When I wake up, the window shows me a night sky. I hear children murmuring in the house, and Claire telling them, “Shh, shh.”
I’m in Silas’s bed. My head feels stuffed with cotton. I stare at the numbers on the bedside clock but can’t comprehend them.
“Are you awake?” Gabriel asks. He looks up from a sea of papers.
With effort I prop myself on my elbow. Something buzzes angrily in my skull. “What happened?”
“Claire said it must have been a kind of seizure,” he answers, all gentleness. “But she was only guessing. You were lying on the floor, bright red with a fever; nothing we did could wake you.” He holds up a medical journal, his face unreadable. “I guess it would interest you to know that it not only doesn’t sound like a seizure, but it doesn’t compare to anything I can find.”
I lie back down and rub my eyes with the heels of my hands, trying to quell the buzzing. Think, I tell myself. Surely the daughter of two scientists cannot be bested by this. But I was never as brilliant as my mother and father. All that comes to me are my brother’s notes, scribbled amid the burned and crumpled pages. He was making a list, trying to figure something out. We’re fighting different battles, my brother and I. If only we could be together, maybe we’d have an answer between us.
“We have to go,” I say, and try to clear the hoarseness from my voice.
Gabriel looks hopeful. “Back to the mansion?”
“To find my brother.”
Gabriel shakes his head. “That’s not a priority right now.”
“How could you say that?”
“Because you’re dying!” he snaps. The room falls silent. He looks at the open book, penitent. Clearly he didn’t mean to say this, but he’s been thinking it. After a few seconds he repeats it, softly. “You’re dying, and I’m not going to sit here and watch you without doing a thing about it.”
I sit up. It’s as though my blood has turned to sand. I am an hourglass. All the sand goes rushing from my head, and I can hear it whooshing. “Rowan might be able to help,” I say.
“He might,” Gabriel says. “But you’re here, and we don’t know where he is, and we can’t afford the time to search the country over.”
I have no way to argue this. I open my mouth, but the words don’t leave my lips. More time. I just need a little more time. I know that he’s right. I know that the answer to all of this might be in the very place I left behind. I know that my madman father-in-law can work miracles just like he can murder an infant—or his son’s defiant bride.
How did I come to be at the mercy of such a man? What horror did I commit in a past life to warrant his interest?
“A doctor, then,” I insist. “Or a shaman. A clairvoyant! Anything else.” The bed lurches, and I grip the edges. Gabriel sees this and eases me back down. He tucks the blankets to my chin, like I am a child.
I pretend that I’m back in the mansion. Not as Vaughn’s prisoner but as Linden’s wife. I am sandwiched between silk sheets, amid down pillows. My sister wives are sleeping across the hall. Be still. Listen. I can hear them breathe. And Gabriel has just brought breakfast for me, before the sun is up, while the empty hallways are filled with ticking clocks and plumes of smoke from incense sticks that have just extinguished themselves after burning through the night. Later there will be trampolines and orange blossoms and bright orange koi flicking their tails to delight me. There’s nothing to fear. Everybody’s safe.
Gabriel presses the back of his hand to my forehead. His mouth tightens into a frown. “Tomorrow we’ll find a hospital,” he says.
“Okay,” I whisper.
Exhausted, I close my eyes. “Are you coming to bed?” I ask him.
“Not yet,” he says. I feel his weight leave the mattress. I fall asleep to the sound of him flipping through pages.
When I wake, it’s still dark outside. Gabriel sleeps with his arm across my waist, his chin on my shoulder.
Every muscle in my body hurts, and in my mouth there’s the coppery, bitter taste that tells me I am going to be sick. But the pain is progress; it means my limbs are no longer numb. I can move, just so slightly, out of Gabriel’s arms. His fingers are gripping my shirt, and as I touch them, one by one, they uncurl. He mumbles something and then turns onto his stomach, hugging the pillow.
I’m careful not to wake him as I climb out of the blankets and make my way to the bathroom. I take some aspirin from the cabinet over the sink, hoping it will somehow curb this nausea. I swallow them with a handful of water.
Then I close the cabinet door, and a blond corpse meets me in the mirror. She is a zombie from the film at the Florida cinema, a sickly shade of gray, with hollow eyes, pale lips, and thinning hair.
I look away, too horrified to let that girl be more than a stranger. In the morning I will have to wash up before anyone sees me.
As I walk down the hall, I am comforted by all the different bodies breathing around me. Some of the children have their own beds, while others huddle together like sardines.
I pass through the living room. Silas, an amorphous mountain of blankets on the couch, says, “You are a ghost, the way you haunt this place at night.”
“Boo,” I whisper.
He chuckles, the sound fading as he returns to his dreams. I cross the room and make my way to the kitchen, and there I make a cup of tea for myself.
