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What Reed calls a supply room is actually a closet. Opening its door reduces the passenger cabin by half. “Needs to be organized,” Reed says, standing at the curtain that separates the cockpit from the passenger cabin. He watches as I open one of the cabinets. Shoe boxes tumble out at me and spill their contents onto my shoes. “I was thinking that’d be your job.”
It’s easy, repetitive work. Sorting medical equipment apart from the dehydrated snacks and labeling their boxes. Reed works on the outside of the plane. I hear him banging parts into place and smoothing them down, trying to blend all the pieces together. He says he’s going to paint it when he’s done. He says it’ll be beautiful. I think it already is.
I open another box, and it’s full of cloth handkerchiefs. I recognize them immediately. They’re exactly like the ones at the mansion: plain white, with a single red sharp-leafed flower embroidered onto them. Gabriel gave me a handkerchief with this pattern, and I kept it for the remainder of my time at the mansion. The same flower that marks the iron gate.
“Oh, those?” Reed says when I ask him about them. He doesn’t look away from his work. He’s sitting on one of the wings, pressing down a sheet of copper and using a screwdriver to mark where the screws will go. “I thought they’d make good bandages; put them with the first aid stuff.”
“Where did they come from?” I ask.
“They used to belong to the boarding school,” he says. “A ton of things were left behind when my parents bought the building—handkerchiefs, blankets, things like that.”
“But what kind of flower is it?” I say.
“It’s a lotus,” he says. “Doesn’t look exactly like one, if you ask me, but that’s the only logical thing it could be. The school was called the Charles Lotus Academy for Girls.”
“Charles Lotus? As in, his name was Lotus?”
“Yep. Now get back to work making things sparkle. I’m not letting you live here eating up all the apples and oxygen for free, you know.”
The rest of the day is a malaise of chores. I pack the handkerchiefs away and bury them at the bottom of all the medical supplies. I don’t want to ever see them again. It’s my fault for hoping they symbolized something important. For believing anything that comes from the mansion could mean anything good.
I take a shower and go to bed early. The sky is still pink, undercooked. I bury myself beneath the blanket. It isn’t very thick; I shiver most nights, but right now the blanket feels like the heaviest thing in the world. It comforts me. I don’t just want to sleep; I want to be crushed down until I disappear.
In the morning there are voices. Something hissing and spitting on the griddle. Footsteps are pounding up the steps, and a voice calls after them, “Wait!” but the footsteps don’t comply. My door is pushed open, and there’s Cecily. The sunlight touches every part of her, making her into an overexposed photograph. Her smile floats ahead of her, a double bright line. “Surprise,” she says.
I sit up, trying to force consciousness back into my brain. “What are you—How did you get here?”
She hops onto the edge of my bed, jostling me. “We took a cab,” she says excitedly. “I’d never been in one before. It smelled like frozen garbage, and it cost a ton of money.”
I rub my eyes, trying to comprehend what she’s saying. “You took a cab?”
“Housemaster Vaughn has the limo,” she says. “He’s at some conference for the weekend. So we came to see you.”
“We?”
“Me and Linden.” She frowns at me. “You don’t look well,” she says. “You didn’t contract sepsis from this place, did you? It’s so filthy.”
“I like it here,” I say, collapsing back onto the pillow, pretending not to notice that it reeks of mustiness. I wonder who slept here before me. They probably died last century.
“It’s worse than the orphanage was,” Cecily says. She pats my leg as she stands, and heads for the door. “Anyway, get up, come downstairs. We brought you things.”
I take my time about getting dressed after she goes. I’m in no hurry to see the emptiness in Linden’s eyes when he looks at me.
I guess I’ve forgotten to brush my hair, judging by the way everyone looks at me when I enter the kitchen. And Cecily kindly informs me that my shirt is inside out.
“She hasn’t been eating,” Reed says apologetically. “I tried waving the fork around her head and everything.”
I drop into a chair opposite Linden. He’s holding Bowen, who is reaching for the things on the shelves. He wants the jars that have caught the morning light; I think he believes they hold little pieces of the sun.
“Of course she hasn’t been eating,” Cecily says. She stands behind me and gently works the tangles from my hair. “She doesn’t want to die.”
