Sever (10 page)

“She was fine when I kissed her good night,” Linden says.

I should be saying something to comfort him. That was always my role in this marriage, to console him. But we aren’t married anymore, and I can’t remember how to be.

“I don’t want them to dissect her,” I say. I know I shouldn’t be so morbid, but I can’t stop myself. If Cecily is dead, then all the rules are broken. “I don’t want your father to have her body. I don’t—” My lip is quivering.

“He won’t get her,” Reed assures me.

Linden whimpers into his palms. “This is my fault,” he says. His voice is strange. “We shouldn’t have tried for another baby so soon. My father said it would be okay, but I should have seen it was too much for her. She was already so—” His voice breaks, and I think the word he croaks out is “frail.”

In more rational circumstances, hearing the intimate details of what went on between my sister wife and my former husband would embarrass me, but feelings of any sort are miles from me now.

“I need air,” I say.

“Wait,” he starts to say, but I stumble on anyway, until a pair of hands grabs my arms. I stare at the nurse’s name tag, uncomprehending, unable to read. He’s probably
younger than I am. There were nurses at the lab where my parents worked too, and it always astounded me how serious they could be, how well they knew medicine.

“Mrs. Ashby?” the nurse asks, his voice too gentle.

I shake my head, eyes on the floor. “Sorry,” I whisper. “No.”

Linden comes up behind me. He says words I don’t understand. And the nurse says words I don’t understand. And I can’t catch any of what’s being said until I hear a cruel pang of hope in Linden’s voice when he asks, “Can we see her?”

I whip my head around to stare at him. He wants to see her? Doesn’t he understand that a body isn’t a person? Doesn’t he understand how awful that would be—how awful it already was to watch her get swept away a few moments ago?

“But it will be a while yet before she’s lucid,” the nurse says. And suddenly—I don’t know why—his name tag makes sense. Isaac. The whole world reemerges from the darkness that had been closing in around me.

My heart starts pounding in my ears, my throat. I try to hang on to what’s being said now.

Somewhere, on a table in a sterile room, my sister wife took in a sharp breath. It happened just as they were drawing the sleeves from their watches to call a time of death.

Her heart forced blood out from her chest, back to her brain, her fingertips, her cheeks.

Cecily. My Cecily. Always the fighter.

A squeaking noise escapes through my teeth, joy and relief.

We’re guided down a hallway, our footsteps echoing around us at all angles like claps.

Linden and I huddle together to see her through the small window in her door. We can’t go in yet. She can’t be agitated. Her body is still working through the shock of losing a pregnancy in its second trimester; all of this is fascinating to the promise of research, which is what this hospital is all about. The doctors want to know everything about the new generations, and such a violent miscarriage invites all sorts of interest. There are monitors recording her heart rate. The nurse is explaining that her temperature will be checked every hour. They’re taking thorough notes on any slight change in her body chemistry.

But I don’t see the intrigue in any of those things. I don’t see more research fodder. All I see is my sister wife, barely hanging on.

There’s a plastic mask over her mouth, misting with her breaths. Her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes lazily rove along the wires that connect the machines to her body. Her heartbeats are small green bursts on the monitor. She looks so alone and lost in her dreams.

I press my hand to the glass, and the ghost of my frowning reflection is superimposed over her bed.

“Will she be all right?” Linden asks. I don’t think he’s heard any of the nurse’s rambling.

“You’ll be able to see her in the morning,” the nurse says.

Old tears still glisten on Linden’s face. His lips move, sending inaudible prayers to phantom gods. The only words I can make out are “thank you.” He takes my hand and leads me to the lobby, where we will wait for the morning light to come and fill Cecily’s hair with its usual fire.

Why did this happen? Any number of reasons. She’s young, the first generation doctor tells Linden. And, superior genes or not, pregnancies in rapid succession can take a toll on a young girl. I can tell he’s being disapproving. So many of the first generations hate what has happened to their children and their children’s children. They look at us and see what we should have been, not what we are.

Doctors speak in impersonal, clinical terms: fetus, infection, placenta, hypothesis, patient. This textbook approach does wonders for taking the emotional edge out of it. The most likely hypothesis here is that the fetus has been dead for days, and, left unchecked, an infection spread through her blood like a wildfire. Eventually her body caught up and worked to expel the source of the problem, and she went into labor. She started hemorrhaging, and, finally, she went into shock. While we were trying to keep her awake in the car, her body was already shutting down. We were inevitably going to lose her without proper treatment. It all sounds so official and
possible the way the doctor explains it. Like I’m reading one of my parents’ lab reports.

It’s that simple. It ends there, with no mention of the fact that if she hadn’t mustered the strength to get out of bed and drag herself down the hall, it would have been too late when we found her. How much time would we have squandered, talking about annulments and fraternal twins as she died alone at the other end of the hall? I file that thought as far back into my brain as I can, out of sight.

“I don’t understand,” Linden says. “There were no signs.”

“She was flushed all the time,” I volunteer, remembering how hot her skin was when we shared a bed. And then I run through the checklist: how heavily she breathed and snored, the way her bones seemed to creak when she moved, the bags under her eyes. Linden is surprised by it. He says he had no idea it was that severe. This doesn’t surprise me. Even outside of the mansion, the full picture is lost on him. He sees what he’s been taught to see. I can’t fault him for that.

