Wither (30 page)

“Did you tell freedom hello for me?” she says as I wrap my arms around a pillow and she tucks the covers over me.

I tell her about the icicles, and the snowy hologram, and the food. “The chocolate-dipped strawberries were worth dying for,” I swoon. “They had a huge fountain just bubbling chocolate. I wish you’d been there.”

“Sounds nice,” she says. Her voice is a little strained, and she coughs. She was coughing earlier today too, and she has looked a little pale for the past few days. I move closer to her and touch my hand to her forehead, but Linden isn’t the only one who’s had a bit to drink, and I can’t tell if she’s warm.

“Are you feeling all right?” I ask.

“I’m just tired. And a little congested. It’s the weather.”

She coughs again, and I feel something warm land on my cheek. My blood runs cold.

“Jenna?” I say.

“What?”

I want to stay here, in the dark, and not make a move in the direction of this new fear. I want to go to sleep and wake up in the morning and find that everything’s okay.

But I don’t. I reach over and I turn on the light. Jenna coughs again, and I see the splatter of blood on her lips.

The baby will not stop crying. His face is bright red, and Cecily paces and paces with him on her shoulder, murmuring nice things to him, though there are fat tears rolling down her face. She doesn’t try to brush them away.

And Vaughn is touching Jenna, feeling the sides of her jaw, holding her tongue under his cruel papery finger to look down her throat, and I can see that she hates having him near her. And she looks so wilted.

Linden takes the baby, and he gurgles for a second, but then resumes screaming. I jam the heels of my hands against my temples and say, “Will you get him out of here please?”

Vaughn is asking Jenna, for the third time, how old she is. And she is telling him, for the third time, that she is nineteen. And yes, she’s sure.

Linden brings the screaming baby out of the room, but we can all still hear him.

“What is it?” Cecily says. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s the virus,” Vaughn says. I suppose he’s trying to sound remorseful but all I see is a giant cartoon snake flicking his tongue. Jenna’s life is nothing to him.

“No,” someone says. And I realize the voice was my own. Cecily touches my arm and I shrug her away violently. “That doesn’t make sense. It isn’t possible.”

Jenna’s eyes are closing. She can barely even stay conscious long enough to hear she’s dying. How is it possible that she’s gotten so sick so rapidly?

“But you can fix it, right?” says Cecily. Tears are staining the collar of her shirt. “You’re working on an antidote.”

“I’m afraid it’s not there yet,” Vaughn says. “But maybe we can prolong her life span until then.” He taps Cecily’s nose, but she no longer finds his favoritism endearing, and I see her take a step back. She shakes her head.

“What the hell have you been working on, then?” she says. “All this time. All this time you spend down there!”

Her lip is quivering, and her breaths have taken on a wet, drowning quality. She believes Vaughn spends all those long hours working on an antidote in the basement, and that soon he’ll save us all. I wish I believed that too.

“Now, darling—”

“No. No, you do something and you do it right now.”

They get into an argument in low voices. Their voices spin and spin, and her sobs splash around me like waves, and I can’t stand it. I want them both to go away. Vaughn and his little pet. I climb into the bed with Jenna and wipe some blood from her lips. She’s already begun to lose consciousness. “Please,” I whisper into her ear. I don’t know what I’m asking. I don’t know what I expect her to do.

Vaughn leaves, mercifully, and Cecily climbs into the bed with us. Her dramatic crying is shaking the mattress, and I snap at her, “She’s sleeping. Don’t wake her up.”

“Sorry,” she whispers, and lays her head on my shoulder. There’s not a sound from her after that.

Jenna falls into an unreachable sleep, while Cecily and I drift in and out of nightmares of our own. I hear Cecily muttering as she stirs beside me, but I can’t reach either of my sister wives. Over and over I am running through the trees with no iron gate in sight. Sometimes I’m drowning. The waves spin me over and over until I don’t know which way is up.

