Wither (25 page)

“But now I’m here, and I get to do what I love, and I’m very fortunate.”

“If you could run away, where would you go?”

“Run away?” she says. She’s at the cabinet now, searching through the bottles of scented oils. “Why would I want to do that?”

“It’s just a question. If you could be anywhere in the whole country, where would you go?”

She laughs a little, dropping a bit of vanilla oil into the water. The foam sparkles and pops. “But I’m happy here,” she says. Then, “Well, there was a painting my father did—of a beach. There were starfish on the sand. I’ve never held a real starfish. I would have liked to go to that beach, or one just like it.”

She looks lost in the memory, staring through the bath tiles. Then she comes out of it and says, “How’s the water? Are you almost ready to get out?”

“Yeah,” I say. I change into a nightgown, and Deirdre rubs some lotion on my feet and calves, and admittedly that does relax me a little. She lights a few candles and tells me the smell will help me fall asleep. They’re supposed to smell like lavender and something called sandal-wood, but as I’m drifting off to sleep, they take me away to a warm sunny beach, and a canvas freshly painted.

I’m up before dawn the next morning. I had a dream that Gabriel came into my room with an atlas on the breakfast tray. It’s not awful, as nightmares go, but the loneliness I feel when I awaken is crushing.

I venture into the hallway, which is dimly lit. The incense sticks have stopped burning, and there’s a distant smell like charred perfume. I know Jenna and Cecily will be asleep at this hour—especially Cecily, who has taken to sleeping until noon most mornings in her third trimester, but I’m sure one of them will let me get into bed with them. Maybe it will work better than sleeping alone.

When I knock on Jenna’s door, I hear her soft giggle from somewhere in the room. There’s a rustling sound, and then she says, “Who is it?”

“It’s me,” I say.

Another giggle. “Come in,” she says.

I open the door to a bedroom that’s warm with candlelight. Jenna is sitting up in the bed, running her fingers through her tousled hair, and Linden is tying the drawstring of his pajama pants. His bare chest is pale; his cheeks are flushed. He pulls his shirt on in a hurry, and it’s still unbuttoned when he stands and heads for the door. “Good morning, sweetheart,” he tells me, not quite meeting my eyes.

There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s perfectly normal. Jenna is his wife. He’s our husband. I should be used to the idea. It was inevitable that I’d eventually catch a glimpse of what goes on behind these doors. But I can’t help the painful blush that washes over my face, and I can see that Linden is looking embarrassed too.

“Morning,” I say, surprised not to have stuttered.

“It’s early; you should try to go back to sleep,” he says, and plants a quick kiss on my lips and hurries down the hall.

When I turn my attention back to Jenna, she’s walking around the room, extinguishing the candles. Her body shimmers in a layer of sweat; the hair receding from her face is damp; the buttons on her nightgown don’t align.

I’ve never seen her this way, so wild and beautiful; Linden must be the only one who usually sees her like this. I push back a wave of jealousy, which is of course absurd.

I have no reason to be jealous. If anything, she’s doing me a favor by keeping Linden’s affections away from me.

She says, “Don’t these things smell awful? They smell like the inside of a leather purse. Linden thinks they set a mood.”

“How long was he here?” I say, in a measured tone.

“Ugh. All night,” she says, and collapses back into bed. “I thought he’d never leave. He thinks if we do it a bunch of different ways, it’ll get me pregnant.”

I’m fighting not to blush. The Kama Sutra book, one of Cecily’s favorites, is open page-down on the floor.

“Is that what you want?” I ask.

She snorts. “To bloat up like a puffer fish like Cecily? Hardly. But what can I do? And anyway, I don’t know why he can’t knock me up. I’m just lucky, I guess.” She pats the mattress beside her, inviting me over. “So, what’s up?”

Without candlelight the room is much darker. I can barely make out her features. Had I really come here a few moments ago expecting to sleep? That seems like an impossibility now.

