Sever (2 page)

I have an interesting blood type, they say. They wouldn’t have been able to find a match even if more people donated their blood for the meager pay the hospital gives.

Cecily mentioned the rain to distract Linden from the nurse who has just sterilized my arm. But it doesn’t work. Linden’s green eyes are trained on my blood as it fills up the syringe. I hold the atlas in my blanketed lap, turn the page.

I find my way back to North America—the only continent that’s left, and even it isn’t whole; there are uninhabitable pieces of what used to be known as Canada and Mexico. There used to be an entire world of people and countries out there, but they’ve all since been destroyed by wars so distant they’re hardly spoken about.

“Linden?” Cecily says, touching his arm.

He turns his head to her, but doesn’t look.

“Linden,” she tries again. “I need to eat something. I’m getting a headache.”

This gets his attention because she is four months pregnant and prone to anemia. “What would you like, love?” he says.

“I saw brownies in the cafeteria earlier.”

He frowns, tells her she should be eating things with more sustenance, but ultimately succumbs to her pouting.

Once he has left my hospital room, Cecily sits on the edge of my bed, rests her chin on my shoulder, and looks at the page. The nurse leaves us, my blood on his cart of surgical utensils.

This is the first time I’ve been alone with my sister wife since arriving at the hospital. She traces the outline
of the country, swirls her finger around the Atlantic in tandem with her sigh.

“Linden is furious with me,” she says, not without remorse, but also not in her usual weepy way. “He says you could have been killed.”

I spent months in Vaughn’s basement laboratory, the subject of countless experiments, while Linden obliviously milled about upstairs. Cecily, who visited me and talked of helping me escape, never told him about any of it.

It isn’t the first time she betrayed me; though, as with the last time, I believe that she was trying to help. She would botch Vaughn’s experiments by removing IVs and tampering with the equipment. I think her goal was to get me lucid enough to walk out the back door. But Cecily is young at fourteen years old, and doesn’t understand that our father-in-law has plans much bigger than her best efforts. Neither of us stands a chance against him. He’s even had Linden believing him for all these years.

Still, I ask, “Why didn’t you tell Linden?”

She draws a shaky breath and sits more upright. I look at her, but she won’t meet my eyes. Not wanting to intimidate her with guilt, I look at the open atlas.

“Linden was so heartbroken when you left,” she says. “Angry, but sad, too. He wouldn’t talk about it. He closed your door and forbade me from opening it. He stopped drawing. He spent so much time with me and with Bowen, and I loved that, but I could tell it was because
he wanted to forget you.” She takes a deep breath, turns the page.

We stare at South America for a few seconds. Then she says, “And, eventually, he started to get better. He was talking about taking me to the spring expo that’s coming up. Then you came back, and I thought, if he saw you, it would undo all the progress he’d made.” Now she looks at me, her brown eyes sharp. “And you didn’t want to be back, anyway. So I thought I could get you to escape again, and he would never have to know, and we could all just be happy.”

She says that last word, “happy,” like it’s the direst thing in the world. Her voice cracks with it. A year ago, here is where she’d have started to cry. I remember that on my last day before I ran away, I left her screaming and weeping in a snowbank when she realized how she’d betrayed our older sister wife, Jenna, by telling our father-in-law of Jenna’s efforts to help me escape, which only aided his decision to dispose of her.

But Cecily has grown since then. Having a child and enduring the loss of not one but two members of her marriage have aged her.

“Linden was right,” she says. “You could have been killed, and I—” She swallows hard, but doesn’t take her eyes from mine. “I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself. I’m sorry, Rhine.”

I wrap my arm around her shoulders, and she leans against me.

“Vaughn is dangerous,” I say into her ear. “Linden doesn’t want to believe it, but I think you do.”

“I know,” she says.

“He’s tracking your every move the way he tracked me.”

“I know.”

“He killed Jenna.”

“I know. I know that.”

