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“And about a thousand other things,” he says, pausing sometimes between his words, making sure he has them right. I get the sense that words are not sufficient tools for him to build what’s going on in his head as he stands before me. “While you were gone, I tried to take all of those memories and turn them into lies. And I thought I’d done it. But I look at you now, and I still see the girl who fed me blueberries when I was grieving. The girl who was in a red dress, falling asleep against me on the drive home.”
He takes a step closer, and my heart leaps into my mouth. “I try to hate you. I’m trying right now.”
I look at him and ask, “Is it working?”
He moves his hand, and I think he’s going to reach for a book on the shelf above me, but he touches my hair instead. Something in me tightens with expectancy. I hold my breath.
When he pushes forward, my mouth falls open, expecting his kiss even before it comes. His lips are familiar. I know the shape of them, know how to make mine fit against them. His taste is familiar too. For all the illusions and colors and sweet smells of that mansion, and of our marriage, he has always tasted like skin. His breaths are shallow. I’m holding his life against my tongue, between my rows of teeth. He’s offering it up.
But it doesn’t belong to me. I know that.
I draw back, gently step out of his hands that gripped my shoulders and were just edging their way to either side of my throat.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
One of his hands still hovers near me, a satellite. I imagine what it would be like to tilt my head into his open palm. The flood of warmth bursting through me.
He looks at me, and I don’t know what he sees. I used to think it was Rose. But she’s not here with us now, in this room. It’s just him and me, and the books. I feel like our lives are in those books. I feel like all the words on the pages are for us.
I could kiss him again. I could do much more than that. But I know it would be for the wrong reasons. It would be because my family is far away, or else dead, and because I miss Gabriel; in my dreams he’s something small I dropped into the ocean, and I wake knowing that I might never find him again. But Linden is here. Brilliantly here. And it would be too easy to make him a substitute for all those things, to take advantage of his desire for me.
But then logic sets in. Logic and guilt.
I won’t hurt him the way I did before, manipulating his affections while I worked for the freedom I wanted.
He seems to understand. His fingers close into his palm, and he lowers his hand from my side.
“I can’t,” I say again, with more certainty.
He steps closer to me, and my nerves bristle like the long grass outside. Everything is rustling with expectancy.
“We never consummated our marriage,” he says softly. “At first I thought you only needed time. I was patient.” He presses his lips together for a moment, thinking. “But then it didn’t matter so much. I liked just being with you. I liked the way you breathed when you were asleep. I liked when you took the champagne glass from my hand. I liked how your fingers were always too long for your gloves.”
A smile tugs at one side of my mouth, and I allow it.
“Looking back, those feel like the most important parts. They were real, weren’t they?”
“Yes,” I answer, and it’s the truth.
He touches my left hand and looks at my eyes, asking permission. I nod, and he holds my palm flat against his and then holds my hand between us. His other hand traces the slope of my wedding ring and pinches either side of it between his thumb and index finger. When I realize what’s happening, my pulse quickens, my mouth goes dry.
He slides the ring down my finger, and it hitches on my knuckle, like part of me is still trying to hang on. My body lilts forward, tethered to the ring for only an instant more before letting go.
This was it. This was why I kept wearing my wedding ring, why it never felt right to remove it myself. There was only one person who could set me free.
“Let’s call this an official annulment,” he says.
I can’t help it. I throw my arms around him and pull him tight against me. He tenses, startled, but then he puts his arms around me too. I can feel his closed fist where he holds the ring.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
Minutes later I’m lying on the divan, watching my ankle swing back and forth over the edge like a guillotine. Linden paces the length of the room, tracing the book spines.
I look for the moon through the open window, but it’s hiding behind clouds.
Linden says, “What’s your brother like?”
I blink. It’s the first time he’s asked me about Rowan. Maybe he’s trying to get to know me, now that he knows I’ll give him the truth.
“He’s smarter than me,” I say. “And practical.”
“Is he older? Younger?”
“About ninety seconds younger,” I say. “We’re twins.”
“Twins?” he says.
I hang my head over the arm of the divan, looking at him upside down. “You sound surprised.”
“It’s just—twins,” he says, leaning against a row of paisley cloth-bound books. “That changes the entire way I look at you.” He keeps his mouth open, struggling for the right words.
“Like I’m half of a whole?” I say, trying to help him.
“I wouldn’t put it like that,” he says. “You’re a whole person by yourself.”
I look out the window again. “You know what scares me?” I say. “I’m starting to feel like you’re right.”
