Wither (16 page)

I pat the ground beside me in invitation, and he lies in the grass. We’re both silent as a breeze moves over us.

Rose still lingers in the trees; the rustling leaves are her ethereal laughter. Linden follows my gaze to the sky.

For a while we say nothing. I listen to the rhythm of his breaths, and ignore the nearly imperceptible flutter in my chest brought on by his presence. The back of his hand just barely brushes mine. An orange blossom falls over us on a perfect diagonal.

“I’m dreading fall. It is a terrifying season,” he says finally. “Everything shriveling up and dying.”

I don’t know how to answer. Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale. I’ve never thought to be frightened of it. My greatest fear is another year of my life passing by while I’m so far from home.

Suddenly the clouds seem very high above us. They’re moving over us in an arch, circling the planet. They have seen abysmal oceans, and charred, scorched islands.

They have seen how we destroyed the world. If I could see everything, as the clouds do, would I swirl around this remaining continent, still so full of color and life and seasons, wanting to protect it? Or would I just laugh at the futility of it all, and meander onward, down the earth’s sloping atmosphere?

Linden takes in another breath, and he musters up the courage to put his hand over mine. I don’t resist. Everything in Linden Ashby’s world is fake, an illusion, but the sky and the orange blossoms are real. His body beside me is real.

“What are you thinking?” he asks me. For all of our marriage I have never allowed myself to be honest with him, but here, now, I want to tell him what’s on my mind.

“I was wondering if we’re worth saving,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

I shake my head against the ground, feel the back of my skull rolling along the cold, hard earth. “It’s nothing.”

“Not nothing. What did you mean?” he says. His voice isn’t intrusive. It’s gentle, curious.

“It’s just all these doctors and engineers are looking for an antidote,” I say. “They’ve been at it for years. But is it really worth it? Can we even be fixed?”

Linden is quiet for a while, and just when I’m sure he’s going to condemn me for what I’ve said or, I don’t know, defend the work of his madman father, he squeezes my hand. “I’ve asked myself the same question,” he says.

“Really?” We turn at the same time and meet each other’s eyes, but I feel my cheeks starting to burn, and I look back to the sky.

“I thought I was going to die, once,” he says. “When I was young. I had a high fever. I remember my father gave me an injection that was supposed to cure it—something experimental he’d been working on, of course, but it only aggravated things.”

Vaughn could have been pumping any number of his twisted experiments into his son’s veins, for all I trust him, but I don’t say this. Linden continues, “For days I was in some halfway land between reality and delirium.

Everything seemed so frightening, and I couldn’t wake myself up. But from someplace far away I could hear my father and some of his doctors calling me. ‘Linden. Linden, come back to us. Open your eyes.’ And I remember that I hesitated. I didn’t know if I should go back. I didn’t know if I wanted to live in a world of certain death. Of fevers and nightmares.”

There’s a long silence, and then I say, “But you came back.”

“Yes,” he says. And then, very quietly, “But that wasn’t my decision.”

He weaves his fingers through mine, and I allow it, feel the clammy warmth of his palm against mine. Flush.

Alive. Eventually I realize that I am holding on to him just as tightly as he holds on to me. And here we are: two small dying things, as the world ends around us like falling autumn leaves.

Cecily’s little stomach begins to swell. She’s often bedridden, but she’s louder than ever, according to the attendants.

I’m eating an ice cream cone and watching the koi in the pond one afternoon when an attendant comes running for me. He stops and puts his hands on his knees, doubling over to catch his breath. “Come quick,” he gasps.

“Lady Cecily is asking for you. Some kind of emergency.”

“Well, is she all right?” I say. To look at him you’d think somebody had died. He shakes his head in response.

He doesn’t know. I think I hand him my ice cream cone as I run for the door. Gabriel is already waiting at the elevator with his key card. Upstairs I run into her bedroom, thinking it will be Rose all over again, thinking I will find her coughing blood or fighting to breathe.

She’s propped upright on pillows, her toes separated by pieces of foam while the nail polish dries. She smiles at me with a straw in her mouth. She’s sipping cranberry juice.

“What’s the matter?” I say, panting.

“Tell me a story,” she says.

