Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy) Read online

  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.

  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?

  “But it will be a while yet before she’s lucid,” the nurse says. And suddenly—I don’t know why—his name tag makes sense. Isaac. The whole world reemerges from the darkness that had been closing in around me.

  My heart starts pounding in my ears, my throat. I try to hang on to what’s being said now.

  Somewhere, on a table in a sterile room, my sister wife took in a sharp breath. It happened just as they were drawing the sleeves from their watches to call a time of death.

  Her heart forced blood out from her chest, back to her brain, her fingertips, her cheeks.

  Cecily. My Cecily. Always the fighter.

  A squeaking noise escapes through my teeth, joy and relief.

  We’re guided down a hallway, our footsteps echoing around us at all angles like claps.

  Linden and I huddle together to see her through the small window in her door. We can’t go in yet. She can’t be agitated. Her body is still working through the shock of losing a pregnancy in its second trimester; all of this is fascinating to the promise of research, which is what this hospital is all about. The doctors want to know everything about the new generations, and such a violent miscarriage invites all sorts of interest. There are monitors recording her heart rate. The nurse is explaining that her temperature will be checked every hour. They’re taking thorough notes on any slight change in her body chemistry.

  But I don’t see the intrigue in any of those things. I don’t see more research fodder. All I see is my sister wife, barely hanging on.

  There’s a plastic mask over her mouth, misting with her breaths. Her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes lazily rove along the wires that connect the machines to her body. Her heartbeats are small green bursts on the monitor. She looks so alone and lost in her dreams.

  I press my hand to the glass, and the ghost of my frowning reflection is superimposed over her bed.

  “Will she be all right?” Linden asks. I don’t think he’s heard any of the nurse’s rambling.

  “You’ll be able to see her in the morning,” the nurse says.

  Old tears still glisten on Linden’s face. His lips move, sending inaudible prayers to phantom gods. The only words I can make out are “thank you.” He takes my hand and leads me to the lobby, where we will wait for the morning light to come and fill Cecily’s hair with its usual fire.

  Why did this happen? Any number of reasons. She’s young, the first generation doctor tells Linden. And, superior genes or not, pregnancies in rapid succession can take a toll on a young girl. I can tell he’s being disapproving. So many of the first generations hate what has happened to their chi
ldren and their children’s children. They look at us and see what we should have been, not what we are.

  Doctors speak in impersonal, clinical terms: fetus, infection, placenta, hypothesis, patient. This textbook approach does wonders for taking the emotional edge out of it. The most likely hypothesis here is that the fetus has been dead for days, and, left unchecked, an infection spread through her blood like a wildfire. Eventually her body caught up and worked to expel the source of the problem, and she went into labor. She started hemorrhaging, and, finally, she went into shock. While we were trying to keep her awake in the car, her body was already shutting down. We were inevitably going to lose her without proper treatment. It all sounds so official and possible the way the doctor explains it. Like I’m reading one of my parents’ lab reports.

  It’s that simple. It ends there, with no mention of the fact that if she hadn’t mustered the strength to get out of bed and drag herself down the hall, it would have been too late when we found her. How much time would we have squandered, talking about annulments and fraternal twins as she died alone at the other end of the hall? I file that thought as far back into my brain as I can, out of sight.

  “I don’t understand,” Linden says. “There were no signs.”

  “She was flushed all the time,” I volunteer, remembering how hot her skin was when we shared a bed. And then I run through the checklist: how heavily she breathed and snored, the way her bones seemed to creak when she moved, the bags under her eyes. Linden is surprised by it. He says he had no idea it was that severe. This doesn’t surprise me. Even outside of the mansion, the full picture is lost on him. He sees what he’s been taught to see. I can’t fault him for that.

  Later, when we’re alone in the lobby, he says, “This is my fault.”

  “No,” I say. “Of course it’s not.”

  He’s trembling. I touch his arm.

  “She was just so sad when Jenna fell ill,” he says. “The only time she was happy at all was with Bowen. My father convinced me that another baby would make her better.”

  “What about you?” I ask. “Was a baby what you wanted?”

  He looks at his lap, and the word comes out so small. “No.” He rubs tears from the side of his face. “I just didn’t know how else to make it better.”

  Poor Linden. He has had, at once, four wives, whom he adored and maybe even loved. But we frightened him, us girls, with our intensity, the weight of our sadness and the sharpness of our hearts. Rose knew him well. She kept her misery a secret and found a way to love him. Jenna and I hid from him; we smiled across the dinner table, let him sleep beside us, and we mourned when we were alone. But Cecily could only love him the way she knows how: all at once. Everything rushing up to the surface. I’ve seen her sadness, and it’s a frightening thing. As her stomach grew with Bowen, I saw it begin, but it was so much worse after she gave birth and after Jenna was gone.

  And then I was gone too.

  Linden only wants for Cecily to be happy. He showers her with affection and pretty things. But all the while he knows that even he will have to leave her.

  The mattress is at a slight incline when we’re brought in to see my sister wife. Her eyes are murky. The infection brought on by the miscarriage left her with a fever, and she’s glistening with sweat. Her lips and cheeks are hot pink. Her hair is in tangles.

  She looks ravaged. Chewed up and spit out.

  Linden stands beside me in the doorway, and he fumbles for my hand but then doesn’t grab it. I know he’s trying to respect the annulment, to get used to us being unmarried. But in this moment I wish he would hold on to me. I need his strength and he needs mine, the way it was before.

  “Linden?” Cecily croaks.

