Wither (12 page)

The homesickness that comes with my brother’s memory is not so bad. Not with Gabriel for company and a tray of pancakes and the June Bean he’s hidden in the napkin.

Linden ignores us in the daytime, but begins inviting all three of his wives to dinner each night. He tells us about his father’s research, how optimistic the scientists and doctors are about finding an antidote. He says that his father is attending a convention in Seattle, where he will compare notes with other researchers. Secretly I wonder if the Housmasters notes are about Rose. I wonder if he has named her Subject A or Patient X. I wonder if her fingernails are still painted. Cecily is, as always, very interested in everything our husband says. Jenna still looks disgusted at the sight of him, though she has started eating. I’m getting better at acting interested in what he has to say. And all the while, the windstorms make the electricity flicker, and interrupt with strange infrequent bouts of rain what would otherwise be beautiful afternoons.

And then one evening when Linden is in unusually high spirits, he announces that, in honor of our two months of marriage, he thinks there should be a celebration. A big one, with colored lanterns and a live band.

He’ll even let us decide which garden to throw it in.

“How about the orange grove?” I say. Gabriel and two other attendants collecting our plates go pale and exchange grave looks. They know the magnitude of what I’ve said. They brought Rose many meals and cups of tea as she frittered endless days away in the orange grove.

It was her favorite, where she and Linden were married, and where—she told me wistfully one afternoon, twirling a June Bean around her tongue—they first kissed.

And it was there that Linden found her a week after her twentieth birthday, unconscious and pale in the shade of an orange tree, gasping, her lips blue. That was the day he was faced with the tragedy of her mortality. His inability to save her. All the pills and potions in the world couldn’t buy more than a few fleeting months.

A party in the orange grove. The pain on Linden’s face is immediate. I am unwavering. He has cost me more pain than I will ever be able to repay.

Cecily, oblivious, says, “Yes! Oh, Linden, we’ve never even seen it!”

Linden dabs his mouth with a napkin, sets the napkin on the table. “I thought along the pool would be more entertaining,” he says quietly. “The warm weather’s nice for swimming.”

“But you said we could pick,” says Jenna; it is perhaps the first time she’s ever said a word to him. Everyone looks at her, even the attendants. She glances briefly at me and then at Linden. She bites a piece of steak from her fork daintily and says, “I vote for the orange grove.”

“Me too,” says Cecily.

I nod assent.

“It’s unanimous, then,” Linden says into his spoon.

The rest of the meal is very quiet. The dinner plates are all cleared. Dessert is served, and then tea. Then we’re dismissed, because Linden has a headache and needs to be alone with his thoughts.

“You’re something else,” Gabriel whispers to me as he escorts us to the elevator. Just before the doors close between us, I smile.

Once upstairs I immediately retreat to my bedroom.

I lie on the bed, sucking a blue June Bean and thinking about how the Atlantic Ocean lapped under my and Rowan’s bare feet. I think about the ferry along the pier that I would watch slice a path toward the horizon, and how secure I would feel in my small piece of the world, how lucky to be alive if only for a short while. That’s where I want my body to be cast when I’m dead. I want to be ashes in the ocean. I want to sink to the ruins of Athens and be carried off to Nigeria, and to swim between fish and sunken ships. I’ll come back to Manhattan frequently, to smell the air, to see how my twin is doing.

My twin, however, does not like to discuss what will happen in four years, when I’ll be dead and he’ll have five years of life in him. I wonder what he’s doing now and if he’s okay. I wonder how long it will take me to break free of this place, or at least communicate to him that I’m alive. But somewhere, in a place in my heart that’s darker than that awful basement, I worry that my corpse will become part of Housemaster Vaughn’s research, and my brother will never even know what’s happened to me.

For that, I am not sorry that Linden Ashby is off somewhere being sad because of something I said at dinner.

It’s been so hard to keep track of the days in this mansion, when they all look the same, when I’m nothing more than Linden’s prisoner. I’ve never been apart from my brother for so long; from the time we were tod-dlers, our mother fit my hand in his and told us to stay together. And we did. We were together on our walks to school, clinging to each other in case of dangers lurking in the ruins of an old building, in the shadow of an abandoned car. We were together on our walks to work, and our voices kept each other company at night, in a dark house once filled with our parents’ presence. Before now I’d never been away from him a day in my life.

