Fever (33 page)

Cecily lingers in the doorway, cloaked in an impossibly bright light. In her arms she’s hugging a bag of writhing snakes, and the snakes have a baby’s cry. The cry is bright red; it washes over everything.

“Get Bowen out of here,” Linden says, in a voice that’s too calm. “He doesn’t need to see this.” He’s wrapping something white around my leg, and the white is becoming red because of the crying and the blood.

“Yes,” another voice says. It’s Vaughn, coming to finish me off. “Show some common sense, darling. You are his mother, after all.”

“Linden,” Cecily cries over the wailing snakes. Her voice is shrill. “Do something—she’s bleeding to death!” The snakes are slithering out of the bag, coiling around her throat, disappearing under her clothes. The word echoes.
Death. Death. Death.

“What have you done to her?” Linden says to his father. I close my eyes so I don’t have to see what’s happening to Linden. The flesh is melting off his skull; his too-green eyes are bulging from their sockets. “How long has she been here?” he demands. “Why wasn’t I told?”

“It’s an experimental drug I was working on. It boosts the immune system. Like vitamin C, really. There’s just some mild hallucination involved.” Too close. Vaughn’s voice is too close to me. No matter where I go, he’s always moving closer. He can track me using whatever he’s planted in my leg. He can lure me to his laboratory like a fish caught on a hook.

“She must have gotten out of her restraints somehow,” Vaughn says, pondering, his tone trailing.

“Restraints?”
Linden splutters, with more vitriol than I’ve ever heard in him. The earth booms like thunder, and for a second I think the mansion is going to finally collapse in on itself, the way I used to wish it would. But then Linden brushes the hair from my face, and his touch is so soft. “What’s happened to you?” he whispers.

I feel Cecily pacing. Her voice is squeaky and panicked. She is saying to Vaughn, “You said you wouldn’t hurt her! You said she’d be safe!”

“You knew about this?” Linden growls at her. The color in my eyelids becomes angry orange.

Cecily is in hysterics. All she can manage is, “I—I . . .”

Vaughn is clucking his tongue. “Both of you are overreacting. A mild sedative, and she’ll be fine.”

“Get it out,” I try to say, but my voice won’t form words. I can’t even scream; my tongue has gone numb, and only heavy, horrible moans come out.

“You had no right, Father,” Linden snaps. “She isn’t your guinea pig. Under this roof she is still my wife!” I feel my body being cradled in his arms.

“Now, Son, be reasonable.”

“She needs a hospital!” Pain breaks through his voice.

“They won’t know how to care for her,” Vaughn says. “Just set her back on the bed, Son. We’ll have her fixed in no time. And then, once you’ve calmed down, I can explain how this drug is benefiting her. Benefiting all of us.”

Linden is whimpering, begging me to open my eyes.

“Don’t just stand there like a pair of idiots; you heard my husband,” Cecily says over the baby’s screams. “Get the car. Now! Move!” Footsteps respond, pounding down like rain, attendants muttering “Yes, Lady Cecily” and “Right away” and “West entrance door—one minute.”

“Oh, God, Linden. Is she breathing?”

“For heaven’s sake, Cecily, get that screaming child out of here,” Vaughn says. His voice is the last thing I hear. I feel his papery hand touching my forehead, and it’s more than I can stand. My limbs give way. My mind dissolves.

The breeze moves through my hair. I take a deep breath, smell the air of the Florida coastline. Things baked and deep-fried mingling with salt water and new concrete. No illusion could replicate it. The real world is speeding all around me.

“You’re going to be okay,” Linden says. “The hospital is just another two blocks.”

“Don’t let him follow,” I whisper. My voice is feeble, but at least I can form words now. I open my eyes, and I see the city through an opening in the tinted window of the limo. I thought I’d never see the world again. I want to reach for it, but my arms won’t move. I know this view will be short-lived, and I try to home in on a memory to take with me, but the moon won’t hold still. It darts behind buildings, gets tangled in trees.

