping gas or locks or snakes that could come slithering through the vents to strangle me.
It’s early evening now, and without civilization for miles I can see darkness stretching toward me from every direction. The stars are bright, splayed across every shade of pink and blue, tracing a lone, oblong cloud.
Linden comes up beside me, follows my gaze skyward. “When I was little,” he says, “my uncle told me the names of all the constellations. But I could never find them.”
“But you know which one’s the North Star,” I remind him. I remember that he told Cecily about it, and she was discouraged by his lack of romance.
“Right there,” he says, following the line of my arm as I point.
“That’s the tail of Ursa Minor,” I say, moving my finger along the corresponding stars. “It’s my favorite because I think it looks like a kite.”
“I actually see it,” he says quietly, as though astonished. “But I thought Ursa Minor was supposed to be in the shape of a dipper.”
“Well, I think it looks like a kite,” I say. “That’s how I’m always able to find it.”
He turns toward me, and I can feel his breaths, so faint and unassuming that they only move the finest hairs around my face. I don’t dare take my eyes from the stars. My heart is pounding. Memories rush through me. Memories of his fingers unbuckling my shoes, inching under the strap of my red party dress. His lips on mine. The darkness of my bedroom swimming with ivy and champagne glasses the night we came home late from the expo. Snow dusting his shoulders and his dark hair the night we said good-bye.
Cecily slams the car door, snapping me back to reality. “If Rhine is staying here tonight,” she says, “I am too, to make sure she doesn’t get murdered by whatever lunatic runs this place.”
I open my mouth to chide her for being so rude. To say that Linden’s uncle was nice enough to let me stay, and that asking for anything more would seem ungrateful. And also to point out that she’s barely as high as my shoulder, and how exactly would she fend off a lunatic if I couldn’t?
But the words won’t come out. The thought of my only remaining sister wife going back to that mansion is making my palms sweat. She was safe when Vaughn kept her oblivious, but now that she’s seen the workings of his basement and she understands what he’s capable of, I worry for her safety.
“My uncle isn’t a lunatic,” Linden says, and opens the car door again to pull out the suitcase that was sliding around the floor on the way here.
“Why does your father hate him so much, then?” Cecily says.
Linden’s father is no judge of who is or is not a lunatic, but I don’t say this either. I lean back against the trunk of the limo because I’m starting to feel light-headed, and the stars are throbbing, and Linden is right, I do need to rest before I venture into the world again. Everywhere I look, there’s nothing. The world is so far away. All that effort, all those miles undone. I was in Vaughn’s basement of horrors for more than two months. Two months that felt like ten minutes. Gabriel must think I’m dead. Just like my brother thinks I’m dead.
But there has been so much sadness, so much disheartenment, that my body has worked up a defense mechanism to keep me from thinking about it. My head goes numb, and my bones start to ache. Hurricane winds spiral in my ear canals. A sharp pain has streaked my vision with a lightning bolt of white.
Cecily and Linden are talking—something about what counts as eccentricity versus insanity, I think, and the conversation is getting terse as they interrupt each other. Linden is a creature of saintlike patience, but Cecily has a way of wearing anyone down.
“You okay?” Cecily asks me, and I realize that they’ve moved a couple of yards ahead of me, toward the house. Linden turns to watch me, Bowen’s diaper bag slung from his shoulder, and a suitcase in his hand; he packed some clothes for me from my old closet.
I nod and follow after them.
Nobody answers when Linden knocks on the door. He knocks harder, then tries looking into the only visible window, which has its shade drawn. “Uncle Reed?” he calls, and knocks on the glass.
“Does he know we’re coming?” I ask.
“I told him last week when I visited,” he says.
“How often do you come out here?” Cecily says, wounded. “You never told me.”
“I’ve kept it secret. …” Linden trails off, mouthing something to himself as he tries to see around the window shade. “I think I see a light inside.” He knocks again, and when there’s no answer, he opens the door.
Cecily cradles Bowen’s head protectively, and casts a pensive stare into the darkness. “Linden, are you sure?” But he has already gone in ahead of us.
I follow him, my sister wife shuffling close behind and gripping the hem of my shirt.
It’s so dark that I can barely make out Linden’s shape as it moves ahead of me. It’s a long hallway, the wood creaking under our feet, and there’s the smoky smell of cedar and must. Then there’s a faint orange light flickering in a room at the end of the hall.
We gather at either side of Linden in the doorway. We’ve come to a kitchen—at least I think that’s what it is. There’s a sink and a stove. But rather than cabinets there are shelves cluttered with things I can’t make out in the darkness.
There’s a small round table, upon which a candle flickers in a mason jar. A man is seated there, hunched over something that looks like a giant metal organ. Its wires, pipes, and gears are the arteries, and it’s a mechanical heart, bleeding black oil onto the table and the man’s fingers.
“Uncle Reed?” Linden says.
The man grunts, working some intricacy with a pair of pliers and taking his time before looking up. He sees me first, then Cecily. “These are your wives?” he says.
Linden hesitates. But he doesn’t have to answer, because the man returns to his work rather unceremoniously and adds, “I thought you said there were three of them.”
“Just two,” Linden says, with so little emotion it gives me pause. It’s as if Jenna never existed. “And this is my son,” he adds, taking the baby from Cecily’s arms. “Bowen.”
The man—Reed—pauses, astonished by something. But then he only grunts. “Doesn’t look like you,” he says.
Cecily plays with a light switch on the wall; it doesn’t work. “Please don’t touch anything,” Reed says, and wipes his hands with a dingy rag that only spreads the oil around. He moves to the sink, and the faucet shudders before it spits out an unsteady stream. I can’t be certain in the candlelight, but I think I see flecks of black in the water. Reed mutters curses.
Then he pulls a cord over his head, and bleary light fills the room from a bulb that swings from the ceiling. The shadows jump back and forth, animating jars and pipes and senseless pieces that fill the shelves. There’s a refrigerator in one corner of the room, but there’s no electrical hum to it, no indication that it’s on.
Reed comes closer, inspects the child in Linden’s arms. Bowen’s eyes are dazed, transfixed on the swinging bulb. “Nope, nothing like you,” Reed reaffirms. “Whose is he?”
“He’s mine,” Cecily says.
Reed snorts. “How old are you? Ten?”
“Fourteen,” she says through gritted teeth.
I get a whiff of something heady and smoky when Reed moves to stand before me. It’s making my eyes water, but I’m just grateful that he looks nothing like Vaughn. He’s not as tall, and he’s a little overweight, and his gray hair is as wild as waves breaking on rocks. “I thought you were dead,” he says to me.
I must be worse off than I thought, because surely I just imagined that. But then Linden says, “That isn’t Rose, Uncle. Her name is Rhine. Remember I told you the other day?”
“Oh, right, right,” Reed says. “I’m bad with names. I’m usually much better with faces.”
“I’ve been told I look like her,” I offer.
“Doll, you could be her ghost,” Reed says. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“She can’t be a reincarnation of Rose,” Cecily says, indignant. “They were both alive at the same time.”
Reed looks at her like she’s something he just stepped in, and she inches closer to Linden’s side.
“Tell me,” Reed says, turning back to me, “because my nephew’s story was confusing. You’re running away from him, and he’s helping you?”
“That’s one way to put it,” I say. “But I’m not running away. Not really. I’m looking for my brother.” A lump is forming in my throat, caused by Reed’s stare and his smell and the interrogating hue of that light. “The last I heard, he was in Rhode Island. He’s gotten into a—situation, and I need to find him. I won’t be any trouble in the meantime.” My words are coming out one atop the other, fast, and Linden puts his hand on my arm, and for some reason it calms me.
Reed looks me over, his mouth squished to one side of his face like he’s thinking. “You have too much hair,” he says. “You’ll have to tie it back so it won’t get caught in the machines.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I say, “Okay.”
“I told him you would help out a little,” Linden says. “It won’t be anything arduous. He knows you’re recovering.”
“From the car accident. Right,” Reed says. I don’t know what story Linden fed him to explain my injuries, but judging from his tone he doesn’t believe it, or care to. “There’s a room upstairs where you can put your things. My nephew can show you. The floors make a terrible creaking, so I’ll have to ask you not to walk around at night.”
That’s apparently our cue to leave, because he turns his attention to the contraption on the table. Linden herds us down the hallway.
“Oh, Linden,” Cecily whispers, her words almost lost to the creaking of the steps. “I knew you were mad at her, but you can’t be serious about leaving her here.”
“I am doing Rhine a favor,” he replies. “And she can take care of herself.” He looks over his shoulder at me. I’m two steps behind him. “Can’t you?” he says.
I nod like I’m not at all unnerved by this new cold side to him. Not cruel like his father. Not warm like the husband who sought me out on quiet nights. Something in between. This Linden has never woven his fingers through mine, never chosen me from a line of weary Gathered girls, never said he loved me in a myriad of colored lights. We are nothing to each other.
Reed may have forgotten my name, but he apparently remembered that I was coming, because the spare bedroom is lit up by three candles—one on the nightstand, two on the dresser. They and a twin bed are the only furniture in the room. There’s a cracked mirror on the far wall, and my reflection drowns in the darkness of it. Rose’s ghost. I almost expect it to move independent of me.
Cecily drops the suitcase and the diaper bag on the floor, and a cloud of dust bursts from the mattress when she sits on it. She makes a big show of choking on it.
“It’s fine,” I say, shaking out the pillow.
“I’m afraid to even ask if there’s a bathroom I can use,” Cecily says.
“At the end of the hall,” Linden says, rubbing his index finger along the bridge of his nose; it’s something I’ve only seen him do when he’s frustrated with his drawings. “Take a candle with you.”
After Cecily has left the room, I sit on the edge of the bed and say, “Thank you, Linden.”
He looks at his reflection in the mirror. “My uncle won’t ask any questions, if you don’t,” he says. “About why you aren’t staying at home with me, that is.”
The silence is tight and unnatural. I grip the blanket in my fists and say, “Are you and Cecily going back there?”
“Of course,” he says.
He still won’t believe me about everything that happened in the basement. About Deirdre. I vaguely remember whispering about her in my medicated delirium, and about Jenna’s body hiding away in some freezer. He rubbed my arm, whispering words that sounded like moth bodies flying into glass windows. Nonsensical things I tried to cling to. Maybe, lying there, I was so pitiful that he felt no choice but to love me. Now he says I can take care of myself. Now I’m the liar trying to destroy the perfect world his father set up for him, who ran away, broke everything. And it’s getting late, and it’s time to part ways.
