Wither (11 page)

“Storm? It was sunny outside just a minute ago,” I say, relieved to find the fear isn’t present in my voice. The sobs have stopped too, leaving only the soft, infrequent hiccups in the aftermath.

“We get a lot of them on the coastline,” he says. “Out of nowhere sometimes. Don’t worry, if it was a hurricane, we would have heard the alarm. It’s not uncommon for strong winds to mess with the electricity and take out one of the elevators.”

Hurricane. From somewhere deep in my mind comes a television image of wind spinning angrily, destroying houses. It’s always the houses that go, sometimes bits of a fence or an uprooted tree, a shrieking heroine in a prairie dress, but always the houses. I imagine a hurricane smashing into this mansion and tearing it apart. I wonder if I’d be able to escape then.

“So this is the basement?” I say.

“I think so,” Gabriel says. “I mean, I’ve never been down this way. I’ve only been to where the storm shelter is. Nobody’s allowed without authorization from Housemaster Vaughn.” He looks nervous, and I know Housemaster Vaughn is the reason. I can’t stand the thought of Gabriel limping to my room, melancholy and bruised because of my transgressions.

“Let’s go back up before anyone catches us,” I say.

He nods. The elevator doors have closed, though, and they don’t open when he swipes his key card across the panel. He tries several times before shaking his head.

“It’s down,” he says. “It’ll be back up eventually, but in the meantime, there’s got to be another elevator farther down we can try.”

We begin walking down this long hallway, with unreliable lighting that cuts out at times and hisses at us. The main hallway branches off to other, darker hallways and closed doors, and I’m sure I don’t want to know where they lead. I never want to see this floor again. It’s triggering something very bad in my memories, in the place of nightmares, where the murdered girls in the van reside, where the Gatherer thief cups his hand over my mouth and presses a blade to my throat. Something about being here makes my palms sweat. And then I realize it. This is where the doctor was, the afternoon before the wedding.

Deirdre brought me to this hallway, led me to a room where a man stuck me with a needle and I blacked out.

My skin becomes gooseflesh at the memory. I need to get out of here.

Beside me Gabriel presses forward without looking at me. “About what you told me,” he says in a low voice, “I think it’s terrible. And what you said earlier, about hating this place? I understand.”

I’ll bet he understands.

“It’s Housemaster Vaughn, isn’t it?” I say. “He’s the one that hurt you? It was my fault, because I got out of my room.”

“You shouldn’t have been locked in a room to begin with,” he says.

I realize all at once that I want to know him. That I’ve begun to see his blue eyes and coppery brown hair as the signs of a friend, and have for a while now. I like that we’re speaking, finally, about things more important than what’s for lunch or what I’m reading or if I want some lemons with my tea. (I never do.)

I want to know more about him, and I want to tell him more about myself. My real, unmarried self, my self from before I ever saw the inside of this mansion—when I lived in a dangerous place but I had my freedom and I was happy with it. I open my mouth, but immediately he stops me by grabbing my arm and yanking me into one of the dark side-hallways. I don’t have a chance to protest before I hear the clatter of something approaching.

We press ourselves against the wall. We try to be the shadows that cover us. We will the whites of our eyes to be dim.

There are voices getting closer. “—cremation isn’t possible, of course—”

“Shame to destroy that poor girl.” A sigh; a tsk tsk.

“It’s for the greater good, if it will save lives.”

The voices are unfamiliar. If I spent the rest of my life in this house, I might never know all its rooms, all the attendants. But as the voices approach, I can see that the people aren’t dressed like attendants. They are dressed in white, their heads protected by the same white hoods that my parents wore to work, with plastic covering their faces. Biohazard suits. They’re wheeling a cart.

Gabriel grabs my wrist, squeezes it, and I don’t understand why. I don’t understand what’s happening at all until the cart gets closer to us and I can see what’s on it.

A body covered by a sheet. Rose’s blond hair trailing out around the edges. And her cold, white hand, with fingernails still painted pink.

