Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy)

by Lauren DeStefano

  The downstairs hallway smells like fried lard, becoming more pungent when I reach the kitchen. “Hungry?” Reed asks. I shake my head.

  “Didn’t think so,” he says, pouring grease from a frying pan into an old can. “You seem birdlike. Even your hair is like a nest.”

  Maybe I should take offense, but I don’t mind this image of me he’s painting. It makes me feel wild, brave.

  “Bet you never eat,” he says. “Bet you drink up the oxygen like it’s butter. Bet you can go for days on nothing but thoughts.”

  That gets a smile out of me. I can see why Vaughn wouldn’t like his brother, and why Linden would.

  “So,” he says, turning to face me. “My nephew tells me you’re still recovering. But you look recovered to me.”

  Linden did say his uncle wouldn’t ask many questions, and he hasn’t. But he has a clever way of getting answers with carefully worded statements.

  “I am,” I say. “Mostly. I’ll only be a day or two, and I can be useful in the meantime. I know how to keep a house running. How to fix things.”

  “Fixing things is good,” he says, walking past me. I follow him down the hallway, out the front door, into the breezy May air. The grass and the bright weeds of flowers sway on the wind like the hologram that came from the keyboard as Cecily played. A stop-motion drawing in colored pencil, unreal.

  It’s gotten warmer since this morning, and there’s the almost plastic smell of grass. I think of Gabriel, how this time last year he brought me tea in the library and read over my shoulder. He pointed to the sketches of boats on the page of the history book, and I thought that it would be nice for us to sail away, the water dividing endlessly in the sunlight. Breaking in half and then breaking in half again.

  I push back my worries. I’ll come to find him soon; that’s all I can hope for.

  Reed shows me to the shed beside his house, which might have once been a barn. It’s enormous enough. “Even things that aren’t broken can be fixed,” he says. The darkness smells like mold and metal. “Everything can become something it’s not.”

  He looks at me, eyebrows up, like it’s my turn to say something. When I remain quiet, it seems to disappoint him. His fingers flutter over his head as he presses forward.

  It’s hard to see. The only light comes through gaps in the wooden planks that make up the walls.

  Then Reed pushes on a far wall, and it swings open. It’s a giant door, and at once the place is flooded with sunlight. Awkward shapes around me become leather straps, guns mounted up by nails, car parts hung like carrion in a butcher shop. The floor is nothing but packed dirt, and there’s a long worktable covered with so many odd things, I can’t make sense of them.

  “Never seen anything like it, I bet,” Reed says, sounding pleased with himself. I get the sense that he takes pride in being perceived as mad. But he doesn’t seem mad to me. He seems curious. Where his brother unravels human beings, weighing their organs in his bare palms, prying back eyelids, drawing blood, Reed unravels things. He showed more care with that engine on his table last night, more respect for its life, than Vaughn ever showed with me.

  “My father liked to make things,” I say. “And fix things. But woodworking, mostly.”

  I don’t know what’s making me talk so much. In the almost year I spent at the mansion, I don’t think I revealed so much truth about myself as I have this morning.

  I’m homesick, I suppose, and talking to a total stranger is my way of dealing with it.

  Reed looks at me, and I catch the green in his eyes. He’s like his brother there. They both have that distance, living in the world their thoughts create. He stares at me a long time and then says, “Say ‘ridiculous.’ ”

  “What?”

  “The word ‘ridiculous,’ ” he insists. “Say it.”

  “Ridiculous,” I say.

  “An absolute ghost,” he says, shaking his head and dropping into a seat at his worktable. It’s really an old picnic table with attached benches. “You look just like my nephew’s first wife. You even have her voice, and ‘ridiculous’ was her favorite word. Everything was ridiculous. The virus. The attempts to cure it. My brother.”

  “Your brother is ridiculous,” I agree.

  “I’m going to call you Rose,” he says with resolution, picking up a screwdriver and working the back off an old clock.

