Wither (17 page)

“Absolutely, darling.”

Jenna, who hates Housemaster Vaughn even more than she hates our husband, pulls the netting closed around a bed and takes a nap. The domestics are talking dresses and sewing notions; they can’t do much for us down here, but I suppose Housemaster Vaughn thinks they will be handy if the mansion is destroyed and we still need someone to knit our blankets and darn our socks. Linden sits on the divan surrounded in papers and architecture magazines he’s brought along to amuse himself, with a pencil in his hand.

I sit next to him, and he doesn’t notice me until I ask, “What are you drawing?”

His dark eyelashes are downcast, like he’s considering whether what’s on the page is worth my time. Then he holds it up to show me, and it’s a delicate pencil sketch of a Victorian house flourishing with flowers and ivy. But under all that, there’s a stable structure. Solid beams on the porch, strong-looking windows. I can even see inside to outlines of floors, and doors with clothes hanging on the knob. I can see that a family lives inside. There’s a pie on the window ledge, and a woman’s hands are either placing it there or retrieving it. The house is at an angle so I can see two of its outer walls. A swing in the yard looks like it has just been in motion; its child has leapt off the edge of the page. There’s a bowl in the grass, where a dog will take a drink after it returns from a walk around the neighborhood, or a nap in a neighbor’s flower bed.

“Wow,” I exhale, without meaning to.

He brightens a little, and then clears the papers away so I can sit closer to him. “It’s just an idea I had,” he says.

“My father thinks I shouldn’t draw families inside the houses. He says nobody will want to buy a design unless it’s clean and they can only see themselves living there.”

As always, his father is wrong.

“I would live there,” I say. Our shoulders are touching; this is closer than we’ve ever come outside of my bed.

“It helps me to draw someone inside the house,” he says. “It gives it a kind of, I don’t know, soul.”

He shows me more of his houses. A flat one-story ranch with a sleeping cat on the porch, towering office buildings with gleaming windows that make me think of home, garages and gazebos, and a lone store that pops out of a blurry strip mall. And I’m stunned, not just by the precision of his lines, but by the immediacy of him beside me, excitedly pointing to things and explaining his process. I would not have imagined that he had this kind of energy. This kind of deftness and talent.

He’s always seemed too sad to do anything but wallow. Not everything in his world is what it seems. His designs command attention. They are beautiful and strong. Meant to last a natural lifetime, like the home where I grew up.

“I used to sell lots of designs before . . .” he says, not finishing the thought. We both know why he stopped designing. Rose fell ill. “I used to oversee the construction, too. Watch the drawings come to life.”

“Why don’t you go back to it?” I say.

“There’s no time.”

“There’s plenty of time.”

Well, four years. A meager lifetime. The look in his eyes makes me think he’s had the same thought.

He smiles at me, and I can’t read what it means. I think, for just a second there, he looked up and saw heterochromatic me. Not a dead girl. Not even a ghost.

He brings his hand to my face, and I feel his fingertips brushing my jaw, his fingers uncurling like something coming to bloom. He looks serious and soft. He’s closer than he was a second ago, and I feel myself being pulled into his gravity, and for some reason I feel like I want to trust him. I’m in his house-building hands, and I want to trust him. My lower lip goes slack, waiting for his to catch it.

“I want to see your drawings too!” Cecily says, and my eyes fly open. I draw my hand away from the crook of Linden’s elbow, where it had somehow become wedged.

I look away from him, and there is Cecily, pregnant and sucking on a piece of caramel that fills her whole left cheek. I scoot over and let her sit between us, and Linden patiently shows her his designs.

She doesn’t understand why the rope on the tire swing is broken, or why there’s a solstice wreath on the front door of the empty shop. And soon enough, she’s bored with the whole thing, I can tell, but she keeps making conversation about his designs because she has his attention and won’t relinquish it.

I climb into the canopy with Jenna, closing the gauze behind me.

“Are you asleep?” I whisper.

