The Chemical Garden Series Books 1-3: Wither, Fever, Sever

the mood of the house is so bright, that he offers all of us the freedom to tour the house and the gardens. When I’m alone, I look for the road through the trees to the outside world, but I can never find so much as a path. Housemaster Vaughn leaves the property sometimes to do work at his hospital, but the lawn must be treated somehow to resist tire marks because I’ve never seen any leading out of the garage. Gabriel called this place eternity and I’m beginning to think he’s right. No beginning, no end. And no matter where I go, I always somehow end up back at the mansion.

My father used to tell me stories of carnivals. He called them celebrations for when there was nothing to celebrate. When he was a child, he could go to a carnival and pay ten dollars to walk through a house of mirrors. He described it many times—warped mirrors that made him too tall or too short; mirrors juxtaposed so that they looked like infinite portals. He said that the house always looked like it went on forever, when from the outside it was really as small as a toolshed. The trick was looking past the illusion, because the exit was never as far as it seemed.

I hadn’t understood what he meant until now. I wander the rose garden, the tennis courts, the labyrinth of shrubbery, trying to channel his spirit. I imagine him looking down on me, watching my speck of a body searching aimlessly when all the while the exit is just beyond my fingertips.

“Help me figure this out,” I tell him. The only answer is a wind through the tall grass as I stand in the orange grove. I’ve never been good at solving puzzles; my brother is the one who solved the Rubik’s Cube on the first try. He’s the one who took an interest in the science of things, asking our father questions about the destroyed countries while I was busy admiring the pictures.

I imagine my brother emerging from between the orange trees. “You shouldn’t have answered that ad,” he’d say. “You never listen to me. What am I going to do with you?” He’d take my hand. We’d go home.

“Rowan …” His name spills out of me with a hot wave of tears. Nothing answers me but the breeze. He isn’t coming; there’s no path on earth that would lead him to me.

When my failed plights become too disheartening, I take a break and succumb to the things that make my prison more enjoyable. I dive into the artificial sea within the pool. An attendant shows me how to use the dial that changes the hologram, and I can swim beneath arctic glaciers or navigate the sunken Titanic. I meander alongside bottlenose dolphins. Afterward, dripping wet and smelling of chlorine, Jenna and I lie in the grass and sip colorful drinks with pineapple slices on the rims. We play mini-golf on a course that I suppose was built for Linden when he was a child, or maybe his dead brother before him. We don’t keep score, and it’s a joint effort to defeat the spinning clown at the last hole. We try playing tennis but give up and make a game of shooting tennis balls at the wall, since that’s all we seem to be good at.

In the kitchen I can eat all the June Beans I want. I sit on the kitchen counter, helping Gabriel peel potatoes, and listening to the cooks talk about the weather and how they’d like to serve the bratty little bride a dirty sock. Gabriel, as good-natured as he is, agrees that Cecily has been particularly awful lately. Someone suggests frying up a rat for her lunch, and the head cook says, “Watch your tongue. There are no rats in my kitchen.”

Linden feels that he’s neglecting Jenna and me, and he asks if we’d like anything—anything at all. I almost ask for a crate of June Beans, because I heard the kitchen staff complaining about early-morning deliveries, and since then I’ve been fantasizing about escaping on a delivery truck. But then I think of all the progress I’ve made earning Linden’s trust, and how easily it would be destroyed if I were caught, which is highly possible, considering Vaughn knows everything that happens in this place.

Jenna says, “I’d like a big trampoline.” And the next morning there it is in the rose garden. We jump until our lungs hurt, and then we lie in the center of it and watch the clouds for a while.

“This isn’t the worst place to die,” she confesses. Then she props herself on her elbow, which causes my body to slide more toward her, and she asks me, “Has he come to your bed at all lately?”

“No,” I say, and fold my hands behind my head. “It’s nice to have it to myself again.”

“Rhine?” she says. “When he came to you, it wasn’t … for children.”

“No,” I say. “It was never that. He hasn’t even kissed me.”

“I wonder why,” she says, lying back down.

“Has he come to you at all?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “A few times, before all his attention started going to Cecily.”

This surprises me. I think back to Jenna’s reliable morning routine of taking tea in the library and burying her nose in romance novels. There hasn’t been a single morning when she has seemed rumpled or out of sorts, especially not the way Cecily was. And even now, she seems very cool about the whole thing.

“What was it like?” I ask, and immediately a hot blush spreads across my face. Did I really just ask that?

