Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy)

by Lauren DeStefano

  I remember that both of their expressions went blank. They were so bereft already that there wasn’t room for new grief. Linden’s hands were shaking when he held his palms to his temples.

  They’ve both endured the worst of it with wayward defiance. The silence between them is like a dam about to burst.

  The car squeals to a stop.

  “Wait for me to get the umbrella,” Linden says. “Cecily, love, pull your hood up.”

  She sits up, groggy, half of her hair rumpled. I help her with the hood of her coat. “We’re here?” she murmurs.

  “Yes,” I say. “And you can go to bed now. I even came by this morning and washed the dust out of the sheets.” I don’t tell her about the blood.

  “She did,” Reed says. “Who knew the washing machine actually worked? I’ve been using it to store food.”

  “I made the bed.” I frown and push the hair from her face. “The sheets are tucked in extra snug, the way you like them.” It was a pathetic gesture to comfort her, too little in the grand scheme of all she’s been through.

  “Thanks,” she yawns. Her head tilts sleepily. Linden pulls up the hood of Bowen’s plasticky raincoat and hands him to Reed before helping Cecily out of the car, holding an umbrella over her. Once we’re inside, he tries to carry her, but she brushes him off.

  “Wait,” Linden says, but she moves down the hallway ahead of him. There’s been a distance behind her eyes since her heart stopped that night. She somnambulates beyond human reach, ignoring voices that call after her. She has stopped talking about her nightmares, but she never truly awakens from them.

  Now her fingertips drag along the wall. Her steps are slow, shaky, but purposeful.

  Reed, who has just pulled the cord that illuminates the stairwell with flickering light, steps aside to let her pass. She stops in front of him, more than a head shorter than he is, and meets his eyes. “I’m sorry for how I acted,” she says. “I was awful, and you’ve been nothing but generous. Thank you for letting me stay in your home.”

  And Reed, who muttered angry things whenever she left the room, softens. “Think nothing of it, kid,” he says. Cecily gives him something like a smile and then pushes herself up the creaky stairs.

  In the bedroom she collapses facedown on the mattress, and Linden removes her muddy shoes. She turns onto her back, limp as a rag doll, watching with dull eyes as he unbuttons her coat, slides it from her arms, and rubs warmth into her fingers.

  He’s murmuring nice things to her the whole time, saying that she’s important and that she’s strong, but she doesn’t react, not even when he tells her he loves her.

  And then I hear her slight gasp, see the way her bottom lip curls back with a sob. The dam is finally breaking.

  When Linden peels away the covers, I backpedal from the doorway and into the hall. They should be alone. Husband and wife. There’s no room for an awkward, unmarried third. And I’ll be leaving soon anyway. If Cecily knew I was staying for her sake, she’d be pushing me out the door. But I can’t leave until I’m sure she’s well.

  I go down to the kitchen, where Reed is attempting to feed Bowen a bottle while working on some project that involves soil and glass jars. “Compact watermelons,” he tells me, not looking up. “If I can make the seed grow in a jar, it’ll take its shape. No bigger, no smaller.”

  “I like it,” I say. “Modifying something without changing its genetics.”

  “Clever you,” he says. “Too bad you won’t stick around to see how it turns out.”

  I take Bowen, surprised at how heavy he is for someone so small, and sit in a chair to feed him the rest of his bottle. I watch his lips move, the milky formula that pools between them without ever spilling over. His eyes are winking. He’s a perfect little machine, I think, flawlessly engineered, except for one pesky glitch.

  It’s quiet for a while, and then Reed says, “That child looks like she’s been to hell and back.”

  I like that Reed sees Cecily for what she is.

  “She’s been to hell,” I agree. “I don’t know about back.”

  Reed reaches into the jar and presses a seed into the layer of soil that lines it.

  “She’s convinced that Vaughn wanted her dead,” I say. “She won’t have him anywhere near her.”

