Fever (The Chemical Garden #2)(41)
Author: Lauren DeStefano

And all at once I can see this tentative civility turning ugly. Linden has a right to be unhappy, but so do I. He deserved better than to be abandoned, but I never asked to be his bride.

“Oh, yes.” I mimic his tone. “That attendant. Among others.”

“What are you going to do?” He falls into the chair beside me. “Walk all the way up the East Coast?”

“Don’t be so smug, Linden,” I say. “You have no idea what I can or cannot do.”

He laughs humorlessly, studying the floor tiles. “You’re right about that.” He’s hurt. And he doesn’t know what to do with himself. I watch his hands fidgeting in his lap. How awful it must be for him to try to reconcile this new image of his father. This new image of me.

“Do you even know what it feels like to lose someone you loved?” he asks.

“I lost everyone I loved,” I tell him. I wait for him to look at me, and then I add, “The day I met you.”

As soon as I’ve said the words out loud, I regret them. Linden shifts his weight in the chair, averts his eyes, and asks no more questions.

The next time I awaken, Linden is asleep in the chair by my bed. There’s an open notebook in his lap, and from where I lie I can just see the outline of a building he has started to draw. Music notes stream from the windows, along with road map lines and telephone wires.

I wonder how long he’s been here. I wonder why he stays.

My head is full of drought, and I don’t bother trying to sit up this time. Instead I lie in the hospital bed and stare at the muted television. They’re running some story about infants. The caption reads: Doctor believes he has duplicated virus symptoms.

That brings me out of my haze. This story is about Vaughn. The newscaster, with her cheerful young face and windswept blond hair, can’t imagine the horrible extremes the doctor has taken, the holocaust of brides and domestics and infants. All of those things had moved to the back of my subconscious when I first awoke in this hospital; there was a dull sense that something was not right. But I was too overwhelmed, too busy trying to sort out what was real, to deal with them.

“Cecily,” I blurt.

Linden’s eyebrows wrinkle as my voice reaches him.

“Linden. Wake up.”

He draws a sharp breath, immediately alert. “What? What’s the matter?”

I’m struggling to sit up, and he helps me this time, propping the pillows behind me.

I blurt out everything I can remember, not pausing to separate what I know to be real from what might be fiction. Deirdre, aged and fragile, the victim of Vaughn’s ventures. Lydia dead. Rose crawling through the pipes. Cecily sneaking down to see me, and nightmares of her screaming. By the time I’ve recounted everything, my pulse is going rapid on the monitor and Linden is telling me to take deep breaths. Then he’s looking at me like I’ve lost my mind again.

“Cecily will tell you,” I insist. “She was there. I’m sure she was there. She probably knows a lot more than I do.”

“Yes, and she should have told me,” Linden says. “She didn’t until it was almost too late. And I will deal with her when the time comes, but for now you need to calm down before you make yourself sick again.”

I shake my head. “It can’t wait.” I’m pleading. “You need to get Cecily out of that house. She can’t be left alone with your father.”

Linden speaks slowly, deliberately. He’s trying to soothe me. “I won’t justify my father’s actions. He nearly killed you. He didn’t tell me that you’d come back, probably because he knew I would never allow testing on someone against their will.” So that’s it. Cecily lied to me. She never told Linden that I was in the basement. I would have expected as much from Vaughn, but maybe I overestimated my sister wife. It wouldn’t be her first deception. And it’s proof that Vaughn still has his hooks in her.

“He took things too far,” Linden goes on. “Sometimes he doesn’t realize how dangerous his treatments can be. If he’d told me, I wouldn’t have agreed—”

“You don’t know the half of what your father isn’t telling you, Linden.” I press my hands together in frustration, and Linden opens his mouth to speak but then pauses to look at my wedding band. “No one is safe in that house!”

“You’re still delirious,” he says.

“Your father is a monster,” I spit, and Linden actually winces. He gets up, steps back.

“I’m getting a doctor,” he says. “You’re getting hysterical.” He’s walking for the door, his frightened eyes trained on me as though I’ll attack him. He’s never seen my anger, not really. I always kept it to myself so I could earn his trust. But now I have nothing to lose, and all those months of silence come bursting out.

“He killed Jenna,” I cry. “He almost killed me. You think Cecily is safe? He keeps Rose’s body in the basement. I saw it! He lied about her ashes—”

“Enough!” Linden bellows, and it’s so frightening coming from him that I shut my mouth. “Do not,” he growls. “Do not bring Rose into this. Not ever. You know nothing about her. Or my father. What right do you have to say these things to me?”