  “Please don’t,” I say. “I knew Rose. I was there when she died. I’d find it creepy.”

  “Life is creepy,” Reed says. “Kids rotting from the inside out at age twenty is creepy.”

  “Even so, my name is Rhine,” I say.

  He nods for me to sit across the table from him, and I do, avoiding a gray puddle of something on the bench. “What kind of name is ‘Rhine,’ anyway?” he asks.

  “It’s a river,” I say. I upturn a bolt and try to spin it like a top. My father used to make them for me and my brother. We’d spin them at the top of the stairs, and crush our shoulders together as we watched them jump down one step to the next. His always got there first, or else mine slipped through the banister and fell away. “Or it was a river, a long time ago. It ran from the Netherlands to Switzerland.”

  “Then I’m sure it still does run there,” Reed says, watching the bolt spin away from my fingers and promptly collapse. “The world is still out there. They just want you to think it’s gone.”

  Okay, maybe he is a little bit mad. But I don’t mind. Linden is right. Reed doesn’t ask many questions. He spends the rest of the morning keeping me busy with menial tasks, never telling me what it is I’m doing. As near as I can tell, I’m disassembling an old clock to make a new one. He checks on me sometimes, but spends most of the time outside, lying flat under an old car, or climbing inside to start its engine, which only splutters and creates black clouds through the tailpipe. He hides away in an even bigger shed farther back, higher than the house and more makeshift, as though he built it as an afterthought, to cover what’s inside.

  But I don’t ask about that, either.

  IT’S LIKE THAT for the rest of the day, and the next day, and the next. I don’t ask questions, and neither does Reed. He places tasks before me, and I do them. One piece at a time. Never knowing what I’m assembling. I watch him, too. He spends a lot of time under cars or in that lumbering shed with the door closed.

  I never have much of an appetite, and the safest things to eat in his kitchen are the apples, anyway, being that they’re the only things I recognize. They’re not the ultrabright green and red fruit I got used to in the mansion. They’re speckled, flawed, and mealy, the way I grew up thinking they should be. I’m still not sure which way is more natural.

  On my fourth morning, when I climb out of bed, I notice that the dizziness and the flecks of light are gone. The pain in my thigh has dulled, and the stitches have started to disintegrate. “I think I’ll leave tomorrow,” I tell Reed while we’re sitting on opposite sides of his worktable. “I’m feeling much better.”

  He’s taking a magnifying glass to some heap of machinery—a motor, I think. “Did my nephew arrange for transportation?” he asks.

  “No,” I say, tracing my finger around the rim of a mason jar filled with screws and grime. “That wasn’t part of the agreement.”

  “So there was an agreement,” Reed says. “Doesn’t seem like it. Seems like you’re just making it up as you go.”

  Story of my life. There’s no real way to counter that, so I just shrug. “I’ll be all right,” I say. “He knows there’s no reason to worry about me.”

  Reed glances at me for a moment, his forehead creased, eyebrows raised, before he returns to his task. “The fact that you’re here says he’s worried about you,” he says. “Doesn’t want you anywhere near his father, that much is clear.”

  “Vaughn and I don’t exactly get along,” I say.

  “Let me guess,” Reed says. “He tried to pluck out your eyes for science.” He says that last word, “science,” with such exaggerated passion that I laugh
.

  “Close,” I say.

  He stops working, leans forward, and stares at me so intently that I can’t help but look back at him. “It was no car accident, was it?” he says.

  “What do you keep in that shed?” I counter. Since we’re asking questions.

  “An airplane,” he says. “Bet you thought they were extinct.”

  It’s true there aren’t many airplanes. Most people wouldn’t be able to afford traveling that way, and most cargo is transported by truck. But the president and select wealthy families have them for business or leisure. Vaughn, for instance, could afford one if he wanted. But my guess is that what Reed calls an airplane is a patchwork of different parts, and not something I’d want to board.

  I look at the table. He answered my question; now he’s waiting for me to answer his.

