Fever (24 page)

The man is all too happy to show us his delivery trucks, and to end the tour of the parking lot with “If you ever see that kid again, tell him he’d be an idiot to show his face around here.”

If. If I ever see him again.

On the walk back to Claire’s, I’m the one who’s muttering angrily. About Gatherers. About months and trucks and nonsensical notes left in a burned-down house. And about time—always time—because that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? Time frittered away at the mansion. Time waiting for a twin who isn’t coming home. Time until I die.

I must look as disgruntled as I feel, because when I return, Silas holds back whatever smart comment he was going to make. For a moment our eyes meet, and he gives me a look that isn’t disgust, or pity, but rather of solidarity. I think he knows my search was a fruitless one. I think he understands how that feels.

I would love nothing more than to go upstairs and bury myself in the nest of blankets and fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. This is what I did when my parents died. But there is some small, logical part of me that keeps going, like a lone gear in a broken watch. I move into the kitchen. I help Claire with the dishes. I boil water for the spaghetti. I wipe sauce dribbling from toddlers’ chins. I dust a menagerie of trinkets on mantels and shelves. I shrug Gabriel off when he asks, over and over, if I’m okay.

And over the next several days, I fall into a routine. I begin sleeping normally. The food is still tasteless and it sticks going down, but I eat it. More than once, going into the shed for canned food or the tool kit to fix a leaky faucet, I find Silas pressed against the wall and tangled in the arms of a new girl. “Come to join us?” he teased the first time, and the girl hit his chest. But after that we learned to ignore each other.

Gabriel is popular among the youngest children because he knows how to play a few songs on the piano. I never knew this about him, and when my chores aren’t very taxing, I sit on the bench and watch his fingers move over the keys. He shows me how I can enhance the song by simply pressing the same key over and over.
Ping, ping, ping.
I focus on just that one note as the rest of the melody washes through the room.

It does not leave me, even after my index finger has left the key.
Ping, ping, ping
as I gather dirty laundry and haul it to the washing machine.
Ping, ping, ping
as I am climbing the stairs and trying to be quiet, because it’s dark now and the children are all still with sleep. I can hear the mishmash cacophony of their breathing, and the water hissing through the pipes as Gabriel showers.

Ping, ping, ping—
the notes catch with my next breath, and before I know what’s happening, I’ve lost my footing and I’m tumbling forward.

I never hit the next step, though, because Silas has grabbed my arm. I can see his pale skin reflected back in the moonlight. Does he ever wear a shirt? His face is in shadow, but his eyes are light enough that I can see them watching me. They roll to every angle of my face as though deciding something.

“Thanks for catching me,” I mumble.

I remove my arm from his grip, and he lets go, but for some reason I am rooted to this spot.

“You got dizzy, didn’t you?” he whispers. “It’s been happening every day.”

“I’m all right,” I whisper back

“You’re not all right,” he says.

I say nothing, stepping around him to go to the bedroom. How can I explain to him that what he perceives as dizziness is, in fact, a creeping form of madness? Like how the tendrils of ivy probed their way up the exterior of my brick house (the one that is now uninhabitable), I am being overtaken.

How can I explain that the reason I fell was because of the aftershock of a laboratory explosion that killed my parents years ago?

In the morning, while I’m making the beds in one of the children’s rooms, I reach out to close the window. I can see Silas staggering behind the shed several feet below, a girl in his arms. The wind picks up her long dark hair and drops it as though in frustration. I see his lazy smile as her arms coil up around his neck. Her sweater sleeves are striped like the Christmas candy in old storybooks.

For just a second, as I’m stretching up to lower the window’s frame, he raises his eyes to me. He taps his nose, then tumbles around the corner of the shed, the girl laughing all the while, and disappears from sight.

Confused, I touch the skin under my nose, trying to find meaning in the gesture. When I move my hand away, it’s smeared with blood.

B
Y MID
-F
EBRUARY
the air starts feeling warmer. The fine layer of frost melts, giving the grass a freshly watered look, and softening the earth. I sit on the curb in front of the orphanage, watching the layer of early fog that swirls above the concrete. I try not to think of the orange blossoms. They would be sleeping in the trees now, waiting to be born.

This time last year I lived in the shipping district of Manhattan. I was barely sixteen. I did not know that I was just days from being Gathered.

I rest my hand on my raised knee and look at my wedding ring. I follow the vines and petals that don’t begin or end.

There are so many thoughts in my head. Ones I should avoid. Ones I should gravitate toward. All of them fluttering like orange blossom petals in this morning fog. I can no longer discern which thoughts are useful and which are dangerous; all I know is that I’m sick of being stagnant. So, not knowing what else to do, I start walking.

Even a few yards down the street, I can hear the children and clattering dishes inside the orphanage. I turn off Dawn Avenue, though, and they vanish. There is nothing but the distant whoosh of city traffic, the faraway tide. A gust of wind picks up, and I hug my chest.

I’m wearing a brown-and-pink-striped sweater that itches everywhere. It was not made especially for me. It is not inlaid with pearls and diamonds.

I’m so busy trying not to think that I don’t hear him calling for me—not until the sound of my name echoes against the empty street with his footsteps. “Rhine! Wait up.”

I stop walking, don’t turn around, and wait for him to catch up.

“Oh, good,” I say, once Silas is beside me. “You’re wearing a shirt.”

He huffs indignantly and shakes the curls from his eyes. They’re blond almost to the point of being completely white. They take on the soft blue morning glow, and the frizz gives them a frothy ocean look.

This is what girls like about him, I guess. The too-cool-to-care thing. Normally this would be the time he’d disappear from the house to be with one of them. In the toolshed or elsewhere in this neighborhood, letting their hands swing between them as they walk away. But that’s his business, and I don’t care. I’m only happy he’s considerate enough to keep his escapades out of Claire’s home, especially since we share a bedroom.

