Authors: Lauren Destefano
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General, #Social Issues, #Death & Dying, #Dating & Sex, #Science Fiction, #Dystopian
Fever (34 page)
That brings me out of my haze. This story is about Vaughn. The newscaster, with her cheerful young face and windswept blond hair, can’t imagine the horrible extremes the doctor has taken, the holocaust of brides and domestics and infants. All of those things had moved to the back of my subconscious when I first awoke in this hospital; there was a dull sense that something was not right. But I was too overwhelmed, too busy trying to sort out what was real, to deal with them.
“Cecily,” I blurt.
Linden’s eyebrows wrinkle as my voice reaches him.
“Linden. Wake up.”
He draws a sharp breath, immediately alert. “What? What’s the matter?”
I’m struggling to sit up, and he helps me this time, propping the pillows behind me.
I blurt out everything I can remember, not pausing to separate what I know to be real from what might be fiction. Deirdre, aged and fragile, the victim of Vaughn’s ventures. Lydia dead. Rose crawling through the pipes. Cecily sneaking down to see me, and nightmares of her screaming. By the time I’ve recounted everything, my pulse is going rapid on the monitor and Linden is telling me to take deep breaths. Then he’s looking at me like I’ve lost my mind again.
“Cecily will tell you,” I insist. “She was there. I’m sure she was there. She probably knows a lot more than I do.”
“Yes, and she should have told me,” Linden says. “She didn’t until it was almost too late. And I will deal with her when the time comes, but for now you need to calm down before you make yourself sick again.”
I shake my head. “It can’t wait.” I’m pleading. “You need to get Cecily out of that house. She can’t be left alone with your father.”
Linden speaks slowly, deliberately. He’s trying to soothe me. “I won’t justify my father’s actions. He nearly killed you. He didn’t tell me that you’d come back, probably because he knew I would never allow testing on someone against their will.” So that’s it. Cecily lied to me. She never told Linden that I was in the basement. I would have expected as much from Vaughn, but maybe I overestimated my sister wife. It wouldn’t be her first deception. And it’s proof that Vaughn still has his hooks in her.
“He took things too far,” Linden goes on. “Sometimes he doesn’t realize how dangerous his treatments can be. If he’d told me, I wouldn’t have agreed—”
“You don’t know the half of what your father isn’t telling you, Linden.” I press my hands together in frustration, and Linden opens his mouth to speak but then pauses to look at my wedding band. “No one is safe in that house!”
“You’re still delirious,” he says.
“Your father is a
monster
,” I spit, and Linden actually winces. He gets up, steps back.
“I’m getting a doctor,” he says. “You’re getting hysterical.” He’s walking for the door, his frightened eyes trained on me as though I’ll attack him. He’s never seen my anger, not really. I always kept it to myself so I could earn his trust. But now I have nothing to lose, and all those months of silence come bursting out.
“He killed Jenna,” I cry. “He almost killed me. You think Cecily is safe? He keeps Rose’s body in the basement. I saw it! He lied about her ashes—”
“Enough!” Linden bellows, and it’s so frightening coming from him that I shut my mouth. “Do not,” he growls. “Do
not
bring Rose into this. Not ever. You know nothing about her. Or my father. What right do you have to say these things to me?”
He’s trembling, and I’m trembling, and tears are welling in his eyes. He’s looking at me with such anger, such heartbreak, that I hate myself for what I say next. “Linden, he killed your child.”
Linden’s face immediately changes, goes white. His expression becomes guarded and distant. His voice catches when he says, “Impossible. Bowen is perfectly fine.”
“Not Bowen,” I say. “Your other child. Your daughter.” I’m sorry, Deirdre; this was your secret, and I swore I’d keep it. But telling may be the only way to save any of us.
“I know Rose had a baby.” I keep talking, propelled by some awful momentum. Linden’s face keeps changing into all kinds of surprise and pain. “The baby died. Your father took it away, said it was a stillborn. But it had cried. It was born alive.”
“Did Rose tell you this?” Linden’s voice is breathless. “She was delirious with pain. She couldn’t accept what had happened.”
“Rose never said a word to me about it. I swear. I didn’t know until after she was gone.”
Linden paces the room, hyperventilating, clenching and unclenching his fists. I’ve never seen him like this.
“Please, Linden,” I say softly. “I know you have every reason not to trust me, but this is the truth. Your father is dangerous.”
“Why?” he says.
“Your father killed your daughter because she was malformed,” I say.
“No—I mean. Why are you saying these things? I—” He shakes his head, disgusted with me. “Why are you being so—” He grits his teeth and can’t bring himself to look at me. His voice fades when he adds, “So awful. You’re awful.”
When he paces toward my bed, I reach out to touch him but think better of it and withdraw.
“Every word out of your mouth,” he pants, “has been a lie, hasn’t it?”
“No,” I say softly. “Not everything.”
“What about your name?” he says. “Is your name even Rhine?”
I know I’ve earned his mistrust, and even still I can see him working through it, fighting the year of instinct that led him to believe me. “Yes,” I say.
“How can I believe you?” he says. “How can you expect me to? I have no way of knowing what’s real when it comes to you.”
