Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy)

by Lauren DeStefano

  I thought I had it all worked out. I would run away. I went through every scenario I could think of. But I never thought that he would be the one to leave me. I never thought being without him could hurt this much.

  My muscles tighten. I break with a sob, and I’m surprised to hear his name come out of my mouth.

  Cecily sobs too. We make horrible sounds echoing each other. I don’t know how long this goes on before she crawls out of bed. The bathroom light comes on, but she closes the door, reducing the light to slivers.

  She runs the water for a very long time. I listen as her sobs taper down to sniffles and intermittent coughs. She opens the bathroom door several minutes later, shaking, silhouetted. Her hair and hands are dripping.

  “Tell me about the twins,” she urges.

  “What?”

  “You and your brother,” she says. “When your parents died, what did you do? How did you get to a place where you could just carry on? Tell me. Tell me, because I’m sure that feeling this way is going to kill me.”

  The last time I told her about the twins, she betrayed my trust. But she was a different girl all those months ago, still so easily coerced by Vaughn’s promises that we’d all be a happy family. She’s brutally wiser now.

  “A feeling can’t kill you,” I say. “The twins thought the same thing as you, and they’re both still alive.”

  “How?”

  I go to her, and I mean to steer her back to bed, but she says that she needs air, and she leads me out into the hallway, and then onto the elevator. We go through the labyrinth of hallways, through the kitchen, out to the rose garden. I think she was hoping to find something here, but it’s missing.

  “I can’t breathe,” she says, gripping the railing of our wedding gazebo. Her words are fast and tight.

  I stand beside her, all sympathy and guilt, remembering a day when I thought this demanding child of a bride was incapable of feelings.

  “You are breathing,” I tell her.

  She shakes her head.

  “I know what you’re feeling,” I say.

  “Not like this you don’t.” She slides forward until her face is on the railing. Her back heaves with the weight of her breaths. All around us is the smell of damp spring, everything still wet from the recent rain. She’s reduced to whispers. “Not like this.”

  I don’t dare to touch her. Loss is a knowledge I’m sorry to have. Perhaps the only thing worse than experiencing it is watching it replay anew in someone else—all its awful stages picking up like a chorus that has to be sung.

  It takes her such a long time to understand that her lungs and heart and blood are going to keep working. Nothing will stop. No feeling can be the end of a person, or else the virus would hardly be our biggest threat.

  I sit on a wet step to wait for her, and to hold myself together. My own breaths are shaky; my head feels swimmy and light. I try to find shapes in the stars—only, they don’t make sense tonight. I can’t remember what they mean.

  For a while everything feels still and unreal. But then I’m filled with thoughts of what the morning will have to bring. I’ll make the bed, and then what?

  When Cecily comes to sit beside me, we rest our heads together and I tell her a final story about the twins. The one whose grief drove him to set the country ablaze. And the one who found a way to love her captor.

  THE LIBRARY has the best view of the orange grove.

  The morning is a gray photograph of a gray world where it is always raining; Cecily and I are standing at the window, watching Vaughn dig his son’s grave.

  “The orange grove is a good place,” Cecily says, and her voice cracks. “Rose will be able to find him there.”

  Many deaths have happened in this house, but none of the bodies were ever buried. Linden once told me that his father said the virus might be detrimental to the soil, and I never quite believed that. I believed that the bodies became Vaughn’s experiments. But after twenty-two years of working to save him, Vaughn is finally going to let Linden be at peace.

  Linden is wrapped in a white sheet on a gurney, and for some reason I can’t rid myself of the worry that he’s going to be soaked by this drizzling rain.

  It’s going to be a shallow grave, but it will be enough. There will be room for roots to spread out and for things to grow over him.

  When Vaughn lifts the body from the gurney, Cecily grabs my shirt in both her fists. My muscles tense. Vaughn kneels by the grave, and at first I think he’s going to lower his son in and be done with it, but then he peels the sheet away from Linden’s face. My mind goes numb. That is Linden and not Linden at all.

  He hugs his son, rocks him, reinforces his grip. Cecily moves to hide her face in my sleeve, but then she changes her mind and we make ourselves watch. We have to. He belonged to us—we have to. The sheet is raised again and the body is lowered, and the dirt covers him.

  As he’s buried, my heart is a stone, burying itself in me.

  So many things were said in the time I had with Linden. Lies were spun and things were whispered in the darkness of my bedroom. There was laughter, anger, party chatter, and occasionally the truth.

  But now there are no words. Rain makes gentle noise against the house.

  Cecily turns away from the window and sweeps her fingers over the table where the three of us as sister wives often took our tea. I hear a faint whimper as she moves out of the room.

  For the rest of the morning I stay in the library, curled in the overstuffed chair that has always been my favorite, and I read one of the romance novels Jenna loved. Every so often I hear the first notes of a song Cecily is playing on the keyboard, but she can only go on for a few seconds before it becomes too much effort. She doesn’t have the strength for an entire song.

  She was right. There is no finality to a funeral. Linden is gone and I saw him go, but there’s still the sense that he’s somewhere. Everything in me is telling me to go outside and find him, bring him back.

