Sever (19 page)

R
EED HAULS
a box of dehydrated food into the backseat of the car.

Cecily frowns, hugging Bowen to her chest. “Is the top of the car made of plastic?”

“Vinyl. It’s a Jeep. Been around for more than a hundred years and still totally weather resistant,” Reed boasts, patting one of the windows. It shimmers as it ripples in the sunlight. “And the radio works. I’ve noticed that you’re a little musical aficionado.”

That gets a smirk out of her, albeit a reluctant one. “And you know how to care for an infant? You’ll have enough formula and everything?”

“Formula?” Reed says, gently rapping his knuckle against Bowen’s cheek. “A boy his age is ready for rum.”

“Kidding,” Linden says quickly, lugging my suitcase out of the house. “He’s kidding, love.” He kisses her cheek as he moves past. “My uncle took care of me
when I was a baby. He knows what he’s doing.”

“And Elle will be here to help him,” I remind her. Right now Elle is upstairs cleaning, as she’s been doing all week; Linden emphasized that her only job is to care for Bowen, not Reed’s house, but she insisted that the level of dust was unhealthy for an infant.

“I should make sure she has my checklist,” Cecily says, and hurries inside. I can see that she’s struggling to be strong about this. Bowen is as much a part of her as her own arm, and it was a difficult decision to leave him behind. But he wouldn’t be safe. Who knows what we’ll encounter.

Linden follows Cecily into the house, and I lean against the side of the Jeep. Reed leans beside me and says, “This isn’t your fault, doll.”

I know he’s trying to comfort me, but I can’t help my bitter laugh. “Right.”

“Really,” Reed says. “It was bound to come to something like this eventually. My brother was going to take things too far one day. I always feared that he would screw something up and Linden would be killed by Vaughn’s efforts to make him healthy. But thanks to you, Linden is finally starting to gain some depth perception.”

“Would it have been so bad letting him carry on in ignorance?” I say. “If I’d never come along, he’d have gotten some happiness, at least.”

“Well, you’re here now,” Reed says. “You can sulk about it, or you can act.”

He’s right, of course. To die trying would be better than to die without purpose.

It was my brother who pulled me out of bed once before, who forced me to go through the motions until it became a comfortable routine. But he’s not here to pull me together now; he’s hundreds of miles away, murdering innocent people in the name of some anarchist cause. He can’t hold me together this time. I have to do it myself.

Linden hauls a carton of water that’s been bottled from Reed’s well into the backseat amid all the other supplies. “Can I help with anything?” I ask.

He closes the door. “It’s all done. We’re ready to go.”

Reed shows us how to use the phones, which are the pride of his homemade contraptions. There are three of them, one of which he’ll keep. “They almost never work,” he tells us. “They work on signal towers, and you’ll only find those in cities. And here, of course, since I made one myself.”

“So that’s what that thing is that’s always humming,” Cecily says ponderingly. She’s got her arms crossed and the hood of her sweater pulled up despite the heat. I think a strong wind could come and blow the hair across her face, and when it receded, she’d be gone.

“You can charge them with the cigarette lighter in the dashboard,” Reed says. “Call me if you run into any emergencies. I’ll come get you.”

Everyone says good-bye. Bowen is complacent when
Cecily and Linden fuss over him, passing him between each other like a shared secret. He laughs, and Cecily frowns when she hands him to Elle, whom she bombards with a last-minute list of reminders. He likes being sung to. It’s important to encourage him to crawl so he doesn’t fall behind on his milestones.

“We’ll be back soon,” Cecily promises her son. “You’ll hardly notice we’re gone.”

I feel a pang of guilt as I climb into the backseat. I don’t want to be the reason anyone is separated from family.

I’m wedged between the plastic window and a pile of boxes and suitcases. Cecily takes the seat in front of me, and Linden gets behind the wheel.

Cecily asks, “So how fast can this thing go?”

“Fifty, maybe,” Linden says.

She crawls over the armrest and peeks at the gauge. “The number goes up to one-forty,” she says, pointing.

“It’s an old car, love,” he says. “Just because it says one-forty doesn’t mean we should go that fast.”

“Oh, Linden,” she says, falling into her seat with a flourish. “Live a little.”

When night falls, we don’t stop. Linden puts the high beams on and keeps driving. The radio softly plays music that’s cut by waves of static.

We took a brief stop at a diner to use the restrooms, and Cecily and I switched seats. Now she’s asleep, snuggled
against the luggage in the backseat. Linden casts worried glances at her in the rearview mirror. Despite her vigor, he worries. I think he’s afraid she’ll stop breathing again.

I think of my brother, out there somewhere. I think of time passing, and our lives slipping away. I think of my mother’s handwriting, and Reed’s gun in Cecily’s fearless hands.

“Can’t sleep?” Linden says.

It’s only nine o’clock, according to the faded green numbers on the dashboard, but it feels much later. It feels as though we’ve been driving for an eternity, rather than four hours. It feels like there’s no destination in sight, and maybe there isn’t. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking that Linden and Cecily would be safest if they could make it to Claire’s. I’ve been wondering if Gabriel is still there, if he thinks I’m dead. And the wondering turns to worry turns to pain, and I have to shut down entirely and stare at the scenery blurring by. But now it’s too dark to do that.

“No,” I say. “Too anxious, I guess. I can drive if you’d like.”

“I’m not tired yet,” he says. “It’s only a few more hours to Charleston. I’d like to make it there before we stop.”

