Sever (16 page)

She frowns but doesn’t cross the threshold. It’s an old habit from mansion life. It was a household rule that we couldn’t enter one another’s bedrooms without asking. None of us ever thought to break it, because we each had our own reasons for following the rules. “You’re angry with me.”

“I’m not,” I say, closing the dictionary. “Honestly, I’m not. What you were saying made sense.”

“I could have been nicer about it,” she mumbles, abashed. “I can’t help it when it comes to Bowen. I get this panicked feeling in my chest—like there’s no time to waste.”

It’s a bizarre thought that she loves her child the way my parents loved me; she’s so young and they were so much older and more prepared. I thought.

Now that I’m looking at her, really looking at her, I can see the half-circle breast milk stains on her nightgown. It must have started up again after she lost the baby, because Bowen’s long been on formula—this powdered stuff that Cecily filled a suitcase with before she came here. There are bags under her eyes. I was wondering how she’d managed to be so energetic these past several days, twirling through the house belting out lyrics and humming refrains, but now I understand. She’s as sad as ever. It’s just that she sings anyway.

When I stand, she asks, “Where are you going?”

“Kitchen. I changed my mind about the tea.”

We tiptoe down the steps. The lights are off. Reed’s snoring drowns out the creaky board I accidentally tread on. He’s sacked out on the armchair, hand on the hilt of his gun. I think he was serious about not letting Vaughn through that front door. He mumbles as we creep past him.

Elle is sleeping on the couch opposite him. She stirs when we pass, and I wonder if she’s really asleep; she’s so trained to be alert whenever Bowen makes a sound.

We bring our tea back up to the library. I don’t think sleep will be an option, but Bowen’s shriek of laughter
startles me, and I open my eyes to realize there’s daylight. My head is on Cecily’s shoulder. She’s hugging the arm of the couch, and I’m slumped against her, our bodies like collapsed dominoes. A blanket has been draped over us, and I wonder if Linden got up sometime in the night, having noticed her absence in that cramped twin bed, and found us together.

“Morning,” Linden says softly. He’s holding Bowen, who’s gawking at nothing in particular. “Sorry to wake you, but Uncle Reed thinks we should get going.”

As though in agreement, an engine splutters outside. The first several attempts to start the car fail. Cecily grumbles something unkind about the noise and buries her face in her arms, trying to hold on to sleep.

Linden carries Bowen to the window, and Bowen brings his face so close to the glass that it mists with his breath. There’s sunlight and birds, so much to fascinate him. Linden watches with a sad sort of smile, like he knows that his son’s happiness is a lie that must one day be dispelled. Linden loves his son, of course, but he can’t show him the affection that Cecily does. After all the loss he’s endured, all that await him are promises of death and good-byes. He’s become very guarded.

He says just one word to his son, nodding into the daylight. “Look.”

It’s an astounding word. It’s a gift.

Bowen looks, and for now everything he sees is beautiful.

P
EOPLE USED
to be connected to one another all the time. That’s what my parents told me. Everyone had phones and computers. Everyone called and kept in touch. They used to be everything, these things that are barely remembered now. These things that mean nothing to me.

I imagine the world felt smaller when it was like that. When someone was away from home, they’d call. There were no brothers worrying that their sisters were dead.

Now we’re left with old antennas, and radio signals. I know there’s less land than there used to be, but without these connections the world seems impossibly big. I feel as though I’m always running, and my brother is always too many paces ahead. I call out, but he can’t hear me. He’s not even listening for the sound of my voice anymore.

And now it’s morning, and I’m going to see some man
with opinions and a radio signal, yet another dead end, keeping hope alive like the frail pulse of a dying animal.

“Can I drive?” Cecily asks. She’s sitting in the front seat of Reed’s car, hovering her fingertips over the knobs and buttons.

“No,” Linden answers from his place beside me in the backseat. “It’s not safe.”

“I wasn’t asking you,” she says, turning her nose up.

“He’s right, kid,” Reed says, pulling the car into gear. “It’s not a good idea. But that knob controls the radio stations. Might be able to find something.”

