Sever (14 page)

“Linden?”

He turns in the doorway to face me.

“I didn’t. I realize you didn’t come right out and ask, but Gabriel and I—we didn’t.”

His expression doesn’t change but for the flush of color to his cheeks. “I’ll see you downstairs,” he says.

Once he’s gone, I force myself to eat everything in the bowl. I have no desire to, but I know my body is craving it. I can feel the emptiness in my stomach gnawing at my bones. After I’ve eaten, I shower under the rusty tap. I ignore the want to collapse under the blankets and sleep away the next three years. If Linden and Cecily can make an effort to go through the motions and be strong, after all that they’ve lost, so can I.

After a week of rain, the days return twice as bright. Blades of grass rise from the heaviness of raindrops in defiance. The sunlight breaks through the gaps in the shed, swimming with bits of dust. Everything smells like flowers and dirt.

Cecily’s domestic arrived the other day. I’m not sure what Linden told his father that made him relinquish control of her and let her stay with us, but she seemed unharmed, if quiet, when she stepped out of the limo.

Cecily comes outside sometimes, barefoot. For most of our marriage she’s been partial to skirts and elaborate sundresses to impress our husband, but now she wears jeans rolled up to her knees. She lays Bowen on his stomach and tries to coax him to crawl, though all he does is grab at the earth and hold it up to the sun in offering. She decides he must be worshipping his secret god.

“There are so many colors in his eyes,” she tells me one afternoon when I come to sit next to her in the dirt. “Sometimes I wonder where he gets that.” She grabs a fistful of grass and sprinkles it over her son, who is bobbling on his hands and trying to push himself forward.

“Do you look like your parents?” she asks.

I draw my knees to my chest. “A little like my mother,” I say. “She had blue eyes.”

“I wonder how far down the line genes go,” she says. “Your mother had blue eyes, and maybe her mother, and her mother. It could be this one gene that’s gone on for thousands of years just to get to you. You could be the last one to ever have that exact shade of blue.”

I don’t tell her that my brother has the same shade of blue, and that he’ll live longer than I will. Although, the way things are going with the explosions and everything, I wonder if he’ll even live long enough for me to get to him.

“How are you feeling?” I ask her. “Are you chilly? I could get you a sweater.”

“No,” she says. “I feel pretty good right now.”

It’s been nearly a week since she’s been discharged from the hospital, and she’s more self-sufficient than ever. She’s insisted on having her meals with us at the table, politely declining Linden’s offers to bring a tray to her in bed. She’s even been cleaning the house, though nobody asked her to and I’ve never known Cecily to be at all domestic. I found her polishing the mason jars, scrubbing the grit from the countertops, kicking a damp rag across the linoleum. She wrapped tinfoil around the radio antenna until the scratchy white noise turned to music. She’s memorized the songs, and she sings in low voices as she moves through the rooms. Sometimes I think I hear her singing in her sleep.

“You should get going soon,” she says to me now. “You’re not getting any younger.”

She knows that I’ve been dawdling. Trapped in the mansion, I could think of nothing but home. But now my home is gone. I’m frightened of what I might find when I’m reunited with Rowan. I’m frightened of not finding him at all. And perhaps what frightens me the most is accepting that once I leave Cecily and Linden, I’ll never see them again.

Time almost seems to stop here on Reed’s middle-of-nowhere piece of land. It’s oddly comforting.

I shield my eyes and squint to see Linden in the distance.
He’s got one of the cars uncovered, and he and his uncle are gesturing to it as they talk.

“So that’s my ride,” I say.

“It’s like looking at an old picture,” she says, squinting.

“I didn’t know Linden could drive,” I say.

“Me either,” she says. “But I think he’s been practicing.”

She scoops Bowen into her lap. His eyes are full of clouds and sky. He reaches for my hair, and I hold up a lock of it for him to grab.

“I used to daydream how nice it’d be if you had one of your own,” Cecily says. “A baby, I mean. And Jenna, too.” She watches Reed lower himself under the car while Linden toys with things under the hood. “This isn’t where I thought we’d all be a year into our marriage. I thought we’d all be happy. Stupid, huh?”

Bowen tugs at my hair, his skin so soft that it sticks to the strands. “No, it isn’t,” I say. “Nobody could have predicted it would turn out like this.”

“What have I done, Rhine?” she says. “I brought a child into this world because Housemaster Vaughn convinced me he could save us. But Bowen is just as doomed as you and me.” Bowen clutches her shirt and throws his head back into the sunlight, utterly without a care. I heard once that humans are the only species aware of their own mortality, but I wonder if that’s true for babies. Would it even matter to Bowen that his life will end?
Childhood is a long, long road, from which that dark whispering forest of death seems an impossible destination. “Who’s going to take care of him when Linden and I are gone?” Cecily says.

I don’t know how to answer her. Bowen is the child of a failed plan, just like all of us. “You and Linden will figure something out,” I say. “Things didn’t turn out how you’d have liked, but nothing ever does. You’ve found a way to manage so far, haven’t you? You’re still going.”

She shakes her head. “I hate that man,” she says. “He ruined everything.” Something dangerous and ugly flashes in her eyes. It’s only there for a moment, but she doesn’t look quite the same after that. And now I know: The winged bride that fluttered ahead of me is gone. She’s been conned, ruined, left for dead, and she’s not going to forgive any of it. She will soldier on, if only out of spite.

