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

My twin, however, does not like to discuss what will happen in four years, when I’ll be dead and he’ll have five years of life in him. I wonder what he’s doing now and if he’s okay. I wonder how long it will take me to break free of this place, or at least communicate to him that I’m alive. But somewhere, in a place in my heart that’s darker than that awful basement, I worry that my corpse will become part of Housemaster Vaughn’s research, and my brother will never even know what’s happened to me.

For that, I am not sorry that Linden Ashby is off somewhere being sad because of something I said at dinner.

It’s been so hard to keep track of the days in this mansion, when they all look the same, when I’m nothing more than Linden’s prisoner. I’ve never been apart from my brother for so long; from the time we were toddlers, our mother fit my hand in his and told us to stay together. And we did. We were together on our walks to school, clinging to each other in case of dangers lurking in the ruins of an old building, in the shadow of an abandoned car. We were together on our walks to work, and our voices kept each other company at night, in a dark house once filled with our parents’ presence. Before now I’d never been away from him a day in my life.

I thought that as twins we would always be able to reach each other, that from far away I would still hear his voice as clearly as I heard him in the next room of our house. We would talk to each other as we moved about the rooms—him in the kitchen, me in the living room—to keep the silence of our parents’ deaths away.

“Rowan,” I whisper. But the sound doesn’t travel farther than my bedroom. The cord between us is severed.

“I’m alive. Don’t give up on me.”

As though in answer, there’s a soft knock at the door. I know it’s not Cecily because it’s not followed by a question or a demand. Deirdre doesn’t knock, and it wouldn’t be Gabriel at this hour. “Who is it?”

The door cracks open and I see Jenna’s gray eyes. “Can I come in?” she asks in her wispy voice.

I sit up on the bed and nod. She purses her lips in the closest I’ve seen her come to a smile, and takes a seat on the edge of my mattress.

“I saw the way Governor Linden looked at you when you brought up the orange grove,” she says. “Why?”

My instincts caution me to be wary of this somber bride, but I’m in just the right stage of grief to pull down my defenses—to lower the mast, I suppose Gabriel would say, and allow myself to drift into uncertain waters. And she seems so timid and harmless in her white nightgown that’s like mine, with her long dark hair in a veil around her shoulders. Something about all this makes me want to see her as a sister, as a confidant.

“It’s because of Rose,” I say. “He fell in love with her in the orange grove. That was her favorite place, and he hasn’t been able to stand it since she became sick.”

“Really?” she says. “How do you know that?”

“Rose told me,” I say, and I stop myself from adding that Rose told me all sorts of things about our husband. I want to keep some of his frailties to myself, such as the infection that nearly killed him as a boy and that caused him to lose several teeth, hence the gold ones. These things make him seem less menacing somehow. Like someone I can overpower or outsmart when the time is right.

“So that’s why he looked so sad,” she says, picking lint off her hemline.

“That’s what I wanted,” I say. “He had no right to bring us here, and I guess he’ll never realize that. So I wanted to hurt him like he hurt me.”

Jenna looks at her lap, and her lip quirks in what I think will be a smile or a laugh, but her eyes well with tears and her voice is broken when she says, “My sisters were in that van.”

Her skin pales, and mine flourishes with gooseflesh as her little sobs wrack the bed. The room is colder, and the nightmare is growing into so much more than I thought it could be. It only gets worse in this mansion of sweet smells and extra-bright gardens. I think of the gunshots that have haunted me since I arrived. How many of those were Jenna’s sisters, and which ones? The first shot? The fifth? The sixth?

I’m too stunned to speak.

“When you brought up the orange grove, I didn’t know what it was, but I saw that it was hurting him,” she sobs, swipes her nose with her fist. “And I wanted him to hurt, so I agreed with you. He has no idea, does he? What he’s taken away?”

“No,” I agree softly. I offer her Gabriel’s handkerchief, which I’ve been keeping in my pillowcase, but she shakes her head, apparently hating this place too much to even blow her nose on its cloths.

“I only have two years left,” she says. “There’s nothing for me out there now, and maybe I’m trapped here, but I won’t let him have his way with me. I don’t care if he murders me, he won’t have me.”

I think of her cold stiff body being pushed into a basement laboratory. I think of Housemaster Vaughn dissecting his daughters-in-law one by one.

I’m not sure what to say, because I do understand her anger. I am a good liar, but lies won’t help me here. Jenna is a girl who has no illusions about what will happen to her; she knows it will never be okay. Am I the one in denial?

“What if you could get out?” I say. “Would you?”

