Wither. Lauren DeStefano
freeze in place; the attendants are left holding blankets and pills and breathing machines. Linden is kneeling by Rose’s bed with his face buried in the mattress. He’s holding the long white stem of her arm, and I follow it up to her body, which doesn’t move and doesn’t breathe. Her gown, her face, is splattered with blood she must have been coughing up as she made those horrible sounds. But now an eerie silence fills the floor. It’s the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable islands, a silence that can be seen from space.
Cecily and Jenna come out of their bedrooms, and it’s so quiet that we hear the strangled noise in Linden’s throat. “Go away,” he murmurs. Then louder, “Go away!” It’s not until he smashes a vase against the wall that we all scatter. I end up on the elevator with Gabriel, and when the doors close behind us, I’m grateful.
There’s nothing for me to do but follow Gabriel to the kitchen; I’d get lost going anywhere else. I sit on a counter, nibbling on grapes while the cooks and the attendants talk as they go about their work. Gabriel leans against the counter beside me, polishing silverware. “I know you were fond of Rose,” he whispers to me, “but you won’t find much love for her down here. She gave the staff a hard time.”
As if in affirmation, the head cook shrieks, “My soup isn’t hot enough! Oh, now it’s too hot!” and makes dramatic spitting noises as a few others burst into a riot of laughter.
I won’t deny that this is painful to hear. I have witnessed Rose’s wrath on the help, but she never once raised her voice to me. Here in this place of syringes, sullen Governors, and looming Housemasters, she has been my only friend.
I say nothing, though. Our bond was a private thing, and none of these people, laughing at her expense, would understand anyway. I begin to pick grapes from the vine and turn them in my fingers one at a time before setting them back into the bowl. Gabriel steals glances at me as he works, and for a while it’s like that, with the rest of the kitchen chattering loudly, a million miles away. And upstairs, Rose is dead.
“She always had those candies,” I say wistfully. “They make your tongue change colors.”
“They’re called June Beans,” Gabriel says.
“Are there more of them?”
“Sure—tons,” he says. “She’d have me order them by the crate. Here …” He leads me to a pantry between the built-in refrigerator and the wall of stoves. Inside there are wooden crates overflowing with the shimmering wrappers in every color. I can smell their sugar, the artificial dyes. She ordered them, and here they wait to be poured into her crystal bowl and savored.
My longing must be all over my face, because Gabriel is putting some of them into a paper bag for me. “Have all you want. They’ll only go to waste.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Hey, you, blondie,” the head cook calls to me. She’s a first generation with greasy hair tied into a graying bun. “Shouldn’t you get upstairs before your husband catches you down here?”
“No,” I say. “He won’t know I’m gone. He doesn’t notice me.”
“He notices you,” Gabriel says. I look at him, unbelieving, but he has turned his blue eyes away from me.
One of the cooks opens the door and tosses out a pot of water, because the sink is in use by the muttering head chef. A gust of cold air pushes the hair from my face. I see a flash of blue sky and green earth, then it’s gone. There are no key cards, no locks. So this is why the wives aren’t allowed to leave their floor; not every part of the mansion is meant to keep us trapped.
“Do you get to go outside?” I ask Gabriel in a low voice.
He gives me a rueful smile. “Just to do yard work or take in deliveries. Nothing terribly exciting.”
“What’s out there?”
“Eternity,” he says with a small laugh. “Gardens. A golf course. Maybe a few other things. I’ve never been in charge of the yard work, so I don’t know. I’ve never seen the end of it.”
“A whole world of trouble is what’s out there for you, blondie,” the head cook says. “Your place is up on that frilly floor of yours, lounging in satin sheets and painting your toenails. Now go on, before you get us all in trouble.”
“Come on,” Gabriel says. “I’ll take you back up.”
Back on the wives’ floor, Rose’s door is shut, and all the attendants and domestics have gone. Cecily is sitting alone in the hallway, playing some sort of game with yarn entwined around her fingers. She was singing to herself, but when I step out of the elevator, she stops and watches me cross to my room.
“What were you doing with that attendant?” she asks, once Gabriel is gone.
She hasn’t seen the paper bag of candies, and I tuck it into my nightstand along with my ivy leaf, which I’ve pressed between the pages of a romance novel I took from the library. There are so many books that I don’t think anyone will miss this one.
I turn just as Cecily appears in my doorway, waiting for an answer. We’re sister wives now, and whatever that may mean in other mansions, I don’t feel as though I can trust her. I also am not fond of her demanding tone, always impatient, always asking questions.
“I wasn’t doing anything with him,” I say.
I sit on my bed, and she raises her eyebrows, perhaps waiting for me to ask her to join me. Sister wives can’t enter one another’s bedrooms without permission. It’s one of the few privacies I have, and I won’t relinquish it.
There’s nothing to stop her from talking, though. “Lady Rose is dead now,” she says. “Linden is free to visit us anytime.”
“Where is he?” I can’t help but ask.
Cecily examines the yarn entwined around her fingers, looking displeased with it or the situation. “Oh, he’s in her bedroom. He made everybody else leave. I knocked, but he won’t come out.”
I go to my dressing table and begin to brush my hair. I’m trying to look busy so that I don’t have to make conversation, and there isn’t much else to do in this room but stare at the wall. Cecily lingers for a while in the doorway, idly twisting in ways that make her skirt ripple. “I didn’t tell our husband that you went off with that attendant,” she says. “I could have, but I didn’t.”
And then she skips away, a trail of bright red yarn following after her.
That night, Linden comes to my bedroom.
“Rhine?” he says softly, just a shadow in my doorway.
It’s late, and I have been lying alone in the darkness for hours, steeling myself against what I knew from the start would be a long awful night. Though she’s gone, I have been listening for the sound of Rose at the end of the hall, yelling at an attendant, calling for me to come brush her hair and talk to her about the world. The silence is maddening, and perhaps that’s why, rather than feigning sleep or denying him, I open the sheets for Linden.
He closes the door and climbs into my bed. I feel his cool, slender fingers encase my cheeks as he settles beside me. He advances for what will be my first kiss, but his lips fail. He sobs, and I feel the heat of his skin and his breath. “Rose,” he says. It is a choked, frightened sound. He buries his face in my shoulder and loses himself in tears.
I understand grief. After my parents’ death many of my nights resembled this. So just this once, I won’t resist him. I allow him to find sanctuary in my bed, and I let him cling to me as the worst of it comes up.
His screams are muffled by my nightgown. Terrible sounds. I feel them vibrating deep in my bones. This goes on for what feels like hours, and then his breathing becomes ragged but even, his grip on my nightgown eases, and I know he’s asleep.
I spend the remainder of the night drifting in and out of a fitful