  It’s thundering outside. Lightning flashes. I try not to think of Linden all alone out there. I try to read what’s on the page, but I’m nearly halfway through the book, and I haven’t retained a single name, a single word of what’s happening.

  An attendant comes for me. First generation, as most of them are. He stands in the doorway for a long time, hesitating. Maybe he thinks that I’m the House Governor’s widow and I’ll crumble and crack if he approaches me the wrong way. So he stares at me, and I stare at the page.

  “What is it?” I say without looking up.

  “The Housemaster has requested to see you downstairs. I was asked to escort you.”

  I close the book, set it on the chair, leave the desperate lovers therein to find their way back to each other, or to lose each other entirely. Jenna said those stories always either ended happily or everyone died. She said, What else is there?

  Sometimes I can’t help being angry that she left me behind.

  The elevator chimes as its doors open, and Cecily comes out of her bedroom. She has changed into her nightgown, and her hair is a mess. I hope this means she’s been sleeping. “Where are you taking her?” she asks the attendant.

  He doesn’t know how to answer her in a way that’s safe. She is prone to temper tantrums, and Vaughn is surely on the warpath today already without having to deal with her.

  “I’m only going downstairs,” I say.

  “You can’t go,” she says. “You won’t come back.”

  “Of course I’ll come back,” I say.

  She shakes her head furiously, barricades the waiting elevator with her body. “No,” she says. “Rhine, please, no, no. I know that you won’t come back.”

  “Cecily,” I snap. I want to comfort her, but I am too exhausted. I want to find a lie that will soothe her, but I’ve run out. At this point I could use a nice lie for myself; nobody is ever kind enough to lie to me. “Go back to bed. It’s fine.”

  She doesn’t move. “You can’t leave me by myself,” she’s whimpering as
I push her out of my way. I don’t want to leave her here. I don’t. But Vaughn seems to have deemed her disposable. What use is she to him now? She can’t give him another grandchild. I won’t let her give him a final reason to do it. I won’t bury her, too. She tries to get between the elevator doors as they’re closing between us, but I give her a hard shove, and her recovery time isn’t quick enough.

  “Thank you.” The attendant sighs, exasperated. “Something else, that one. She’s too much to handle most days.”

  “This morning she watched from a window as her husband was buried,” I say. “What did you do this morning?”

  He clears his throat and looks straight ahead at the doors.

  When the doors open on the ground floor, Rowan is waiting for me in the hallway, and I can see by his frown that he’s all set to pity me. I steel myself.

  “You’re to go straight through the kitchen. The car will be waiting outside,” the attendant tells us as I leave the elevator.

  After the elevator doors have closed, Rowan says, “Dr. Ashby told me what happened to his son, your ex-husband. I’m sorry, Rhine.”

  “Linden,” I say quietly as I start walking. “His name was Linden.”

  “You still had feelings for him, yes?” Rowan says.

  I use the word that Jared said. “He was my friend.”

  I don’t say anything further, and I don’t look at him, though I feel his eyes watching me. My brother was never especially good with compassion. His idea of helping is to find the quickest way to overcome the loss, and I’m not quite ready. I’m not sure it’s possible.

  I move down the hallway and through the kitchen and to the outdoors.

  Vaughn is waiting by the limo’s open door. The light rain makes little shadows on his gray suit. I can’t bring myself to look at him, but he puts his hand on my shoulder to stop me from getting into the car, and he tells Rowan to go on ahead, and then Vaughn closes the door.

  “It seems the terms of our agreement have changed,” he says. “But I still have something you want, don’t I?”

  He lowers his face until our eyes meet, and he waits for me to answer with the obvious, as though I’m a child.

  “Gabriel,” I say.

  “And you do still have something that I want. I still need your cooperation.”

  I don’t know what more he wants from me. He already has my DNA, and the insides of my eyes, and my brother. He has enough fuel to take us all to a place where people go on living, indifferent or else oblivious to our misery. None of it is going to save his son.

  “Can I still count on that cooperation?” he asks.

  His eyes are almost kind. I have to look away from them, but I nod.

  “Good girl,” he says, and opens the door for me. As long as Vaughn is still alive, there will always be doors to open. There will always be something horrible waiting on the other side.

  On the flight out to Hawaii, Vaughn tells us that he’s sorry he didn’t arrange for meals, but our next treatment is going to require a twelve-hour fasting. He has pills for us instead, and I am grateful when they make me feel drowsy. On some faraway level I’m aware of my body curling up on the seat, my eyes closing.

  I’m barely conscious by the time we land. I try to call for my brother, but I can’t move my tongue. Through a sheen of darkness I see the oriental rug rushing toward me as I fall, and then someone is holding me by the arms and I’m eased into a wheelchair.

  I feel the mugginess and the heat. I hear the city noises and the ocean’s waves, everything through a vacuum as I fall down, down, into the darkness I’m craving.

  The darkness isn’t perfect, though. Bits of reality peek through. A cold metal table under me. Surgical tools rattling on a rolling cart. Voices talking miles away from me, in a place where it still means something to be alive.

