Wither (31 page)

Bowen, unfazed by her absence, has fallen asleep. I envy his complacency. I envy his twenty-five remaining years.

Later, I close my bedroom door. I shut off the lights.

I bury my face in my pillow and I scream and scream until I’m so numb that I can’t feel my arms and legs, just like Jenna. And the silence throbs. Rowan, my parents, Rose, the Manhattan harbor. Things I miss. Things I love. Things that I have left behind, or that have fallen through my fingers. I want my mother to come and kiss me good night. I want my father to play the piano. I want my brother to keep watch while I sleep, to give me a swig of vodka when the pain is too bad. I miss him. I haven’t allowed myself to truly miss him in a long time, but now I can’t help it. A floodgate has opened. And I’m so tired and so lost, and I don’t know if I’ll ever truly be able to escape. I don’t know how I’ll be able to open the iron gate with its pointed flower. I wipe my tears on Gabriel’s handkerchief, which I’ve kept hidden in my pillowcase all this time. In the darkness I feel the embroidery, and I sob until my throat is raw, and I just hope, hope, hope that I’ll make it home.

I dream of being cast into the sea. I dream of drowning, but this time I don’t thrash or struggle. I succumb.

And after a while, in the quiet of the underwater, I can hear my father’s music, and it’s not so bad.

In the morning, Cecily wakes me in tears. “Jenna won’t open her eyes,” she says. “She’s burning up.”

Cecily tends to be dramatic, but when I stumble, still half-sleeping, to Jenna’s room, I can see that it’s even worse than she described. Our sister wife’s skin has paled and taken on a cruel yellow tinge. Bruises are spreading across her throat and arms. No, not bruises; they’re more like festering wounds. I touch her forehead, and she makes a pitiful croaking sound.

“Jenna?” I whisper.

Cecily paces, clenching and unclenching her fists. “I’m getting Housemaster Vaughn,” she says.

“No.” I get onto the mattress and bring Jenna’s head into my lap. “Go to the bathroom and get a wet cloth.”

“But—”

“There’s nothing he can do for her that we can’t do ourselves,” I say, forcing a calm tone.

Cecily obliges, and I hear her sobbing as she runs the water, but she has composed herself when she returns with the wet cloth. She pulls back the blankets and undoes the top buttons of Jenna’s nightgown to help cool the fever, and all the while I can see her struggling to contain the panic that’s filled up her eyes. Do my eyes look the same way? I’m sitting here, calmly running my fingers through Jenna’s hair, but my heart is pounding, my stomach is sick. This is so much worse than what I saw Rose go through. So, so much worse.

Hours pass, and I think this is going to be the end of my sister wife. She’ll never open her eyes again. Even I hadn’t expected it to happen so fast.

Cecily puts her arms around me and buries her face in my neck. But I have no words of comfort for her. It takes all my effort just to keep breathing.

“We should get Housemaster Vaughn,” she says, for the third or fourth time.

I shake my head. “She hates him,” I say.

And then Jenna laughs. “Yep,” she says. It’s a weak, garbled sound, but Cecily and I snap to attention, and we see the smile on Jenna’s purpled lips. Her eyelashes flutter and she opens her eyes. They’re not the vivacious things they once were. They’re eerie and distant. But there’s still life in them. She’s still with us.

“Hi,” Cecily croons, kneeling at the bedside and taking Jenna’s hand in both of hers. “How are you feeling?”

“Great,” Jenna says, and her eyes roll back as she closes them.

“Can we get you anything?” I say.

“A tunnel of light,” she says, and I think she’s trying to smirk.

“Don’t say things like that,” Cecily says. “Please don’t. I can read to you if you’d like. I’ve gotten much better at it.”

Jenna opens her eyes long enough to watch Cecily flip through one of the many books piled on the nightstand, and then she laughs again, and it’s more painful to hear than before. “That one’s not exactly death bed appropri-ate, Cecily.”

I can’t stand this. I look at Jenna and all I can see is this thing that’s killing her. This voice doesn’t even sound like hers.

