The eyes look Linden up and down. “Your father is that doctor that’s always on the news,” the voice, Edgar, says.
Linden has nothing to say for himself. He knows less about his own father, it seems, than the rest of the world does.
Before I realize she’s let go of my hand, Cecily steps forward and snatches Bowen from Elle’s arms. “Yes,” she says, exasperated. “Yes. His father is that doctor that’s always on the news. And this is our son.” She steps as close to the eyes as she dares, hoisting Bowen on her hip. “He’s going to die. But you know that. We’ve heard you on the radio, and all you talk about is cures and theories. Well, this is what we’re trying to cure.”
There’s a slight tremble in her posture. Linden stands behind her and touches Bowen’s curls with one hand, her shoulder with the other.
The door slams shut.
There’s the sound of a chain latch rustling, and then the door opens again, this time enough for us to see inside.
Though it’s a bright, clear morning, no sunlight fills the room. The windows are blacked out, and instead there are lights strung along the edges of the ceiling like clumps of stars.
Edgar is tall, with wiry limbs but a round gut barely contained by the buttons of his flannel shirt. His eyes are dark and owlish.
“I have guns,” he says to Cecily. “I don’t care if you are a little girl. Don’t try anything. None of you try anything.”
We all look at Reed, as if to say we’re wary. He waves us on. He’s awfully calm, given the threat that was just made, and given how protective of me he’s been against his brother. It occurs to me that Reed isn’t fearful of many things, but his brother is one of those things.
Bowen is back in Elle’s arms. She has plucked a blade of long grass to distract him so he’ll be manageable. Lately all he wants to do is grab things.
Inside, the lights make everything warm and vaguely orange-brown. The walls are nothing but bookshelves. “Don’t touch anything,” Edgar says again. I wouldn’t know where to begin, anyway. There are wires running across the floor, leading into another room, where they all assemble and cover a table like jungle vines. In that room there’s a flickering television mounted to the wall and playing a grainy rendition of the news, as though we need another reminder of how bleak our world is.
I begin to wonder about the house Linden drew for Cecily. I wonder what was inside it—sometimes he offers you a peek through the windows. I wonder if he wanted to build it for her so they could live there. I wonder if she felt it come alive right there on the page when he put it into her hands. I wonder if anyone can see his houses the way that I do.
“You know how I feel about visitors,” Edgar grumbles. He’s hardly the assured voice I heard on the radio last night. He seemed to know what he was talking about when he went on about my parents. Now he seems scattered and unstable.
“Genius that you are, you sure have a way of missing what’s right in front of your eyes,” Reed says. “Have you even looked at what’s in front of you?”
Edgar is looking us over, paying no real attention to any of us, more worried, it seems, about his things being stolen or damaged.
Reed grabs my chin, squishing my cheeks with his fingers and forcing my face into the light. “Her eyes,” he says. “Look at her eyes.”
Linden tenses, as though he wants to save me. I wish he would. I feel exposed. I feel the way I did standing in a line of Gathered girls on the side of the road.
Edgar gets a good look at my eyes. Reed lets go of me, and I stay frozen in that position. Best to get it over with. Best to prove that having one blue eye and one brown eye doesn’t mean anything. It’s the same view of the same world, no matter what color your irises are.
Edgar trips when he takes a step closer to me. Something falls and clatters against the ground. He doesn’t seem to care. My eyes have hypnotized him.
“You’re thinking I look like that boy,” I say, feeling disparaged and brave. “That terrorist you’ve seen on the news who’s blowing up research hospitals and labs, right? I look like him?”
In the corner of my vision, I see Cecily frowning. She realizes, finally, that she has subjected me to this with her hope, her desperation. She sees how it hurts me.
“Yes,” Edgar says. He laughs. It’s a humorless madman’s laugh. A laugh of relief, maybe. “Yes. You’re the dead one.”
Reed thought I was Rose’s ghost, and my brother believes I’m dead, and now Edgar. Gabriel, wherever he is, probably thinks I’m dead too. Pretty soon I’ll start believing it too.
But Reed says, “As you can see, she’s alive. And she has some questions for you.”
Edgar’s mystified expression changes back into a guarded one. “Is this a trick?” he says.
“You know things about my parents,” I say. “At least you sounded like you did on the radio. You said people were familiar with their research. The Ellerys.”
“You’re supposed to be dead,” Edgar repeats. “That boy on the news said so.”
“That was my brother,” I say, surprised at how steady my voice is, how all the grief and the shock reaches a level so great that I’m unable to acknowledge it. “I disappeared more than a year ago. He just assumes because I haven’t been able to reach him—”
“No,” Edgar interrupts. “No, he said you were killed in an experiment that went awry.”
My stomach drops. “What?”
“That’s why he’s doing this. He opposes the research labs.”
“That couldn’t have been Rhine’s brother, then,” Linden says. “You said on your broadcast that there are imposters, right? People who claim to be the children of experiments?”
“Only one way to find out,” Edgar says. He ushers us into the room where all the wires lead. I feel as though my insides have been scooped out. My heart beats in a dark, empty space, and I think I’ll be sick.
