Fever

by Lauren DeStefano

Page 14

 

  As we get away, I once again fight back the feeling that it came too easily.

  The sign reads: YOUR FORTUNE FOR A DOLLAR OR TRADE.

  Nearly every word is grossly misspelled.

  The night ended gradually, with the sky becoming gray, then shifting with shades of brown and pink, the stars rearranging themselves. My body moved, detached from my mind, as the world took shape in the daylight. I imagined the stars were the pearls and diamonds in Deirdre’s sweater, desperate for the feel of its familiar knitted warmth against my skin. But I’ll never get it back now; I’m stuck with this horrific yellow sari that trips me as I walk. Gabriel helped me tear off the sash so we could wrap it around Maddie as a makeshift blanket over her coat. It has helped somewhat.

  There wasn’t much in the bag Lilac threw to us before she was caught. There were boots and coats that Jared had dropped for us when diverting Madame. The coat is too big for Maddie, but I wrapped it around her like a blanket, and her teeth stopped chattering. There was also an old children’s book. Soggy strawberries bleeding through a folded cloth. Stale bread. A rusty flask of water. A syringe and a glass vial of the ominous beige-clear liquid I know to be angel’s blood. The water helped a little, but Gabriel and I were too sick to eat, and Maddie stubbornly refused food as well.

  Now snow flits along the ground like enchanted dust. The field ended hours ago, turning into empty warehouses and skeletal buildings that had been picked of their insulation and contents. I said that there must be some civilization nearby, because it looked as though everything here had been stolen. Gabriel mumbled that they couldn’t be too civilized. Maddie slept, her breath jagged.

  But eventually I turned out to be right, because now we’re standing before a small building that has smoke billowing from its chimney. To call it a building is actually kind. It’s barely taller than Gabriel, and made from pieces of scrap metal and boards. There’s only one wall—the one with the chimney, which is a story higher than the roof—that is made of brick. The only remaining wall of a house. There are no windows, not even the outline of them.

  Gabriel shifts Maddie to his other arm. All night he’s carried her without a complaint, but he has to be tired. The morning light shows dark bags under his eyes, and his irises are not their usual bright blue. We had to stop several times because one or the other of us doubled over, sick from the angel’s blood and fatigue. He looks like he’s about to drop, and I doubt I look any better.

  I’m the one to approach the door, which is a real door, with hinges that have somehow been welded to a piece of metal. I’m about to knock, when Gabriel whispers harshly, “Are you crazy? What if they want to murder us?”

  “That would be unfortunate,” I say, sounding more exasperated than I mean to.

  He touches my arm like he means for me to step back, but I don’t. I spin around to face him. “We have no other options. We’re exhausted, and sick, and I don’t see any luxury hotels around here. Do you?”

  Maddie, her cheek against Gabriel’s shoulder, opens her eyes. Her pupils are small, and her normally distant stare is eerie in an entirely new way. For the first time I can see streaks on her face left by old tears. Was she crying all night in her sleep?

  As scared as Gabriel and I are, it must be ten times worse for her.

  “We don’t have another option,” I say. Gabriel opens his mouth to say something, but I turn away and knock before he gets a word out.

  I’ve just realized what it is about Maddie that always leaves me feeling so unsettled. She reminds me too much of the children born in the lab. The small, malformed ones that clung to life for hours or days, or even weeks, but ultimately died. Her languid eyes just now confirmed it. I always ran past the rooms of those sad, hopeless lives, eyes averted, humming frantically in my head until the moment passed.

  After I knock, the door rattles and then opens a few inches, with a horrible scraping sound. The metallic warmth of the building makes my nostrils flare. Gabriel has wrapped his arm around mine, and I can feel the rough burlap of his shirt.

  The woman standing on the other side of the door is small and hunched. She’s wearing glasses so grimy I can barely see her eyes through the lenses. Her mouth is open, her face nonchalant, as though the three of us are a delivery she was expecting and is now inspecting for damages. She looks me over—the torn fabric where my sash was, my muddy hemline, rumpled hair—and says, “You look like a broken empress. ”

  “I’ve been called worse,” I say.

  She smiles, but it’s a distracted smile. Now she’s looking at Maddie, who is latched to Gabriel’s hip like a baby koala.

  “Your child?” the woman says. Then, “No, not yours. ”

  It would not take a fortune-teller to arrive at this conclusion. Maddie has her mother’s dark skin, though it is not as dark, and her smooth black hair.

  “She has a broken arm,” I say, as though that will explain her presence.

  “Come in, come in,” the woman says. But not before eyeing Madame’s jewelry around my neck. As we follow her inside—me first, and Gabriel right behind me, still holding on—I cover my left fist with my right hand, hiding my wedding ring.

  Inside, the small house is impossibly hot, the metal walls reflecting the light from the fire like we’re in an oven. And there are things everywhere. Things that make no sense being near one another—a rusty lantern dripping strings of blue beads, a pink plastic Statue of Liberty, a jade dragon, a taxidermy deer head over the fireplace, a dresser that’s plastered with stickers and missing its top drawer.