  With that, he rushes to her. “I’m here, love,” he says, and kisses the top of her head, her nose, her lips with a fury of affection that says he’s so glad to have her back that he can’t get enough of her at once. It’s the kind of attention she lives for, but she’s so defeated that all she manages is a weary smile.

  “You weren’t here when I woke up,” she says. “I was worried about you.”

  Linden laughs shakily. “You were worried?” he says. “You gave me the scare of my life last night.”

  “Did I?” She’s trying to blink the lethargy from her eyes. The doctor told us she wouldn’t be very alert and that she wouldn’t be talking much, but he clearly underestimated her resolve. “Where’s Bowen?”

  “Bowen is all right,” Linden says, and puts another quick kiss on her lips. “My uncle took him back to the house.”

  “He’ll be hungry,” she says. She tries to push herself upright, but Linden holds her shoulders down.

  “Bowen is being taken care of, Cecily.” His voice is stern. “You’ll see him later. Right now you need to rest.”

  “Don’t order me around like I’m a child,” she says.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, taking her hands. “You’re not a child.”

  A child is exactly what she is, but she hides it so well sometimes that even I forget.

  But it’s no matter what I think. Husband and wife are in their own universe right now, and I’m not a part of their conversation. For the first time I feel the full effect of the annulment.

  She looks at me with cloudy eyes. “You were right about everything.”

  “Shh.” I touch her arm. “You should be asleep.”

  “Who do we think we are,” she says to Linden, “to have children when we can’t cure our own curse?”

  Though her voice is calm, her lip is quivering.

  “We’ll talk later, love,” Linden coos. “You aren’t thinking clearly.”

  “It’s as clear as crystal,” she says. Her voice is eerie and hoarse. Tears are streaking down her temples.

  There’s pain in Linden’s eyes, though I’m not sure if it’s because he’s worried or because he believes what she’s saying. He says something into her ear in a low voice, and it calms her. She lets him dab at her runny nose with his sleeve. And she has put up a good fight, but the fever and the exhaustion and the drugs are overpowering her.

  “I can go back to the house and check on Bowen,” I offer lamely.

  “No.” Her voice is fading as she closes her eyes. “No, no, no. Stay where I can see you. It isn’t safe out there.”

  She’s delirious, but there might be some truth to that still.

  “That’s enough now.” Linden draws the outline of her eyelids with his finger. There’s a nearly imperceptible tremor in his biceps. “Get some rest. We’ll be right here.”

  Her eyebrows raise, but her eyelids stay down. She mumbles, “Promise?”

  “Yes,” he tells her, desperation in the word. Of course he won’t leave her. After all this, I don’t believe he’ll ever let her out of his sight again. She knows that; she only needed to hear him say it.

  True to his word, he doesn’t leave after she falls asleep. He just sits there, smoothing back her hair and frowning.

  I stay in a chair on the opposite side of the bed, invisible. I don’t belong here, but I have no place else to go tonight. I don’t want her to wake in the night and realize I’m gone and go into a panic.

  As though Linden has been reading my mind, he says, “Thank you for staying.” He doesn’t take his eyes off Cecily.

  “I’ll leave when she’s stronger,” I say.

  “I meant what I said before. I want you to be safe.”

  “I know,” I say. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  “Just the same, I’d appreciate a good-bye this time.”

  He ventures a glance at me, and he smiles the way he did the morning after Rose’s death. That morning the smile faded the instant he realized I wasn’t her. It stays now. He understands that I’m not a ghost. I’m a girl, and one who hasn’t always been especially kind to him.

  “I promise I’ll say good-bye this time,” I say. I feel certain I’ll cry if I say anything more.

  I listen to the monitor steadily relaying m
y sister wife’s pulse, and I think of how far away Gabriel is. I don’t know that I could ever love him the way that Linden and Cecily are in love, or the way Linden and Rose were. I never saw the point in exhausting so much emotion on something there are so few years to enjoy. I never planned on getting married, though in weak and foolish moments I let myself pretend there would be time for such things.

  But this surge of longing that comes to me now—is it love? I’ve never felt so alone.

  We can change so many times in our lives. We’re born into a family, and it’s the only life we can imagine, but it changes. Buildings collapse. Fires burn. And the next second we’re someplace else entirely, going through different motions and trying to keep up with this new person we’ve become.

  I was somebody’s daughter once, and then I was somebody’s wife. I’m neither of those things now. This sullen boy sitting before me is not my husband, and the girl he’s fretting over isn’t me, will never be me.

  LINDEN LOOKS at the clock mounted over the door.

  “Maybe you should go to the cafeteria,” he tells me.

  “Do you need me to get you something?” I ask.

  He shakes his head, watches the motion of Cecily’s chest as she draws a troubled breath. She’s been asleep for hours. “My father will be here soon,” he says. “It’s best if he doesn’t see you. He’s rushing over from a conference in Clearwater. He said it would take him a couple of hours, but that was this morning.”

  My blood goes cold. “You called your father?”

  “Of course.” He says this louder than he perhaps meant to, because Cecily’s eyes open. She stares at us through a haze, and I’m not sure if she’s awake. Linden pushes the hair from her forehead and leans close and says, “You’re getting the best possible care. My father will see to it.”

  At that her pupils dilate. I can see her immediate fight to regain awareness. It’s like watching a person that has fallen through the ice and has nothing to grab for. “No,” she says. The acceleration of her heart makes the beeping on the monitor intensify. “Linden, no. Please, no.” She looks to me for help, and I grip her hand.