I thought that as twins we would always be able to reach each other, that from far away I would still hear his voice as clearly as I heard him in the next room of our house. We would talk to each other as we moved about the rooms—him in the kitchen, me in the living room—to keep the silence of our parents’ deaths away.

“Rowan,” I whisper. But the sound doesn’t travel farther than my bedroom. The cord between us is severed.

“I’m alive. Don’t give up on me.”

As though in answer, there’s a soft knock at the door.

I know it’s not Cecily because it’s not followed by a question or a demand. Deirdre doesn’t knock, and it wouldn’t be Gabriel at this hour. “Who is it?”

The door cracks open and I see Jenna’s gray eyes.

“Can I come in?” she asks in her wispy voice.

I sit up on the bed and nod. She purses her lips in the closest I’ve seen her come to a smile, and takes a seat on the edge of my mattress.

“I saw the way Governor Linden looked at you when you brought up the orange grove,” she says. “Why?”

My instincts caution me to be wary of this somber bride, but I’m in just the right stage of grief to pull down my defenses—to lower the mast, I suppose Gabriel would say, and allow myself to drift into uncertain waters. And she seems so timid and harmless in her white nightgown that’s like mine, with her long dark hair in a veil around her shoulders. Something about all this makes me want to see her as a sister, as a confidant.

“It’s because of Rose,” I say. “He fell in love with her in the orange grove. That was her favorite place, and he hasn’t been able to stand it since she became sick.”

“Really?” she says. “How do you know that?”

“Rose told me,” I say, and I stop myself from adding that Rose told me all sorts of things about our husband.

I want to keep some of his frailties to myself, such as the infection that nearly killed him as a boy and that caused him to lose several teeth, hence the gold ones. These things make him seem less menacing somehow. Like someone I can overpower or outsmart when the time is right.

“So that’s why he looked so sad,” she says, picking lint off her hemline.

“That’s what I wanted,” I say. “He had no right to bring us here, and I guess he’ll never realize that. So I wanted to hurt him like he hurt me.”

Jenna looks at her lap, and her lip quirks in what I think will be a smile or a laugh, but her eyes well with tears and her voice is broken when she says, “My sisters were in that van.”

Her skin pales, and mine flourishes with gooseflesh as her little sobs wrack the bed. The room is colder, and the nightmare is growing into so much more than I thought it could be. It only gets worse in this mansion of sweet smells and extra bright gardens. I think of the gunshots that have haunted me since I arrived. How many of those were Jenna’s sisters, and which ones? The first shot? The fifth? The sixth?

I’m too stunned to speak.

“When you brought up the orange grove, I didn’t know what it was, but I saw that it was hurting him,” she sobs, swipes her nose with her fist. “And I wanted him to hurt, so I agreed with you. He has no idea, does he? What he’s taken away?”

“No,” I agree softly. I offer her Gabriel’s handkerchief, which I’ve been keeping in my pillowcase, but she shakes her head, apparently hating this place too much to even blow her nose on its cloths.

“I only have two years left,” she says. “There’s nothing for me out there now, and maybe I’m trapped here, but I won’t let him have his way with me. I don’t care if he murders me, he won’t have me.”

I think of her cold stiff body being pushed into a basement laboratory. I think of Housemaster Vaughn dissecting his daughters-in-law one by one.

I’m not sure what to say, because I do understand her anger. I am a good liar, but lies won’t help me here. Jenna is a girl who has no illusions about what will happen to her; she knows it will never be okay. Am I the one in denial?

“What if you could get out?” I say. “Would you?”

She shrugs, snorts incredulously through her tears.

“To what?” she says. “No, might as well go out in style.”

She waves her wrist, exaggerating the ruffles on the cuff of her sleeve. Then she wipes her nose with them, and she looks so defeated. A skeleton, a ghost, a very pretty girl who’s already dead. She turns to me, and her eyes still have traces of life. “Did you really spend the night with him?” she asks. But her tone isn’t invasive like Cecily’s. She’s not being crass; she just wants to know.

“He spent the night in here when Rose died,” I say.

“He just fell asleep, that’s all. It was never more than that.”

She nods, swallows a hard lump in her throat. I touch her shoulder, and she starts but doesn’t pull away. “I am really sorry,” I say. “He’s an awful man, and this is an awful place. The only one who likes it here is Cecily.”