But the words come out of me anyway. “Don’t go.”
He looks at me.
“Don’t go,” I say. “And don’t take Cecily back there. I know you don’t believe me, but I have a terrible feeling that—”
“I can take care of Cecily,” he says. “I would have taken care of you, too. If I’d known you were so worried about my father.”
Bowen has fallen asleep against Linden’s chest, and Linden shifts him to the other arm. “My father thought that if you didn’t want to be married to me, he could have you. It’s because of your eyes. He wanted to study them, and he took it too far. He can be that way.” His eyebrows knit together, and he looks at his feet, struggling to make sense of what he’s saying, to force logic where there is none. “He isn’t the monster you think he is. He just—he gets so into his work that he forgets people are people. He gets carried away.”
“Carried away?” I spit back. “He drove needles into my eyes, Linden! He murdered a newborn—”
“Don’t you think I know my own father?” he interrupts. “I’d trust him before I’d believe anything you say. You couldn’t even do me the dignity of telling the truth.”
There was a night, months ago, when I almost did. It was after the expo. I was half-drunk, my hair sticky and perfumed and teased, the bed tipping under me. He climbed over my body, and he kissed me. I could hear tree branches murmuring to one another in the moonlight. And Linden said, so close that I could feel his breath on my eyelashes, But I don’t know who you are. I don’t know where you came from. His eyes were bright. I wanted so badly to tell him, but something about that entire night seemed so beautiful, so bizarre, that I didn’t trust it with my secrets. Or maybe I just wanted to play along, to wear his ring and be his wife for a little while before the magic took the light from the moon.
Now I say nothing. There’s no brightness in his eyes for me.
“If you didn’t love me,” he says, “you should have said it. I would have let you go.”
“You might have,” I admit. “But not your father.”
“My father has never been in charge of what I do,” he says.
“Your father has always been in charge of what you do,” I say.
He looks at me, and I stop breathing. Something comes surging up behind his eyes, some argument of love or vengeance. Something that’s been building every second I’ve been away. And I want it, whatever it is. Want to hold it in both hands like his leaping heart that’s been ripped from his chest. Want to warm it with my body heat.
He says, “When Cecily comes back, tell her I’ll be waiting by the car.”
Then he’s gone.
“I don’t want to leave you here,” Cecily says when I relay the message. “This place looks like it could give you cancer or something.” She’s remembering that word, “cancer,” from a soap opera Jenna used to watch. It’s a disease that was eliminated from our genetics.
“I don’t think cancer was something you could catch,” I tell her.
“That’s my point,” she says.
We must be making too much noise, because Reed bangs on the ceiling.
Cecily huffs and sits on the bed next to me. After a few seconds she puts her arm around my shoulders and stares at her stomach. At four months along she’s already looking tired and swollen. Her cheeks and fingertips are flushed. Her face and hair are damp from where she’s splashed herself with cold water, something she does after a bout of nausea.
“Have you been sick a lot?” I ask her.
“It’s not so bad,” she says softly. “Linden takes care of me.”
I’m worried about her. I wonder if it has even occurred to her or to Linden that she hardly had a rest between pregnancies. Vaughn surely knows how unsafe this is, and he allowed it, which worries me even more. I’m scared that she’ll enter that dark hall, descend the stairs, and be forever in Vaughn’s clutches. I think she’s scared too, because she doesn’t move. I don’t know how much time passes before Linden comes looking for her.
“Ready to go?” He stands in the doorway, mostly in shadow.
“I’m staying the night,” she says.
They have some sort of conversation with their eyes. A husband-and-wife thing—something I could never quite get the hang of. Cecily wins, because Linden picks up the diaper bag and says, “I’ll be back for you in the morning, first thing.”
A few minutes later, through the window, we watch the limo drive out of sight.
The mattress is lumpy and hard, and Cecily, who is back to snoring the way she did in her later trimesters, spends the night thrashing and turning. She kicks me so many times that I eventually take a pillow and settle on the floor. But every position on the hard wood aggravates the recovering gash in my thigh. In my dreams, it bleeds and seeps through the floorboards, and Reed pounds on the ceiling because blood is raining down on his work. The engine on the table comes to life. It pulses and breathes.
In the darkness Cecily whispers my name. At first I think it’s part of my dream, but she persists, increasing in frequency and intensity until I say, “What?”
“Why are you on the floor?” I can just make out her face and arm leaning over the mattress, tangle of hair coming over one shoulder.
“You were kicking,” I say.
“I’m sorry. Come back up. I promise I won’t anymore.”
She makes room for me, and I cram in beside her. Her skin is sticky and hot. “You shouldn’t wear socks to bed,” I tell her. “They keep heat in. Last time you were pregnant, you always got feverish at night.”
Her legs move under the blanket as she kicks her socks off. It takes her a while to get comfortable, and I can tell she’s trying not to disturb me, so I don’t complain as I’m knocked around the mattress. Eventually she settles on her side, facing me.
“Did you get sick earlier, when you went to use the bathroom?” I ask.
“Don’t tell Linden,” she says, yawning. “He’s squeamish about that stuff. He worries.”
That’s to be expected after what happened with Rose’s pregnancy. But it’s not as though I can tell her that. And soon I find, despite my worries, that I’m exhausted enough to fall asleep.
Just as I’m beginning to dream, she says, “I think about those other girls in the van with us. The ones who were killed.”
My dreams fade away from me, and I wish desperately that they’d return. Even a nightmare would be welcome over that memory. It’s not something my sister wives and I ever talked about, the odd and horrific thing that bonded us to one another. I especially wouldn’t expect to hear about it from Cecily, who has always wanted to be the happy housewife.
“I just wanted you to know that,” she says. “I’m not a monster.”
I turn my head to look at her. “Of course you aren’t.”
“You called me one,” she says. “The day you ran away.”
“I was upset,” I say, pushing the sweaty hair from her face. “But what happened to Jenna isn’t your fault.”
She draws a shaky breath, closes her eyes for a long moment. “Yes, it is.”
Here is where I expect her to cry, but she doesn’t. She only looks at me. And it strikes me again how much she’s grown in my absence. Maybe she had no choice. There were no sister wives to console her, the father-in-law she trusted had only been using her, and it’s not as though she could explain any of this to her husband.
I struggle for words of comfort, but nothing feels sincere enough. And no matter what I say, Jenna is still gone, and so are the other girls that were Gathered, and the girl Silas and I found lying in a ditch. Cecily still won’t live to see Bowen grow, and my brother has spiraled out of control in his grief, and I’m no closer to finding him than I was last year.
I am entirely powerless.
“The whole time we were married, I treated you like you were too small to understand what was happening to us,” I say. “But I felt small too. I couldn’t control the way things were any more than you could.”
“You looked so confident,” she says. “I envied you from the day we were married. I’ve decided I’m going to be more like you.” She says it with conviction. “I’m going to be stronger.”
The last thing I am is strong.
“Get some sleep,” I whisper.
“Rhine?”
“What?”
“I told Linden to believe you. I told him it’s true that Housemaster Vaughn is doing awful things downstairs.”
I feel hope. Linden might not have any reason to believe me, but he’ll listen to Cecily. Even if it’s just to humor her so she doesn’t go hysterical on him. “You did?”
“He wouldn’t listen at first,” she says. “It was while you were in the hospital. But I begged him to go and see for himself.”
“Did he?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “But—when he came back, he said there was nothing down there. A few of Housemaster Vaughn’s chemicals and things, lots of machines and attendants working on them, but no bodies. No Deirdre. He says you must have been hallucinating, or making it all up.”
Hope swims away, leaving me with less than nothing. “But you saw those things too,” I press. “Did you tell him that?”
Now she’s the one brushing her fingers through my hair, trying to console me. “I only saw what was happening to you,” she says. “I wish I’d seen more. I wish I’d seen Deirdre, or Rose’s domestic, what was her—”
“Lydia,” I say.
“Right. Lydia. I wish I could prove it.” She’s talking to me in that hushed, cooing tone usually reserved for her son. Trying to lull me to sleep, or compliance.
And then I realize why.
“You don’t believe me,” I say.
“Oh, Rhine, Housemaster Vaughn did such terrible things to you. You were so delirious, and so sick. Maybe there’s a chance some of it—”
“It was real,” I say, sitting up. “It was all real.”
She sits upright herself, facing me in the darkness. She’s frowning. “There was nothing down there, Rhine.”
“He hid them, then,” I say. “The bodies. The domestics. If Gabriel were here, he’d tell you the same thing.”
Cecily straightens her posture, hopeful. She wants to believe me. “Did he tell you there were bodies down there?”
“Not exactly,” I say.
“What did he tell you?”
My stomach sinks. I collapse back onto the pillow, defeated. “Not much,” I admit. He was so high on opiates at first, and then it was one problem after the next, really. “He didn’t have a chance.”
Cecily lies beside me, rubs my arm reassuringly. We both go silent. I struggle to cope with the fact that I am the only one who saw what Vaughn kept in the basement. But even worse than that, I want to believe what Linden and Cecily do, that none of it really happened. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe Deirdre really did get sold to another house when I left, and Adair and Lydia too. Maybe they’re comfortable and safe, and I’d conjured Deirdre up to cope with the loneliness as I lay strapped to that bed. She visited me often.
I start to make a list in my head of all the things I know. Vaughn killed Jenna; he admitted as much. Rose’s body was in the basement that day the elevators gave out. I saw her. I recognized her nail polish, her blond hair. There was a tracker in my leg. Deirdre told me about it. Didn’t she? I think of all the attendants who came to work on me while I was in the basement. In my memory they all have the same blank expressions; they’re all voiceless, uncaring. Deirdre was warm. She spoke gently, made me feel safe, which was a bizarre thing in that place.
The list collapses in on itself, words and memories jumbling into a bloody mess. It’s so frustrating the way the pictures keep on changing.
In the end it’s Cecily I reach for. At least I can be certain she exists. Her skin is sweaty and warm as I scrunch up the sleeves of the nightgown she borrowed from me. I worry about how overheated she gets, like there’s a fire inside her. I think she drifted off to sleep and I woke her, because she mumbles something nonsensical before opening her eyes. “You don’t have to believe me,” I tell her. “You just have to believe that Vaughn is capable of those things.”
“I do,” she says. “Linden doesn’t. I think he chooses not to. He’s sensitive, you know?”
She strokes my cheek with the side of her hand—a repetitive, wispy motion. Like little ghost kisses.
