Fever (31 page)

I see Deirdre standing a few feet away from my bed. She doubles over, making retching sounds for a few awful seconds before the bile comes up, strange and odiferous and green. Her gown is slipping off one shoulder; I can see the notches in her spine. Her knuckles are white, her fists clenched. And when it’s over, she’s quiet for a very long time, taking deep breaths.

She looks at me, eyes all pupil, and says, “He’s planning far worse things for you. You shouldn’t have come back.”

“Deirdre,” I say, my voice full of longing. I want to pull her into my arms and keep her safe. My sweet, loyal domestic who devoted her days to making sure I was cared for, who once upon a time never could have imagined such awful things as are happening to both of us now. And it’s all because of me.

I struggle against my restraints as she takes a towel to the puddle of vomit and then disposes of it in the biohazard container where the attendants dispose of my needles. She throws her hands into her lap, and she looks so hopeless, but she won’t cry, maybe because she still has some fight left. I remember this about her. She’s a small thing, but she was always resilient. “It helps if you think of someplace nice.” Her sallow face is lit up by the fake sunlight over holographic lilies that are animated on a loop. I’ve memorized the way they sway: left, left, left, waver for a bit, right.

Think of someplace nice.
Claire’s house at night, little lungs breathing in every room. My head in Gabriel’s lap. He said he wouldn’t let anyone hurt me, and I knew that this was beyond anyone’s control, even his, but I closed my eyes and pretended to believe it.

I force the thought away. I won’t think of someplace nice; it makes it that much harder to open my eyes and remember that I’m here.

“I should have taken you with me,” I say. “Hidden you someplace he couldn’t find you.”

“He would have found me when he found you,” Deirdre says. She makes her way to my bed, and when she touches my thigh, I flinch. As Linden’s bride I grew used to the fussing and pampering of Deirdre and the attendants. Grew used to the hair braiding and makeup and the deep-tissue massages when I was too tense. But a few rounds of needles has reversed that. At my flinching, my once-domestic frowns apologetically and then hikes my gown up to my waist. “There,” she whispers. “You probably can’t see it, but this is where he put it.” She indicates the fleshy part of my thigh, where I see nothing but sickly pale skin and veins.

“What am I looking at?” I say.

“Before your wedding a doctor inspected you,” Deirdre says. “For fertility, among other things. And you were implanted with a tracker so that the Housemaster could always know where you are.” Her wispy voice is being drowned out by the pulsing in my ears. “You and your sister wives are his property. You’ll always belong to him.”

This honestly never occurred to me. While I lived in the mansion, Vaughn tricked Cecily into spying on me. I’d entertained the thought of surveillance cameras, recording devices, attendants who might do his bidding. But I thought I would be safe out in the real world.
My
world.

And then I laugh, for the first time in I don’t know how long. Of course Vaughn was tracking me. How could I think I’d ever be rid of him? The laugh is broken and weak, and maybe it’s a bit hysterical too, because Deirdre looks concerned. She claps her hand over my mouth and shushes me. “Please be quiet,” she whispers. “They’ll hear.”

“I don’t care,” I mumble into her palm, but for her I lower my voice. “What more can they do to me?” I say. “Or to you, or to anyone else who’s down here?”

Deirdre smoothes the hair from my face. Her eyes are pleading. “You shouldn’t ask questions like that,” she says.

We both know it’s dangerous for her to visit me, but she still comes often. She removes one of the IVs from the needle that’s in my arm, and she must know what she’s doing, because I slowly come back to awareness.

I always knew Deirdre was brave. She’s small, but she maintains a steely resolve in the face of all this atrocity. She’s still trying to care for me. Maybe it comforts her. Like a ghost that doesn’t know it’s dead, repeating the same last action over and over.

For the first time, today she allows herself to receive my affection. I ease my wrist out of the restraint and let her climb onto the mattress beside me. I tell her the stories I used to tell Cecily, about the twins and the kites. I leave out the laboratory explosion and instead make up new stories about ferry rides and mermaids swimming below the waters of Liberty Island.