Reed lights his cigar and bumps Linden’s shoulder with his fist. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be blessed by the presence of your wives.”
Cecily drops my hair. She reaches across the table and snatches the cigar right out of Reed’s teeth and squishes the ignited tip into the table.
“What the hell!” Reed snaps. The house rattles. Bowen stops reaching.
“I’m pregnant, you moron,” Cecily says. “Don’t you know anything about gestation? And in case you’re blind, there is also a five-month-old baby sitting right next to you.”
Reed stares at her, aghast. And then he narrows his eyes as he stands and leans forward across the table, until his nose is an inch from hers. And I really think he’s about to strangle her—Linden tenses, ready to stop him—but Reed only growls and says, “I don’t like you, kid.”
She presses her hand to her chest. “Break my heart,” she says, spins around, and makes her exit.
Reed rescues the smoldering cigar and tries to relight it, grunting with each failed spark. “Will never know what you see in that one,” he says to Linden.
“I’m sorry,” I say, standing and scooping the ashes into my hand, and then dumping them into the sink. “She’s just sort of an acquired taste.”
Reed bellows with laughter. “Acquired taste,” he says, clapping his arm around Linden. “See now, this one, I like. You’re letting the wrong one get away.”
Linden’s cheeks go pink.
Cecily returns with a backpack slung over her arm. It also bears the lotus embroidery on one of the front pockets. She grabs my shoulders and guides me back into a chair, then sets a foil container in front of me and opens the lid. I’m hit with a blast of sweet-smelling steam. The head cook’s berry cobbler, topped with giant crumbles of sugar. Cecily presses a plastic fork into my hand and says, “Eat.”
Linden says, “Let her be. She can take care of herself.”
“Obviously she can’t,” Cecily says. “Look at her.”
“I’m fine,” I say, and to prove it I take a forkful of cobbler. Some small, distant part of me acknowledges that it’s delicious, rich with fat and nutrients I’ve been in need of. But a more frontal, prominent part of me is having a hard time just getting it down my throat.
Cecily resumes working on my tangles.
The silence is tense, and Reed breaks it by saying, “Well, I hate to leave a party. But I’ve got work to get to.” He makes a production of sticking a fresh cigar between his teeth as he heads for the door. “Help yourself to anything you’d like.” He eyes the cobbler and then looks at me with his eyebrows raised. “Though, it looks like you’ve brought your own supplies.”
Floorboards creak under his feet as he walks down the hall. As soon as he’s gone outside, Linden says, “Cecily, that was incredibly rude.”
She ignores him, humming and setting my hair neatly against my shoulders like she’s laying down an expensive dress. I’m glad my sister wife is here. She’s a chore sometimes, but she comforts me. I want to lean against her and let the weight I’ve been carrying fall away. But a part of me is angry that she has returned. I already said good-bye to her, accepted that we had no choice but to part ways. I don’t want to have to say good-bye again.
I can feel Linden frowning at me. I can’t bring myself to look at him.
“You’re not eating,” Cecily fusses.
“Leave her alone,” Linden says.
The tension is too much. Too tight. I feel myself bursting, but somehow my voice is very soft when I say, “Yes, why don’t you? Why don’t you both leave me alone?”
I look up at Linden, then Cecily. “Why did you come back?”
Cecily tries to touch my forehead, but I lean away from her. I stand up and walk backward toward the sink. Their stares are strangling me somehow.
Cecily looks at Linden and says, “Do you see?”
“See what?” I say, and this time my voice is a little louder.
Linden swallows something hard in his throat, composing himself, readying that diplomatic tone of his. “Cecily,” he says, “why don’t you take Bowen outside? It’s a warm day. Show him the wildflowers.”
It unnerves me that she agrees easily to this. She gives me a frown as she goes, and then sings something to Bowen about daffodils.
“I’m sorry,” Linden says after she has left us alone. “I warned her not to smother you. She’s just been worried about your well-being.”
I know this. Cecily worries. It’s her way. She’s the youngest of all Linden’s wives, yet she has always loved to play mother hen. But Linden is the practical diplomat in this marriage. He should be reminding her that I’ll be gone for good. And sure, she’d argue with him. She’d slam a few doors and refuse to speak to him for a while. But how long could that really go on? Locked up on that wives’ floor by herself, the loneliness would make her forgive him soon enough.