  “Is that so,” Reed says, not sounding at all surprised. “What do you think?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him,” I say, tilting the bottle so Bowen doesn’t suck up any air bubbles. I remember this from watching my mother handle newborns in the lab. “If a second pregnancy was dangerous to her, maybe he didn’t have to do anything; maybe he could just sit back and let it take its course. What I don’t understand is why. Maybe he has realized he can’t control her anymore, but for her to be dead? What would he gain from that?”

  “I heard there used to be hunters,” Reed says, “who’d use the whole animal. Cook with its fat, eat its meat, wear its pelt, preserve its organs, and worship its skull. My brother is like that—nothing wasted, nothing without purpose.”

  “You’re thinking of the Inuit,” I say. “They used to carve sculptures out of the bones and make thread from the sinew.” I read about them in one of my father’s encyclopedias years ago. They lived in Canada’s arctic regions and survived almost entirely on sea life. Even now I can see the glossy photographs of their heavy fur coats, the long trail of footsteps in the snow behind a little girl in black braids as she held up a fish. I remember how strong they seemed, and how beautiful. It pains me to compare them to Vaughn, but it’s accurate. He would gut me and my sister wives like fish, but every organ would have a purpose.

  Anger bests me for a moment, and my hand shakes; the bottle slips out of Bowen’s mouth, but he sucks it back into place. It doesn’t seem right that I’m holding such a fragile creature while I’m thinking such ugly thoughts.

  “You know a lot of things, doll,” Reed says. “You can’t trust everything the history books tell you, though. They lie.” He shakes a little glass bottle of seeds, holding them up to the lightbulb that’s swinging over his head. The seeds are tiny, unborn things, and I resent them. They’ll be planted and they’ll grow into exactly what they’re meant to be.

  “Rhine?” Linden’s voice is soft. He’s standing in the doorway, pale as death.

  “I’m almost done feeding Bowen,” I say. “Then I’ll bring him up. Unless you want to take him right now?”

  “No, let him finish,” Linden says, his tone never changing. “Just put him in the bassinet when he’s through, if you don’t mind. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He doesn’t wait to hear my reply. He turns around slowly and with precision, like he’s balancing porcelain plates on his head, and disappears into the darkness of the hall.

  Reed frowns through a mason jar. “Look at that boy,” he says. “I always hoped he would come around and realize the kind of person his father is. But I never wanted it to make him look like that. Ignorance is bliss—have you ever heard that expression?”

  “Yes,” I say. Though, my generation hasn’t been granted enough ignorance to squander.

  “My nephew is a bright boy, but I think he prefers to stay ignorant,” Reed says. “Not you, though. There are always cogs turning in that head of yours.”

  “A lot of good it does,” I say. “I’ve caused nothing but trouble for everyone.”

  “The trouble was already there,” Reed says. “You’ve just uncovered it, is all.”

  After Bowen has finished his bottle, I carry him up the stairs, avoiding the creakiest boards as best I can. The lights are off in the bedroom, but I hear Cecily say, “Your father is definitely doing something down there.”

  “We didn’t see anything,” Linden says. Both of them are trying to recover from crying; I can hear it in their voices.

  “I would hear things in the walls. People. I don’t think Rhine was lying. She wouldn’t lie to me.”

  “Love, I used to think that too. . . . ”

  “I believe her
. I believe her whether you do or not.” She breaks with a sob. “Stop it—don’t touch me like that, like you pity me.”

  “We’ll talk more about it when you’re well,” he says.

  “I’m not made of glass,” she says. “When will you stop treating me like I’m going to break?”

  “Okay.” He sobs too. “Okay. There’s something I never told you,” he says. There’s a long pause, blankets rustling. “Long before you and I were married, I had a daughter.”

  His voice becomes just a murmur, so faint I can’t even be sure he’s still speaking, until Cecily says, “My god,” and a new round of sobbing kicks up from the both of them. “Why didn’t you tell me? Something like that.”

