Sever. Lauren DeStefano

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      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.

      What is happening to her? What does it do to a young girl to birth two children in less than a year’s time? There’s a rash across her cheeks; her pianist’s fingers are swollen. In sleep she clings to my shirt the way Bowen clings to hers. The way a child clings to its mother.

      I rake my fingers through her hair as I go on flipping the pages.

      I’ve gone through all the pictures of boats a second time, never bothering with the words, when there’s a soft knock at the door. I know it’s Linden. Reed never comes upstairs at night. In fact, I’m not sure where he sleeps, or even if he does.

      “Come in,” I say.

      Linden inches into the room through the slight gap in the doorway. His presence is barely there. He looks at Cecily and me, and I feel like a model in an unfinished portrait. The Ashby Wives. There were four of us once.

      “Is she asleep?” Linden asks.

      “I’m awake,” Cecily murmurs. “I had a dream we were ice-skating.” She sits up, rubbing her eyes.

      “I wanted to see how you were feeling,” Linden tells her, looking right past me. I’m nothing—candlelight on the wall. “Did you need anything to drink? Are your feet sore?”

      She says something about needing a back rub, and I take my book and slip out of the room just as easily as Linden slipped in.

      I’ve memorized which floorboards in the hallway don’t creak, thereby leaving Reed undisturbed as he toils about his mysteries below me.

      The window is open in the library, and the books and walls and floorboards are all cool with the night’s breeze. I hear crickets as though they’re in the shelves. The stars are so bright and unobstructed that their light fills the room, making everything silver.

      I replace the boat book and run my fingers over the spines of the other books, not really looking for anything. I think I’m too exhausted to read, anyway. There’s a pillow and a blanket on the divan, and it looks inviting, but I don’t feel right about getting into the bed Linden has made for himself. I focus on the book spines.

      “My uncle used to let me pretend they were bricks,” Linden says, startling me. He eases a thick hardcover from the shelf, hefts it in either hand, and then places it back. “I liked to build houses out of them. They never came out exactly like I’d planned, but that’s good. It taught me that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.”

      For some reason I’m finding it difficult to meet his eyes. I nod at one of the lower shelves and say, “Maybe it’s because in your mind you don’t have to worry about building materials. So you’re not as limited.”

      “That’s astute,” he says. He pauses. “You’ve always been astute about things.”

      I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a compliment, but I suppose it’s true. So much silence passes СКАЧАТЬ