Sever (The Chemical Garden #3)(26)
Author: Lauren DeStefano

As a result their daughter grew to be fearless. She played among the tents and talked wildly about the ocean and the sky. She had dreams of leaving the country. If the rest of the world were destroyed, she wanted to visit the graves of the other countries. She wanted to start at one end of the world and sail all the way around until she came back again.

Madame blames herself for this. She raised her daughter to be discontent in this carnival of dying and broken girls. When Rose’s father left on research endeavors, Rose pleaded to go along with him, and he most always relented. When Rose was eleven, he took her to the coast of Florida, where he would be meeting with several colleagues. Vaughn Ashby was among them.

“She was supposed to build sand castles on the beach and put her toes in the ocean,” Madame says.

“What happened?” Cecily asks gently. She reaches for her teacup, but I put my hand on her wrist to stop her. Even if Madame is being civil, I don’t trust anything she serves us.

Madame strokes the cloth-swaddled edges of the picture frame.

“There was a car bombing,” Madame says. “I was told it was caused by pro-naturalists who opposed the research being conducted. I was told my lover and daughter were killed.”

She looks at Linden now. He’s so small and weary, and I worry that he’ll collapse, but he doesn’t. He says, “Rose thought that her parents were killed in that explosion. She thought that her mother met up with her father and that they died on their way to her. She had nightmares for—always. She always did.”

“I can’t help noticing”—Madame’s voice is dry and lacking emotion, but ripe with expectancy—“that you are referring to her in the past tense.”

Linden cannot speak. He only looks, bleary-eyed, into his teacup.

“Rose has been gone for a year now,” I say.

“When she would have turned twenty, then,” Madame says. “I let hope get the better of me for a moment.”

“I—excuse me,” Linden blurts, and before any of us can stop him, he’s on his feet and stumbling through the slit in the tent, and Madame is yelling for her guards not to shoot, to keep the fences closed but to let him go wherever he pleases.

Cecily runs after him.

Madame looks at me, and I see a rare moment of humanity about her face. I see her brown eyes, and I understand now why she seemed so familiar to me when we first met several months before.

“Rose looked like you,” I say.

During my time at this carnival, I was subjected to Madame’s whims, treated like one of her girls. But not exactly. She put the pill down my throat but she never forced me to go quite as far as the other girls when I was with Gabriel. I never had to forfeit my virginity. Maybe that was her way of not sullying the image of her daughter. Maybe she still loved her after all.

Madame’s mouth opens and shuts several times. She turns the picture frame over and over in her hands and says, “Vaughn asked me about arranging a marriage between our children. But I thought it would be a waste of time. Vaughn said that we could have grandchildren, but—burying Rose was going to be hard enough. I didn’t want more children to bury.”

This is the real Madame. I can see why she hides herself in accents and gems and exotic perfumes. I can see why she’s grown to hate anything to do with love. She isn’t evil or corrupt the way that Vaughn is. She’s broken. Only broken.

“You remind me of her,” Madame says. “Not just your hair and your face. You’ve both got that restlessness. Your eyes are somewhere else.”

“I only knew Rose a little, toward the end,” I say. “But she wasn’t unhappy. She and Linden loved each other very much.”

“All those years wasted,” Madame says, and her voice is venomous. “I could have had her for nine more years. I could have said good-bye.”

This is a woman who imprisoned me, who drugged me and betrayed me and nearly murdered a little girl right in front of me. And yet I believe that her grief is sincere. I believe that she loved her daughter. I don’t hate her anymore.

“Vaughn lies,” I tell her. “He took me away from my family too. He’s the one I was running away from, not Linden. Linden would never hurt anybody.”

“He was always off,” Madame says. “That Vaughn. Always trying to save the world, never mind what it cost. He has always believed he would cure the virus.” She stares past me for a long time, and then, hesitantly, she asks me, “Did Rose have any children?”

“No,” I say. That pain, at least, I can spare her.

I find Linden and Cecily at the old merry-go-round. Linden is staring at the horses that are impaled by rusted poles. “She told me about these,” he says. “She told me stories about a Ferris wheel and a merry-go-round and women in extravagant dresses. My father told her it had been demolished. He told her that her parents were dead.”

Rose told me many things, but she never told me about her childhood here. Too painful, I suppose. It must have taken years for her to speak of her past with her own husband.

Cecily’s mouth twists as though the pain were her own. She can’t bear to see him so sad.

“He took away everything she loved,” Linden says through gritted teeth. “He wanted her to think there was nothing left for her so that she’d have no reason to run away.”

