I go on reading about my brother’s temper, and how dangerous it was for me to make friends with the little girl who lived in the house next door. I was too trusting, my mother wrote. I was cursed with her warm heart, she writes in parentheses, and that would have been a virtue a century ago.
And then I caught pneumonia, and my lungs filled with fluid. I remember that. I remember the steam bath in the bathroom with the tub with rusted knobs. It’s rare for new generations to fall ill before their time, especially as severely as I did. Only, it wasn’t pneumonia, my mother writes. It was a poor reaction to an experimental drug they gave me. My brother developed a rash behind his neck, but nothing more serious than that. Males have the better immune systems. Something is superior in their genes as a result of this virus. It takes five years more for their systems to shut down. My mother’s handwriting has gone furious here. She’s had a breakthrough. I can’t read her tirade, because the words are running together, letters piling atop one another, many of them crossed out. Her daughter could have died from that reaction, but in these notes she has no daughter. Only subjects.
There are so many words. I feel like I could drown in what I don’t understand of them, and it’s getting hard to concentrate.
We were experiments. My brother and I were experiments. Round two. The twins that lived. And since our parents have died, we’ll always be unfinished. Vaughn can pick up where they left off and run experiments of his own, but we’ll never know what my parents might have gone on to do with us.
You and your brother were never meant to be ordinary.
I can’t look at any more of this. Not now.
Rowan senses this, and he closes the notebook. “There’s no point in trying to understand every word of it,” he says. “Dr. Ashby has gone through it, and he’s even tried to duplicate some of their work. He says it was advanced for the time it was written. He thinks they were on the path to becoming valuable in their profession.”
My voice is small when I say, “They already were valuable.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he says. “Rhine, you know I loved our parents.”
I do know that, but I needed to hear him say it.
I slump back against the pillows and throw my arm over my eyes to block out the light. “God,” I mumble. “Is all of this really happening?”
His weight jars the mattress as he lies beside me, and it’s quiet for a while before he says, “I never stopped feeling like you were alive. I thought I must have been going crazy.”
I prop myself on my elbow to look at him. “But I’m here now,” I say. “You can stop destroying those labs. You can stop making people think there’s no hope. You don’t have to do everything Vaughn says anymore.”
He tries to smile, but it fades as his eyes move up and down the length of my face. “Let’s not talk about that now,” he says. “Let’s go back to the part where we’re both alive.”
I fall beside him again. “We are, aren’t we?” I say. I don’t know why it makes me laugh, but he laughs too, and outside the window there are traffic lights changing color and people throwing open their windows; there are buttons being buttoned and shoes being laced; there are clocks and calendars; there are fishing lines going out into the water.
It’s a world worth fighting for. Set fire to the broken pieces; start anew.
“There is the matter of my son and grandson,” Vaughn murmurs to me as I’m boarding the jet. “Keep that in mind.”
This time as we ascend, I watch the world sinking below us. I watch the way the city fades into sand that gets washed by the ocean.
“It’s like Dad’s postcards,” Rowan says.
It is exactly like that. It’s like my father’s postcards have become animated. And it’s strange to see this alien world getting smaller and smaller as we head for the clouds. It’s strange to think that this alien world is full of nothing but strangers.
An hour into the flight, Vaughn has immersed himself in his notes. He has put in earplugs and turned away from us. He’s asked not to be disturbed.
“He gets this way,” Rowan says. “I can only imagine what it’s like in his mind.”
I’ve spent a great deal of this past year trying not to find out what’s in Vaughn’s mind.
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
He stretches his arms out over the back of the seat. “Great,” he says. “And listen, there’s a reason the others didn’t come with us. The things that happened here are not for anyone else to know. The others don’t know about the jet or about Hawaii or about any of what’s been told to you since yesterday.”
“Don’t they get suspicious?” I say.
“People need to feel like someone else is in charge,” Rowan says. “But those two need to feel like they’re part of the bigger plan. They know that I’m working with Dr. Ashby. They think it’s simply because I’m helping to rid him of the competition.”
“That girl seems to like you a lot,” I say.
“Bee? She clings.”
He watches my left hand as I reach for my glass of water. “You’re wondering where my wedding band is,” I say.
“It had crossed my mind. But I meant what I said; you don’t need to talk about it if you aren’t ready.”
“The marriage was annulled,” I say. I take a sip of water, and it does nothing for how dry my mouth has become. How to tell the story of my marriage to Linden? Should I leave out Jenna and Rose? The horror of watching Cecily give birth? Or does he already know these things? Are my sister wives all Subjects A, B, and C in Vaughn’s research? I don’t know that I can stand the thought of summarizing them in that way. And I don’t know that I can do justice to them either.
“I ran away,” I say instead. “It wasn’t that he made me unhappy; it was just that I wanted to go home.”
“You made it all the way back home by yourself?”