  It’s hard to make out his words after that, because his voice has been reduced to a teary whisper, “Rose said . . . couldn’t believe her . . . didn’t want to think it . . . thought it would frighten you.”

  I hear her respond, “You can always tell me anything. Anything.”

  Bowen, intuitive little thing that he is, hiccups and lets out the high-pitched whimper that prefaces his tears. He knows there’s cause to be sad.

  “Rhine?” Cecily calls, and to her credit there’s nothing to indicate she’s been crying, though the air carries the tension of a conversation cut short by my arrival.

  I step into the darkness of the bedroom, and I can just make out their forms in the twin bed. “He’s all fed,” I say by way of explanation.

  Bowen whimpers, and Cecily reaches out for him and says “Thank you” when I hand him off.

  “Good night,” I say.

  “Night,” she says, with a cheer that doesn’t sound at all forced, and then she snuggles under the covers with her husband and son.

  Linden yawns so casually it would seem that nothing is wrong. “Sleep well,” he says.

  If we were all still married to one another, I wonder if they’d want me to be a part of their conversation. I wonder if any of these horrible things would even be happening.

  On the divan in the library, I immediately feel myself falling asleep. This always seems to be my reaction when things are bad. Exhaustion. It’s comforting. It’s a heavy blanket, making everything dark and soft. Across the hall Bowen is crying, and his parents are forgetting their own tears to tend to him. It occurs to me that they’re a family, every bit as real as the one I once had, almost too long ago to remember.

  My sleep carries late into the afternoon. When I open my eyes, the clock on the wall tells me it’s after two p.m.

  I would have slept later if not for the noise of an engine revving outside. Reed trying to bring one of the old cars to life, no doubt.

  There’s a tray on the floor by the divan, with a teacup of beige liquid and a bowl of cubed fruit floating in its own juices.

  “Sorry,” Linden says from the doorway. “I know you like fruit for breakfast, but my uncle is big on canning all his food, except for some apples that looked a bit mealy.”

  I sit up, batting away the hair that’s falling into my face. The shade on the window has been drawn, though I’m sure it was open last night. “It’s all right,” I say. “Thank you.”

  He nods, looks at me for a few seconds and then at his feet.

  “I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he says. “It was getting late, and you hadn’t woken up.”

  “How’s Cecily?” I ask.

  “She’s downstairs trying to get the radio to work,” he says. “When I left her, she was about to throw it at the wall.”

  He forces a laugh, and I smile a little. It’s comforting to think she’s back to normal. As much as she can be, anyway.

  Linden looks as though he has more to say, but he’s waiting for an invitation, I think. I make room for him on the divan, bundling myself in the scratchy wool blanket.

  He sits on the far end, putting more than a foot of distance between us. It takes him a long time to speak.

  “I owe you an apology,” he says, looking at the clock like it’s holding a gun on him. “Everything you said—it was staring me in the face, and I chose not to believe it. I made excuses not to.”

  I can’t blame him for not trusting me. After all, I did most of the lying in our marriage. But I don’t want to interrupt him when he’s clearly having a hard enough time getting the words out.

  “My father showed no regard for your safety. As my wife you should have felt that you could tell me when someone was threatening you. You chose to keep that from me. And I understand your reasoning. I wouldn’t have believed you. Just like I didn’t believe Rose.” He winces when he says her name.

  “She tried to tell me things about my father. She told me that she’d heard our daughter cry. And—” He has to stop.

  He looks right at me. And once again I feel like Rose’s ghost. He is looking at her hair, her face, trying to make amends with the dead. “A part of me believed it. She was a lot like you: very grounded, never making statements unless she was sure. She was always right, too. But still it seemed like too awful a thing to be true. And so—to hear you say it, that afternoon when you woke up in the hospital, it was a little bit like she had come back to haunt me.”

  My heart is thudding in my throat. I hug my knees to my chest in the blanket, making myself as small as I can.