She shrugs, snorts incredulously through her tears. “To what?” she says. “No, might as well go out in style.” She waves her wrist, exaggerating the ruffles on the cuff of her sleeve. Then she wipes her nose with them, and she looks so defeated. A skeleton, a ghost, a very pretty girl who’s already dead. She turns to me, and her eyes still have traces of life. “Did you really spend the night with him?” she asks, but her tone isn’t invasive like Cecily’s. She’s not being crass; she just wants to know.

“He spent the night in here when Rose died,” I say. “He just fell asleep, that’s all. It was never more than that.”

She nods, swallows a hard lump in her throat. I touch her shoulder, and she starts but doesn’t pull away. “I am really sorry,” I say. “He’s an awful man, and this is an awful place. The only one who likes it here is Cecily.”

“She’ll learn,” Jenna says. “She reads all those pregnancy books and Kama Sutra stuff, but she has no idea what he will do to her.”

This is also true. Jenna, who is as quiet as a shadow, has been paying attention to her sister wives all this time. She has given us a lot of thought.

For a while she sits there, choking down the last of her sobs, pulling herself together. I offer her the glass of water that’s been sitting on my nightstand, and she takes a few sips. “Thank you,” she says. “For sticking up for yourself at dinner. For showing him how it feels.”

“Thank you for backing me up,” I say. I think that’s a smile on her lips when she turns to look at me one last time before disappearing into the hallway.

I fall asleep and have horrible dreams of sad girls with exquisite eyes, gray vans erupting with butterflies, windows that won’t open. And everywhere girls, tumbling from trees like orange blossoms and hitting the earth with sickening thuds. They crack open.

Sometime in the night my mind enters a deeper dimension of dreaming. The sound disappears and something obscures my vision. There’s whiteness, the smells of decay in soil and surgical gloves. Then Housemaster Vaughn in a biohazard suit yanks the sheet from my face. I try to scream, but I can’t because I’m dead, eyes frozen wide. He brings his knife between my breasts, ready to cut. The pain is just about to register when a sound comes bursting into my dreams. “Rhine,” the voice says.

“Rhine.”

I open my eyes, gasp. My heart is thudding in my chest, and all at once I’m bursting with the life I didn’t have in my nightmare. In the early morning darkness I can just make out Gabriel’s blue eyes. I say his name both to test my voice and to be sure he’s really there. I can see the silver gleam of the breakfast tray on my nightstand.

“You were thrashing around,” he whispers. “What was it?”

“The basement,” I whisper back. I bring the heel of my hand across my forehead, and it comes back damp with sweat. “I was trapped; I couldn’t get out.” I sit up and turn on the lamp. The light is too much, and I shield my eyes and then blink wildly as Gabriel comes into focus, sitting on the edge of my bed where just hours before, Jenna sat and told me about her own nightmare.

“It was an awful thing to see,” Gabriel agrees.

“But you’ve seen worse,” I say. It’s not a question.

He nods, his expression darkening.

“Like what?” I say.

“Lady Rose had a baby,” he says. “It was over a year ago. It didn’t make it. Strangled by the umbilical cord, I think. The House Governor and Lady Rose scattered its ashes in the orange grove, but I wonder about those ashes, if they were really the baby. When people die here in general, I wonder what happens to them. I’ve never seen any kind of graveyard; it’s either ashes or they just disappear.”

Rose had a child. I never knew. It, or something like it, is scattered among the orange blossoms.

“Gabriel?” There is true fear in my voice. “I want to get out of here.”

“I’ve been here for nine years,” he says. “That’s half my life. I can’t even remember, most days, that there’s a world other than this one here.”

“Well, there is,” I say. “There’s the ocean, and boats leaving harbors, and people jogging on sidewalks, and streetlights that come on in the evening. That’s the real world. This isn’t.”

But I understand where he’s coming from. Lately I almost forget these things myself.

The party happens in the orange grove, as promised. Cecily spends the afternoon working poor Elle to the bone with dress adjustments and makeup redos. Her hair is styled, washed, and styled again, and again. She calls me over to see each attempt, and they all make her look beautiful but young. A child in her mother’s too-big heels, trying to be a woman.

For me, Deirdre has constructed a soft orange frock that she says will make me look dazzling in the evening light. She leaves my hair untouched, long and wavy and many shades of blond. She doesn’t say it, but I know that as she stands beside me in the mirror, she’s thinking I look like Rose. And when Linden sees me, I suspect he will not be seeing me at all, but some reincarnation of the girl he lost. I can only hope it earns me his favoritism.

