Wither (22 page)

Housemaster Vaughn and Elle are helping Cecily into the bed. “Go on,” Vaughn says. “She’s got another two months yet before the baby comes.”

I don’t trust him. I imagine Cecily being rolled through the basement on a gurney, screaming in agony as the baby is born dead, and Vaughn going to work dissecting it for an antidote. He’s a merciless beast; there’s no humanity in his eyes as he cuts the infant apart.

Cecily whimpers, and Elle dabs her face with a wet cloth. Cecily opens her mouth, and I think she’s trying to form the word “stay,” but Vaughn grabs her hand and says, “Darling, if your husband secures any buyers tonight, that means one of his drawings will become a new house. Or maybe a store. And wouldn’t you like to visit it? Wouldn’t that be nice?”

She hesitates. She and Vaughn have some kind of weird bond I can’t figure out. It’s like she’s his favorite, or she thinks of him as the father she never had. And she’ll do anything he says.

“You should go to the expo,” she says. “I’ll be fine here. This is my job, after all. I’m happy to contribute.”

Strangely, there’s no malice in the way she says it.

“That’s a good girl,” Vaughn says.

I don’t want to leave her alone with him. I don’t. But when will I have another chance to prove to Linden that I’m first wife material, the one who should be on his arm at parties?

While Linden is saying good-bye to Cecily, promising he’ll be back soon, I find Jenna in the library and ask her to keep an eye out. “I don’t trust Housemaster Vaughn with her,” I say.

“Me either,” she says. “They’ve got all kinds of secrets together. I don’t know what he tells her. It makes me nervous.”

“I don’t want him alone with her.”

“No,” she says. “Of course not.” She’s already a step ahead of me. She’s found a chessboard in the sitting room, and she’s going to ask Cecily to teach her how to play.

“Just try to have fun, okay?” Jenna tells me. “Tell freedom I said hello.”

“If I happen to see it, I will,” I say.

Of all things, Linden leads me to the same limousine that brought me here in the first place. He opens the door for me and doesn’t even understand my hesitation.

“Can we open the windows?” I ask.

“It’s snowing,” he says. I’d always thought Florida was a temperate state, but so far it’s proven to be sporadic.

“The cold air is good for our lungs.” I heard this from Vaughn, so it might not be true, but Linden just shrugs.

“If that’s what you want,” he says.

I climb into the back of the limo, and despite the bottle of champagne waiting for us in a bucket of ice, and the heated leather seats, I keep expecting something awful to happen. I open my window right away, and I breathe in the frozen air, and don’t mind when Linden puts his coat around my shoulders. We haven’t started moving yet, and I am still unconvinced this is safe. Knowing Vaughn, he’s probably arranged for me to be knocked out just so I won’t find my way to the gate.

There’s a window in the roof. But it’s tinted dark and I can’t see the night sky beyond it. “Does that one open?” I ask.

Linden laughs and rubs my arms to generate warmth.

“Are you trying to turn yourself into an icicle? Sure the sunroof opens.”

After it opens, I stand, almost losing my balance because we’ve started moving. Linden grabs my waist to keep me from falling, and I don’t mind at all because I’ve got the sunroof open, and I rest my arms on the roof of the car. There’s snow falling into my hair, and it seems to melt as it reaches the light of the limo. I watch the trees pass, the repaired mini-golf course, the orange grove, Jenna’s trampoline. I watch as all these things that have been my entire world for these past months get smaller as the car pulls away. They seem to be saying good-bye to me. Good-bye, enjoy your night. I smile, look ahead to see what’s coming up next.

There’s nothing but trees for a while. I’ve never gone this far before. I didn’t even know there was a road this way. We drive for what feels like eternity. I begin to watch the stars through the trees, and the three-quarter moon that hurries to keep up with me.

Then we come to the gate, with the pointed flower that breaks open as the gate parts to allow us through.

