Fever (20 page)

I feel my knees buckle, a hand gripping my arm so I don’t collide with the pavement that’s rushing up to meet me.

Something cool and rubbery brushes my face. I blink, and Maddie is sliding a wet leaf along my jaw. She plucked it from one of my mother’s evergreen shrubs that have all managed to stay alive beneath the kitchen window. They don’t die as easily as flowers; you can grow them nearly anywhere. My brother says they’re like weeds that way. But after our parents’ death, even he didn’t have the heart to uproot them.

I’m sitting on the top step—number one in the morning, number three in the evening—staring at Maddie’s unreal blue eyes. Blackbirds take flight and rush across the skies in them. The world is slowly coming back into focus. The familiar street where I grew up. The overcast sky. Lifeless branches shaking at a gust of cold February wind.

I moan, stretch my legs in front of me, and raise my palm to my throbbing forehead.

“Careful,” Gabriel says. “There’s glass.”

“I blacked out,” I say. I meant for it to be a question, but my voice can’t summon the wherewithal required for inflection.

“For a few minutes.” Gabriel is rubbing my shoulder, as though trying to coax my blood back into circulation. His eyes are dark with worry.

“This is wrong,” I say.

“Here, drink some of this.”

“I—”

“The sugar will help.” He’s holding a can of soda in front of me, but I only stare at it.

“I don’t understand. How . . .” I don’t finish the thought. The word flutters around me and echoes into the atmosphere.
How, how, how . . .

Gabriel tilts the can to my lips, and I choke for a second and then force myself to drink.

I let the sugar and the calories spread through me. I let strength and thought back in. It takes a while, but I convince myself to turn around and look at my house. It’s so ruined that even the century-old ivy imprints are gone.

“Oh, Rowan,” I whisper. “What did you do?”

I tread carefully, upsetting the cockroaches that spread out and rustle in the shadows. There is nothing left of the soft orange wallpaper in the kitchen. The linoleum tiles—the ones still here, anyway—are scorched. The tip of my shoe knocks against an empty can, causing it to roll into a pile of ash.

No, not ash. Paper.

I crouch at the hill of crumpled pages by the door frame. They reek of gasoline, and the black oval on the wall beside them tells me the fire must have started here. I tear through the pages, searching for one that isn’t destroyed, that doesn’t crumble to dust in my hands, and finally I have one. I uncrumple it and read the words that are scrawled outside of the lines:

crossbred flowers

cilium

eggshells and chloroform

my sister’s ideas

greenhouse gases

my mother’s hands

one hundred days

but still no sign

The fragments are delivered one atop the other, like a chaotic madman’s poem. The rest has been crossed out by a frustrated hand; the pen nearly dug through the paper.

“My brother wrote this,” I say.

Gabriel crouches behind me and reads. The words make no sense to either of us, but they can’t hurt him like they hurt me. Because this page is one of dozens. And maybe all of the pages together would bring this story into focus. But I will never know if that’s true.

My brother set fire to his words. There’s no message here for me because he didn’t think I would come back to read it.

I feel dizzy. Numbly I allow Gabriel to take my arm and guide me to my feet. There’s no place to sit down, so I lean against him and look around the room. There is nothing for me here. Over the threshold I can see the living room in the same state.

“Maybe it was arson,” Gabriel says. “And your brother was forced to evacuate.”

I know he’s trying to make me feel better, but I am too drained right now to allow false hope. “No, I’m sure he did this,” I say. My brother can be ruthless about defending what’s his; one winter he let a dead orphan lie on our porch for days as a warning to trespassers. He would not have been driven out of this house against his will. “He wasn’t planning on coming back, and he didn’t think I would either.”

“But why burn it down?” Gabriel asks.

I have no answer.

There’s a memory of my mother, shrouded in light. Light and blue. She was hanging blue glass doves over the kitchen window with kite string. A sort of wind chime. Her voice was so melodic, humming the words to me while I sat on the counter making soap bubbles through my fingers. “Always look after your brother. He isn’t strong like you are.”

I remember giggling at the absurdity. Rowan was stronger than me. Of course he was. He was always taller, and he could bend tree branches down so I could pluck their best autumn leaves. He could hold a fishing rod against the resistance of a struggling catch without letting go and losing it to the ocean. I relayed this, and my mother told me, “A different kind of strength, love. You have a different kind of strength.”

A loud creak jars me from my thinking. I recognize it as the last floorboard before the basement door.

“Maddie, wait!” I cry. “It’s dangerous!” But she has already pulled open the door and is descending into the darkness. Gabriel and I follow her. She still has the flashlight from the hotel, and now she’s waving it around as she goes. I’m surprised the steps are able to hold our weight, but the basement looks as though it has been spared.

One step, two, three, four. With each one I wrestle with hope. That when I get to the bottom, something will be waiting for me. Or that my brother is still here. But ultimately I’m wondering why my mother said those words to me. I must have been very small, because my bare feet were in the kitchen sink as the tap water ran between my toes. I remember that. And the smell of something baking. And how pretty the walls looked in that slant of daylight.

Rowan’s note crinkles in my palm, and I fold it and tuck it into my pocket.

Gabriel holds my arm, probably thinking I’ll black out again and fall. Maddie waves the flashlight around when she reaches the bottom of the steps. Instinctually I reach for the pull cord that will turn on the hanging light, but of course there’s no power.

I take the flashlight and point it, first into the corner of the room where the cot still stands. My brother and I slept here in hourly shifts, keeping each other safe through the night. Then I find the courage to move the light to the tiny refrigerator, which is empty, door open, without electricity. As I am sweeping the light to yet another corner, I find something more troubling than the emptiness I expected.