Linden is quiet for a long time. I hear his clothes rustling, the chair creaking under his weight. “I think I understand,” he says. “When I lost Rose, I kept going, I still do, but I’ll never be what I was when she was alive. It’ll always feel like something’s … not right, without her here.”
“That’s sort of what it’s like,” I agree. Even though my brother and I are both still alive, the longer we’re apart, the more I feel myself changing. It’s like I’m evolving into something that doesn’t include him. I don’t think I can ever be the person I was before all this.
It’s quiet again after that. It’s a comfortable quiet, though. Peaceful. I feel unburdened, and after a while I start to imagine that the divan is a boat moving over the ocean. Sunken cities play music beneath the waves. The ghosts are stirring.
Someone turns on the light, and my thoughts scatter away as I blink at the brightness. This is one of the few rooms with functioning lightbulbs, though they flicker.
“Linden?” Cecily says.
She’s standing in the doorway, her knuckles white from clutching the frame. Everything about her is white: her face, the quivering misshapen O of her lips, the nightgown that she’s got bunched up to her hips as though she’s unveiling her body to us.
But sliding down her thighs is an abundance of red. It’s pooling at her feet, from the trail of blood that followed her into the room.
Linden moves fast. He scoops her up by the backs of her knees and shoulders. She comes alive with a scream so awful that he has to brace his hand on the wall to keep from falling. She’s whimpering while he’s rushing her down the stairs.
I hurry after them down the long hallway, making footprints in the red puddles and thinking about how small she is, about how much blood it takes to keep a girl her size going, how much of it she can stand to lose. Redness is leaking rivers over Linden’s arms like veins atop his skin.
He says my name, and I realize what he wants. I push ahead of him and open the door.
Outside, the night is warm, sprinkled with stars. The grass sighs in indignation as we crush it with our bare feet. Wings and insect legs make music, which moments before had been lovely through the open window in the room full of books.
In the backseat of the car, which reeks of cigars and mold, I take Cecily’s head in my lap while Linden runs off to find his uncle to drive us.
“I lost the baby,” Cecily chokes.
“No,” I say. “No, you didn’t.”
She closes her eyes, shudders with a sob.
“They’ll know what to do at the hospital,” I tell her, though I don’t believe a word of it. I’m only trying to calm her, and maybe myself. I hold her hand in both of mine. It’s clammy, ice-cold. I can’t reconcile this pale, trembling girl with the one who stood before the mirror hardly an hour ago, fussing over her stomach.
Thankfully, Linden is back soon.
The drive to the hospital is rocky, thanks to Reed’s reckless driving and the lack of a paved road. Linden holds Bowen, whose eyes are wide and curious, and shushes him even though he doesn’t cry. I’ve always thought Bowen was intuitive. He just might be the only child of Linden’s to live.
I feel a gentle pressure around my finger, and I look down to realize Cecily is touching the place where my ring used to be. But she doesn’t ask about it, the bride who has always made it her mission to know everything about everyone in her marriage. She has been eerily silent this whole ride.
“Open your eyes,” Linden tells her when she closes them. “Love? Cecily. Look at me.”
With effort she does.
“Tell me where it hurts,” he says.
“It’s like contractions,” she says, cringing as we hit a pothole.
“It’s only another minute from here,” Linden says. “Just keep your eyes open.” The gentleness is gone from his voice, and I know he’s trying to stay in control, but he looks so frightened.
Cecily is fading. Her breaths are labored and slow. Her eyes are dull.
“‘There will come soft rain,’” I blurt out in a panic. She looks up at me, and we recite the words in unison, “‘And the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound.’”
“What is that?” Linden says. “What are you saying?”
“It’s a poem,” I tell him. “Jenna liked it, didn’t she, Cecily?”
“Because of the ending,” Cecily says. Her voice sounds miles away. “She just liked how it ended.”
“I’d like to hear the whole thing,” Linden says.
But we’ve arrived at the hospital. It’s the only real source of light for miles. Most of the streetlights—the ones still standing, anyway—have long since burned out.
Cecily has closed her eyes again, and Linden passes the baby off to me and hoists her into his arms. She murmurs something I can’t understand—I think it’s another line of the poem—and her muscles go lax.
It takes a few seconds for me to realize that her chest has stopped rising and falling. I wait for her next breath, but it doesn’t come.
