Sever. Lauren DeStefano
absurd for him to have made it up. “How will you get it out?” I say. “How will you even start it without being poisoned by the fumes?”
“Haven’t gotten to that part yet,” he says. “But no matter; she’s not ready to fly.”
I stare at it, and for some reason my shoulders shake and I start to laugh. It’s the first real laugh I’ve felt in days. Or weeks. Or months, maybe. Reed is either a genius or completely mad, or both. But if he’s mad, then I am too, because I love this airplane. I’ve never seen one up close before, and the stories I’ve heard never prepared me for the power such a magnificent thing implies. I want to climb inside of it. I want it to carry me up, the grass getting greener and greener the farther away it becomes.
Reed is grinning when he tugs the handle of the curved door. It looks like it once belonged to a car and was melted into shape. With a horrible rusty noise, it opens from the top, like a curled finger rising to point at me.
The door opens to a small cockpit. There are monitors and buttons and what appear to be two half-circle steering wheels. “The supply room’s in the passenger cabin,” Reed says, pointing me to a curtain that serves as a door.
The passenger cabin is all beige and red, like a mouth. It seems almost human. When I was bedridden in the mansion, Linden read a story to me that was about a scientist named Frankenstein who created a man from the body parts of the dead. Somehow Frankenstein gave this creation a pulse and made it breathe. I imagine it must have looked like this odd assemblage of pieces.
The plane is a lot bigger than it looks from the outside. The ceiling is high enough that Reed, who’s taller than me, can nearly stand up straight. There’s some room to walk around. The seats are red, mounted to the wall. There are four of them, in pairs of two, facing each other. The carpet is beige and stained, like the walls.
What Reed calls a supply room is actually a closet. Opening its door reduces the passenger cabin by half. “Needs to be organized,” Reed says, standing at the curtain that separates the cockpit from the passenger cabin. He watches as I open one of the cabinets. Shoe boxes tumble out at me and spill their contents onto my shoes. “I was thinking that’d be your job.”
It’s easy, repetitive work. Sorting medical equipment apart from the dehydrated snacks and labeling their boxes. Reed works on the outside of the plane. I hear him banging parts into place and smoothing them down, trying to blend all the pieces together. He says he’s going to paint it when he’s done. He says it’ll be beautiful. I think it already is.
I open another box, and it’s full of cloth handkerchiefs. I recognize them immediately. They’re exactly like the ones at the mansion: plain white, with a single red sharp-leafed flower embroidered onto them. Gabriel gave me a handkerchief with this pattern, and I kept it for the remainder of my time at the mansion. The same flower that marks the iron gate.
“Oh, those?” Reed says when I ask him about them. He doesn’t look away from his work. He’s sitting on one of the wings, pressing down a sheet of copper and using a screwdriver to mark where the screws will go. “I thought they’d make good bandages; put them with the first aid stuff.”
“Where did they come from?” I ask.
“They used to belong to the boarding school,” he says. “A ton of things were left behind when my parents bought the building—handkerchiefs, blankets, things like that.”
“But what kind of flower is it?” I say.
“It’s a lotus,” he says. “Doesn’t look exactly like one, if you ask me, but that’s the only logical thing it could be. The school was called the Charles Lotus Academy for Girls.”
“Charles Lotus? As in, his name was Lotus?”
“Yep. Now get back to work making things sparkle. I’m not letting you live here eating up all the apples and oxygen for free, you know.”
The rest of the day is a malaise of chores. I pack the handkerchiefs away and bury them at the bottom of all the medical supplies. I don’t want to ever see them again. It’s my fault for hoping they symbolized something important. For believing anything that comes from the mansion could mean anything good.
I take a shower and go to bed early. The sky is still pink, undercooked. I bury myself beneath the blanket. It isn’t very thick; I shiver most nights, but right now the blanket feels like the heaviest thing in the world. It comforts me. I don’t just want to sleep; I want to be crushed down until I disappear.
In the morning there are voices. Something hissing and spitting on the griddle. Footsteps are pounding up the steps, and a voice calls after them, “Wait!” but the footsteps don’t comply. My door is pushed open, and there’s Cecily. The sunlight touches every part of her, making her into an overexposed photograph. Her smile floats ahead of her, a double bright line. “Surprise,” she says.
I sit up, trying to force consciousness back into my brain. “What are you—How did you get here?”
She hops onto the edge of my bed, jostling me. “We took a cab,” she says excitedly. “I’d never been in one before. It smelled like frozen garbage, and it cost a ton of money.”
I rub my eyes, trying to comprehend what she’s saying. “You took a cab?”
“Housemaster Vaughn has the limo,” she says. “He’s at some conference for the weekend. So we came to see you.”
“We?”
“Me and Linden.” She frowns at me. “You don’t look well,” she says. “You didn’t contract sepsis from this place, did you? It’s so filthy.”
“I like it here,” I say, collapsing back onto the pillow, pretending not to notice that it reeks of mustiness. I wonder who slept here before me. They probably died last century.
“It’s worse than the orphanage was,” Cecily says. She pats my leg as she stands, and heads for the door. “Anyway, get up, come downstairs. We brought you things.”
I take my time about getting dressed after she goes. I’m in no hurry to see the emptiness in Linden’s eyes when he looks at me.
I guess I’ve forgotten to brush my hair, judging by the way everyone looks at me when I enter the kitchen. And Cecily kindly informs me that my shirt is inside out.
“She hasn’t been eating,” Reed says apologetically. “I tried waving the fork around her head and everything.”
I drop into a chair opposite Linden. He’s holding Bowen, who is reaching for the things on the shelves. He wants the jars that have caught the morning light; I think he believes they hold little pieces of the sun.
“Of course she hasn’t been eating,” Cecily says. She stands behind me and gently works the tangles from my hair. “She doesn’t want to die.”
Reed lights his cigar and bumps Linden’s shoulder with his fist. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be blessed by the presence of your wives.”
Cecily drops my hair. She reaches across the table and snatches the cigar right out of Reed’s teeth and squishes the ignited tip into the table.
“What the hell!” Reed snaps. The house rattles. Bowen stops reaching.
“I’m pregnant, you moron,” Cecily says. “Don’t you know anything about gestation? And in case you’re blind, there is also a five-month-old baby sitting right next to you.”
Reed stares at her, aghast. And then he narrows his eyes as he stands and leans forward across the table, until his nose is an inch from hers. And I really think he’s about to strangle her—Linden tenses, ready to stop him—but Reed only growls and says, “I don’t like you, kid.”
She presses her hand to her chest. “Break my heart,” she says, spins around, and makes her exit.
Reed rescues the smoldering cigar and tries to relight it, grunting with each failed spark. “Will never know what you see