Wither

by Lauren DeStefano

Page 30

 

  That was the day the twins became orphans.

  I wake up to the sound of a dinner tray being set on my night table. Cecily is curled up beside me, snoring in that nasal way she’s adopted in her third trimester. My eyes dart to the bringer of the tray hopefully, but it’s just the nervous new attendant from this morning. The disappointment on my face must be obvious, because he tries to smile as he’s turning to leave.

  “Thank you,” I say, but even that sounds heartbroken.

  “Look in the napkin,” he says, and then he’s gone.

  I sit up slowly so as not to disturb Cecily. She mumbles into a little lake of drool on the pillow and sighs.

  I unroll the cloth napkin that encompasses the silverware, and a blue June Bean falls into my hand.

  I don’t see Gabriel the next day, or the next.

  Outside, the snow begins to stick to the ground, and I keep Cecily company while she pouts about not being allowed to go out and make snowmen. The orphanage never let her go out in the snow either. It would be too easy for the children to get sick in the cold, and the staff members weren’t equipped to deal with an epidemic.

  She only sulks for a little while, though, before she fades into one of her naps. I can’t wait for this pregnancy to be over. My fear over what’s to come when the baby is born is surpassed by my fear of what’s happening to her now. She’s always out of breath, or crying, and her finger is swollen around her wedding band.

  While she sleeps, I sit on her window ledge, flipping through the atlas Gabriel brought me. I find out that while my name is a European river, Rowan is a type of small red berry that grew in the Himalayas and Asia. I’m not sure what it means or if it means anything at all. But the last thing I need is another puzzle to try and solve, and after a while I just watch the snow falling outside.

  The view from Cecily’s window is nice. It’s mostly trees, and I think it could be just the normal woods out in the real world. It could be anywhere at all.

  But then, of course, I see the black limousine driving a path through the snow and I’m reminded of where I am. I watch it navigate around a shrub and then drive straight into the trees.

  Straight into the trees! There’s no impact. The limo simply drives straight through them as though they weren’t even there.

  And then it dawns on me. Those trees aren’t really there. That’s why I couldn’t find my way to the gate from any of the gardens or the orange grove. The true path is hidden by some sort of illusion. A hologram, like the houses at the expo. Of course. It’s so simple. Why didn’t I think of it before? It figures that I’d learn this now, when Vaughn has made it nearly impossible for me to be outside unaccompanied.

  For the rest of the day I try to figure out a plan to get outside so I can inspect the tree hologram, but all paths in my mind lead back to Gabriel. If I found a way out, I couldn’t leave without him. I told him I wouldn’t leave without him, but he was against the idea in the first place. If he’s in trouble because of me, will he completely abandon the idea of escaping?

  I just need to know that he’s okay. I can’t even think about leaving until I know that much.

  Dinner comes, and I don’t eat. I sit at a table in the library with my hand in my pocket turning the June Bean over and over. Jenna tries to distract me with interesting facts she’s read in the library books, and I know it’s for my benefit, because normally all she reads are romance novels, but I just can’t bring myself to pay attention. She coaxes me to try some of the homemade chocolate pudding, but it’s like paste in my mouth.

  That night I have a hard time falling asleep. Deirdre draws a bath for me with chamomile soaps that leave a layer of frothy green on the water. The soapy water feels like a deep-tissue massage and smells like heaven, but I can’t relax. She braids my hair while I’m soaking, and she tells me about the new fabrics she’s ordered in from Los Angeles, and how they’ll make lovely tiered summer skirts. And it only makes me feel worse to think I’ll still be here next summer to wear them. And the less responsive I am, the more desperate her tone seems to become.

  She can’t understand the cause of my unhappiness. Me.

  The pampered bride of a soft-spoken Governor who will give me the world on a string. She’s my eternal little optimist, always asking how I am or if I need anything and trying to make my day better. But it occurs to me that she never talks about herself.

  “Deirdre?” I say as she’s replenishing the soaps and adding more hot water to the bath. “You said your father was a painter. What did he paint?”

  She pauses with her hand on the faucet, and she smiles in a sad, wistful way. “Portraits, mostly,” she says.

  “Do you miss him?” I ask.

  I can tell that this is a subject of great sorrow for her, but she’s got a strength and tranquility that reminds me of Rose, and I know she’s not going to break down and cry.

  “Every day,” she says. Then she presses her hands together in a cross between a clap and a gesture of prayer.

  “But now I’m here, and I get to do what I love, and I’m very fortunate. ”

  “If you could run away, where would you go?”

  “Run away?” she says. She’s at the cabinet now, searching through the bottles of scented oils. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “It’s just a question. If you could be anywhere in the whole country, where would you go?”

