Wither

That’s when Cecily’s domestic, Elle, comes bursting into the room. “There you are,” she cries at Gabriel. “You need to hurry to the kitchen and bring Lady Rose something for her cough.”

I can hear her coughing now, at the end of the long hallway. It’s become such a fixture in this place that I don’t always notice it. Gabriel hurries to his feet, and I close the book, make a motion to follow him out. “Don’t,” he says, stopping me at the doorway. “It’s better if you stay in here until this passes.”

But past his shoulder I can see an unusual chaos. Domestics are scrambling past one another. First generation attendants are coming out of the elevator carrying all sorts of bottles, and a machine that resembles the humidifier my parents put in my bedroom the winter I caught pneumonia. There’s an air of futility about it all, and Gabriel senses it too. I can tell by the look in his eyes.

“Stay here,” he says. Of course I follow him into the hallway. And it’s so frightening out here that I want to follow him into the elevator, which probably isn’t allowed, but I’m beyond caring about that. Gabriel swipes his key card, and the doors to the elevator are just opening when it all stops. Simply stops. The domestics 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 sleep of my own. I dream of gunshots and gray coats and Rose’s mouth changing color. Eventually I fall into a more substantial sleep, and when the turning of the doorknob awakens me, it’s morning. Soft light and the sounds of early birds fill the room.

Gabriel comes in, holding my usual breakfast tray, and stops in his tracks when he sees Linden in my bed. Sometime in the night Linden turned away from me, and he is now snoring softly with his arm dangling over the mattress’s edge. I silently catch Gabriel’s eyes and bring a finger to my lips. Then with the same finger I point to my dressing table.

It’s impossible to read Gabriel’s expression as he sets my breakfast where I’ve indicated; he somehow looks as wounded as the day when he was limping and bruised. I’m not sure what’s causing him to look that way until I imagine how this must seem to him. Rose is dead not even a day and I’ve already replaced her. But what does that matter to him? He said himself none of the attendants really liked Rose anyway.

I mouth a silent thank-you for the breakfast, and he nods and leaves. Later, perhaps when he sees me in the library, I’ll explain what happened. Rose’s death is starting to sink in, and I have a feeling that very soon I’ll need someone I can talk to.

I’m careful about getting out of bed. Best to let Linden sleep. He’s had such a rough night, and I’ve had better ones myself. I quietly slide the drawer of my nightstand open and retrieve one of the June Beans from the paper bag and head to the window. It still won’t open, but the ledge is wide enough to be used as a seat.

I sit and watch the garden as I suck on the candy, which is as green as the mowed lawn beneath my window. From here I have a perfect view of the pool, and I see someone in an attendant uniform cutting into the water with a long net. The water catches the sunlight and breaks into diamond shapes. I think of the ocean that can be seen along the piers in New York. Long ago there used to be beaches there, but now there are concrete slabs that stop where the ocean begins. You can put five dollars in a rusty telescope and see all the way to the Statue of Liberty or one of the gift shop islands beaming with bright lights and key chains and photo opportunities. You can take a double-deck ferry along the pier while a tour guide talks about all the changes to the cityscape over the centuries. You can slip beneath the railing, take off your shoe, and stick your bare foot into the bleary water that’s ripe with salt, and fish that aren’t safe to eat—fishermen catch them for sport and throw them back.

I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I’m touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again. Somewhere beneath it lie the ruins of colorful Japan, and Rose’s favorite, India, the nations that could not survive. This lone continent is all that’s left, and the darkness of the water is so mysterious, so alluring, that I find this bright pool water to be too frivolous. Clean and sparkling and safe. I wonder if Linden has ever touched the ocean. I wonder if he knows that this colorful paradise is a lie.

Did Rose ever leave this place? She talked about the world as though she’d seen it for herself, but how much farther than the orange groves did she go? I hope that now she’s someplace with thriving islands and continents, with plenty of languages to learn and elephants to ride.

“Good-bye,” I whisper, turning the candy around with my tongue. The taste is like peppermint. I hope she has plenty of June Beans, too.

There’s a gasp from the bed, and Linden flips onto his back, propped up by his elbows. His curls are disheveled, his eyes puffy and confused. For a moment we look at each other, and I can see him struggling to focus. He looks so far away that I wonder if he’s still asleep. In the night there were times when he opened his eyes wide and looked at me, and then he’d drift off again, muttering about pruning shears and the danger of bees.

Now there’s a weak smile coming to his lips. “Rose?” he croaks.

But then he must wake a bit more, because he looks devastated. I stare out the window, unsure what to do with myself. A part of me feels sorry for him, but stronger than my pity is my hatred. For this place, for the gunshots that haunt my dreams. Why should I console him, simply because I have his dead wife’s blond hair? I’ve lost the people I love too. Who is there to console me?

After a long pause he says, “Your mouth is green.”

He sits up. “Where did you get the June Beans?” he asks.

I can’t tell him the truth. I don’t want to risk getting Gabriel into trouble again. “Rose gave them to me. The other day, from the bowl in her room.”

“She was fond of you,” he says.

