Wither (19 page)

Time has lost all meaning; I don’t know how long I’ve been lying in this bed. I drift in and out of consciousness, and something different awaits me each time I open my eyes. Linden reads to me. My sister wives huddle in the doorway, frowning over my condition; I stare at them until the frowns melt from their faces and their eyes turn black. There’s pain everywhere, and heavy numbness on top of that.

“I must admit, a hurricane is more extreme than an air vent,” Vaughn’s voice is floating over me. I struggle to open my eyes, but all I can make out is a smear of color. His dark slicked-back hair. Something warm rushes through my veins, and I shudder with relief as the pain in my ribs disappears. “Did you know that’s what your dead sister wife tried? The air vents! And she made it all the way down the hall in that air duct before she was discovered. Such a clever little girl she was, and only eleven at the time.”

Rose . . . The word won’t reach my lips.

I feel Vaughn’s papery hands brushing over my forehead, but I can’t open my eyes anymore. His hot breath spirals into my ear with his echoing words. “Of course, who could blame the girl; it was how she was raised. Her parents were colleagues of mine, very well-respected surgeons, in fact. But then they lost their minds. They traveled state to state spreading some crackpot conspir-acy that if we couldn’t find an antidote, there had to be some surviving country out there in that wasteland of water that would help us. They taught her all about the destroyed countries, as though any of that matters.”

Another surge of warmth through my blood. More medicated numbness. What is he injecting me with? I will all of my strength to my eyelids, and I manage to raise them. The room doubles, then materializes just enough for me to see that Linden isn’t beside me, and my sister wives are no longer standing in the doorway.

“Shh, it’s all right,” Vaughn says, and lowers my eyelids with his thumb and index finger. “Listen to my bed-time story. It doesn’t have much of a happy ending, I’m afraid. They toted that girl with them everywhere they went, spouting their nonsense. And do you know what happened to them? A car bomb in a parking garage. And she was orphaned just like that. The world is a dangerous place, isn’t it?”

A bomb. I have heard those in Manhattan, a distant
boom!
telling me that people have just died. The memory is not something I care to relive, and instinctively I try to move, but whatever courses through my veins has made moving impossible.

“There are people out in that world who don’t want an antidote. People who think the world is ending and it’s best to let the human race die out. And they’ll kill those who try to save us.”

I know! I know this. My parents received so many death threats for their lab work. There are two warring sides: pro-science, which favors genetic research and the pursuit of an antidote; and pro-naturalism, which believes that it’s too late, and that breeding new children and subjecting them to experimentation is unethical. In short, pro-naturalism believes that it’s natural to let the human race end.

“But lucky you,” Vaughn says. “You’re warm and safe in here. And you wouldn’t want to jeopardize the good thing you have here. You’re more special than you realize; if Linden were to lose you, it just might destroy his spirit. You don’t want that.”

And suddenly it makes sense that Rose tried to deter me from escaping. It wasn’t simply because she wanted Linden to have a companion after she was gone. She was trying to warn me, to spare me whatever punishment she faced for her own escape attempt.

It’s her voice, not Vaughn’s, that whispers the final words into my ear.

“If you value your life, you won’t run again.”

Linden seems to have no idea that I sustained these injures trying to run away from him.

“I told him you were in the garden when the storm came,” Jenna whispers one afternoon, while Linden sleeps with his arms wrapped protectively around my elbow. “I saw you go out the window. What were you doing?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Whatever it was, I failed.”

She looks like she wants to hug me, but she can’t because it’s painful enough for me just to lie there and be looked at. “Did he believe you?” I ask.

“Governor Linden did despite the broken window. I don’t know about Housemaster Vaughn. Everyone in the kitchen said they saw you out in the garden before the storm, and that you were trying to get back inside when you heard the alarm. I think that might have convinced him.”

“They did that?” I say.

She smiles a little, tucks my hair behind my ear. “They must like you. Especially Gabriel.”

Gabriel! His blue eyes stabbing through the frenzy.

His arms opening up. I remember crashing into him. I remember feeling safe, before the world disappeared into nothingness.

“He came after me,” I say.

“Half the house went after you,” she says. “Even Governor Linden. He took a few hits from some flying branches.”

Linden. Bruised and sleeping at my side. There’s a little blood dribbling from the corner of his lips. I brush it away with my finger.

“I thought you were dead,” she says. “Gabriel carried you into the kitchen and it looked like every bone in your body was broken.”

“Pretty close,” I say.

“Cecily was screaming her head off, and it took three attendants to drag her up to her room. The Housemaster told her she was going to miscarry if she didn’t quiet down. But she’s fine, of course. You know how she gets.”

“What happened to Gabriel?” I say. I haven’t seen him since waking up. I still don’t know how much time has passed.

Linden mumbles in his sleep, startling me. He nuz-zles his face against my shoulder, and I wait for his eyes to open, but his breathing remains deep and even with sleep.

Jenna, whose eyes are suddenly serious, leans close to me. Although we’re already whispering, she wants to be extra sure nobody will hear us. “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but be careful. Okay? I think Housemaster Vaughn suspects something.”

Vaughn. Just mention of him makes my blood go cold.

I haven’t spoken to anyone about what he said about Rose, partly because the memory is so fuzzy that I can’t delineate fact from dream, but also because I’m afraid of what he’ll do. I force him out of my mind.

I don’t know how to answer Jenna because I don’t know what’s going on between me and Gabriel. And suddenly all I can think of is the fear that makes Gabriel go rigid when Vaughn is nearby. Is it because he’s been threatened? I swallow something painful. “Is he okay?”

“He’s fine. Just a little scratched up. He’s been in a few times, but you were asleep.”

