Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy)

by Lauren DeStefano

  “What’s the matter, love?” Linden says. “Nobody is going to hurt you. I’m right here.”

  She shakes her head wildly. “I don’t want your father. I don’t want him.”

  But it’s too late. Her nightmare has arrived. I can hear his voice in the hallway, calling her name.

  And then he’s here.

  Vaughn brings with him the smell of spring rain and earth. It has always been a smell I associated with life, but right now it’s choking. His hair is wet and windswept, his coat dripping, his boots muddying the tiles. “Oh, Cecily,” he says, “I’m so sorry about the baby. Perhaps if you listened to me about staying in bed, it wouldn’t have happened. You always were too reckless for your own good.”

  Of course he’s blaming her for this.

  She’s kicking her legs, propelling herself away from him. I’ve never seen her so frightened. The girl who has spent the last several hours asleep is now squeezing my hand with enough brute strength, I’m certain, to bruise bone.

  “Please, love, you have to lie back down,” Linden urges. “You’re not well.”

  But Cecily doesn’t even hear him. “You did this,” she tells Vaughn. “You’ll bury me alive the first chance you get.”

  The faraway stare in her eyes terrifies me. She’s sitting up now, speaking in whole sentences, but she’s muddled by delirium.

  Vaughn brushes past me and leans over her bed. I think he’s going to grab her arm like that morning outside of Reed’s house, but he only touches the IV bag hanging over her and checks the writing on it. “They shouldn’t have you on something this strong,” he says. “I’ll get this sorted out.”

  “No,” Cecily says. “No.” She turns to Linden, pleading. “You have to make him leave. He wanted me dead. Me and our baby.”

  The hurt in Linden’s eyes is immediate. He blinks several times before he can speak. “Cecily, no . . . ”

  “Just get him out of here, Linden,” I say through gritted teeth.

  Vaughn looks at me with dead eyes before regarding Cecily with a surge of affection. “Darling, you don’t have a clear head,” he says. “We’ll get you set up with something milder, and you’ll feel better.” Then, to Linden, “You and I should talk outside.”

  Once they’re gone, I manage to calm Cecily enough that she lies down. “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “He isn’t coming back.”

  “He’ll try to take Bowen,” she says, tears brimming in her eyes.

  “That’s not going to happen. Have you seen Reed’s gun collection? He won’t let anyone touch Bowen.”

  I wipe at her cheeks with the cuff of my green sweater because it’s the softest thing I can think of. It catches her tears without absorbing them, and they hang between the fibers like stars.

  “I feel strange,” she says, “like I’m underwater.”

  I tuck the bedsheet up to her chin and press the back of my hand to her forehead. “That’s the fever.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I know the feeling.”

  “I was never sick a day in my life before I got pregnant with Bowen,” she says. “I never even had a runny nose.”

  “You’ll be better soon,” I say, willing it to be true.

  “I dreamt Housemaster Vaughn pushed me into the dirt and I started sinking,” she says. “His eyes turned into Jenna’s eyes. I tried to scream, and my mouth filled up with mud.”

  It doesn’t matter if I keep constant vigil; I can never protect her from what’s happening in her dreams.

  “That wasn’t real.” I pull the flimsy hospital blanket over the sheet. “Close your eyes,” I whisper, and she does.

  I weave small sections of her hair into braids, untangle them and start again. It’s something Jenna used to do to our hair when she was bored, which was often, and doing it now makes me feel like Cecily and I are still a part of that trio.

  “Don’t leave me by myself,” she says. “Please.”

  “Of course not. I’m right here,” I say.

  “He tried to murder me,” she says.

  “If he tries again, I’ll murder him first,” I tell her.

  “Not necessary.” Her voice is slurring. “I’ll do it myself.”

  I keep up the braiding, and eventually the drugs and the exhaustion pull her back under. Her mouth falls open, letting out steady breaths.