  I wake up spluttering and gagging. A tube has just been pulled from my throat; when I manage to open my eyes, I see the nurse taking it away. It’s bright in this room, and I can’t see the nurse’s face, can’t tell if she’s first generation or new or something else entirely.

  She runs an ice cube across my lips and tells me that I’m brave. I want to ask her what’s happening, but I can’t speak.

  “Rest now,” I hear Vaughn say. “It’s done, Rhine. It’s all done.”

  Linden is in the darkness with me, and he’s trying to speak. But something isn’t right. I can’t hear his words. I can’t understand them.

  “You have to go now,” I tell him, and he does. Even the dead know that we have to face certain things alone.

  When I open my eyes again, I’m in a white room on an inclined mattress.

  “Rhine?” Rowan says, and at once he has moved from the window to my bedside. He’s all dressed in white like the walls and the curtains and the blanket that’s drawn up to my chest. There’s another bed on the other side of the end table, its blankets disturbed. I suppose Rowan recovered sooner than I did.

  He takes my hand. Odd, he was never one for affection. I find that I have the strength to wriggle my fingers between his. The numbness of sleep is receding.

  I try to speak. “What’s happening to us?”

  He smiles in a way I’ve rarely seen since we were children, when we were still foolish enough to think the world had anything to promise us. “Dr. Ashby has done it,” Rowan says. “He’s modified an existing formula for the cure. He made his official presentation to President Guiltree this morning. We were both supposed to attend, but you’ve been asleep, and I wanted to be here when you woke up. I wanted to be the one to tell you that we’ve been cured.”

  I must still be groggy, because I’m having trouble understanding. “I thought none of the cures were universal.”

  He squeezes my hand. “We think this one is,” he says. “He’s spent this past week testing dosages on us and comparing his findings with other subjects. He’s tested all of our hormone levels and our cell counts, and none of the abnormalities of the other treatments have appeared with this one.”

  All I understand from that is the word “week.”

  Linden has been dead for a week.

  “Rhine?” Rowan says. I hear myself sniffle, and the room blurs through a rush of tears. “What’s the matter?” he asks, and dabs at my cheeks with the cuff of his sleeve.

  A week. Gabriel has remained frozen for all the things he knows and because I’m the only bargaining chip that could ever awaken him.

  Cecily has been alone.

  “How can anything be the matter?” my brother says. “You understand, don’t you? We’re cured.”

  “I don’t care,” I say, before the tears make it impossible to speak.

  “Cure” is one of the most precious words in the English language. It’s a short word. A clean and simple word. But it isn’t so easy a thing as it sounds. There are questions like: How will this affect us in ten years? In twenty? What will it do to our children? Our children’s children? Our immune systems are going to suffer, I’m being told. We may develop tumors. We’ll be more vulnerable to toxins in the air. Minor ailments like colds run the risk of progressing into respiratory infections. Rowan and I have been fitted with tracking devices that will also keep track of our vital signs, which will be monitored around the clock.

  In time the scientists are hoping the effects will take to female reproductive systems. There are already studies being planned to test the results of a new generation conceiving with a partner that wasn’t born with the virus. This is not the conclusion, but only the beginning, the spark. We will undergo monthly physical examinations. And then there is the matter of certainty. The virus wouldn’t have affected us until after my twentieth birthday and Rowan’s twenty-fifth. There are fifty other participants in the study who vary in age, but we will all have to survive that fatal year before there’s even going to be talk of starting to make these findings public. The hope is that more participants can be brought into the study annually as researchers build data on how the initial subjects are reacting
to treatment.

  All of this, of course, assumes that the formula for the cure that Vaughn modified will do what it’s supposed to, and we won’t all die a gruesome death like some subjects in other studies.

  And because of the sensitivity and confidentiality of it all, we will not be allowed to return to the public. The president doesn’t have the funds to keep all of us here, so we will return to the States, where we’ll be monitored by the doctor assigned to our care—Vaughn, as far as Rowan and I are concerned.

  I’m back to the familiar role of a prisoner, only this time without the formality of a husband. At least Rowan won’t be free to destroy any more labs. He’ll have to leave his friends behind, but he doesn’t even think enough of them to mention it. Maybe that’s why Bee stared at me with such contempt—she knew that for me, Rowan would abandon any life he had built elsewhere.

  Rowan is the one who tells me all of these things. He talks softly, patiently, as I sit on the window ledge and watch boats with colorful triangles for sails scratch the ocean.

  I don’t touch the dinner that’s gone cold on my nightstand. I don’t ask any questions or give any indication that I’ve heard what he’s telling me.

  I watch the perfectly imperfect people several stories below, living their perfectly imperfect lives, and I think about how many decades will have to pass before the whole world can be like that again. I think about how many decades will pass before someone gets another idea to make the world perfect and destroys it completely.

  “Rhine, please,” Rowan says. He sits on the ledge beside me. “You have to care about this.” After our parents died, one morning he interrupted my sulking by throwing the blankets away from me. The cold air made me wince. “I’m not going to spoon-feed you,” he said. But I suppose that’s what he’s doing now—forcing me to take in this news, hoping it will cure this incurable grief I feel. It’s not like him to say “please.”