Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy)

by Lauren DeStefano

They have some sort of conversation with their eyes. A husband-and-wife thing—something I could never quite get the hang of. Cecily wins, because Linden picks up the diaper bag and says, “I’ll be back for you in the morning, first thing.”

  A few minutes later, through the window, we watch the limo drive out of sight.

  The mattress is lumpy and hard, and Cecily, who is back to snoring the way she did in her later trimesters, spends the night thrashing and turning. She kicks me so many times that I eventually take a pillow and settle on the floor. But every position on the hard wood aggravates the recovering gash in my thigh. In my dreams, it bleeds and seeps through the floorboards, and Reed pounds on the ceiling because blood is raining down on his work. The engine on the table comes to life. It pulses and breathes.

  In the darkness Cecily whispers my name. At first I think it’s part of my dream, but she persists, increasing in frequency and intensity until I say, “What?”

  “Why are you on the floor?” I can just make out her face and arm leaning over the mattress, tangle of hair coming over one shoulder.

  “You were kicking,” I say.

  “I’m sorry. Come back up. I promise I won’t anymore.”

  She makes room for me, and I cram in beside her. Her skin is sticky and hot. “You shouldn’t wear socks to bed,” I tell her. “They keep heat in. Last time you were pregnant, you always got feverish at night.”

  Her legs move under the blanket as she kicks her socks off. It takes her a while to get comfortable, and I can tell she’s trying not to disturb me, so I don’t complain as I’m knocked around the mattress. Eventually she settles on her side, facing me.

  “Did you get sick earlier, when you went to use the bathroom?” I ask.

  “Don’t tell Linden,” she says, yawning. “He’s squeamish about that stuff. He worries.”

  That’s to be expected after what happened with Rose’s pregnancy. But it’s not as though I can tell her that. And soon I find, despite my worries, that I’m exhausted enough to fall asleep.

  Just as I’m beginning to dream, she says, “I think about those other girls in the van with us. The ones who were killed.”

  My dreams fade away from me, and I wish desperately that they’d return. Even a nightmare would be welcome over that memory. It’s not something my sister wives and I ever talked about, the odd and horrific thing that bonded us to one another. I especially wouldn’t expect to hear about it from Cecily, who has always wanted to be the happy housewife.

  “I just wanted you to know that,” she says. “I’m not a monster.”

  I turn my head to look at her. “Of course you aren’t.”

  “You called me one,” she says. “The day you ran away.”

  “I was upset,” I say, pushing the sweaty hair from her face. “But what happened to Jenna isn’t your fault.”

  She draws a shaky breath, closes her eyes for a long moment. “Yes, it is.”

  Here is where I expect her to cry, but she doesn’t. She only looks at me. And it strikes me again how much she’s grown in my absence. Maybe she had no choice. There were no sister wives to console her, the father-in-law she trusted had only been using her, and it’s not as though she could explain any of this to her husband.

  I struggle for words of comfort, but nothing feels sincere enough. And no matter what I say, Jenna is still gone, and so are the other girls that were Gathered, and the girl Silas and I found lying in a ditch. Cecily still won’t live to see Bowen grow, and my brother has spiraled out of control in his grief, and I’m no closer to finding him than I was last year.

  I am entirely powerless.

  “The whole time we were married, I treated you like you were too small to understand what was happening to us,” I say. “But I felt small too. I couldn’t control the way things were any more than you could.”

  “You looked so confident,” she says. “I envied you from the day we were married. I’ve decided I’m going to be more like you.” She says it with conviction. “I’m going to be stronger.”

  The last thing I am is strong.

  “Get some sleep,” I whisper.

  “Rhine?”

  “What?”

  “I told Linden to believe you. I told him it’s true that Housemaster Vaughn is doing awful things downstairs.”

  I feel hope. Linden might not have any reason to believe me, but he’ll listen to Cecily. Even if it’s just to humor her so she doesn’t go hysterical on him. “You did?”

  “He wouldn’t listen at first,” she says. “It was while you were in the hospital. But I begged him to go and see for himself.”

