Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy)

by Lauren DeStefano

  I like the idea of something greater than us. We destroy things with our curiosity. We shatter with our best intentions. We are no closer to perfection than we were one hundred years ago, or five hundred.

  I want to think that Linden has gone to the place that god implies—even if that means he’s just in the orange grove with his first love. I hope that Linden will be able to hear Bowen laughing in the gardens as he plays.

  As the night wears on, I find that it’s impossible for me to sleep. I feel I’ll go crazy if I’m made to lie still much longer.

  Cecily barely stirs when I move away from her and climb out of the bed. I’m quiet as I make my way to the elevator and press the button that will take me to the ground floor.

  Outside it’s a beautiful night, warm and starry. The buzz and chirp of insects gives the feel that the grass is alive under my bare feet as I make my way to the orange grove.

  I don’t know why I’ve come here. I think I was hoping that the night would make it someplace different from what it is in the day. I was hoping to overhear a murmur or the whispered secrets of the dead.

  I was hoping for guidance.

  But when I hear footsteps worrying the earth behind me, it’s no ghost that says, “A bit late for a walk, isn’t it?”

  Vaughn moves out from the shadow of the branches and into the light of the three-quarter moon.

  Normally there is something menacing about his presence, but tonight I suspect he is just a father visiting his son’s unmarked grave.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I say.

  “You need your rest,” he says. “I’ll have an attendant send a sleep aid up to your room.”

  “Thanks,” I say, “but I’ve had my fill of medications.”

  He laughs, and for once there is nothing dark about it. It’s sad and defeated.

  “I was pleasantly surprised this evening by how big my grandson has gotten,” he says. “Even if I don’t see much of his father in his features, there’s something hopeful about babies. It’s a joyous thing to watch them grow. I’ve missed him.”

  He paces under an orange tree and reaches out to touch a branch, but then withdraws. “I would have liked for my granddaughter to be here as well. She would be talking by now. I’d take her for walks and I’d teach her the things ordinary children out there aren’t privy to. Maybe I’d tell her how many countries still remain. I’d promise to take her to whichever ones she liked when she got older.”

  He’s talking about Rose and Linden’s only child together. The scary part is that I believe him.

  “Why couldn’t you have just let her live?” I say. I feel that we’re past the formality of lies; we both know that baby wasn’t a stillbirth.

  The branches are rustling; Linden and Rose are waiting for his answer.

  For a moment I feel certain there is someone hiding there.

  “A curious thing, malformed children,” Vaughn says. “One can never be certain they’ll live for a full day, a full year. There’s no certainty that they’ll speak, or that they’ll be able to draw a single breath without agony. My granddaughter wouldn’t have been the child her parents had been daydreaming about. She was bound to be nothing more than a heartbreak for the both of them.”

  “That wasn’t your decision to make,” I say. “That wasn’t your child.”

  “Linden was my child,” Vaughn snaps. “Everything that had to do with him concerned me. If he’d had time to fall in love with that baby, only to lose it, he would have come apart.”

  Maybe that’s true. Maybe. But, one way or another, he was still damaged. He was so shaken by that loss, so shaken by all of his losses, that every bit of love Linden felt for his own son was also filled with guilt for bringing him into this world, where nothing lasts as long as it should.

  “There are different types of malformations,” Vaughn says. “My granddaughter’s was severe. But your older sister wife’s was hardly noticeable.”

  “Jenna?” I say.

  “Yes, darling.”

  And just like that the small bit of belief I mustered in my former father-in-law comes undone. He must have a very low opinion of my intelligence if he expects me to believe there was a thing wrong with Jenna. “Jenna wasn’t malformed,” I say. “She was perfect.”

  “She was a convincing one,” Vaughn says. “When my son chose her from the lot of you, my first thought was that her features would complement his nicely when they had a child. But that thought was short-lived. Before any of you were married to my son, you underwent a physical examination, and that’s when I realized that she wasn’t as perfect on the inside as she was on the outside.”

  I’m beginning to feel sick. I’m not sure I want to hear this, but I listen anyway, because she was my sister wife, and because there’s nobody left to hear her secrets now but me.

  “Her uterus was as viable as a lump of scar tissue. She would never have been able to bear children,” Vaughn says. “I was going to have to find another use for her. And for a while I did, didn’t I? I learned that one avenue of treatment proved fatal. I might have been able to save her life, if only she hadn’t been so meddlesome. My efforts were better saved for something more important.”

  So there it is. Jenna’s big secret. Though I’m sure it’s only one of many.

  “Was Gabriel involved in this?” I say.

  “Not very,” Vaughn says. He begins walking away from the orange grove, and I follow him. “I tell each of my workers the details necessary to their specific tasks. I never reveal the full picture.”

  “What will happen to him, then?” I say, keeping pace beside him. “You’ve gotten everything you wanted from me. I’ve cooperated.”

  “Yes, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” he says. “What is it that you saw in him? What has he got that my son couldn’t have given you? Is it just that running off with an attendant felt like the romantic thing to do?”