  “I lied to you,” he says. “The truth is, I believed everything you were saying. I just didn’t want to.”

  “Of course you didn’t want to think of your father that way,” I say gently. “Linden, I understand—”

  “Please,” he says. “Just let me finish.” He holds my gaze, forcing Rose away, forcing himself to accept that he cannot apologize now for how he wronged her. There’s only me.

  “When you told me Cecily was in danger, I didn’t want to believe that, either. I thought I could keep her safe. But that night she lost the baby, I—” He looks at his empty hands. “There was nothing I could do.”

  He has made it this far with a steady tone, but now his hands start to shake and his eyes well with tears. It’s been a valiant effort to stay brave; he even made it through talking about Rose without breaking. But for Cecily to suffer is just too much; she’s precious to him.

  “I should have listened to you.” He clenches his fists.

  I disentangle myself from the blanket and scoot closer to him. Our shoulders and the crowns of our heads rest together.

  He says, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  It’s quiet for a while. I let him collect himself, and then I draw back to look at him and ask, “But are you sure? You really believe everything you’ve just said?”

  “Cecily still swears my father is to blame. She thinks he knew about the baby and that he was just waiting for it to kill her. My father, of course, will insist she’s being unreasonable.”

  “Your father is wrong about a lot of things,” I say. He was wrong about his own son. He told me that Linden’s unrequited love for me had turned violent. But Linden had the chance to turn his back on me—nobody would have blamed him for it—and he didn’t.

  “It still doesn’t make sense,” Linden says. “I don’t understand why my father would want to hurt her. Maybe it’s a big misunderstanding. But I had to choose a side, and I chose Cecily. She told me a lot of things that she was afraid to tell me earlier. She thought I would feel betrayed and cast her away.” As I was falling asleep last night, I could hear them whispering down the hall; I wonder if either of them got any sleep.

  “She doesn’t want to lose her marriage,” I say. “It’s her whole world.”

  “Mine too,” he says. “We talked for a long time. We agreed to be honest with each other. And we agreed to support each other, no matter what.”

  “That’s good,” I say.

  “Which is why, when she told me we should help you, I agreed.”

  “Help me?”

  “We want to help you find your brother,” he says. “And that attendant.”

  “Gabriel.”

  “Yes. Gabr
iel.” He looks at his lap, then at me.

  I’m suddenly unsure what to do with my hands. I tuck them between my knees. My cheeks feel hot, and I feel at once the need to cry and to laugh, but I find I have the energy to do neither.

  “I know it isn’t my place to ask what’s gone on between the two of you,” Linden says. “Even before the annulment, I see now that I was wrong to expect all of your affections to be for me.”

  “It wasn’t wrong of you,” I say. “We were married.”

  “Foolish, then,” he says. “But I admit that I’ve wondered, since the day you both went missing, what existed between you and him. I wondered what made you love him instead of me.”

  “It wasn’t what you think,” I say, too quickly and too loudly. I force myself to look at him. “I couldn’t leave him behind. I loved the idea of being free again, and I loved the idea of Gabriel being free, rather than carrying on in servitude until the end. It doesn’t seem right to me, Linden, people only seeing the world through daydreams and windows.”

  I think I’ve hurt him. He stares past my shoulder and nods.

  “He’s been good to you, then?” he says. “Gabriel?”

  “Better than I’ve been to him,” I admit.

  Still looking past me, he tightens his lips. I can see that they’re heavy with something he’d like to say.

  He wants to ask if I slept with Gabriel. I think he’s wanted to ask me since my return, but he hasn’t. It’s too forward a question for him.

  He clears his throat. “What I really came here to tell you is that I’d still like to help you get home. If you’ll allow me, that is. I have a plan this time.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “My uncle is going to fix one of his old cars,” Linden says. “He modifies them to run on his homemade fuel. It’s some big secret recipe of his, so I don’t know how reliable it is, but it’s better than nothing, isn’t it? I can teach you how to drive.”