Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy)

by Lauren DeStefano

  Reed busies himself clearing all of the debris from the plane. Cecily is bursting with giggles because it’s the greatest thing she’s ever seen; she didn’t quite believe Reed when he told her that he was hiding a plane in the shed.

  By the time we’ve cleared away all of the shed debris from the plane’s wings and body, the sun is starting to set. “There’s still enough light to fly it,” Reed says. He’s climbing into the open door that leads to the cockpit.

  “Are you sure it will start?” Cecily asks.

  “We’re about to find out,” Reed says. “Climb in.”

  Cecily moves forward, but Linden grabs her arm and says, “No, love. It isn’t safe.”

  She wrests away from him. “Stay down here if you want to,” she says. “But I’m tired of you always holding me back.”

  “Love . . . ”

  She sees that she’s hurt him, and she softens. “It’ll be fun,” she says. “A little adventure.”

  He pulls her toward him and he stoops down, and she rises on tiptoes so their foreheads can touch. “I almost lost you once,” he says.

  “Nothing will happen.” She kisses him. “When are we ever going to have another chance to do something like this?”

  Reed is annoyed by their display. He starts the engine, and the little propeller at the nose of the plane starts to spin; the ground is vibrating, sending waves through my body. We’re all choking on the dirt plumes. “Cowards!” he says. Just as he’s closing the door by the pilot’s seat, I hoist myself through it.

  “I’ll go,” I say. Boarding this dilapidated plane without a tarmac and being flown by Reed won’t be the craziest thing I’ve experienced this week.

  “There isn’t a runway,” Linden protests, trying to appeal to my better senses. “And my uncle has never flown—”

  Reed slams the door shut and pats the empty seat beside him. The cockpit is so cramped that I can’t stand at full height. There are more gauges than I can count, levers pointing in different directions, but the pedals look at least vaguely similar to the ones in cars.

  “You can be my copilot,” he says, gesturing again to the seat beside him.

  The engine is shaking the entire plane. My heart is pounding, but in the best way. I want to fly for that horizon like I want my next breath. I’ve spent my whole life on the ground looking up. I’ve spent so many afternoons on Jenna’s trampoline reaching the greatest heights that I can. And now that I’ve had a taste of greater height, I don’t think I’ll ever have my fill.

  Still, Linden does have a point. “Have you ever flown?” I ask.

  Reed looks offended. “I’ve read,” he says. “I know what all of these gauges and switches mean. And I’ve been on a plane before; they were still popular when I was a boy, you know. Don’t look at me like that.”

  Cecily is pounding on the door, and when Reed opens it, she pushes her way inside, Linden on her heels. “I talked him into it,” she says.

  Linden looks less than enthusiastic.

  “That’s the spirit!” Reed says, and he pats the copilot’s seat that was promised to me. “Best way to face your fears is to look straight at them with the best view in the house.”

  After Linden sits down in the copilot’s seat, Cecily rakes both of her hands through his hair, and she kisses the top of his head and says something in a low voice. I see a nervous smile in his reflection in the glass.

  There’s hardly room for Cecily and me to be standing here, and Reed says, “You girls are going to have to sit in back, at least while we take off.”

  Cecily and I move through the curtain that takes us into the cramped passenger cabin, and we sit across from each other, knees touching. Cecily is gripping the edge of her seat. “I’m terrified,” she says, like it’s the greatest feeling to have.

  The plane jerks and splutters, but then we’re moving, and with a squeal Cecily grabs my skirt like it’s a horse’s reins. Through the oval windows on each wall, we watch the grass begin speeding past us; the house is getting farther away; Elle, standing in the grass, cradles Bowen’s head in the curve of her neck to protect him from the wind we’re causing as we go forward and then up.

  We don’t go nearly as high as Vaughn’s private jet took me, but we can see the top of Reed’s house, and then we’re high enough that we can’t see the cracks in the road or the weeds in the grass and we can’t tell which trees are dying. Everything looks tidy and healthy.

