Sever (39 page)

Authors: Lauren Destefano

BOOK: Sever

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“It’s because he was better than me,” I say. “He never wanted to hurt anyone. I didn’t want to hurt him, either.
I only wanted to go home, and instead I made a mess of everything. I killed him.”

“You didn’t,” Gabriel says. But he says nothing more, because I’m sobbing and he knows that I’m in no state to listen to his reason. He rubs my back and he says impossible things. He tells me that I’m strong and that I deserve to be here. He tells me that I’ll never have to be alone.

As the day turns darker, I weave in and out of sleep, dreaming of the world through an airplane window. I try to find Linden, but he’s not on the crowded beach or in any of the gleaming windows. I listen for his voice, but I only hear Gabriel’s whispers filling the clouds and turning them pink as the sun goes down.

“I’ve loved you since the day I stole the atlas for you,” Gabriel says, because he thinks I’m asleep.

The door creaks open, startling me awake.

Timidly, Cecily moves into the doorway. “I knocked but you didn’t answer,” she says. “There’s a man downstairs to speak with you and your brother.”

Even before I’m fully awake, my heart is pounding. “What does he want?”

“I don’t know, but he’s rude,” she says. “He won’t tell me a thing. He just demanded to talk to you.”

She glances at Gabriel sleeping beside me, but her blank expression doesn’t change.

“I’ll be right down,” I say.

Once she’s gone, Gabriel, with his eyes still closed, says, “I heard her moving around all last night.”

“She’s having a terrible time with everything,” I say.

“What about you?” Gabriel says.

“Me? I slept well last night.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“I know,” I say, climbing out of the bed, seeking out my reflection in the mirror and gathering my hair into a ponytail. “I’m not ready to get into all of that. You’re here, I’m here, my brother and Cecily and Bowen are here.” I tug the wrinkles out of my shirt and jeans. “I’d like to focus on being grateful for all of that, if you don’t mind.”

He gives me a wan smile.

“Maybe over breakfast I’ll tell you what Madame has been up to. I guarantee that most of it isn’t what you’d expect.” I smile at him as I leave.

The man waiting to speak to me is an official sent by the president—a doctor-slash-scientist who has been assigned to monitor Rowan’s and my progress and escort us to our monthly physical examinations in Hawaii. He won’t be staying with us, only monitoring our vitals via our tracking devices. It turns out that there was never any rule about us staying on the property; that was something Vaughn devised to keep us contained. While we’re bound to confidentiality on penalty of execution, we are, as the official puts it, free to go where we please, provided we are here in time for our monthly flight.

I would just as soon cut the tracking device out of my body and be done with it, but Cecily comes out from her hiding place in the hallway and begins an eager round of questions about what she can do to participate in the study. She insists that she was Vaughn’s protégé, that he planned to include her as soon as a new round of subjects was recruited. Though this isn’t true, Rowan and I readily agree. There’s no reason to suspect that a man as in love with research as Vaughn was wouldn’t have planned to save his other daughter-in-law.

After the official leaves and Cecily has gone upstairs, Rowan and I sit at the kitchen table.

“Why did Dr. Ashby hate Cecily so much?” he asks.

“He told you he hated her?”

“He didn’t have to. I could tell by the way he treated her that night when we all had dinner. That, and he never expressed any interest in trying to cure her.”

I stare at my tea that’s gone cold. “I think he was jealous of her,” I say. She endured much of Vaughn’s venom, and perhaps the worst part of it was that he once pretended to love her. “Linden was finally beginning to grow up. He was making decisions that had nothing to do with his father’s wishes, and she was the reason for much of that. He chose her over his father.”

Rowan nods into his tea. I don’t know if my explanation makes sense to him. He only knows Vaughn as a brilliant doctor. He wasn’t here for all the gory affairs of the family dynamic. And part of me doesn’t want to sully
the image of his hero, because the fact is that we may all live beyond our expectancy because of that man.

“Someday I’ll tell you all of it,” I say.

“I’d like that,” he says.

“No,” I say. “I promise you won’t.”

I
T’S NEARLY
a year before there are openings in the study and Cecily is able to sign up. Gabriel joins her. By then the years of careful planning that went into Vaughn’s basement experiments are undone. We’ve searched every room, and while we found every manner of machinery, we never found any bodies. I decide that’s for the best; there are some questions I never want answered.

Reed does away with the key card system, and he opens entire rooms and levels of the house that I never saw before. He fills them with his strange and wonderful things. He turns an entire wing of the basement into a sort of greenhouse.