I can always trust Jenna to know what’s happening in this house. She’s quiet, a background fixture, but she misses nothing. I think of what Vaughn said about casting her back into the water. I think about her sisters being shot in that van, and tears are filling my eyes and I can’t stop myself from sobbing, and she says “Shh, shh” and kisses my forehead. “It’s okay. I’ll look out for him,” she whispers. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay,” I choke. But I can’t say more than that, because Housemaster Vaughn might overhear. He already knows everything. He’s already everywhere, this awful man who controls us all. And he’s right. I’m going to die here, so I might as well get comfortable. I’m starting to think he’s my real captor, and that this man sleeping beside me is as much a prisoner as his own brides.

Jenna stays with me until I exhaust myself and the pain in my ribs and my legs and my head becomes too much to stay conscious for.

In the morning I awaken to Cecily standing uneasily in the doorway. She is noticeably more pregnant. She’s becoming skinny arms and legs and a full moon of a stomach. “Hi,” she says. It’s a child’s voice.

“Hi,” my voice is like broken glass, but I know it will hurt to clear my throat. I think of what Jenna said, about Cecily screaming her head off when she saw my body.

“How are you feeling?” she asks. And before I can answer, she takes her hands out from behind her back and shows me a vase of white star-shaped flowers. “Lilies, like in your story,” she says.

And they are just like my mother’s lilies, with pink-red streaks running from the stamens like spilled ink.

Cecily puts them on my nightstand and then touches her hand to my forehead. “You’re running a slight fever,” she says.

She’s a little girl playing mother. Playing house. And maybe it’s all the painkillers in my system, but I just adore her. “Come here,” I say, and open my IV arm to her, and she doesn’t hesitate. She’s mindful of my ribs when she hugs me, but she grips my nightgown, and my neck is damp with her tears.

“I was so scared,” she says. This mansion is her perfect dream house. Nobody is supposed to be hurt. Everything is happy ever after.

“Me too,” I say. I still am.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asks, once she’s had a little cry and is rubbing her cheeks dry.

I nod my head to where Linden is sleeping beside me.

“Get him out of here for a little while,” I say. “It’s no good for him to be cooped up in here, worrying about me all day. See if you can get him to play a game with you or something that’s fun.”

She brightens and nods. She’s good at lifting our husband’s mood, and she knows she can do this for me.

Besides, she seizes any opportunity to have Linden’s undivided attention.

By late morning she has convinced Linden that she’s starved for attention and if he doesn’t help her practice chess, she’s going to cry. He doesn’t want her to cry, because he thinks she’ll miscarry.

And I am granted my limited form of freedom.

I enjoy the quiet for a while, drifting in and out of summery dreams. All warmth and light. My mother’s hands. My father playing the piano. The little girl next door’s voice humming in a paper cup in my hands.

And then there’s another voice, and my eyes fly open so fast that the room spins.

“Rhine?”

Gabriel’s voice can reach me anywhere. Even in a hurricane.

He’s standing in my doorway now, scratched and bruised, holding something I can’t quite make out. I struggle to sit up, but I’m doing a lousy job of it, and he comes and sits beside me. He opens his mouth to speak, but I beat him to it.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

He sets whatever he was holding on the bed, and takes my hand in both of his, and the security I feel is exactly like the moment I crashed into his arms.

“Are you okay?” he says.

It’s a simple question. And for him, because he saved my life, for whatever that is worth, I give him the truth.

“No.”

He looks at my face for a while, and I can’t imagine how pathetic I must look, but he doesn’t seem to even be seeing me. The sight of me is taking him someplace far away.

“What is it?” I say. “What are you thinking?”

He doesn’t answer me for a while. Then he says, “You were almost gone.” He doesn’t mean I almost escaped.

I open my mouth to, I don’t know, apologize again maybe. But he takes my face in his hands and presses his forehead to mine. And he’s so close that I can feel his little warm breaths, and all I know is that when he draws his next breath I want to get sucked in.

Our lips touch, almost as soft as not touching at all.

Then they press closer to each other, draw back uncertainly, touch again. There is warmth shooting through my broken body where there should be pain, and I put my arms around the back of his neck and I hold on to him. I hold on because you never know in this place when something good will be taken away.

It’s a noise in the hallway that rips us apart. Gabriel gets up, looks out into the hallway. Then out the window.

We’re alone, but shaken. So much for being careful.

My heart is hammering in my ears, and it’s something euphoric, not the pain or an angry wind, that makes it a little hard to breathe. Gabriel clears his throat. His cheeks are warm pink and his eyes have taken on a sleepy haze. It’s difficult for us to look at each other. “I brought you something,” he says, his eyes averted. He holds up the thing he was carrying a moment ago. It’s a heavy black book with a red earth ingrained on the cover.

“You brought me Linden’s atlas?” I say, skeptical.

“Yes, but look.” He opens to a page that is all brown and beige maps with blue lines on them. The text at the top says
Rivers of Europe
. There’s a key on the side that lists landmarks and rivers. Gabriel points to the third one down.
Rhine
. He traces his finger along the length of a blue line. “Rhine is a river,” he says.

Well, it was a river, before everything got destroyed. But I never knew this. My parents must have. They so loved to be mysterious scientists, and there are so many things they never had a chance to tell my brother and me.

My finger trails after Gabriel’s, along the vein of a river that no longer exists. But still I think it’s out there.

I think it has flooded over and freed itself into the ocean, somewhere beyond the pointed flower on the iron gate to freedom.

“I had no idea,” I say. “I didn’t think my name meant anything.”

Was this what Rose meant, when I told her my name and she said it was a beautiful place?