  “I wanted him to know freedom,” I say. “It wasn’t about what he could give to me. It was about what he should have had for himself.”

  “Freedom,” Vaughn says. “My son had one small taste of freedom, didn’t he? Before he died? An entire lifetime of keeping him safe, and it only took one—one moment to end his life.” I notice a beat of hesitation from him. He is a beast of a man, but even with his last son in the ground, he’s still a father. “Freedom is dangerous,” he finishes.

  Of course it is. Rose’s life in her mother’s carnival would have been dangerous. And Cecily’s life as an orphan, and Jenna’s life with her sisters in a scarlet district, and my life in Manhattan. And Linden would still be safe and alive if he’d stayed on the ground, but our safety came at the price of being caged. There’s a limit to how much living can be done in a life without freedom.

  There was more freedom in the moment that plane came down than Linden had experienced in his whole life. I want to believe that’s worth something. I have to believe that’s worth something.

  If Vaughn has more to say, it’s lost by his sharp breath. He stops walking and turns to look at the orange grove, its leaves and branches silver and black in the moonlight, its oranges the only vague bits of brightness.

  Then I realize that wasn’t just a breath. It was a sob.

  Maybe it’s my own grief that’s clouding my judgment, but I believe that Vaughn is human.

  He’s through talking, I can tell, and the grief is creeping up on him again. He should be alone with it.

  Just after I’ve taken a step away from him, a loud crack splits the air, making me jump. Something rustles in the orange grove, but it isn’t a ghost.

  Vaughn puts his hand to his chest, and that’s when I see the dark stain of blood on his shirt. Another shot comes, and then he drops to the ground, astonished eyes open and unblinking.

  I’m too startled to scream.

  Footsteps come toward me, and as she gets closer, I see my sister wife’s red hair in the moonlight. I see the opened purse at her hip, and the gun in her hand, and her unfli
nching stare as she looks at what she’s done.

  She presses the gun’s safety switch with her thumb just as she was taught, and as she lowers it, I see the fake emeralds studded around the handle. Madame’s gun.

  I also see that her bottom lip has started to tremble. She presses her lips together and stares at Vaughn’s motionless form, either to make sure he’s dead or because she can’t bring herself to look away.

  “Cecily.” I put my hands on her shoulders, and she looks at me.

  She opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes. How can she explain? How can words ever be enough? There’s a space in her womb where her unborn child died inside her. There’s a place in the orange grove where her husband is buried. There’s a world out there that nobody has bothered to promise to her.

  I understand. It wouldn’t have ever been enough for Vaughn that I bled into tubes. It wouldn’t have been enough that Cecily gave him a grandchild and nearly died to give him another. It wouldn’t have been enough that Jenna was destroyed, or that Rose was in so much pain that she didn’t want to endure his measures to save her.

  We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.

  SHE HAD BEEN dreaming of this for a long time. But Madame was the one to put the gun into her hands. Madame looked at Cecily, and she saw the latest of Vaughn’s victims. She saw a girl with vengeance in her eyes. And so they whispered and convened in colorful tents. They hugged good-bye at the gate and wished each other well, all the while a gun hiding in that innocuous pink purse.

  It takes her a long time to tell me about Madame, and for her to admit that Vaughn’s murder might have only been a daydream of hers if Linden were still alive; she knows it isn’t what he would have wanted. She tells me that as angry as her husband was with his father, he was disgusted by the violence and the deceit. He wouldn’t have wanted another death. But without Linden, she’s certain that Vaughn was going to kill her if she didn’t act soon, and the idea of Bowen being orphaned was too much for her to stand. She might not have been brave enough to do it at all if she hadn’t used the key card she blackmailed off an attendant and followed me outside. She was only going to join me on my walk; she was too scared to sleep upstairs alone. But then she saw Vaughn and she hid. She heard what he said about Jenna.

  We’re sitting on the trampoline, in the darkness, and she finishes with the words “I had to.” She’s shivering now. In the moonlight her eyes are dark and worried.

  I think she’s brave. I think that nobody has ever believed what she could be capable of. All her life, nobody was listening.

  I put my hand over hers.

  In the morning the lotus gate is wide open. There’s an emerald-studded gun in the grass, wiped clean of any fingerprints. There’s a prominent doctor lying dead a few feet from the weapon that killed him.

  It makes sense. He had become a member of the president’s elite. There would be competition. There would be jealousy. There would be people that he had, in his fervor of research, shorted or stolen from or wronged.

  Cecily and I are playing chess in the library; we aren’t supposed to know any of these things yet. We’re supposed to be waiting for breakfast.

  Her fingers are shaking as she selects a pawn; she’s far more competent at this game than I am, but neither of us is paying attention to the board. “I’ve seen your brother on the news,” she says, “but seeing him in person—I wasn’t prepared for how much he looks like you. It’s jarring.”

  I watch her set down the pawn on the same square.

  “I bet it makes you feel like you belong somewhere,” she says. “I’ve never had brothers or sisters. It must be nice.”