I notice his speed has increased. We’re barreling down a tunnel of nothingness. Dead things all around. Broken buildings, civilizations that are hiding in their barricaded houses, if there’s any civilization at all.

There’s this sudden overwhelming need to hold on to something. This feeling that I’m falling forever and forever into nothingness, and I want to grab Linden’s hand. I want to feel the pull of the steering wheel in his certain grasp. I want to feel like I have any control at all over where I’m going and what will happen next.

It takes all I’ve got to resist reaching for him.

He clears his throat. “I had a brother too,” he says. “You knew that, right? My father told you?”

“He died before you were born,” I say.

“Right. I never even knew his name,” Linden says. “If I ask about him, my father shuts down, even gets angry. I don’t know if he looked like me. I don’t know if he was kind, or—or angry, or anything at all. But I think of him every day. He’s not at the front of my thoughts, exactly, but he’s like this weight I carry. This echo I hear sometimes when I speak.”

I fold my legs, turning in my seat so that I face him. “I’m sorry that you never got to meet him,” I say.

“It’s a fact,” Linden says, “that if my brother hadn’t died, I would never have been born. My father wanted to have me so that he could have something to save.”

I’m very quiet. I try to make my breathing inaudible. I know that what he’s saying is important, and I don’t dare disturb him; I think maybe he’s never said these words out loud, and that he’ll never say them again.

“Sometimes it makes me feel less than human,” he says. “I don’t tell my father that. He tells me that I’m the
most privileged boy in the world because I’ll be the one who lives. He tells me that everyone else is brought into this world because of the birth control ban, or because other wealthy families are naïve enough to believe they’ll be the ones to produce the cure. He doesn’t even understand that he’s just like them. He doesn’t understand that he has not only wasted his time, he’s wasted mine. I’m just a wasted effort, and he won’t accept that until I’m dead, until I’ve paid the price for his mistake.”

“Don’t say that,” I tell him softly. “You aren’t a waste.”

“Your parents were scientists too, right?” His voice is so placid, I’m not sure if I’ve just imagined that slight tremble in it. “Didn’t you ever want to resent them, even a little, for putting you here?”

“A little,” I admit. “But we aren’t asked into this world, Linden. We’re here whether we like it or not. I can’t let myself think it’s for nothing.”

“If you had been asked,” he says, eyes always straight on the road, “would you have wanted to be born?”

I don’t know what my answer will be until I’ve said it: “Yes.” Soap bubbles between my fingers and words I wrote in window fog and my mother’s fluttery good night kisses when she thought I was asleep, and my heart pounding when Gabriel and I first kissed, the warm buzzing going through my body when I had too much champagne and Linden unbuckled my shoe and told me I was beautiful. “Absolutely yes.”

“I knew you were going to say that,” he says.

“What about you?” I say.

“I don’t know anymore,” he says. “I hear Cecily singing the words of that poem sometimes—‘And Spring herself when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone’—and I think it had the right idea. I think it’s wrong of us to keep trying for something that will never come. I think it was cruel of me to try to have children. There’s nothing out there, Rhine. There’s no world. Only water that’s full of dead things. Why keep trying to fill the empty space?”

Children. He’s had three, and two of them are gone. I saw his eyes when Cecily had the stillbirth. He carried on as though the only thing that concerned him was her health, but I know losing that child devastated him. Our fake marriage taught me to read him very well.

“Try not to think about why so much,” I say. “That poem was written more than three hundred years ago, you know. I bet that back when people lived to be a hundred and the earth was lush and the buildings were clean and new, people still questioned why they were here. I don’t think that started after the virus.”

I think that’s a smile that comes to his lips, or maybe just a wry grin. “I can see why your brother said those things about hope,” he says. “You have a way of looking at things. You make it seem as though everything’s going to be okay. I can’t imagine a more dangerous thing to have than hope like yours.”

In the backseat Cecily coughs and stirs. Linden
glances into the rearview mirror. “Are you awake, love?” he asks.

She shuffles around for a while more before she sits up. “Your talking woke me,” she complains. “Are we stopping here for the night?”

“No,” Linden says. “We’re going to try to make it to Charleston before stopping.” I’m mystified by the tenderness of his words. For me he is openly bitter about the truths and troubles of the world, but he still adores Cecily.

“I want to sleep up front with you, then,” she says. I can tell by her slur and stumbles that she’s not entirely awake, but still she manages to climb over the seat and wedge her way between us, trailing a blanket after her.

She settles perfectly to Linden’s side. “You don’t mind getting in back, do you?” she says to me. “There’s not enough room for the three of us.”

T
HE MUSIC
makes my heart leap onto my tongue before I’m even awake. I’m pushing for consciousness through rainbow scarves and pale limbs and that music, that brass music that every nerve of me remembers.

Cecily is kneeling in the front seat, climbing over Linden to see out his window. “What is it?” she’s asking.

It’s dark. My eyes try to adjust. The car slows to a stop, and Linden says, “It’s a carnival.”

“Drive,” I say. “Don’t stop the car.”

“What’s a carnival?” Cecily asks.

“Drive!”

My tone startles Linden into accelerating. The tires squeal as we go forward, and I’m telling him to go faster, go a hundred-forty like the speedometer says we can, and he’s saying “What, what’s wrong?” as I turn in my seat and watch the shadows through the back window. Shadows that are full of Madame’s guards, and broken girls,
and Lilac, whose real name is Grace, who turned herself in so her daughter could be free.