I see the television that’s mounted to the wall, and I know what it means. Just when I’m sure I have no energy left, a moment before I’m about to collapse, Linden grabs one of my hands and Cecily takes the other.
Edgar fumbles through a box of video discs in a cardboard box.
When he finds the one that means something to him, he inserts it into the video player.
My body feels a rush of hot, then cold, hot, then cold.
The screen goes to static, and then there’s an image of a crowd. It’s amateur footage, which isn’t uncommon for the nationwide news. Someone with a camera can make good money risking his life to film news footage.
I think it’s the same clip we heard last night on the radio. Bodies blur out of focus as the camera tries to adjust. Eventually it does, and I see that the crowd isn’t as big as I thought. It looks like new generations, from young children to those in their final year. There are two figures standing at a distance, not high up on a stage like I pictured, but on overturned wooden crates. I see the ocean behind them. This must be near the shoreline; bitterly I wonder how close my brother is to where Gabriel and I stood a few months earlier.
I recognize my brother immediately. There’s a girl standing beside him that I don’t recognize. She has chaotic black hair and eyes to match. Both of them are smeared with dirt.
No, not dirt. Ash.
The girl looks wild and dangerous. And then I realize Rowan does too. This is what happened to him when I left. Losing our parents had already taken away his hope, but losing me took away his reason.
The crowd knows him; they’re saying his name, asking him to speak.
And then calmly, methodically, he begins to tell his story. Long ago he was a bright-eyed child with stupid delusions that the world could be saved. He had parents and a sister. His parents, trying to save the world, were killed in a bombing much like the ones he and his partners are responsible for now. So then, he asks the crowd, is it wrong of him to take away someone else’s parents? Is it wrong to set fire to these buildings?
The crowd is silent, waiting for his response, because
the venom has left the voice of this vigilante warrior. He seems so painfully, vulnerably human.
“No,” he says. “A long time ago, maybe. But this is a world without right and wrong. This is a world that was someone’s idea of perfection, and when that perfection didn’t happen, this world was abandoned, and we were all left to run wild.
“And as for my sister,” he says. “She was the opposite of me. While I was trying to keep us both alive, she was in a dead garden, trying to make dead things bloom. I didn’t agree with it, but I thought, ‘What’s the harm? Why not let her pretend?’ ”
The girl standing beside him touches his arm. She’s heard this story before. She noticed that falter in his voice.
He shrugs her off.
“Because I let her pretend, her imaginary faith in this cesspool of a world grew. Behind my back she signed up for an experimental procedure. She was lured into some primitive makeshift laboratory by promises of life.” Any hint of an emotional edge has left him now. He speaks as though reading from a textbook. “Her heart began to palpitate first. And then her throat swelled shut; her eyes started to bleed. And when she died, several agonizing minutes later? Her body was dissected for even more research.”
This has been Rowan’s reality. While I was being laced into a wedding dress and was sucking on June Beans and napping comfortably on a fluffy blanket with my sister wives and daydreaming of home, that’s the image of me he has carried.
My vision is tunneling around me, and I can’t feel my legs, but somehow I’m still standing.
“Breathe,” Linden whispers, reminding me.
“I’m here to take away your hope,” Rowan says, “because hope will kill you. Every moment of this 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.”
I try to hear his next words, but the cheering crowd cuts him off. They’re in support of what he’s doing, clearly. I almost can’t blame them. A story like that is convincing; hope is so hard to come by and even harder to hold on to. Better to throw it away. Easier. After all, in his story there is the twin who tried to survive, and the twin who fell victim to silly hopes.
The film goes to static.
Edgar puts the disc back into its place.
“So you see,” he says, “you’re dead.”
“Obviously she’s alive,” Cecily snaps. “Or are you even crazier than you look?”
Nobody chastises her for this.
“Seems like that brother of yours is the crazy one,” Edgar tells me.
“I—” My voice is a rusty creak. “Where would he have heard such a thing?”
“Who else but the most respected doctor in modern science and medicine?” Edgar says, turning to face us. “Vaughn Ashby.”
“That’s impossible,” I say.
“That’s the rumor underground,” Edgar says. “The rumor is that he wants to be rid of all the competition so he can find the cure himself.”
“What underground?” Linden asks.
Edgar doesn’t look entirely sane when he says, “I never reveal my sources.”
I AM HAVING a hard time reading your twin because there is something about this person that you won’t admit even to yourself. That’s what the fortune-teller said. Maybe she’d made a lucky guess, or maybe she really did have a gift, because she was right. I hadn’t wanted to admit that my brother was capable of these awful things. I wanted to believe that I could find him again and it would be as before.
There are more things that Edgar can tell us. He has news clippings and a fascination with the work and progress of one of the nation’s most prominent doctors and scientists, also known as my former father-in-law. But Linden takes one look at my bloodless face, and he says, “That’s enough.”
I open my mouth to argue, but before I can utter a word, he says, “If you want to know the truth about your parents, it sounds as though your brother has the answers.”
My parents’ notes, all missing from the trunk buried in the yard. Did Rowan make sense of them, or did he twist them to fuel his delusions?