  “Did he?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says. “But—when he came back, he said there was nothing down there. A few of Housemaster Vaughn’s chemicals and things, lots of machines and attendants working on them, but no bodies. No Deirdre. He says you must have been hallucinating, or making it all up.”

  Hope swims away, leaving me with less than nothing. “But you saw those things too,” I press. “Did you tell him that?”

  Now she’s the one brushing her fingers through my hair, trying to console me. “I only saw what was happening to you,” she says. “I wish I’d seen more. I wish I’d seen Deirdre, or Rose’s domestic, what was her—”

  “Lydia,” I say.

  “Right. Lydia. I wish I could prove it.” She’s talking to me in that hushed, cooing tone usually reserved for her son. Trying to lull me to sleep, or compliance.

  And then I realize why.

  “You don’t believe me,” I say.

  “Oh, Rhine, Housemaster Vaughn did such terrible things to you. You were so delirious, and so sick. Maybe there’s a chance some of it—”

  “It was real,” I say, sitting up. “It was all real.”

  She sits upright herself, facing me in the darkness. She’s frowning. “There was nothing down there, Rhine.”

  “He hid them, then,” I say. “The bodies. The domestics. If Gabriel were here, he’d tell you the same thing.”

  Cecily straightens her posture, hopeful. She wants to believe me. “Did he tell you there were bodies down there?”

  “Not exactly,” I say.

  “What did he tell you?”

  My stomach sinks. I collapse back onto the pillow, defeated. “Not much,” I admit. He was so high on opiates at first, and then it was one problem after the next, really. “He didn’t have a chance.”

  Cecily lies beside me, rubs my arm reassuringly. We both go silent. I struggle to cope with the fact that I am the only one who saw what Vaughn kept in the basement. But even worse than that, I want to believe what Linden and Cecily do, that none of it really happened. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe Deirdre really did get sold to another house when I left, and Adair and Lydia too. Maybe they’re comfortable and safe, and I’d conjured Deirdre up to cope with the loneliness as I lay strapped to that bed. She visited me often.

  I start to make a list in my head of all the things I know. Vaughn killed Jenna; he admitted as much. Rose’s body was in the basement that day the elevators gave out. I saw her. I recognized her nail polish, her blond hair. There was a tracker in my leg. Deirdre told me about it. Didn’t she? I think of all the attendants who came to work on me while I was in the basement. In my memory they all have the same blank expressions; they’re all voiceless, uncaring. Deirdre was warm. She spoke gently, made me feel safe, which was a bizarre thing in that place.

  The list collapses in on itself, words and memories jumbling into a bloody mess. It’s so frustrating the way the pictures keep on changing.

  In the end it’s Cecily I reach for. At least I can be certain she exists. Her skin is sweaty and warm as I scrunch up the sleeves of the nightgown she borrowed from me. I worry about how overheated she gets, like there’s a fire inside her. I think she drifted off to sleep and I woke her, because she mumbles something nonsensical before opening her eyes. “You don’t have to believe me,” I tell her. “You just have to believe that Vaughn is capable of those thing
s.”

  “I do,” she says. “Linden doesn’t. I think he chooses not to. He’s sensitive, you know?”

  She strokes my cheek with the side of her hand—a repetitive, wispy motion. Like little ghost kisses.

  “I thought Housemaster Vaughn wanted to do good things and save us all,” she says. “I was wrong. And admitting that meant admitting he won’t find an antidote and none of us has much time. You said you have to find your brother—so you should go do that. And Linden and I have Bowen, and this baby. I want to spend as much time with them as I can. I want to be with them until the end.”

  These are all things she wouldn’t have dared to say last year. But now she’s unflinching. Her voice doesn’t even catch when she adds, “If all those things you saw are real, there’s nothing we can do about them. We have our own lives to take care of, and there’s only time to do so much with them.”

  What she says is terrible and true. She grabs my hand. We squeeze each other’s fingers, and I wait for her to realize the magnitude of what she’s said. I wait for her to squish up against me and sob. But from the reason in her tone, I sense that those words have been in her for a long time. That while I was away, she had plenty of time to get used to them.

