“He’s been good to you, then?” he says. “Gabriel?”
“Better than I’ve been to him,” I admit.
Still looking past me, he tightens his lips. I can see that they’re heavy with something he’d like to say.
He wants to ask if I slept with Gabriel. I think he’s wanted to ask me since my return, but he hasn’t. It’s too forward a question for him.
He clears his throat. “What I really came here to tell you is that I’d still like to help you get home. If you’ll allow me, that is. I have a plan this time.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“My uncle is going to fix one of his old cars,” Linden says. “He modifies them to run on his homemade fuel. It’s some big secret recipe of his, so I don’t know how reliable it is, but it’s better than nothing, isn’t it? I can teach you how to drive.”
I already know how to drive. My brother taught me on the delivery trucks he used for work. But now’s not the time to add another thing to the list of what Linden doesn’t know about me, so all I can offer is my most sincere, “Thank you.”
Linden sees the hope this has brought me. “It’ll mean postponing your trip a bit longer, but it’ll still be faster in the long run, and I’d feel much better about your traveling this way, for what it’s worth.” He reaches to touch my shoulder but then changes his mind, and I get the sense that he’s in too much of a hurry to get away from me. But when he looks at me, he smiles wearily as he stands. “Eat, and get washed up if you want to. I think my uncle needs your help out in the shed. I offered to help, but he said I should stick to designing things, not repairing them. I don’t think he’s quite forgiven me for the homemade radio I broke when I was a child.”
“Linden?”
He turns in the doorway to face me.
“I didn’t. I realize you didn’t come right out and ask, but Gabriel and I—we didn’t.”
His expression doesn’t change but for the flush of color to his cheeks. “I’ll see you downstairs,” he says.
Once he’s gone, I force myself to eat everything in the bowl. I have no desire to, but I know my body is craving it. I can feel the emptiness in my stomach gnawing at my bones. After I’ve eaten, I shower under the rusty tap. I ignore the want to collapse under the blankets and sleep away the next three years. If Linden and Cecily can make an effort to go through the motions and be strong, after all that they’ve lost, so can I.
After a week of rain, the days return twice as bright. Blades of grass rise from the heaviness of raindrops in defiance. The sunlight breaks through the gaps in the shed, swimming with bits of dust. Everything smells like flowers and dirt.
Cecily’s domestic arrived the other day. I’m not sure what Linden told his father that made him relinquish control of her and let her stay with us, but she seemed unharmed, if quiet, when she stepped out of the limo.
Cecily comes outside sometimes, barefoot. For most of our marriage she’s been partial to skirts and elaborate sundresses to impress our husband, but now she wears jeans rolled up to her knees. She lays Bowen on his stomach and tries to coax him to crawl, though all he does is grab at the earth and hold it up to the sun in offering. She decides he must be worshipping his secret god.
“There are so many colors in his eyes,” she tells me one afternoon when I come to sit next to her in the dirt. “Sometimes I wonder where he gets that.” She grabs a fistful of grass and sprinkles it over her son, who is bobbling on his hands and trying to push himself forward.
“Do you look like your parents?” she asks.
I draw my knees to my chest. “A little like my mother,” I say. “She had blue eyes.”
“I wonder how far down the line genes go,” she says. “Your mother had blue eyes, and maybe her mother, and her mother. It could be this one gene that’s gone on for thousands of years just to get to you. You could be the last one to ever have that exact shade of blue.”
I don’t tell her that my brother has the same shade of blue, and that he’ll live longer than I will. Although, the way things are going with the explosions and everything, I wonder if he’ll even live long enough for me to get to him.
“How are you feeling?” I ask her. “Are you chilly? I could get you a sweater.”
“No,” she says. “I feel pretty good right now.”
It’s been nearly a week since she’s been discharged from the hospital, and she’s more self-sufficient than ever. She’s insisted on having her meals with us at the table, politely declining Linden’s offers to bring a tray to her in bed. She’s even been cleaning the house, though nobody asked her to and I’ve never known Cecily to be at all domestic. I found her polishing the mason jars, scrubbing the grit from the countertops, kicking a damp rag across the linoleum. She wrapped tinfoil around the radio antenna until the scratchy white noise turned to music. She’s memorized the songs, and she sings in low voices as she moves through the rooms. Sometimes I think I hear her singing in her sleep.
“You should get going soon,” she says to me now. “You’re not getting any younger.”
She knows that I’ve been dawdling. Trapped in the mansion, I could think of nothing but home. But now my home is gone. I’m frightened of what I might find when I’m reunited with Rowan. I’m frightened of not finding him at all. And perhaps what frightens me the most is accepting that once I leave Cecily and Linden, I’ll never see them again.