I hold my breath as they pass. Eternity is the crisp footsteps, the rickety wheels getting farther away. We wait in silence for a while just to be sure it’s safe, and then I splutter like coming up for air.

“Where are they taking her?” I gasp.

Gabriel’s sad expression becomes evident in the near-darkness. He shakes his head. “Housemaster Vaughn must be planning to study her,” he says. “He’s been looking for an antidote for years.”

“But,” I croak. “That’s Rose.”

“I know.”

“Linden would never allow this.”

“Maybe not,” Gabriel says. “We can’t tell him. We never saw this. We were never here.”

We find the elevator and make it back to the cooks’

hallway, where there’s a cacophony of metal against metal, plate against plate, the head cook shouting that someone is a lazy bastard. A riot of laughter. They have no idea that the wife they so disliked has been weaving a cold path through hallways under their feet.

“Hey, blondie’s here!” someone calls. It’s becoming the kitchen’s official nickname for me. Even though brides aren’t supposed to leave the wives’ floor, they don’t seem to mind my hanging around their workspace. I don’t ask anything of them, which Gabriel says is more than Linden’s last wife and the little one (the brat, they call her) could manage. “What’s wrong with your face, blondie? You’re all red.”

I touch the tender skin under my eyes, remembering my tears. They seem like they happened a million years ago now.

“I’m allergic to shellfish,” I call back, stuffing the damp handkerchief into my pocket. “The stink traveled all the way up to the wives’ floor, made my eyes all puffy. Are you trying to kill me or what?”

“She insisted on coming down here to tell you herself,” Gabriel says obligingly.

As we head toward the kitchen, I do my best to seem disgusted, when really the smell reminds me of home, coaxes an appetite back into me.

“We’ve got bigger problems than your diet needs,” the head cook says, brushing a strand of hair from her sweaty face, nodding out the window. The sky is a bizarre shade of green. Lightning flashes through the clouds. Less than an hour ago there was sunlight and birdsong.

Someone offers me a little cardboard box of strawberries. “Shipped in fresh this morning.” Gabriel and I each take a handful as we stand at the window. Like the blueberries, their color is more vivid than what I’m used to. Their juice floods my mouth with sweetness, and the seeds get lodged in my molars.

“It’s that time of year already?” Gabriel says. “It seems a little early.”

“We might get a good storm this year,” says one of the cooks as he kneels at the oven and furrows his brow at something that’s baking. “Maybe even a category three.”

“What does that mean?” I ask, popping the next strawberry into my mouth.

“Means you three princesses will be locked in the dungeon,” the head cook hisses, and I’m just about to believe her when she claps a hand on my shoulder hard and laughs. “The House Governor takes every precaution with his wives,” she says. “If the winds get bad, you’ll all have to wait out the storm in the storm shelter.

Don’t worry, blondie, I bet it’s comfy cozy, and the rest of us’ll be up here cooking and bringing you your meals.”

“You just work through the storm?” I say.

“Sure, unless the power’s out.”

“Don’t worry,” Gabriel says. “The house won’t blow away.” His small laugh suggests he knows that’s what I’d been hoping for. We exchange a look, and his tentative grin blooms into the first real smile I’ve seen on him. I allow myself to smile back.

But a few minutes later, a pall hangs over us, as gloomy as the thundering clouds, as we take the elevator back to the wives’ floor. There’s a pushcart of lunch trays between us. Lobster bisque for the others and a small glazed chicken for me, since I’m supposed to be allergic to shellfish. We don’t speak. I try not to think of Rose, but can see nothing but her lifeless hand dipping out of the sheet as she passes. A hand that just the other day was weaving my hair into a braid. I think of the sadness in Linden’s eyes; what would he say if he knew his childhood love, the little girl who fed sugar to horses in the orange grove, is being dissected in this very house?