I touch his shoulder, but he jerks away.

“Leave me alone,” he says. “Both of you.”

Cecily frowns. “Linden . . . ”

“It’s all right, Cecily,” I say. “Come on. I’ll show you the strawberry patch.”

She follows me, looking over her shoulder at Linden, whose back is shaking with tears now that he’s alone.

“He needs to grieve,” I tell her. “He’ll come find us when he’s ready.”

“Rose is never going to be dead,” she says, too disheartened to sound bitter.

I didn’t see Madame’s carnival in the summer. Last time I was here, everything was dusted with snow. Now insects and Jared’s machines are buzzing in the afternoon heat. The strawberries are fat and alive, not at all shriveled and mushy like they were in the winter. The flowers that frame the tents have multiplied in quantity and in color. The first generations have a fascination with keeping plants alive.

It’s quiet this time of day, while all the working girls sleep.

Cecily and I sit in the tall grass. She shreds a leaf into ribbons. “I feel like I can relate to that woman,” she says. “I feel like I lost a child too. It was never even born alive. I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl. I miss something I never even really had. Isn’t that dumb of me?”

“It’s not dumb,” I say.

She tosses the bits of leaf over her shoulder. “I know it was wrong of me to try to bring another child into the world,” she says. Her mouth twists into a smile that becomes a frown. “I wanted it, though. I would give anything to have it back.”

I think she’ll cry, but she doesn’t. She only plucks a blade of grass and winds it around and around her wedding band.

She shakes her head. “Linden doesn’t want me to talk about it anymore. He says it’ll only make me sad. He says we need to move on now.”

“We could have a funeral,” I say.

“Have you ever seen a funeral?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “Maybe I should’ve had one for my parents. It didn’t seem necessary at the time; my brother and I knew they were gone. But it never felt final. I kept feeling like they’d come home.”

Now I’m pulling at a blade of grass too, then peeling it apart.

“I don’t think a funeral would have stopped that,” Cecily says. “Those ashes I’ve been holding on to since Jenna was cremated? I know they probably don’t belong to her. Even if they do, they won’t bring me any closer to her. I know she isn’t coming back, but I still think that she will. Nothing can make that go away. We figure out what death means when we’re born, practically, and we live our whole lives in some kind of weird denial about it.”

She’s right. I hate that someone so young can be so right about death.

Eventually Madame finds us. Her eyes are reddened, thick layers of makeup melting tear-shaped rivers down her cheeks. “I’ve arranged for Jared to take you someplace safe,” she says. Jared, the bodyguard who helped Gabriel and me escape the first time. She kneels before me and takes my cheeks in her hand. I’m caught off guard when she pushes forward and kisses my forehead, leaving lipstick residue so heavy that I can feel it. “I’m setting you free, little lovebird,” she says. “Go enjoy the rest of your years.”

Jared is not the same as when I saw him last. He somehow doesn’t seem as tall, or as menacing. Though, the last time I was at Madame’s carnival, I was under the influence of so many opiates that it’s a wonder I have any memories of this place at all.

The sleeves of his shirt have been torn away, and I can see the scar from where the Gatherer’s bullet hit. A rusted white car is idling beside us. Its windows are tinted black.

“You’ll be taking them to the northern compound,” Madame says. “See that they’re fed and they have a chance to rest. Don’t stop for anyone. The whole country’s looking for them.” She pats Cecily’s shoulder blades with so much force that Cecily stumbles. “It’s a good thing you were caught here, where people would think to bring you to me. They know better than to have kept you from me. I own these parts, Goldenrod. I told you that.”

Back when she told me that, months ago, I couldn’t tell if it was true or if it was more maddened nonsense from the woman who smoked too many hallucinogens and was perpetually rambling about spies.

“We need to get our car back,” Cecily says.

“Consider it long gone,” Madame says. “I’m sure the vultures have taken it for themselves by now, and if they haven’t, they’re even stupider than I suspect, which doesn’t seem possible.”

Linden looks at the dirt. He doesn’t ask about his father. He doesn’t say anything at all other than, “Thank you.”

As we’re climbing into the back of the car, Madame grips my arm.

She looks at me, and I can see all of the lines in her face. Now that I’m really paying attention, that neon pink doesn’t hide her thin lips. I can see all the pain she’s ever felt in her seventy-plus years. “When my Rose died,” she says, “tell me, please—was she still pretty?” Beauty is Madame’s obsession. It was Rose’s also. I remember how she looked, languishing on the divan or in her bed, makeup always covering her illness, her hair always arranged in some way or other that was lovely.