Sever (The Chemical Garden #3)(7)
Author: Lauren DeStefano

“That’s not much of a plan,” he says. “What are you going to do for money? Transportation? Food? Where will you sleep?”

I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters.”

“This is why Reed was stalling, isn’t it? He wanted to talk to you before I left.” I suppress a cry of frustration. “Please just let this be my problem,” I say. “Not yours.”

He’s silent after that. The silence adds a foreign element to the air, polluting the moonlight, making my throat tight, the crickets extra loud. Planets are leaning in to listen. And finally I can’t take it anymore. “Just say it,” I tell him.

“Say what?”

“Whatever it is you want to say to me. There’s something ugly in there you’ve been wanting to let out. I can tell.”

“It’s not ugly,” he says gently. “Or angry at all, really. It’s more of a question.”

I prop myself on one elbow to look at him, and he does the same. There’s no hostility in his eyes. There’s no kindness, either. There’s nothing but green. “That night, at the New Year’s party, you said you loved me. Did you mean that?”

I stare at him a long time. Until his face disappears, and he’s just a shadow.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “If I did, it wasn’t enough to make me stay.”

He nods. Then he gets up, dusts the backs of his legs, and offers his hand to me. I let him pull me to my feet.

“Don’t leave tomorrow,” he says. “Please. Give me a chance to figure something out. If I just let you go, Cecily will be livid.”

“She’ll be okay,” I say. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“Then think of it as doing me a favor,” he says. “I’d like for Cecily to not be angry with me.”

I hesitate. “How long?”

“A couple of days, maybe less.”

“All right,” I say. “A couple of days. Maybe less.”

His lips waver, and I think he’s going to smile, but he doesn’t. The last time I saw him, he was brimming with words and thoughts, anger and intensity. I could feel them humming inside him. But now they’re all gone. I wonder where he put them. I wonder if he shouted them into the orange grove with the supposed ashes of his dead wife and child. When he opens his mouth, all he says is, “If you’re going to be out here, you should really wear a sweater. I packed one for you.”

Then he turns to leave. The limo is idling in the distance.

“It wasn’t all a lie, Linden,” I burst out when he’s a few yards away. My voice is weak, getting smaller with each word. “Not everything. Not all of it.”

He climbs into the backseat, giving no indication that he believes me.

Chapter 5

REED SITS across the kitchen table, watching me as I turn the apple in my fingers. Maybe he’s right about my never needing to eat. I can’t remember the last time I had a real appetite. Even the delicacies served to me on the wives’ floor wouldn’t appeal to me right now.

I keep my eyes down. I don’t want Reed to see my defeat. I don’t want him to see that Vaughn has had a victory over me, because almost all of my misfortunes can be traced to that man. Being separated from my brother. Losing Jenna. Watching Cecily go with tears in her eyes. Leaving Gabriel to fear the worst. Linden’s coldness toward me. I keep staggering forward because I have to, but what Linden said last night is true: It’s not much of a plan.

“Are you going to eat that, or submit it for fingerprint analysis?” Reed says.

I set the apple down neatly, and tuck my hands under the table.

He tilts his head, watching me. He’s eating some sort of deep-fried stew. The smell is repulsive; some of it drips onto his plaid shirt.

“Okay, then,” he says. “No food today either. So what will sustain you?”

“Oxygen,” I say softly.

“You need to spice it up with something,” he says. This is his way of making conversation. I think he feels sorry for me.

“A question, then,” I say.

He sets his spoon into the bowl with authority. “All right. Go for it.”

I look aside, thinking of how I want to word this. “You and Vaughn don’t seem anything alike,” I begin. “I guess my question is—was he always this way? You said your mother didn’t really care for him.”

Reed laughs gruffly. “He was quiet all the time. I don’t mean like he was being polite or solemn. I mean like he was planning something.”

“He’s still like that,” I say. I try to imagine Vaughn as a child or even as a young man, but I can’t. All I see is a version of a young Linden with blackness where his eyes should be.

“But he didn’t have much purpose until his boy died,” Reed says. “That’s when he reprogrammed the elevators so that only he could access the basement. I never knew what was going on down there.”

“Did he used to let you visit?” I ask, thinking of what Reed said a few days ago about Vaughn not allowing Reed onto his property.

“I used to live there,” Reed says. “When our parents died, they left that house to both of us. Our father was an architect, and it was an old boarding school he’d reconstructed. That’s why it’s so enormous. You’d think, with all that space, there’d be room for both of us. But we seemed to get in each other’s way. We both like things just so.”

