Wither (7 page)

I lie on my stomach, hugging a pillow, and she begins to work my calves; it’s just what I need after so many hours in those high heels. She has lit some candles too, filling the room with the warm scent of obscure flowers. I’m so relaxed that I just let the words come out, so beyond worrying about being classy at this point, “So how does this wedding night work? Does he choose us in a lineup? Drug us with sleeping gas? Pool the three of us into one bed?”

Deirdre does not seem offended by my crassness.

Patiently she says, “Oh, the House Governor won’t consummate his brides tonight. Not with Lady Rose . . .” She trails off.

I push myself up just enough to look over my shoulder at her. “What about her?”

A tragic look is on Deirdre’s face, her shoulders moving as she rubs my sore legs. “He’s very in love with her,” she tells me wistfully. “I don’t believe he’ll visit any of his new brides until she has passed on.”

It’s true that Governor Linden doesn’t come into my bedroom, and after Deirdre has blown out the candles and is gone, I eventually drift off to sleep. But in the early hours of the morning, I’m awakened by the turn of the doorknob; in recent years I’ve become a very light sleeper, and without any sleep-inducing toxin in my system, I’ve returned to my usual alertness. Still I don’t react. I wait, eyes wide open, watching my door open in the darkness.

The curly hair of the shadowy figure identifies Linden for me.

“Rhine?” He says my name for the second time in our short marriage. I want to ignore him and pretend that I’m still asleep, but I think the terrified pounding of my heart must be audible across the room. It’s irrational, but I still think a creaking door will mean Gatherers coming to shoot me in the head or steal me away. Besides, Linden has seen that my eyes are open.

“Yes,” I say.

“Get up,” he says softly. “Put on something warm; I have something to show you.”

Something warm!
I think. This must mean he’s taking me outside.

To his credit, he leaves the room so I can get dressed in private. The closet illuminates when I open it, revealing rows of more clothing than I bothered to notice earlier. I choose a pair of black pants that are warm and fleecy, and a sweater that has pearls worked into the knit—Deirdre’s handiwork, no doubt.

When I open the door—which is no longer locked from the outside as it was before the wedding—I find Linden waiting for me in the hall. He smiles, loops his arm through mine, and leads me to the elevator.

It’s distressing how many hallways make up this mansion. Even if the front door were left wide open for my escape, I’m certain I’d never be able to find it. I try to make a note of where I am: a long, plain hallway with a green carpet that looks new. The walls are a creamy off-white, with the same kind of generic paintings that are in my bedroom. There are no windows, so I can’t even tell that this is the ground floor until Linden opens a door and we’re on the path to the rose garden, down the same familiar hallway of bushes. But this time we pass the gazebo. The sun has yet to come up, giving the place a subdued, sleepy feel.

Linden shows me one of the fountains, which trickles into a pond populated by long thick fish that are white, orange, and red. “Koi fish,” he tells me. “They’re originally from Japan. Heard of it?”

Geography has become such an obscure subject that I never encountered it in my brief years of schooling, before my parents’ deaths forced me to work instead. Our school was held in what was once a church, and the students barely filled out the first row of pews in full attendance.

Mostly we were the children of first generations, like my brother and me, who had been raised to value education even if we’ll die without a chance to use it. And the school had an orphan or two with dreams of becoming an actor, who wanted to learn enough reading to memorize scripts.

All we were taught of geography was that the world had once been made up of seven continents and several countries, but a third world war demolished all but North America, the continent with the most advanced technology. The damage was so catastrophic that all that remains of the rest of the world is ocean and uninhabitable islands so tiny that they can’t even be seen from space.

My father, however, was a world enthusiast. He had an atlas of the world as it appeared in the twenty-first century, with full color images of all the countries and customs. Japan was a favorite of mine. I enjoyed the painted geishas with their penciled features and puckered lips. I liked the pink and white cherry blossom trees, so unlike the meager things that grow in fences along the Manhattan sidewalks. The whole country of Japan seemed to be one giant color photo, glossy and bright. My brother preferred Africa, with its floppy-eared elephants and its colorful birds.