  She’s grown so much since I ran away. Her pert chin has elongated just enough for her face to lose its permanent pout and give her an air of assuredness instead. Her bratty sense of superiority has matured into a cool, practical certainty, which is perhaps why Vaughn grabbed her arm that morning, why he seems to fear he has lost control of her. Her ferocity is palpable now; it’s the very strength that brought her spluttering and gasping from death itself, as if to say she were promised twenty good years and she’s going to have them.

  “Jenna would be proud of you,” I whisper. Her eyebrows knit for a moment and then relax.

  When Linden returns, his arms are folded across his stomach. There are streaks from tears on his skin. He looks small, rattled. I’ve only known him to be this way late at night, when he was first mourning Rose; the darkness hid the worst of it then. His shaking breaths make my arms remember the shape of him beneath the blankets. Something deep within me wants to pull him close.

  “How is she?” he asks. His voice is congested.

  I open my mouth to say that she’s okay, but what comes out is, “She’s terrified, Linden.”

  I expect him to argue that she’s perfectly safe, but he only nods as he takes his place in the chair by her bed. “My father agreed to leave for now, so she can rest. But he wanted to take her home tonight. He thought she’d get the best care in her own bed, with the doctors we have at home.” He watches her eyes roving busily as she dreams. Her eyelids break apart, revealing a sliver of white. “I said it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  I’m impressed. It’s the first time he has overridden one of his father’s decisions.

  I think about how he spent last night awake, waiting for the moment when he could see Cecily again. I drifted to sleep a few times in the waiting room, leaning against him, and every time I awoke, his face had changed into a different kind of grief. “Linden,” I say softly now, “you should at least try to get some sleep.”

  He shakes his head, watching as I gather Cecily’s hair for a new braid.

  “My father warned me that you’re an interloper. He told me I should make you leave, since we’re no longer married and you’re not my concern,” he says. The thought gives me a chill. Yes, I’m sure Vaughn would love for his son to abandon me, so that Vaughn can swoop in and reclaim me the second I’m alone.

  But Linden adds, “I told him that wouldn’t be a good idea either.”

  By evening Linden has succumbed to sleep. He sits hunched over the bed, his head resting beside Cecily’s on the pillow, his hand gripping her arm as though she might float away from him. I listen to the rain and the thunder, and I think I hear Jenna’s voice in them, sounding out a warning. She’s been gone for months now. But sometimes it feels like she’s more alive than ever. She’s one of the indecipherable things that make sounds in the wind, and she’s in every kind of dream—the good and the awful.

  I go into a fitful half sleep. Coasting along, I hear Cecily’s voice, high and operatic and lovely when she sings. I dream of Jenna braiding her own long dark hair as music notes fill the room. We’re safe here. Safer than we’ll ever be when we’re awake.

  But with morning comes reality. The rumble of gurneys and trays in the hallway replaces the danger of last night’s storm.

  “I brought you some tea,” Linden says when I open my eyes. He nods to the paper cup on the night table. “It’s gone cold.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Sure,” he says, looking at Cecily, whose face is more relaxed in sleep.

  “I think she’s doing better,” Linden says, miserable, drained, “now that my father’s gone.” His next breath l
ooks like it hurts. “I thought she loved my father. I thought my father loved her. He has told me that she’s like a daughter to him.”

  I decide that right now is not the time to say anything awful about his father. Linden’s having a hard enough time. I sip my tea. It is cold, but I feel it immediately in my stomach, stirring things, waking my organs and making me alert.

  Whatever Linden is thinking, he doesn’t say it. He only stares at Cecily.

  “She’ll be all right,” I say, resolute. “We’ll get her a little bell to ring when she needs anything, and by the second day we’ll want to throw it out the window.”

  That gets a smile out of him. I hear the scrape of stubble when he rubs his chin. He opens his mouth like he wants to say something, but then he looks away.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Do you think—” He swallows something painful. “Do you think my father had something to do with this?”

  Linden. The thought is sinister for him. Even I didn’t want to entertain the possibility. But now that the fear and the shock are subsiding, I know it’s the best explanation. Vaughn is so good at his wicked craft that he can ruin his daughters-in-law without even being under the same roof, without even being in the same city. He finds a way into our blood, as deadly as the virus that kills us.