  “Vaughn was using me to find an antidote,” I say. “Something about my eyes being like a mosaic, or something. I don’t know. It’s hard to follow him.” And at the time, I had so many drugs running through me that I thought the ceiling tiles were singing to me. Those days were so vivid at the time, but now, looking back, the memory is a shadow at the end of a long corridor. I can’t remember much of anything.

  “Doesn’t sound like something my nephew would allow,” Reed says. “Don’t get me wrong, the poor boy is as oblivious as a rabbit on a lion reserve, but still.”

  Animal reserves are a thing of the past, but somehow this comparison feels right.

  “He didn’t know,” I say. “And when I told him, he didn’t really believe it was as bad as it was. He still won’t. So we’ve decided it’s best to”—I pause, looking for the right words—“part ways. He and Cecily have the new baby coming, and I need to find my brother.” And Gabriel, but that would require even more explaining, and I’m already starting to feel exhausted and achy just thinking about what’s been said so far.

  The dull aching becomes a stab of pain in my temple when Reed asks, “Then, why, doll, are you still wearing his ring?”

  My wedding ring. Etched with fictional flowers that don’t begin and don’t end. More than once I’ve thought about cutting into it with something sharp. Making a line, severing the vines just so they stop somewhere.

  “Can I see your plane?” I ask. “Does it fly?”

  He laughs. It’s nothing like Vaughn’s laugh. There’s warmth in it. “You want to see the plane?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Why not?”

  “No reason not to, I suppose,” he says. “It’s just that no one’s ever asked before.”

  “You have an airplane in your shed, and no one has ever asked to see it?” I say.

  “Most people don’t know it’s there,” he says. “But I like you, not-Rose. So maybe tomorrow. For now, we have other things to do.”

  That night I lie in Reed’s yard. It stretches on farther than I can see, empty, aside from the tall grass and the bursts of wildflowers. I lie on the dirt and think, There is where the orange grove would be. And over there, the golf course, with its spinning windmill, its lighthouse gleaming. And farther down would be the stables, abandoned now, where Rose and Linden used to keep their horses. And here, where I’m lying, would be the swimming pool. I could coast on an inflatable raft as imaginary guppies flicked their bodies around me in glimmers of color.

  I thought I’d left that place behind me. But it keeps rebuilding itself in my mind.

  Something rustles nearby and I turn my head, watching the grass move. I get the terrible sense that it’s trying to warn me.

  I sit up and hold my breath, trying to listen. But a gust of wind is rolling through. I think it’s saying my name. No, that voice didn’t belong to the wind, though it would make more sense than the truth.

  “Rhine?”

  I lean back on my arms, tilt my head all the way to see the figure standing behind me.

  “Hi,” I say.

  The moon is full and beaming like a halo behind his head. His curls are his dark crown. He could be a sort of prince.

  “Hi,” Linden says. “Can I sit?”

  I collapse onto my back, liking the way the cold earth feels against my skull. I nod.

  He sits next to me, careful to avoid my hair that’s splayed around my head like blood. A bullet to the forehead, boom, blond waves everywhere.

  “Didn’t think you were coming back,” I say, focusing on the kite in the stars. I look for other kites, or people to fly them.

  Linden lies beside me. All I can think is that he’s going to get grass stains on his white shirt. He’s going to dirty that lovely hair. I feel like he’s trying to prove a point that he can be like me—not so neat and perfect.

  “I didn’t send my father, the other day,” he says. “I didn’t know he was going to do that.”

  What he doesn’t say is that his father probably tracked my whereabouts using whatever device he implanted in Cecily. Linden saw for himself the one that had been implanted in me.

  “Thought you said you knew him so well,” I mumble. Without looking back, I can feel his stare.

  “He was trying to spare me,” Linden says. “He knew how difficult it would be for me to see you.”

  “So you were spared,” I say. “Why did you come back?”

  “My uncle called me this afternoon,” he says.