“Don’t let Linden talk you into trusting him,” I say. “Don’t put yourself in a situation where you’re alone with him.”

“You can run away, but I can’t,” she says. “That’s my home. It’s all I have.”

Linden clears his throat in the doorway. Cecily bounds to him and ups herself on tiptoes to kiss him when she takes the brownie from his hand. Then she unwraps its plastic. She settles in a chair and props her swollen feet up on the window ledge. She has a way of ignoring Linden’s hints about wanting to be alone with me. It was a minor annoyance in our marriage, but right now it’s a relief. I don’t know what Linden wants to say to me, only that his fidgeting means he wants it to be in private, and I’m dreading it.

I watch as Cecily nibbles the edges of the brownie and dusts crumbs off her shirtfront. She’s aware of Linden’s restlessness, but she also knows he won’t ask her to leave. Because she’s pregnant, and because she’s the only wife left who so genuinely adores him.

Linden picks up the sketchbook he abandoned on a chair, sits, and tries to busy himself looking through his building designs. I sort of feel sorry for him. He has never been authoritative enough to ask for what he wants. Even though I know this conversation he’s itching to have will leave me feeling guilty and miserable, I owe him this much.

“Cecily,” I say.

“Mm?” she says, and crumbs fall from her lips.

“Leave us alone for a few minutes.”

She glances at Linden, who looks at her and doesn’t object, and then back to me.

“Fine,” she sighs. “I have to pee anyway.”

After she leaves, closing the door behind her, Linden shuts his notebook. “Thanks,” he says.

I push myself upright, smooth the sheets over my thighs, and nod, avoiding his eyes. “What is it?” I ask.

“They’re letting you out tomorrow,” he says, taking the seat by my bed. “Do you have any sort of plan?”

“I was never good at plans,” I say. “But I’ll figure it out.”

“How will you find your brother?” he says. “Rhode Island is hundreds of miles away.”

“One thousand three hundred miles,” I say. “Roughly. I’ve been reading up on it.”

He frowns. “You’re still recovering,” he says. “You should rest for a few days.”

“I might as well get moving.” I close the atlas. “I have nowhere else to go.”

“You know that isn’t true,” he says. “You have a—” He hesitates. “A place to stay.”

He was going to say “home.”

I don’t answer, and the silence is filled with all the things Linden wants to say. Phantom words, ghosts that haunt the pieces of dust swimming in beams of light.

“Or,” he starts up again. “There is another option. My uncle.”

That gets me to look at him, maybe too inquisitively, because he seems amused. “My father disowned him years ago, when I was very young,” he says. “I’m supposed to pretend he doesn’t exist, but he doesn’t live far from here.”

“He’s your father’s brother?” I say, skeptical.

“Just think about it,” Linden says. “He’s a little strange, but Rose liked him.” He says that last part with a laugh, and his cheeks light up with pink, and I strangely feel better.

“She met him?” I ask.

“Just once,” Linden says. “We were on our way to a party, and she leaned over the driver’s seat and said, ‘I’m sick of these boring things. Take us anywhere else.’ So I gave the driver my uncle’s address, and we spent the evening there, eating the worst coffee crumb cake we’d ever tasted.”

It’s the first time since her death that he’s brought up Rose without wincing at the pain.

“And the fact that my father hates him just made my
uncle that much more appealing to her,” Linden goes on. “He’s too pro-naturalism for my father’s taste, and admittedly a little strange. I’ve had to keep it a secret that I visit with him.”

Linden has a rebellious side. Who knew. He reaches out and tucks my hair behind my ear. It’s done out of habit, and he jerks his hand back when he realizes his mistake.

“Sorry,” he mumbles.

“It’s all right,” I say. “I’ll think about it.” My words are coming out fast, bumbling. “What you said— I mean— I’ll think about it.”

