Gabriel holds my arm, probably thinking I’ll black out again and fall. Maddie waves the flashlight around when she reaches the bottom of the steps. Instinctually I reach for the pull cord that will turn on the hanging light, but of course there’s no power.
I take the flashlight and point it, first into the corner of the room where the cot still stands. My brother and I slept here in hourly shifts, keeping each other safe through the night. Then I find the courage to move the light to the tiny refrigerator, which is empty, door open, without electricity. As I am sweeping the light to yet another corner, I find something more troubling than the emptiness I expected.
Rats. Dozens of rats, lying everywhere. On their backs, on their sides. Some in lakes of blood and others decomposed to near nothingness. All of them dead. And scattered among them are rotted stems and wilted flower petals. I’m so horrified that I don’t even hear Gabriel’s reaction.
My brother had concocted his own poison to take care of our rat problem, but I had only ever seen it kill one or two at a time. And then there are the flowers. Lilies, shriveled like earthworms. The ones from my mother’s garden. Every spring I would try again with seeds I bought at various markets in Manhattan, and even from flower shops out of state if my brother’s deliveries took him away.
The only seeds I didn’t dare to try were the ones that my mother had kept in a pouch in her dresser drawer. They belonged to her, and I felt I had no right planting them. I remember that I pressed them between the pages of one of her notebooks and buried it in the backyard with all the other things my brother and I didn’t want to have stolen.
The backyard. I move the flashlight until I find the shovel that’s resting under the staircase, and I hurry upstairs. I run through the living room, trying not to see the mess that’s become of my father’s desk and wicker chair, or the couch that still, just barely, bears brightness from its daisy print.
By the time Gabriel has reached me in the backyard, I’m jamming my weight onto the shovel to break the earth. He helps me, even though he’s not sure what we’re looking for, and I can tell, by the way the dirt has been disrupted, that it’s already gone.
Chapter 17
MY BROTHER left some things in the trunks we’d buried. Probably because they were too much to carry wherever he was going. Or because he didn’t think they’d be useful. Clothes; my parents’ lab coats; my father’s glasses; a flightless paper kite I made when I was young; yellowed books about war or romance; my father’s twenty-first-century atlas.
I flip through all the pieces of my childhood, and the books my parents read to escape work for a while, and I ignore the memories and the pain that fly up with the dust, because there is something more pressing that I want.
“What are you looking for?” Gabriel says. He helps me, carefully unfolding and refolding the clothes, checking the jewelry box and finding it empty. Even the globe necklace is absent. I hope my brother didn’t sell my mother’s necklaces and rings for money, though hope seems stupid at this point.
“Seeds,” I say. “My mother’s lily seeds.”
Maddie is a few yards away, studying an abandoned wasp nest on the ground.
“Maybe we dropped them while we were moving things around,” Gabriel says.
“No,” I say. “They aren’t here. And neither are any of my parents’ notebooks, which is where I left the seeds.”
I search everything a second and third time, though, before putting all but the atlas back into the ground. Gabriel takes the shovel from my hands, and I don’t object when he reburies my parents’ things so I won’t have to. I just stand there, useless, my fingers worrying over the edges of the atlas, fighting back the emotions that come at me like bullets. Better to feel nothing. Better not to think.
And that’s when the memory comes back.
She was baking a cake for Rowan’s and my birthday. Our ninth birthday. And the other side of the sink was full of dishes that I was helping to wash. Dinner had just ended, and with his mouth full of food, my brother turned to me and said, “Next year you’ll be middle-aged. But I won’t be.” At first I thought he was trying to compete with me, but then he averted his eyes, and I knew he was hurt.
Once he had gone upstairs to take his bath, after my mother had hung the blue birds, she said to me, “You have to look out for each other.”
Look out for each other. That was our theme. I could almost believe my parents had had twins on purpose, rather than by chance, just so we could each fulfill that promise.
But I didn’t follow through on that, did I? I left him here alone. I don’t know where he has gone, just like he doesn’t know what happened to me. The only thing we seem to know is that the other is not coming back.
There is something about this person that you won’t admit even to yourself. That’s what Annabelle said when she laid the tarot cards before me. Something about my own brother that I wouldn’t admit.
I stare at the hole I made in the earth, which was already pliable from my brother’s efforts.
“He thinks I’m dead,” I whisper.
Gabriel says something, but his voice comes to me as though underwater, and I don’t make out the words. My pulse is throbbing in my ears. My blood is waves of hot and cold.