“I don’t care. I’ll read it anyway,” Cecily says. “There’s a bookmark in the middle, so I’ll start there. You should at least get to see how it ends.”

“Skip to the last page, then,” Jenna says. “I’m not made of time.” And then her chest convulses and blood and vomit spill from her mouth. I turn her onto her side and rub her back while she struggles to cough it all up. Cecily cringes, her eyes filling with tears. I don’t know how Cecily has the energy to cry so much. I can barely muster the energy to move. Just being alive feels so arduous that all I want to do is climb under the covers and sleep.

It seems impossible that I ever had the strength even to walk.

I slept for days after my parents died. Weeks. Until my brother couldn’t take it anymore.
Get up,
he said.

They’re dead. We’re alive. We have things to do.

Jenna chokes and gasps. I can see the notches in her spine through her gown. When did she become so thin?

There’s barely any life left in her when she’s through coughing and vomiting. She rolls onto her back, eyes shut, motionless except for her jagged breathing. She doesn’t even move when Cecily and I strip the ruined bedsheets from under her.

She sleeps the morning away, barely mumbling when Cecily and I change her soiled nightgown and dab at her with cool cloths. Her skin is bruised everywhere, so translucent and marbled with veins that I hesitate to touch her. Some of the bruises have started to bleed.

It’s like her body is rotting from the inside out. Her hair has become thin; locks of it fall out at a time. I sweep it away. Cecily reads aloud from the romance novel, which is all about healthy young lovers and summer kisses. She pauses sometimes to clear the sobs caught in her throat.

We dismiss the attendants who come with medications, after Jenna proves too weak to swallow pills, and fails to keep down anything else they try to give her.

It gets to be so bad that Jenna, hazy and barely able to speak, starts to hide her face in my or Cecily’s nightgown when she hears footsteps approaching. I know what she’s trying to tell us. It’s the same thing that Rose was begging for. She doesn’t want to prolong this misery.

She doesn’t struggle with Adair, though, and so we allow him in. Her domestic is light on his feet and unassuming with his touch. He rubs a salve on her chest that takes the creakiness out of her breathing. And he doesn’t stay longer than he has to. He always raved about Jenna’s beauty, and he understands that she doesn’t want anyone to witness her dying in such a hideous way.

By late afternoon, Linden is concerned enough to check on us. Immediately his face changes when he crosses the threshold. He can smell it: the heavy stench of decay and sweat and blood. I can see in his eyes that this is familiar. He spent the final days at Rose’s side. But he doesn’t approach this wife. I know Jenna always kept an emotional distance from Linden, that their marriage was purely sexual, but I wonder if Linden was partly to blame for that too. After losing Rose, he didn’t want to love another woman he would outlive. I have as many years left as he does, and Cecily will outlive us both. But Jenna . . .

Linden looks so piteous and apologetic, standing there. His three wives are huddled together on the bare mattress, one of them dying; when we’re together, we form an alliance he can’t touch. He’s scared to even try.

“I forgot to feed Bowen, didn’t I?” Cecily says when she sees her son in Linden’s arms.

“It’s all right, love. There’s the wet nurse for that,” Linden says. “I’m more worried about you.”

I can’t imagine why Linden would bring his son here, unless he’s feeling lonely and hoped it would lure Cecily away to spend some time with him. It doesn’t work.

Cecily buries her face against Jenna’s arm and closes her eyes. I close my eyes too. We’re in the Gatherers’ van all over again, recoiling into the darkness, wanting to disappear in the safety of one another.

“The attendants said you’ve been turning them away,” Linden says. “At least let me send someone up with fresh bedsheets.”

“No,” Cecily murmurs. “Don’t send anyone. Tell them all to leave her alone.”

“Can’t I do anything?” he says.

“No,” I say.

“No,” Cecily echoes.

I can feel our husband standing in the doorway. The closeness of his wives frightens him, as if one dying wife could be the death of all three.

Eventually he leaves without another word.

Jenna mutters a word I can’t understand. I think it’s a name. I think she’s looking for her sisters.