“I thought Housemaster Vaughn wanted to do good things and save us all,” she says. “I was wrong. And admitting that meant admitting he won’t find an antidote and none of us has much time. You said you have to find your brother—so you should go do that. And Linden and I have Bowen, and this baby. I want to spend as much time with them as I can. I want to be with them until the end.”
These are all things she wouldn’t have dared to say last year. But now she’s unflinching. Her voice doesn’t even catch when she adds, “If all those things you saw are real, there’s nothing we can do about them. We have our own lives to take care of, and there’s only time to do so much with them.”
What she says is terrible and true. She grabs my hand. We squeeze each other’s fingers, and I wait for her to realize the magnitude of what she’s said. I wait for her to squish up against me and sob. But from the reason in her tone, I sense that those words have been in her for a long time. That while I was away, she had plenty of time to get used to them.
And when the sob does come, several minutes later, it’s mine.
My sister wife has already fallen asleep.
I dream of Linden in the doorway. He looks at me a long while, the green in his eyes changing every second. “The stars do look like a kite,” he admits. “But everything else you’ve said is a lie.”
In the morning I awaken to Cecily jumping from the bed, her feet crashing onto the floorboards like baritone notes, to get to the window. “Quiet,” I tell her, cringing at the sudden light when she yanks the window shade, forcing it to recoil with a slurping noise.
“No, no, no. You have to hide,” she tells me. Panic in her eyes. The sound of an engine purring under the window.
I stagger to my feet, every muscle sore, and walk to the window. And outside is the limo, a figure standing beside it waving us down. Linden said he’d be here to collect Cecily in the morning, but as my grogginess subsides, I realize that Linden isn’t here.
Vaughn is.
3
“STAY HERE,” I say, hurrying to put on a pair of jeans under my nightgown.
“Wait!” Cecily calls after me as I’m running down the stairs.
“Stay!” I tell her.
Outside, the early morning air is cold, and I hug my arms for warmth. Dewy grass clings to my bare feet as I move toward him. He smiles. “Ah, so she awakens,” he says. His voice disrupts the gray sky. A burst of blackbirds rushes past.
I maintain my distance, keep my tone neutral when I ask, “Where’s Linden?”
“Your husband had an early meeting with a potential contractor,” he says. “He sent me for you and Cecily.”
“Sure he did,” I say, bracing one foot behind me to take a step back.
“You’re still angry with me,” he says. “I understand. But, Rhine, darling, you’re such a fascinating creature. You should be flattered; before you came along, I was sure I’d seen everything. I couldn’t help but get carried away.”
Carried away. I laugh humorlessly, a cloud bursting from my open mouth.
“Let’s just be honest with each other. If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead,” he says.
“Thanks to you, I almost was,” I say. “What will you do if I refuse to go along this time? Burn down this house?”
“While I do think a fire would be an improvement, no. The choice is entirely your own,” he says, sounding sincere. “I thought you and I could put this sordid mess behind us. How does resuming first wife status sound?”
I open my mouth, aghast, but no words come. How did he even find me here? The tracker has been removed from my leg. Did Linden really send him here after me? I know he’s angry, but I don’t believe he’d do anything so venomous.
The screen door slams behind me, and then I realize it. Cecily. Vaughn can’t trace my steps anymore, but she is still his property. How does it work? Is there a computer somewhere that spells out our location on a digital map? Or some kind of beeping device that sounds an alarm when we’re nearby, like a metal detector hovering over coins? My parents used to have one of those; it was often how my father found scrap metal to build things with.
She moves to stand beside me, coiling her arm around mine. “She isn’t going back,” she says.
“You don’t want your sister wife to come home?” Vaughn says. “But you’ve been so lonely. So lonely, in fact, that you were sneaking down to visit her every time I left the house.”
She draws a deep breath. She’s scared, though she’s trying not to let on.
“Don’t go with him,” I say into her ear.
The screen door slams again, and I catch a whiff of smoke. Reed has a cigar in his mouth. Grease and brown splotches stain his white shirt. “Nobody was going to invite me to the reunion?” he says to Vaughn. “You can’t have it both ways, Little Brother. If I can’t come onto your property, you can’t come onto mine.”
“I’ve just come to collect something that belongs to me,” Vaughn says. “Put something decent on, Cecily. Run a brush through that hair, and let’s go.” She’s still wearing one of the nightgowns that Linden packed for me, the unbuttoned collar dipping over her shoulder.
“I’ll leave when my husband gets here,” Cecily says. “Not before then.”
“You heard the kid,” Reed says.
Vaughn opens his mouth to say something, but the sound of a baby crying interrupts him. And the words he was going to say turn into a grin. Cecily stiffens.
Vaughn opens the passenger door and says, “Come on out and talk some sense into your keeper.”
Elle, Cecily’s domestic, steps out of the car. She’s holding Bowen to her chest, and his face is red and wet with tears. Cecily reaches for him immediately, but Vaughn steps in her way. “It’s chilly out here, darling,” he says. “And you’re pregnant. You don’t even have the sense to wear a coat. What makes you think you can get by without me to supervise your prenatal care? You’ve already missed your vitamins this morning.”
“He’s right,” Elle says a bit too softly. She’s looking at the ground, and her words sound rehearsed. She’s smaller than Cecily—nine, maybe ten years old, and of all our domestics she’s always been the most timid. I’m sure it was no challenge for Vaughn to intimidate her.
Cecily purses her lips together, composing herself. I think she’s trying not to cry. “You can’t keep my son from me.”
Vaughn laughs, taps her nose the way he did when she was a newlywed, when she adored him because she didn’t know any better. “Of course not,” he says. “You’re the one who’s been away from him.”
She steps past Vaughn, and he grips her forearm when she tries to reach for her son. I see the strain in his arm from the force of holding her. Her jaw swells with spite. He has never grabbed her before; he’s always been able to command her with his serpent’s charm. “Come home, or don’t,” he says. “But know that I won’t allow my grandson to stay here in this cesspool.”
He looks at me and adds, “As always, the invitation is extended. It wouldn’t be home without you.”
“Whose home?” I mutter. I take a step back, into the choking smog of Reed’s cigar. He says nothing, standing on the top porch step. This isn’t his battle.
Cecily looks at me with the same regret as on the day I told her our father-in-law was responsible for Jenna’s death, when snow was falling between us. And my heart breaks the same way it did then. “I have to go,” she says.
“I know,” I tell her, because I realize it too. She has Bowen and an unborn child to care for, and a husband to love. I have my brother and Gabriel to find. Cecily and I can’t keep each other safe. We have to let go.
Vaughn releases her, and she comes at me, hugging me with so much force that I stumble. I wrap my arms around her. “Take care,” she murmurs into my ear. “Be brave, okay?”
“You too,” I say.
She lets go of me when Bowen’s cries jump up a few octaves. Vaughn escorts her to the car and waits until she has climbed inside, before instructing Elle to hand her the baby.
Cecily clings to her son, but watches me over his wispy curls. Her lower eyelids have gone pink, a wavering line of tears tracing them. We know how unlikely it is that we’ll ever see each other again. If Linden had come to collect her, at least we’d have had time for a real good-bye.
Vaughn climbs in beside her and closes the door, and I’m left staring at my own reflection in the darkened windows. Until even that is gone.
Reed steps beside me, and together we watch the limo get swallowed by the horizon. He offers me a puff of his cigar, but I shake my head, letting the numbness take over my head, welcoming the pain into my bones. Waiting for this sadness to disappear like both of my sister wives.
“Don’t feel bad, doll,” Reed says. “My mother never cared for Vaughn either. Though, bless her soul, she did try.” He claps my shoulder. “Better get washed up. There’s work to do.”
The water trickles from the showerhead; it runs bleary and chunked with rust. But it’s not very much worse than what I was used to in Manhattan, and I’m able to get reasonably clean by not standing directly under it and splashing myself when it’s at its clearest. I take extra care with the gash that runs along my inner thigh, the skin pinched together with stitches.
When I go through the suitcase Linden packed, I find that he left a roll of gauze and a bottle of antiseptic in one of the inner pouches by my toothbrush, where I’d be sure to see them. He was still thinking of me, caring for me in that passive way of his. Everything is neatly folded too. A lesser husband would be angry after what I put him through, would hope the wound became infected and the entire leg fell off.
I dress the wound, and try to roll up the rest of the gauze as neatly as I found it, but I can’t duplicate Linden’s meticulousness.
Remembering what Reed said last night about the machines, I tie my hair back with one of the many rubber bands hanging on the doorknob. Rubber bands on doorknobs, and bolts and rusty nails in glass jars, stacked into pyramids in corners. The entire house is a sort of machine, as though gears are turning between the walls.
The downstairs hallway smells like fried lard, becoming more pungent when I reach the kitchen. “Hungry?” Reed asks. I shake my head.
“Didn’t think so,” he says, pouring grease from a frying pan into an old can. “You seem birdlike. Even your hair is like a nest.”
Maybe I should take offense, but I don’t mind this image of me he’s painting. It makes me feel wild, brave.
“Bet you never eat,” he says. “Bet you drink up the oxygen like it’s butter. Bet you can go for days on nothing but thoughts.”
That gets a smile out of me. I can see why Vaughn wouldn’t like his brother, and why Linden would.
“So,” he says, turning to face me. “My nephew tells me you’re still recovering. But you look recovered to me.”
Linden did say his uncle wouldn’t ask many questions, and he hasn’t. But he has a clever way of getting answers with carefully worded statements.
“I am,” I say. “Mostly. I’ll only be a day or two, and I can be useful in the meantime. I know how to keep a house running. How to fix things.”
“Fixing things is good,” he says, walking past me. I follow him down the hallway, out the front door, into the breezy May air. The grass and the bright weeds of flowers sway on the wind like the hologram that came from the keyboard as Cecily played. A stop-motion drawing in colored pencil, unreal.
It’s gotten warmer since this morning, and there’s the almost plastic smell of grass. I think of Gabriel, how this time last year he brought me tea in the library and read over my shoulder. He pointed to the sketches of boats on the page of the history book, and I thought that it would be nice for us to sail away, the water dividing endlessly in the sunlight. Breaking in half and then breaking in half again.
I push back my worries. I’ll come to find him soon; that’s all I can hope for.
Reed shows me to the shed beside his house, which might have once been a barn. It’s enormous enough. “Even things that aren’t broken can be fixed,” he says. The darkness smells like mold and metal. “Everything can become something it’s not.”