“No,” she whispers back. “Do you realize he almost just kissed you?”

As always, she has been observing. She turns to face me, and her eyes search me over. “Don’t forget how you got here,” she says. “Don’t forget.”

“No, never,” I say.

But she’s right.

For a moment I almost did.

I fall asleep, and the voices of the storm cellar become far away. I dream of everyone I hear. Cecily is a little ladybug in a plaid skirt, and Housemaster Vaughn is a large cricket with cartoon eyes. “Listen to me, darling,” he tells her, wrapping his fuzzy arm around her shell.

“Your husband has two other wives. Your sisters. You must not interrupt them.”

“But!” Her cartoon eyes well with petulance and sorrow. She’s sucking on a caramel.

“There, there,” he says. “ Jealousy looks so ugly on your pretty face. How about you and your father-in-law play some chess?”

She is his pet. His pregnant, faithful little pet.

Bishop to F5. Knight to E3.

Outside the winds are roaring, and over and over I hear the words:
It will be the very coldest day in hell . . .
The very coldest day in hell . . .

The house doesn’t blow away. Aside from a few broken trees, the world returns to normal.

Gabriel finds me lying in a pile of leaves. I sense his presence standing over me and open my eyes. He’s holding a thermos. “I brought you some hot chocolate,” he says. “Your nose is all red.”

“So are your fingers,” I say. Red like the falling leaves.

His breath comes out in little clouds. In all this autumn, his eyes are very blue.

“There’s a bug,” he says, nodding toward my head. I look and see some little winged thing jump and crawl along my blond hair. I blow gently, and it’s gone.

“I’m glad you didn’t get blown away,” I say, and as I’d hoped, he takes this as a cue to sit beside me.

“That house is something like a thousand years old,” he says, uncapping the thermos. The lid becomes a cup and he pours me some hot chocolate. I sit up and accept it, inhaling the sugary warmth for a while. He drinks straight from the thermos, and I watch his Adam’s apple move under his skin. “It’s not going anywhere.”

I look at the brick mansion in the distance, and I know he’s telling the truth.

“So did you win the bet?” I say, sipping my hot chocolate. It burns my tongue and turns a patch of it to sandpaper. “Was it a category two?”

“A three,” he says. His lips are chapped, like mine, nothing like Linden’s, and I think we are two unwitting prisoners out here in this barren garden. This garden that’s gone to sleep for the coming winter.

“I don’t love him,” I say.

“What?” he says.

“Linden. I don’t love him. I don’t even like to be in the same room as him. I just wanted you to know that.”

He won’t look at me, suddenly. He takes another sip, and this time he throws his head back to get the final dregs of hot chocolate. There’s a little arch of chocolate left over his lip.

“I just wanted you to know,” I say again.

“It’s good to know,” he says, and nods.

When our eyes meet, we both grin, and then we laugh, tentatively at first, like peeking out to be sure it’s safe, and then more confidently. I snort, and throw my hand over my mouth, too hysterical to be embarrassed.

I don’t know what’s funny or if anything even is. I just know it feels really good.

I wish we could spend more time like this, even if all we can do is walk and kick up some dead leaves as we go. But when we get up and start walking automatically toward the house, I remember that we’re both prisoners.

He can only talk to me if he’s bringing me something, and then it’s back to the kitchen, back to polishing the woodwork, back to vacuuming the infinite rugs. I guess that’s why he brought the hot chocolate.

The closer we get to the house, the more faint the sweet taste becomes. The burned sandpaper part of my tongue spreads. The soft cloudy sky begins to look ominous. The dead leaves scuttle away as though in fear.

Just as Gabriel reaches for the doorknob, the door opens. Housemaster Vaughn greets us with a smile.

The kitchen behind his shoulder is quiet, aside from the necessary sounds of things being prepared and cleaned.

None of the usual chatter.

“I asked him to bring me hot chocolate,” I say.