The sound of elevator doors startles her. In one motion she is off the bed and reinserting my IV as I move my wrist back into its restraint.

“I’ll be back soon,” she whispers, and hurries off.

I close my eyes, feign unconsciousness while I wait for the drug to overtake me. But it never does. I hear footsteps in my room, and feel the pressure of something being taken out of my forearm.

“I know you’re awake,” Vaughn says. “That’s good. You’ll need to be conscious for this one.”

He pries my eyelid open, shines a flashlight at me. “Your pupils aren’t dilating the way they should. Somehow I suspect you’ve been tampering with your dosages.” He laughs. “You always were difficult, weren’t you?”

I squeeze my eyes shut. I wish for him to be a nightmare. But I can still hear him milling about, preparing my next dose of hell.

“I much prefer you when you’re unconscious,” he says. “It’s just easier to keep track of you. But now I need you on a more normal sleep regimen. You might experience some vivid dreams. They’re nothing to be alarmed about.”

Just before he leaves, he taps my nose. It’s the same condescending affection he usually reserves for Cecily.

“I’ll be back to check on you soon, darling,” he says.

I don’t have the vivid dreams Vaughn promised me. Rather, I lose the distinction between dreams and reality entirely. There are times when I’m sure that I’m awake, but the sterile walls start to become black, as though an invisible brush is painting them. I begin to feel a painful throb in my thigh, where Deirdre told me the tracker was. I hear voices whispering to me. I see my father, pale and lifeless, standing in the doorway watching me. He never says anything, and eventually he leaves. Sometimes Rowan comes to loosen my restraints. He is always in a hurry, always trying to push me from the bed, but I’m never able to move fast enough before he disappears.

There is a man in the holograph window. He stalks through the lilies, shrouded in dark clothes, and I know he’s coming for me.

Sounds become twice as loud. I can hear the rolling carts in the hallway as though they are moving inside my skull. The hushed voices of the attendants get trapped in my head and beat against my brain like moths.

I hear every footfall within this mansion, every creaking floorboard, every trill of laughter from the kitchen, every murmur and sigh from my sister wife’s bedroom when Linden visits her. There is no escaping these magnified commotions, no way to cover my ears. And even when it’s quiet, my own heart beats like gunfire.

Vaughn comes in frequently. The first few times, I keep my eyes closed and try to lie still despite my pounding heart. But then one time, while he’s fiddling with my IV bag, he says, “The orange blossoms look especially lovely today.”

I open my eyes. There are white petals on his shoulders, spilling off him when he moves and dissolving before they reach the ground. His eyes are very green today. They’re Linden’s eyes, I think. How did they find their way onto his father’s face?

Vaughn smiles at me with none of his son’s kindness. “You’re looking flushed,” he says. “Don’t worry. The fevers are normal.”

I watch as an orange tree sprouts up behind him. A flock of starlings rushes across the ceiling, and I say, “Wherever I go, you’ll find me, won’t you?”

“That’s neither here nor there,” he says as he taps the barrel of the syringe. “You’re not going anyplace.”

I stare at the ceiling tiles, knowing what he says is true. Cecily promises an escape, but this, like everything, is out of her hands. That is best, I think. She would only endanger herself by coming down here. Better for her to live upstairs. She is always trying to take charge of things much too big for her; but how can I hold that against her? I’m the same way. Jenna was right to worry. Perhaps she was the only bride who knew what she was dealing with; she accepted her fate with grace and serenity.

I can hear the rush of air through the vents; the temperature in the basement is probably regulated. Sometimes I think I hear Rose crawling through the air ducts, but none of them lead her outside. She’ll never be free either.

“Have you noticed anything unusual?” Vaughn asks me. “Chest pains? Headaches? Heartburn?”

“Just the orange blossoms,” I say, as though he’ll know that I can see them now. I turn my head and blow at the few that have settled on my shoulder.