  The anger is so much and so sharp that I can’t bear it. “It’s a sound theory,” I say.

  Linden doesn’t seem to hear me, though. He’s staring ahead when he says, “It would’ve destroyed me if I’d lost her. My father knows that, doesn’t he?”

  “He does,” I say cautiously. I can see the doubt coming to his face, the way he’s piecing things together. Vaughn never told Linden much about his late brother, or his mother. He didn’t want Linden to feel a shred of love for them. But Linden can love his wives if he wants to, because if they die, Vaughn knows that his son will return to him, broken and vulnerable and so easy to control.

  He looks so haggard. I move my chair beside his and force the cup of cold tea into his hands, hold my palm under it, and guide it to his lips. He takes small obligatory sips, but then I have to take the cup away because his hands are shaking so much that the tea is splashing onto his thighs.

  I put my arms around him, and he grabs my shirt in his fists and pulls me close.

  “Hey,” I say into his ear. “She’s going to be okay. That’s the important thing. We’ll figure the rest out later.”

  Linden nods and says nothing more, but I can feel his rage. This is where it starts. This is the spark that will eventually consume him.

  I WRING OUT the sponge, and the water in the bucket goes pink with my sister wife’s blood.

  Reed makes his own soap—these crude oatmeal-based rectangles that leave a beige film on everything. But it’s doing wonders for the upholstery in his car. The big bloody stain becomes a dull orange, and then gray. By now it looks like it could be a grease stain, or cooking oil. But I want it gone completely, and so I scrub until my shoulders ache and the upholstery starts to look thinner. After this I’ll mop up the red streaks in the hallway, launder the bedsheets, burn them if washing them doesn’t take care of it. Bad enough she had to lose the baby in that hospital room all alone. I’ll be damned if she has to come home to the evidence, too.

  “I think you got all of it, doll,” Reed says. His hands are dirty up to the elbows. He said he’d be in his shed. I don’t know how long he’s been standing there. I don’t look up. Keep scrubbing.

  “Not all of it,” I say.

  “Really. It was pretty dirty before, anyway. You can’t make it perfect.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Doll . . . ”

  I wring out the sponge again. Pink suds drip from my fingers and onto the stain. This is getting counterproductive. I need fresh water. When I pick up the bucket, it slips in my wet hands and spills across the floor of the car. And suddenly I can’t move. I can only watch the water get absorbed into the carpet. I’m breathing hard. My muscles ache. My head is pounding. And all I want is for this stupid car to be clean, but it’s not going to happen. It’s not ever going to happen.

  Did I bring this on? In warning Cecily about Vaughn, did I only fuel her defiance against him and put her in his warpath? How bad would it have been to let her carry on in blissful ignorance? She would have been safer under Vaughn’s thumb, maybe, and she wouldn’t have lost this baby.

  I feel sick, and I purse my lips to fight against a dry heave.

  Reed climbs into the driver’s seat, reaches across and opens the front passenger door. “Come on,” he says, and numbly I step out of the car, walk around it and sit in the passenger side. I close the door with a slam that makes everything shudder, and the tears just come. I can’t stop them. I’m too tired to even try. I’ve been sleeping hunched over in a plastic chair, my dreams pervaded by a sharp, rhythmic beeping. My back is sore and I’ve definitely pulled something in my neck, but how can I possibly fixate on that? I can’t, not when Linden’s eyes are so puffy, and not while there’s so much cleaning to do.

  Reed slides his hands around the steering wheel like he’s pretending to drive. “Rough week, huh?” he finally says.

  I snort and wipe my eyes with my wrist. “Yeah.”

  “They’re letting her out tonight, aren’t they? Linden’s youngest wife.”

  “Cecily,” I remind him. Names aren’t his strong suit. “And she’s his only wife now.”

  “Well, then, that’s a bit of good news, isn’t it? It means she’ll be okay.”

