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

When the elevator doors open, it’s to the hallway that is loud with noises from the kitchen. It smells of lobster steam and something sweet and freshly baked. Gabriel pushes a button and the doors close, only this time the car doesn’t move. “Want to talk about it?” he says.

“Don’t you have to get back to the kitchen?” I say, blowing my nose. I do my best not to look sniveling and pathetic, but it’s hard when the handkerchief is already too damp and slimy to dry the rest of my tears as they come.

“It’s all right,” he says. “They’ll think I got held up catering to Cecily.” Sassy, demanding little Cecily is quickly taking Rose’s place among the help as least favorite wife. Gabriel and I sit cross-legged on the floor, and he waits patiently for me to stop hiccupping so I can speak.

It’s nice in the elevator. The carpet is worn but clean. The walls are cranberry red, inlaid with Victorian patterns that make me think of my parents’ bedspread, how protected I felt inside of it. Distantly my mind registers the memory of that long-gone security. I’m safe here, too. Somewhere in the back of my mind I wonder if these walls have ears—if at any moment Housemaster Vaughn’s voice will come booming through an overhead speaker, threatening Gabriel for allowing me to make it this far. But I wait, and no voice comes, and I’m so upset that I’m beyond caring anyway.

“I have a brother,” I say, starting at the beginning. “Rowan. When our parents died four years ago, we had to leave school and find jobs. It was easy for him to find factory work that paid well. But I had so little skill, I was practically useless. He didn’t think it was safe for me to go out alone, so we tried to stay near each other, and I always wound up with phone jobs in the factories that paid next to nothing. We had enough to get by, but not the way we used to, you know? I wanted to do more.

“A few weeks ago I saw an ad in the paper, offering money for bone marrow. Supposedly they were conducting a new screening for causes of the virus.” I turn the handkerchief in my hands, studying it through unreliable vision. In one corner there’s a crimson embroidery of what appears to be a flower, but it’s unlike any I’ve ever seen, with an abundance of spear-shaped petals crowded together. It blurs and doubles. I shake my head to clear my vision.

“I realized it was a trap as soon as I stepped inside the lab and saw all those other girls,” I say, my fingers automatically curling like claws. “I fought. I scratched, bit, kicked. It didn’t matter. They herded all of us into a van. And I don’t know how long we were riding. Hours. Sometimes we’d stop, the doors would open, and more girls would come in. It was so awful in there.”

I remember that blackness. There were no walls, there was no up or down. I could have been living or dead. I listened to the other girls as they breathed around me, above me, inside me, and that was the whole planet earth. Just those terrified hiccups of breath. I thought I’d gone mad. And maybe I am mad, because I think I hear one of the Gatherer’s bullets now, and I jump. Sparks fly around me.

Gabriel raises his head just as the lights begin to flicker. There’s another loud boom, not a gunshot but something mechanical-sounding. Our car begins to shake, and then the doors slide open, and Gabriel is tugging me to my feet and we’re hurrying into the hallway. But it’s not the cooks’ hallway. This one is darker and sterile-smelling. Neon lights are struggling on the ceiling, and in the floor tiles I can see the dim reflection of our shoes before each step lands.

“We must’ve gone down a floor,” Gabriel says.

“What? Why?” I say.

“Storm,” he says. “Sometimes the elevators all move to the basement as a precaution.”

“Storm? It was sunny outside just a minute ago,” I say, relieved to find the fear isn’t present in my voice. The sobs have stopped too, leaving only the soft, infrequent hiccups in the aftermath.

“We get a lot of them on the coastline,” he says. “Out of nowhere sometimes. Don’t worry, if it was a hurricane, we would have heard the alarm. It’s not uncommon for strong winds to mess with the electricity and take out one of the elevators.”

Hurricane. From somewhere deep in my mind comes a television image of wind spinning angrily, destroying houses. It’s always the houses that go, sometimes bits of a fence or an uprooted tree, a shrieking heroine in a prairie dress, but always the houses. I imagine a hurricane smashing into this mansion and tearing it apart. I wonder if I’d be able to escape then.

“So this is the basement?” I say.

“I think so,” Gabriel says. “I mean, I’ve never been down this way. I’ve only been to where the storm shelter is. Nobody’s allowed without authorization from Housemaster Vaughn.” He looks nervous, and I know Housemaster Vaughn is the reason. I can’t stand the thought of Gabriel limping to my room, melancholy and bruised because of my transgressions.

“Let’s go back up before anyone catches us,” I say.

He nods. The elevator doors have closed, though, and they don’t open when he swipes his key card across the panel. He tries several times before shaking his head. “It’s not working,” he says. “It’ll be back up eventually, but in the meantime, there’s got to be another elevator we can try.”