He looks at me, eyebrows up, like it’s my turn to say something. When I remain quiet, it seems to disappoint him. His fingers flutter over his head as he presses forward.
It’s hard to see. The only light comes through gaps in the wooden planks that make up the walls.
Then Reed pushes on a far wall, and it swings open. It’s a giant door, and at once the place is flooded with sunlight. Awkward shapes around me become leather straps, guns mounted up by nails, car parts hung like carrion in a butcher shop. The floor is nothing but packed dirt, and there’s a long worktable covered with so many odd things, I can’t make sense of them.
“Never seen anything like it, I bet,” Reed says, sounding pleased with himself. I get the sense that he takes pride in being perceived as mad. But he doesn’t seem mad to me. He seems curious. Where his brother unravels human beings, weighing their organs in his bare palms, prying back eyelids, drawing blood, Reed unravels things. He showed more care with that engine on his table last night, more respect for its life, than Vaughn ever showed with me.
“My father liked to make things,” I say. “And fix things. But woodworking, mostly.”
I don’t know what’s making me talk so much. In the almost year I spent at the mansion, I don’t think I revealed so much truth about myself as I have this morning.
I’m homesick, I suppose, and talking to a total stranger is my way of dealing with it.
Reed looks at me, and I catch the green in his eyes. He’s like his brother there. They both have that distance, living in the world their thoughts create. He stares at me a long time and then says, “Say ‘ridiculous.’”
“What?”
“The word ‘ridiculous,’” he insists. “Say it.”
“Ridiculous,” I say.
“An absolute ghost,” he says, shaking his head and dropping into a seat at his worktable. It’s really an old picnic table with attached benches. “You look just like my nephew’s first wife. You even have her voice, and ‘ridiculous’ was her favorite word. Everything was ridiculous. The virus. The attempts to cure it. My brother.”
“Your brother is ridiculous,” I agree.
“I’m going to call you Rose,” he says with resolution, picking up a screwdriver and working the back off an old clock.
“Please don’t,” I say. “I knew Rose. I was there when she died. I’d find it creepy.”
“Life is creepy,” Reed says. “Kids rotting from the inside out at age twenty is creepy.”
“Even so, my name is Rhine,” I say.
He nods for me to sit across the table from him, and I do, avoiding a gray puddle of something on the bench. “What kind of name is ‘Rhine,’ anyway?” he asks.
“It’s a river,” I say. I upturn a bolt and try to spin it like a top. My father used to make them for me and my brother. We’d spin them at the top of the stairs, and crush our shoulders together as we watched them jump down one step to the next. His always got there first, or else mine slipped through the banister and fell away. “Or it was a river, a long time ago. It ran from the Netherlands to Switzerland.”
“Then I’m sure it still does run there,” Reed says, watching the bolt spin away from my fingers and promptly collapse. “The world is still out there. They just want you to think it’s gone.”
Okay, maybe he is a little bit mad. But I don’t mind. Linden is right. Reed doesn’t ask many questions. He spends the rest of the morning keeping me busy with menial tasks, never telling me what it is I’m doing. As near as I can tell, I’m disassembling an old clock to make a new one. He checks on me sometimes, but spends most of the time outside, lying flat under an old car, or climbing inside to start its engine, which only splutters and creates black clouds through the tailpipe. He hides away in an even bigger shed farther back, higher than the house and more makeshift, as though he built it as an afterthought, to cover what’s inside.
But I don’t ask about that, either.
4
IT’S LIKE THAT for the rest of the day, and the next day, and the next. I don’t ask questions, and neither does Reed. He places tasks before me, and I do them. One piece at a time. Never knowing what I’m assembling. I watch him, too. He spends a lot of time under cars or in that lumbering shed with the door closed.
I never have much of an appetite, and the safest things to eat in his kitchen are the apples, anyway, being that they’re the only things I recognize. They’re not the ultrabright green and red fruit I got used to in the mansion. They’re speckled, flawed, and mealy, the way I grew up thinking they should be. I’m still not sure which way is more natural.
On my fourth morning, when I climb out of bed, I notice that the dizziness and the flecks of light are gone. The pain in my thigh has dulled, and the stitches have started to disintegrate. “I think I’ll leave tomorrow,” I tell Reed while we’re sitting on opposite sides of his worktable. “I’m feeling much better.”
He’s taking a magnifying glass to some heap of machinery—a motor, I think. “Did my nephew arrange for transportation?” he asks.
“No,” I say, tracing my finger around the rim of a mason jar filled with screws and grime. “That wasn’t part of the agreement.”
“So there was an agreement,” Reed says. “Doesn’t seem like it. Seems like you’re just making it up as you go.”
Story of my life. There’s no real way to counter that, so I just shrug. “I’ll be all right,” I say. “He knows there’s no reason to worry about me.”
Reed glances at me for a moment, his forehead creased, eyebrows raised, before he returns to his task. “The fact that you’re here says he’s worried about you,” he says. “Doesn’t want you anywhere near his father, that much is clear.”
“Vaughn and I don’t exactly get along,” I say.
“Let me guess,” Reed says. “He tried to pluck out your eyes for science.” He says that last word, “science,” with such exaggerated passion that I laugh.
“Close,” I say.
He stops working, leans forward, and stares at me so intently that I can’t help but look back at him. “It was no car accident, was it?” he says.
“What do you keep in that shed?” I counter. Since we’re asking questions.
“An airplane,” he says. “Bet you thought they were extinct.”
It’s true there aren’t many airplanes. Most people wouldn’t be able to afford traveling that way, and most cargo is transported by truck. But the president and select wealthy families have them for business or leisure. Vaughn, for instance, could afford one if he wanted. But my guess is that what Reed calls an airplane is a patchwork of different parts, and not something I’d want to board.
I look at the table. He answered my question; now he’s waiting for me to answer his.
“Vaughn was using me to find an antidote,” I say. “Something about my eyes being like a mosaic, or something. I don’t know. It’s hard to follow him.” And at the time, I had so many drugs running through me that I thought the ceiling tiles were singing to me. Those days were so vivid at the time, but now, looking back, the memory is a shadow at the end of a long corridor. I can’t remember much of anything.
“Doesn’t sound like something my nephew would allow,” Reed says. “Don’t get me wrong, the poor boy is as oblivious as a rabbit on a lion reserve, but still.”
Animal reserves are a thing of the past, but somehow this comparison feels right.
“He didn’t know,” I say. “And when I told him, he didn’t really believe it was as bad as it was. He still won’t. So we’ve decided it’s best to”—I pause, looking for the right words—“part ways. He and Cecily have the new baby coming, and I need to find my brother.” And Gabriel, but that would require even more explaining, and I’m already starting to feel exhausted and achy just thinking about what’s been said so far.
The dull aching becomes a stab of pain in my temple when Reed asks, “Then, why, doll, are you still wearing his ring?”
My wedding ring. Etched with fictional flowers that don’t begin and don’t end. More than once I’ve thought about cutting into it with something sharp. Making a line, severing the vines just so they stop somewhere.
“Can I see your plane?” I ask. “Does it fly?”
He laughs. It’s nothing like Vaughn’s laugh. There’s warmth in it. “You want to see the plane?”
“Sure,” I say. “Why not?”
“No reason not to, I suppose,” he says. “It’s just that no one’s ever asked before.”
“You have an airplane in your shed, and no one has ever asked to see it?” I say.
“Most people don’t know it’s there,” he says. “But I like you, not-Rose. So maybe tomorrow. For now, we have other things to do.”
That night I lie in Reed’s yard. It stretches on farther than I can see, empty, aside from the tall grass and the bursts of wildflowers. I lie on the dirt and think, There is where the orange grove would be. And over there, the golf course, with its spinning windmill, its lighthouse gleaming. And farther down would be the stables, abandoned now, where Rose and Linden used to keep their horses. And here, where I’m lying, would be the swimming pool. I could coast on an inflatable raft as imaginary guppies flicked their bodies around me in glimmers of color.
I thought I’d left that place behind me. But it keeps rebuilding itself in my mind.
Something rustles nearby and I turn my head, watching the grass move. I get the terrible sense that it’s trying to warn me.
I sit up and hold my breath, trying to listen. But a gust of wind is rolling through. I think it’s saying my name. No, that voice didn’t belong to the wind, though it would make more sense than the truth.
“Rhine?”
I lean back on my arms, tilt my head all the way to see the figure standing behind me.
“Hi,” I say.
The moon is full and beaming like a halo behind his head. His curls are his dark crown. He could be a sort of prince.
“Hi,” Linden says. “Can I sit?”
I collapse onto my back, liking the way the cold earth feels against my skull. I nod.
He sits next to me, careful to avoid my hair that’s splayed around my head like blood. A bullet to the forehead, boom, blond waves everywhere.
“Didn’t think you were coming back,” I say, focusing on the kite in the stars. I look for other kites, or people to fly them.
Linden lies beside me. All I can think is that he’s going to get grass stains on his white shirt. He’s going to dirty that lovely hair. I feel like he’s trying to prove a point that he can be like me—not so neat and perfect.
“I didn’t send my father, the other day,” he says. “I didn’t know he was going to do that.”
What he doesn’t say is that his father probably tracked my whereabouts using whatever device he implanted in Cecily. Linden saw for himself the one that had been implanted in me.
“Thought you said you knew him so well,” I mumble. Without looking back, I can feel his stare.
“He was trying to spare me,” Linden says. “He knew how difficult it would be for me to see you.”
“So you were spared,” I say. “Why did you come back?”
“My uncle called me this afternoon,” he says.
“I didn’t know you even had a phone,” I say. Somehow this feels like a violation, a reminder that while Linden treated me as an equal during our marriage, that was only part of the illusion. I was always a prisoner.
“He told me you were leaving,” Linden says. “He said you just planned to walk off and leave everything to chance.”
“Something like that,” I say.
“That’s not much of a plan,” he says. “What are you going to do for money? Transportation? Food? Where will you sleep?”
I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
“This is why Reed was stalling, isn’t it? He wanted to talk to you before I left.” I suppress a cry of frustration. “Please just let this be my problem,” I say. “Not yours.”
He’s silent after that. The silence adds a foreign element to the air, polluting the moonlight, making my throat tight, the crickets extra loud. Planets are leaning in to listen. And finally I can’t take it anymore. “Just say it,” I tell him.
“Say what?”
“Whatever it is you want to say to me. There’s something ugly in there you’ve been wanting to let out. I can tell.”