  And when the sob does come, several minutes later, it’s mine.

  My sister wife has already fallen asleep.

  I dream of Linden in the doorway. He looks at me a long while, the green in his eyes changing every second. “The stars do look like a kite,” he admits. “But everything else you’ve said is a lie.”

  In the morning I awaken to Cecily jumping from the bed, her feet crashing onto the floorboards like baritone notes, to get to the window. “Quiet,” I tell her, cringing at the sudden light when she yanks the window shade, forcing it to recoil with a slurping noise.

  “No, no, no. You have to hide,” she tells me. Panic in her eyes. The sound of an engine purring under the window.

  I stagger to my feet, every muscle sore, and walk to the window. And outside is the limo, a figure standing beside it waving us down. Linden said he’d be here to collect Cecily in the morning, but as my grogginess subsides, I realize that Linden isn’t here.

  Vaughn is.

  “STAY HERE,” I say, hurrying to put on a pair of jeans under my nightgown.

  “Wait!” Cecily calls after me as I’m running down the stairs.

  “Stay!” I tell her.

  Outside, the early morning air is cold, and I hug my arms for warmth. Dewy grass clings to my bare feet as I move toward him. He smiles. “Ah, so she awakens,” he says. His voice disrupts the gray sky. A burst of blackbirds rushes past.

  I maintain my distance, keep my tone neutral when I ask, “Where’s Linden?”

  “Your husband had an early meeting with a potential contractor,” he says. “He sent me for you and Cecily.”

  “Sure he did,” I say, bracing one foot behind me to take a step back.

  “You’re still angry with me,” he says. “I understand. But, Rhine, darling, you’re such a fascinating creature. You should be flattered; before you came along, I was sure I’d seen everything. I couldn’t help but get carried away.”

  Carried away. I laugh humorlessly, a cloud bursting from my open mouth.

  “Let’s just be honest with each other. If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead,” he says.

  “Thanks to you, I almost was,” I say. “What will you do if I refuse to go along this time? Burn down this house?”

  “While I do think a fire would be an improvement, no. The choice is entirely your own,” he says, sounding sincere. “I thought you and I could put this sordid mess behind us. How does resuming first wife status sound?”

  I open my mouth, aghast, but no words come. How did he even find me here? The tracker has been removed from my leg. Did Linden really send him here after me? I know he’s angry, but I don’t believe he’d do anything so venomous.

  The screen door slams behind me, and then I realize it. Cecily. Vaughn can’t trace my steps anymore, but she is still his property. How does it work? Is there a computer somewhere that spells out our location on a digital map? Or some kind of beeping device that sounds an alarm when we’re nearby, like a metal detector hovering over coins? My parents used to have one of those; it was often how my father found scrap metal to build things with.

  She moves to stand beside me, coiling her arm around mine. “She isn’t going back,” she says.

  “You don’t want your sister wife to come home?” Vaughn says. “But you’ve been so lonely. So lonely, in fact, that you were sneaking down to visit her every time I left the house.”

  She draws a deep breath. She’s scared, though she’s trying not to let on.

  “Don’t go with him,” I say into her ear.

  The screen door slams again, and I catch a whiff of smoke. Reed has a cigar in his mouth. Grease and brown splotches stain his white shirt. “Nobody was going to invite me to the reunion?” he says to Vaughn. “You can’t have it both ways, Little Brother. If I can’t come onto your property, you can’t come onto mine.”

  “I’ve just come to collect something that belongs to me,” Vaughn says. “Put something decent on, Cecily. Run a brush through that hair, and let’s go.” She’s still wearing one of the nightgowns that Linden packed for me, the unbuttoned collar dipping over her shoulder.

  “I’ll leave when my husband gets here,” Cecily says. “Not before then.”

  “You heard the kid,” Reed says.

  Vaughn opens his mouth to say something, but the sound of a baby crying interrupts him. And the words he was going to say turn into a grin. Cecily stiffens.

  Vaughn opens the passenger door and says, “Come on out and talk some sense into your keeper.”

