Wither (8 page)

“He doesn’t want me to get rained on,” I say, beginning to understand.

She raises her eyes, smiles at me, tosses the umbrella into my hands. “Exactly. And it only rains outside.”

Outside. I never thought the word could make my stomach flip-flop like this. It’s one of the small freedoms I’ve had all my life, and now I’d do anything to have it back. My grip on the umbrella tightens. “But are the elevators the only way outside?” I say.

“Forget about the elevators,” Rose says. “Your husband is your only way outside.”

“I don’t understand. What if there’s a fire? Wouldn’t we all be killed?”

“Wives are an investment,” Rose says. “Housemaster Vaughn paid good money for you. In fact, Housemaster Vaughn is obsessed with genetics, and for those eyes of yours, I’m willing to bet he paid a little extra. If he wants you to be safe, then fire, hurricane, tidal wave—doesn’t matter. You’re safe.”

I guess this is supposed to flatter me. But it only makes me worry. If I’m such an investment, it’s going to be that much harder for me to leave undetected.

Rose is looking weary, so I toss the umbrella into my room, and then I help her into her bed. Normally she’ll fight the attendants when they tell her to rest, but she allows me because I never try to force any medicine into her. “Open the window,” she murmurs, settling into her silky blankets. I do as she asks, and a cool spring breeze rolls in. She breathes deeply. “Thank you,” she sighs.

I sit on the window ledge, press my hand against the screen. It looks like a perfectly ordinary screen, one that would pop out of its frame if pushed hard enough. I could jump, although it’s several stories up—higher than the roof of my own house, at least—but there are no trees to reach for. It isn’t worth the attempt. But still, I think of what Rose said when she found me at the elevator. She said she wouldn’t tell on me because she understood.

“Rose?” I say. “Did you ever try to escape?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says.

I think of the little girl in the photo, smiling, so full of life. She’s been here all these years. Was she bred to be Linden’s bride? Or was she once resistant to it? I open my mouth to ask, but she’s sitting up in the bed now, and she says, “You’ll see the world again. I can tell. He’s going to fall in love with you. And if you’d just listen to me, you’d realize you’re going to be his favorite once I’m dead.” She mentions her death so casually. “He’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

“Not anywhere,” I say. “Not home.”

She smiles, pats the mattress beside her in invitation.

I sit beside her, and she gets up to kneel behind me, and begins weaving my hair into a braid. “This is your home now,” she says. “The more you resist—” she tugs my hair for emphasis “—the tighter the trap gets. There.” She takes a ribbon that was draped over her headboard and ties my hair in place. She crawls across the mattress so that she’s facing me, and she strokes a wisp of hair away from my eyes. “You look nice with your hair back. You have great cheekbones.”

High cheekbones, just like hers. I can’t ignore our resemblance to each other: the thick, wavy blond hair; the pert chin; soft nose. All that’s missing in her are the heterochromatic eyes. But there’s one other difference between us, and it’s significant. She was able to accept this life, to love our husband. And if I have to die trying, I will get out of here.

There’s no more talk of escape between Rose and me after that day. She favors me over the other wives, who have never spoken with her at all. Jenna speaks as little as possible, and Cecily has asked me more than once why I bother getting to know Linden’s dying wife. “She’s going to die, and then he’ll focus on us more,” she says, like it’s something to look forward to. It disgusts me that Rose’s life is so meaningless to her, but it’s not very different from the things my brother said about the orphan we found frozen to death on our porch last winter.

Tears welled in my eyes when I discovered the body, but my brother said we shouldn’t even move right away, that it could be a warning to anyone else trying to break into our home. “We did such a great job with the locks, they’ll die before they get in,” he said. Necessity. Survival. It was us or them. Days later, when I suggested we bury the body—a little girl in a threadbare plaid coat—he had me help him haul it to the Dumpster. “Your problem is that you’re too emotional,” he said. “And that’s the kind of thing that’ll make you an easy target.”

Well, maybe not this time, Rowan. Maybe this time being emotional can help, because Rose and I talk for hours, and I relish our conversations, certain I can use them as an opportunity to learn everything about Linden and earn his favor.

But as the days turn to weeks, I sense a genuine friendship blossoming between us, which should be the last thing I want from someone who is dying. Still, I enjoy her company. She tells me about her mother and father, who were first generations that died in some sort of accident when she was young; they were close friends of Linden’s father, which is how she came to live in this mansion and become his bride.

She tells me that Linden’s mother—Housemaster Vaughn’s younger, second wife—died in childbirth with Linden. And Vaughn was so immersed in his research, so obsessed with saving his son’s life from the start, that he never bothered to take on another wife. He might have been ridiculed for it, Rose says, if he weren’t such a capable doctor and so in love with his work. He owns a thriving hospital in the city and is one of the area’s leading genetic researchers. She tells me that the Housemaster’s first son lived a full twenty-five years and was gone and buried by the time Linden came along.

This, I suppose, is something I have in common with my new husband. Before my brother and I were born, my parents had two children, another set of twins, who were born blind and unable to speak. Their limbs were malformed and they didn’t live past five years. Genetic abnormalities like this are rare, given the perfection of the first generations, but they do happen. They’re called malformed. It seems my parents were incapable of making children without genetic oddities, though now I have cause to be grateful for my heterochromia. It may have spared me a gunshot to the brain in the back of that van.

Rose and I talk about happier things too, like cherry blossom trees. I even come to trust her enough to tell her about my father’s atlas and my disappointment at having missed the world in its prime. As she braids my hair, she tells me that if she could have lived anywhere in the world, she would have chosen India. She would have worn saris and positively covered herself in henna, and she would have paraded the streets on an elephant shrouded in jewels.

I paint her nails pink, and she arranges novelty jewels on my forehead from a sticker sheet.