I feel my cheeks burning as I gather my knees to my chest and look out at the clouds. “An attendant ran away with me. I—”
I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. That’s what I was going to say, but my lip is quivering and the dryness in my mouth has been replaced by the taste of salt, and everything is starting to blur.
“Hey,” Rowan says. He touches my shoulder, and just like that my limbs unfold and I fall against him in tears. It isn’t just Gabriel. It’s everything. It’s Rose’s blond hair spilling out from the sheet that covered her body, and Jenna’s final breath, and Cecily, lifeless in Linden’s arms, and all those mornings I awoke with a collar dampened by a night of my husband’s tears. It’s that all of these things happened because of one man, a man I decided was evil, but who has shown me the world I imagined as a little girl. It’s that we’re flying away from it, and I don’t know what will await me when we land.
Rowan is saying, “Hey, shh. It’ll be okay,” with such compassion that it makes me fall apart all over again. And even though we’ve both grown, even though he’s wearing different clothes and he’s not exactly as I left him, he’s the only certainty I’ve got, and I’m so afraid that something awful is coming for us.
He never used to let me get away with crying like this, but now he allows it. He wraps his arms around me and rests his chin on my head. I wonder if it’s because he feels the same way.
Somewhere toward the end of the flight, Rowan fell asleep, and I think he was lying about how he’s been feeling since yesterday’s procedure. He always did see pain as a weakness.
His head is canted back against my shoulder. He’s grinding his teeth, something I’ve never known him to do. I sit very still so I don’t disturb him.
I turn the pages of my mother’s notebook as carefully as I can. Rowan and I—Subject A and Subject B—were the results of in vitro fertilization. It was no accident that we were twins. Our parents needed a male and a female. So many of the notes are illegible, or just beyond my understanding. There are cross diagrams with notes in the margins about iridium. What it all comes down to is that we were born for a
specific purpose. We were born for the same reason Linden was born—to be cured. Linden was ill as a result of his father’s testing, but then, so was I.
If my parents hadn’t been killed, would their desperation only have intensified as the years went on? Would they have earned the president’s attention? Would they have taken the measures Vaughn has taken? Had they already begun to?
I have entirely new reasons for why Rowan and I were wise to bury our parents’ things in the backyard. It’s too late now to wish they hadn’t been unearthed.
The jet touches down on an unfamiliar tarmac. But it’s the same desolate horizon, everything shrouded in the smoggy blue of early dawn.
Rowan stirs and moves away from me. I close the notebook and slide it into his backpack.
“Where are we now?” I ask.
“We aren’t very far from home,” Vaughn says. “That’s where we’re headed.”
“Home?” I say. It’s a word that can mean anywhere and nowhere.
“Yes, of course,” Vaughn says, rising to his feet and heading for the jet’s door. “You’ll always have a home. I told you that.”
ROWAN IS blinking and sitting up very straight in an effort to keep from falling asleep in the limo. And despite persistent feelings of dread and anxiety, I feel myself fading as well.
“This will be the first time our Rowan has seen the property,” Vaughn says. Our Rowan. I don’t know what to do with the anger that causes in me. “Once you’ve both had a chance to rest, you must show him around. Everything is still as you left it, even that eyesore of a trampoline.”
I stare out the tinted window as the mansion gates come into view. All around us are trees, some of them real and others a hologram meant to give the illusion that there’s no way out from the inside. The gates open, and we drive straight through the illusory trees.
“You lived here?” Rowan asks as we drive past the mini-golf course. I wonder if any of my blood remains on the windmill from my escape attempt.
“Yes,” I say.
Vaughn starts talking about how he’s been thinking of ordering horses for the stables again, and he’d like to know what I think. He doesn’t seem to notice that I don’t answer him; he moves on to another speech about the rose garden thriving in the summer heat and this being ideal pool weather. Not that there’s time for swimming, he says. Not now, at least. Later. There will be time for everything later.
The word “time” doesn’t sound the same to me anymore.
We enter the mansion through the kitchen, which is dimly lit and empty. When my husband and sister wives and I were here, the head cook would be milling about preparing the day’s menu at this hour. By her third trimester Cecily had developed so many food aversions that on an especially bad day she might send back four untouched breakfast trays.
Vaughn leads us onto the elevator. It was here that Gabriel stopped its descent so that I could tell him the story of how I came to be Linden’s unwilling bride. Was Vaughn listening in and collecting information that would lead him to my brother? Looking back now, I realize how foolish it was for me to utter secrets within these walls.
The doors open, and I’m expecting to be met with the wives’ floor; even after I became first wife and earned my key card, that and the ground floor were the only levels I had access to. But something different awaits me this time. Rather than the smell of incense, there’s leather and a spice I can’t exactly explain, but it’s not unlike the smell inside the trunk that held my parents’ things.