  When Cecily and I peek through the curtain into the cockpit, Reed is laughing and Linden is pale.

  “See?” Cecily says. “It’s not so bad.”

  Linden looks like he wants to throw up. He’s focusing on his shoes. I wedge myself between the two pilot seats. “Pretend we aren’t going to land down there,” I tell him. “Pretend that we’re going to fly straight across the ocean to a place where everyone lives to be a hundred.”

  In answer he raises his eyes to the windshield for the first time.

  We fly over empty fields and little gray lakes and sparsely scattered houses. We go in a long loop that eventually leads us back to Reed’s.

  Linden is still too anxious to speak, but it’s starting to register that he’s flying, that there’s more to the world than what we can see from standing in one place.

  I lean over Linden, cup my hand around his ear, and say, “There’s a whole world of this.”

  He turns his head to face me, and our noses almost touch. He sees my smile, sees that I’m hiding something, and I think he understands. “Really?” he says.

  Cecily and Reed are talking to each other, excitedly pointing out the scenery, and they aren’t paying attention to us.

  “I’ve seen more than this,” I tell him. “I know you don’t believe me. I wouldn’t either.”

  The skepticism in his eyes is intermingled with hope. A year ago he wouldn’t have dared hope for anything beyond the mansion walls. I like to think I’ve had something to do with that.

  “From the start I’ve never known what surprises you’d bring,” he says.

  “Not all of them are bad, are they?” I say.

  “Mostly good,” he says. “But I’ve developed a habit of believing you when I shouldn’t.”

  “Give me a chance to prove it you,” I say. “Give me time.”

  “For you, always.”

  He sits up straight to look out past the nose of the plane, and the happiness that was starting to form on his face is gone at once. Through the window I can see Vaughn’s limo winding down the back roads that lead to the house. The only car on the road. From up here it’s like a fish that’s swimming upstream. “My father,” Linden says. And so ends his rush from his greatest act of rebellion. He understands that no matter where he runs or how high he flies, he will always have to come home.

  “I’ll never hear the end of this one,” Reed grumbles. “Back in your seats, kids. I have to figure out how to land this thing.” He shoos Cecily and me through the curtain.

  The plane was already shaking, but by the time we get to our seats, Reed’s landing attempt has Cecily and me clinging to each other in horror. I feel it when we hit the ground, and then it’s like we’re speeding hopelessly through the field behind Reed’s house, and I shut my eyes and will us not to go careening into the house.

  I brace my legs against the adjacent seats, but when the plane makes its final jolt, despite my best efforts I go flying across the tiny cabin, and Cecily crashes into me. The storage cabinet flies open and rains little foil packets of food and lotus-embroidered handkerchiefs.

  There’s a moment of stillness. The engine has stopped, but things are still plinking and hissing under our feet.

  “Everyone alive?” Reed calls to us.

  We’re stumbling as we all pour through the cockpit and out onto the grass. My shoulder is aching, but I’m otherwise intact. Cecily is inspecting her wrist that I’m guessing is sore from the way she braced herself in the last second.

  Linden puts his hand to his temple, and it comes back bright
with blood that’s trickling down the side of his face.

  “Oh!” Cecily says. “You’re bleeding. Come here; let me see.”

  He takes a step toward her.

  Everything happens in slow motion after that. He raises his foot for the next step, and then he’s falling. I swear I can hear the sound of his bones hitting the dirt.

  Blood is frothing in his mouth, and his eyes are closed and he’s having convulsions.

  Cecily drops to his side and she’s screaming his name, but she’s too afraid to touch him. I’m too afraid to move at all.

  Reed takes a step forward but stops when he sees Vaughn running toward us. “Linden!” Vaughn is calling. “Son— Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him!” He says those words over and over, gasping them, whispering them as he drops into the high grass and forces Cecily out of his way. She crawls a few feet back and then watches, unsure what to do with herself.