“It’s not safe for you here,” she says. I don’t know if she’s talking to her sisters, or to us.

Jenna was right. She leaves before I do. We lose her on January 1, in the early hours before the sun comes up. It’s just Cecily and me at her side, and after days of living in her bed, all that was left was for us to talk to her for a while as her eyes fluttered open and shut. We wanted her to know she wasn’t alone. For all our months together as sister wives, I should have had something meaningful to say to her, but in the end I could only bring myself to talk about the weather as I watched her die.

And now she’s gone. Her eyes are still open, but they’ve taken on a deeper shade of gray. Hollow. Like a machine that’s been unplugged. I lower her eyelids with my thumb and index finger, and then I kiss her forehead.

She’s still warm. Her body still looks like it’s about to draw a breath.

Cecily stands and begins to pace. She touches her forehead, her chest. “I don’t understand,” she says. “It happened so fast.”

I think of how happy she was when Rose died, how she immediately asserted herself as the one willing to bear Linden’s child. They’ve already talked about having more.

“Housemaster Vaughn should have been able to prolong—”

“Don’t mention his name,” I say fiercely, but I don’t know why I’m getting upset with her. I haven’t been able to stand the sight of her since Jenna became sick, and I’m not sure why that is. But now isn’t the time to dwell on it.

I tuck Jenna’s long hair behind her ears and try to comprehend her stillness. She’s like a wax figure, when only a minute ago she was a human being. Cecily gets into the bed with her and buries her face in Jenna’s neck and says her name. Jenna, Jenna, Jenna. Over and over, like it will do any good.

It isn’t long before Vaughn comes to check on Jenna’s vitals. He doesn’t even have to approach the bed. He can see in Cecily’s tears, in my distant gaze out the window, that our sister wife is gone. He says it’s a pity but when he checked on her last night he knew she wouldn’t be long for this world.

When the attendants and their gurney come for Jenna’s body, Cecily is still holding on. But she’s too dis-traught to protest when Jenna’s hand is pulled from her grasp. “Be brave,” is all Cecily says.

I hear her a short while later. She’s in the sitting room, playing an angry Bach in D minor. The keys are like the footsteps of death storming down the hall.

I listen to it as I lie on my bedroom floor, too bereft even to move toward my bed. I imagine this great music pouring out of Cecily’s small body, notes hovering around her in reds and blacks, like a dark genie awoken from its slumber.

I wait for her music to stop. I wait for her to appear in my doorway, teary-eyed, asking if she can lie beside me for a while the way she always does when she’s upset.

But she doesn’t come. Instead my doorway is filled with her angry, fearless song.

Be brave
, it seems to say.

I want to be away from here. I want to escape now. I can’t stand to be in this mansion, with Vaughn doing who knows what to my sister wife’s body while the rest of us are expected to eat our dinner and drink our tea. Cecily carries Bowen around like he’s her little rag doll, and the two of them are red from crying. He’s the most discontent baby on the planet. Probably means he’s intuitive.

Within hours Vaughn gives us the ashes to scatter, and Cecily clings to the urn. She asks if it would be all right for her to keep Jenna’s ashes on a shelf in her room.

It will make her feel better. I say that’s fine by me, and quietly I resent her ignorance.

In bed that night I hear a soft knock at the door, but I don’t answer. Partly because I don’t want to see anyone, but mostly because I am a million miles from earth. I have been lying in the dark for what seems like forever, listening to the distant sobs of a girl who has possessed my skin. I am floating in space.

When I do phase back to my senses, the wailing sounds coming from me are terrible and inhuman.

The door opens, filling my bedroom with light, and I curl away from it, just like I did in the van. I feel all at once how heavy my body is, how raw my throat is from all the screaming. My vision is blurry and wet.

“Rhine?” Linden says. His voice is barely familiar. I don’t want to see him, and I try to tell him to go away, but when I open my mouth, there are only these unintelligible sounds. He sits on the edge of the bed and rubs my back. I try to shrug him away, but I don’t have the strength.