“You’re going to stay here, then?” she asks me. “For how long?”
Vaughn laughs, holding Bowen up close to his face. “For now the project is top secret. Nobody who knows about it will be leaving here. The twins will remain in these walls for years, most likely. Perhaps for the rest of their lives.”
Vaughn calling us “the twins” is an entirely new violation somehow. Maybe even the worst one yet. Even Rowan casts a displeased stare when Vaughn isn’t looking.
“What about Bowen?” Cecily asks.
“What about him?” Vaughn says. He’s playing with Bowen’s curls now. They’ve got Linden’s shape, but they’re blond and beginning to take on Cecily’s shade of red. I think he looks the way she must have looked as a baby. Vaughn, with all his genetic expertise, must think this as well. Surely it fuels his hatred for her.
“Is he going to be cured also?” Cecily says the words like she doesn’t believe any of this.
“He’s too young yet,” Vaughn says. “This study isn’t open to infants, but I am certain that he’ll be as right as rain when he’s a bit older. Won’t you, Bowen?”
Cecily doesn’t ask what will become of her. She already knows.
Chapter 28
“HOUSEMASTER VAUGHN is going to murder me,” Cecily says.
She’s been soaking in my tub for the better part of an hour. I can smell all of the salts and soaps from where I’m lying on my bed, Jenna’s romance novel open in my lap. I’m trying to ignore that the bath smells like the hours I’d spend getting ready for Linden’s parties. I’ll never be on his arm for another one. I’m trying to forget that he isn’t coming home.
“Nobody is going to murder you,” I say.
“Did you see the way he was looking at Bowen, like he wants him all for himself?”
“That bathwater must be ice-cold by now,” I say.
“I was never anything but an incubator for his grandson,” she says. “He has no use for me now.” I hear the water rushing down the drain after she pulls the plug.
While she dries her hair, I try to focus on the ill-fortuned man and woman in this story; they don’t yet realize that they love each other. I’m not sure they’ll figure it out in time.
When Cecily falls into the bed beside me, she stares at the ceiling and says, “Linden didn’t know anything about his mother. She died in childbirth. That’s what almost happened to me the second time. Maybe it almost happened the first time too, and I was too exhausted at the time to know it. How often does anyone even die in childbirth these days? I had such a difficult time giving birth to Bowen, and I was so ill after. You remember—”
“Cecily, stop,” I say.
“Do you remember when Vaughn taught me to play chess during that hurricane?” she says. “A pawn is the littlest piece. He told me that. It was right in front of me, and I didn’t see that I was his pawn. And now I’m not even that. I have no use, except to interfere with how Bowen is raised.”
I roll over so that I’m on top of her, and I put my hand over her mouth and bring my face close to hers. “Listen,” I say, very quietly. “There are certain things you shouldn’t say out loud in this house. I’m here now, and I am not going to let anything happen to you, so no more of this talk. Understand?”
She stares at me, breaths heavy and warm, and there is such desperation in her eyes, such loss. But whether she believes me or not, she nods.
“Good,” I say. “Come on. Get under the covers. We both need to sleep.”
After we’ve both settled under the blanket, I turn off the lamp. “I thought you could read your book out loud until I fall asleep,” she says.
I don’t think she could bear a tragic love story right now. “It isn’t very good,” I say.
“I don’t care about that,” she says. “I just can’t stand the quiet.”
So I tell her a story of my own. I tell her about a little girl, named Maddie, who doesn’t speak because, although she’s just a child, she has learned that this world has nothing to offer her. She’s found a way to hide herself in a world of her own, a world where there’s always music, a world that’s on the other side of the ocean, where the water is the most unreal shade of blue. In that world there are entire walls made of windows, and when the people awaken and pull apart the curtains, there is everything they’ve ever wanted laid out in front of them. It isn’t a perfect place. There are no perfect places. But nobody cares about perfection when there are sand castles to build and kites to chase, children that are being born, old hearts that are giving in.
It’s not long before she’s asleep. All she needed was for someone to stay in the bed with her, someone to make her feel protected and tell her nice things.
I’m the one who’s awake now, head full of ugliness. For most of the last week, any sleep I’ve gotten has been the result of heavy medication. And now, cured or not, I am haunted by my once-husband’s final moments. I’m wondering what his thoughts were before we spilled back to earth in Reed’s plane. I’m wondering if he was in pain in his last seconds, or if he had already left his body, the world getting smaller and dimmer below him until we had vanished into the greenery as we watched him die. I’m wondering if there’s any truth to this word I hear sometimes: god. People say it when they’re frustrated or when they’re sad. It implies that there is something, someone greater than us. Greater than the presidents we used to elect or the kings and queens we used to throne.