Wither

by Lauren DeStefano

Page 21

 

  Just as Gabriel reaches for the doorknob, the door opens. Housemaster Vaughn greets us with a smile.

  The kitchen behind his shoulder is quiet, aside from the necessary sounds of things being prepared and cleaned.

  None of the usual chatter.

  “I asked him to bring me hot chocolate,” I say.

  “Of course, darling. I can see that,” Housemaster Vaughn says. He looks like a kind geriatric when she smiles at us. I feel Gabriel tense up beside me, and I am fighting a strange impulse to hold his hand, to let him know I’m just as afraid even if I don’t show it.

  “Why don’t you return to your duties, then,” Housemaster Vaughn tells Gabriel. He doesn’t need to be told twice; he melts into the kitchen and becomes part of the work noise.

  I’m left to face this man alone. “It’s such a nice cool day. The air is refreshing on these old lungs of mine,” he says, patting his chest. “I don’t suppose you’ll take a walk with your father-in-law?” It’s not really a question. We walk away from the house between the ponds in the rose garden.

  Jenna’s trampoline is covered in dead and dying leaves.

  I do my best to ignore this man who has threaded his arm through mine, who smells like tweed and aftershave and the basement I so fear. I leave Florida for a while. I think about the leaves in Manhattan in the fall. There aren’t very many trees—the chemical factories have taken their luster. But on a windy day, the scant leaves gather into crowds and fall all at once, giving the illusion of more. The memory helps me to make it through the rose garden without hyperventilating.

  Just when I’m thinking I’ll be able to get through this without having to speak, we come to the mini-golf course and Housemaster Vaughn says, “There’s an expression we old people have. ‘The apple of one’s eye. ’ Have you heard it?”

  “No,” I say. I am intrigued. I am fearless.

  You’re a good liar, Rhine. You can get through this.

  “Well, you, darling, are the apple of Linden’s eye. ”

  He gives my shoulders an affectionate squeeze. I feel my heart and lungs constricting. “You’re his favorite, you know. ”

  I am demure. “I didn’t think he noticed me,” I say.

  “He’s so fond of Cecily. ” Though, truthfully, Linden’s attention has started to shift toward me. Especially in the basement when he almost kissed me. I still haven’t figured out if it’s my resemblance to Rose that interests him, or something else.

  “He adores Cecily, as do I. She’s eager to please. It’s charming, really. ” Cecily is a little girl who never had a childhood, who wants so badly to fit into this role that she’ll do anything our husband asks. “But she’s young.

  She has much to learn. Wouldn’t you agree?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “And the older one, Jenna, she fulfills her duties, but she doesn’t have an ounce of your charm. She’s something of a cold fish, isn’t she? If I had my way, we would just toss her back into the water. ” His fingers flutter dramatically in the air. “But Linden insists we keep her. He thinks she’ll come around and conceive a child. He always was a little too compassionate. ”

  Some compassion. He killed her sisters.

  “She’s just a little shy,” I say. “She cares for him. She’s afraid of saying the wrong thing. She tells me all the time she can’t work up the courage to speak to him. ” None of this is true, but I hope it will keep Vaughn from tossing her back into the water. Whatever he means by that, I’m sure it’s not something I want to happen to her.

  “And then there’s you,” Vaughn says, not seeming to have heard me. “Intelligent. So lovely. ” We stop walking, and he strokes my chin between his thumb and index finger. “I’ve seen the way he brightens when you’re near him. ”

  I blush, which wasn’t supposed to be part of the act.

  “He’s even thinking of joining the human race again.

  He’s talking about returning to work. ” Housemaster Vaughn’s smile seems almost sincere. He puts his arm around me again, and we walk through the golf obstacles. Grinning clowns, giant ice cream cones, spinning windmills, and a big lighthouse with a working light that shoots out into the trees.

  “I had a son, many years ago, before Linden. Strong as an ox—That’s another expression us first generations used to have. ”

  “Really?” I say.

  “Healthy every day of his life. This was before we realized the poisonous bomb ticking away in our children. He succumbed just like the rest of them. Just as you believe you will. ”

  We stop, and I follow his lead and sit down on the giant gumdrop that is the seventh hole. “Linden isn’t the strongest child, but he’s all I have. ” His kind geriatric face is back. If I didn’t know better, I’d pity him.

  But when I put my arm around him in comfort, I’m fully aware that he’s not to be trusted.

  “From the day of his birth, I’ve been working tire-lessly on an antidote. I have an ever-rotating medical staff that’s working in a laboratory as we speak. I will find an antidote within four years. ”

  And if not, then what? I try to fight off a thought that Cecily’s baby will become his new guinea pig after Linden and his wives are gone.

