Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy)

by Lauren DeStefano

There’s a sharp pain in my head, like a kite string has lassoed my brain, tugging me to the speakers. And I know that I am about to hear something I have not heard in a very long time. A simple thing, the absence of which has parched something deep within me.

  My brother’s voice.

  He’s riled up, shouting into the crowd. The tape recorder that captured the sound is buried somewhere in all the cheering and jeering voices, rustling, picking up the rush of wind. But Rowan is the maestro of this cacophony. I concentrate on my brother, imagining him standing someplace high, and I hear him say, “—research is pointless. All this madness trying to find a cure is more dangerous to us than the virus itself. It kills people. It killed my sister.” There’s a devastated pitch when he says that last word. The word that symbolizes me. “It’s gone too far, and it must end!”

  The clip is over, and he’s gone.

  A sound comes out of me; something like a choke or a whimper.

  There’s no doubting it now. He thinks I’m dead. He’s given up on me.

  “Rhine?” Linden shoves past Reed and kneels on the step before me. He pushes the hair from either side of my face and cradles my skull with his fingertips. His eyes are searching mine, like he’s checking a vase for chips and cracks.

  “It was my brother,” I manage to say. My voice is strained, like I’m only inhaling, which maybe I am. I can’t tell. I’ve never felt like this. There was the adrenaline and terror of being thrown into the Gatherer’s van, and again in the back of that truck with Gabriel, but in the darkness all of that melted down to a sort of malaise after a while. Then came the planning. I’d kept myself together with logic. I’d been taken. I’d escape. I’d make it home, and my brother and my house would still be waiting for me. But my brother has made a crater of our house. He has made a crater of himself and everything he touches.

  “You have to breathe,” Linden says softly. He’s always so careful with me, even when I’ve hurt him. Bright spots move around him like someone shook the stars from a blanket and they all went flying.

  “This is my fault,” I say. “We were supposed to look out for each other, and I left him. He’s gone now. I’ll never get him back.”

  “Sure you will,” Linden says.

  “I know the guy who runs that first broadcast,” Reed offers. “I could take you to him. Maybe he’ll know something.”

  Linden moves to sit between Reed and me. “Is it safe?” he asks. “He sounded like he was deranged.”

  “Linden, you’ve been bred to think everything is dangerous,” Reed says.

  “You have to talk to him,” Cecily says. “You have to find out about the Chemical Gardens. Maybe your parents knew something real, Rhine. Maybe there is a cure. Maybe it has something to do with you and your brother. You have a responsibility to find out.” The hope in her voice is unbearable.

  “Cecily,” Linden snaps. “Now isn’t the time to make demands. Could you try to be a little sensitive?”

  “Sensitive?” she says. “Sensitive! When I was pregnant with our son, you told me that he was my job. You said, ‘Don’t you see how important it is?’ Well, I do! Maybe this is a dead end—who knows? But we have to find out. I brought him into this world thinking he’d have a shot at surviving, and I’m not going to just sit here and wait to die if there’s still a chance.”

  Everyone is looking at her now. She seems bigger in the moonlight. Hardened by tragedy. But I see the way the now-silent radio is shaking in her hands. Her jaw is clenched. No matter how realistic Cecily has become, something within her will always ignite at the thought of hope. Even if we all know that hope is pointless, who am I to take it away from her?

  Linden opens his mouth to speak, but I put my hand on his arm. “She’s right,” I say. “We should talk to him.”

  “You’re sure?” Linden says.

  His pity and Reed’s pity and Cecily’s intensity have all become too much. I look away from them and toward the tall grass bending sideways on a gust of wind.

  “Yes,” I say. “Can I please be alone now?”

  Reed is on his feet immediately. “Show’s over, kiddos,” he says, herding Linden and Cecily back inside.

  The windows are open upstairs, and a few moments later I hear Bowen start to cry, and then Cecily singing to him. Linden asks her what she’s done with his suitcase, and she tells him it’s under the bed.

  They’re all going to die too soon. I want to be the thing to save them, but I can’t.