I’ve never heard a human make a noise like the cry that escapes Linden’s throat when he calls her name. Reed runs past us, and when he returns, he’s got a fleet of nurses behind him, first generation and new. They rip Cecily from Linden’s arms, leave him staggering and reaching after her. I can’t help but think this attention is due to her status as Vaughn’s daughter-in-law. Reed must have made that clear.
Bowen starts to wail, and I bounce him on my hip as I watch Cecily’s body through the glass doors. The hospital lights reveal the gray of her skin. And, strangely, I can see her wedding band as though through a magnifying glass; the long serrated petals etched into it are like knives. They catch every bit of hospital light, the gleam stabbing my eyes. Then she’s laid onto a gurney that turns a corner, and she’s gone.
She’s dead. We’ll never get her back.
The thought hits me in the back of the knees, shaking me with its certainty.
7
I’M SITTING ON the floor of the hospital lobby, waiting. That’s always the worst part, the waiting.
Bowen has fallen into a quiet lull, ear to my heart. My arm hurts from supporting him. But I can’t think about that. I can’t think about anything. Voices and bodies move past.
The lobby is crowded. The chairs that line the walls are full of the coughing and the sleeping and the wounded. This is one of the few research hospitals in the state; my father-in-law often boasts about it. They take the wounded, the emaciated, the pregnant, or those who are dying of the virus—depending on which cases are interesting enough to be seen, and depending on who is willing to have blood drawn and tissue sampled without being compensated for it.
A young nurse is standing with a clipboard, trying to decide who is in the worst shape. Cecily was hurried down that sterile hallway not because of her condition but because her father-in-law owns this place. They know Linden here; last I saw him, someone was trying to console him as he wrestled away in pursuit of his wife.
I shouldn’t have Bowen in a place like this. His superior genes will promise him a life free of major diseases, sure, but he isn’t completely immune to the germs that are surely hovering around us. He could catch a cold. Someone has to think of his health, and suddenly that task has been placed in my hands, along with his chubby little body.
I raise my head and search for Reed. Eventually I spot him emerging from the same hallway that took my sister wife. Linden is pacing ahead of him, head down, face drained of color. I rise to meet them, and I realize my knees are trembling. And suddenly I don’t want to hear what they have to tell me. I don’t want to return Bowen to his father. I want to take him and run away from here.
Linden’s hands have been scrubbed of the blood. His face is splashed wet. The hem of his shirt is wrinkled, and when he begins twisting it in his fist again, I understand why.
“They couldn’t get a pulse—” he says, and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, hard. “I wanted to be with her, but they pushed me away.”
All I can think is that Cecily was supposed to outlive us all.
But when I open my mouth, what comes out is, “Bowen shouldn’t be here.”
Reed understands. Reed has always understood me. He takes the baby, and he’s so careful with him, even smiles at him.
“She was fine when I kissed her good night,” Linden says.
I should be saying something to comfort him. That was always my role in this marriage, to console him. But we aren’t married anymore, and I can’t remember how to be.
“I don’t want them to dissect her,” I say. I know I shouldn’t be so morbid, but I can’t stop myself. If Cecily is dead, then all the rules are broken. “I don’t want your father to have her body. I don’t—” My lip is quivering.
“He won’t get her,” Reed assures me.
Linden whimpers into his palms. “This is my fault,” he says. His voice is strange. “We shouldn’t have tried for another baby so soon. My father said it would be okay, but I should have seen it was too much for her. She was already so—” His voice breaks, and I think the word he croaks out is “frail.”
In more rational circumstances, hearing the intimate details of what went on between my sister wife and my former husband would embarrass me, but feelings of any sort are miles from me now.
“I need air,” I say.
“Wait,” he starts to say, but I stumble on anyway, until a pair of hands grabs my arms. I stare at the nurse’s name tag, uncomprehending, unable to read. He’s probably younger than I am. There were nurses at the lab where my parents worked too, and it always astounded me how serious they could be, how well they knew medicine.
“Mrs. Ashby?” the nurse asks, his voice too gentle.
I shake my head, eyes on the floor. “Sorry,” I whisper. “No.”
Linden comes up behind me. He says words I don’t understand. And the nurse says words I don’t understand. And I can’t catch any of what’s being said until I hear a cruel pang of hope in Linden’s voice when he asks, “Can we see her?”
I whip my head around to stare at him. He wants to see her? Doesn’t he understand that a body isn’t a person? Doesn’t he understand how awful that would be—how awful it already was to watch her get swept away a few moments ago?