  I am guessing that when she sells fortunes, the payment is more trade than dollars.

  The dirt floor is covered by mismatched tiles—linoleum and stone and patches of carpet. There’s a sleeping bag in the corner and a coffee table surrounded by couch cushions.

  The warmth brings Maddie back to life. Her cheeks are flushed, her pupils expanded, her lower lip curled back in that brave defiance she showed Madame.

  I look right at her, Maddie’s unusual eyes against mine. I want to think our erratic features allow us some sort of telepathy. Don’t do anything crazy right now, my gaze is saying. I don’t know if she understands.

  The woman, who introduces herself only as Annabelle and doesn’t ask for our names, invites us to sit on the cushions. She offers us blankets, even though the fire is more than enough, and inspects the makeshift splint the blond girl at Madame’s carnival made for Maddie’s arm. It’s just twigs and gauze, but it has held up pretty well, all things considered.

  Maddie is so small that when she lies on the cushion, her feet hardly dangle over the edge of it. Her eyes are darting to all the things in the room, and the firelight lapping the walls and ceiling. I don’t think she ever stops observing. Her mind is a bird that’s trapped inside her skull, flapping and thrashing, never breaking free.

  I take a strawberry from Lilac’s bag and offer it to her. I have to dangle it over her face before she notices it, and then she raises her lip in a snarl, like it’s toxic. “You need to eat something,” I say. I feel absurd talking to her. She stares at me in a way that makes me remember the throbbing pain in my hand from where she bit me so hard that it’s bruising. But she accepts the strawberry.

  “Fruit, in this weather?” Annabelle says. She rubs some grime from her glasses with both fists, revealing murky green eyes. She’s a first generation, but her voice is light and young. Her house smells charred and sweet. It takes a second for me to recognize the smell. Incense, not overbearing like the kind at Madame’s carnival, but sweet, similar to what burned in the hallways on the wives’ floor.

  For some indiscernible reason it’s making me homesick.

  Gabriel says, “They aren’t very good. ”

  “Actually, they’re about rotten,” I say. It doesn’t stop Maddie from eating the next one I feed her.

  Annabelle kneels beside Maddie’s cushion, her frizzed white
hair full of firelight. Maddie snarls at her, teeth stained pink with juice.

  “I don’t have anything for a broken arm,” Annabelle says. “But I have something for fevers, if you wouldn’t mind my taking those strawberries off your hands. You said yourself they were rotten. ”

  “Take them,” Gabriel says before I can interject. I shoot him an indignant look, but his eyes are on Maddie, whose cheeks are flushed.

  I hand over the strawberries, careful to keep the stale bread hidden. Who knows when we’ll be able to find food again.

  We watch Annabelle eat every mushy strawberry, several at a time, then suck the juice from the cloth, and finally suck each of her fingertips. The entire process seems to go on for a very long time.

  “Ah,” she groans, sitting back on her heels. “That hit the spot. Hardly anything but dehydrated food in the winter. ” She doesn’t ask where the strawberries came from, though, which I take as an act of consideration on her part.

  She crawls to the dresser and rummages through one of its drawers, finally extracting a mason jar of white pills. Normally I would be wary of accepting pills from a total stranger, especially after Madame, but as she brings the jar closer, I recognize their oval shapes, the A stamped onto each individual pill. Aspirin. The same stuff my brother and I kept in the house. It’s not hard to come by—if you can afford it.

  Annabelle is so grateful for the semi-fresh fruit that, in addition to giving Maddie a dose of aspirin, she even offers us a spot on her floor to sleep. “Only until noon,” she says. “That’s when I start getting customers. ” She adds, “That sure is pretty, dear. ”

  She’s eyeing one of my necklaces, which bears yellow beads shaped like stars and moons. I pull it over my head and hand it to her without a word. And then I settle on the blanket, my back to Gabriel’s chest. Maddie is already asleep on the cushion, which is why it’s so easy for me to drape my arm over her. I’m a light sleeper. I’ll know if she or Gabriel moves away from me.

  Annabelle ignores us, humming as she pokes the fire and arranges the tarot cards on her coffee table. A few minutes later she leaves, I think to use the outhouse that stands a distance from her house.

  “We shouldn’t both sleep,” Gabriel says the moment she’s gone. “You go ahead. I’m wide awake anyway. ”

  My cheek rests on his arm. In the abyss of my eyelids, I can see both of his arms wrapping around me, coiling and coiling, covering me head to toe. It’s as creepy as it is comforting. I feel myself fading. How can he stay awake?

  “Shifts,” I agree. My voice sounds a million miles away. I’m not even sure if I’m speaking, or dreaming of speaking. “When you get too tired, move away from me and I’ll wake up and take over. ”

  He peels some hair from my face, and I can feel his eyes studying me. “Okay,” he murmurs. It’s not even a word. It’s a white throb in my eyelids.