“What?”

“You and Jenna are having all the fun without me.”

She pouts. Her stomach floats in front of her like a little quarter-moon. She isn’t very far along—four months—but what I know and she doesn’t is that Linden does not want to risk losing another baby. He will spare no precaution. She may be well enough to play mini-golf or even swim in the pool, which is heated and treated to repel leaves and insects this time of year, but she has become the greatest captive here.

“What do you do all day?” she asks.

“We have lots of fun,” I snap, because she worried me for nothing. “We eat cotton candy and somersault in midair on the trampoline. Shame you can’t come out.”

“What else?” She pats the mattress beside her, her eyes eager. “No, wait. Tell me about another place. What was your orphanage like?”

Of course she would think I grew up in an orphanage.

That’s all her short life has showed her of the world.

I sit cross-legged on her mattress and push the hair from her eyes. “I didn’t grow up in an orphanage,” I say. “I grew up in a city. With millions of people, and buildings so tall you’d get dizzy trying to see the tops of them.”

She’s dazzled. And so I tell her about the ferries and the toxic fish that are caught and for sport returned to the sea. I remove myself from the stories and instead tell her about a pair of twins, a brother and a sister, who grew up in a house where someone was always playing the piano. There were peppermints and parents and bed-time stories. The blankets all smelled like mothballs and, vaguely, their mother’s best perfume, from when she’d lean in to kiss them good night.

“Are they still there?” she asks me. “Did they grow up?”

“They grew up,” I tell her. “But a hurricane came one day, and they were each blown to a different side of the country. And now they’ve been separated.”

She looks doubtful. “A hurricane blew them away? That’s dumb.”

“I swear it’s true,” I say.

“And it didn’t kill them?”

“That part may be a blessing or a curse,” I say. “But they are both still alive, trying to find their way back to each other.”

“What about their mom and dad?” she says.

I take her empty juice cup from the night table. “I’ll go get you a fresh drink,” I say.

“Don’t. That’s not your job.” She pushes the blue button over her night table and says, “Cranberry juice. And waffles. With syrup. And an umbrella toothpick!”

“Please,” I add, because I know they’re all rolling their eyes at her, and it really is only a matter of time before someone blows their nose into her napkin.

“I liked that story,” she says. “Is it really true? Do you really know those twins?”

“Yes,” I say. “And their little house is waiting for them to return. It has a broken fire escape and it used to be covered in flowers. But that city isn’t like this place. The chemicals from factories make it very hard for things to grow. Only their mother was able to grow lilies, because she had a magic touch, and when she died, they all wilted.

That was that.”

“That was that,” she echoes, in agreement.

I leave her when it’s time for her ultrasound. Gabriel catches my arm in the hallway. “Was the story all true?” he says.

“Yes,” I say.

“So how long do you think it’ll be?” he says. “Before the next hurricane comes along to take you home.”

“Can I tell you my biggest fear?” I say.

“Yes. Tell me.”

“That it will be a very windless four years.”

It isn’t windless, though. By late October we have severe weather patterns. In the kitchen there are bets on what category the first hurricane will be. Three is most popular. Gabriel thinks two, because it is a weird time of year for such a thing. I just agree with him because I have no idea what I’m talking about. We don’t have very dramatic weather in Manhattan. Whenever the wind is bad, I ask, “Is this a hurricane? Is this?” and the kitchen laughs at me. Gabriel assures me I’ll know.

The pool water thrashes, and I think it might get sucked into the air. The trees and bushes convulse. Oranges roll as though being kicked along by ghosts. There are leaves everywhere, red, and brown-splattered yellow. When nobody is around, I gather the leaves into piles and bury myself. I breathe in the dampness of them. I feel like a little girl again. I stay hidden until the wind takes them away in spiraling ribbons. “I want to go with you,” I say.

One afternoon I return to my bedroom and find that my window has been opened. A present Linden left for me to find. I test it—it opens and closes. I sit on the sill and smell the wet earth, the cold wind that strips everything clean, and I think of stories my parents told me about their childhood. At the turn of the new century, when the world was safe, they had a holiday called Hal-loween. They would go out in groups of friends dressed as hideous things and ring doorbells asking for candy.