  “I didn’t know you even had a phone,” I say. Somehow this feels like a violation, a reminder that while Linden treated me as an equal during our marriage, that was only part of the illusion. I was always a prisoner.

  “He told me you were leaving,” Linden says. “He said you just planned to walk off and leave everything to chance.”

  “Something like that,” I say.

  “That’s not much of a plan,” he says. “What are you going to do for money? Transportation? Food? Where will you sleep?”

  I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters.”

  “This is why Reed was stalling, isn’t it? He wanted to talk to you before I left.” I suppress a cry of frustration. “Please just let this be my problem,” I say. “Not yours.”

  He’s silent after that. The silence adds a foreign element to the air, polluting the moonlight, making my throat tight, the crickets extra loud. Planets are leaning in to listen. And finally I can’t take it anymore. “Just say it,” I tell him.

  “Say what?”

  “Whatever it is you want to say to me. There’s something ugly in there you’ve been wanting to let out. I can tell.”

  “It’s not ugly,” he says gently. “Or angry at all, really. It’s more of a question.”

  I prop myself on one elbow to look at him, and he does the same. There’s no hostility in his eyes. There’s no kindness, either. There’s nothing but green. “That night, at the New Year’s party, you said you loved me. Did you mean that?”

  I stare at him a long time. Until his face disappears, and he’s just a shadow.

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “If I did, it wasn’t enough to make me stay.”

  He nods. Then he gets up, dusts the backs of his legs, and offers his hand to me. I let him pull me to my feet.

  “Don’t leave tomorrow,” he says. “Please. Give me a chance to figure something out. If I just let you go, Cecily will be livid.”

  “She’ll be okay,” I say. “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “Then think of it as doing me a favor,” he says. “I’d like for Cecily to not be angry with me.”

  I hesitate. “How long?”

  “A couple of days, maybe less.”

  “All right,” I say. “A couple of days. Maybe less.”

  His lips waver, and I think he’s going to smile, but he doesn’t. The last time I saw him, he was brimming with words and thoughts, anger and intensity. I could feel them humming inside him. But now they’re all gone. I wonder where he put them. I wonder if he shouted them into the orange grove with the supposed ashes of his dead wife and child. When he opens his mouth, all he says is, “If you’
re going to be out here, you should really wear a sweater. I packed one for you.”

  Then he turns to leave. The limo is idling in the distance.

  “It wasn’t all a lie, Linden,” I burst out when he’s a few yards away. My voice is weak, getting smaller with each word. “Not everything. Not all of it.”

  He climbs into the backseat, giving no indication that he believes me.

  REED SITS across the kitchen table, watching me as I turn the apple in my fingers. Maybe he’s right about my never needing to eat. I can’t remember the last time I had a real appetite. Even the delicacies served to me on the wives’ floor wouldn’t appeal to me right now.

  I keep my eyes down. I don’t want Reed to see my defeat. I don’t want him to see that Vaughn has had a victory over me, because almost all of my misfortunes can be traced to that man. Being separated from my brother. Losing Jenna. Watching Cecily go with tears in her eyes. Leaving Gabriel to fear the worst. Linden’s coldness toward me. I keep staggering forward because I have to, but what Linden said last night is true: It’s not much of a plan.

  “Are you going to eat that, or submit it for fingerprint analysis?” Reed says.

  I set the apple down neatly, and tuck my hands under the table.

  He tilts his head, watching me. He’s eating some sort of deep-fried stew. The smell is repulsive; some of it drips onto his plaid shirt.

  “Okay, then,” he says. “No food today either. So what will sustain you?”

  “Oxygen,” I say softly.

  “You need to spice it up with something,” he says. This is his way of making conversation. I think he feels sorry for me.

  “A question, then,” I say.

  He sets his spoon into the bowl with authority. “All right. Go for it.”

  I look aside, thinking of how I want to word this. “You and Vaughn don’t seem anything alike,” I begin. “I guess my question is—was he always this way? You said your mother didn’t really care for him.”