We arrive in the orange grove by early evening, and even with the stage set up and the band tuning its instruments and the crowd of people I’ve never met, I can see that this place is not like the rest of the mansion. It’s wild, with uneven lengths of grass as high as my uncomfortable heels or my knees. It reaches into my dress like thin rubbery fingers. Ants crawl around the rims of crystal glasses and make lines up trees. All the greenery hums and rustles.

I don’t recognize most of the faces here. Some are attendants setting up heaters for the food or perfecting the paper lanterns. Others are well-dressed, polished to the point of being borderline greasy, all first generations. “They’re Housemaster Vaughn’s colleagues,” Deirdre whispers to me, standing on a foldout chair and adjusting my bra strap so it will stop sliding down my arm. “The House Governor doesn’t have friends of his own. When Rose took ill, he stopped even leaving the property.”

“What did he do before then?” I ask, smiling like she’s saying something delightful.

“Designed houses,” she says, and fluffs my hair around my shoulders. “There! You look so pretty.”

My sister wives and I start the night as wallflowers, which is what our domestics have coached us to do. We hold hands with one another, share a cup of punch, look pretty, and wait to be introduced. One at a time the strangers, first generations, steal us for dances. They put their hands on our hips and shoulders, getting too close, forcing us to smell their crisp suits and aftershave. I find myself looking forward to the moment when they’ll release me, when I can catch my breath beneath the oranges. Jenna stands beside me, all danced out. Despite her ever-present resentment for her captivity, she is a fantastic dancer. Fast or slow, her body moves like a flame or a ballerina in a music box. She smiles at our husband as she moves, and he blushes, overcome by her beauty. But I know what her smile really means. I know why she’s enjoying this night. It’s because his dead wife still lingers here, and he’s in agony, and she wants him to know that his pain will never go away.

Her smile is her revenge.

Now she stands beside me and plucks an orange from its branch. She turns it in her hands and says, “I think we’ll get off easy tonight.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

She nods ahead of us, to where Cecily is slow dancing in Linden’s arms. Her white teeth can be seen beaming even from here. “She’s captured his heart for the moment,” Jenna says. “He hasn’t let her go for a second.”

“You’re right,” I say. He has given all of his dances to Cecily. He has spent the rest of his time staring in awe at Jenna. He hasn’t looked at me at all.

Jenna is plucked away for another dance, having gained many admirers with her versatility and charming smile. I’m left alone to nurse punch from a crystal glass. A cool breeze washes through my hair, and I wonder where Rose fell ill. Was it where the attendants are arguing over not making enough chicken for the occasion? Where Cecily and Linden have snuck away from the dance floor to giggle in the tall grass? And where did the scattered ashes fall? And what were those ashes, and what really became of Linden and Rose’s dead child?

As the night presses on and the guests thin out, Jenna and I sit in the grass while Adair and Deirdre comb the tangles from our hair. Linden and Cecily are nowhere to be found, not even when we slip away to bed much later.

The following day, Cecily stumbles into the library sometime after noon, looking pale and dazed. There’s a hazy smile on her lips that won’t go away, and her hair is a mess. It’s like a brushfire filled with casualties.

Gabriel brings the tea, and Cecily pours in too much sugar as usual. She doesn’t talk to us. There are pillow creases on her face, and she cringes whenever she moves her legs.

“It’s a pretty day,” she finally says, long after I’ve moved to my overstuffed chair and Jenna has begun pacing the aisles.

She doesn’t look right. Not right at all. Her usual verve is subdued, and her voice is gentle like wind chimes. She seems like a wild bird that has been tamed and is surveying its captivity in a daze in which captivity doesn’t seem so bad.

“Are you all right?” I ask her.

“Oh, yes,” she says. Her head cants to one side, then the other, and then she gently rests it on the table. Across the room Jenna shoots me a look. Her mouth doesn’t move, but I understand what she’s telling me. Now that Cecily has finally gotten what she wanted of our husband, this means Linden has tucked Rose safely inside his memories, and he’s ready to visit the beds of his remaining wives.

Cecily looks so small and helpless, as happy as she may be, that I say “Come on” and gently bring her to her feet. She doesn’t object, and in fact wraps her little arm around my back as I guide her to her room.

Linden is a monster, I think. He’s a vile man. “Can’t you see she’s still a little girl?” I murmur.

“Hm?” Cecily raises her eyebrows.

“Nothing,” I say. “How are you feeling?”

She climbs into the bed, which is unmade and looking as though she just left it, and as her head reaches the pillow, she stares at me with cloudy eyes. “Brilliant,” she says.

I tuck her in, and I notice the small bit of blood on the sheets.