“It’s not ugly,” he says gently. “Or angry at all, really. It’s more of a question.”
I prop myself on one elbow to look at him, and he does the same. There’s no hostility in his eyes. There’s no kindness, either. There’s nothing but green. “That night, at the New Year’s party, you said you loved me. Did you mean that?”
I stare at him a long time. Until his face disappears, and he’s just a shadow.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “If I did, it wasn’t enough to make me stay.”
He nods. Then he gets up, dusts the backs of his legs, and offers his hand to me. I let him pull me to my feet.
“Don’t leave tomorrow,” he says. “Please. Give me a chance to figure something out. If I just let you go, Cecily will be livid.”
“She’ll be okay,” I say. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“Then think of it as doing me a favor,” he says. “I’d like for Cecily to not be angry with me.”
I hesitate. “How long?”
“A couple of days, maybe less.”
“All right,” I say. “A couple of days. Maybe less.”
His lips waver, and I think he’s going to smile, but he doesn’t. The last time I saw him, he was brimming with words and thoughts, anger and intensity. I could feel them humming inside him. But now they’re all gone. I wonder where he put them. I wonder if he shouted them into the orange grove with the supposed ashes of his dead wife and child. When he opens his mouth, all he says is, “If you’re going to be out here, you should really wear a sweater. I packed one for you.”
Then he turns to leave. The limo is idling in the distance.
“It wasn’t all a lie, Linden,” I burst out when he’s a few yards away. My voice is weak, getting smaller with each word. “Not everything. Not all of it.”
He climbs into the backseat, giving no indication that he believes me.
5
REED SITS across the kitchen table, watching me as I turn the apple in my fingers. Maybe he’s right about my never needing to eat. I can’t remember the last time I had a real appetite. Even the delicacies served to me on the wives’ floor wouldn’t appeal to me right now.
I keep my eyes down. I don’t want Reed to see my defeat. I don’t want him to see that Vaughn has had a victory over me, because almost all of my misfortunes can be traced to that man. Being separated from my brother. Losing Jenna. Watching Cecily go with tears in her eyes. Leaving Gabriel to fear the worst. Linden’s coldness toward me. I keep staggering forward because I have to, but what Linden said last night is true: It’s not much of a plan.
“Are you going to eat that, or submit it for fingerprint analysis?” Reed says.
I set the apple down neatly, and tuck my hands under the table.
He tilts his head, watching me. He’s eating some sort of deep-fried stew. The smell is repulsive; some of it drips onto his plaid shirt.
“Okay, then,” he says. “No food today either. So what will sustain you?”
“Oxygen,” I say softly.
“You need to spice it up with something,” he says. This is his way of making conversation. I think he feels sorry for me.
“A question, then,” I say.
He sets his spoon into the bowl with authority. “All right. Go for it.”
I look aside, thinking of how I want to word this. “You and Vaughn don’t seem anything alike,” I begin. “I guess my question is—was he always this way? You said your mother didn’t really care for him.”
Reed laughs gruffly. “He was quiet all the time. I don’t mean like he was being polite or solemn. I mean like he was planning something.”
“He’s still like that,” I say. I try to imagine Vaughn as a child or even as a young man, but I can’t. All I see is a version of a young Linden with blackness where his eyes should be.
“But he didn’t have much purpose until his boy died,” Reed says. “That’s when he reprogrammed the elevators so that only he could access the basement. I never knew what was going on down there.”
“Did he used to let you visit?” I ask, thinking of what Reed said a few days ago about Vaughn not allowing Reed onto his property.
“I used to live there,” Reed says. “When our parents died, they left that house to both of us. Our father was an architect, and it was an old boarding school he’d reconstructed. That’s why it’s so enormous. You’d think, with all that space, there’d be room for both of us. But we seemed to get in each other’s way. We both like things just so.”
“Linden’s grandfather was an architect,” I say quietly, more to myself than to Reed. It makes me happy to know Linden inherited that brilliance. It skipped his father and buried itself in him, like it knew he would do better things with it.
“Linden takes after him in a lot of ways,” Reed agrees. “Vaughn hates when I point that out. He likes to pretend he’s the only family that boy’s got. Won’t even talk about Linden’s mother, or Linden’s brother that died before he was born. It’s one of the things we butted heads about. My brother and I were already walking a fine line with each other, but I suppose the last straw was when Linden fell ill.”
I raise my head at that. Linden told me about a time when he was very sick as a child. He could hear his father’s voice calling him back to consciousness, but he was too scared to answer. He’d made the decision to let go, but he survived anyway.
Reed stares at something over my shoulder, his pupils turning to pinpricks. “That poor boy,” he says distantly. “I really thought it was the end of him.”
“What was it?” I ask, and he snaps back to attention and looks at me. “What made him so sick?”
“I can tell you what Vaughn said, or I can tell you what I think,” he says.
I press my eyebrows together. “You think Vaughn was responsible?”
“Not on purpose,” Reed says. “I don’t think he meant to harm him. But I think he was running some experiment that went haywire. I called him out on it, and he asked me to leave.”
“So you did?” I ask.
“I did,” he says. “I’m better off with my own place anyway. I would have liked to take my nephew with me, but Vaughn would have had my head for it. There’s nowhere I could take that boy where Vaughn wouldn’t have found him.”
“I know the feeling,” I mumble.
“Look at that,” Reed says. He slaps his palms on the table, rattling the bowl, startling me. “You asked for an answer to one question, and you got an entire story. Feeling sustained yet?”
In answer I take a bite from the apple.
“Finish your breakfast and then tie that hair back. I have a new project for you.”
“New project?” I say before taking another bite.
“A cleaning project,” he says. He drops his bowl into the sink and then winks at me. “I think you have a knack for making things shine.”
Once I finish the apple and throw the core into the compost pile that Reed started just outside the kitchen window, and swat away a good deal of flies, Reed leads me past the usual shed and keeps going toward the bigger one.
“What I’m about to show you is top secret stuff,” he says. I can’t tell whether he’s kidding. “I wouldn’t want anyone coming out here chopping it up for parts.”
He fiddles around with a padlock, somehow coaxing it apart without a key. Then he pushes the door open, moves aside, and makes a flourishing gesture with his arm for me to enter first.
It’s dark until he flips a switch, and tiny bulbs strung along the ceiling and walls illuminate the space.
“What do you think, doll?” Reed says.
“It’s … a plane. In your shed.” I can’t hide my astonishment. He told me it would be here, and here it is, yet it still surprises me. It’s rusty and mismatched, but it has a body and wings, and it takes up almost the entirety of the shed. “How did you get it in here?” I ask.
“Didn’t,” he says. “Most of it was already here. I figure it probably crash-landed forty, fifty years ago and was abandoned. So I decided to fix it up, see if I could make it fly. Of course the weather proved to make things difficult, so I built this shed over it.”
The whole thing sounds too absurd for him to have made it up. “How will you get it out?” I say. “How will you even start it without being poisoned by the fumes?”
“Haven’t gotten to that part yet,” he says. “But no matter; she’s not ready to fly.”
I stare at it, and for some reason my shoulders shake and I start to laugh. It’s the first real laugh I’ve felt in days. Or weeks. Or months, maybe. Reed is either a genius or completely mad, or both. But if he’s mad, then I am too, because I love this airplane. I’ve never seen one up close before, and the stories I’ve heard never prepared me for the power such a magnificent thing implies. I want to climb inside of it. I want it to carry me up, the grass getting greener and greener the farther away it becomes.
Reed is grinning when he tugs the handle of the curved door. It looks like it once belonged to a car and was melted into shape. With a horrible rusty noise, it opens from the top, like a curled finger rising to point at me.
The door opens to a small cockpit. There are monitors and buttons and what appear to be two half-circle steering wheels. “The supply room’s in the passenger cabin,” Reed says, pointing me to a curtain that serves as a door.
The passenger cabin is all beige and red, like a mouth. It seems almost human. When I was bedridden in the mansion, Linden read a story to me that was about a scientist named Frankenstein who created a man from the body parts of the dead. Somehow Frankenstein gave this creation a pulse and made it breathe. I imagine it must have looked like this odd assemblage of pieces.
The plane is a lot bigger than it looks from the outside. The ceiling is high enough that Reed, who’s taller than me, can nearly stand up straight. There’s some room to walk around. The seats are red, mounted to the wall. There are four of them, in pairs of two, facing each other. The carpet is beige and stained, like the walls.
What Reed calls a supply room is actually a closet. Opening its door reduces the passenger cabin by half. “Needs to be organized,” Reed says, standing at the curtain that separates the cockpit from the passenger cabin. He watches as I open one of the cabinets. Shoe boxes tumble out at me and spill their contents onto my shoes. “I was thinking that’d be your job.”
It’s easy, repetitive work. Sorting medical equipment apart from the dehydrated snacks and labeling their boxes. Reed works on the outside of the plane. I hear him banging parts into place and smoothing them down, trying to blend all the pieces together. He says he’s going to paint it when he’s done. He says it’ll be beautiful. I think it already is.
I open another box, and it’s full of cloth handkerchiefs. I recognize them immediately. They’re exactly like the ones at the mansion: plain white, with a single red sharp-leafed flower embroidered onto them. Gabriel gave me a handkerchief with this pattern, and I kept it for the remainder of my time at the mansion. The same flower that marks the iron gate.
“Oh, those?” Reed says when I ask him about them. He doesn’t look away from his work. He’s sitting on one of the wings, pressing down a sheet of copper and using a screwdriver to mark where the screws will go. “I thought they’d make good bandages; put them with the first aid stuff.”
“Where did they come from?” I ask.
“They used to belong to the boarding school,” he says. “A ton of things were left behind when my parents bought the building—handkerchiefs, blankets, things like that.”
“But what kind of flower is it?” I say.
“It’s a lotus,” he says. “Doesn’t look exactly like one, if you ask me, but that’s the only logical thing it could be. The school was called the Charles Lotus Academy for Girls.”
“Charles Lotus? As in, his name was Lotus?”
“Yep. Now get back to work making things sparkle. I’m not letting you live here eating up all the apples and oxygen for free, you know.”
The rest of the day is a malaise of chores. I pack the handkerchiefs away and bury them at the bottom of all the medical supplies. I don’t want to ever see them again. It’s my fault for hoping they symbolized something important. For believing anything that comes from the mansion could mean anything good.