Then one afternoon, as we’re lying beside each other on the bed, stuffing ourselves with colorful candies, I blurt out, “How can you stand it, Rose?”

She turns her head on the pillow to face me. Her tongue is deep purple. “What?”

“Doesn’t it bother you that he has remarried, while you’re still alive?”

She smiles, looks at the ceiling, and fiddles with a wrapper. “I asked him to. I convinced him it will be easier, with new wives already in the house.” She closes her eyes and yawns. “Besides, he was starting to get teased in the social circles. Most House Governors have at least three wives, sometimes seven—one for every day of the week.” It’s absurd enough that she laughs a little, sup-presses a cough. “But not Linden. Housemaster Vaughn has been trying to talk him into it for years, and he has always refused. Finally he agreed to it, as long as he had a choice in the selection. He didn’t even have a choice with me.”

Her voice is cool, and she is so bizarrely serene. It worries me that I’ve become her favorite new bride simply for my blond hair, my vague resemblance to her. She is such a brilliant, well-read girl, and I wonder if she has figured out that I’ll never love Linden, especially not in the way she does, and that he’ll never love anyone the way he loves her. I wonder if she realizes, despite all her efforts to train me, that I can never take her place.

“I want to play a game,” Cecily says.

Jenna doesn’t look up from her novel. She’s strewn languidly on the couch, with her legs dangling over the armrest. “No shortage of those.”

“I don’t mean the keyboard or virtual skiing,” Cecily insists. “I mean a
game
game.” She looks to me for help, but the only game I know is the one where my brother and I set noise traps in the kitchen and try to survive the night intact. And when I was taken by Gatherers, I sort of lost.

I’m curled up on the window ledge in the sitting room—a room that is filled with virtual sports games and a keyboard meant to imitate a symphony orches-tra—and I have been staring at the orange tree blossoms that flutter like thousands of tiny white-winged descending birds. Rowan wouldn’t even believe them, the life they imply, the health and beauty. Manhattan is full of gasping, shriveled weeds that grow from the asphalt.

Refrigerator-smelling carnations for sale that are more science than flower.

“Don’t you know any games?” Cecily is asking me directly now. I feel her brown eyes staring at me.

Well. There was one game, with paper cups and string, and the little girl who lived across the alleyway. I open my mouth, prepared to explain it, but change my mind.

I don’t want to whisper my secrets into a paper cup to share with my sister wives. Really I only have one secret that’s worth anything, and that’s my plan to escape.

“We could play virtual fishing,” I say. I can feel Cecily’s indignation without even looking at her.

“There has to be something real we could do,” she says. “There
has
to be.” She paces out of the room, and I hear her shuffling around down the hall.

“Poor kid,” Jenna says, and rolls her eyes toward me for a moment. Then she returns to her book. “She doesn’t even understand what kind of place this is.”

It happens at noon. Gabriel brings my lunch to me in the library—which has become my new favorite place—and stops to look over my shoulder when he sees the sketch of a boat on the page.

“What are you reading?” he asks.

“A history book,” I say. “This one explorer proved the world was round by assembling a team and sailing all the way around it on three boats.”

“The
Nina
,
Pinta
, and
Santa Maria
,” he says.

“You know about world history?” I ask.

“I know about boats,” he says, and sits behind me on the arm of the overstuffed chair and points to the image.

“This one here is a caravel.” He begins describing its structure to me—the trio of masts, the lateen rigging.

All I truly understand from this is that the style was Spanish. But I don’t interrupt him. I can see the intensity in his blue eyes, that he’s taken a brief respite from the sullen work of cooking for and catering to Linden’s brides, that he has a passion for something.

Sitting in his shadow in the overstuffed chair, I actually feel a smile coming on.

That’s when Cecily’s domestic, Elle, comes bursting into the room. “
There
you are,” she cries at Gabriel. “You need to hurry to the kitchen and bring Lady Rose something for her cough.”

I can hear her coughing now, at the end of the long hallway. It’s become such a fixture in this place that I don’t always notice it. Gabriel hurries to his feet, and I close the book, make a motion to follow him out. “Don’t,” he says, stopping me at the doorway. “It’s better if you stay in here until this passes.”

But past his shoulder I can see an unusual chaos.

Domestics are scrambling past one another. First generation attendants are coming out of the elevator carrying all sorts of bottles, and a machine that resembles the humidifier my parents put in my bedroom the winter I caught pneumonia. But there’s an air of futility about it all, and Gabriel senses it too. I can tell by the look in his eyes.

“Stay here,” he says. But of course I follow him into the hallway. And it’s so frightening out here that I want to follow him into the elevator, which probably isn’t allowed, but I’m beyond caring about that. The domestics freeze in place; the attendants are left holding blankets and pills and breathing machines. Linden is kneeling by Rose’s bed with his face buried in the mattress.

He’s holding the long white stem of her arm, and I follow it up to her body, which doesn’t move and doesn’t breathe. Her gown, her face, is splattered with blood she must have been coughing up as she made those horrible sounds. But now an eerie silence fills the floor. It’s the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable islands, a silence that can be seen from space.

Cecily and Jenna come out of their bedrooms, and it’s so quiet that we hear the strangled noise in Linden’s throat. “Go away,” he murmurs. Then louder, “Go away!”

It’s not until he smashes a vase against the wall that we all scatter. I end up on the elevator with Gabriel, and when the doors close behind us, I’m grateful.

There’s nothing for me to do but follow Gabriel to the kitchen; I’d get lost going anywhere else. I sit on a counter, nibbling on grapes while the cooks and the servers talk as they go about their work. Gabriel leans against the counter beside me, polishing silverware. “I know you were fond of Rose,” he whispers to me, “but you won’t find much love for her down here. She gave the staff a hard time.”