We begin walking down this long hallway, with unreliable lighting that cuts out at times and hisses at us. The main hallway branches off to other, darker hallways and closed doors, and I’m sure I don’t want to know where they lead. I never want to see this floor again. It’s triggering something very bad in my memories, in the place of nightmares, where the murdered girls in the van reside, where the Gatherer thief cups his hand over my mouth and presses a blade to my throat. Something about being here makes my palms sweat. And then I realize it. This is where the doctor was, the afternoon before the wedding. Deirdre brought me to this hallway, led me to a room where a man stuck me with a needle and I blacked out.

My skin becomes gooseflesh at the memory. I need to get out of here.

Beside me Gabriel presses forward without looking at me. “About what you told me,” he says in a low voice, “I think it’s terrible. And what you said earlier, about hating this place? I understand.”

I’ll bet he understands.

“It’s Housemaster Vaughn, isn’t it?” I say. “He’s the one that hurt you? It was my fault, because I got out of my room.”

“You shouldn’t have been locked in a room to begin with,” he says.

I realize all at once that I want to know him. That I’ve begun to see his blue eyes and coppery brown hair as the signs of a friend, and have for a while now. I like that we’re speaking, finally, about things more important than what’s for lunch or what I’m reading or if I want some lemons with my tea. (I never do.)

I want to know more about him, and I want to tell him more about myself. My real, unmarried self, my self from before I ever saw the inside of this mansion—when I lived in a dangerous place but I had my freedom and I was happy with it. I open my mouth, but immediately he stops me by grabbing my arm and yanking me into one of the dark side hallways. I don’t have a chance to protest before I hear the clatter of something approaching.

We press ourselves against the wall. We try to be the shadows that cover us. We will the whites of our eyes to be dim.

There are voices getting closer. “—cremation isn’t possible, of course—”

“Shame to destroy that poor girl.” A sigh; a tsk tsk.

“It’s for the greater good, if it will save lives.”

The voices are unfamiliar. If I spent the rest of my life in this house, I might never know all its rooms, all the attendants. But as the voices approach, I can see that the people aren’t dressed like attendants. They are dressed in white, their heads protected by the same white hoods that my parents wore to work, with plastic covering their faces. Biohazard suits. They’re wheeling a cart.

Gabriel grabs my wrist, squeezes it, and I don’t understand why. I don’t understand what’s happening at all until the cart gets closer to us and I can see what’s on it.

A body covered by a sheet. Rose’s blond hair trailing out around the edges. And her cold, white hand, with fingernails still painted pink.

nity is the crisp footsteps, the rickety wheels getting farther away. We wait in silence for a while just to be sure it’s safe, and then I splutter like coming up for air.

“Where are they taking her?” I gasp.

Gabriel’s sad expression becomes evident in the near-darkness. He shakes his head. “Housemaster Vaughn must be planning to study her,” he says. “He’s been looking for an antidote for years.”

“But,” I croak. “That’s Rose.”

“I know.”

“Linden would never allow this.”

“Maybe not,” Gabriel says. “We can’t tell him. We never saw this. We were never here.”

We find the elevator and make it back to the cooks’ hallway, where there’s a cacophony of metal against metal, plate against plate, the head cook shouting that someone is a lazy bastard. A riot of laughter. They have no idea that the wife they so disliked has been weaving a cold path through hallways under their feet.

“Hey, blondie’s here!” someone calls. It’s becoming the kitchen’s official nickname for me. Even though brides aren’t supposed to leave the wives’ floor, they don’t seem to mind my hanging around their workspace. I don’t ask anything of them, which Gabriel says is more than Linden’s last wife and the little one (the brat, they call her) could manage. “What’s wrong with your face, blondie? You’re all red.”

I touch the tender skin under my eyes, remembering my tears. They seem like they happened a million years ago now.

“I’m allergic to shellfish,” I call back, stuffing the damp handkerchief into my pocket. “The stink traveled all the way up to the wives’ floor, made my eyes all puffy. Are you trying to kill me or what?”

“She insisted on coming down here to tell you herself,” Gabriel says obligingly.

As we head toward the kitchen, I do my best to seem disgusted, when really the smell reminds me of home, coaxes an appetite back into me.

“We’ve got bigger problems than your diet needs,” the head cook says, brushing a strand of hair from her sweaty face, nodding out the window. The sky is a bizarre shade of green. Lightning flashes through the clouds. Less than an hour ago there was sunlight and birdsong.

