“He’s been good to you, then?” he says. “Gabriel?”
“Better than I’ve been to him,” I admit.
Still looking past me, he tightens his lips. I can see that they’re heavy with something he’d like to say.
He wants to ask if I slept with Gabriel. I think he’s wanted to ask me since my return, but he hasn’t. It’s too forward a question for him.
He clears his throat. “What I really came here to tell you is that I’d still like to help you get home. If you’ll allow me, that is. I have a plan this time.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“My uncle is going to fix one of his old cars,” Linden says. “He modifies them to run on his homemade fuel. It’s some big secret recipe of his, so I don’t know how reliable it is, but it’s better than nothing, isn’t it? I can teach you how to drive.”
I already know how to drive. My brother taught me on the delivery trucks he used for work. But now’s not the time to add another thing to the list of what Linden doesn’t know about me, so all I can offer is my most sincere, “Thank you.”
Linden sees the hope this has brought me. “It’ll mean postponing your trip a bit longer, but it’ll still be faster in the long run, and I’d feel much better about your traveling this way, for what it’s worth.” He reaches to touch my shoulder but then changes his mind, and I get the sense that he’s in too much of a hurry to get away from me. But when he looks at me, he smiles wearily as he stands. “Eat, and get washed up if you want to. I think my uncle needs your help out in the shed. I offered to help, but he said I should stick to designing things, not repairing them. I don’t think he’s quite forgiven me for the homemade radio I broke when I was a child.”
“Linden?”
He turns in the doorway to face me.
“I didn’t. I realize you didn’t come right out and ask, but Gabriel and I—we didn’t.”
His expression doesn’t change but for the flush of color to his cheeks. “I’ll see you downstairs,” he says.
Once he’s gone, I force myself to eat everything in the bowl. I have no desire to, but I know my body is craving it. I can feel the emptiness in my stomach gnawing at my bones. After I’ve eaten, I shower under the rusty tap. I ignore the want to collapse under the blankets and sleep away the next three years. If Linden and Cecily can make an effort to go through the motions and be strong, after all that they’ve lost, so can I.
After a week of rain, the days return twice as bright. Blades of grass rise from the heaviness of raindrops in defiance. The sunlight breaks through the gaps in the shed, swimming with bits of dust. Everything smells like flowers and dirt.
Cecily’s domestic arrived the other day. I’m not sure what Linden told his father that made him relinquish control of her and let her stay with us, but she seemed unharmed, if quiet, when she stepped out of the limo.
Cecily comes outside sometimes, barefoot. For most of our marriage she’s been partial to skirts and elaborate sundresses to impress our husband, but now she wears jeans rolled up to her knees. She lays Bowen on his stomach and tries to coax him to crawl, though all he does is grab at the earth and hold it up to the sun in offering. She decides he must be worshipping his secret god.
“There are so many colors in his eyes,” she tells me one afternoon when I come to sit next to her in the dirt. “Sometimes I wonder where he gets that.” She grabs a fistful of grass and sprinkles it over her son, who is bobbling on his hands and trying to push himself forward.
“Do you look like your parents?” she asks.
I draw my knees to my chest. “A little like my mother,” I say. “She had blue eyes.”
“I wonder how far down the line genes go,” she says. “Your mother had blue eyes, and maybe her mother, and her mother. It could be this one gene that’s gone on for thousands of years just to get to you. You could be the last one to ever have that exact shade of blue.”
I don’t tell her that my brother has the same shade of blue, and that he’ll live longer than I will. Although, the way things are going with the explosions and everything, I wonder if he’ll even live long enough for me to get to him.
“How are you feeling?” I ask her. “Are you chilly? I could get you a sweater.”
“No,” she says. “I feel pretty good right now.”
It’s been nearly a week since she’s been discharged from the hospital, and she’s more self-sufficient than ever. She’s insisted on having her meals with us at the table, politely declining Linden’s offers to bring a tray to her in bed. She’s even been cleaning the house, though nobody asked her to and I’ve never known Cecily to be at all domestic. I found her polishing the mason jars, scrubbing the grit from the countertops, kicking a damp rag across the linoleum. She wrapped tinfoil around the radio antenna until the scratchy white noise turned to music. She’s memorized the songs, and she sings in low voices as she moves through the rooms. Sometimes I think I hear her singing in her sleep.
“You should get going soon,” she says to me now. “You’re not getting any younger.”
She knows that I’ve been dawdling. Trapped in the mansion, I could think of nothing but home. But now my home is gone. I’m frightened of what I might find when I’m reunited with Rowan. I’m frightened of not finding him at all. And perhaps what frightens me the most is accepting that once I leave Cecily and Linden, I’ll never see them again.
Time almost seems to stop here on Reed’s middle-of-nowhere piece of land. It’s oddly comforting.