“You shouldn’t have brought her here,” I say. “You shouldn’t be here either. We both know there’s nothing to figure out. You’re only prolonging our good-byes.” And I don’t add that every day he keeps me here is another day my brother thinks I’m dead and is capable of destruction. And still I can’t bring myself to escape in the night, behind his back. Not again, especially after all he’s done to help me.
He looks at the wall over my head. I can’t read his expression. He opens his mouth to speak, but only a fraction of a syllable makes it out. I concentrate on a crack in the linoleum floor that looks like the apex of a leaf.
“I can’t believe the things you told me about my father,” he says. “You understand that, don’t you? I can’t side against him.”
He seemed to be on my side while he was carrying me away from his father’s clutches and trying to stop the bleeding. He seemed to be on my side when he slept in the chair at my bedside and told me he wouldn’t let his father cross the threshold of that hospital room while I was inside it.
But the upsetting part is that I do understand. While Vaughn controlled my sister wives and me with gates and holograms, he controlled his son with something deeper than blood or bones. Vaughn is Linden’s only constant. How can Linden have any choice but to love his father, to believe there’s good in the man who raised him?
I’m no one to judge. There is no number of buildings my brother can destroy, and no number of lives he can claim, that would undo my love for him.
I nod.
From somewhere very far away, in a world where there’s only green and deeper green, Bowen shrieks with laughter.
“I’ve brought some things for you,” Linden says. “I was going to bring more of your clothes, but I thought they’d only weigh you down if you were traveling. So I packed a first aid kit and some bus fare. You should be careful about letting anyone see that you’re carrying money.” He laughs, but it comes out more like a cough. “But you probably know that, don’t you?”
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say. Then, thinking better of it, I add, “But thank you.”
He gets up and pushes his chair back against the table, then Cecily’s chair, then mine. “You and Cecily can share the bed. I’m going to sleep on the divan in my uncle’s library. I’ll set up Bowen’s bassinet in the bedroom, but you won’t have to worry; he mostly sleeps through the night.”
“You’re really staying the weekend, then?” I say.
“It’ll be good for Cecily,” he says. “She’s been stir-crazy lately.” He lingers in the doorway for a moment, his back to me. “It’ll give both of you a chance for a proper good-bye. It’ll help her to let go of you.”
6
CECILY STANDS at the bedroom mirror, frowning. Her shirt is rolled to her chest, and she dusts her fingers over the pink ribbons of shining skin that run up her stomach. “Horrible, aren’t they?” she says. “Bowen stretched me out as far as I could go.”
I’m sitting on the bed, staring at the book I’ve taken from Reed’s library. He doesn’t have as many books as his brother, and they’re all tattered and old. I get the sense that he inherited the rejects of the collection. Some of the history books have pages ripped away, and passages that are blacked out. There was a book about the discovery of America—I was drawn to it by the image of a ship on the cover—but the pages were filled with furious notes calling the text a lie, theories scrawled in smudged, sloppy lettering I couldn’t read. I didn’t want to read it anyway; I just wanted to look at the ships and try to remember Gabriel’s fingers in my hair.
I turn the page, staring at yet another photograph of a cargo ship. Gabriel would have something to say about it, I’m sure. He would know how fast it could move across the water. This ship looks burdened by the weight of its cargo, though. I bet that if I stowed away, it would be easy for me to hide among those towering crates, but it would take me months to reach Gabriel. It would be torturous, feeling myself drag across the water so slowly.
But slowly would be better than not at all.
Cecily is still going on about how she’s lost her youth, and how her body will never be the same, but how happy she is to be a part of it all. Some kind of miracle, reinforced hope. I don’t want to look at her naked stomach, which is starting to take the shape of an upside-down question mark; her knuckles and cheeks and feet are always bright red. She gave birth to her first child with difficulty, fazing in and out of consciousness, crying when she had the strength, white from blood loss. I don’t want to think about her going through it all again. The whole thing terrifies me.
