Sever (37 page)

“You’re going to stay here, then?” she asks me. “For how long?”

Vaughn laughs, holding Bowen up close to his face. “For now the project is top secret. Nobody who knows about it will be leaving here. The twins will remain in these walls for years, most likely. Perhaps for the rest of their lives.”

Vaughn calling us “the twins” is an entirely new violation somehow. Maybe even the worst one yet. Even Rowan casts a displeased stare when Vaughn isn’t looking.

“What about Bowen?” Cecily asks.

“What about him?” Vaughn says. He’s playing with Bowen’s curls now. They’ve got Linden’s shape, but they’re blond and beginning to take on Cecily’s shade of red. I think he looks the way she must have looked as a baby. Vaughn, with all his genetic expertise, must think
this as well. Surely it fuels his hatred for her.

“Is he going to be cured also?” Cecily says the words like she doesn’t believe any of this.

“He’s too young yet,” Vaughn says. “This study isn’t open to infants, but I am certain that he’ll be as right as rain when he’s a bit older. Won’t you, Bowen?”

Cecily doesn’t ask what will become of her. She already knows.

“H
OUSEMASTER
V
AUGHN
is going to murder me,” Cecily says.

She’s been soaking in my tub for the better part of an hour. I can smell all of the salts and soaps from where I’m lying on my bed, Jenna’s romance novel open in my lap. I’m trying to ignore that the bath smells like the hours I’d spend getting ready for Linden’s parties. I’ll never be on his arm for another one. I’m trying to forget that he isn’t coming home.

“Nobody is going to murder you,” I say.

“Did you see the way he was looking at Bowen, like he wants him all for himself?”

“That bathwater must be ice-cold by now,” I say.

“I was never anything but an incubator for his grandson,” she says. “He has no use for me now.” I hear the water rushing down the drain after she pulls the plug.

While she dries her hair, I try to focus on the
ill-fortuned man and woman in this story; they don’t yet realize that they love each other. I’m not sure they’ll figure it out in time.

When Cecily falls into the bed beside me, she stares at the ceiling and says, “Linden didn’t know anything about his mother. She died in childbirth. That’s what almost happened to me the second time. Maybe it almost happened the first time too, and I was too exhausted at the time to know it. How often does anyone even die in childbirth these days? I had such a difficult time giving birth to Bowen, and I was so ill after. You remember—”

“Cecily, stop,” I say.

“Do you remember when Vaughn taught me to play chess during that hurricane?” she says. “A pawn is the littlest piece. He told me that. It was right in front of me, and I didn’t see that I was his pawn. And now I’m not even that. I have no use, except to interfere with how Bowen is raised.”

I roll over so that I’m on top of her, and I put my hand over her mouth and bring my face close to hers. “Listen,” I say, very quietly. “There are certain things you shouldn’t say out loud in this house. I’m here now, and I am not going to let anything happen to you, so no more of this talk. Understand?”

She stares at me, breaths heavy and warm, and there is such desperation in her eyes, such loss. But whether she believes me or not, she nods.

“Good,” I say. “Come on. Get under the covers. We both need to sleep.”

After we’ve both settled under the blanket, I turn off the lamp. “I thought you could read your book out loud until I fall asleep,” she says.

I don’t think she could bear a tragic love story right now. “It isn’t very good,” I say.

“I don’t care about that,” she says. “I just can’t stand the quiet.”

So I tell her a story of my own. I tell her about a little girl, named Maddie, who doesn’t speak because, although she’s just a child, she has learned that this world has nothing to offer her. She’s found a way to hide herself in a world of her own, a world where there’s always music, a world that’s on the other side of the ocean, where the water is the most unreal shade of blue. In that world there are entire walls made of windows, and when the people awaken and pull apart the curtains, there is everything they’ve ever wanted laid out in front of them. It isn’t a perfect place. There are no perfect places. But nobody cares about perfection when there are sand castles to build and kites to chase, children that are being born, old hearts that are giving in.

It’s not long before she’s asleep. All she needed was for someone to stay in the bed with her, someone to make her feel protected and tell her nice things.

I’m the one who’s awake now, head full of ugliness. For most of the last week, any sleep I’ve gotten has been the
result of heavy medication. And now, cured or not, I am haunted by my once-husband’s final moments. I’m wondering what his thoughts were before we spilled back to earth in Reed’s plane. I’m wondering if he was in pain in his last seconds, or if he had already left his body, the world getting smaller and dimmer below him until we had vanished into the greenery as we watched him die. I’m wondering if there’s any truth to this word I hear sometimes: god. People say it when they’re frustrated or when they’re sad. It implies that there is something, someone greater than us. Greater than the presidents we used to elect or the kings and queens we used to throne.

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 unflinching stare as she looks at what she’s done.