  Linden is still convulsing, making strained noises, and I’m not sure, but I think he’s trying to breathe. And Vaughn, the only one of us who should know how to fix this, looks absolutely panicked. His hands hover over Linden’s face, wanting to touch him, to soothe him, but he knows better. He can see that his son’s injury is far more serious than the outer wound implies.

  Blood is streaming out of Linden’s ear, and it’s so awful, so unimaginable, that my mind is trying to tell me it’s only a trick of the light. Only, I know it isn’t. Blood in his mouth, too. He’s drowning in it.

  There’s a man who would drown for you, Annabelle the fortune-teller said, the light of all her metal and plastic treasures jumping around us.

  And then Linden goes still, and Cecily is moaning, “Oh god, oh god, Linden,” because she realizes before the rest of us that he isn’t breathing. Vaughn tells her to shut up, and she does. He’s checking for his son’s pulse and then clearing the blood and the foam from his mouth. He’s feeling for broken ribs, and then he’s pressing his fists to the chest and forcing oxygen into the still lungs. For all the tools he has used, the equipment he has engineered, and the solutions he has concocted, all he has to save his son with now are his bare hands.

  It isn’t enough. Even I know that. The sun is coming down and everything is painted gold. The tiny airplane. Linden’s curls.

  Vaughn is persistent. It goes on like that forever and ever. But I know it’s over when I hear his sob, baritone and booming. I’ve never seen him cry; I didn’t think he could. It would have to take something greater than the end of the world to reduce Vaughn Ashby to tears.

  I WATCH VAUGHN scoop his son into his arms the way he probably did when Linden was small. I watch unresponsive limbs hanging slack, an open, motionless mouth that once told me “I love you.” I watch Vaughn carrying him to the limo and yelling at the driver, who runs out to help what can’t be helped. I watch the door close. I watch the limo getting smaller until it disappears.

  And then, only then, I fall to my hands and knees.

  When Vaughn returns after dark, the front door bursts open. His footsteps are thunderous and his voice is a hiss, and he’s telling Reed that he’s never, never going to let him see the children again. The children he’s talking about are Cecily, Bowen, and me. Reed is broken. He says nothing. He’s in his kitchen surrounded by mason jars, where watermelons and sprouts are growing beautifully according to his plan. He has always been the one to make things live while his brother was the wrong one. His brother was the one who killed and prodded and destroyed. That was the way it always was, who they always were.

  I’m in the living room, in the dark, on an armchair that reeks of cigars. Cecily has made herself disappear. There’s no lock on the door of the upstairs bedroom, so she barricaded it with the dresser. She didn’t even come out for Bowen, who was wailing for the better part of a half hour before Elle found something to distract him in the library. She really is a skilled caregiver; she can open a textbook about air conditioner models and pretend to be reading from it, pointing to the pictures as she makes up a story about angels and falling stars. I was listening to her earlier, her young voice coming down the stairs as I focused on a crack in the ceiling. It took me away from the ugliness in my head for a while.

  Vaughn breezes past me, and at first I don’t think he realizes I’m here, but without looking back at me, he says, “Get everyone out to the car.”

  The screen door slams behind him. I hear a floorboard creak, and when I get to the base of the staircase, I see Cecily at the top step. It’s too dark for me to see her face. All I see is the sheen in her eyes that are staring through me. She’s got the fuchsia purse on her shoulder and Linden’s suitcase in her hand. We brought clothes and supplies with us when we went to South Carolina, but things like Bowen’s formula and Linden’s sketch pads were left behind.

  “It’s time?” she says. They’re the first words she’s spoken to me all night. They might be the first words she’s said at all since she has become a fourteen-year-old widow.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Elle,” she says, not raising her voice, not looking back to see if her domestic is following as she descends.

  We don’t say good-bye to Reed, but I look over my shoulder and see him in the kitchen, staring through the table. This isn’t his fault. I want to tell him that. I want to believe that the same way that I want to forget that I was the one who should have been sitting in the copilot’s seat, and that the blood on the windshield should have been mine.