But it’s unavoidable. Since Cecily arrived with her son, this room has smelled like a nursery. Powder and some indeterminable sweetness that lingers on infant skin. It has taken over the room like it has taken over her life. The child here is no longer her.
“Aren’t you tired?” she asks, falling onto the bed beside me and kicking off her socks before getting under the blanket. “Don’t you want to change into your pajamas?”
“Not yet,” I say. “I think I’ll read for a while. I could go somewhere else if the light bothers you.”
“No, stay,” she yawns, and rests her head on my knee and closes her eyes.
Within minutes she’s breathing that disquieting pregnancy snore that makes me worry. We were brought to Linden as breeding machines, and Vaughn saw no greater opportunity than in the most naïve among all the girls to tumble from that line: Cecily. I’ve no doubt that’s why she was chosen. He saw that determination in her eyes, that vulnerability. She would do anything, anything to belong to his son after a lifetime of belonging to no one at all.
What is happening to her? What does it do to a young girl to birth two children in less than a year’s time? There’s a rash across her cheeks; her pianist’s fingers are swollen. In sleep she clings to my shirt the way Bowen clings to hers. The way a child clings to its mother.
I rake my fingers through her hair as I go on flipping the pages.
I’ve gone through all the pictures of boats a second time, never bothering with the words, when there’s a soft knock at the door. I know it’s Linden. Reed never comes upstairs at night. In fact, I’m not sure where he sleeps, or even if he does.
“Come in,” I say.
Linden inches into the room through the slight gap in the doorway. His presence is barely there. He looks at Cecily and me, and I feel like a model in an unfinished portrait. The Ashby Wives. There were four of us once.
“Is she asleep?” Linden asks.
“I’m awake,” Cecily murmurs. “I had a dream we were ice-skating.” She sits up, rubbing her eyes.
“I wanted to see how you were feeling,” Linden tells her, looking right past me. I’m nothing—candlelight on the wall. “Did you need anything to drink? Are your feet sore?”
She says something about needing a back rub, and I take my book and slip out of the room just as easily as Linden slipped in.
I’ve memorized which floorboards in the hallway don’t creak, thereby leaving Reed undisturbed as he toils about his mysteries below me.
The window is open in the library, and the books and walls and floorboards are all cool with the night’s breeze. I hear crickets as though they’re in the shelves. The stars are so bright and unobstructed that their light fills the room, making everything silver.
I replace the boat book and run my fingers over the spines of the other books, not really looking for anything. I think I’m too exhausted to read, anyway. There’s a pillow and a blanket on the divan, and it looks inviting, but I don’t feel right about getting into the bed Linden has made for himself. I focus on the book spines.
“My uncle used to let me pretend they were bricks,” Linden says, startling me. He eases a thick hardcover from the shelf, hefts it in either hand, and then places it back. “I liked to build houses out of them. They never came out exactly like I’d planned, but that’s good. It taught me that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.”
For some reason I’m finding it difficult to meet his eyes. I nod at one of the lower shelves and say, “Maybe it’s because in your mind you don’t have to worry about building materials. So you’re not as limited.”
“That’s astute,” he says. He pauses. “You’ve always been astute about things.”
I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a compliment, but I suppose it’s true. So much silence passes between us after that, with nothing to sustain the atmosphere but impassive crickets and starlight, that I become willing to say anything that will end it. The words that come out of me are, “I’m sorry.”
I hear his breath catch. Maybe he’s as surprised as I am. I don’t look up to see what his expression is.
“I know you think that I’m awful. I don’t blame you.” That’s it—all I have the courage to say. I fidget with the hem of my sweater. It’s one of Deirdre’s creations, of course. Emerald green embroidered with gold gossamer leaves. Since having my custom-made clothes returned to me, I’ve been sleeping in them. I’ve missed how comfortable they are, how getting dressed into something that fits every angle and curve feels like rematerializing into something worthwhile.
“I don’t know what to think,” Linden says quietly. “Yes, I’ve told myself that you’re awful. I’ve told myself you must be—that’s the only explanation. But my thoughts always go back to the you I remember. You, lying in the orange grove and saying you didn’t know if we were worth saving. You held my hand then. Do you remember?”
Something rushes through my blood, from my heart to my fingertips, where the memory still lingers. “Yes,” I say.