This doesn’t pacify her for long, because as we start driving, none of the stations will come through. Sometimes there’s a human voice in all the static, and my chest seizes up with dread and hope, but nothing comes of it. There’s no more word about my brother. There’s no sign of life out there at all.

Elle is small and quiet, holding Bowen in the seat beside me. She was cheerful and attentive when Bowen was first born, but now she’s somber. The sunlight in her fine honey-brown hair does nothing to relinquish her from the grayness that overshadows her. I wonder if Vaughn has done something to her. I wonder if she knows what he has done to Deirdre, and I wonder still if any of that is real. And then my wondering turns to that dark, painful place, where I look at Elle and I see the young girl who should be making daisy crowns and daydreaming and living.

This isn’t living, what all of us are doing.

We drive down long, dilapidated back roads. Reed ignores the stop signs, and the abandoned traffic lights stare at us like empty eye sockets. Fields have gone to weed. There’s a little town of houses that have been haphazardly repaired by boards and scraps of metal. Linden is watching over my shoulder as they go by. He grew up in a very small, affluent town, and I doubt he could have imagined people living like this. I wonder what sort of world his father painted in his head for him. I bet it was all mansions and holograms, and then just clean white stretches of nothing in between. No matter. Nothing there.

He doesn’t seem surprised, though. Just sad, in that dulled-over way he’s adopted since Cecily miscarried. I think he’s beginning to understand, and understanding is a horrible thing.

Linden clenches his hand into a fist. I want to make the world into something different so that he can be okay. I want to be the cure that doesn’t exist. But I’m nothing. I can’t even work up the courage to say something reassuring.

We come to another house that’s similar to Reed’s in that it’s isolated. There are chickens squawking and meandering in an area fenced by wire, and they flap and flutter at the gurgling-popping sound Reed’s engine makes when he shuts it off. There’s a sign advertising fresh eggs for twenty dollars a dozen, a cup of churned
butter for the same price. The pricing is outrageous but not uncommon. My brother and I would pay slightly less to the vendors in Manhattan, if we could haggle them down with the promise of repeat business.

Cecily is the first one out of the car.

Linden sees the guilt in my eyes as I watch her. “It’s okay,” he says softly. “She’ll learn eventually.”

When? In three years, when she’s watching her husband die? When she’s dying herself?

We wade through high grasses, and I watch Elle, two paces ahead of me, pertly landing on the stepping-stones that are half-buried in the weeds.

The house, despite its neglect, has small signs of care. There are red shutters, and window boxes that are full of wisteria blooms. Cecily presses her hand against her heart and says, “Oh, Linden, look. It’s like the house you drew for me.”

Linden is drawing houses for her now. I ignore this new wave of senseless jealousy and plod forward.

“Careful where you step,” Reed says when we get to the porch. “The wood looks rotted.”

Elle presses Bowen’s head to her chest protectively, but he whimpers and resists. He wants to look over her shoulder at the morning light in the long grass.

Reed knocks on the door, which is fashioned from pieces of welded metal. Cecily is suddenly apprehensive. “You know this man, right?” she says. “I mean, not just know
of
him, but actually know him?”

“He’s harmless,” Reed says.

Linden is standing closer to her, but it’s my hand she reaches for as we hear movement inside the house. Happy as she is to be Linden’s wife, the ordeal of being Gathered still haunts her. She knows that unwanted girls can be made to huddle in dark vans and be shot. Like me, she’s wary of shadowy places, and of strangers. Sometimes we don’t know how afraid we are until we’ve reached a strange door and we don’t know what will be on the other side.

The door opens just wide enough for us to see a pair of eyes blinking out at us.

“Reed?” a voice says. “Why the crowd?”

“I’ve brought my nephew,” Reed says, clapping his hands on Linden’s shoulders. “And the girls are with him. Girls follow him everywhere he goes. Poor boy’s cursed with the family charm.”

Linden’s sullenness cracks to make room for embarrassment. He looks at the banister.

“There’s too many of you,” the voice says.

“Oh, hell, Edgar. Don’t be crazy,” Reed says. “Would it make you feel better if we all wore foil hats?”

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.