I’ve never seen this floor. Rather than lush carpeting, the floors are a dark, glossy hardwood. The walls are green and decorated with photos in gold frames. I immediately recognize the one of a young Rose and Linden in the orange grove. As we make our way down the hall, I watch them play together, run away from the camera with their hands knotted between them. I watch them get married, Rose in a billowing white dress that’s both absurd and beautiful on her child frame, Linden an awkward boy concentrating deeply on the ring he slides onto her finger.
At the end of the hall, their story ends with their foreheads pressed together. He’s got his hands on her swollen stomach, but the picture was taken a moment too soon; she will always be just about to smile.
Rowan isn’t looking at the pictures. His eyes are dark and unfocused. “Rowan?” I say.
“Hm?” He raises his head but doesn’t turn it toward me.
Vaughn opens the door that’s in front of us, revealing a bedroom only slightly different from the ones on the wives’ floor. There are dust-framed rectangles on the wall where pictures once hung. “I expected you might be tired,” Vaughn says, wrapping his arm around Rowan’s shoulders and leading him to the bed. “This room belonged to my son, but even when he’s home, he doesn’t much care for it anymore. Too many memories, I suppose.”
There’s no trace of Linden left in this room. I can see the empty spaces where things might have been once.
Rowan crawls under the sheets, and he’s gone in seconds. Vaughn tucks the covers to his chin, as though my brother is a child in his care rather than a subject exhausted from horrifying treatments.
“He has your fire,” Vaughn says. “I’m impressed that he was able to stand on his feet for as long as he did. Anyone else would be positively incoherent for at least two days following the sedation required for a retinal procedure. But time and again, the both of you exceed my expectations.”
I watch Rowan turn onto his left side. It’s how he’s always slept, turned away from me when we shared a bed.
“You’re looking tired,” Vaughn tells me. “I could bring you to your room, but I was hoping we’d have a chance to talk first. There’s something I’d like to show you.”
After the thriving Hawaiian cityscape and my parents’ notes and my brother, I cannot imagine what’s left to see. But finding out is bound to be more tolerable than facing the wives’ floor alone, so I agree to follow him.
I can’t help but be curious about what’s behind all of the closed doors along this hallway, and wonder what was going on under my feet and over my head while I was trapped on the wives’ floor every day. This level could almost belong to a different house.
We get into the elevator, and I’m not surprised a few moments later when the doors open to reveal the basement. But its chemical smell and flickering lights don’t frighten me this time. I’ll never trust Vaughn, but I can feel that things have changed. The world is not what I thought it was, and my brother is asleep upstairs, and somehow I know that I won’t be harmed by this place this time.
There is a silence so great that I can hear the ice crystals cracking and falling from eyelashes of girls who will never blink again. Girls who used to braid my hair, wrap arms and legs around me in sleep, and ask me what the party lights were like in my rare evenings of freedom. They’re here and not here.
And Spring herself when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Unlike two of my sister wives, I still have a pulse. I feel like a traitor.
As we walk, Vaughn says, “The hallucinations that caused you to harm yourself were very interesting. Your brother did experience some nightmares—I’d asked him to keep a journal—but he was, for lack of a better word, sane. I can’t say the same thing for you.”
He restrained me to a bed and filled me with drugs and took endless notes. The only company I had was my ailing domestic, who appeared to be even worse off than I was. But he wants to talk about sane.
“I’d like to try something different this time,” he says. “I’d like to let you have more freedom. It occurs to me that I’ve treated you like a caged animal. I’d like for you to travel with your brother and me while you receive your treatments. I think you’d enjoy yourself.”
I don’t know how to answer. I’m scared to admit to myself that I might be willing to do as he asks. I do want to see what more is out there. I am starting to believe in the methods he’s using to find this cure.
“You don’t hav
e to answer me now,” Vaughn says. “Before we get to that, there is the matter of my son and grandson.”
We’ve stopped before a closed door, and my heart starts pounding. My palms fill with sweat. Whatever is behind that door, I know it’s going to be a bargaining chip.
I find my voice to say, “I can’t force them to come back here; Linden has to decide for himself.”
“So modest,” Vaughn says, rapping his knuckle against the tip of my nose. “Still refusing to see the power you have over my son. And, perhaps more important, over your former sister wife.”
“Cecily?” I say.
“Something tells me that she plays the biggest hand in keeping Linden and Bowen away from home. It’s such a surprise because she used to be the obedient one.”
I never would have described Cecily as obedient. But I suppose that’s what she was to Vaughn. He earned her trust by being the parent she’d never had, and when she finally saw that she was being used, she ran as far and as fast as she could. Nothing will bring her back now.
“She’ll listen to you,” Vaughn says. “She’ll follow you anywhere.”
“She wouldn’t follow me back here,” I say.
“Let’s just hope that she does,” Vaughn says, and he opens the door.
At first I don’t register what it is I’m seeing. I’m too afraid to let my eyes focus. But then I see a room like the one that kept me imprisoned the last time I was here, complete with a fake window that would show a fake horizon if it were turned on. Instead the screen is turned off. What’s the point when there’s no one to look at it?
Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy) Page 21