Did he give them to Vaughn?
I feel as though I’m floating over my body. Even Cecily, who pressed for this, agrees with Linden that it’s time to leave. If I want answers, I have to find my brother, and for now, at least, I have some idea where he might be.
But even with all of my unanswered questions, so much has been said and realized before noon. The ride home is quiet. We’re all thinking, staring in opposite directions, in this car being driven by the brother of evil himself.
All I can think is, I have to get to Rowan.
Never mind all of the terrible things Edgar said after the broadcast was through. Never mind all the news clippings he showed us. What matters now is getting to Charleston, South Carolina, quickly, before Rowan is gone again.
“Why isn’t anyone stopping him?” Linden blurts.
He looks at me. “Your brother has obviously gone crazy. Why aren’t there any authorities stopping him?”
“He isn’t crazy,” I say with a calm I find disturbing. “He’s right. We were abandoned when things didn’t go as planned. Nobody really cares what we do.”
“I can’t believe that,” Linden says.
“Believe it, kid,” Reed says.
“You knew about this,” I say to Reed. “Didn’t you?”
His eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror for a moment. “All us crazy old men pay attention to the news, doll. I’d have told you myself, but I didn’t have the heart.”
Linden opens his mouth to say something, but the words fade away. I’d expect him to look hurt, or angry, but his eyes are blank. His whole face is blank.
I think he was going to defend his father.
He’s watching Cecily’s reflection in the glass as she stares out her window. He’s watching the way her face disappears and reemerges in the scenery, and maybe he’s remembering that his father is the reason she was almost gone entirely.
At least they still have each other, I think with the most bitter rush of jealousy I’ve ever experienced.
When we get back to Reed’s, Linden quietly disappears into the house. Elle trails after him to feed Bowen; this is the sort of thing Cecily would normally want to be involved with, but instead we find ourselves sitting in the high grass and watching Reed toy with the car that’s supposed to take me to Rowan. He thought it was ready to drive, but now something or other is overheating and he’s not so sure.
“Linden is planning to go with you to find your brother,” she says finally. “He thought you would object and try to run off on your own, so he didn’t tell you.” Her head feels heavy when she rests it on my shoulder. “But please let him do this. He thinks this whole thing is his fault. He thinks that he’s the only one who can protect you if his father comes after you, and he’s probably right.”
Linden planned to come with me. I guess it’s not much of a surprise. I think of all the times he tried to coddle and console me during our marriage. And I think of how many times, despite my resentment, he was the only one who helped.
“What about you?” I say.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” she says, and sighs. “It would mean leaving Bowen here with Reed and Elle; I don’t like the thought of leaving him behind. On the other hand there’s this dream I keep having.”
The sun breaks away from a wandering cloud, and she shields her eyes. “In it I’m chasing something. Some kind of shadow. And as it runs away from me, these pieces are falling away from it, crumbling into ashes before they reach the ground. The pieces come away, and the shadow gets smaller and smaller.
“I think the shadow is the cure. I think that the longer I wait, the smaller my chances are of ever reaching it. And don’t tell me it’s stupid to hope for a cure, because I know you’re hoping too.”
Thanks to Rowan, anyone who watches the national news knows that of the two of us, I am the one who was stupid enough to hope.
But am I still hoping? I don’t know.
“Don’t tell Linden I told you,” she says.
“I won’t.”
By late afternoon the heat has escalated. The sun is burning my skin clean. The light has made hostages of Cecily and Reed, who stand a few feet away, their bodies reduced to shadow except for the strip of color that is Cecily’s ponytail.
He’s explaining his .22 caliber rifle to her. He’s telling her about loading the chamber, and the gunpowder in the bullets, and the recoil. But she only has one question: “Can it kill?”
“It’s a gun, isn’t it?” Reed says.
He opens the chamber, and one at a time the gold shells fall into her waiting palm.
“But this isn’t the one you carry around with you all the time,” she says.
“That’s because this one isn’t as dangerous. It can catch dinner well enough, though.”
I’m leaning on my elbows in the tall grass, and I close my eyes and roll my head back to catch the heat of the sun before it’s swallowed by a wandering cloud.
I know a little bit about guns. My brother and I kept a shotgun for protection. Rowan greased the barrel because he said it made the shots louder. He wanted them to be a warning to intruders. He wanted everyone to think we were dangerous. It took months for me to stop being so afraid of that gun. The heaviness of it. The things it implied. I felt as though just being near it could kill me.
Cecily shows no such fear. She’s never seen anything like Reed’s arsenal, and after days of admiring it she’s finally asking him questions. He’s all too happy to teach her. He’s patient; his answers are wise, detailed. Despite what he said about preferring dogs to children, I think he would have been a good father. A better one than Vaughn, for sure.
Reed puts the gun into Cecily’s hands, and he shows her how to aim it at a dying dogwood tree several yards in the distance. “You always treat a gun like it’s loaded, even if it’s empty,” he instructs. There’s a pop as she pulls the trigger, draws back the hammer, pulls the trigger again.
“Keep practicing and maybe I’ll let you shoot it for real,” he says.
Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy) Page 12