  I sleep, but my dream is a vivid hallucination of Vaughn’s hands snatching Bowen out of his bassinet while Cecily and Linden sleep in a bed five feet away. And then Vaughn steps into a shred of moonlight, and he’s not Vaughn at all. He’s my brother.

  I open my eyes, heart pounding. I won’t close them again. I rise from the divan and move to the open window. It’s so motionless out there. If I don’t look behind me, if I look to the horizon, I could believe that the line where the earth meets the sky is the end of the world. And in the quiet I think I hear my father calling something to me.

  My mother said I had a different kind of strength, and that’s why I needed to look out for my brother. But maybe she didn’t know me as well as she thought, because while my brother is starting disturbing revolutions and making fire in the sky, I’m struggling just to catch my breath. I’m not very strong by anyone’s standards, especially my brother’s.

  When we were eight, he and I found a fallen star.

  It wasn’t really that. I guess it was just some scrap metal that had blown into our yard on a windy night. But in the early morning, when we first saw it, the edges caught the rising sun at odd angles, and it appeared to be on fire. We ran outside in our pajamas, the fire dying more with every step, until we saw that it was just a crumpled piece of metal. My father came running after us, warning us not to touch it. He said it might be dangerous, and I knew that he was right. I saw all the jagged edges and rust, understood the treachery of the dark crevices it bore. Still, I wanted to think there was something special about it.

  My brother nudged it with his foot, and almost immediately I could see the red dominating his white sock. He didn’t move. He just watched as his blood spread out, until my father grabbed him and carried him inside. Next, I remember him sitting on the kitchen counter while my mother fussed and dabbed at his foot with wet dishrags and antiseptic that hissed and crackled when they touched skin.

  I remember looking out at the metal star in the yard, seeing the bright line of blood where it had cut him. I felt betrayed that something so fascinating and pretty had hurt my brother.

  “It’s okay,” he told me later, when his foot was all bandaged. “It’s probably a piece from a bomb. It was designed to hurt people.”

  He was so cool about the whole thing. That’s the last time I ever saw him get hurt. He understood very early the ways of war. Approaching weaponry and touching it out of curiosity would never work. No. He had to understand its purpose and then find a way to utilize it.

  Maybe he’s always been leaning toward this. Maybe our parents’ death made him view the virus and all attempts to cure it as his enemy, and maybe I really was the only thing keeping him docile. Maybe my mother knew exactly what she was talking about when she told us to always stay together.

  I rest my elbows on the window frame and let that thought sink in.

  When the thoughts turn painful, I seek respite in one of Reed’s books. I would love a book of American history, but Reed doesn’t keep them. He has some silly theory that history was doctored shortly before the first generations were born. He says we can’t trust any of the information we’re given. His conspiracy theories have become a comfort to me. I like everything about Reed and his strange little world.

  The dictionary happens to be the first thing I grab, and I take it back to the divan and start on the first page, working my way from the As. Whenever I encounter a word I’ve never had cause to use, I whisper it aloud, just to have said it in my lifetime.

  I’m two page
s into the As when the door creaks open and Cecily peers in. She’s gotten better about avoiding the noisier floorboards, and I didn’t hear her coming.

  “I saw the light on,” she says softly. “Bad dream?”

  She knows me well. “Lots to think about,” I say.

  “Want to talk about any of it?” she says. “I could make some tea.” Much as she scoffs at Reed’s strange menu, she loves his homemade tea. He grows the herbs in cans and cardboard boxes.

  But tea or no tea, I don’t want to talk about what’s on my mind. It’s exhausting enough just trying to sort it out. And it’s painful enough to know how much hope I’ve given her, and how devastated she’s going to be all over again when she realizes it’s false. “I’ll pass,” I say. “Thanks, though.”

  She frowns but doesn’t cross the threshold. It’s an old habit from mansion life. It was a household rule that we couldn’t enter one another’s bedrooms without asking. None of us ever thought to break it, because we each had our own reasons for following the rules. “You’re angry with me.”