“I’m worried about Gabriel,” I say. I sit on the edge of the bed, where Linden moments ago was adjusting his drawstring, and somehow I can’t bring myself to get under the covers.

Jenna sits up and puts her arm around me. “He’ll be okay,” she promises.

I stare dismally at my lap.

“Okay, that’s it, get up,” she says, pushing me to my feet and following suit. “I know what you need.”

A few minutes later we’re huddled under a blanket on a couch in the sitting room, sharing a gallon of vanilla ice cream she ordered from the kitchen, and we’re watching an early-morning rerun of yesterday’s soap opera.

Along with the romance novels, these are another of her guilty pleasures. The actors are all teenagers made up to look much older. Jenna tells me they’re constantly changing the actors, since of course the show has been on for more than a decade and the original actors have died by now. The only consistent actors are first generations. And as she’s explaining to me who’s in a coma and who unknowingly married an evil twin, bathed in the television’s glow I do start to relax a little.

“You two are so loud.” Cecily is in the doorway, rubbing her eyes. Her stomach looks like an overblown bal-loon. She hasn’t bothered with the last few buttons of her nightgown, and the skin around her bellybutton is stretched so far that it shines painfully. “What are you doing at this hour?”

“It’s called
This Maddened World
,” Jenna says, making room on the couch. Cecily gets between us and retrieves the spoon I stuck in the mound of ice cream. “See, this guy here—Matt—he’s in love with the nurse, so he broke his arm on purpose. But she’s about to tell him that the X-ray is showing he has a tumor.”

“What’s a tumor?” Cecily licks the spoon and dips it back into the carton for more.

“It’s what used to cause cancer,” Jenna says. “This is supposed to be the twentieth century.”

“Are they going to have sex on that operating table?”

Cecily says, incredulous.

“Gross,” I say.

“I think it’s sweet,” Jenna gushes.

“It’s dangerous.” Cecily gestures wildly with the spoon. “There’s a tray of needles, like, right there.”

“He’s just been given a death sentence. What better time to make a move on the love of his life?” Jenna says.

The couple on the screen does, in fact, begin having sex on the operating table. It’s censored by strategically placed props and close-ups of the actors’ faces, but I still look away. I dig a spoon into the ice cream and wait for the romantic music to stop.

Cecily catches me and says, “You’re such a prude.”

“I’m not,” I say.

“You haven’t even consummated with Linden,” she says. “What are you waiting for, our golden anniver-sary?” Cecily is the only one who believes Vaughn will find his miracle antidote, and that we’ll live to see old age.

“What goes on in my bedroom is none of your business, Cecily,” I say.

“It’s just sex. It’s no big deal,” she says. “Linden and I do it practically every day. Sometimes twice.”

“Oh, you do not,” Jenna says. “Please. He thinks you’re going to miscarry if he even looks at you funny.”

Cecily bristles. “Well, we will, once this stupid pregnancy is over. And if you think I’m having all the babies, you’re crazy.” She waves her spoon between Jenna and me. “One of you is doing this next. You have no excuse, Jenna. I see how often you two shut the door.” Cecily may not be the most observant of us, but she always seems to know what goes on in our bedrooms—or, in my case, what doesn’t go on.

Jenna looks uneasy, suddenly, putting a spoonful of ice cream into her mouth. “We’ve tried. It just hasn’t happened.”

“Well, try harder.”

“Drop it, okay?”

They continue to argue, but I turn my attention back to the television, where there’s a much safer scene of two people talking in a garden. I want no part of this conversation. I am more of a sister wife to Cecily and Jenna than I am a wife to Linden. And I can’t bring myself to think of him in the way they’re discussing. I can’t bring myself to think of anyone that way.

Gabriel once again enters my mind. Our kiss after the hurricane, the eager warmth that filled my body, quelling my pain. If we ever manage to escape this mansion, will our connection develop into something more? I don’t know, but the beauty of running away with Gabriel is that I’ll have the freedom to decide for myself.