He adjusts a bag of fluid and finds a vein, and I watch as the blood gets drawn from my arm. “Rose said you wanted me for my eyes,” I say.

“Rose was not a stupid girl,” Vaughn says. “I made suggestions that day, but my son picked you out on his own. If he hadn’t, maybe things would have been easier.”

“Because I’d be dead,” I say.

He extracts the needle from my arm, dabs alcohol on the spot. “Of course not, darling,” he says. “You’d have been here helping me find the antidote much sooner. Do you know much about heterochromia? Picture your genes like a mosaic,” he says. “All different pieces that don’t seem to blend together, but step back and you’ll find that those mismatched pieces make a coherent picture. They just take a more creative approach to making it.”

He’s losing me. But lately I have a hard time understanding even simple things. “I suspect that what you have is genetic mosaicism. Two different populations of cells, where the average person only has one. One blue eye; one brown eye.”

He leans forward and strokes the hair from my face, as if I’m a small child unable to comprehend his bedtime story.

If Rowan were here, he’d understand this. Maybe he has already figured it out on his own. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll never see him again. And I will never tell Vaughn about my brother; if Vaughn is fascinated with me, he’d be downright giddy to know I’m a twin.

“I could never have anticipated how much my son would love you,” Vaughn goes on. “I knew I couldn’t take you away from him.”

“He doesn’t love me now,” I say.

“He absolutely loves you,” Vaughn says. “Love unrequited is violent. He loves you so much that he’s turned it into hate.”

Hate. I try to picture it in Linden’s sullen face, but I can’t. Maybe it’s for the best that I don’t.

“How have you been sleeping?” Vaughn asks.

I laugh. The sound explodes into echoes. His concern for me is just that absurd.

When he leaves me, I hear Rose in the ceiling start to scream.

I
N MY DREAM
the windmill in the golf course is spinning, its bolts loosening in the hurricane winds. Gabriel is calling for me to come back inside.

“Rhine?”

The windmill is still grating. “Cecily?” My voice is less than a whisper. “Get back inside.” Her red hair whips up over her head; she reaches for me, but I’m too far away. I watch her lips move.

“Wake up,” she says.

I open my eyes, and she’s leaning over me, breathless, flushed, lights speeding over her head. This isn’t a hurricane, though, and after a moment I realize I’m being pushed through the basement on a rolling cart. Like Rose’s corpse. Cecily is pacing to keep up. She’s surrounded by attendants in white. One of them is yelling at her to get out of the way, but she hops up onto the cart and sits beside me.

“What’s happening?” I say. Deep within me is the dull sense of panic, but my body won’t react. I can hardly feel my hand in Cecily’s grasp.

“The Housemaster would have your head if he saw you down here, child,” one of the attendants tells her, and she scowls.

“I’m no child. And my father-in-law will do no such thing,” she says pertly. “Because he won’t know.”

“Who keeps letting her down here?” the attendant says.

“Can’t very well tell House Governor Linden’s bride how to behave,” another says.

Cecily winks at me, smug. “Housemaster Vaughn isn’t here,” she whispers to me. I can just make out her voice over the grating of the wheels. “He’s in Seattle giving a presentation on antibodies.”

The cart stops moving. “Off,” a voice commands, and Cecily lets go of my hand. My arm drops to my side, as heavy and useless as a board. I’m transferred from the gurney to a bed that leaves me propped at an incline. An IV is hooked into my arm, and I wait for the familiar fade of unconsciousness, but it doesn’t come. My eyelids are taped open, but I wouldn’t be able to blink them now if I tried. Before the numbness overtakes me, I can just move my lips enough to get out my sister wife’s name one last time, and she’s there.

Cecily climbs onto the bed and inches behind me so that her knees straddle my body, my back against her stomach. She puts her chin on my shoulder, and suddenly I can feel the heat of her cheeks, can imagine them turning red the way they do when she’s about to cry. It takes me a while to realize that the words she’s whispering over and over are “Be brave.”