  “I’m not,” I say, closing the dictionary. “Honestly, I’m not. What you were saying made sense.”

  “I could have been nicer about it,” she mumbles, abashed. “I can’t help it when it comes to Bowen. I get this panicked feeling in my chest—like there’s no time to waste.”

  It’s a bizarre thought that she loves her child the way my parents loved me; she’s so young and they were so much older and more prepared. I thought.

  Now that I’m looking at her, really looking at her, I can see the half-circle breast milk stains on her nightgown. It must have started up again after she lost the baby, because Bowen’s long been on formula—this powdered stuff that Cecily filled a suitcase with before she came here. There are bags under her eyes. I was wondering how she’d managed to be so energetic these past several days, twirling through the house belting out lyrics and humming refrains, but now I understand. She’s as sad as ever. It’s just that she sings anyway.

  When I stand, she asks, “Where are you going?”

  “Kitchen. I changed my mind about the tea.”

  We tiptoe down the steps. The lights are off. Reed’s snoring drowns out the creaky board I accidentally tread on. He’s sacked out on the armchair, hand on the hilt of his gun. I think he was serious about not letting Vaughn through that front door. He mumbles as we creep past him.

  Elle is sleeping on the couch opposite him. She stirs when we pass, and I wonder if she’s really asleep; she’s so trained to be alert whenever Bowen makes a sound.

  We bring our tea back up to the library. I don’t think sleep will be an option, but Bowen’s shriek of laughter startles me, and I open my eyes to realize there’s daylight. My head is on Cecily’s shoulder. She’s hugging the arm of the couch, and I’m slumped against her, our bodies like collapsed dominoes. A blanket has been draped over us, and I wonder if Linden got up sometime in the night, having noticed her absence in that cramped twin bed, and found us together.

  “Morning,” Linden says softly. He’s holding Bowen, who’s gawking at nothing in particular. “Sorry to wake you, but Uncle Reed thinks we should get going.”

  As though in agreement, an engine splutters outside. The first several attempts to start the car fail. Cecily grumbles something unkind about the noise and buries her face in her arms, trying to hold on to sleep.

  Linden carries Bowen to the window, and Bowen brings his face so close to the glass that it mists with his breath. There’s sunlight and birds, so much to fascinate him. Linden watches with a sad sort of smile, like he knows that his son’s happiness is a lie that must one day be dispelled. Linden loves his son, of course, but he can’t show him the affection that Cecily does. After all the loss he’s endured, all that await him are promises of death and good-byes. He’s become very guarded.

  He says just one word to his son, nodding into the daylight. “Look.”

  It’s an astounding word. It’s a gift.

  Bowen looks, and for now everything he sees is beautiful.

  PEOPLE USED to be connected to one another all the time. That’s what my parents told me. Everyone had phones and computers. Everyone called and kept in touch. They used to be everything, these things that are barely remembered now. These things that mean nothing to me.

  I imagine the world felt smaller when it was like that. When someone was away from home, they’d call. There were no brothers worrying that their sisters were dead.

  Now we’re left with old antennas, and radio signals. I know there’s less land than there used to be, but without these connections the world seems impossibly big. I feel as though I’m always running, and my brother is always too many paces ahead. I call out, but he can’t hear me. He’s not even listening for the sound of my voice anymore.

  And now it’s morning, and I’m going to see some man with opinions and a radio signal, yet another dead end, keeping hope alive like the frail pulse of a dying animal.

  “Can I drive?” Cecily asks. She’s sitting in the front seat of Reed’s car, hovering her fingertips over the knobs and buttons.

  “No,” Linden answers from his place beside me in the backseat. “It’s not safe.”

  “I wasn’t asking you,” she says, turning her nose up.

  “He’s right, kid,” Reed says, pulling the car into gear. “It’s not a good idea. But that knob controls the radio stations. Might be able to find something.”

  This doesn’t pacify her for long, because as we start driving, none of the stations will come through. Sometimes there’s a human voice in all the static, and my chest seizes up with dread and hope, but nothing comes of it. There’s no more word about my brother. There’s no sign of life out there at all.