A wave of heat rushes up between my thighs. The ice cream in my mouth tastes twice as sweet. And for no reason at all, I sigh.

Linden says, “You and Jenna get along well, don’t you?”

He and I are hand in hand through the sleepy winter wonderland that the orange grove has become. Everything around us is white and deeper white, and a path has been carved for us through snowdrifts as high as my head. I didn’t know winter could be so extreme this far south.

“She’s my sister,” I say, and nod into a cloud of my own breath. Linden looks at our joined hands, mine in Deirdre’s cable-knit gloves. He brings my hand to his lips for a kiss, and as we press forward, I say, “She doesn’t speak to you much, does she?” In the ten months we’ve been here, Jenna has held on to her resentment for her imprisonment and the murder of her sisters. I can’t blame her. And if Cecily has noticed the strain between our sister wife and husband at all, she’s probably just glad not to have the competition. If Jenna wanted to, she could become my rival to be Linden’s first wife easily.

She’s beautiful and graceful, and she is very compassionate and loyal when you aren’t responsible for the murder of her family.

“Usually, no,” he says. “Last night she asked me up to her room, and we spent time together, as you know.” He blushes a little. “And we talked.”

I furrow my brows. “Talked? About what?”

“You,” he says. “She’s worried about you. With the stress of the baby coming and everything.”

“Linden,” I say, “that’s not even my baby.”

“No,” he agrees, “but Jenna says that my father has kept the three of you on a tight lockdown, and that it’s been especially difficult for you to try to care for Cecily the way she is, without being able to have a few moments to yourself.”

“It does get a little crowded with three wives on one floor all day,” I agree, but I’m confused. What was Jenna trying to do?

Linden smiles at me. He looks like a little boy, his nose and cheeks bright red, his dark curls coming out of his knit hat in tangles. He’s the child in Rose’s photograph.

“I think we should change that, then,” he says. “I spoke with my father, and—well, here.” We stop walking and he reaches into the pocket of his wool coat and extracts a small colorfully wrapped box. “The solstice isn’t for another week yet, but I think you deserve this now.”

I remove my gloves so I can untie the beautiful bow, and I work fast because my fingers are already going numb. There’s a small box under all the paper, and I lift the lid, expecting something impractical like diamonds or gold, but it’s something else. A plastic card strung on a silver necklace. I’ve seen them around the necks of all the attendants.

It’s a key card to use the elevators.

It’s happening. I’m becoming first wife! And I’m being given the trust that comes with it. I can’t help the squeak that escapes my throat. I cover my mouth, and the excitement just fills my eyes. Freedom. Just being handed to me in a little box. “Linden!” I say.

“Now, it won’t take you to
every
floor. It will allow you to access the ground floor so you can go outside, and—”

I launch myself into his arms, and he stops talking, takes a deep breath into my hair.

“Thank you,” I say, even though he has no idea what this means, and he never can.

“Do you like it?” he whispers, a little stunned.

“Of course,” I say, and draw back. He smiles at me in that little boy way that makes him so much different from his father. The cold makes his lips especially red, and I think he is exactly the type of portrait Deirdre’s father would have painted. So soft and lovely and sweet.

He takes my face in his hands, and for the second time in our ten-month marriage, we kiss. And for the first time, I don’t draw back.

Back on the wives’ floor, I run down the hallway calling Jenna’s name, the key card swinging around my neck.

Linden’s slight taste is still on the tip of my tongue, and it clashes with the incense smell of the hallway flooding my senses, like I’m returning home after a trip to outer space.

I can’t find Jenna, and Cecily is sleeping. I can hear her snoring through the closed bedroom door. I page Deirdre, who tells me that Adair hasn’t heard from Jenna either, but don’t worry, she couldn’t have gone far. And it’s true, she couldn’t have. So I wait in the library, looking for more information on the Rhine River or rowan berries, but there’s nothing, of course. Instead I read about the life cycle of hummingbirds until Linden calls me to dinner.