“Even if Vaughn had meant to save us, our marriage couldn’t have gone on like that forever,” I say.

Cecily watches the daylight shift in Bowen’s hair.

“I never wanted to live forever,” she says. “I just wanted enough time.”

“E
AT UP
,”
Reed says, plopping a pot of some type of gravy in the middle of the table.

Cecily peers into the murky gray liquid and frowns at a cube of meat that’s floating against the rim. “What was this in a past life?” she asks.

“Pigeons and a field rabbit,” Reed says. “Hunted them down myself.”

“He’s an excellent shot,” Linden says.

“Can you eat pigeons, though?” Cecily falls back into her chair, looking a mix of disgusted and curious.

“You can eat just about anything,” Reed says, dumping a ladleful into her bowl. Like me, Cecily has been sticking to the mealy apples and the most recognizable of the canned fruits and pickled vegetables. We haven’t been quite as brave as Linden, who swears his uncle’s ventures “aren’t so bad.”

I can tell that Cecily has more she wants to say, but
she doesn’t, because this is the last meal we’ll all have together. In the morning I’m leaving. I’ve decided to return to New York to find Gabriel first. I can only hope he’s still with Claire. And I miss him. I miss him every time Linden and Cecily look at each other, or whisper behind a closed door, because it all reminds me that I’m not a part of what they have. I don’t belong here.

The pieces of my life can never seem to stay in one place.

Nobody talks. Reed has brought his work to the dinner table. It’s some kind of small electronic device that hisses and spits sparks at him.

Linden eats the gray liquid with quiet sips. I swirl my spoon around the inside of the bowl.

Cecily leaves the table and returns moments later with the radio, which roars with static interrupted by high squeals and the occasional muffled voice.

“Do you have to bring that to the table?” Linden says.

“Well, your uncle has that . . . thing.” She gestures to Reed’s project. “I just want a little dinner music, that’s all.”

Linden frowns, but he says nothing more. He knows how to choose his battles with Cecily, and he’s been much more forgiving since her brush with death. He endures the grating noise.

Finally she finds a station that comes through. There’s no music, though. It’s some kind of news report. Long before I was born, there used to be whole stations
dedicated to music, but there haven’t been new songs for years, and the only music that plays is the filler between news broadcasts. Old cheerful songs about frivolous things that mean nothing to me. Cecily likes them, though; anything she can sing along to.

She waves the antenna back and forth until the voices come through more clearly. “Maybe they’ll play something soon,” she says.

“Doubt it, kid,” Reed says. “I’ve heard this guy. He runs his own broadcasts out of his home.”

She frowns and reaches for the knob again, but Linden says, “Wait. Did you hear that?”

“What?” she says. The sound has gone to static again, and she repositions the tinfoil wrapped around the antenna.

Voices cut through, trying to reach us. At first when the words come, they mean nothing. I’ve heard them all my life. “Genetics.” “Virus.” “Hope.” It’s become like white noise, especially having parents who spent their evenings listening to such broadcasts.

I take a spoonful of the gray liquid, purposefully avoiding the cubes of meat. The taste isn’t terrible.

“There,” Linden says. Cecily moves her hands away from the antenna, and the static has subsided to make way for the voices.

She looks disappointed. “It’s only that same guy again.”

Linden’s listening intently, though.

“So-called doctors have been at it for years,” the voice on the radio says.

Another voice responds, “The Ellerys’ work has developed a cult following among doctors and extremists alike in the wake of these recent terrorist bombings. Their research, which as we all know was cut short by an act of terrorism that killed them, had faded into the grain with all the rest.”

The small bit I’ve eaten immediately feels like it’s gone to stone in my stomach. My body goes cold, a sort of numbness clouds my judgment, and I think:
Not the Ellerys
I
know
. How could these strange voices possibly know anything about my parents, who have been dead for several years? They were scientists and doctors, and their life’s work was to pursue a cure, but they were small-time compared to nationally recognized doctors like Vaughn.

Oh, but the broadcasters know about Vaughn as well. “Even revered experts like this Dr. Ashby have cited the Ellerys’ study of twins. Dr. Ashby theorizes that the Ellerys’ children, twins themselves supposedly, were a part of their research.”

“If they even existed,” the other voice says. “They may have been metaphors.”

Cecily is pulling at a lock of her hair that’s come free of her ponytail, and I swear her eyes are getting wider as she stares at me and the words on the radio get stranger.

“Dr. Ashby is essentially revamping the Ellerys’
theory that the virus can be duplicated in a way similar to vaccinations. Given in small doses, it can build up the immune system to make its victims resistant.”

The men are having such an impassioned discussion, and the static keeps interfering, and Linden adjusts and readjusts the tinfoil trying to make the voices stay. But it doesn’t matter, because I can’t hear them anymore. There’s static in my head, making it impossible to concentrate. The room feels twice as hot, and the lightbulb dangling from the ceiling makes so many shadows. How have I never noticed all these shadows?

“What about these claims by one of the terrorists heading these attacks that he’s the Ellerys’ only surviving twin? He very well could be who he claims to be.”

“How many extremists have claimed to be products of some research project or other? That’s if the Ellerys’ research isn’t an urban legend,” the other voice counters. “The Ellerys ran these nurseries as part of their supposed Chemical Garden project, nurseries that also served as research labs. If their children existed, they were probably killed along with the other subjects. The only reason the Ellerys are getting attention now is because of this terrorist claiming to be their son.”