  Cecily is quiet as we make our way to the idling limo. She’s been quiet all evening, not a murmur, not a sob. But then she looks into the waiting car, and she sees the wraparound leather seat where the three of us sat just hours before, on our way back from South Carolina. The car smells like the mansion. It smells like the past year of our lives.

  She turns around and looks at me, as if to ask what I make of this nightmare.

  I can tell that she hasn’t cried at all. I don’t know if this is a healthy response, but I haven’t cried either.

  She opens her mouth to speak, but only a feeble croaking sound comes out. Elle and Vaughn are waiting behind us.

  “Go on,” I tell her softly. “I’m right behind you.”

  She nods, crawls into the seat by the window. I follow her. Then Elle with the sleeping baby. Cecily watches him. “What will happen to us?” she says breathlessly. “I gave Linden everything I had.”

  “Don’t be foolish, Cecily,” Vaughn says. “You had nothing to give. You were nothing then, and you’re nothing now.” He closes the door on us.

  Don’t you dare believe that, is what I would say to her if I were brave enough to speak. She clenches her jaw, tightens her grip on the purse strap, and stares out her window.

  I don’t see Rowan when we make it back to the mansion, and I’m not foolish enough to ask about Gabriel, which would surely invite new wrath from Vaughn. I fear that he would kill Gabriel just to prove some sick point. In any case, Vaughn has vanished by the time an attendant opens the car door for us. We’re guided through the kitchen, which is empty and tidy, though there is the faint smell of food. I think Vaughn had been anticipating a family dinner.

  When we get to the elevator, the attendant hands me a plastic key card strung on a silver necklace. The same one Linden gave to me when he decided to make me first wife.

  “Housemaster Vaughn has requested that you come with me,” the attendant says to Elle. Cecily takes the baby and the diaper bag from Elle before she’s led away.

  There’s only one place in the world left for us to go. I swipe my key card, the elevator doors open, and I push the button that will take us to the wives’ floor.

  For what feels like hours, I sit in the library and listen to Cecily’s brutal wails. She’s finally found whatever it took for her to grieve, but whenever I knock on her door and call to her, she falls silent, waiting for me to leave her alone.

  I pace the halls, missing the perfumed must of the incense and feeling unwelcome without it. Eventually I crawl onto my old bed a
nd close my eyes against the light of my bedside lamp. Something deep within me cannot summon the wherewithal to grieve. I drift into a dream of Linden on the wet Hawaii sand, gray, eyes closed. The image gets closer like shutter clicks in a camera. A hundred pictures of a boy without life.

  With a gasp I open my eyes.

  I hear a rustle in the doorway, and I turn and find Cecily standing there. She’s red-faced and wringing her hands. Wet hair sticks to her cheeks like bony copper fingers trying to pull her back. She opens her mouth to speak, but her lips are quivering, and only more tears come.

  “Come here,” I say. My voice is hoarse. She takes slow steps, and I pull back the blanket so we can both crawl beneath it.

  After a very long time she says, “We’re all that’s left.” And then she breaks down again, and I busy myself with holding her, saying, “I know” and “I’m here,” because if I can just keep on this way, there’s no time for me to face it myself. There is a dark place calling to me, but I will not go just yet. I know I can’t return from it.

  Eventually she exhausts herself and falls into a sleep so fragile that I wake her once with my breathing. Night deepens. There is no one to turn on the hall lights. No dinner is brought to us. There is no one keeping us trapped in this room, and it seems impossible that I ever could have wanted it that way.

  I’m woken from my half sleep when Cecily moves toward me. My back is to her, but I can feel the mattress shift. Her breathing is matched by the heaviness of rain that has started outside. She weaves her fingers into my hair. She thinks I’m sleeping, and she doesn’t want to wake me. She only needs to touch my hair, to make and undo little braids so that her hands can stop shaking. She only needs to not be alone.

  And I stay very still, because I need it too.

  Last year I was lying in this bed, half-asleep, when Linden climbed in beside me. He was warm, and he smelled like alcohol and the chocolate éclairs we’d brought home with us. This was where he burrowed against me and asked me not to leave him.