My father’s favorite kind, he said, looked like little traffic cones with yellow tips.

Jenna, whose window remains locked, comes to my room and presses her nose to the screen and breathes deeply, traveling to kind memories of her own. She tells me that on days like this the orphanage would serve hot chocolate. She and her two sisters would share a mug, and they’d all have chocolate mustaches.

Cecily’s window is also left locked, and when she objects, Linden says the draft will be too much for her in her fragile state. “Fragile state,” she mutters to me once he has left. “I’ll put him in a fragile state if I can’t get out of this bed soon.” But she does like the attention. He sleeps beside her most nights, and he helps her improve her reading and writing. He feeds her éclairs and rubs her feet. When she coughs, there are doctors tripping over themselves to check her lungs.

But she is healthy. She’s strong. She’s not Rose. And she’s restless. On an afternoon when Linden isn’t doting so heavily on her, Jenna and I close Cecily’s bedroom door, and Jenna teaches us to dance. We don’t have Jenna’s grace, but that’s part of the fun. And in that fun, I can forget how Jenna became such an adept dancer.

“Oh!” Cecily cries, cutting short her clumsy pirou-ette. I think she’s going to collapse again, or start bleeding, but she bounces on her heels and says, “It kicked, it kicked!” She grabs our hands and presses them to her stomach, under her shirt.

As though in response, a terrible wailing alarm fills the room. A red light we didn’t know existed begins to flash from the ceiling, and I look out the window and notice that the tree with the robin’s nest has fallen over.

Our domestics come to hustle us into the basement, with Cecily in tears because she doesn’t want to be in a wheelchair when her legs work just fine. Linden isn’t hearing what she’s saying, partly but not entirely due to the alarms, and he holds her hand and says, “You’re safe with me, love.”

The elevator opens to the basement, and everyone steps out. Linden, Housemaster Vaughn, Jenna, Cecily and our domestics. But not Gabriel, and he’s the only one who knows how frightened I am of this place. And the alarms are so loud. I imagine the noise rattling the cold metal table where Rose’s body lie. I imagine her being shaken back to life, stitched and rotting and a sickly shade of green. I imagine her dragging herself toward me, hating me, knowing I’m plotting to escape. She’ll bury me alive if that’s what it takes to keep me here by Linden’s side, because he’s the love of her life and she will not let him die alone.

“Are you okay?” Jenna says, and for some reason her soft voice in my ear is clearer than the alarms. I realize she’s holding my hand, which is full of sweat. I nod dazedly.

Once the elevator doors close behind us, the alarm stops. The silence says that everyone is safe. Well, everyone that Linden thinks is important. The kitchen staff and all the attendants, as promised, are still working about the mansion. If the worst happens and they’re sucked into the ether, they can be replaced. Housemaster Vaughn can put in a low bid on good orphans.

As we’re walking down the hallway of horrors, I ask, “When will dinner be served?”

What I’m really asking is: Where is Gabriel?

Housemaster Vaughn chuckles. It’s such an ugly sound. He says, “All this one can think about is food. I suppose if we’re all in one piece tonight, dinner will be at seven as usual, darling.”

I smile charmingly, blush like his teasing makes me feel like a happy little daughter-in-law. I want him to get blown away. I want him to stand alone in the kitchen while knives and pans spin around in the hurricane winds and plates smash at his feet. And then I want for the roof to be ripped away, and for him to be pulled up, getting smaller and smaller until he’s nothing.

We come to a room that is warmly lit, with overstuffed chairs like the ones in the library, and divans and canopy beds with gauzy lilac and white netting. Comfy cozy. There are window with images of fake tranquil landscapes. The air comes in through vents in the ceiling. Cecily harrumphs and gets out of her wheelchair, brushing Linden off as she explores the chess table. “Is it some kind of game?” she asks.

“You mean a bright girl like yourself has never been taught the cultural art of chess?” Housemaster Vaughn says.

If Cecily wasn’t interested in playing a moment ago, she is now. She wants to be cultured as much as she wants to be sexy and well read. She wants to be all the things a young girl is not. “Teach me?” she asks as she takes a seat.