Wither (35 page)

“Sweetheart, what is it?” Linden says, and I realize there are tears in my eyes. It’s so cold that I don’t know how they haven’t frozen.

“It’s nothing,” I say. “I was just thinking about how little time there is.”

He’s looking at me the way he does when he asks for my thoughts on his building designs. Like he wants to cast himself into my mind. He wants to understand, and be understood.

In another time, in another place, I wonder who we would have been to each other.

And then I realize how ridiculous that is. In another time and place I wouldn’t have been kidnapped to be his bride. And he wouldn’t be trapped in this mansion. He would be a famous architect, and maybe I would live in one of his houses, and have a real marriage, and children who would live a good, long time.

I laugh, trying to be reassuring, and squeeze his hand.

“I was thinking how little time people will spend in your beautiful houses.”

He presses his forehead to my temple, closes his eyes.

“When the weather gets nicer, I’ll show you some of them,” he says. “It’s nice to see the changes people make, the pets and swing sets and evidence of life. It’s enough to make you forget sometimes.”

“I’d like that, Linden,” I say.

We don’t talk after that. I let him squeeze his arms around me. The snow and the cold get to be too much for him after a while, and he brings me back to my room. We kiss, his frozen nose touching mine, one last time.

“Good night, sweetheart,” he says.

“Good-bye, sweetheart,” I say. And it’s so casual, so innocent, that he doesn’t suspect a thing. The elevator doors close between us, and he’s gone from my world forever.

The door to Cecily’s bedroom is ajar, and I see her on the rocker in her bedroom. She’s got her nightgown open and she’s offering her bare breast to Bowen, but he’s thrashing and whining. “Please, please take it,” she’s sobbing in a hushed tone. But he won’t. Vaughn was lying about there being a wet nurse. I saw him giving Bowen a bottle, and once a baby has the sweet taste of formula, it never returns to the breast. This is something I remember my parents telling me, when they worked in the lab. But Cecily has no idea. Vaughn is taking her son away slowly, beginning to control him the way he controls his own son. Vaughn wants Cecily to think her own child doesn’t love her.

I stand in the hallway for a long time, watching her.

This excited little bride who has become so haggard and pale. I remember the day she tumbled from the diving board, and we swam through the tropics and reached for imaginary starfish. That’s my best memory of her, and it’s an illusion.

No, maybe that’s not the best memory. When I was bedridden she brought the lilies to my room.

I can’t think of a way to say good-bye to her. Eventually I walk away, as quietly as I came, and leave her to the life she was so eager to have. I know that some-day I’ll stop hating her. I know that she’s only a child, a silly, naïve little girl who fell victim to Vaughn’s lies. But when I look at her, all I see is Jenna’s cold body in the basement, under a sheet and awaiting the knife. And that is Cecily’s fault. And I do not forgive her.

My last stop is Jenna’s room. I stand in her doorway for a long, long time. I look at the placement of things.

The brush on the dresser could belong to anyone; her paperback romance is gone. Only the lighter she stole from the attendant remains of her, in plain sight, because nobody paid enough attention to even know it was there.

I take it now, put it in my pocket. This one small piece of her I’ll keep. There’s nothing left of any sentimental value. The bed has been stripped, cleaned, made up as though it expects her to come and rest her head on its pillows. She won’t, but maybe another girl will soon.

There’s nothing here to say good-bye to. There’s no dancing girl. No mischievous smile. She’s gone, off with her sisters, broken free, escaped. And if she were here now, she would say, “Go.”

The clock on her night table is showing me the time—9:50. It’s like she’s pushing me out the door.

I don’t say good-bye. I’m just gone.

I take the elevator to the ground floor and cross through the kitchen, expecting it to be empty. But as I’m putting my hand on the doorknob, a voice stops me with, “Bit cold for a stroll, isn’t it?”

I spin around, and the head cook is emerging from the hallway, brushing the greasy hair from her face.

“It’s just going to be a short walk,” I say. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Be careful out there, blondie,” she says. “In this kind of snow, you go out for a short walk and you might just get lost and never return.” A sly smile creeps across her face. “Nobody wants that, right?”

“Of course not,” I say cautiously. What does she know?

“Well, just in case, here’s something to keep you warm.” As she approaches, I see that she’s carrying a thermos. It’s so warm that I can feel it through my gloves when she presses it into my hands.

“Thank you,” I say.

She opens the door for me, and slaps me on the shoulder. “Careful,” she says. “It’s cold out there.”

I step outside, and by the time I’ve turned around to thank her again, she’s closed the door.

The snow has gotten heavier. It takes me a long time to trek through the drifts because I’m trying to cover my tracks. When I’m far enough from the house, I start whispering Gabriel’s name, but the wind is stealing my voice. It’s like the hurricane all over again, but full of snow. I stumble into a tree, and I feel my way along the edge of the woods as I go, calling his name a little louder and a little louder. Eventually I find the hologram. I reach for a tree and fall right through it. I’m far enough from the house now that I can call his name loudly.

“Gabriel! Gabriel!”

But he doesn’t come, and he doesn’t come. And I know that soon I’ll have a decision to make. I can run to the ocean without him, or I can go back into the maelstrom of snow and look for him. Either way I am leaving this mansion tonight. Even if Gabriel has never sailed a boat, he knows more about boats than anyone else I know, and I know next to nothing. And, more importantly, I fear what Vaughn will do if Gabriel is left behind. Vaughn will know that Gabriel helped me escape. That settles it.