I sit with her for a while as she drifts back to sleep. I listen to the robins that have nested in the tree below her window. She’d wanted to show them to me before, just a child looking for an excuse to talk to me. I haven’t been very kind to her, or fair. She can’t help that she’s oblivious, that she’s so young. She can’t help that she grew up in a world without parents, in an orphanage that allowed her to be taken for either a bride or a corpse. She doesn’t know how fragile she is, how close she came to death in that van.

But I do. I push some tangled hair from her face and say, “Have sweet dreams.”

It’s the best thing anyone can hope for, in this place.

I’m so angry with Linden that I can’t stand the sight of him. He comes into my bedroom that night, and without asking he advances to my bed. I don’t open the sheets, and so he stops. I turn on the light and act as though I’m just waking, when in fact I’ve been expecting him.

“Hello,” he says softly.

“Hello,” I say, and sit up.

He touches the edge of my mattress but doesn’t sit. Could he be waiting for an invitation? Did Cecily give him one? Jenna never will. If he isn’t going to force himself on us, then Cecily is the only one who will ever allow him.

He says, “You looked beautiful last night, in the orange grove.”

“I didn’t think you noticed me,” I say. Even now, he doesn’t look at me. He looks out my window that doesn’t open. The winds have picked up again, howling like the dead. Oranges and roses must be flying from the greenery and getting mangled in the air.

“Can I come to bed?” he says.

“No,” I say, folding the blanket neatly across my lap.

He looks at me, raises a delicate eyebrow. “No?”

“No,” I affirm. I mean to sound angry, but somehow it doesn’t come out right. There’s tight silence between us, and then I say, “But thank you for asking.”

He stands rigidly and seems to be trying to decide where to put his hands. His pajama pants don’t have pockets. “Then how about a walk?” he says.

“Now?” I say. “It looks like it’s a cold night.” Florida has proven thus far to have strange weather.

“Wear a coat,” he says. “Meet me at the elevator in a few minutes.”

Well, I suppose there’s no harm in a walk. I go to my closet and put a light knit coat over my nightgown, and a pair of thick socks that make it hard for me to wriggle my feet into my shoes.

When I meet Linden at the elevator, I see that my coat is the feminine cut of his, and I wonder if this is coincidence. Deirdre, hopeless little romantic that she is, may have designed it specially to match. I suppose she means for me to learn to love him. But she’s young yet. She has plenty of years to learn what true love is, or at the very least what it isn’t.

The elevator moves down and I’m haunted by images of my mother twirling in her billowy dresses, my father dipping her over his arm, music filling the living room. You want to know about true love? my father the geneticist said to my brother and me as we watched them dance. I’ll tell you something about true love. There’s no science to it. It’s natural as the sky.

Love is natural. Even the human race can’t claim to be natural anymore. We are fake, dying things. How fitting that I would end up in this sham of a marriage.

Outside it’s bitter and cold. There’s a burned, leafy smell like autumn. I think of Windbreakers and rakes and new kneesocks for school. Things that are a world away, but lingering still. My nose is frozen; I pull the collar of my coat up around my ears.

Linden hooks his arm in mine and we begin to walk, not through the rose garden but toward the orange grove. All traces of the party are gone, and now I can see it for what it really is: straggly and natural and pretty. A place where I would want to lie on a blanket and read. I can see why Rose spent so much time here, and I wonder if she knew she was ill that day she collapsed. I wonder if she thought she might slip away quietly, shaded by soft white blossoms, so that her pain would not be prolonged.

The wind rustles everything, and I feel her serenity everywhere. I feel peaceful, not so angry anymore.

“She’s here,” Linden says, like he was reading my mind.

“Mm,” I agree.

We walk for a while, along a vague path of well-trod grass and dirt. There are no man-made ponds here, no quaint little love seats or benches. The wind comes in such loud bouts that when we open our mouths, all hope of words is sucked from our throats. But I sense there’s something Linden wants to say, and when it’s calm, he stops walking and takes my hands. The cold has chapped my knuckles, but his palms are smooth and moist over them.

“Listen to me,” he says. His eyes are bright green in the moonlight. “I will share this place with you. Anywhere you wish to go, just ask and I’ll allow it. But this place is sacred, all right? I will not let you use it as a weapon against me.”

There’s nothing forceful about his tone, but he squeezes my hands and lowers his head so our eyes are even. So he knows, then. He knows that my party suggestion was malicious, and yet he didn’t raise a hand to me. He didn’t abuse me for my defiance like his father abused Gabriel. Why? Why would a man who stole three girls from their homes show me any kindness?