Rats. Dozens of rats, lying everywhere. On their backs, on their sides. Some in lakes of blood and others decomposed to near nothingness. All of them dead. And scattered among them are rotted stems and wilted flower petals. I’m so horrified that I don’t even hear Gabriel’s reaction.

My brother had concocted his own poison to take care of our rat problem, but I had only ever seen it kill one or two at a time. And then there are the flowers. Lilies, shriveled like earthworms. The ones from my mother’s garden. Every spring I would try again with seeds I bought at various markets in Manhattan, and even from flower shops out of state if my brother’s deliveries took him away.

The only seeds I didn’t dare to try were the ones that my mother had kept in a pouch in her dresser drawer. They belonged to her, and I felt I had no right planting them. I remember that I pressed them between the pages of one of her notebooks and buried it in the backyard with all the other things my brother and I didn’t want to have stolen.

The backyard. I move the flashlight until I find the shovel that’s resting under the staircase, and I hurry upstairs. I run through the living room, trying not to see the mess that’s become of my father’s desk and wicker chair, or the couch that still, just barely, bears brightness from its daisy print.

By the time Gabriel has reached me in the backyard, I’m jamming my weight onto the shovel to break the earth. He helps me, even though he’s not sure what we’re looking for, and I can tell, by the way the dirt has been disrupted, that it’s already gone.

M
Y BROTHER
left some things in the trunks we’d buried. Probably because they were too much to carry wherever he was going. Or because he didn’t think they’d be useful. Clothes; my parents’ lab coats; my father’s glasses; a flightless paper kite I made when I was young; yellowed books about war or romance; my father’s twenty-first-century atlas.

I flip through all the pieces of my childhood, and the books my parents read to escape work for a while, and I ignore the memories and the pain that fly up with the dust, because there is something more pressing that I want.

“What are you looking for?” Gabriel says. He helps me, carefully unfolding and refolding the clothes, checking the jewelry box and finding it empty. Even the globe necklace is absent. I hope my brother didn’t sell my mother’s necklaces and rings for money, though hope seems stupid at this point.

“Seeds,” I say. “My mother’s lily seeds.”

Maddie is a few yards away, studying an abandoned wasp nest on the ground.

“Maybe we dropped them while we were moving things around,” Gabriel says.

“No,” I say. “They aren’t here. And neither are any of my parents’ notebooks, which is where I left the seeds.”

I search everything a second and third time, though, before putting all but the atlas back into the ground. Gabriel takes the shovel from my hands, and I don’t object when he reburies my parents’ things so I won’t have to. I just stand there, useless, my fingers worrying over the edges of the atlas, fighting back the emotions that come at me like bullets. Better to feel nothing. Better not to think.

And that’s when the memory comes back.

She was baking a cake for Rowan’s and my birthday. Our ninth birthday. And the other side of the sink was full of dishes that I was helping to wash. Dinner had just ended, and with his mouth full of food, my brother turned to me and said, “Next year you’ll be middle-aged. But I won’t be.” At first I thought he was trying to compete with me, but then he averted his eyes, and I knew he was hurt.

Once he had gone upstairs to take his bath, after my mother had hung the blue birds, she said to me, “You have to look out for each other.”

Look out for each other. That was our theme. I could almost believe my parents had had twins on purpose, rather than by chance, just so we could each fulfill that promise.

But I didn’t follow through on that, did I? I left him here alone. I don’t know where he has gone, just like he doesn’t know what happened to me. The only thing we seem to know is that the other is not coming back.

There is something about this person that you won’t admit even to yourself.
That’s what Annabelle said when she laid the tarot cards before me. Something about my own brother that I wouldn’t admit.

I stare at the hole I made in the earth, which was already pliable from my brother’s efforts.

“He thinks I’m dead,” I whisper.

Gabriel says something, but his voice comes to me as though underwater, and I don’t make out the words. My pulse is throbbing in my ears. My blood is waves of hot and cold.

When our parents died, my brother became all about survival. He took care not to let me sink too deep into that endless cavern of despair. He worked us both into a routine of doing and surviving. And all that time, while he was keeping me afloat, it never occurred to me that I was doing the same for him. That he needed me every bit as much as I needed him.

That, without me, the routine would fall apart.

I held fast to the hope that he’d go on here without me, waking himself in the morning, having tea, working through the afternoon, setting the traps and sleeping on our cot. But I’ve been gone too long, and there are new ashes billowing up from the incinerators every day.

He has given up on me. What is holding him together? The answer is the same as what he’s left behind. Nothing.

Mind racing ahead of me, I run into the house.
Search every corner,
something is telling me. This can’t be everything. This can’t be all. The stairs shudder and creak under my weight. A separate fire had been lit upstairs; it ate all the doors, charred the walls. And though these rooms have been empty since my parents’ death, they seem emptier still. Black like craters. Nothing. More nothing.

I don’t know how long I stand there, panting. I wait for tears, but they don’t come.

“Rhine?” Gabriel is starting to climb up after me.

“Don’t,” I say, descending the stairs. “There’s nothing to see up there.”

He tries to put his arm around me, but I walk ahead of him, through the scorched doorway and into the ruined yard.

Some distant part of me is trembling. I can feel it. I don’t think my legs will hold much longer, and so I sink into the high grass. I feel orphaned all over again.

Gabriel is kind enough to not say anything when he sits next to me. He offers me soda, doesn’t press me when I refuse, and lets the time go to slow motion as we watch Maddie entertain herself in the high, dead grass. In fact, it’s not until rain clouds threaten the sky that he asks, “What now?”