I wake up gasping. The dampness on my neck is Cecily, pressed against me, sweating and crying and drooling. Her lips are moving, trying to make words. Her eyebrows are pressed together.

Down the hall the baby is crying and crying, and Cecily’s shirt is stained with breast milk, but she is never allowed to feed her son. Vaughn takes him away. He hired a wet nurse, and he says it will be healthier for Cecily this way, but she always looks like she’s in pain.

My sister wives are wilting like my mother’s lilies, and I don’t know how to revive them. I don’t know what to do.

Jenna opens her eyes and looks me over. “You look awful,” she says hoarsely. “What’s that smell?”

“Breast milk,” I say.

At my tone, Cecily begins to stir. She’s choking on her drool and complaining about not liking the music. Then her eyes open and register awareness, and she sits up.

“What’s happening? Are you feeling better?”

The baby is still crying, and she looks to the doorway.

“I have to feed him,” she says, stumbling and hitting the door frame on her way out.

“Something’s not right with her,” Jenna says.

“You’re just now noticing?” I say, and we both laugh a little.

Jenna manages to sit up, and I coax some water into her. I think she’s only drinking it for my benefit. She’s pale, and her lips are faintly tinted purple. I try comparing her to Rose, who was still able to act healthy on a good day. I think of how the June Beans dyed her mouth such ridiculous colors, and I wonder if that was part of her concealment. And how her face was always blushed with makeup. I think of how she hated the medicines, how she begged to be left to die.

“Are you in a lot of pain?” I ask.

“I can’t really feel my arms or legs,” Jenna says. She laughs a little. “So I guess I’m getting out of here before you after all.”

“Please don’t say that.” I push the hair from her forehead.

“I had a dream that I was in the van with my sisters,” she says. “But then someone opened the door, and I looked at them and saw you and Cecily in their places. Rhine, I think I’ve begun to forget what they looked like. Sounded like.”

“I forget my brother’s voice.” I only realize it once I’ve said the words.

“But you don’t forget his face. Because you’re twins.”

“You figured that out, huh?”

“Your twin stories were too vivid to be fiction,” she says.

“But we aren’t identical twins,” I say. “Boys and girls can’t be identical twins, you know. And I do forget what he looks like a little bit.”

“You’ll see him again,” she says, sounding sure about it. “You never told me if you made it into the basement.”

I nod, sniffle, and try to disguise it as a cough. “We’ve figured out a plan. We’re leaving next month. But maybe I can stay awhile longer.”

“I did not light those curtains on fire for nothing.

You’re getting out of here, and it’s going to be amazing.”

“Come with us,” I say.

“Rhine . . .”

“You hate it here. Do you really want to spend what’s left of your life in this bed?” I don’t know what I think freedom can do for her. That she’ll get to see the ocean.

That we’ll watch the sunrise as free beings. That we’ll bury her at sea.

“Rhine, I’ll be gone before you leave.”

“Don’t say that!”

I rest my forehead against her shoulder, and she brushes her fingers through my hair. Tears are threatening behind my eyes, but I force them away. The effort makes my lip quiver. I’m trying to stay strong for her sake, but she picks up easily on my distress. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s fine.”

“You’re crazy to say that.”

“No,” she says, drawing back so that I raise my head and look at her. “Think about how close you are to finally having what you want.”

“What about you?” I say, louder than I mean to. The quivering has spread to my hands, and I grip at the blanket.

She smiles. It is an easy, beautiful smile. “I’ll have what I want too,” she says.

In the days that follow, Linden starts spending time with Jenna. But it’s not like the time he spent with me after my escape attempt, or Cecily while she was in labor. Jenna has never established herself as his wife in any emotional capacity. He sits on a chair or on the divan, never on the bed with her. He doesn’t touch her.

I don’t know what they talk about, this estranged husband and wife who were never even acquainted to begin with, but I can’t help but think their conversations are the obligatory terminal discussions you’d expect to find in a hospital. Like he’s granting her last wishes. Like he’s trying to get some closure before she goes.