C
ECILY HANGS
out the limo’s open window, her hair flailing behind her like a ribbon caught on a hook. Bowen, in his father’s arms, reaches out to catch it. I’m astounded by how much he grew while I was away. He’s a teddy bear of a boy—stocky and friendly and apple-cheeked. He was born with dark hair and beaming blue eyes that have since gone hazel. His hair has lightened to a coppery blond that I imagine mimics Cecily’s when she was a baby, which we’ll never know for certain. He has her defiant chin, her thin eyelashes. With every day that passes, prominent traces of Linden dissolve from his face.

He is beautiful, though. And Cecily is mad for him. I’ve never seen anyone love anything as much as she loves that baby. Even now, though she’s facing the sky that rushes past, she’s singing a lullaby for him. I recognize it as a poem from a book in the library on the wives’ floor. Jenna used to read it aloud.

And frogs in the pools singing at night,

And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire . . .

The sun is setting, making the world orange. I rub my fists over my knees, uneasy. I can’t believe Vaughn let us use the limo for this. Maybe he’s trying to stay on Linden’s good side, to manipulate him by being contrite and reliable. I keep expecting the driver to turn on us and take me back to the mansion. But he has taken us so far into the countryside that I’m beginning to let go of that fear. It’s been minutes since we passed any buildings. There’s only grass, and the occasional lone tree that comes and goes like an explosion.

Cecily interrupts her song to ask, “Where are we?” and lean back into her seat.

“Someplace rural,” Linden says. “It’s hard to say. I never knew the street names.”

Cecily reaches for the baby, and then holds him over her head, blowing absurd-sounding kisses on his belly; his giggles make her grin.

“It’s this turn,” Linden tells the driver. “Off the road. Follow the tire tracks.”

Even the limo, with its smooth ride, jostles over the uneven terrain. And a few minutes later we’ve come to the only thing in sight: a two-story brick house that looks as old and stable as the mansion, but much smaller.
Surrounding it are half a dozen tarps arranged like black car-shaped ghosts. There’s a dilapidated shed and a windmill. The roof is covered in reflective panels.

Cecily crinkles her nose and turns to Linden. “We can’t leave her here,” she says. “It looks like a junkyard.”

“It’s not as bad as all that,” he says.

“There’s tinfoil on his roof!”

“They’re solar panels,” Linden amends patiently. “So he doesn’t have to use so much electricity.”

Cecily opens her mouth to object, but I say, “It’s only for a couple of days. It looks fine.” I don’t mention that, while this is a step down from the luxuries of the mansion, it’s as nice as any of the homes I grew up near. And solar panels aren’t uncommon in Manhattan at all, where many can’t afford electricity.

The limo stops, and I open my door quickly, afraid of sleeping gas or locks or snakes that could come slithering through the vents to strangle me.

It’s early evening now, and without civilization for miles I can see darkness stretching toward me from every direction. The stars are bright, splayed across every shade of pink and blue, tracing a lone, oblong cloud.

Linden comes up beside me, follows my gaze skyward. “When I was little,” he says, “my uncle told me the names of all the constellations. But I could never find them.”

“But you know which one’s the North Star,” I remind
him. I remember that he told Cecily about it, and she was discouraged by his lack of romance.

“Right there,” he says, following the line of my arm as I point.

“That’s the tail of Ursa Minor,” I say, moving my finger along the corresponding stars. “It’s my favorite because I think it looks like a kite.”

“I actually see it,” he says quietly, as though astonished. “But I thought Ursa Minor was supposed to be in the shape of a dipper.”

“Well, I think it looks like a kite,” I say. “That’s how I’m always able to find it.”

He turns toward me, and I can feel his breaths, so faint and unassuming that they only move the finest hairs around my face. I don’t dare take my eyes from the stars. My heart is pounding. Memories rush through me. Memories of his fingers unbuckling my shoes, inching under the strap of my red party dress. His lips on mine. The darkness of my bedroom swimming with ivy and champagne glasses the night we came home late from the expo. Snow dusting his shoulders and his dark hair the night we said good-bye.