Later, when we’re alone in the lobby, he says, “This is my fault.”

“No,” I say. “Of course it’s not.”

He’s trembling. I touch his arm.

“She was just so sad when Jenna fell ill,” he says. “The only time she was happy at all was with Bowen. My father convinced me that another baby would make her better.”

“What about you?” I ask. “Was a baby what you wanted?”

He looks at his lap, and the word comes out so small. “No.” He rubs tears from the side of his face. “I just didn’t know how else to make it better.”

Poor Linden. He has had, at once, four wives, whom he adored and maybe even loved. But we frightened him, us girls, with our intensity, the weight of our sadness and the sharpness of our hearts. Rose knew him well. She kept her misery a secret and found a way to love him. Jenna and I hid from him; we smiled across the dinner table, let him sleep beside us, and we mourned when we were alone. But Cecily could only love him the way she knows how: all at once. Everything rushing up to the surface. I’ve seen her sadness, and it’s a frightening thing. As her stomach grew with Bowen, I saw it begin, but it was so much worse after she gave birth and after Jenna was gone.

And then I was gone too.

Linden only wants for Cecily to be happy. He showers her with affection and pretty things. But all the while he knows that even he will have to leave her.

The mattress is at a slight incline when we’re brought in to see my sister wife. Her eyes are murky. The infection brought on by the miscarriage left her with a fever, and she’s glistening with sweat. Her lips and cheeks are hot pink. Her hair is in tangles.

She looks ravaged. Chewed up and spit out.

Linden stands beside me in the doorway, and he fumbles for my hand but then doesn’t grab it. I know he’s trying to respect the annulment, to get used to us being unmarried. But in this moment I wish he would hold on to me. I need his strength and he needs mine, the way it was before.

“Linden?” Cecily croaks.

With that, he rushes to her. “I’m here, love,” he says, and kisses the top of her head, her nose, her lips with a fury of affection that says he’s so glad to have her back that he can’t get enough of her at once. It’s the kind of attention she lives for, but she’s so defeated that all she manages is a weary smile.

“You weren’t here when I woke up,” she says. “I was worried about you.”

Linden laughs shakily. “You were worried?” he says. “You gave me the scare of my life last night.”

“Did I?” She’s trying to blink the lethargy from her eyes. The doctor told us she wouldn’t be very alert and that she wouldn’t be talking much, but he clearly underestimated her resolve. “Where’s Bowen?”

“Bowen is all right,” Linden says, and puts another quick kiss on her lips. “My uncle took him back to the house.”

“He’ll be hungry,” she says. She tries to push herself upright, but Linden holds her shoulders down.

“Bowen is being taken care of, Cecily.” His voice is
stern. “You’ll see him later. Right now you need to rest.”

“Don’t order me around like I’m a child,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” he says, taking her hands. “You’re not a child.”

A child is exactly what she is, but she hides it so well sometimes that even I forget.

But it’s no matter what I think. Husband and wife are in their own universe right now, and I’m not a part of their conversation. For the first time I feel the full effect of the annulment.

She looks at me with cloudy eyes. “You were right about everything.”

“Shh.” I touch her arm. “You should be asleep.”

“Who do we think we are,” she says to Linden, “to have children when we can’t cure our own curse?”

Though her voice is calm, her lip is quivering.

“We’ll talk later, love,” Linden coos. “You aren’t thinking clearly.”

“It’s as clear as crystal,” she says. Her voice is eerie and hoarse. Tears are streaking down her temples.

There’s pain in Linden’s eyes, though I’m not sure if it’s because he’s worried or because he believes what she’s saying. He says something into her ear in a low voice, and it calms her. She lets him dab at her runny nose with his sleeve. And she has put up a good fight, but the fever and the exhaustion and the drugs are overpowering her.

“I can go back to the house and check on Bowen,” I offer lamely.

“No.” Her voice is fading as she closes her eyes. “No, no, no. Stay where I can see you. It isn’t safe out there.”

She’s delirious, but there might be some truth to that still.

“That’s enough now.” Linden draws the outline of her eyelids with his finger. There’s a nearly imperceptible tremor in his biceps. “Get some rest. We’ll be right here.”

Her eyebrows raise, but her eyelids stay down. She mumbles, “Promise?”

“Yes,” he tells her, desperation in the word. Of course he won’t leave her. After all this, I don’t believe he’ll ever let her out of his sight again. She knows that; she only needed to hear him say it.

True to his word, he doesn’t leave after she falls asleep. He just sits there, smoothing back her hair and frowning.

I stay in a chair on the opposite side of the bed, invisible. I don’t belong here, but I have no place else to go tonight. I don’t want her to wake in the night and realize I’m gone and go into a panic.

As though Linden has been reading my mind, he says, “Thank you for staying.” He doesn’t take his eyes off Cecily.

“I’ll leave when she’s stronger,” I say.

“I meant what I said before. I want you to be safe.”

“I know,” I say. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

“Just the same, I’d appreciate a good-bye this time.”

He ventures a glance at me, and he smiles the way he
did the morning after Rose’s death. That morning the smile faded the instant he realized I wasn’t her. It stays now. He understands that I’m not a ghost. I’m a girl, and one who hasn’t always been especially kind to him.

“I promise I’ll say good-bye this time,” I say. I feel certain I’ll cry if I say anything more.