Alone in my room, I don’t touch my lunch. I soak in a hot bath and wash Gabriel’s handkerchief in the bubbles and then hold it up in front of me. I try to imagine another place, another time, when flowers might have looked like its embroidery. It’s such a powerful thing, sharp and dangerous and lovely. It rests on what appears to be a lily pad. I commit the image to memory and then research it in the library. The closest match I find is the lotus flower, which existed in Eastern countries and may have originated in a country called China. All I have to go by is a fraction of a page in an almanac of aquatic botany; the almanac would rather tell me about water lilies, perhaps a close cousin, but not the same. Not as rare.

And after hours of research, I still can’t find a decent match.

I ask Gabriel, and he says the attendants take the handkerchiefs from a plastic bin where the cloth napkins are kept. He doesn’t know who ordered them or where they came from, but I can keep it because there are dozens more.

In the days to come, Gabriel begins bringing breakfast while the other wives are still asleep. He hides June Beans in rolled napkins or under the plate or, once, between the pancakes. He arranges the strawberry slices into Eiffel Towers and boats with spear-shaped masts.

He leaves the tray on my nightstand, and, if I’m sleeping, I feel his presence as I dream. I feel warm ribbons reaching into my subconsciousness, and I feel safe. I open my eyes to the silver cover on the breakfast tray, and I know he was nearby. On the mornings that I’m awake, we talk in low voices, barely making out each other’s faces in the darkness. He tells me that he’s been an orphan for as long as he can remember, that Housemaster Vaughn bought him at an auction when he was nine. “It’s not as awful as it sounds,” Gabriel says. “In orphanages they teach you skills like cooking, sewing, cleaning. They keep a sort of report card on you, and then the well-to-do can bid. That’s how we got Deirdre, Elle, and Adair, too.”

“You don’t remember your parents at all?” I say.

“Hardly. I barely even remember what the world outside of this place looks like,” he says. And my heart sinks.

Nobody, he tells me, not even the help, leaves the property. They order shipments of food and fabric and anything imaginable, but they never visit stores themselves.

The only ones to leave are the delivery truck drivers, Housemaster Vaughn, and sometimes Linden if he has a mind to. I’ve seen House Governors and their first wives on TV at social events—political elections, ribbon-cut-ting ceremonies, things like that—but Gabriel tells me that Linden is not the social type. He’s something of a recluse. And why not? You could take an entire day and still not walk from one end of this place to the other. But I haven’t lost hope. Linden took Rose to parties all the time, and she said herself that if he plays favorites with me, he’ll take me anywhere I want to go.

“Don’t you miss it?” I say. “Being free.”

He laughs. “It wasn’t much freer in the orphanage, but I suppose I do miss the beach,” he says. “I used to be able to see it from my window. Sometimes they let us go there. I liked watching the boats go out. I think if I could have done anything, I would have liked to work on one. Maybe build one. But I’ve never even caught a fish.”

“My brother taught me how to fish,” I say. We would sit on the concrete slab that stopped at the ocean, our feet dangling over the edge. I remember the strong pull on the fishing line, the reel spinning out of my control and Rowan catching it for me, showing me how to bring it in. I remember the silver body, all muscle, like a tongue thrashing on the hook, eyes open wide. I freed it from the hook and tried to hold it, but it leapt from my hand.

Hit the water with a splash. Disappeared, off to visit the ruins of France or maybe Italy to send them my regards.

I try relaying this experience to Gabriel, and even though I think I’m doing a poor job of imitating the pulling motion of the fishing rod and my pathetic attempts to reel the fish in, he’s paying close attention. When I imitate the splash of the fish hitting the water, he even laughs, and I laugh too, quietly, in the darkness of my room.

“Did you ever eat any of the catches?” he asks.

“No. The edible catches are farther out, and then they’re hauled in by boat. The closer you get to land, the more contaminated the water. This was just for fun.”

“It sounds fun,” he says.

“It was kinda gross, actually,” I say, remembering the cold slimy scales and bloodshot eyes. Rowan deemed me the worst fisherman ever and said it was a good thing these fish were inedible, because if we needed them for food, we would starve with me in charge. “But it’s one of the few things my brother likes to do that doesn’t involve work.”