Just like that. And then we’re off the property. There are more trees, and then suddenly there’s a city. Bright lights and blurs of people laughing and talking. It’s a wealthier place than where I come from, by the looks of it, and money has given these people the illusion of time. Maybe they’re hoping for an antidote to save them, or maybe they’re just happy to have a comfortable home to return to. There are no traces of desperation, no panhandling orphans. Instead I see a woman in a pink dress doubled over with laugher in front of a cinema that’s displaying its movies’ titles on a giant illuminated marquee. I can smell fast food and fresh concrete and the stench of an irrigation pipe somewhere far off.

It’s a shock. It’s like landing on Mars, but also like coming home.

We drive past a harbor, and it’s not exactly like the one in Manhattan. There’s a sandy beach dissolving into the water, and plenty of docks where sailboats are tied for the night, swaying to the rhythm of the sea.

Linden is guiding me back inside, telling me I’ll catch pneumonia. For a second I don’t care, but then I think if I get pneumonia, he’ll never let me leave the house again.

I’m already lucky to be out now, given how worried he was while my broken bones healed. Vaughn had to convince him that I was as strong as an ox (like his dead son, I thought when I heard the comparison) before Linden considered taking me out tonight.

I settle back in the heated seat and let Linden close the windows, and I watch the city through the subdued tint of the glass. This isn’t so bad. Linden pours me a glass of champagne and we clink our glasses together.

I’ve had alcohol once before, a few years ago when I fell off the roof while Rowan and I were trying to repair a leak. I dislocated my shoulder and Rowan gave me a dusty bottle of vodka from the basement to help with the pain as he set my shoulder back in place.

But this is different, bubbly and light. It warms my stomach, where the vodka had burned.

I let Linden put his arm around me. It’s something a first wife would do. He’s rigid for a while, and then he seems to relax a little. He picks up one of my curls—all over-sprayed and conditioned and treated to last the evening—and winds his finger around it. I wonder how Rose wore her hair when he took her out.

We finish the last of our champagne, and he takes the empty glass from my hand and tells me there will be more at the expo. He tells me there will be lots of toasts and attendants carrying glasses of wine on trays. “After the alcohol came to be too much, Rose would only pretend to take sips. I think she was getting an attendant to serve her empty glasses to help the illusion.” He looks away, to the traffic outside the window, looking like he regrets what he said.

I put my hand on his knee and gently say, “That’s good. What else would she do?”

He purses his lips, ventures a glance at me. “She laughed at everything anyone said, and she looked at their eyes when they spoke. And she was always smiling. At the end of the night, when it was just us, she said her cheeks hurt from all the smiling.”

Smile. Look interested. Pretend to drink.
And shine like
a star
, I add to the list, because it also seems like something Rose would have done. As we get closer to our des-tination, I feel myself entering her world. I feel like her replacement, which is what she said to me on the day we met, and I hadn’t wanted to believe it then. But now, with the warmth from the leather seats and the sweet smell of Linden’s aftershave, being her replacement doesn’t seem so bad. Though this is only temporary, of course.

I take a moment to remind myself that the vibrant city outside is not
my
city, that these people are strangers. That my brother isn’t here. He’s alone somewhere, waiting for me. While I’m gone, there’s no one to keep watch while he sleeps. And the thought brings up a bitter wave of anxiety sloshing in the champagne in my stomach, but I force myself to calm down before I vomit.

The only way I can return to him is if I pull this thing off, however long it takes.

We come to a tall white building with a large velvet bow over the double doors. As we step out of the limo, I see the same velvet bows on streetlights and storefronts.

There’s a man dressed as Santa Claus ringing a bell while people drop money into a red bucket as his feet.

“They’re getting ready for the winter solstice early this year,” Linden says casually.

I haven’t celebrated a solstice since I was twelve.

Rowan thought spending money on gifts and wasting time decorating was too impractical. When we were children, our parents would decorate the house with red bows and cardboard snowmen, and all through December there was always the smell of something wonderful and sweet baking in the kitchen. My father would play sheet music from a centuries-old book entitled
Christmas
Classics
, even though nobody has called it Christmas since before his time. And on the solstice, the shortest day of the year, our parents would give us gifts. Things they’d made, mostly—my mother was an excellent seamstress and my father could make anything from wood.