  “You’ve had sisters,” I say.

  She raises her head to me, and she isn’t quite able to smile, she doesn’t have the strength, but I know my words have reached her.

  A nervous attendant bursts into the room, uncertain what to do as he explains the catastrophe with the Housemaster. Without a Housemaster and without a House Governor, there is no order to follow.

  We tell him that Vaughn has a living relative. A brother. We tell the attendant where he lives, how he can be reached.

  Several floors below us the chemicals are slowly filtering out of Gabriel’s system. His mind is slowly awakening, his eyes blinking. Elle is familiar with the practices of nursing, and she has access to the basement.

  When Reed arrives, Cecily and I run from the kitchen door to greet him. And for the first time in well over a decade, he’s invited into the building his father had reconstructed into a home. We don’t have to explain. He can see in Cecily’s eyes that she’s the reason his brother is dead. Maybe he already knew she had it in her when he taught her how to pull a trigger.

  When she puts her arms around him, she finally breaks into tears.

  “It’s okay, kid,” he says. For an instant her feet are off the ground, she’s holding on so tight. “It’ll be okay.”

  “CAREFUL,” I say, setting the tray on the nightstand when Gabriel tries to stand. I tuck my comforter back over his legs. “You shouldn’t be on your feet.”

  “I could say the same for you,” he says, but he accepts the kiss I place on his lips.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “I made tea. And you”—I poke his chest, pushing him back against the headboard—“need to drink some of it.”

  His eyes are wandering the length of me, and he mouths “Okay” and closes my hand in his. He wants to ask if I’m all right, but he won’t. That will only make it worse. It is taking all I have to keep my eyes dry. Staying busy helps.

  “It’s chamomile,” I say. “It’s supposed to make you sleepy. I think it’s only a placebo effect, though.”

  His eyes are bright, so bright and blue like the water sparkling around Hawaii as I looked down from the plane. His cheeks are pink again, and I follow a prominent vein in his wrist that disappears halfway up his forearm. When we’re alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it’s as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.

  “Rhine—” Gabriel says, at the same time that I blurt out, “I wanted to ask you—”

  My fist clenches inside his hands.

  “You go,” he says.

  “I wanted to ask you what happened the night Vaughn found me at Claire’s,” I say, finally meeting his eyes. “It’s fine if you don’t want to discuss it, and I suppose it doesn’t matter, but I’ve been all over the place these past few months wondering what happened to you after I left. I thought it would be nice to have at least one chapter I could close.”

  “I woke up and you weren’t in bed anymore,” he says. “So I came looking for you.”

  With his free hand he takes a sip of tea. Steam swirls about the rim as he exhales.

  “And then Vaughn knocked you unconscious,” I say. I think of the syringe that was emptied into my arm, the sick feeling and then the blackness.

  “No,” Gabriel says. “Housemaster Vaughn was waiting on the sidewalk. He knew I’d be coming to find you. And there you were in the backseat. You were sick while we were at Claire’s, but that was the worst I’d seen you. He told me that you would die if he didn’t tend to you.”

  “And you believed him,” I say.

  “Of course I believed him. It turned out to be true, didn’t it?”

  “But did he threaten you?” I say. “You knew a lot of his secrets; that’s what he told me. Did he tell you that you had to come back?”

  “Maybe he would have if I’d refused,” Gabriel says. “But I didn’t.”

  “You went,” I say, and only when I hear the anger in my voice do I realize how upset this makes me. “Willingly. After all that effort to be rid of him.”

  “I wanted to be rid of him,” he says. He raises my chin with his thumb. “Bu
t not if it meant being rid of you. I climbed in beside you, and you put your head in my lap. You can’t think I would have left you like that.”

  “Look what it got you,” I say.

  “Tea in bed and you here in front of me,” he says. “It was a terrible decision, and I confess I’d make it again.”

  It’s impossible for me to resist his smile. One day after awakening from the coma, he is doing astoundingly well. Vaughn’s strongest chemicals are no match for the will to live, it seems.

  “I’m not through being angry,” I say, my words muffled when he kisses me.

  “Stop ruining it,” he says, and kisses me again, and again, until I let go and I move into his waiting arms.

  His parted fingers move up my neck and through my hair, and the rush of nerves is overwhelming, and I freeze, stop breathing.

  After all the months without him, my bed somehow kept Linden’s scent, and I’ve just found it in the pillow.

  “Rhine?” Gabriel says.

  I’m sitting up now. My eyes are aching. “I should make dinner,” I say. “Cecily and Rowan probably haven’t eaten, and you should try something solid. I’m sure your stomach will handle it now.”

  He means to say something, but I’m on my feet before he can get the words out. I kiss his forehead and hurry away, to the scent of incense in the hall. Cecily has been lighting the sticks.

  The kitchen is empty when I enter it, but the moment I make the slightest noise, the head cook is there, swatting at me with a wooden spoon and telling me to stay away from her ingredients. She’ll make whatever I’d like if I get out of her hair, she says.