He looks at the wall over my head. I can’t read his expression. He opens his mouth to speak, but only a fraction of a syllable makes it out. I concentrate on a crack in the linoleum floor that looks like the apex of a leaf.
“I can’t believe the things you told me about my father,” he says. “You understand that, don’t you? I can’t side against him.”
He seemed to be on my side while he was carrying me away from his father’s clutches and trying to stop the bleeding. He seemed to be on my side when he slept in the chair at my bedside and told me he wouldn’t let his father cross the threshold of that hospital room while I was inside it.
But the upsetting part is that I do understand. While Vaughn controlled my sister wives and me with gates and holograms, he controlled his son with something deeper than blood or bones. Vaughn is Linden’s only constant. How can Linden have any choice but to love his father, to believe there’s good in the man who raised him?
I’m no one to judge. There is no number of buildings my brother can destroy, and no number of lives he can claim, that would undo my love for him.
I nod.
From somewhere very far away, in a world where there’s only green and deeper green, Bowen shrieks with laughter.
“I’ve brought some things for you,” Linden says. “I was going to bring more of your clothes, but I thought they’d only weigh you down if you were traveling. So I packed a first aid kit and some bus fare. You should be careful about letting anyone see that you’re carrying money.” He laughs, but it comes out more like a cough. “But you probably know that, don’t you?”
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say. Then, thinking better of it, I add, “But thank you.”
He gets up and pushes his chair back against the table, then Cecily’s chair, then mine. “You and Cecily can share the bed. I’m going to sleep on the divan in my uncle’s library. I’ll set up Bowen’s bassinet in the bedroom, but you won’t have to worry; he mostly sleeps through the night.”
“You’re really staying the weekend, then?” I say.
“It’ll be good for Cecily,” he says. “She’s been stir-crazy lately.” He lingers in the doorway for a moment, his back to me. “It’ll give both of you a chance for a proper good-bye. It’ll help her to let go of you.”
Chapter 6
CECILY STANDS at the bedroom mirror, frowning. Her shirt is rolled to her chest, and she dusts her fingers over the pink ribbons of shining skin that run up her stomach. “Horrible, aren’t they?” she says. “Bowen stretched me out as far as I could go.”
I’m sitting on the bed, staring at the book I’ve taken from Reed’s library. He doesn’t have as many books as his brother, and they’re all tattered and old. I get the sense that he inherited the rejects of the collection. Some of the history books have pages ripped away, and passages that are blacked out. There was a book about the discovery of America—I was drawn to it by the image of a ship on the cover—but the pages were filled with furious notes calling the text a lie, theories scrawled in smudged, sloppy lettering I couldn’t read. I didn’t want to read it anyway; I just wanted to look at the ships and try to remember Gabriel’s fingers in my hair.
I turn the page, staring at yet another photograph of a cargo ship. Gabriel would have something to say about it, I’m sure. He would know how fast it could move across the water. This ship looks burdened by the weight of its cargo, though. I bet that if I stowed away, it would be easy for me to hide among those towering crates, but it would take me months to reach Gabriel. It would be torturous, feeling myself drag across the water so slowly.
But slowly would be better than not at all.
Cecily is still going on about how she’s lost her youth, and how her body will never be the same, but how happy she is to be a part of it all. Some kind of miracle, reinforced hope. I don’t want to look at her naked stomach, which is starting to take the shape of an upside-down question mark; her knuckles and cheeks and feet are always bright red. She gave birth to her first child with difficulty, fazing in and out of consciousness, crying when she had the strength, white from blood loss. I don’t want to think about her going through it all again. The whole thing terrifies me.
But it’s unavoidable. Since Cecily arrived with her son, this room has smelled like a nursery. Powder and some indeterminable sweetness that lingers on infant skin. It has taken over the room like it has taken over her life. The child here is no longer her.
“Aren’t you tired?” she asks, falling onto the bed beside me and kicking off her socks before getting under the blanket. “Don’t you want to change into your pajamas?”
“Not yet,” I say. “I think I’ll read for a while. I could go somewhere else if the light bothers you.”
“No, stay,” she yawns, and rests her head on my knee and closes her eyes.
Within minutes she’s breathing that disquieting pregnancy snore that makes me worry. We were brought to Linden as breeding machines, and Vaughn saw no greater opportunity than in the most naïve among all the girls to tumble from that line: Cecily. I’ve no doubt that’s why she was chosen. He saw that determination in her eyes, that vulnerability. She would do anything, anything to belong to his son after a lifetime of belonging to no one at all.