I imagined the world outside North America must have been a beautiful place. And it was my father who introduced that beauty to me. I think of these long-gone places still. A koi wriggles past me and disappears into the depth, and all I can think is that my father would have been so happy to see it.

The grief of my father’s loss is so sudden that my knees nearly buckle under the weight of it; I force tears back down my throat, past the lump that’s forming there.

“I’ve heard of it,” is all I say.

Linden seems impressed. He smiles at me, and raises his hand as though to touch me, but then changes his mind and continues walking. We come to a wooden swing that’s shaped like a heart. We sit for a while, not touching, rocking slightly and staring at the horizon over the edges of the rosebushes. The color comes slowly, bits of orange and yellow, like with Deirdre’s makeup brush.

Stars are still visible, fading away where the sky blushes with fiery color.

“Look,” Linden says. “Look how beautiful it is.”

“The sunrise?” I ask. It is lovely, but hardly worth getting out of bed so early. I’m so used to sleeping in shifts, taking turns keeping watch with my brother, that my body has been trained not to waste whatever sleep it can get.

“The start of a new day,” Linden says. “Being healthy enough to witness it.”

I can see sadness in his green eyes. I don’t trust it.

How can I, when this is the man who paid the Gatherers so he could have me for the last years of my life? When the blood of those other girls in the van is on his hands?

My sunrises may be limited, but I will not view all the rest of mine as Linden Ashby’s wife.

It’s quiet for a while. Linden’s face is lit up by the early sun, and my wedding band burns in a twist of light.

I hate the thing. It took all my willpower last night not to flush it down the toilet. But if I’m to earn his trust, I have to wear it.

“You know about Japan. What else do you know about the world?” he asks.

I will not tell him about my father’s atlas, which my brother and I hid with our valuables in a locked trunk.

Someone like Linden has no need to lock anything precious, except for his brides. He would not understand the madness of poorer, more desperate places.

“Not much,” I say. And I feign ignorance as he begins to tell me about Europe, a tower clock called Big Ben (I remember the image of it glowing at twilight amidst a London crowd), and extinct flamingos whose necks were as long as their legs.

“Rose taught me about most of these things,” he admits, and then, just as the sunlight is awakening the reds and greens of the garden, he looks away from me.

“You may go back inside,” he says. “An attendant will be waiting to take you up.” His voice catches at the end, and I know that now is not the time to sit and pretend to adore him. I find my way back to the door, leaving him to his new day so he may think of Rose, whose sunrises are numbered.

In the days to follow, Linden barely acknowledges his brides. Our bedroom doors are unlocked and we’re mostly left to ourselves, allowed to wander about the floor, which has its own library and sitting room, but not much else. We aren’t permitted to use the elevator unless he invites us to dinner, which happens rarely; usually our meals are brought on trays to our bedrooms. I spend a lot of time in an overstuffed chair in the library, thumbing through brilliant pages of flowers that no longer grow in this world, and some that can still be found in other parts of the country. I educate myself on the polar ice caps, vaporized long ago by warfare, and an explorer named Christopher Columbus who proved the earth was round. In my prison I lose myself in the history of a free and boundless world that’s long dead.

I don’t see my sister wives often. Sometimes Jenna will take a couch beside me and look up from her novel to ask me what I’m reading. Her voice is timid, and when I look at her, she flinches like I might hit her. But beneath that timorousness there’s something more, the remains of a broken person who had once been assured, strong, brave. Her eyes are often bleary and misting with tears.

Our conversations are measured and brief, never more than a sentence or two.

Cecily complains that the orphanage didn’t do a good job teaching her to read. She’ll sit studiously at one of the tables with a book and sometimes spell a word out loud, waiting impatiently for me to pronounce it and sometimes tell her what it means. Though she is only thirteen, her favorite reads are all about childbirth and pregnancy.