“Linden,” I say, “my name is Rhine.” Then I add, deliberately, “Ellery. I was forced to marry you against my will. I spent our marriage trying to break free so I could go home. Jenna was trying to help me, and your father knew that when he killed her. He killed your daughter and told you it was a stillborn. Cecily is in danger if she’s alone with him. I’m telling you the truth.”
My voice is calm, reasonable, and Linden holds his breath as he listens. Then he stares at me, his eyes suddenly bleary and colorless. He’s pale and haggard. And the way his mouth twists—like he wants to sob or shout something horrible at me—makes my body ache with longing. It’s an old instinct from all our nights together, so many of which were spent grieving our separate losses. I want to hold him. But I don’t dare try.
And after a few moments of hair pulling and heavy breathing, my once-husband takes the horrible news I’ve given him and turns to leave.
“Don’t you care about Cecily?” I ask. “If it were Rose, you know you’d go back.”
Once I’ve said it, I fear it’s going to make him angry. But his face goes distant, his tone practical. “I love Cecily,” Linden says, “whether or not you believe it. Not in the same way I loved Rose, or you. But what should that matter? I’ve loved all of my wives differently.”
“Not Jenna,” I amend.
“Don’t presume to know my relationship with Jenna,” he says. “There are things you don’t know about her. About us.”
That’s true. Jenna kept a lot of secrets, knew how to dodge questions, smile when she was filled with hatred. I’ll never know the whole truth about her, but I was certain there was nothing between her and Linden. She never quite forgave him for selecting her to live when her sisters were killed.
“We had an understanding,” Linden goes on. His voice is softer, maybe because he knows the pain of losing my oldest sister wife is still fresh.
I keep my voice measured, and I straighten my back. “What do you mean?”
“I watched Rose die. There was so much life in her, and then one morning her skin was bruised, she could scarcely breathe. She would cry out if I touched her.”
“What—” My voice cracks. “What does that have to do with Jenna?”
“Jenna knew that she was going to die,” he says. “She didn’t believe she’d ever see an antidote. And deep down I didn’t believe it either. Not after what I’d seen. So we came to an understanding: When we were together, we wouldn’t feel or think anything at all. In a way, it rid us of loneliness for a while.”
That was what Jenna did best, wasn’t it? Doing away with a man’s loneliness for however long he paid for her company. There are thousands of girls like that; I’ve seen them spilling from Madame’s tents, their faces painted like dripping China dolls. I’ve heard the clink of coins in glass jars as the men come and go. But there was only one Jenna, wild and kind, beautiful and deceptive. The girl Linden knew is not the girl I knew. I still feel her absence, as strong as her presence was. I still dream of her shape in the clouds, daylight burning through.
I clear my throat and look at my lap. “If you know her so well, you know she’d agree with me. Your father shouldn’t be left alone with the brides you claim to love so much.”
“Yes, well,” Linden says, walking for the door, “she was always a cynic. You need your rest; I’ll check on you in a bit.”
He doesn’t slam the door behind him, but it somehow feels that way.
I slump against the pillows, heartsick with guilt. In all our months of marriage, I kept Linden from getting to know me. I lied, I manipulated. But I got to know him very well. A year after Rose’s death, he can hardly bring himself to say her name, much less hear that her body is still a part of his father’s experiments. And I never intended to tell him about Vaughn murdering the only child Rose ever gave him. The child that could still be here, malformed but alive.
It’s true that Linden has no reason to believe me. But I saw the belief in his eyes. Now he can’t even look at me. But that doesn’t change the fact that Deirdre and who knows how many others are trapped in that basement, dying, maybe dead. And Cecily, who tries so hard to play the grown-up, has no idea of the danger she’s in. Linden is shocked by all this, and really, why wouldn’t he be? I think of the moment when I learned of Rose’s baby, how stunned and sickened I was. I wanted a more compassionate way to tell Linden, but it’s the sort of thing that has to be blurted. There’s no kind way to tell it.
I’m pinned to this bed by the wires in my arm, and there’s nothing I can do but wait. Even if I could get up and find Linden, he’s in no state to listen to me. If he didn’t hate me for running away, he certainly hates me for what I’ve just said. But at least I am sure that no amount of hatred would cause him to allow his father near me. He’ll come back, or he’ll tell the doctors to release me.
Images move without sound on the screen. Dreary side roads, cratered buildings that vaguely resemble houses. The air is ashen from a recent explosion. The cheery young newscaster walks backward, chattering into a microphone. I recognize her as the nationwide correspondent; this particular segment airs in every state. The caption reads:
Pro-naturalist rebels disagree with antidote efforts.
The newscaster stoops down. She’s too clean and prim for such an ugly place. There’s a run in her stockings, and her red heels are starting to be overtaken with mud. She’s holding the microphone out to a group of young men and women who sit on the curb, looking filthy and exhausted but eager to speak.
One of them takes the microphone from her hand, and he’s speaking so angrily that she leans back. The camera pans in on him, the matted hair, bloodied cheek. His eyes, though, are bright and eager. And if not for them, I wouldn’t recognize him at all. Because those eyes are exactly like mine. I open my mouth to speak, and only a cry escapes. I cover my mouth, wait for the joy and fear and shock to become manageable, then try again.
“Rowan.”
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