When our parents died, my brother became all about survival. He took care not to let me sink too deep into that endless cavern of despair. He worked us both into a routine of doing and surviving. And all that time, while he was keeping me afloat, it never occurred to me that I was doing the same for him. That he needed me every bit as much as I needed him.
That, without me, the routine would fall apart.
I held fast to the hope that he’d go on here without me, waking himself in the morning, having tea, working through the afternoon, setting the traps and sleeping on our cot. But I’ve been gone too long, and there are new ashes billowing up from the incinerators every day.
He has given up on me. What is holding him together? The answer is the same as what he’s left behind. Nothing.
Mind racing ahead of me, I run into the house. Search every corner, something is telling me. This can’t be everything. This can’t be all. The stairs shudder and creak under my weight. A separate fire had been lit upstairs; it ate all the doors, charred the walls. And though these rooms have been empty since my parents’ death, they seem emptier still. Black like craters. Nothing. More nothing.
I don’t know how long I stand there, panting. I wait for tears, but they don’t come.
“Rhine?” Gabriel is starting to climb up after me.
“Don’t,” I say, descending the stairs. “There’s nothing to see up there.”
He tries to put his arm around me, but I walk ahead of him, through the scorched doorway and into the ruined yard.
Some distant part of me is trembling. I can feel it. I don’t think my legs will hold much longer, and so I sink into the high grass. I feel orphaned all over again.
Gabriel is kind enough to not say anything when he sits next to me. He offers me soda, doesn’t press me when I refuse, and lets the time go to slow motion as we watch Maddie entertain herself in the high, dead grass. In fact, it’s not until rain clouds threaten the sky that he asks, “What now?”
I lean my head on his shoulder. “You must think I’m so stupid,” I say. “To leave the mansion behind for this.”
He swallows, and I’m so close to his throat that I hear it. “I didn’t understand it at first,” he admits.
I close my eyes. I don’t have to remind myself not to daydream about the mansion, because right now I see nothing.
“And then Jenna came to the basement to talk to me,” Gabriel says. “She told me that, after everything that had happened—the hurricane, the expo—you still wanted out, and that I shouldn’t let you go alone.”
“But you still tried to convince me to stay after that,” I remind him.
“I didn’t want you to be hurt. Or killed,” he says. I feel his weight shift. “But maybe you felt like it was better to die trying than to stay trapped, and who was I to argue?”
“I didn’t think I would die trying,” I say.
“Because you don’t think about death.”
“Right.”
A new thought has occurred to me, though. Why did Gabriel come with me? Because I’d convinced him, or because he felt he had to protect me at Jenna’s insisting? In either instance it doesn’t sound as though he wanted to.
“And you don’t care for plans, either,” Gabriel adds.
When the next breeze washes over me, it brings something like guilt with it. But I do have a plan. Even if it is a long shot.
I open my eyes, sit up, brush the dirt from my knees.
“Maddie,” I say. From where she’s crouched in the grass, she raises her head to me. “Let’s show Gabriel your storybook.”
Claire Lottner’s address is in the residential district of Manhattan. “Right now we’re in factories and shipping. It’s just across a bridge. We could be there before evening.”
“Who is she?” Gabriel asks.
“I have no idea. Maybe she’s not even there.”
But it’s the best idea either of us has. And it’s better than sitting here breathing in the burned smell of what was once my home, so we start moving.
My neighborhood no longer looks the same to me. I keep my eyes on the street, recognizing the more substantial cracks, trying not to think about anything. It never works, though. The thing about hope is that it doesn’t go away even when it serves no purpose.
There’s no need to look at the pamphlet map Gabriel picked up at the bus station; I know where we are. I recognize every crumbling building, every withering excuse for a park, every turn of the ocean. I even know its fish, the rainbow scales, the deadpan eyes, the toxicity that makes sport fishermen throw them back. I lead, and the others follow me through streets that will take us to the bridge that leads to the residential district.
We become aware of a crowd that has gathered about a half mile from the bridge. There are balloons everywhere—white and royal blue, the trademark colors of President Guiltree’s family. The distant thundering sound becomes drums and music as we press on. Maddie claps her hands over her ears, and her whimper of distress is drowned out by all of the commotion.
“What’s going on?” Gabriel shouts over the noise. He picks up Maddie, who is rigid in his arms, her eyes round with alarm. She shakes her head frantically, covering her face with her hair.
“Maybe the president is giving a speech,” I say. Manhattan is so technologically advanced that most of the president’s news broadcasts are filmed here. It’s not unusual for select roads to close to accommodate them. Not that his speeches are worthy of closing a road, my brother would say.