  Elle is small and quiet, holding Bowen in the seat beside me. She was cheerful and attentive when Bowen was first born, but now she’s somber. The sunlight in her fine honey-brown hair does nothing to relinquish her from the grayness that overshadows her. I wonder if Vaughn has done something to her. I wonder if she knows what he has done to Deirdre, and I wonder still if any of that is real. And then my wondering turns to that dark, painful place, where I look at Elle and I see the young girl who should be making daisy crowns and daydreaming and living.

  This isn’t living, what all of us are doing.

  We drive down long, dilapidated back roads. Reed ignores the stop signs, and the abandoned traffic lights stare at us like empty eye sockets. Fields have gone to weed. There’s a little town of houses that have been haphazardly repaired by boards and scraps of metal. Linden is watching over my shoulder as they go by. He grew up in a very small, affluent town, and I doubt he could have imagined people living like this. I wonder what sort of world his father painted in his head for him. I bet it was all mansions and holograms, and then just clean white stretches of nothing in between. No matter. Nothing there.

  He doesn’t seem surprised, though. Just sad, in that dulled-over way he’s adopted since Cecily miscarried. I think he’s beginning to understand, and understanding is a horrible thing.

  Linden clenches his hand into a fist. I want to make the world into something different so that he can be okay. I want to be the cure that doesn’t exist. But I’m nothing. I can’t even work up the courage to say something reassuring.

  We come to another house that’s similar to Reed’s in that it’s isolated. There are chickens squawking and meandering in an area fenced by wire, and they flap and flutter at the gurgling-popping sound Reed’s engine makes when he shuts it off. There’s a sign advertising fresh eggs for twenty dollars a dozen, a cup of churned butter for the same price. The pricing is outrageous but not uncommon. My brother and I would pay slightly less to the vendors in Manhattan, if we could haggle them down with the promise of repeat business.

  Cecily is the first one out of the car.

  Linden sees the guilt in my eyes as I watch her. “It’s okay,” he says softly. “She’ll learn eventually.”

  When? In three years, w
hen she’s watching her husband die? When she’s dying herself?

  We wade through high grasses, and I watch Elle, two paces ahead of me, pertly landing on the stepping-stones that are half-buried in the weeds.

  The house, despite its neglect, has small signs of care. There are red shutters, and window boxes that are full of wisteria blooms. Cecily presses her hand against her heart and says, “Oh, Linden, look. It’s like the house you drew for me.”

  Linden is drawing houses for her now. I ignore this new wave of senseless jealousy and plod forward.

  “Careful where you step,” Reed says when we get to the porch. “The wood looks rotted.”

  Elle presses Bowen’s head to her chest protectively, but he whimpers and resists. He wants to look over her shoulder at the morning light in the long grass.

  Reed knocks on the door, which is fashioned from pieces of welded metal. Cecily is suddenly apprehensive. “You know this man, right?” she says. “I mean, not just know of him, but actually know him?”

  “He’s harmless,” Reed says.

  Linden is standing closer to her, but it’s my hand she reaches for as we hear movement inside the house. Happy as she is to be Linden’s wife, the ordeal of being Gathered still haunts her. She knows that unwanted girls can be made to huddle in dark vans and be shot. Like me, she’s wary of shadowy places, and of strangers. Sometimes we don’t know how afraid we are until we’ve reached a strange door and we don’t know what will be on the other side.

  The door opens just wide enough for us to see a pair of eyes blinking out at us.

  “Reed?” a voice says. “Why the crowd?”

  “I’ve brought my nephew,” Reed says, clapping his hands on Linden’s shoulders. “And the girls are with him. Girls follow him everywhere he goes. Poor boy’s cursed with the family charm.”

  Linden’s sullenness cracks to make room for embarrassment. He looks at the banister.

  “There’s too many of you,” the voice says.

  “Oh, hell, Edgar. Don’t be crazy,” Reed says. “Would it make you feel better if we all wore foil hats?”