Time almost seems to stop here on Reed’s middle-of-nowhere piece of land. It’s oddly comforting.
I shield my eyes and squint to see Linden in the distance. He’s got one of the cars uncovered, and he and his uncle are gesturing to it as they talk.
“So that’s my ride,” I say.
“It’s like looking at an old picture,” she says, squinting.
“I didn’t know Linden could drive,” I say.
“Me either,” she says. “But I think he’s been practicing.”
She scoops Bowen into her lap. His eyes are full of clouds and sky. He reaches for my hair, and I hold up a lock of it for him to grab.
“I used to daydream how nice it’d be if you had one of your own,” Cecily says. “A baby, I mean. And Jenna, too.” She watches Reed lower himself under the car while Linden toys with things under the hood. “This isn’t where I thought we’d all be a year into our marriage. I thought we’d all be happy. Stupid, huh?”
Bowen tugs at my hair, his skin so soft that it sticks to the strands. “No, it isn’t,” I say. “Nobody could have predicted it would turn out like this.”
“What have I done, Rhine?” she says. “I brought a child into this world because Housemaster Vaughn convinced me he could save us. But Bowen is just as doomed as you and me.” Bowen clutches her shirt and throws his head back into the sunlight, utterly without a care. I heard once that humans are the only species aware of their own mortality, but I wonder if that’s true for babies. Would it even matter to Bowen that his life will end? Childhood is a long, long road, from which that dark whispering forest of death seems an impossible destination. “Who’s going to take care of him when Linden and I are gone?” Cecily says.
I don’t know how to answer her. Bowen is the child of a failed plan, just like all of us. “You and Linden will figure something out,” I say. “Things didn’t turn out how you’d have liked, but nothing ever does. You’ve found a way to manage so far, haven’t you? You’re still going.”
She shakes her head. “I hate that man,” she says. “He ruined everything.” Something dangerous and ugly flashes in her eyes. It’s only there for a moment, but she doesn’t look quite the same after that. And now I know: The winged bride that fluttered ahead of me is gone. She’s been conned, ruined, left for dead, and she’s not going to forgive any of it. She will soldier on, if only out of spite.
“Even if Vaughn had meant to save us, our marriage couldn’t have gone on like that forever,” I say.
Cecily watches the daylight shift in Bowen’s hair.
“I never wanted to live forever,” she says. “I just wanted enough time.”
Chapter 10
“EAT UP,” Reed says, plopping a pot of some type of gravy in the middle of the table.
Cecily peers into the murky gray liquid and frowns at a cube of meat that’s floating against the rim. “What was this in a past life?” she asks.
“Pigeons and a field rabbit,” Reed says. “Hunted them down myself.”
“He’s an excellent shot,” Linden says.
“Can you eat pigeons, though?” Cecily falls back into her chair, looking a mix of disgusted and curious.
“You can eat just about anything,” Reed says, dumping a ladleful into her bowl. Like me, Cecily has been sticking to the mealy apples and the most recognizable of the canned fruits and pickled vegetables. We haven’t been quite as brave as Linden, who swears his uncle’s ventures “aren’t so bad.”
I can tell that Cecily has more she wants to say, but she doesn’t, because this is the last meal we’ll all have together. In the morning I’m leaving. I’ve decided to return to New York to find Gabriel first. I can only hope he’s still with Claire. And I miss him. I miss him every time Linden and Cecily look at each other, or whisper behind a closed door, because it all reminds me that I’m not a part of what they have. I don’t belong here.
The pieces of my life can never seem to stay in one place.
Nobody talks. Reed has brought his work to the dinner table. It’s some kind of small electronic device that hisses and spits sparks at him.
Linden eats the gray liquid with quiet sips. I swirl my spoon around the inside of the bowl.
Cecily leaves the table and returns moments later with the radio, which roars with static interrupted by high squeals and the occasional muffled voice.
“Do you have to bring that to the table?” Linden says.
“Well, your uncle has that . . . thing.” She gestures to Reed’s project. “I just want a little dinner music, that’s all.”
Linden frowns, but he says nothing more. He knows how to choose his battles with Cecily, and he’s been much more forgiving since her brush with death. He endures the grating noise.
Finally she finds a station that comes through. There’s no music, though. It’s some kind of news report. Long before I was born, there used to be whole stations dedicated to music, but there haven’t been new songs for years, and the only music that plays is the filler between news broadcasts. Old cheerful songs about frivolous things that mean nothing to me. Cecily likes them, though; anything she can sing along to.