“Thinking of running away from our fine establishment?” he asks as we start walking again.

“No. Just going for a walk,” I say.

I try to stay out of Silas’s hair. If he goes to bed before I do, I busy myself with chores until I’m sure he’s asleep. And if I go to bed first, I pretend to be asleep as he tiptoes over my body. I have also done my best to give him no indication of the bright bits of light that swim around before me at the worst moments, when hope feels impossible. Right now, for instance.

Gabriel has been concerned about me too, but I don’t need to avoid him, because he isn’t intrusive. He asks, I change the topic, and that’s the end of it.

If Silas questions my state again, I am fully prepared to run away from him. I am scouting potential alleys as we go.

It’s not until he speaks again that I realize there is another reason I’ve been avoiding him. It’s so I won’t have to try to answer his question—the one that’s been hiding in his sleepy, disinterested-looking eyes from day one. “Gabriel’s not really your husband, is he?”

The least exhausting thing would be honesty. And I have so little energy to spare these days. “No,” I say. “But you knew that.”

“Mm,” he says.

“How?” I ask. “You always look at us like you know, but how?”

“It isn’t a lack of affection; you obviously care about each other, or whatever,” Silas says. “If I say this, you’re going to think I’m crazy.”

“No,” I say. “Trust me, I won’t.”

“How do I explain it?” he says. “It’s like there’s an invisible cord on that wedding band, and it doesn’t lead to him. It’s like you’re tethered.”

Tethered. That’s a good way to put it. Thoughts of my husband and sister wives, and even my deranged father-in-law, seem to never truly leave me.

“I ran away,” I say. “I was Gathered, and I escaped, and I came home, and my family was gone.”

I don’t realize how badly I’ve needed to say those words until they’ve left my mouth. They hang in the air. And all I want now is to be away from them. To leave the truth behind. Because if I can’t do anything about it, I certainly don’t want to face it.

I turn off the main road and start walking downhill, careful not to slip on the grass that’s slick with dew. In a brighter city, with cleaner air, this would be a place flowers might bloom. Instead there’s nothing at the bottom other than a trickle of a river and some bony tangled shrubs. I thought about that when I came here the other day. I needed to get away from the chaos of the orphans for a while, and this little area seemed safe to me, shrouded in sun, bearing the damp, earthy smell of spring.

Today there is a different smell. I don’t recognize it, not right away, until Silas is gripping my arm and telling me not to look.

But it’s too late. I’ve already seen the dead girl lying faceup in the shallow water, her eyes full of clouds.

There are so many bright pieces of light that it hurts my eyes. I just stand there, mouth shut, staring through them. I do not see this girl’s features, the color of her hair. A bizarre thing happens. I see her bones instead. I see right through her skin, to the blood and tissue that’s blackened and still. I see the torn muscle that used to be her heart. That’s where the Gatherer’s bullet hit.

Silas talks to me as though through glass. He pushes me, tries to make me move. I can’t feel my body, though, and I’m like his marionette, arms and legs moving limply as he forces me uphill. Then he sits next to me on the sidewalk curb, watches as I brace my hands on either side of me.

Gradually the blood starts flowing again. The bits of light dwindle and disappear.

“That could have been me,” I whisper.

Silas is watching me.

“There were three of us,” I add. “Three who got chosen. They shot the rest. Threw them somewhere. Left them to rot in a ditch until someone came to cremate them.”

The words sound so awful when said out loud. I should probably be crying, or even hysterical. But I can’t seem to feel anything. I shake my head violently at nothing in particular.

Silas says, “You have to be careful of ditches. You never know what you’ll find.”

“Maybe it should have been me,” I say.

“Why?” he asks.

“Because I never wanted to be married,” I tell him. “One of my sister wives did. The other—she could at least acknowledge that it was better than death, and she accepted it. But I . . . threw it back. I could have been murdered right there in the lineup, but for some ridiculous reason I was chosen, and I threw it back. I almost got killed, once, trying to get away.”

“Guess you didn’t let that stop you,” Silas says. “I mean, because you’re sitting here now.”

I shake my head. “I didn’t.”

I look over my shoulder, down the ditch, but at this angle I can’t see what’s coasting on the shallow water. Silas places a finger tenuously under my chin, waits a moment, and then turns my head toward him. “Maybe that girl chose death over imprisonment,” he says. “Maybe she looked right down the barrel of the gun and said ‘Screw you.’”

“Doubtful,” I say.

“Stop it. So you ran away. You don’t deserve to die for that.”

I smooth my jeans against my thighs, watch leaves scuttle against the pavement. I think of Linden’s hot, sobbing breaths against my skin. Rose, languid and elegant on her deathbed, ascending gracefully to her end. The blood on the sheets when Cecily was in labor. My heart pounding, sometimes in terror, sometimes in exhilaration. Sharks in the pool. Road maps in my husband’s paper houses. Kisses that tasted like June Beans and autumn winds and stale laboratory air. Permanent. Inescapable.

The girl lying in the ditch will not have memories like these. Her skin will dissolve down to bone, her skull emerging with its grin of teeth. Her hair will fall away. Her ribs and hips and elbows will stay together for as long as they can, but ultimately she’ll be nothing but pieces, in a heap of other pieces, on their way to becoming ash.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, but she can’t hear me.

“Come on,” Silas says, getting up, pulling me along by the wrists. “Let’s go do something fun.”

“Like what?” I say.

He throws an arm around my shoulders in an exaggerated gesture of camaraderie, but I think he’s trying to keep me from falling over. And it’s a good thing, because my head is starting to feel hazy.