I take a shower and go to bed early. The sky is still pink, undercooked. I bury myself beneath the blanket. It isn’t very thick; I shiver most nights, but right now the blanket feels like the heaviest thing in the world. It comforts me. I don’t just want to sleep; I want to be crushed down until I disappear.
In the morning there are voices. Something hissing and spitting on the griddle. Footsteps are pounding up the steps, and a voice calls after them, “Wait!” but the footsteps don’t comply. My door is pushed open, and there’s Cecily. The sunlight touches every part of her, making her into an overexposed photograph. Her smile floats ahead of her, a double bright line. “Surprise,” she says.
I sit up, trying to force consciousness back into my brain. “What are you—How did you get here?”
She hops onto the edge of my bed, jostling me. “We took a cab,” she says excitedly. “I’d never been in one before. It smelled like frozen garbage, and it cost a ton of money.”
I rub my eyes, trying to comprehend what she’s saying. “You took a cab?”
“Housemaster Vaughn has the limo,” she says. “He’s at some conference for the weekend. So we came to see you.”
“We?”
“Me and Linden.” She frowns at me. “You don’t look well,” she says. “You didn’t contract sepsis from this place, did you? It’s so filthy.”
“I like it here,” I say, collapsing back onto the pillow, pretending not to notice that it reeks of mustiness. I wonder who slept here before me. They probably died last century.
“It’s worse than the orphanage was,” Cecily says. She pats my leg as she stands, and heads for the door. “Anyway, get up, come downstairs. We brought you things.”
I take my time about getting dressed after she goes. I’m in no hurry to see the emptiness in Linden’s eyes when he looks at me.
I guess I’ve forgotten to brush my hair, judging by the way everyone looks at me when I enter the kitchen. And Cecily kindly informs me that my shirt is inside out.
“She hasn’t been eating,” Reed says apologetically. “I tried waving the fork around her head and everything.”
I drop into a chair opposite Linden. He’s holding Bowen, who is reaching for the things on the shelves. He wants the jars that have caught the morning light; I think he believes they hold little pieces of the sun.
“Of course she hasn’t been eating,” Cecily says. She stands behind me and gently works the tangles from my hair. “She doesn’t want to die.”
Reed lights his cigar and bumps Linden’s shoulder with his fist. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be blessed by the presence of your wives.”
Cecily drops my hair. She reaches across the table and snatches the cigar right out of Reed’s teeth and squishes the ignited tip into the table.
“What the hell!” Reed snaps. The house rattles. Bowen stops reaching.
“I’m pregnant, you moron,” Cecily says. “Don’t you know anything about gestation? And in case you’re blind, there is also a five-month-old baby sitting right next to you.”
Reed stares at her, aghast. And then he narrows his eyes as he stands and leans forward across the table, until his nose is an inch from hers. And I really think he’s about to strangle her—Linden tenses, ready to stop him—but Reed only growls and says, “I don’t like you, kid.”
She presses her hand to her chest. “Break my heart,” she says, spins around, and makes her exit.
Reed rescues the smoldering cigar and tries to relight it, grunting with each failed spark. “Will never know what you see in that one,” he says to Linden.
“I’m sorry,” I say, standing and scooping the ashes into my hand, and then dumping them into the sink. “She’s just sort of an acquired taste.”
Reed bellows with laughter. “Acquired taste,” he says, clapping his arm around Linden. “See now, this one, I like. You’re letting the wrong one get away.”
Linden’s cheeks go pink.
Cecily returns with a backpack slung over her arm. It also bears the lotus embroidery on one of the front pockets. She grabs my shoulders and guides me back into a chair, then sets a foil container in front of me and opens the lid. I’m hit with a blast of sweet-smelling steam. The head cook’s berry cobbler, topped with giant crumbles of sugar. Cecily presses a plastic fork into my hand and says, “Eat.”
Linden says, “Let her be. She can take care of herself.”
“Obviously she can’t,” Cecily says. “Look at her.”
“I’m fine,” I say, and to prove it I take a forkful of cobbler. Some small, distant part of me acknowledges that it’s delicious, rich with fat and nutrients I’ve been in need of. But a more frontal, prominent part of me is having a hard time just getting it down my throat.
Cecily resumes working on my tangles.
The silence is tense, and Reed breaks it by saying, “Well, I hate to leave a party. But I’ve got work to get to.” He makes a production of sticking a fresh cigar between his teeth as he heads for the door. “Help yourself to anything you’d like.” He eyes the cobbler and then looks at me with his eyebrows raised. “Though, it looks like you’ve brought your own supplies.”
Floorboards creak under his feet as he walks down the hall. As soon as he’s gone outside, Linden says, “Cecily, that was incredibly rude.”
She ignores him, humming and setting my hair neatly against my shoulders like she’s laying down an expensive dress. I’m glad my sister wife is here. She’s a chore sometimes, but she comforts me. I want to lean against her and let the weight I’ve been carrying fall away. But a part of me is angry that she has returned. I already said good-bye to her, accepted that we had no choice but to part ways. I don’t want to have to say good-bye again.
I can feel Linden frowning at me. I can’t bring myself to look at him.
“You’re not eating,” Cecily fusses.
“Leave her alone,” Linden says.
The tension is too much. Too tight. I feel myself bursting, but somehow my voice is very soft when I say, “Yes, why don’t you? Why don’t you both leave me alone?”
I look up at Linden, then Cecily. “Why did you come back?”
Cecily tries to touch my forehead, but I lean away from her. I stand up and walk backward toward the sink. Their stares are strangling me somehow.
Cecily looks at Linden and says, “Do you see?”
“See what?” I say, and this time my voice is a little louder.
Linden swallows something hard in his throat, composing himself, readying that diplomatic tone of his. “Cecily,” he says, “why don’t you take Bowen outside? It’s a warm day. Show him the wildflowers.”
It unnerves me that she agrees easily to this. She gives me a frown as she goes, and then sings something to Bowen about daffodils.
“I’m sorry,” Linden says after she has left us alone. “I warned her not to smother you. She’s just been worried about your well-being.”
I know this. Cecily worries. It’s her way. She’s the youngest of all Linden’s wives, yet she has always loved to play mother hen. But Linden is the practical diplomat in this marriage. He should be reminding her that I’ll be gone for good. And sure, she’d argue with him. She’d slam a few doors and refuse to speak to him for a while. But how long could that really go on? Locked up on that wives’ floor by herself, the loneliness would make her forgive him soon enough.
“You shouldn’t have brought her here,” I say. “You shouldn’t be here either. We both know there’s nothing to figure out. You’re only prolonging our good-byes.” And I don’t add that every day he keeps me here is another day my brother thinks I’m dead and is capable of destruction. And still I can’t bring myself to escape in the night, behind his back. Not again, especially after all he’s done to help me.
He looks at the wall over my head. I can’t read his expression. He opens his mouth to speak, but only a fraction of a syllable makes it out. I concentrate on a crack in the linoleum floor that looks like the apex of a leaf.
“I can’t believe the things you told me about my father,” he says. “You understand that, don’t you? I can’t side against him.”
He seemed to be on my side while he was carrying me away from his father’s clutches and trying to stop the bleeding. He seemed to be on my side when he slept in the chair at my bedside and told me he wouldn’t let his father cross the threshold of that hospital room while I was inside it.
But the upsetting part is that I do understand. While Vaughn controlled my sister wives and me with gates and holograms, he controlled his son with something deeper than blood or bones. Vaughn is Linden’s only constant. How can Linden have any choice but to love his father, to believe there’s good in the man who raised him?
I’m no one to judge. There is no number of buildings my brother can destroy, and no number of lives he can claim, that would undo my love for him.
I nod.
From somewhere very far away, in a world where there’s only green and deeper green, Bowen shrieks with laughter.
“I’ve brought some things for you,” Linden says. “I was going to bring more of your clothes, but I thought they’d only weigh you down if you were traveling. So I packed a first aid kit and some bus fare. You should be careful about letting anyone see that you’re carrying money.” He laughs, but it comes out more like a cough. “But you probably know that, don’t you?”
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say. Then, thinking better of it, I add, “But thank you.”
He gets up and pushes his chair back against the table, then Cecily’s chair, then mine. “You and Cecily can share the bed. I’m going to sleep on the divan in my uncle’s library. I’ll set up Bowen’s bassinet in the bedroom, but you won’t have to worry; he mostly sleeps through the night.”
“You’re really staying the weekend, then?” I say.
“It’ll be good for Cecily,” he says. “She’s been stir-crazy lately.” He lingers in the doorway for a moment, his back to me. “It’ll give both of you a chance for a proper good-bye. It’ll help her to let go of you.”
6
CECILY STANDS at the bedroom mirror, frowning. Her shirt is rolled to her chest, and she dusts her fingers over the pink ribbons of shining skin that run up her stomach. “Horrible, aren’t they?” she says. “Bowen stretched me out as far as I could go.”
I’m sitting on the bed, staring at the book I’ve taken from Reed’s library. He doesn’t have as many books as his brother, and they’re all tattered and old. I get the sense that he inherited the rejects of the collection. Some of the history books have pages ripped away, and passages that are blacked out. There was a book about the discovery of America—I was drawn to it by the image of a ship on the cover—but the pages were filled with furious notes calling the text a lie, theories scrawled in smudged, sloppy lettering I couldn’t read. I didn’t want to read it anyway; I just wanted to look at the ships and try to remember Gabriel’s fingers in my hair.
I turn the page, staring at yet another photograph of a cargo ship. Gabriel would have something to say about it, I’m sure. He would know how fast it could move across the water. This ship looks burdened by the weight of its cargo, though. I bet that if I stowed away, it would be easy for me to hide among those towering crates, but it would take me months to reach Gabriel. It would be torturous, feeling myself drag across the water so slowly.
But slowly would be better than not at all.
Cecily is still going on about how she’s lost her youth, and how her body will never be the same, but how happy she is to be a part of it all. Some kind of miracle, reinforced hope. I don’t want to look at her naked stomach, which is starting to take the shape of an upside-down question mark; her knuckles and cheeks and feet are always bright red. She gave birth to her first child with difficulty, fazing in and out of consciousness, crying when she had the strength, white from blood loss. I don’t want to think about her going through it all again. The whole thing terrifies me.
But it’s unavoidable. Since Cecily arrived with her son, this room has smelled like a nursery. Powder and some indeterminable sweetness that lingers on infant skin. It has taken over the room like it has taken over her life. The child here is no longer her.