  She laughs a little, dropping a bit of vanilla oil into the water. The foam sparkles and pops. “But I’m happy here,” she says. Then, “Well, there was a painting my father did—of a beach. There were starfish on the sand. I’ve never held a real starfish. I would have liked to go to that beach, or one just like it. ”

  She looks lost in the memory, staring through the bath tiles. Then she comes out of it and says, “How’s the water? Are you almost ready to get out?”

  “Yeah,” I say. I change into a nightgown, and Deirdre rubs some lotion on my feet and calves, and admittedly that does relax me a little. She lights a few candles and tells me the smell will help me fall asleep. They’re supposed to smell like lavender and something called sandal-wood, but as I’m drifting off to sleep, they take me away to a warm sunny beach, and a canvas freshly painted.

  I’m up before dawn the next morning. I had a dream that Gabriel came into my room with an atlas on the breakfast tray. It’s not awful, as nightmares go, but the loneliness I feel when I awaken is crushing.

  I venture into the hallway, which is dimly lit. The incense sticks have stopped burning, and there’s a distant smell like charred perfume. I know Jenna and Cecily will be asleep at this hour—especially Cecily, who has taken to sleeping until noon most mornings in her third trimester, but I’m sure one of them will let me get into bed with them. Maybe it will work better than sleeping alone.

  When I knock on Jenna’s door, I hear her soft giggle from somewhere in the room. There’s a rustling sound, and then she says, “Who is it?”

  “It’s me,” I say.

  Another giggle. “Come in,” she says.

  I open the door to a bedroom that’s warm with candlelight. Jenna is sitting up in the bed, running her fingers through her tousled hair, and Linden is tying the drawstring of his pajama pants. His bare chest is pale; his cheeks are flushed. He pulls his shirt on in a hurry, and it’s still unbuttoned when he stands and heads for the door. “Good morning, sweetheart,” he tells me, not quite meeting my eyes.

  There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s perfectly normal. Jenna is his wife. He’s our husband. I should be used to the idea. It was inevitable that I’d eventually catch a glimpse of what goes on behind these doors. But I can’t help the painful blush that washes over my face, and I can see that Linden is looking embarrassed too.

  “Morning,” I say, surprised not to have stuttered.

  “It’s early; you should try to go back to sleep,” he says, and plants a quick kiss on my lip
s and hurries down the hall.

  When I turn my attention back to Jenna, she’s walking around the room, extinguishing the candles. Her body shimmers in a layer of sweat; the hair receding from her face is damp; the buttons on her nightgown don’t align.

  I’ve never seen her this way, so wild and beautiful; Linden must be the only one who usually sees her like this. I push back a wave of jealousy, which is of course absurd.

  I have no reason to be jealous. If anything, she’s doing me a favor by keeping Linden’s affections away from me.

  She says, “Don’t these things smell awful? They smell like the inside of a leather purse. Linden thinks they set a mood. ”

  “How long was he here?” I say, in a measured tone.

  “Ugh. All night,” she says, and collapses back into bed. “I thought he’d never leave. He thinks if we do it a bunch of different ways, it’ll get me pregnant. ”

  I’m fighting not to blush. The Kama Sutra book, one of Cecily’s favorites, is open page-down on the floor.

  “Is that what you want?” I ask.

  She snorts. “To bloat up like a puffer fish like Cecily? Hardly. But what can I do? And anyway, I don’t know why he can’t knock me up. I’m just lucky, I guess. ” She pats the mattress beside her, inviting me over. “So, what’s up?”

  Without candlelight the room is much darker. I can barely make out her features. Had I really come here a few moments ago expecting to sleep? That seems like an impossibility now.

  “I’m worried about Gabriel,” I say. I sit on the edge of the bed, where Linden moments ago was adjusting his drawstring, and somehow I can’t bring myself to get under the covers.

  Jenna sits up and puts her arm around me. “He’ll be okay,” she promises.

  I stare dismally at my lap.

  “Okay, that’s it, get up,” she says, pushing me to my feet and following suit. “I know what you need. ”

  A few minutes later we’re huddled under a blanket on a couch in the sitting room, sharing a gallon of vanilla ice cream she ordered from the kitchen, and we’re watching an early-morning rerun of yesterday’s soap opera.

  Along with the romance novels, these are another of her guilty pleasures. The actors are all teenagers made up to look much older. Jenna tells me they’re constantly changing the actors, since of course the show has been on for more than a decade and the original actors have died by now. The only consistent actors are first generations. And as she’s explaining to me who’s in a coma and who unknowingly married an evil twin, bathed in the television’s glow I do start to relax a little.

  “You two are so loud. ” Cecily is in the doorway, rubbing her eyes. Her stomach looks like an overblown bal-loon. She hasn’t bothered with the last few buttons of her nightgown, and the skin around her bellybutton is stretched so far that it shines painfully. “What are you doing at this hour?”