“Not terrible,” is Jenna’s nonchalant reply. “He kept asking if I was okay. Like he thought I’d break or something.” She laughs a little at the thought. “If I was going to break, he wouldn’t be the one to do it.”

I’m not sure how to respond to that. The very thought of Linden kissing me sets my nerves on edge, puts my stomach in knots. And yet both of my sister wives have done much more than kiss him, and one is even carrying his child.

“I thought you hated him,” I finally say.

“Of course I do,” she says. Her voice is a gentle hum. She crosses her ankle over her pointed knee and swings her foot casually. “I’ve hated all of them. But this is the world we live in.”

“All of them?” I say.

She sits up and looks at me, her face a mix of confusion, pity, and maybe amusement. “Really?” she says, and cups my chin in her hand, inspecting me. Her skin is soft, and it smells like the lotions Deirdre lays out for me on the dressing table. “You’re so pretty, and you have such a nice figure,” she says. “How were you earning money?”

I sit up too, as I realize what she’s asking me. “You thought I was a prostitute?” I say.

“Well, no,” she says. “You seemed too sweet for that. But I just assumed—how else could girls like us get by?”

I think of all the girls who dance in the park at New Year’s parties, how some of them will slip into a car with a wealthy first generation. And all the brothels in the scarlet district with blacked-out windows. Sometimes a door would open as I passed by, and I’d hear the burst of pulsing music, see a flicker of rainbow lights. I think of how deftly Jenna danced that night in the orange grove, and how charismatic she was to these men she despised. Her life was in one of those dark and secret places I’d barely had the courage to walk past on the sidewalk.

“I thought the orphanage would have provided you with enough to get by,” I say. But I realize immediately that that can’t be true. Rowan and I deterred enough orphans from stealing from us. We wouldn’t have had to if orphanages had provided for them.

Jenna lies back down, and I lie beside her. “You’re serious?” she says. “So you’ve never …”

“No,” I say, a tad defensively. In my mind Jenna begins to materialize in a new light. But I don’t judge her. I don’t blame her. Like she said, it’s the world we live in.

“Well, I don’t know why he hasn’t come to you,” she says. “I get the sense there’s a reason for everything that happens here.”

“I don’t get it,” I say. “If you hate him so much, why not refuse? Linden is so mild, I can’t imagine him forcing himself on any of us.”

Though, it has worried me more than once that Linden has not pressed the issue of consummating our marriage. Has he sensed my hesitation and allowed me the luxury of time? How long before his patience is gone?

She turns to face me, and I can swear there is fear in her gray eyes for a moment. “It’s not him I’m worried about,” she says.

“Who?” I blink. “Housemaster Vaughn?”

She nods.

I think of Rose’s body in the basement. All those ominous hallways that could lead to anywhere. And I sense that Jenna, who is such a keen observer, has found her own reasons in this place to be afraid. The question hangs heavy on my tongue: Jenna, what has Housemaster Vaughn done to you?

But I’m too afraid of the answer. The image of Rose’s hand under that sheet sends a cold ripple up my spine. There are ugly, dangerous things lurking beneath the beauty of this mansion. And I’d like to be far away from here before ever knowing what they are.

with new colors. I’ve been here for six months. I avoid Housemaster Vaughn when I can. And at dinner when he regales me in banter about the meal or the weather, I try to smile like his voice isn’t sending cockroaches up and down my spine.

Linden finds me one afternoon while I’m alone in the orange grove, lying in the grass, and I’m not sure if he was looking for me or if he meant to be here alone. I smile at him and tell myself I’m glad he’s here. Now that most of his attention goes to my younger sister wife, I’ve had little opportunity to earn his favor. We’re alone in his dead wife’s favorite place, and I sense an opportunity to bond with him.

I pat the ground beside me in invitation, and he lies in the grass. We’re both silent as a breeze moves over us.

Rose still lingers in the trees; the rustling leaves are her ethereal laughter. Linden follows my gaze to the sky.

For a while we say nothing. I listen to the rhythm of his breaths, and ignore the nearly imperceptible flutter in my chest brought on by his presence. The back of his hand just barely brushes mine. An orange blossom falls over us on a perfect diagonal.

“I’m dreading fall. It is a terrifying season,” he says finally. “Everything shriveling up and dying.”

I don’t know how to answer. Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale. I’ve never thought to be frightened of it. My greatest fear is another year of my life passing by while I’m so far from home.