Someone offers me a little cardboard box of strawberries. “Shipped in fresh this morning.” Gabriel and I each take a handful as we stand at the window. Like the blueberries, their color is more vivid than what I’m used to. Their juice floods my mouth with sweetness, and the seeds get lodged in my molars.

“It’s that time of year already?” Gabriel says. “It seems a little early.”

“We might get a good storm this year,” says one of the cooks as he kneels at the oven and furrows his brow at something that’s baking. “Maybe even a category three.”

“What does that mean?” I ask, popping the next strawberry into my mouth.

“Means you three princesses will be locked in the dungeon,” the head cook hisses, and I’m just about to believe her when she claps a hand on my shoulder hard and laughs. “The House Governor takes every precaution with his wives,” she says. “If the winds get bad, you’ll all have to wait out the storm in the storm shelter. Don’t worry, blondie, I bet it’s comfy cozy, and the rest of us’ll be up here cooking and bringing you your meals.”

“You just work through the storm?” I say.

“Sure, unless the power’s out.”

“Don’t worry,” Gabriel says. “The house won’t blow away.” His small laugh suggests he knows that’s what I’d been hoping for. We exchange a look, and his tentative grin blooms into the first real smile I’ve seen on him. I allow myself to smile back.

But a few minutes later, a pall hangs over us, as gloomy as the thundering clouds, as we take the elevator back to the wives’ floor. There’s a pushcart of lunch trays between us. Lobster bisque for the others and a small glazed chicken for me, since I’m supposed to be allergic to shellfish. We don’t speak. I try not to think of Rose, but can see nothing but her lifeless hand dipping out of the sheet as she passes. A hand that just the other day was weaving my hair into a braid. I think of the sadness in Linden’s eyes; what would he say if he knew his childhood love, the little girl who fed sugar to horses in the orange grove, is being dissected in this very house?

Alone in my room, I don’t touch my lunch. I soak in a hot bath and wash Gabriel’s handkerchief in the bubbles and then hold it up in front of me. I try to imagine another place, another time, when flowers might have looked like its embroidery. It’s such a powerful thing, sharp and dangerous and lovely. It rests on what appears to be a lily pad. I commit the image to memory and then research it in the library. The closest match I find is the lotus flower, which existed in Eastern countries and may have originated in a country called China. All I have to go by is a fraction of a page in an almanac of aquatic botany; the almanac would rather tell me about water lilies, perhaps a close cousin, but not the same. Not as rare. And after hours of research, I still can’t find a decent match.

I ask Gabriel, and he says the attendants take the handkerchiefs from a plastic bin where the cloth napkins are kept. He doesn’t know who ordered them or where they came from, but I can keep it because there are dozens more.

In the days to come, Gabriel begins bringing breakfast while the other wives are still asleep. He hides June Beans in rolled napkins or under the plate or, once, between the pancakes. He arranges the strawberry slices into Eiffel Towers and boats with spear-shaped masts. He leaves the tray on my nightstand, and, if I’m sleeping, I feel his presence as I dream. I feel warm ribbons reaching into my subconsciousness, and I feel safe. I open my eyes to the silver cover on the breakfast tray, and I know he was nearby. On the mornings that I’m awake, we talk in low voices, barely making out each other’s faces in the darkness. He tells me that he’s been an orphan for as long as he can remember, that Housemaster Vaughn bought him at an auction when he was nine. “It’s not as awful as it sounds,” Gabriel says. “In orphanages they teach you skills like cooking, sewing, cleaning. They keep a sort of report card on you, and then the well-to-do can bid. That’s how we got Deirdre, Elle, and Adair, too.”

“You don’t remember your parents at all?” I say.

“Hardly,” he says. “I barely even remember what the world outside of this place looks like.” And my heart sinks. Nobody, he tells me, not even the help, leaves the property. They order shipments of food and fabric and anything imaginable, but they never visit stores themselves. The only ones to leave are the delivery truck drivers, Housemaster Vaughn, and sometimes Linden if he has a mind to. I’ve seen House Governors and their first wives on TV at social events—political elections, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, things like that—but Gabriel tells me that Linden is not the social type. He’s something of a recluse. And why not? You could take an entire day and still not walk from one end of this place to the other. But I haven’t lost hope. Linden took Rose to parties all the time, and she said herself that if he plays favorites with me, he’ll take me anywhere I want to go.

“Don’t you miss it?” I say. “Being free.”

He laughs. “It wasn’t much freer in the orphanage, but I suppose I do miss the beach,” he says. “I used to be able to see it from my window. Sometimes they let us go there. I liked watching the boats go out. I think if I could have done anything, I would have liked to work on one. Maybe build one. But I’ve never even caught a fish.”

