Sever (11 page)

I listen to the monitor steadily relaying my sister wife’s pulse, and I think of how far away Gabriel is. I don’t know that I could ever love him the way that Linden and Cecily are in love, or the way Linden and Rose were. I never saw the point in exhausting so much emotion on something there are so few years to enjoy. I never planned on getting married, though in weak and foolish moments I let myself pretend there would be time for such things.

But this surge of longing that comes to me now—is it love? I’ve never felt so alone.

We can change so many times in our lives. We’re born into a family, and it’s the only life we can imagine, but it changes. Buildings collapse. Fires burn. And the next second we’re someplace else entirely, going through different motions and trying to keep up with this new person we’ve become.

I was somebody’s daughter once, and then I was somebody’s wife. I’m neither of those things now. This sullen boy sitting before me is not my husband, and the girl he’s fretting over isn’t me, will never be me.

L
INDEN LOOKS
at the clock mounted over the door.

“Maybe you should go to the cafeteria,” he tells me.

“Do you need me to get you something?” I ask.

He shakes his head, watches the motion of Cecily’s chest as she draws a troubled breath. She’s been asleep for hours. “My father will be here soon,” he says. “It’s best if he doesn’t see you. He’s rushing over from a conference in Clearwater. He said it would take him a couple of hours, but that was this morning.”

My blood goes cold. “You called your father?”

“Of course.” He says this louder than he perhaps meant to, because Cecily’s eyes open. She stares at us through a haze, and I’m not sure if she’s awake. Linden pushes the hair from her forehead and leans close and says, “You’re getting the best possible care. My father will see to it.”

At that her pupils dilate. I can see her immediate fight
to regain awareness. It’s like watching a person that has fallen through the ice and has nothing to grab for. “No,” she says. The acceleration of her heart makes the beeping on the monitor intensify. “Linden, no. Please, no.” She looks to me for help, and I grip her hand.

“What’s the matter, love?” Linden says. “Nobody is going to hurt you. I’m right here.”

She shakes her head wildly. “I don’t want your father. I don’t want him.”

But it’s too late. Her nightmare has arrived. I can hear his voice in the hallway, calling her name.

And then he’s here.

Vaughn brings with him the smell of spring rain and earth. It has always been a smell I associated with life, but right now it’s choking. His hair is wet and windswept, his coat dripping, his boots muddying the tiles. “Oh, Cecily,” he says, “I’m so sorry about the baby. Perhaps if you listened to me about staying in bed, it wouldn’t have happened. You always were too reckless for your own good.”

Of course he’s blaming her for this.

She’s kicking her legs, propelling herself away from him. I’ve never seen her so frightened. The girl who has spent the last several hours asleep is now squeezing my hand with enough brute strength, I’m certain, to bruise bone.

“Please, love, you have to lie back down,” Linden urges. “You’re not well.”

But Cecily doesn’t even hear him. “You did this,” she
tells Vaughn. “You’ll bury me alive the first chance you get.”

The faraway stare in her eyes terrifies me. She’s sitting up now, speaking in whole sentences, but she’s muddled by delirium.

Vaughn brushes past me and leans over her bed. I think he’s going to grab her arm like that morning outside of Reed’s house, but he only touches the IV bag hanging over her and checks the writing on it. “They shouldn’t have you on something this strong,” he says. “I’ll get this sorted out.”

“No,” Cecily says. “No.” She turns to Linden, pleading. “You have to make him leave. He wanted me dead. Me and our baby.”

The hurt in Linden’s eyes is immediate. He blinks several times before he can speak. “Cecily, no . . . ”

“Just get him out of here, Linden,” I say through gritted teeth.

Vaughn looks at me with dead eyes before regarding Cecily with a surge of affection. “Darling, you don’t have a clear head,” he says. “We’ll get you set up with something milder, and you’ll feel better.” Then, to Linden, “You and I should talk outside.”

Once they’re gone, I manage to calm Cecily enough that she lies down. “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “He isn’t coming back.”

“He’ll try to take Bowen,” she says, tears brimming in her eyes.

“That’s not going to happen. Have you seen Reed’s gun collection? He won’t let anyone touch Bowen.”

I wipe at her cheeks with the cuff of my green sweater because it’s the softest thing I can think of. It catches her tears without absorbing them, and they hang between the fibers like stars.

“I feel strange,” she says, “like I’m underwater.”

I tuck the bedsheet up to her chin and press the back of my hand to her forehead. “That’s the fever.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I say. “I know the feeling.”

“I was never sick a day in my life before I got pregnant with Bowen,” she says. “I never even had a runny nose.”

“You’ll be better soon,” I say, willing it to be true.

“I dreamt Housemaster Vaughn pushed me into the dirt and I started sinking,” she says. “His eyes turned into Jenna’s eyes. I tried to scream, and my mouth filled up with mud.”

It doesn’t matter if I keep constant vigil; I can never protect her from what’s happening in her dreams.

“That wasn’t real.” I pull the flimsy hospital blanket over the sheet. “Close your eyes,” I whisper, and she does.

I weave small sections of her hair into braids, untangle them and start again. It’s something Jenna used to do to our hair when she was bored, which was often, and doing it now makes me feel like Cecily and I are still a part of that trio.

“Don’t leave me by myself,” she says. “Please.”

“Of course not. I’m right here,” I say.

