Sever. Lauren DeStefano
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.
“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