“My brother taught me how to fish,” I say. We would sit on the concrete slab that stopped at the ocean, our feet dangling over the edge. I remember the strong pull on the fishing line, the reel spinning out of my control and Rowan catching it for me, showing me how to bring it in. I remember the silver body, all muscle, like a tongue thrashing on the hook, eyes open wide. I freed it from the hook and tried to hold it, but it leapt from my hand. Hit the water with a splash. Disappeared, off to visit the ruins of France or maybe Italy to send them my regards.

I try relaying this experience to Gabriel, and even though I think I’m doing a poor job of imitating the pulling motion of the fishing rod and my pathetic attempts to reel in the fish, he’s paying close attention. When I imitate the splash of the fish hitting the water, he even laughs, and I laugh too, quietly, in the darkness of my room.

“Did you ever eat any of the catches?” he asks.

“No. The edible catches are farther out, and then they’re hauled in by boat. The closer you get to land, the more contaminated the water. This was just for fun.”

“It sounds fun,” he says.

“It was kinda gross, actually,” I say, remembering the cold slimy scales and bloodshot eyes. Rowan deemed me the worst fisherman ever and said it was a good thing these fish were inedible, because if we needed them for food, we would starve with me in charge. “But it’s one of the few things my brother likes to do that doesn’t involve work.”

The homesickness that comes with my brother’s memory is not so bad. Not with Gabriel for company and a tray of pancakes and the June Bean he’s hidden in the napkin.

Linden ignores us in the daytime, but begins inviting all three of his wives to dinner each night. He tells us about his father’s research, how optimistic the scientists and doctors are about finding an antidote. He says that his father is attending a convention in Seattle, where he will compare notes with other researchers. Secretly I wonder if the Housemaster’s notes are about Rose. I wonder if he has named her Subject A or Patient X. I wonder if her fingernails are still painted. Cecily is, as always, very interested in everything our husband says. Jenna still looks disgusted at the sight of him, though she has started eating. I’m getting better at acting interested in what he has to say. And all the while, the windstorms make the electricity flicker, and interrupt with strange infrequent bouts of rain what would otherwise be beautiful afternoons.

And then one evening when Linden is in unusually high spirits, he announces that, in honor of our two months of marriage, he thinks there should be a celebration. A big one, with colored lanterns and a live band. He’ll even let us decide which garden to throw it in.

“How about the orange grove?” I say. Gabriel and two other attendants collecting our plates go pale and exchange grave looks. They know the magnitude of what I’ve said. They brought Rose many meals and cups of tea as she frittered endless days away in the orange grove. It was her favorite, where she and Linden were married, and where—she told me wistfully one afternoon, twirling a June Bean around her tongue—they first kissed. And it was there that Linden found her a week after her twentieth birthday, unconscious and pale in the shade of an orange tree, gasping, her lips blue. That was the day he was faced with the tragedy of her mortality. His inability to save her. All the pills and potions in the world couldn’t buy more than a few fleeting months.

A party in the orange grove. The pain on Linden’s face is immediate. I am unwavering. He has cost me more pain than I will ever be able to repay.

Cecily, oblivious, says, “Yes! Oh, Linden, we’ve never even seen it!”

Linden dabs his mouth with a napkin, sets the napkin on the table. “I thought along the pool would be more entertaining,” he says quietly. “The warm weather’s nice for swimming.”

“But you said we could pick,” says Jenna; it is perhaps the first time she’s ever said a word to him. Everyone looks at her, even the attendants. She glances briefly at me and then at Linden. She bites a piece of steak from her fork daintily and says, “I vote for the orange grove.”

“Me too,” says Cecily.

I nod assent.

“It’s unanimous, then,” Linden says into his spoon. The rest of the meal is very quiet. The dinner plates are all cleared. Dessert is served, and then tea. Then we’re dismissed, because Linden has a headache and needs to be alone with his thoughts.

“You’re something else,” Gabriel whispers to me as he escorts us to the elevator. Just before the doors close between us, I smile.

Once upstairs I immediately retreat to my bedroom. I lie on the bed, sucking a blue June Bean and thinking about how the Atlantic Ocean lapped under my and Rowan’s bare feet. I think about the ferry along the pier that I would watch slice a path toward the horizon, and how secure I would feel in my small piece of the world, how lucky to be alive if only for a short while. That’s where I want my body to be cast when I’m dead. I want to be ashes in the ocean. I want to sink to the ruins of Athens and be carried off to Nigeria, and to swim between fish and sunken ships. I’ll come back to Manhattan frequently, to smell the air, to see how my twin is doing.