  When I last saw her, she was in a hospital bed, rocking her son and whispering into his hair. Linden was trying to say something to her, but she kept moving her head away.

  I was astounded by how young and how very old she looked at the same time. And then I thought of Jenna—strong, steely, beautiful Jenna, who turned sallow and died in our hands while we just watched. Vaughn can do what he wants with us. He can make us sick, and make us well again, and keep us alive for months after our expiration date if he has a mind to. He can deliver our babies, or kill them in the womb, or smother them if they’re malformed.

  And I can’t stop him. All I can do is clean up.

  “I have to get fresh water,” I say.

  “You should stop now,” Reed says. “You’re about to drop.”

  My legs are shaking from the inactivity. Tears are heavy in my eyes. “Until that happens, I have work to do.”

  “You’re of no use to any of us unconscious,” he says. “Sit for a while.”

  “If you make me stay, I’m going to ask all the questions I like, until you’re sick of me,” I warn.

  “Deal.”

  “And you have to answer them,” I say.

  “Shoot.”

  I don’t have to think about it; there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask him. “Have you ever been married?”

  “No,” he says. “I rather like being by myself. Had a dog for a while; it followed me around and never talked. I imagine a wife wouldn’t grant me that level of peace.”

  “You never wanted children?” I ask. “Not even before they knew about the virus?”

  “Having children seemed like a reckless thing for someone like me to do,” Reed says. “Now that we know about the virus, it’s worse than reckless. It’s cruel. No offense, doll; you had as much a right to be born as any first generation, but if I wanted to watch something live its course and die, I’d get another dog.”

  I don’t know why, but that makes me laugh. Dogs. I’ll only live a few years longer than a dog. All that effort to save my sister wife, and the bloodstain she left in the backseat will be around longer than she will anyway. Reed has had his solitude disrupted by a house full of kids, and in a few years we’ll all be dead, though he’s the one with tired eyes and wrinkled hands and gray hair. We are young and energetic, but in six years there won’t be a trace of us. The absurdity of it all.

  Reed frowns at me.

  “Your brother has been filling everyone’s head w
ith promises of a cure,” I say, recovering from my laughter with intermittent hiccups of it. “He builds all of these hospitals and secret lairs. But not you.”

  “My brother is mad,” Reed says. “Completely off his rocker. Don’t get me wrong, but if you strip all of that away, he just doesn’t want to bury another son. I have to hold on to that thought, or else I wouldn’t believe he was human at all.”

  “And when he can’t save Linden, he’ll move on to Bowen,” I say.

  “Bowen and Linden,” Reed says, clapping his hands against the steering wheel and staring straight ahead. “Those are two names I thought I’d never hear in the same sentence.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Vaughn doesn’t like to talk about the past, you understand,” Reed says. “Poor Linden has no idea that his son is named after his dead brother.”

  That night Cecily is discharged from the hospital. It rains. Reed goes speeding down twisty back roads, the tires of his old car squealing at sharp turns. Through the windshield I can’t see a thing, and I wonder how, or even if, he can.

  Linden sits in the front seat holding Bowen, and patiently says things like “Uncle Reed, please” and “That was a stop sign.”

  Cecily’s eyes are closed, and she’s curled up in the backseat with her head on my shoulder. I can tell that she’s awake by the way she tenses when we hit bumps, but she doesn’t make a sound, and I know what’s keeping her subdued.

  When she’d gone into premature labor, she’d been unconscious, hanging to life by a thread. But the doctors had chemicals to do the work for her. Dilate the cervix. Loosen the muscles. Force everything out. I remember from one of Cecily’s childbirth books a drawing of a fetus at four months. In the drawing it was sucking its thumb, eyes closed, knees curled, and ankles crossed. Even when Cecily began to get stronger a few days ago, she asked me to stay with her. I was at her bedside when she and Linden asked the doctor about their stillborn child—if they could see it, if it had been a boy or a girl. The doctor said it was long gone, donated to the hospital research lab, which would take anything it found worthy of analysis. The doctor said it should be a comfort to them, knowing their loss might help find a cure.