Sever (5 page)

“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.