Sever (8 page)

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.”

C
ECILY 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.