“He tried to murder me,” she says.

“If he tries again, I’ll murder him first,” I tell her.

“Not necessary.” Her voice is slurring. “I’ll do it myself.”

I keep up the braiding, and eventually the drugs and the exhaustion pull her back under. Her mouth falls open, letting out steady breaths.

She’s grown so much since I ran away. Her pert chin has elongated just enough for her face to lose its permanent pout and give her an air of assuredness instead. Her bratty sense of superiority has matured into a cool, practical certainty, which is perhaps why Vaughn grabbed her arm that morning, why he seems to fear he has lost control of her. Her ferocity is palpable now; it’s the very strength that brought her spluttering and gasping from death itself, as if to say she were promised twenty good years and she’s going to have them.

“Jenna would be proud of you,” I whisper. Her eyebrows knit for a moment and then relax.

When Linden returns, his arms are folded across his stomach. There are streaks from tears on his skin. He looks small, rattled. I’ve only known him to be this way late at night, when he was first mourning Rose; the darkness hid the worst of it then. His shaking breaths make my arms remember the shape of him beneath the blankets. Something deep within me wants to pull him close.

“How is she?” he asks. His voice is congested.

I open my mouth to say that she’s okay, but what comes out is, “She’s terrified, Linden.”

I expect him to argue that she’s perfectly safe, but he only nods as he takes his place in the chair by her bed. “My father agreed to leave for now, so she can rest. But he wanted to take her home tonight. He thought she’d get the best care in her own bed, with the doctors we have at home.” He watches her eyes roving busily as she dreams. Her eyelids break apart, revealing a sliver of white. “I said it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

I’m impressed. It’s the first time he has overridden one of his father’s decisions.

I think about how he spent last night awake, waiting for the moment when he could see Cecily again. I drifted to sleep a few times in the waiting room, leaning against him, and every time I awoke, his face had changed into a different kind of grief. “Linden,” I say softly now, “you should at least try to get some sleep.”

He shakes his head, watching as I gather Cecily’s hair for a new braid.

“My father warned me that you’re an interloper. He told me I should make you leave, since we’re no longer married and you’re not my concern,” he says. The thought gives me a chill. Yes, I’m sure Vaughn would love for his son to abandon me, so that Vaughn can swoop in and reclaim me the second I’m alone.

But Linden adds, “I told him that wouldn’t be a good idea either.”

By evening Linden has succumbed to sleep. He sits hunched over the bed, his head resting beside Cecily’s on the pillow, his hand gripping her arm as though she might float away from him. I listen to the rain and the thunder, and I think I hear Jenna’s voice in them, sounding out a warning. She’s been gone for months now. But sometimes it feels like she’s more alive than ever. She’s one of the indecipherable things that make sounds in the wind, and she’s in every kind of dream—the good and the awful.

I go into a fitful half sleep. Coasting along, I hear Cecily’s voice, high and operatic and lovely when she sings. I dream of Jenna braiding her own long dark hair as music notes fill the room. We’re safe here. Safer than we’ll ever be when we’re awake.

But with morning comes reality. The rumble of gurneys and trays in the hallway replaces the danger of last night’s storm.

“I brought you some tea,” Linden says when I open my eyes. He nods to the paper cup on the night table. “It’s gone cold.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“Sure,” he says, looking at Cecily, whose face is more relaxed in sleep.

“I think she’s doing better,” Linden says, miserable, drained, “now that my father’s gone.” His next breath looks like it hurts. “I thought she loved my father. I
thought my father loved her. He has told me that she’s like a daughter to him.”

I decide that right now is not the time to say anything awful about his father. Linden’s having a hard enough time. I sip my tea. It
is
cold, but I feel it immediately in my stomach, stirring things, waking my organs and making me alert.

Whatever Linden is thinking, he doesn’t say it. He only stares at Cecily.

“She’ll be all right,” I say, resolute. “We’ll get her a little bell to ring when she needs anything, and by the second day we’ll want to throw it out the window.”

That gets a smile out of him. I hear the scrape of stubble when he rubs his chin. He opens his mouth like he wants to say something, but then he looks away.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Do you think—” He swallows something painful. “Do you think my father had something to do with this?”

Linden. The thought is sinister for him. Even I didn’t want to entertain the possibility. But now that the fear and the shock are subsiding, I know it’s the best explanation. Vaughn is so good at his wicked craft that he can ruin his daughters-in-law without even being under the same roof, without even being in the same city. He finds a way into our blood, as deadly as the virus that kills us.

The anger is so much and so sharp that I can’t bear it. “It’s a sound theory,” I say.

Linden doesn’t seem to hear me, though. He’s staring
ahead when he says, “It would’ve destroyed me if I’d lost her. My father knows that, doesn’t he?”

“He does,” I say cautiously. I can see the doubt coming to his face, the way he’s piecing things together. Vaughn never told Linden much about his late brother, or his mother. He didn’t want Linden to feel a shred of love for them. But Linden can love his wives if he wants to, because if they die, Vaughn knows that his son will return to him, broken and vulnerable and so easy to control.

He looks so haggard. I move my chair beside his and force the cup of cold tea into his hands, hold my palm under it, and guide it to his lips. He takes small obligatory sips, but then I have to take the cup away because his hands are shaking so much that the tea is splashing onto his thighs.

I put my arms around him, and he grabs my shirt in his fists and pulls me close.