  Elle, Cecily’s domestic, steps out of the car. She’s holding Bowen to her chest, and his face is red and wet with tears. Cecily reaches for him immediately, but Vaughn steps in her way. “It’s chilly out here, darling,” he says. “And you’re pregnant. You don’t even have the sense to wear a coat. What makes you think you can get by without me to supervise your prenatal care? You’ve already missed your vitamins this morning.”

  “He’s right,” Elle says a bit too softly. She’s looking at the ground, and her words sound rehearsed. She’s smaller than Cecily—nine, maybe ten years old, and of all our domestics she’s always been the most timid. I’m sure it was no challenge for Vaughn to intimidate her.

  Cecily purses her lips together, composing herself. I think she’s trying not to cry. “You can’t keep my son from me.”

  Vaughn laughs, taps her nose the way he did when she was a newlywed, when she adored him because she didn’t know any better. “Of course not,” he says. “You’re the one who’s been away from him.”

  She steps past Vaughn, and he grips her forearm when she tries to reach for her son. I see the strain in his arm from the force of holding her. Her jaw swells with spite. He has never grabbed her before; he’s always been able to command her with his serpent’s charm. “Come home, or don’t,” he says. “But know that I won’t allow my grandson to stay here in this cesspool.”

  He looks at me and adds, “As always, the invitation is extended. It wouldn’t be home without you.”

  “Whose home?” I mutter. I take a step back, into the choking smog of Reed’s cigar. He says nothing, standing on the top porch step. This isn’t his battle.

  Cecily looks at me with the same regret as on the day I told her our father-in-law was responsible for Jenna’s death, when snow was falling between us. And my heart breaks the same way it did then. “I have to go,” she says.

  “I know,” I tell her, because I realize it too. She has Bowen and an unborn child to care for, and a husband to love. I have my brother and Gabriel to find. Cecily and I can’t keep each other safe. We have to let go.

  Vaughn releases her, and she comes at me, hugging me with so much force that I stumble. I wrap my arms around her. “Take care,” she murmurs into my ear. “Be br
ave, okay?”

  “You too,” I say.

  She lets go of me when Bowen’s cries jump up a few octaves. Vaughn escorts her to the car and waits until she has climbed inside, before instructing Elle to hand her the baby.

  Cecily clings to her son, but watches me over his wispy curls. Her lower eyelids have gone pink, a wavering line of tears tracing them. We know how unlikely it is that we’ll ever see each other again. If Linden had come to collect her, at least we’d have had time for a real good-bye.

  Vaughn climbs in beside her and closes the door, and I’m left staring at my own reflection in the darkened windows. Until even that is gone.

  Reed steps beside me, and together we watch the limo get swallowed by the horizon. He offers me a puff of his cigar, but I shake my head, letting the numbness take over my head, welcoming the pain into my bones. Waiting for this sadness to disappear like both of my sister wives.

  “Don’t feel bad, doll,” Reed says. “My mother never cared for Vaughn either. Though, bless her soul, she did try.” He claps my shoulder. “Better get washed up. There’s work to do.”

  The water trickles from the showerhead; it runs bleary and chunked with rust. But it’s not very much worse than what I was used to in Manhattan, and I’m able to get reasonably clean by not standing directly under it and splashing myself when it’s at its clearest. I take extra care with the gash that runs along my inner thigh, the skin pinched together with stitches.

  When I go through the suitcase Linden packed, I find that he left a roll of gauze and a bottle of antiseptic in one of the inner pouches by my toothbrush, where I’d be sure to see them. He was still thinking of me, caring for me in that passive way of his. Everything is neatly folded too. A lesser husband would be angry after what I put him through, would hope the wound became infected and the entire leg fell off.

  I dress the wound, and try to roll up the rest of the gauze as neatly as I found it, but I can’t duplicate Linden’s meticulousness.

  Remembering what Reed said last night about the machines, I tie my hair back with one of the many rubber bands hanging on the doorknob. Rubber bands on doorknobs, and bolts and rusty nails in glass jars, stacked into pyramids in corners. The entire house is a sort of machine, as though gears are turning between the walls.