My father used to tell me stories of carnivals. He called them celebrations for when there was nothing to celebrate. When he was a child, he could go to a carnival and pay ten dollars to walk through a house of mirrors.
He described it many times—warped mirrors that made him too tall or too short; mirrors juxtaposed so that they looked like infinite portals. He said that the house always looked like it went on forever, that it was infinite, when from the outside it was really as small as a tool shed. The trick was looking past the illusion, because the exit was never as far as it seemed.
I hadn’t understood what he meant until now. I wander the rose garden, the tennis courts, the labyrinth of shrubbery, trying to channel his spirit. I imagine him looking down on me, watching my spec of a body searching aimlessly when all the while the exit is just beyond my fingertips.
“Help me figure this out,” I tell him. The only answer is a wind through the tall grass as I stand in the orange grove. I’ve never been good at solving puzzles; my brother is the one who solved the Rubik’s Cube on the first try. He’s the one who took an interest in the science of things, asking our father questions about the destroyed countries while I was busy admiring the pictures.
I imagine my brother emerging from between the orange trees. “You shouldn’t have answered that ad. You never listen to me,” he’d say. “What am I going to do with you?” He’d take my hand. We’d go home.
“Rowan . . .” His name spills out of me with a hot wave of tears. Nothing answers me but the breeze. He isn’t coming; there’s no path on earth that would lead him to me.
When my failed plights become too disheartening, I take a break and succumb to the things that make my prison more enjoyable. I dive into the artificial sea within the pool. An attendant shows me how to use the dial that changes the hologram, and I can swim beneath arctic glaciers or navigate the sunken Titanic. I meander alongside bottlenose dolphins. Afterward, dipping wet and smelling of chlorine, Jenna and I lie in the grass and sip colorful drinks with pineapple slices on the rims. We play mini-golf on a course that I suppose was built for Linden when he was a child, or maybe his dead brother before him. We don’t keep score, and it’s a joint effort to defeat the spinning clown at the last hole. We try playing tennis but give up and make a game of shooting tennis balls at the wall, since that’s all we seem to be good at.
In the kitchen I can eat all the June Beans I want. I sit on the kitchen counter, helping Gabriel peel potatoes, and listening to the cooks talk about the weather and how they’d like to serve the bratty little bride a dirty sock. Gabriel, as good-natured as he is, agrees that Cecily has been particularly awful lately. Someone suggests frying up a rat for her lunch, and the head cook says,
“Watch your tongue. There are no rats in my kitchen.”
Linden feels that he’s neglecting Jenna and me, and he asks if we’d like anything—anything at all. I almost ask for a crate of June Beans, because I heard the kitchen staff complaining about early-morning deliveries, and since then I’ve been fantasizing about escaping on a delivery truck. But then I think of all the progress I’ve made earning Linden’s trust, and how easily it would be destroyed if I were caught, which is highly possible, considering Vaughn knows everything that happens in this place.
Jenna says, “I’d like a big trampoline.” And the next morning there it is in the rose garden. We jump until our lungs hurt, and then we lie in the center of it and watch the clouds for a while.
“This isn’t the worst place to die,” she confesses. Then she props herself on her elbow, which causes my body to slide more toward her, and she asks me, “Has he come to your bed at all lately?”
“No,” I say, and fold my hands behind my head. “It’s nice to have it to myself again.”
“Rhine?” she says. “When he came to you, it wasn’t .. . for children.”
“No,” I say. “It was never that. He hasn’t even kissed me.”
“I wonder why,” she says, lying back down.
“Has he come to you at all?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “A few times, before all his attention started going to Cecily.”
This surprises me. I think back to Jenna’s reliable morning routine of taking tea in the library and burying her nose in romance novels. There hasn’t been a single morning when she has seemed rumpled or out of sorts, especially not the way Cecily was. And even now, she seems very cool about the whole thing.
“What was it like?” I ask, and immediately a hot blush spreads across my face. Did I really just ask that?
“Not terrible,” is Jenna’s nonchalant reply. “He kept asking if I was okay. Like he thought I’d break or something.” She laughs a little at the thought. “If I was going to break, he wouldn’t be the one to do it.”
I’m not sure how to respond to that. The very thought of Linden kissing me sets my nerves on edge, puts my stomach in knots. And yet both of my sister wives have done much more than kiss him, and one is even carrying his child.
“I thought you hated him,” I finally say.
“Of course I do,” she says. Her voice is a gentle hum.
She crosses her ankle over her pointed knee and swings her foot casually. “I’ve hated all of them. But this is the world we live in.”
“All of them?” I say.