But for all her shortcomings, Cecily is something of a musical prodigy. I can hear her sometimes as she plays the keyboard in the sitting room. The first time, I was drawn to the threshold well past midnight. There she sat, this tiny body with flame red hair, trapped in a hologram of flurrying snow that was projected from somewhere on the keyboard. But Cecily, who is so dazzled by the false glamour of this mansion, played with her eyes closed. Lost in her concerto, she was not my little sister wife in a winged dress, or the same girl who throws silverware at the attendants who cross her on the wrong day, but rather some otherworldly creature. There was no ticking time bomb inside of her—no indication of this horrible thing that will kill her in a few short years.

She’ll play more clumsily in the afternoons, tapping the keys in nonsensical patterns to amuse herself. The keys won’t work unless one of the hundreds of hologram slides is inserted into the keyboard to accompany the music: rushing rivers, a sky full of glittering fireflies, speeding rainbows. I have never seen her use the same hologram twice, and yet she scarcely acknowledges any of them.

There’s no shortage of illusions in the sitting room.

The television can, at the press of a button, simulate a ski slope or an ice rink or a racetrack. There are remotes, steering wheels, skis, and a whole assortment of control-lers to replace the actual world. I wonder if my new husband grew up in this way—trapped within this sprawling mansion, with only illusions to teach him about the world. Once when I was alone, I tried my hand at fishing, and, unlike with the real thing, I excelled at it.

In my abundance of time alone, I’ve wandered the entire length of the wives’ floor several times, from Rose’s bedroom on one far end of the hall, to the library on the other. I’ve inspected the vents, which are bolted to the ceiling, and the laundry chutes, which are too small to fit anything larger than a small load of laundry. None of the windows budge, except in Rose’s room, which is always occupied by her.

The fireplace in the library is entirely fake, with a hologram flame that makes crackling sounds but provides no warmth. There’s no chimney, no way for the air to reach the sky.

And there’s no staircase. Not even a locked emergency exit. I’ve felt along the walls, peered behind bookshelves and under furniture. And I wonder if the wives’ floor is the only part of the house without a staircase, and if there’s a fire and the elevators stop working, Linden’s brides will be burned to a crisp.

We’re easy to replace, after all. He didn’t think twice about the lives of the other girls in that van.

But that doesn’t make sense. What about Rose, with whom Linden is so madly in love? Isn’t her life worth something more to him? Maybe not. Maybe even first wives, favorites, are disposable.

I try opening the elevator, but none of the buttons will work for me without a key card. I try prying it open with my fingers, and then with the toe of my shoe, pretending that there’s a fire, pretending my life depends on an immediate escape. The door doesn’t budge. I search my bedroom for a tool that can help me, and I find an umbrella hanging in my closet, and I try that. I’m able to wedge the point between the metal doors, and they part just slightly, enough for me to fit my shoe between them.

And then—success!—they slide open.

Immediately I’m blasted with the stale air of the elevator shaft, and the darkness that intensifies when I look up or down. I study the cables, with no way to tell where they begin or end. I don’t know how many floors are above or below. I reach out and touch one of them, get a firm grip on it. I could try climbing it, or just hold on to it and slide all the way down. Even if I only got as far as the floor below me, I might be able to find an open window, or a staircase.

It’s the word
might
that makes me hesitate. Because I
might
not be able to open the elevator doors from the inside. I
might
be crushed to death if the car comes before I’m able to escape.

“Contemplating suicide?” Rose says. I flinch, retract my arm from the elevator shaft. My sister wife stands a few feet away, arms folded, in her wispy nightgown. Her hair is tousled, her skin pale, her mouth an unnatural candied red, and she’s smiling. “It’s all right,” she says. “I won’t tell on you. I understand.”

The elevator doors slide closed, without me.

“Do you?” I say.

“Mm,” she says, gesturing for my umbrella. I hand it to her, and she pops it open, twirls it once over her head.

“Where did you find this?” she asks.

“In my closet.”

“Right,” she says. “Did you know you’re not even supposed to open them inside? Bad luck. In fact, Linden is very superstitious.” She closes the umbrella, studies it.

“And Linden has final say on what’s in your bedroom, did you know that? Your clothes, your shoes—this umbrella. If he allowed you to have this, what do you suppose that means?”