“Aren’t you tired?” she asks, falling onto the bed beside me and kicking off her socks before getting under the blanket. “Don’t you want to change into your pajamas?”
“Not yet,” I say. “I think I’ll read for a while. I could go somewhere else if the light bothers you.”
“No, stay,” she yawns, and rests her head on my knee and closes her eyes.
Within minutes she’s breathing that disquieting pregnancy snore that makes me worry. We were brought to Linden as breeding machines, and Vaughn saw no greater opportunity than in the most naïve among all the girls to tumble from that line: Cecily. I’ve no doubt that’s why she was chosen. He saw that determination in her eyes, that vulnerability. She would do anything, anything to belong to his son after a lifetime of belonging to no one at all.
What is happening to her? What does it do to a young girl to birth two children in less than a year’s time? There’s a rash across her cheeks; her pianist’s fingers are swollen. In sleep she clings to my shirt the way Bowen clings to hers. The way a child clings to its mother.
I rake my fingers through her hair as I go on flipping the pages.
I’ve gone through all the pictures of boats a second time, never bothering with the words, when there’s a soft knock at the door. I know it’s Linden. Reed never comes upstairs at night. In fact, I’m not sure where he sleeps, or even if he does.
“Come in,” I say.
Linden inches into the room through the slight gap in the doorway. His presence is barely there. He looks at Cecily and me, and I feel like a model in an unfinished portrait. The Ashby Wives. There were four of us once.
“Is she asleep?” Linden asks.
“I’m awake,” Cecily murmurs. “I had a dream we were ice-skating.” She sits up, rubbing her eyes.
“I wanted to see how you were feeling,” Linden tells her, looking right past me. I’m nothing—candlelight on the wall. “Did you need anything to drink? Are your feet sore?”
She says something about needing a back rub, and I take my book and slip out of the room just as easily as Linden slipped in.
I’ve memorized which floorboards in the hallway don’t creak, thereby leaving Reed undisturbed as he toils about his mysteries below me.
The window is open in the library, and the books and walls and floorboards are all cool with the night’s breeze. I hear crickets as though they’re in the shelves. The stars are so bright and unobstructed that their light fills the room, making everything silver.
I replace the boat book and run my fingers over the spines of the other books, not really looking for anything. I think I’m too exhausted to read, anyway. There’s a pillow and a blanket on the divan, and it looks inviting, but I don’t feel right about getting into the bed Linden has made for himself. I focus on the book spines.
“My uncle used to let me pretend they were bricks,” Linden says, startling me. He eases a thick hardcover from the shelf, hefts it in either hand, and then places it back. “I liked to build houses out of them. They never came out exactly like I’d planned, but that’s good. It taught me that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.”
For some reason I’m finding it difficult to meet his eyes. I nod at one of the lower shelves and say, “Maybe it’s because in your mind you don’t have to worry about building materials. So you’re not as limited.”
“That’s astute,” he says. He pauses. “You’ve always been astute about things.”
I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a compliment, but I suppose it’s true. So much silence passes between us after that, with nothing to sustain the atmosphere but impassive crickets and starlight, that I become willing to say anything that will end it. The words that come out of me are, “I’m sorry.”
I hear his breath catch. Maybe he’s as surprised as I am. I don’t look up to see what his expression is.
“I know you think that I’m awful. I don’t blame you.” That’s it—all I have the courage to say. I fidget with the hem of my sweater. It’s one of Deirdre’s creations, of course. Emerald green embroidered with gold gossamer leaves. Since having my custom-made clothes returned to me, I’ve been sleeping in them. I’ve missed how comfortable they are, how getting dressed into something that fits every angle and curve feels like rematerializing into something worthwhile.
“I don’t know what to think,” Linden says quietly. “Yes, I’ve told myself that you’re awful. I’ve told myself you must be—that’s the only explanation. But my thoughts always go back to the you I remember. You, lying in the orange grove and saying you didn’t know if we were worth saving. You held my hand then. Do you remember?”
Something rushes through my blood, from my heart to my fingertips, where the memory still lingers. “Yes,” I say.
“And about a thousand other things,” he says, pausing sometimes between his words, making sure he has them right. I get the sense that words are not sufficient tools for him to build what’s going on in his head as he stands before me. “While you were gone, I tried to take all of those memories and turn them into lies. And I thought I’d done it. But I look at you now, and I still see the girl who fed me blueberries when I was grieving. The girl who was in a red dress, falling asleep against me on the drive home.”
He takes a step closer, and my heart leaps into my mouth. “I try to hate you. I’m trying right now.”
I look at him and ask, “Is it working?”
He moves his hand, and I think he’s going to reach for a book on the shelf above me, but he touches my hair instead. Something in me tightens with expectancy. I hold my breath.
When he pushes forward, my mouth falls open, expecting his kiss even before it comes. His lips are familiar. I know the shape of them, know how to make mine fit against them. His taste is familiar too. For all the illusions and colors and sweet smells of that mansion, and of our marriage, he has always tasted like skin. His breaths are shallow. I’m holding his life against my tongue, between my rows of teeth. He’s offering it up.
But it doesn’t belong to me. I know that.
I draw back, gently step out of his hands that gripped my shoulders and were just edging their way to either side of my throat.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
One of his hands still hovers near me, a satellite. I imagine what it would be like to tilt my head into his open palm. The flood of warmth bursting through me.
He looks at me, and I don’t know what he sees. I used to think it was Rose. But she’s not here with us now, in this room. It’s just him and me, and the books. I feel like our lives are in those books. I feel like all the words on the pages are for us.
I could kiss him again. I could do much more than that. But I know it would be for the wrong reasons. It would be because my family is far away, or else dead, and because I miss Gabriel; in my dreams he’s something small I dropped into the ocean, and I wake knowing that I might never find him again. But Linden is here. Brilliantly here. And it would be too easy to make him a substitute for all those things, to take advantage of his desire for me.
But then logic sets in. Logic and guilt.
I won’t hurt him the way I did before, manipulating his affections while I worked for the freedom I wanted.
He seems to understand. His fingers close into his palm, and he lowers his hand from my side.
“I can’t,” I say again, with more certainty.
He steps closer to me, and my nerves bristle like the long grass outside. Everything is rustling with expectancy.
“We never consummated our marriage,” he says softly. “At first I thought you only needed time. I was patient.” He presses his lips together for a moment, thinking. “But then it didn’t matter so much. I liked just being with you. I liked the way you breathed when you were asleep. I liked when you took the champagne glass from my hand. I liked how your fingers were always too long for your gloves.”
A smile tugs at one side of my mouth, and I allow it.
“Looking back, those feel like the most important parts. They were real, weren’t they?”
“Yes,” I answer, and it’s the truth.
He touches my left hand and looks at my eyes, asking permission. I nod, and he holds my palm flat against his and then holds my hand between us. His other hand traces the slope of my wedding ring and pinches either side of it between his thumb and index finger. When I realize what’s happening, my pulse quickens, my mouth goes dry.
He slides the ring down my finger, and it hitches on my knuckle, like part of me is still trying to hang on. My body lilts forward, tethered to the ring for only an instant more before letting go.
This was it. This was why I kept wearing my wedding ring, why it never felt right to remove it myself. There was only one person who could set me free.
“Let’s call this an official annulment,” he says.
I can’t help it. I throw my arms around him and pull him tight against me. He tenses, startled, but then he puts his arms around me too. I can feel his closed fist where he holds the ring.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
Minutes later I’m lying on the divan, watching my ankle swing back and forth over the edge like a guillotine. Linden paces the length of the room, tracing the book spines.
I look for the moon through the open window, but it’s hiding behind clouds.
Linden says, “What’s your brother like?”
I blink. It’s the first time he’s asked me about Rowan. Maybe he’s trying to get to know me, now that he knows I’ll give him the truth.
“He’s smarter than me,” I say. “And practical.”
“Is he older? Younger?”
“About ninety seconds younger,” I say. “We’re twins.”
“Twins?” he says.
I hang my head over the arm of the divan, looking at him upside down. “You sound surprised.”
“It’s just—twins,” he says, leaning against a row of paisley cloth-bound books. “That changes the entire way I look at you.” He keeps his mouth open, struggling for the right words.
“Like I’m half of a whole?” I say, trying to help him.
“I wouldn’t put it like that,” he says. “You’re a whole person by yourself.”
I look out the window again. “You know what scares me?” I say. “I’m starting to feel like you’re right.”
Linden is quiet for a long time. I hear his clothes rustling, the chair creaking under his weight. “I think I understand,” he says. “When I lost Rose, I kept going, I still do, but I’ll never be what I was when she was alive. It’ll always feel like something’s … not right, without her here.”
“That’s sort of what it’s like,” I agree. Even though my brother and I are both still alive, the longer we’re apart, the more I feel myself changing. It’s like I’m evolving into something that doesn’t include him. I don’t think I can ever be the person I was before all this.
It’s quiet again after that. It’s a comfortable quiet, though. Peaceful. I feel unburdened, and after a while I start to imagine that the divan is a boat moving over the ocean. Sunken cities play music beneath the waves. The ghosts are stirring.
Someone turns on the light, and my thoughts scatter away as I blink at the brightness. This is one of the few rooms with functioning lightbulbs, though they flicker.
“Linden?” Cecily says.
She’s standing in the doorway, her knuckles white from clutching the frame. Everything about her is white: her face, the quivering misshapen O of her lips, the nightgown that she’s got bunched up to her hips as though she’s unveiling her body to us.
But sliding down her thighs is an abundance of red. It’s pooling at her feet, from the trail of blood that followed her into the room.
Linden moves fast. He scoops her up by the backs of her knees and shoulders. She comes alive with a scream so awful that he has to brace his hand on the wall to keep from falling. She’s whimpering while he’s rushing her down the stairs.
I hurry after them down the long hallway, making footprints in the red puddles and thinking about how small she is, about how much blood it takes to keep a girl her size going, how much of it she can stand to lose. Redness is leaking rivers over Linden’s arms like veins atop his skin.
He says my name, and I realize what he wants. I push ahead of him and open the door.
Outside, the night is warm, sprinkled with stars. The grass sighs in indignation as we crush it with our bare feet. Wings and insect legs make music, which moments before had been lovely through the open window in the room full of books.
In the backseat of the car, which reeks of cigars and mold, I take Cecily’s head in my lap while Linden runs off to find his uncle to drive us.
“I lost the baby,” Cecily chokes.
“No,” I say. “No, you didn’t.”
She closes her eyes, shudders with a sob.
