Sever. Lauren DeStefano
at home with me, that is.”
The silence is tight and unnatural. I grip the blanket in my fists and say, “Are you and Cecily going back there?”
“Of course,” he says.
He still won’t believe me about everything that happened in the basement. About Deirdre. I vaguely remember whispering about her in my medicated delirium, and about Jenna’s body hiding away in some freezer. He rubbed my arm, whispering words that sounded like moth bodies flying into glass windows. Nonsensical things I tried to cling to. Maybe, lying there, I was so pitiful that he felt no choice but to love me. Now he says I can take care of myself. Now I’m the liar trying to destroy the perfect world his father set up for him, who ran away, broke everything. And it’s getting late, and it’s time to part ways.
But the words come out of me anyway. “Don’t go.”
He looks at me.
“Don’t go,” I say. “And don’t take Cecily back there. I know you don’t believe me, but I have a terrible feeling that—”
“I can take care of Cecily,” he says. “I would have taken care of you, too. If I’d known you were so worried about my father.”
Bowen has fallen asleep against Linden’s chest, and Linden shifts him to the other arm. “My father thought that if you didn’t want to be married to me, he could have you. It’s because of your eyes. He wanted to study them, and he took it too far. He can be that way.” His eyebrows knit together, and he looks at his feet, struggling to make sense of what he’s saying, to force logic where there is none. “He isn’t the monster you think he is. He just—he gets so into his work that he forgets people are people. He gets carried away.”
“Carried away?” I spit back. “He drove needles into my eyes, Linden! He murdered a newborn—”
“Don’t you think I know my own father?” he interrupts. “I’d trust him before I’d believe anything you say. You couldn’t even do me the dignity of telling the truth.”
There was a night, months ago, when I almost did. It was after the expo. I was half-drunk, my hair sticky and perfumed and teased, the bed tipping under me. He climbed over my body, and he kissed me. I could hear tree branches murmuring to one another in the moonlight. And Linden said, so close that I could feel his breath on my eyelashes, But I don’t know who you are. I don’t know where you came from. His eyes were bright. I wanted so badly to tell him, but something about that entire night seemed so beautiful, so bizarre, that I didn’t trust it with my secrets. Or maybe I just wanted to play along, to wear his ring and be his wife for a little while before the magic took the light from the moon.
Now I say nothing. There’s no brightness in his eyes for me.
“If you didn’t love me,” he says, “you should have said it. I would have let you go.”
“You might have,” I admit. “But not your father.”
“My father has never been in charge of what I do,” he says.
“Your father has always been in charge of what you do,” I say.
He looks at me, and I stop breathing. Something comes surging up behind his eyes, some argument of love or vengeance. Something that’s been building every second I’ve been away. And I want it, whatever it is. Want to hold it in both hands like his leaping heart that’s been ripped from his chest. Want to warm it with my body heat.
He says, “When Cecily comes back, tell her I’ll be waiting by the car.”
Then he’s gone.
“I don’t want to leave you here,” Cecily says when I relay the message. “This place looks like it could give you cancer or something.” She’s remembering that word, “cancer,” from a soap opera Jenna used to watch. It’s a disease that was eliminated from our genetics.
“I don’t think cancer was something you could catch,” I tell her.
“That’s my point,” she says.
We must be making too much noise, because Reed bangs on the ceiling.
Cecily huffs and sits on the bed next to me. After a few seconds she puts her arm around my shoulders and stares at her stomach. At four months along she’s already looking tired and swollen. Her cheeks and fingertips are flushed. Her face and hair are damp from where she’s splashed herself with cold water, something she does after a bout of nausea.
“Have you been sick a lot?” I ask her.
“It’s not so bad,” she says softly. “Linden takes care of me.”
I’m worried about her. I wonder if it has even occurred to her or to Linden that she hardly had a rest between pregnancies. Vaughn surely knows how unsafe this is, and he allowed it, which worries me even more. I’m scared that she’ll enter that dark hall, descend the stairs, and be forever in Vaughn’s clutches. I think she’s scared too, because she doesn’t move. I don’t know how much time passes before Linden comes looking for her.
“Ready to go?” He stands in the doorway, mostly in shadow.
“I’m staying the night,” she says.
They have some sort of conversation with their eyes. A husband-and-wife thing—something I could never quite get the hang of. Cecily wins, because Linden picks up the diaper bag and says, “I’ll be back for you in the morning, first thing.”
A few minutes later, through the window, we watch the limo drive out of sight.
The mattress is lumpy and hard, and Cecily, who is back to snoring the way she did in her later trimesters, spends the night thrashing and turning. She kicks me so many times that I eventually take a pillow and settle on the floor. But every position on the hard wood aggravates the recovering gash in my thigh. In my dreams, it bleeds and seeps through the floorboards, and Reed pounds on the ceiling because blood is raining down on his work. The engine on the table comes to life. It pulses and breathes.
In the darkness Cecily whispers my name. At first I think it’s part of my dream, but she persists, increasing in frequency and intensity until I say, “What?”
“Why are you on the floor?” I can just make out her face and arm leaning over the mattress, tangle of hair coming over one shoulder.
“You were kicking,” I say.
“I’m sorry. Come back up. I promise I won’t anymore.”
She makes room for me, and I cram in beside her. Her skin is sticky and hot. “You shouldn’t wear socks to bed,” I tell her. “They keep heat in. Last time you were pregnant, you always got feverish at night.”
Her legs move under the blanket as she kicks her socks off. It takes her a while to get comfortable, and I can tell she’s trying not to disturb me, so I don’t complain as I’m knocked around the mattress. Eventually she settles on her side, facing me.
“Did you get sick earlier, when you went to use the bathroom?” I ask.
“Don’t tell Linden,” she says, yawning. “He’s squeamish about that stuff. He worries.”
That’s to be expected after what happened with Rose’s pregnancy. But it’s not as though I can tell her that. And soon I find, despite my worries, that I’m exhausted enough to fall asleep.
Just as I’m beginning to dream, she says, “I think about those other girls in the van with us. The ones who were killed.”
My dreams fade away from me, and I wish desperately that they’d return. Even a nightmare would be welcome over that memory. It’s not something my sister wives and I ever talked about, the odd and horrific thing that bonded us to one another. I especially wouldn’t expect to hear about it from Cecily, who has always wanted to be the happy housewife.
“I just wanted you to know that,” she says. “I’m not a monster.”