Cecily and I keep our old bedrooms, and we still call ourselves sister wives, or sometimes just sisters. Eventually Cecily decides that Jenna’s room would make the perfect nursery for Bowen. And our sister wife’s room,
which was stagnant for far too long, comes alive again, in an entirely new way.

Rowan understands what made Cecily pull the trigger. He’s made it clear that he’s on our side. But he still maintains that Vaughn, despite his destructions and downfalls, is the one who ultimately saved us. He resorted to drastic means because he was fulfilling his calling to save the world. I still haven’t decided if the world can be saved, but there’s talk among those of us in the study now of opening our borders. Vaughn’s formula for the cure is bound to reach the rest of the country if the cure works.

Gabriel has stopped trying to understand Vaughn. He says that we have to move forward, and I agree. We don’t talk of revenge or bitterness anymore. We don’t forget our losses, but we’ve stopped counting them. There are so many other things to live for. We still aren’t allowed to explore the countries outside of our own—not just yet. But President Guiltree grants the study’s participants access to his private Hawaiian beach sometimes. From there we can hear the traffic. We can feel the pull of a thriving world that we will one day be able to join. The hope is most palpable there, and sometimes Gabriel and I disentangle ourselves from the others. We go as far out into the water as we dare, and only when we’re alone in this way do we talk to each other of love, like it’s a faraway city.

Remembering the address for Grace’s Orphanage,
I send word to Silas about the study. He shows up one year as the study’s newest participant, and he takes an immediate liking to my sister wife; every day she’s growing more into a woman, becoming something lovely and enchanting. She meets Silas’s advances with annoyance, although sometimes he manages to get a laugh or a smile out of her. “Be careful with her,” I tell him one afternoon as we’re wading in the ocean’s shallows. “I know how you can get around girls.” He kicks ocean water at me.

Cecily is just as hesitant about these things as I am. She still wears her wedding ring and maintains that Linden will always be her only love. But maybe one day that will change; everything is already starting to change all around us.

I’m still uncertain. I’m still untrusting that I’ll live long enough to know what it means to love the way that my parents loved.

On the morning of my twenty-first birthday, though, I awaken with a feeling that the whole world is possible.

That’s the morning that Cecily bursts into my room with Linden’s sketch pad and tells me her greatest plan yet to keep Linden alive. She wants us to build one of his houses.

Every day, we’ve looked for ways to keep Linden alive. It’s especially important to do this for Bowen, who doesn’t remember. Cecily has an exceptional memory for detail; she can make stories of even small moments. She writes things down so that she won’t ever forget,
and sometimes, late at night, she comes to my doorway unable to sleep, fearing that he’s slipping away from her, and we put our memories together—the way he held his sketch pad at an angle, and his small, frustrated sighs as he erased the lines, and how at a glance his hair was black, but then the sun made it bright with auburns. I remember the things she can’t, and in that way he’s still our husband, the thing that once did and always will bond us together.

Reed has his memories too. He tells us of the quiet, inquisitive boy who wanted to know how things were made, who built houses out of old books and towers out of cards. He tells stories that make us laugh, and more still that have us in tears.

I didn’t think the house would happen so quickly, but one day Reed started building it, and he hasn’t stopped. Once he hired the contractors, the skeleton of the house seemed to appear overnight. I help wherever I can, and Cecily makes sure that the details are exact. The number of steps. The gingerbread trim.

“Maybe it will give you some closure too,” Gabriel says, and I let him pull me into his arms.

We let Bowen help with the painting, and though he’s only four, he moves with patience, taking care with his strokes. Cecily’s convinced he’ll grow up to do something great, something that will impact the world. She won’t let him waste a second of his potential, because just being able to grow up at all is a gift.
Each new year, each new day, is the chance to do more. I try to remind her that she’s still young herself. We all are. Once the house is built and Bowen is older, we’ll all travel. We’ll see the things we thought only existed in books. We’ll scale mountains and parachute from planes, and visit the river that has my name. Rowan believes our parents always meant for us to see it, that they knew it was out there waiting for us to find; it won’t be the way they intended, but we’ll get there. We’ll squeeze every second that we can from our lives, because we’re young, and we have plenty of years to grow. We’ll grow until we’re braver. We’ll grow until our bones ache and our skin wrinkles and our hair goes white, and until our hearts decide, at last, that it’s time to stop.