Just as I’m realizing I can’t leave him behind, that I need to go looking for him, someone grabs my wrist.

“Rhine.”

I turn, and I’m careening right into his arms. For the second time, in a second storm, he’s come to hold me steady. And there’s so much I want to tell him about what’s happened in this whole horrible month without him, but there’s no time. The wind has picked up, and we can’t make out each other’s words, so we just start running, hand in hand, into the darkness.

The wind sounds like voices. It sounds like my father and mother laughing, and Rowan waking me up for my shift, and Cecily’s baby crying, and Linden saying I love you. I don’t stop to listen. I don’t respond. But sometimes we trip on twigs and snowbanks, and we pull each other back up. We are unstoppable. And then we make it to the gate, which is of course locked.

There’s a panel, but my key card doesn’t work on it.

Did I really think it would? “What now?” Gabriel shouts to me over all the wind. I start walking the length of the fence, looking for the place where it ends, but it soon becomes abundantly clear that there is no end to it, that it must wrap all the way around the property in a circle that’s miles and miles wide.

What now?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

Escape is so close. I can reach through the bars and touch the free air. I can almost grasp at a tree limb on the other side. Frantically I survey our surroundings. The trees would be impossible to climb; the branches are too high; the fence is too icy. I try scaling the iron bars and fail every time. But I try and try until eventually Gabriel grabs me and holds me back. He unbuttons his wool coat and brings me to his chest, and wraps it around the both of us. We kneel together against a snowbank, and I think I know what he’s trying to tell me. There is no way out.

We’re going to freeze to death.

But I don’t feel the acceptance I felt in the hurricane.

I was so sure that night that I was going to die, and yet something told me to keep going and keep going, and when I climbed the lighthouse, I saw the exit. I don’t believe that was for nothing.

I feel Gabriel kiss my forehead. But even his normally warm lips have gone cold. I draw back a little, pull his collar up around his ears. He slides his hands under my hair, on either side of my neck, and we bring warmth back to each other that way.

I take Jenna’s lighter from my pocket, and with the wind it’s almost impossible to spark a flame. I have to wriggle free of Gabriel’s coat, and he cups his hands around the flame so that the wind won’t steal it. It calls to mind a story I read in Linden’s library about a dying girl who lit matches to keep warm. Each new little flame brought a different memory of her life. But right now the only memory is Jenna, her little glowing life flickering in our hands. It’s the only light in all this darkness, and I think I’d like nothing more than to light this place on fire. To watch it burn like those ugly curtains. Light one tree and watch the fire spread to them all. But the wind is too strong. I feel like Vaughn has somehow brought on this blizzard. I’m afraid that tomorrow morning he’ll find Gabriel’s and my body frozen and dead, so hopelessly close to our escape.

It can’t happen. I won’t give him the satisfaction.

Just as I’m considering trying to ignite one of the trees, I hear a voice on the wind. I think I’m imagining it again, but Gabriel looks too. We can just make out a shadowy figure running toward our little light.

I hurry to my feet, pulling Gabriel with me. It’s Vaughn. It’s Vaughn coming to finish us off, or worse, to drag us into his basement to torture us, mutilate us, strap us to operating tables in the same room as Rose’s and Jenna’s corpses. I start to run, but Gabriel stops me. The man gets closer, and it’s not Vaughn at all.

It’s the nervous attendant who took Gabriel’s place.

The one who said I was the nice one; the one who told me to check my napkin for the June Bean.

He’s waving something over his head. A key card.

His mouth is moving, but with all the wind and snow, I can’t hear his words. So we just watch, Gabriel and I, as he swipes the key card across the panel. The gate hitches a little, trying to dig through the snow, but it opens.

For the longest time I just stand there, not sure what to make of this. Not sure if I should trust it. I am still expecting Vaughn to—I don’t know, pop out from behind a tree and shoot us or something.

But the attendant is waving us along, and I think he’s saying, “Go, go!”

“Why?” I say. I move close to him so that I can hear him better. I’m shouting over the wind. “Why are you helping us? How did you know we were here?”

“Your sister wife asked me to help you,” he says. “The little one. The redhead.”

We run for what feels like all night. It feels like the world could have ended and there’s nothing left but this path, and these trees, and this snowy darkness. We stop to catch our breath, but the frozen air offers little relief to our gasping lungs. We are cold and exhausted, and still the wind rages.

In the library I read a book called
Dante’s Inferno
about the many circles of a place called hell, in the after-life. In one of the circles were two lovers who were forever punished for their adultery by being trapped in a windstorm, unable to speak, unable to hear each other or have a moment of stillness.

That could be us,
I think. And the sad part is that we’ve never even had the chance to become lovers. We are just a servant and an unwilling bride who haven’t been granted one moment of true freedom to explore how we feel about each other. I’m even still wearing my wedding band under Deirdre’s cabled glove.

When we’re far enough from the iron gate, we relax our pace and go slowly. I can’t understand why this road is so long. In the limousine it was only minutes that we were on it. Did Gabriel and I take a wrong turn? There’s so much snow that I can’t even be certain we’re on the road at all.

Right about the time I’m deciding that the world has ended, or that we’re in our own circle of hell, there are lights.