I don’t want to discuss Rose with him. The night is over, and I won’t be his solace any longer. In the night when we were both vulnerable, I was more forgiving, but now in the daylight everything is clear again. I’m still his prisoner.

But I can’t be completely cold. I can’t let my contempt show if he’s ever to trust me. “Do you swim?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “You like the water?”

When I was a child, safe in my parents’ care, I would swim in the indoor pool at the local gym, diving for rings and trying to best my brother in somersault competitions. It’s been years since I last went. The world has become too dangerous since then. After the city’s only research lab was bombed, destroying jobs and hope for the antidote in one fell swoop, things deteriorated rapidly. There was once a time when science was optimistic about an antidote. But years turned to decades, and new generations are still dying. And hope, like all of us, is dying fast.

“A little,” I say.

“I’ll have to show you the pool, then,” Linden says. “You’ve never experienced anything like this one.”

The pool doesn’t look very special from here, but I think of the effects the bath soaps have on my skin, and the glitter that surrounded Cecily’s dress without falling, and I understand that not everything in Linden Ashby’s world is as it seems.

“I’d like that,” I say. This is the truth. I would very much like to be out there where the attendant is skimming the water. It’s not freedom, but I bet it’s close enough that I’d be able to pretend.

He’s still watching me, though I’m acting interested in the pool.

“Would it be asking too much,” he says, “for you to come sit with me for a while?”

Yes. Yes, it would be too much. It’s too much that I’m here at all. I wonder if Linden is aware of the unfair power he has over me. If I express even a fraction of my disgust, I’ll never leave this floor again in my life. I have no choice but to oblige.

I find a comfortable in-between by carrying my breakfast tray to the bed. I set it between us, and I sit cross-legged before him. “Breakfast came in while you were asleep,” I say. “You should try to eat something.” I lift the lid over the food, and there are waffles dotted with fresh blueberries, far bluer than the ones in the grocery stores back home. Rowan would say not to trust anything so bright. I wonder if these berries were grown in one of the many gardens, if this is what fruit used to look like before it started being harvested in chemical soil.

Linden picks up a waffle in his hand and studies it. I know that look in his eyes. When my parents died, I stared at my meals the same way. Like food was paste, like there was no point to it. Before I can stop myself, I pick up a blueberry and bring it to his lips. I just can’t stand to be reminded of that pitiful sadness.

He looks surprised, but he eats it, smiles a little.

I bring him another blueberry, and this time he puts his hand on my wrist. It isn’t a forceful grip, like I’d expected. It’s tenuous, and it lasts only as long as it takes him to swallow the blueberry in his mouth. Then he clears his throat.

We’ve been married for nearly a month, but this is the first time since our wedding that I’ve been able to look at him. Perhaps it’s the grief, the pink swollen skin around his eyes that makes him seem harmless. Even kind.

“There. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” I say, and take a blueberry for myself. It tastes sweeter than the ones I’m used to. I take the waffle out of his hand and break it in half—a piece for each of us.

He eats, taking small bites and swallowing like it’s painful. It’s like that for a while, with only the sound of the birds outside and us chewing.

When the plate is cleaned, I hand him the glass of orange juice. He takes it in the numb way he’s taken the rest of the meal, gulping methodically, his heavy eyelashes pointed down. All this sugar will be good for him, I think.

I shouldn’t care how he feels. But it will be good for him.

“Rhine?” There’s a knock at my door. It’s Cecily. “Are you up? What’s this word? A-M-N-I-O-C-E-N-T-E-SI-S.”

“Amniocentesis,” I call back, pronouncing it for her.

“Oh. Did you know that’s how they test babies for defects?” she says.

I do know. My parents worked in a laboratory that analyzed everything about fetuses and newborns.

“That’s nice,” I say.

“Come out,” she says. “There’s a robin’s nest outside my window. I want to show you. The eggs are really pretty!” She’s rarely interested in seeing me, but I’ve noticed she doesn’t like when doors are closed to her.

“After I get dressed,” I say, and listen for the silence that means she’s left. I pick up the tray and bring it to my dressing table, wondering how long Linden is going to stay. I busy myself by brushing my hair, fastening it back with clips. I open my mouth and see that the green is gone from my tongue.

Linden leans back on his elbow, picking at a stray thread on his cuff and looking pensive. After a while he gets up. “I’ll be sure someone comes for the tray,” he says, and leaves.

I take a warm bath, soaking in the layer of pink foam that floats on the water. I’ve gotten used to the crackling sensation the bubbles leave on my skin. I dry my hair and dress in jeans, and a sweater that feels like heaven to touch. All Deirdre’s work. I am always shimmering in the things she makes me. I roam the hallway for a while, expecting Cecily to find me and lead me to her bird’s nest, but she’s nowhere to be found.

“Governor Linden took her out to one of the gardens,” Jenna says when I find her, thumbing through the catalog cards in the library. Her voice sounds clearer today, less sullen. She even looks at me after she speaks, purses her lips like she’s deciding whether to say more. Then she looks back to the cards.

“Why do you call him Governor Linden?” I ask her. During our wedding dinner Housemaster Vaughn explained to us that he was to be addressed as Housemaster, because he was the highest authority in the house. But we were expected to call our husband by his given name as a sign of familiarity.

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