Linden is holding me, my blood smearing his delicate cheeks and caking in his dark curls. He brushes the hair from my face. It’s been so long since I was this close to him, but I never forgot his frailty, his skin like a paper lantern ensconcing a warm light. He says, “Nobody is following you.”

“Yes,” I insist, but he doesn’t believe me. His piteous stare says he thinks I’ve lost my mind, and maybe I have. So I say the only thing I know will keep me safe. “Don’t leave me.”

He presses my head against his chest, where I can hear the blood gurgling around his tissue and bones. I can feel his warmth in my ears and in my ribs. “I won’t,” he says. “I promise.”

By the time the car has stopped, the sheet around my leg is dripping with red. I’m being swept up, pushed forward, rolled away. I struggle to stay afloat, but the world is blurring around me. I can feel the blood spilling from my skin, taking with it my ability to comprehend or to speak or to focus. I become something less than human—wild and primal. I fight against the new faces and new hands that try to pin me down, but this only makes them more forceful. They’re shouting angry things at me, and I can’t understand them. I can’t hang on to what they’re saying. The only voice I can make out is Linden’s, a thousand miles away, saying, “She doesn’t know what’s happening. She doesn’t mean to fight you.”

I’m on a metal table, writhing under a bright light. My legs no longer seem to work, but I’m able to land a few punches without seeing who takes them. Vaughn is coming; they don’t understand. I try to tell them about the tracker in my leg, but my words are shrill and nonsensical. “Shh,” Linden is saying. “It’s okay. You’re in a hospital. They’re going to help you.” That’s no comfort; Vaughn owns every hospital in the area.

Linden catches my fist midair and then holds it, strokes the length of my arm. All the fight leaves me. I’m a whimpering mess. I can’t even open my eyes. Some sort of mask covers my mouth and nose, and I think it means to suffocate me, but all it does is make it that much harder to stay awake.

Linden doesn’t know the depths of his father’s maddening drugs. Doesn’t know this dark looming canyon that surely awaits me. Death has never felt so certain, so close. It was always a distant reality, and Gabriel was right, I don’t like to think about it. But now it’s unavoidable. It’s here. It’s pulling me under.

The darkness swallows me a moment before the words can reach my lips:

I don’t want to die.

T
HE SOUND
of rain, traffic, and thunder.

I open my eyes to a steady rhythm of beeps and realize there are once again wires in my forearm. But this isn’t the basement. I’m sure that window isn’t a hologram.

Linden isn’t looking at me. His bleary eyes are on the television bolted high up on the wall near the foot of my bed. The soft oval of his chin is flecked with stubble; his skin is pale. I don’t know how much time I’ve spent in this bed, but I doubt he’s slept for any of it.

Not looking at me, he says, “Do you know where you are?”

“One of your father’s hospitals,” I guess.

“How about the month?” he asks tiredly. “Do you know what month it is?”

“No.”

He looks at me, and I keep waiting for his face to mutate into something nightmarish, but it doesn’t. There is only a wilted, sleepy look, and the distance in his eyes.

“They thought you were mad,” he says. “The way you were screaming. The things you were saying. Do you still think there are bodies in the ceiling tiles?”

“I said that?” I ask him.

“Among other things.”

I look at the ceiling tiles. Ordinary and white. I wait for the sound of Rose crawling through the air ducts, but there’s nothing. “No,” I say.

“You said something else,” Linden tells me. “You said there was something in your leg that you needed to get out.”

“A tracker,” I say. I know that much was real. Wasn’t it? I’m still trying to make sense of this newfound lucidity. I grew used to a world wherein everything became a nightmare. I’m still expecting Linden’s flesh to drip from his skull. He frowns at the way I keep blinking. “Your father put a tracker in my leg, so he’d know where to find me if I ever got away.”