Without them our little tradition died. Winter for my brother and me was nothing more than the worst season for beggars in Manhattan. We would have boarded up the windows by now to discourage any orphans who might try to find respite from the blustery cold. The cold there is brutal and violent. Snow piled up to our doorknob, and we’d be up at dawn some mornings carving our way to freedom so we could make it to work. We’d drag the cot closer to the furnace and still be able to see our breath in front of our faces.

“Don’t be upset if they all want to kiss your hand,” Linden whispers in my ear as he takes my arm and we venture up the steps.

After Linden called these expos dry and boring, I didn’t expect much. But inside there is a large and well-dressed crowd. There are holograms suspended around the room, with images of houses that spin and swivel.

Windows open, and you’re taken inside for a sweeping tour of the rooms. Architects stand beside their holograms and eagerly explain them to anyone who will listen. Even the walls and ceiling of the expo room are a sweeping illusion of a blue sky with meandering clouds.

The ground looks like swaying grass full of wildflowers, and I can’t help stooping to touch the floor to be sure the grass isn’t real. I feel the cold tiles, though it looks like my hands are digging into the soil. Linden chuckles as I reattach myself to his side. “They always try to present an atmosphere in which a house could be built,” he says.

“It’s better than the last expo I attended—it looked more like a desert. All it did was make everyone thirsty. And the year they made it an empty sidewalk to encourage businesses was just depressing. It looked postapocalyp-tic.”

The dessert table is set up like a cityscape. There’s a bio-dome cake that’s already been cut into. There’s a wobbly gelatin swimming pool with chocolate chip concrete, a chocolate fountain. Frosting flowers have been swiped, mutilated, and it’s like Dorothy’s Oz after someone has bitten into it.

We’ve barely taken a few steps before someone has snatched my hand and kissed it. The hair on the back of my neck stands up. I smile beamingly. “And who is this lovely young thing?” a man says. To even call him a man seems wrong, because he’s probably younger than I am, though he’s dressed in a suit that would cost more than a month of electricity in the mansion.

Linden proudly introduces me as his wife, and I keep my smile, but I drink the entire glass of wine that comes my way, and the next, because I find it makes all these kisses and hellos easier to endure. There are other wives, but they all seem happy with their husbands. They compliment my bracelets, ask how long it took to style my hair, and they complain about their own attendants and domestics being incompetent with zippers or pearls or whatever. After a while it all blurs into white noise and I just nod and smile and drink. One is pregnant, and she makes a big production of yelling at an attendant who offers her a glass of wine. They call me sweetheart and honey and ask me when I’m going to have a baby of my own. I say, “We’re trying.”

None of the wives mention the security guards by the door, who will probably tackle us to the ground if we try to leave without our husbands.

I do enjoy the spinning house holograms, though, and when Linden sets up his own hologram I’m mesmerized by his drawing that’s been colored and brought to life.

It’s not exactly something I’ve seen before; it’s more like a collaboration of many designs. It’s a Victorian house with tendrils of ivy that grow up the walls, retract, and grow again. Inside I can see the outlines of people moving, but when the image enters the window, the people step back, showing me the hardwood floors and billowing curtains, and I think I even smell Rose’s potpourri.

One of the bedrooms is filled with vases of lilies. There’s a library full of nothing but atlases, with an unfinished game of chess in the middle of the room.

The sweeping tour makes me dizzy. I cling to Linden’s arm, and he keeps me steady, places a light kiss on my temple. And after all the strangers handling and kissing me, I find myself relieved that he’s the only one who’s touching me now.

“What do you think?” he asks.

“If nobody wants to live here, they’re all crazy,” I say.

We smile at each other, and take synchronized gulps of wine.

By the end of the night, my mouth is filled with alcohol and heavy bakery frosting that somehow makes the world smell sweeter. My curls have not wilted even though there’s sweat pooling on the back of my neck. I’m in a daze, smiling always, laughing, putting my hands on the shoulders of strange men and saying “Oh, stop” when they compliment me over and over on my eyes.

Half of them ask if they’re real, and I say, “Of course, what else would they be?”

One man asks, “Where did you get such incredible eyes?”