He’s trembling, and I’m trembling, and tears are welling in his eyes. He’s looking at me with such anger, such heartbreak, that I hate myself for what I say next. “Linden, he killed your child.”

Linden’s face immediately changes, goes white. His expression becomes guarded and distant. His voice catches when he says, “Impossible. Bowen is perfectly fine.”

“Not Bowen,” I say. “Your other child. Your daughter.” I’m sorry, Deirdre; this was your secret, and I swore I’d keep it. But telling may be the only way to save any of us.

“I know Rose had a baby.” I keep talking, propelled by some awful momentum. Linden’s face keeps changing into all kinds of surprise and pain. “The baby died. Your father took it away, said it was a stillborn. But it had cried. It was born alive.”

“Did Rose tell you this?” Linden’s voice is breathless. “She was delirious with pain. She couldn’t accept what had happened.”

“Rose never said a word to me about it. I swear. I didn’t know until after she was gone.”

Linden paces the room, hyperventilating, clenching and unclenching his fists. I’ve never seen him like this.

“Please, Linden,” I say softly. “I know you have every reason not to trust me, but this is the truth. Your father is dangerous.”

“Why?” he says.

“Your father killed your daughter because she was malformed,” I say.

“No—I mean. Why are you saying these things? I—” He shakes his head, disgusted with me. “Why are you being so—” He grits his teeth and can’t bring himself to look at me. His voice fades when he adds, “So awful. You’re awful.”

When he paces toward my bed, I reach out to touch him but think better of it and withdraw.

“Every word out of your mouth,” he pants, “has been a lie, hasn’t it?”

“No,” I say softly. “Not everything.”

“What about your name?” he says. “Is your name even Rhine?”

I know I’ve earned his mistrust, and even still I can see him working through it, fighting the year of instinct that led him to believe me. “Yes,” I say.

“How can I believe you?” he says. “How can you expect me to? I have no way of knowing what’s real when it comes to you.”

“Linden,” I say, “my name is Rhine.” Then I add, deliberately, “Ellery. I was forced to marry you against my will. I spent our marriage trying to break free so I could go home. Jenna was trying to help me, and your father knew that when he killed her. He killed your daughter and told you it was a stillborn. Cecily is in danger if she’s alone with him. I’m telling you the truth.”

My voice is calm, reasonable, and Linden holds his breath as he listens. Then he stares at me, his eyes suddenly bleary and colorless. He’s pale and haggard. And the way his mouth twists—like he wants to sob or shout something horrible at me—makes my body ache with longing. It’s an old instinct from all our nights together, so many of which were spent grieving our separate losses. I want to hold him. But I don’t dare try.

And after a few moments of hair pulling and heavy breathing, my once-husband takes the horrible news I’ve given him and turns to leave.

“Don’t you care about Cecily?” I ask. “If it were Rose, you know you’d go back.”

Once I’ve said it, I fear it’s going to make him angry. But his face goes distant, his tone practical. “I love Cecily,” Linden says, “whether or not you believe it. Not in the same way I loved Rose, or you. But what should that matter? I’ve loved all of my wives differently.”

“Not Jenna,” I amend.

“Don’t presume to know my relationship with Jenna,” he says. “There are things you don’t know about her. About us.”

That’s true. Jenna kept a lot of secrets, knew how to dodge questions, smile when she was filled with hatred. I’ll never know the whole truth about her, but I was certain there was nothing between her and Linden. She never quite forgave him for selecting her to live when her sisters were killed.

“We had an understanding,” Linden goes on. His voice is softer, maybe because he knows the pain of losing my oldest sister wife is still fresh.

I keep my voice measured, and I straighten my back. “What do you mean?”

“I watched Rose die. There was so much life in her, and then one morning her skin was bruised, she could scarcely breathe. She would cry out if I touched her.”

“What—” My voice cracks. “What does that have to do with Jenna?”

“Jenna knew that she was going to die,” he says. “She didn’t believe she’d ever see an antidote. And deep down I didn’t believe it either. Not after what I’d seen. So we came to an understanding: When we were together, we wouldn’t feel or think anything at all. In a way, it rid us of loneliness for a while.”

That was what Jenna did best, wasn’t it? Doing away with a man’s loneliness for however long he paid for her company. There are thousands of girls like that; I’ve seen them spilling from Madame’s tents, their faces painted like dripping China dolls. I’ve heard the clink of coins in glass jars as the men come and go. But there was only one Jenna, wild and kind, beautiful and deceptive. The girl Linden knew is not the girl I knew. I still feel her absence, as strong as her presence was. I still dream of her shape in the clouds, daylight burning through.