Linden nods, looks at his lap. “So you said.” I can’t tell if he’s angry with me, or hurt. I can’t read him at all. But the usual softness is gone from his face, and I know, whatever he’s feeling, he’s not happy with me. Gone are the days of his blind affections. I threw those back at him the night I ran away. I’m not even sure why he’s here, but I’m afraid of saying anything that would cause him to go.

“I thought you were delirious when you said that,” he says. “Your fever was . . . dangerously high. I thought for sure you were imagining . . .” He trails off.

“I don’t know how much of it was real,” I admit. “But I’m sure that was.”

“They found it,” he says, watching as his finger traces shapes on his thigh. He’s wearing pajamas, and when I search back to my memory of him standing in the doorway in the basement, he was wearing them then, too. And Cecily was in her nightgown. My bloody fit with the smashed pitcher must have gotten everyone out of bed. “It was the size of a pea,” he says. “I’d never seen anything like it.”

“Your father found me all the way in Manhattan with it,” I say.

Linden raises his eyes to me. The brighter, kinder version of his father’s eyes.

“So that’s where you went,” he says, and looks away. There’s a long pause before he asks, “Why?”

“That’s my home,” I say. Or, it was my home. There’s nothing left for me in that charred house now.

Linden stands, paces to the window, and watches the torrential rain. I can just make out his reflection in the glass, and I know he’s watching my reflection too. Maybe because he can’t stand to look right at me. I don’t blame him. He should hate me for my betrayal, and I can see him struggling with this, because hate has never been a part of who he is. When we were first married, I thought he must have been the most heartless, hateful man I’d ever known, but he was just as much a prisoner as I was. Where Vaughn imprisoned me with walls, he imprisoned his son with ignorance.

“Linden . . .”

He raises his head.

I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes. And when I struggle to sit up, he turns and watches me, not helping, not cooing words of encouragement. Gone are my days of taking his love for granted. There is emptiness where that love once thrived. I was wrong about Linden’s abandoning me; he wouldn’t have given me to his father to be a guinea pig. But that’s because he’s kind, and compassionate, and not at all because he has any love left for me.

“You should rest more,” he says. “You’re not a hundred percent.”

I manage to prop myself up against the headboard, and my vision doubles. It helps when I focus on the television screen. Bright, moving images start to make sense again. The sound is down, but I can tell this is a news broadcast about the wind levels rising close to the shore. Maybe there will be another hurricane.

“I can’t stay here. I need to get home.”

“My father isn’t coming for you,” Linden says with a hint of impatience. “I won’t let him, all right? You need to rest.”

“You don’t understand. People will miss me. They’ll think I’m dead.”

“Oh, yes,” Linden says. “That attendant.”

And all at once I can see this tentative civility turning ugly. Linden has a right to be unhappy, but so do I. He deserved better than to be abandoned, but I never asked to be his bride.

“Oh, yes.” I mimic his tone. “That attendant. Among others.”

“What are you going to do?” He falls into the chair beside me. “Walk all the way up the East Coast?”

“Don’t be so smug, Linden,” I say. “You have no idea what I can or cannot do.”

He laughs humorlessly, studying the floor tiles. “You’re right about that.” He’s hurt. And he doesn’t know what to do with himself. I watch his hands fidgeting in his lap. How awful it must be for him to try to reconcile this new image of his father. This new image of me.

“Do you even know what it feels like to lose someone you loved?” he asks.

“I lost everyone I loved,” I tell him. I wait for him to look at me, and then I add, “The day I met you.”

As soon as I’ve said the words out loud, I regret them. Linden shifts his weight in the chair, averts his eyes, and asks no more questions.

The next time I awaken, Linden is asleep in the chair by my bed. There’s an open notebook in his lap, and from where I lie I can just see the outline of a building he has started to draw. Music notes stream from the windows, along with road map lines and telephone wires.

I wonder how long he’s been here. I wonder why he stays.

My head is full of drought, and I don’t bother trying to sit up this time. Instead I lie in the hospital bed and stare at the muted television. They’re running some story about infants. The caption reads:
Doctor believes he has duplicated virus symptoms.