“She’ll learn,” Jenna says. “She reads all those pregnancy books and Kama Sutra stuff, but she has no idea what he will do to her.”

This is also true. Jenna, who is as quiet as a shadow, has been paying attention to her sister wives all this time. She has given us a lot of thought.

For a while she sits there, choking down the last of her sobs, pulling herself together. I offer her the glass of water that’s been sitting on my nightstand, and she takes a few sips. “Thank you,” she says. “For sticking up for yourself at dinner. For showing him how it feels.”

“Thank you for backing me up,” I say. I think that’s a smile on her lips when she turns to look at me one last time before disappearing into the hallway.

I fall asleep and have horrible dreams of sad girls with exquisite eyes, gray vans erupting with butterflies, windows that won’t open. And everywhere girls, tumbling from trees like orange blossoms and hitting the earth with sickening thuds. They crack open.

Sometime in the night my mind enters a deeper dimension of dreaming. The sound disappears and something obscures my vision. There’s whiteness, the smells of decay in soil and surgical gloves. Then Housemaster Vaughn in a biohazard suit yanks the sheet from my face.

I try to scream, but I can’t because I’m dead, eyes frozen wide. He brings his knife between my breasts, ready to cut. The pain is just about to register when a sound comes bursting into my dreams. “Rhine,” the voice says.

“Rhine.”

I open my eyes, gasp. My heart is thudding in my chest, and all at once I’m bursting with the life I didn’t have in my nightmare. In the early morning darkness I can just make out Gabriel’s blue eyes. I say his name both to test my voice and to be sure he’s really there. I can see the silver gleam of the breakfast tray on my nightstand.

“You were thrashing around,” he whispers. “What was it?”

“The basement,” I whisper back. I bring the heel of my hand across my forehead, and it comes back damp with sweat. “I was trapped; I couldn’t get out.” I sit up and turn on the lamp. The light is too much, and I shield my eyes and then blink wildly as Gabriel comes into focus, sitting on the edge of my bed where just hours before, Jenna sat and told me about her own nightmare.

“It was an awful thing to see,” Gabriel agrees.

“But you’ve seen worse,” I say. It’s not a question.

He nods, his expression darkening.

“Like what?” I say.

“Lady Rose had a baby,” he says. “It was over a year ago. It didn’t make it. Strangled by the umbilical cord, I think. The House Governor and Lady Rose scattered its ashes in the orange grove, but I wonder about those ashes, if they were really the baby. When people die here in general, I wonder what happens to them. I’ve never seen any kind of graveyard; it’s either ashes or they just disappear.”

Rose had a child. I never knew. It, or something like it, is scattered among the orange blossoms.

“Gabriel?” There is true fear in my voice. “I want to get out of here.”

“I’ve been here for nine years,” he says. “That’s half my life. I can’t even remember, most days, that there’s a world other than this one here.”

“Well, there is,” I say. “There’s the ocean, and boats leaving harbors, and people jogging on sidewalks, and streetlights that come on in the evening. There are graveyards with names on the headstones. That’s the real world. This isn’t.”

But I understand where he’s coming from. Lately I almost forget these things myself.

The party happens in the orange grove, as promised.

Cecily spends the afternoon working poor Elle to the bone with dress adjustments and makeup re-dos. Her hair is styled, washed, and styled again, and again. She calls me over to see each attempt, and they all make her look beautiful but young. A child in her mother’s too-big heels, trying to be a woman.

For me, Deirdre has constructed a soft orange frock that she says will make me look dazzling in the evening light. She leaves my hair untouched, long and wavy and many shades of blond. She doesn’t say it, but I know that as she stands beside me in the mirror, she’s thinking I look like Rose. And when Linden sees me, I suspect he will not be seeing me at all, but some reincarnation of the girl he lost. I can only hope it earns me his favoritism.

We arrive in the orange grove by early evening, and even with the stage set up and the band tuning its instruments and the crowd of people I’ve never met, I can see that this place is not like the rest of the mansion. It’s wild, with uneven lengths of grass as high as my uncomfortable heels or my knees. It reaches into my dress like thin rubbery fingers. Ants crawl around the rims of crystal glasses and make lines up trees. All the greenery hums and rustles.