“Did you know Jenna had sisters?” he asks me as we’re eating dinner. It’s just the two of us. Cecily is catching what little precious sleep she can, and Vaughn is supposed to be in the basement working on his miracle antidote.

“Yes,” I say.

“She tells me they died, though. Some kind of accident,” he says.

I try to eat, but chewing feels arduous. The food falls down my throat and into an empty pit. I never taste it. I wonder why, with all her resentment, Jenna hasn’t told Linden the truth about her sisters. Maybe it isn’t worth the energy. Maybe keeping it from him is her ultimate form of spite. She will die, and he will never have known her at all.

“I’ve never really understood that one,” Linden says, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. “But I know how fond you were of her.”

“‘Were?’ I still am,” I say. “She’s still here.”

“Of course. I’m sorry.”

We don’t talk for the rest of the meal, but even the sound of his silverware touching the plate is gnawing at me. He is so painfully clueless. When I run away, I bet Vaughn will tell him I died, give him some fake ashes to scatter. And he’ll be left alone with Cecily, who wanted this life from the start, who will probably have half a dozen more babies to fill the empty spaces in both of their lives. And then they’ll both die, and Vaughn will replace them easily enough, because he’s a first generation, and who knows how long he’ll live. Our bedrooms will be filled with new girls after we’re dead and gone.

Linden and Cecily. They’ve both been so isolated that they don’t even know what they’re missing. And that is for the best. They’ll say good-bye to Jenna and to me, bury us in some dark place in their hearts, and carry on for the remainder of their short lives. They’ll find happiness in holograms and illusions.

In another time, in another place, I wonder who they might have been.

The attendants come to take our plates, and Linden frowns at how little I’ve eaten. “You’re going to make yourself sick,” he says.

“I’m just tired,” I say. “I think I’ll go to bed.”

Upstairs Cecily’s bedroom door is open, and I can hear Bowen gurgling softly, breathing in that cadenced, raspy, newborn way. The light is off, and perhaps he’s lying awake in his crib while Cecily sleeps. I know this routine. Left unattended, when he awakens from a nap, he will inevitably start to cry. And when he cries, he doesn’t stop.

My plan was to try to get some sleep, but it’s better to take Bowen from his crib before he wakes up my sister wives. But when I step into the bedroom, I find Jenna sitting on the edge of the bed, illuminated in a strip of light from the hallway. Her long hair cascades over one shoulder, and her face is tilted down toward the baby in her arms. Cecily is sleeping under the covers behind her in silence.

“Jenna?” I whisper. She smiles without raising her head.

“He looks like our husband,” she says softly. “But I can tell by his temper that he’s going to be like Cecily. It’s too bad none of us will get to see that.”

She looks so beautiful like this. The darkness hides her pale complexion, her purpling lips. Her nightgown is tiers and tiers of lace, her hair a perfect dark curtain. And I am struck with the painful realization that she looks like she could be somebody’s mother. The caregiver, deft and gentle, with long capable fingers tracing Bowen’s half-moon face. I wonder if she cared for her sisters this way before they were murdered, the way she has cared for Cecily. The way she has cared for me.

I swear I’ve just watched a tear roll from the corner of her eye, but she swipes it away before it gets far.

“How are you feeling?” I ask.

“All right,” she says. I force myself to believe her. She looks so strong right now, so young. “Here, take him for a minute, okay?” She stands, and when she walks toward me, I can see that her knees are trembling. She comes closer, and the light from the hallway shows me the beads of sweat on her face, the blue shadows under her eyes.

I let her ease the baby into my arms, and she walks by me with all the presence of a ghost, sweeping through the spot where she flirted with the baffled attendant, where hundreds of times she paced toward her room with her nose in a romance novel.

Her hand trails the wall as she makes her way to her bedroom and closes the door. Moments later I hear the mangled sounds of her coughing.