Suddenly the clouds seem very high above us. They’re moving over us in an arch, circling the planet. They have seen abysmal oceans and charred, scorched islands. They have seen how we destroyed the world. If I could see everything, as the clouds do, would I swirl around this remaining continent, still so full of color and life and seasons, wanting to protect it? Or would I just laugh at the futility of it all, and meander onward, down the earth’s sloping atmosphere?

Linden takes in another breath, and he musters up the courage to put his hand over mine. I don’t resist. Everything in Linden Ashby’s world is fake, an illusion, but the sky and the orange blossoms are real. His body beside me is real.

“What are you thinking?” he asks me. For all of our marriage I have never allowed myself to be honest with him, but here, now, I want to tell him what’s on my mind.

“I was wondering if we’re worth saving,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

I shake my head against the ground, feel the back of my skull rolling along the cold, hard earth. “It’s nothing.”

“Not nothing,” he says. “What did you mean?” His voice isn’t intrusive. It’s gentle, curious.

“It’s just all these doctors and engineers are looking for an antidote,” I say. “They’ve been at it for years. But is it really worth it? Can we even be fixed?”

Linden is quiet for a while, and just when I’m sure he’s going to condemn me for what I’ve said or, I don’t know, defend the work of his madman father, he squeezes my hand. “I’ve asked myself the same question,” he says.

“Really?” We turn at the same time and meet each other’s eyes, but I feel my cheeks starting to burn, and I look back to the sky.

“I thought I was going to die, once,” he says. “When I was young. I had a high fever. I remember my father gave me an injection that was supposed to cure it—something experimental he’d been working on, of course, but it only aggravated things.”

Vaughn could have been pumping any number of his twisted experiments into his son’s veins, for all I trust him, but I don’t say this. Linden continues, “For days I was in some halfway land between reality and delirium. Everything seemed so frightening, and I couldn’t wake myself up. But from someplace far away I could hear my father and some of his doctors calling me. ‘Linden. Linden, come back to us. Open your eyes.’ And I remember that I hesitated. I didn’t know if I should go back. I didn’t know if I wanted to live in a world of certain death. Of fevers and nightmares.”

There’s a long silence, and then I say, “But you came back.”

“Yes,” he says. And then, very quietly, “But that wasn’t my decision.”

He weaves his fingers through mine, and I allow it, feel the clammy warmth of his palm against mine. Flush. Alive. Eventually I realize that I am holding on to him just as tightly as he holds on to me. And here we are: two small dying things, as the world ends around us like falling autumn leaves.

Cecily’s little stomach begins to swell. She’s often bedridden, but she’s louder than ever, according to the attendants.

I’m eating an ice cream cone and watching the koi in the pond one afternoon when an attendant comes running for me. He stops and puts his hands on his knees, doubling over to catch his breath. “Come quick,” he gasps. “Lady Cecily is asking for you. Some kind of emergency.”

“Well, is she all right?” I say. To look at him you’d think somebody had died. He shakes his head in response. He doesn’t know. I think I hand him my ice cream cone as I run for the door. Gabriel is already waiting at the elevator with his key card. Upstairs I run into her bedroom, thinking it will be Rose all over again, thinking I will find her coughing blood or fighting to breathe.

She’s propped upright on pillows, her toes separated by pieces of foam while the nail polish dries. She smiles at me with a straw in her mouth. She’s sipping cranberry juice.

“What’s the matter?” I say, panting.

“Tell me a story,” she says.

“What?”

“You and Jenna are having all the fun without me.” She pouts. Her stomach floats in front of her like a little quarter-moon. She isn’t very far along—four months—but what I know and she doesn’t is that Linden does not want to risk losing another baby. He will spare no precaution. She may be well enough to play mini-golf or even swim in the pool, which is heated and treated to repel leaves and insects this time of year, but she has become the greatest captive here.

“What do you do all day?” she asks.

“We have lots of fun,” I snap, because she worried me for nothing. “We eat cotton candy and somersault in midair on the trampoline. Shame you can’t come out.”

“What else?” She pats the mattress beside her, her eyes eager. “No, wait. Tell me about another place. What was your orphanage like?”

Of course she would think I grew up in an orphanage. That’s all her short life has showed her of the world.

I sit cross-legged on her mattress and push the hair from her eyes. “I didn’t grow up in an orphanage,” I say. “I grew up in a city. With millions of people, and buildings so tall you’d get dizzy trying to see the tops of them.”