“Of course, darling. I can see that,” Housemaster Vaughn says. He looks like a kind geriatric when she smiles at us. I feel Gabriel tense up beside me, and I am fighting a strange impulse to hold his hand, to let him know I’m just as afraid even if I don’t show it.

“Why don’t you return to your duties, then,” Housemaster Vaughn tells Gabriel. He doesn’t need to be told twice; he melts into the kitchen and becomes part of the work noise.

I’m left to face this man alone. “It’s such a nice cool day. The air is refreshing on these old lungs of mine,” he says, patting his chest. “I don’t suppose you’ll take a walk with your father-in-law?” It’s not really a question. We walk away from the house between the ponds in the rose garden.

Jenna’s trampoline is covered in dead and dying leaves.

I do my best to ignore this man who has threaded his arm through mine, who smells like tweed and aftershave and the basement I so fear. I leave Florida for a while. I think about the leaves in Manhattan in the fall. There aren’t very many trees—the chemical factories have taken their luster. But on a windy day, the scant leaves gather into crowds and fall all at once, giving the illusion of more. The memory helps me to make it through the rose garden without hyperventilating.

Just when I’m thinking I’ll be able to get through this without having to speak, we come to the mini-golf course and Housemaster Vaughn says, “There’s an expression we old people have. ‘The apple of one’s eye.’ Have you heard it?”

“No,” I say. I am intrigued. I am fearless.

You’re a good liar, Rhine. You can get through this.

“Well, you, darling, are the apple of Linden’s eye.”

He gives my shoulders an affectionate squeeze. I feel my heart and lungs constricting. “You’re his favorite, you know.”

I am demure. “I didn’t think he noticed me,” I say.

“He’s so fond of Cecily.” Though, truthfully, Linden’s attention has started to shift toward me. Especially in the basement when he almost kissed me. I still haven’t figured out if it’s my resemblance to Rose that interests him, or something else.

“He adores Cecily, as do I. She’s eager to please. It’s charming, really.” Cecily is a little girl who never had a childhood, who wants so badly to fit into this role that she’ll do anything our husband asks. “But she’s young.

She has much to learn. Wouldn’t you agree?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “And the older one, Jenna, she fulfills her duties, but she doesn’t have an ounce of your charm. She’s something of a cold fish, isn’t she? If I had my way, we would just toss her back into the water.” His fingers flutter dramatically in the air. “But Linden insists we keep her. He thinks she’ll come around and conceive a child. He always was a little too compassionate.”

Some compassion. He killed her sisters.

“She’s just a little shy,” I say. “She cares for him. She’s afraid of saying the wrong thing. She tells me all the time she can’t work up the courage to speak to him.” None of this is true, but I hope it will keep Vaughn from tossing her back into the water. Whatever he means by that, I’m sure it’s not something I want to happen to her.

“And then there’s you,” Vaughn says, not seeming to have heard me. “Intelligent. So lovely.” We stop walking, and he strokes my chin between his thumb and index finger. “I’ve seen the way he brightens when you’re near him.”

I blush, which wasn’t supposed to be part of the act.

“He’s even thinking of joining the human race again.

He’s talking about returning to work.” Housemaster Vaughn’s smile seems almost sincere. He puts his arm around me again, and we walk through the golf obstacles. Grinning clowns, giant ice cream cones, spinning windmills, and a big lighthouse with a working light that shoots out into the trees.

“I had a son, many years ago, before Linden. Strong as an ox—That’s another expression us first generations used to have.”

“Really?” I say.

“Healthy every day of his life. This was before we realized the poisonous bomb ticking away in our children. He succumbed just like the rest of them. Just as you believe you will.”

We stop, and I follow his lead and sit down on the giant gumdrop that is the seventh hole. “Linden isn’t the strongest child, but he’s all I have.” His kind geriatric face is back. If I didn’t know better, I’d pity him.

But when I put my arm around him in comfort, I’m fully aware that he’s not to be trusted.