“They’ll know what to do at the hospital,” I tell her, though I don’t believe a word of it. I’m only trying to calm her, and maybe myself. I hold her hand in both of mine. It’s clammy, ice-cold. I can’t reconcile this pale, trembling girl with the one who stood before the mirror hardly an hour ago, fussing over her stomach.
Thankfully, Linden is back soon.
The drive to the hospital is rocky, thanks to Reed’s reckless driving and the lack of a paved road. Linden holds Bowen, whose eyes are wide and curious, and shushes him even though he doesn’t cry. I’ve always thought Bowen was intuitive. He just might be the only child of Linden’s to live.
I feel a gentle pressure around my finger, and I look down to realize Cecily is touching the place where my ring used to be. But she doesn’t ask about it, the bride who has always made it her mission to know everything about everyone in her marriage. She has been eerily silent this whole ride.
“Open your eyes,” Linden tells her when she closes them. “Love? Cecily. Look at me.”
With effort she does.
“Tell me where it hurts,” he says.
“It’s like contractions,” she says, cringing as we hit a pothole.
“It’s only another minute from here,” Linden says. “Just keep your eyes open.” The gentleness is gone from his voice, and I know he’s trying to stay in control, but he looks so frightened.
Cecily is fading. Her breaths are labored and slow. Her eyes are dull.
“‘There will come soft rain,’” I blurt out in a panic. She looks up at me, and we recite the words in unison, “‘And the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound.’”
“What is that?” Linden says. “What are you saying?”
“It’s a poem,” I tell him. “Jenna liked it, didn’t she, Cecily?”
“Because of the ending,” Cecily says. Her voice sounds miles away. “She just liked how it ended.”
“I’d like to hear the whole thing,” Linden says.
But we’ve arrived at the hospital. It’s the only real source of light for miles. Most of the streetlights—the ones still standing, anyway—have long since burned out.
Cecily has closed her eyes again, and Linden passes the baby off to me and hoists her into his arms. She murmurs something I can’t understand—I think it’s another line of the poem—and her muscles go lax.
It takes a few seconds for me to realize that her chest has stopped rising and falling. I wait for her next breath, but it doesn’t come.
I’ve never heard a human make a noise like the cry that escapes Linden’s throat when he calls her name. Reed runs past us, and when he returns, he’s got a fleet of nurses behind him, first generation and new. They rip Cecily from Linden’s arms, leave him staggering and reaching after her. I can’t help but think this attention is due to her status as Vaughn’s daughter-in-law. Reed must have made that clear.
Bowen starts to wail, and I bounce him on my hip as I watch Cecily’s body through the glass doors. The hospital lights reveal the gray of her skin. And, strangely, I can see her wedding band as though through a magnifying glass; the long serrated petals etched into it are like knives. They catch every bit of hospital light, the gleam stabbing my eyes. Then she’s laid onto a gurney that turns a corner, and she’s gone.
She’s dead. We’ll never get her back.
The thought hits me in the back of the knees, shaking me with its certainty.
7
I’M SITTING ON the floor of the hospital lobby, waiting. That’s always the worst part, the waiting.
Bowen has fallen into a quiet lull, ear to my heart. My arm hurts from supporting him. But I can’t think about that. I can’t think about anything. Voices and bodies move past.
The lobby is crowded. The chairs that line the walls are full of the coughing and the sleeping and the wounded. This is one of the few research hospitals in the state; my father-in-law often boasts about it. They take the wounded, the emaciated, the pregnant, or those who are dying of the virus—depending on which cases are interesting enough to be seen, and depending on who is willing to have blood drawn and tissue sampled without being compensated for it.
A young nurse is standing with a clipboard, trying to decide who is in the worst shape. Cecily was hurried down that sterile hallway not because of her condition but because her father-in-law owns this place. They know Linden here; last I saw him, someone was trying to console him as he wrestled away in pursuit of his wife.
I shouldn’t have Bowen in a place like this. His superior genes will promise him a life free of major diseases, sure, but he isn’t completely immune to the germs that are surely hovering around us. He could catch a cold. Someone has to think of his health, and suddenly that task has been placed in my hands, along with his chubby little body.
I raise my head and search for Reed. Eventually I spot him emerging from the same hallway that took my sister wife. Linden is pacing ahead of him, head down, face drained of color. I rise to meet them, and I realize my knees are trembling. And suddenly I don’t want to hear what they have to tell me. I don’t want to return Bowen to his father. I want to take him and run away from here.
Linden’s hands have been scrubbed of the blood. His face is splashed wet. The hem of his shirt is wrinkled, and when he begins twisting it in his fist again, I understand why.
“They couldn’t get a pulse—” he says, and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, hard. “I wanted to be with her, but they pushed me away.”
All I can think is that Cecily was supposed to outlive us all.
But when I open my mouth, what comes out is, “Bowen shouldn’t be here.”
Reed understands. Reed has always understood me. He takes the baby, and he’s so careful with him, even smiles at him.
“She was fine when I kissed her good night,” Linden says.
I should be saying something to comfort him. That was always my role in this marriage, to console him. But we aren’t married anymore, and I can’t remember how to be.
“I don’t want them to dissect her,” I say. I know I shouldn’t be so morbid, but I can’t stop myself. If Cecily is dead, then all the rules are broken. “I don’t want your father to have her body. I don’t—” My lip is quivering.
“He won’t get her,” Reed assures me.
Linden whimpers into his palms. “This is my fault,” he says. His voice is strange. “We shouldn’t have tried for another baby so soon. My father said it would be okay, but I should have seen it was too much for her. She was already so—” His voice breaks, and I think the word he croaks out is “frail.”
In more rational circumstances, hearing the intimate details of what went on between my sister wife and my former husband would embarrass me, but feelings of any sort are miles from me now.
“I need air,” I say.
“Wait,” he starts to say, but I stumble on anyway, until a pair of hands grabs my arms. I stare at the nurse’s name tag, uncomprehending, unable to read. He’s probably younger than I am. There were nurses at the lab where my parents worked too, and it always astounded me how serious they could be, how well they knew medicine.
“Mrs. Ashby?” the nurse asks, his voice too gentle.
I shake my head, eyes on the floor. “Sorry,” I whisper. “No.”
Linden comes up behind me. He says words I don’t understand. And the nurse says words I don’t understand. And I can’t catch any of what’s being said until I hear a cruel pang of hope in Linden’s voice when he asks, “Can we see her?”
I whip my head around to stare at him. He wants to see her? Doesn’t he understand that a body isn’t a person? Doesn’t he understand how awful that would be—how awful it already was to watch her get swept away a few moments ago?
“But it will be a while yet before she’s lucid,” the nurse says. And suddenly—I don’t know why—his name tag makes sense. Isaac. The whole world reemerges from the darkness that had been closing in around me.
My heart starts pounding in my ears, my throat. I try to hang on to what’s being said now.
Somewhere, on a table in a sterile room, my sister wife took in a sharp breath. It happened just as they were drawing the sleeves from their watches to call a time of death.
Her heart forced blood out from her chest, back to her brain, her fingertips, her cheeks.
Cecily. My Cecily. Always the fighter.
A squeaking noise escapes through my teeth, joy and relief.
We’re guided down a hallway, our footsteps echoing around us at all angles like claps.
Linden and I huddle together to see her through the small window in her door. We can’t go in yet. She can’t be agitated. Her body is still working through the shock of losing a pregnancy in its second trimester; all of this is fascinating to the promise of research, which is what this hospital is all about. The doctors want to know everything about the new generations, and such a violent miscarriage invites all sorts of interest. There are monitors recording her heart rate. The nurse is explaining that her temperature will be checked every hour. They’re taking thorough notes on any slight change in her body chemistry.
But I don’t see the intrigue in any of those things. I don’t see more research fodder. All I see is my sister wife, barely hanging on.
There’s a plastic mask over her mouth, misting with her breaths. Her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes lazily rove along the wires that connect the machines to her body. Her heartbeats are small green bursts on the monitor. She looks so alone and lost in her dreams.
I press my hand to the glass, and the ghost of my frowning reflection is superimposed over her bed.
“Will she be all right?” Linden asks. I don’t think he’s heard any of the nurse’s rambling.
“You’ll be able to see her in the morning,” the nurse says.
Old tears still glisten on Linden’s face. His lips move, sending inaudible prayers to phantom gods. The only words I can make out are “thank you.” He takes my hand and leads me to the lobby, where we will wait for the morning light to come and fill Cecily’s hair with its usual fire.
Why did this happen? Any number of reasons. She’s young, the first generation doctor tells Linden. And, superior genes or not, pregnancies in rapid succession can take a toll on a young girl. I can tell he’s being disapproving. So many of the first generations hate what has happened to their children and their children’s children. They look at us and see what we should have been, not what we are.
Doctors speak in impersonal, clinical terms: fetus, infection, placenta, hypothesis, patient. This textbook approach does wonders for taking the emotional edge out of it. The most likely hypothesis here is that the fetus has been dead for days, and, left unchecked, an infection spread through her blood like a wildfire. Eventually her body caught up and worked to expel the source of the problem, and she went into labor. She started hemorrhaging, and, finally, she went into shock. While we were trying to keep her awake in the car, her body was already shutting down. We were inevitably going to lose her without proper treatment. It all sounds so official and possible the way the doctor explains it. Like I’m reading one of my parents’ lab reports.
It’s that simple. It ends there, with no mention of the fact that if she hadn’t mustered the strength to get out of bed and drag herself down the hall, it would have been too late when we found her. How much time would we have squandered, talking about annulments and fraternal twins as she died alone at the other end of the hall? I file that thought as far back into my brain as I can, out of sight.
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Lauren DeStefano
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The third and final novel in Lauren DeStefano’s breathtaking dystopian romance series, The Chemical Garden TrilogyTime is running out for Rhine.With less than three years left until the virus claims her life, Rhine is desperate for answers. Having escaped torment at Vaughn’s mansion, she finds respite in the dilapidated home of her husband’s uncle, an eccentric inventor who hates Vaughn almost as much as Rhine does.Rhine’s determination to be reunited with her twin brother, Rowan, increases as each day brings terrifying revelations to light about his involvement in an underground resistance. She realizes must find him before he destroys the one thing they have left: hope.In this breathtaking conclusion to Lauren DeStefano’s The Chemical Garden trilogy, everything Rhine knows to be true will be irrevocably shattered. But what she discovers along the way has alarming implications for her future – and about the past her parents never had the chance to explain.