“Linden’s grandfather was an architect,” I say quietly, more to myself than to Reed. It makes me happy to know Linden inherited that brilliance. It skipped his father and buried itself in him, like it knew he would do better things with it.

“Linden takes after him in a lot of ways,” Reed agrees. “Vaughn hates when I point that out. He likes to pretend he’s the only family that boy’s got. Won’t even talk about Linden’s mother, or Linden’s brother that died before he was born. It’s one of the things we butted heads about. My brother and I were already walking a fine line with each other, but I suppose the last straw was when Linden fell ill.”

I raise my head at that. Linden told me about a time when he was very sick as a child. He could hear his father’s voice calling him back to consciousness, but he was too scared to answer. He’d made the decision to let go, but he survived anyway.

Reed stares at something over my shoulder, his pupils turning to pinpricks. “That poor boy,” he says distantly. “I really thought it was the end of him.”

“What was it?” I ask, and he snaps back to attention and looks at me. “What made him so sick?”

“I can tell you what Vaughn said, or I can tell you what I think,” he says.

I press my eyebrows together. “You think Vaughn was responsible?”

“Not on purpose,” Reed says. “I don’t think he meant to harm him. But I think he was running some experiment that went haywire. I called him out on it, and he asked me to leave.”

“So you did?” I ask.

“I did,” he says. “I’m better off with my own place anyway. I would have liked to take my nephew with me, but Vaughn would have had my head for it. There’s nowhere I could take that boy where Vaughn wouldn’t have found him.”

“I know the feeling,” I mumble.

“Look at that,” Reed says. He slaps his palms on the table, rattling the bowl, startling me. “You asked for an answer to one question, and you got an entire story. Feeling sustained yet?”

In answer I take a bite from the apple.

“Finish your breakfast and then tie that hair back. I have a new project for you.”

“New project?” I say before taking another bite.

“A cleaning project,” he says. He drops his bowl into the sink and then winks at me. “I think you have a knack for making things shine.”

Once I finish the apple and throw the core into the compost pile that Reed started just outside the kitchen window, and swat away a good deal of flies, Reed leads me past the usual shed and keeps going toward the bigger one.

“What I’m about to show you is top secret stuff,” he says. I can’t tell whether he’s kidding. “I wouldn’t want anyone coming out here chopping it up for parts.”

He fiddles around with a padlock, somehow coaxing it apart without a key. Then he pushes the door open, moves aside, and makes a flourishing gesture with his arm for me to enter first.

It’s dark until he flips a switch, and tiny bulbs strung along the ceiling and walls illuminate the space.

“What do you think, doll?” Reed says.

“It’s . . . a plane. In your shed.” I can’t hide my astonishment. He told me it would be here, and here it is, yet it still surprises me. It’s rusty and mismatched, but it has a body and wings, and it takes up almost the entirety of the shed. “How did you get it in here?” I ask.

“Didn’t,” he says. “Most of it was already here. I figure it probably crash-landed forty, fifty years ago and was abandoned. So I decided to fix it up, see if I could make it fly. Of course the weather proved to make things difficult, so I built this shed over it.”

The whole thing sounds too absurd for him to have made it up. “How will you get it out?” I say. “How will you even start it without being poisoned by the fumes?”

“Haven’t gotten to that part yet,” he says. “But no matter; she’s not ready to fly.”

I stare at it, and for some reason my shoulders shake and I start to laugh. It’s the first real laugh I’ve felt in days. Or weeks. Or months, maybe. Reed is either a genius or completely mad, or both. But if he’s mad, then I am too, because I love this airplane. I’ve never seen one up close before, and the stories I’ve heard never prepared me for the power such a magnificent thing implies. I want to climb inside of it. I want it to carry me up, the grass getting greener and greener the farther away it becomes.

Reed is grinning when he tugs the handle of the curved door. It looks like it once belonged to a car and was melted into shape. With a horrible rusty noise, it opens from the top, like a curled finger rising to point at me.

The door opens to a small cockpit. There are monitors and buttons and what appear to be two half-circle steering wheels. “The supply room’s in the passenger cabin,” Reed says, pointing me to a curtain that serves as a door.

The passenger cabin is all beige and red, like a mouth. It seems almost human. When I was bedridden in the mansion, Linden read a story to me that was about a scientist named Frankenstein who created a man from the body parts of the dead. Somehow Frankenstein gave this creation a pulse and made it breathe. I imagine it must have looked like this odd assemblage of pieces.