She’s dazzled. And so I tell her about the ferries and the toxic fish that are caught for sport and returned to the sea. I remove myself from the stories and instead tell her about a pair of twins, a brother and a sister, who grew up in a house where someone was always playing the piano. There were peppermints and parents and bedtime stories. The blankets all smelled like mothballs and, vaguely, their mother’s best perfume, from when she’d lean in to kiss them good night.

“Are they still there?” she asks me. “Did they grow up?”

“They grew up,” I tell her. “But a hurricane came one day, and they were each blown to a different side of the country. And now they’ve been separated.”

She looks doubtful. “A hurricane blew them away? That’s dumb.”

“I swear it’s true,” I say.

“And it didn’t kill them?”

“That part may be a blessing or a curse,” I say. “But they are both still alive, trying to find their way back to each other.”

“What about their mom and dad?” she says.

I take her empty juice cup from the night table. “I’ll go get you a fresh drink,” I say.

“Don’t. That’s not your job.” She pushes the blue button over her night table and says, “Cranberry juice. And waffles. With syrup. And an umbrella toothpick!”

“Please,” I add, because I know they’re all rolling their eyes at her, and it really is only a matter of time before someone blows their nose into her napkin.

“I liked that story,” she says. “Is it really true? Do you really know those twins?”

“Yes,” I say. “And their little house is waiting for them to return. It has a broken fire escape, and it used to be covered in flowers. But that city isn’t like this place. The chemicals from factories make it very hard for things to grow. Only their mother was able to grow lilies, because she had a magic touch, and when she died, they all wilted. That was that.”

“That was that,” she echoes in agreement.

I leave her when it’s time for her ultrasound. Gabriel catches my arm in the hallway. “Was the story all true?” he says.

“Yes,” I say.

“So how long do you think it’ll be?” he says. “Before the next hurricane comes along to take you home.”

“Can I tell you my biggest fear?” I say.

“Yes. Tell me.”

“That it will be a very windless four years.”

It isn’t windless, though. By late October we have severe weather patterns. In the kitchen there are bets on what category the first hurricane will be. Three is most popular. Gabriel thinks two, because it is a weird time of year for such a thing. I just agree with him because I have no idea what I’m talking about. We don’t have very dramatic weather in Manhattan. Whenever the wind is bad, I ask, “Is this a hurricane? Is this?” and the kitchen laughs at me. Gabriel assures me I’ll know.

The pool water thrashes, and I think it might get sucked into the air. The trees and bushes convulse. Oranges roll as though being kicked along by ghosts. There are leaves everywhere, red, and brown-splattered yellow. When nobody is around, I gather the leaves into piles and bury myself. I breathe in the dampness of them. I feel like a little girl again. I stay hidden until the wind takes them away in spiraling ribbons. “I want to go with you,” I say.

One afternoon I return to my bedroom and find that my window has been opened. A present Linden left for me to find. I test it—it opens and closes. I sit on the sill and smell the wet earth, the cold wind that strips everything clean, and I think of stories my parents told me about their childhood. At the turn of the new century, when the world was safe, they had a holiday called Halloween. They would go out in groups of friends dressed as hideous things and ring doorbells, asking for candy. My father’s favorite kind, he said, looked like little traffic cones with yellow tips.

Jenna, whose window remains locked, comes to my room and presses her nose to the screen and breathes deeply, traveling to kind memories of her own. She tells me that on days like this the orphanage would serve hot chocolate. She and her two sisters would share a mug, and they’d all have chocolate mustaches.

Cecily’s window is also left locked, and when she objects, Linden says the draft will be too much for her in her fragile state. “Fragile state,” she mutters to me once he has left. “I’ll put him in a fragile state if I can’t get out of this bed soon.” But she does like the attention. He sleeps beside her most nights, and he helps her improve her reading and writing. He feeds her éclairs and rubs her feet. When she coughs, there are doctors tripping over themselves to check her lungs.

But she is healthy. She’s strong. She’s not Rose. And she’s restless. On an afternoon when Linden isn’t doting so heavily on her, Jenna and I close Cecily’s bedroom door, and Jenna teaches us to dance. We don’t have Jenna’s grace, but that’s part of the fun. And in that fun, I can forget how Jenna became such an adept dancer.

“Oh!” Cecily cries, cutting short her clumsy pirouette. I think she’s going to collapse again, or start bleeding, but she bounces on her heels and says, “It kicked, it kicked!” She grabs our hands and presses them to her stomach, under her shirt.

As though in response, a terrible wailing alarm fills the room. A red light we didn’t know existed begins to flash from the ceiling, and I look out the window and notice that the tree with the robin’s nest has fallen over.