  He pats my hand. “My son is going to have a healthy lifespan. And so are his wives. You will have a real lifetime. You’re bringing Linden out of the darkness that Rose left him with, don’t you see that? You’re restoring his life. He’s going to become successful again, and you’ll be on his arm at every party. You’ll have everything you can dream of for years and years. ”

  I don’t know why he’s saying these things to me, but his presence is starting to nauseate me. Is this a concerned father looking out for his son? Or has he somehow read into my intention to escape? He’s looking right into my eyes and I can’t recognize him. He seems less menacing than usual.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “I do. ”

  When our parents died, our basement became hopelessly infested with rats. They were coming up from the sewers and chewing our wires and destroying our food.

  They were too smart for the traps we’d laid out, and so Rowan got the idea to poison them. He mixed flour, sugar, water, and baking soda and left it in puddles on the floor. I didn’t think it would work, but it did. While it was my turn to keep watch one night, I saw a rat run in strange circles and then collapse. I could hear its little whinnying noises, could see its feeble twitching. This went on for what felt like hours before it died. Rowan’s experiment was a gruesome success.

  Housemaster Vaughn is giving me a choice. Here I can live in this house where he’s dissecting Linden’s dead wife and child for an antidote that doesn’t exist. Here I can die in four years and our bodies will all be experiments. But for four brief years I’ll be the dazzling wife at ritzy parties, and that will be my reward. I’ll still die like the rat, in agony.

  I think of Vaughn’s words for the rest of the day. He smiles at me across the dinner table. I think of the dead rat.

  But by nightfall, I force Vaughn’s menacing voice out of my mind. Lately I have been promising myself that once I’m in bed, I will think only of my home—how to return to it, and what it looks like. What my life was before coming to this place.

  Nobody in this mansion is allowed into these thoughts, except for when I remind myself that Linden, even with his mild manner, is the enemy. He has stolen me from my twin, my home, and he keeps me for his own.

  So at night, when I’m alone, I think of my brother, who from the time we were children had a habit of standing in front of me, as though any terrible danger would have to hit him before it could reach me. I think of how looked, gun in hand, after he shot that Gatherer and saved my life; the terror in his eyes at the thought of losing me. I think of how we have always belonged to each other, our mother fitting our young hands together and telling us to hold on. />
  These thoughts build night after night, when I’m most alone in this mansion of spouses and servants, and for a few hours I’m able to separate myself from this fake life. No matter how lonely it makes me, and no matter how wide and horrific the loneliness, at least I remember who I am.

  And then one night, while my mind is fading into sleep, I hear Linden close my bedroom door after coming in. But he’s a thousand miles from me. I’m with Rowan, setting the kite string. My mother’s light laughter fills the room, and my father is playing a Mozart sonata in G major on the piano. Rowan casually unravels the string that’s tangled around my fingers, and he asks me if I’m still alive. I try to laugh like what he’s saying is crazy, but the sound doesn’t come, and he won’t raise his eyes to me.

  I won’t stop looking for you, he says. I won’t ever stop. If it kills me, I’ll find you.

  “I’m right here,” I say.

  “You’re dreaming,” he says. But the voice doesn’t belong to my brother. Linden has buried his face into the curve of my neck. The music is gone; my fingers fumble for string that isn’t there. And I know the truth, that if I open my eyes, I’ll see the dark bedroom in my lavish prison. But I don’t try to free my mind of its hazy state, because the disappointment is too much to take.

  I feel the dampness of Linden’s tears on my skin, his shuddering gasps. And I know he has been dreaming of Rose; like me, his nights are often too lonely. He kisses my hair and wraps an arm around me. I allow it. No, I want it. Need it. Eyes closed, I lay my head to his chest for the forceful thud-thud of his heart.

  I want to be myself, yes. Rhine Ellery. Sister, daughter. But sometimes it’s too painful.

  My captor pulls me toward him, and I fall asleep enveloped in the sound of his breathing.

  In the morning I awaken to Linden’s breath at the nape of my neck. I’m facing away from him, and he’s pressed to my back with his arms around me. I lie perfectly still, not wanting to wake him, ashamed with myself for my vulnerability last night. At what point does this good wife act stop being an act? How long before he tells me he loves me, and expects me to carry his baby? And what’s worse, how long before I agree?

  No. That will never happen.

  I try to fight it, but Vaughn’s voice floods into my brain.

  You’ll have everything you can dream of for years and years.

  I can have this. I can be Linden’s bride, in Linden’s mansion. Or I can run, as far and as fast as I can. And I can have a shot at dying with my freedom.

  Three days later, when the next hurricane alarm begins to scream, I break through the screen in my bedroom window.