I can hear the gentle wind sighing outside. I tiptoe past Silas, who is now snoring, and I open the door to breathe in the spring air. There is something eerily welcoming about nighttime in this small borough. I close the door behind me and sit on the top step. Not too far. I stay close to the house, away from the street, ready to hurry back inside if there’s anything dangerous.
But it’s calm. I look out at the bleary sepia-toned houses on this street. The malnourished, skeletal trees. The wilting brown grass. And I know I’m where I was meant to be. I was born into a world that was already dying; I belong to it. I will take it over holographic oceans and spinning diagrams of beautiful houses. Because even if the lie is beautiful, the truth is what you face in the end.
There is something else here too, so jarring against the rest because it does not belong. In the darkness I can just see it approaching—a black limousine pulling up to the curb. I wonder what the occasion is. I suppose a child has been purchased; I think there are other orphanages on this block. Surely nobody is being picked up for a party. There’s no wealth in this area.
The engine idles for a bit and then dies.
Then I’m filled with a sick feeling of dread. That limousine looks very familiar.
The front passenger door opens, and I watch the shadowy figure of a man step out. He tightens a scarf around his neck and then steps onto the sidewalk, tilts his head toward me.
“Beautiful night for stargazing, isn’t it?” he says.
My skin swells with goose bumps at that voice.
Run, run, run! Maddie’s old warning flashes at me, but for some reason I’m frozen to the spot, clinging to my cup of tea with both hands. “How did you find me?” I say.
“That’s no way to greet your father-in-law,” Vaughn says. “I know you can muster a warmer welcome than that.”
There’s a clicking noise, and then a flame appears in Vaughn’s cupped hand. It takes a moment for me to realize that he is not holding fire itself, but rather a small candle. He moves toward me, and I inch for the door, but he stops a couple of yards away.
“Fire is such a clever little thing,” he says. “Especially for clever girls who can think of a good use for it. Setting fire to some curtains to create a diversion, perhaps?”
The light shows me all the hundred creases in his smile.
How is it possible that my worst nightmare has arrived and I am unable to move from this spot, holding my cup of tea?
Slowly I get to my feet, avoiding sudden movements as though he were a venomous snake. He takes a quick step closer, and I flinch.
He only laughs. “Relax, darling. I wasn’t going to set fire to the place, if that’s what you were thinking. Not with all those helpless orphans and your true love inside.”
He comes closer, until he’s on the bottom step, and he holds the candle to my face. Its heat in this chilly air immediately causes my nose to run.
“You aren’t looking too well.” Vaughn tsk-tsks. “Look at those bags under your eyes. That haystack you call hair. You’ve let yourself go, darling.”
“Circumstances beyond my control,” I say bitterly.
Vaughn goes on as if I haven’t spoken. “You’ve always had such ravishing beauty. Untamed, but lovely. That’s the sort of thing my son prefers, you know.”
He tucks a wisp of hair over my shoulder. His eyes hold that kindness again; I first saw it one afternoon when he walked me through the golf course. It startled me then like it startles me now, the way my sole enemy can at once transform into a version of his mild-mannered son.
A pang of longing moves through me, sharp and unexpected. If someone had to come to drag me back to that prison, I wish it had been Linden. Linden, whose eyes were always filled with love for me, even if I never quite believed that love to be real.
Vaughn traces his finger from my scalp and down the line of my hair, and to my shoulder, which he grabs so hard I can feel his fingertips on the bone. “Let’s you and me have a talk,” he says.
I could scream. In an instant Gabriel, Silas, and Claire would be in the doorway, several pairs of blinking eyes behind them. But my gaze is trained on the flame and all that it implies. It’s a very small warning of a very large destruction. He would think nothing of burning this place to the ground and killing everyone inside if that’s what it would take to recapture me. And I know that he is only here for me, not them.
Those bright pieces of light are back, flurrying in the night air like the snow on my last night in the mansion. Linden and I watched it on the verandah, letting it stick to our hair.
I don’t move, and Vaughn doesn’t try to pull me. I know he won’t shove me kicking and screaming into the back of that limo. It’s not his way. But I also know he is confident that, one way or another, I will wind up there. His smile is full of teeth and triumph.
“How have you been feeling?” he asks me. “Any unexplained symptoms? Fevers?” He strokes my hair away again, holding up the thin blond pieces that have fallen out between his fingers.
My breath catches. That lone pang of longing for Linden to be here instead of his father has doubled, tripled, transformed into something ugly. My ears buzz with the electricity of it.
“Just the flu,” I say coldly, unbelieving.
“Your immune system is shutting down,” he says. “Right now your antibodies are moving through your bloodstream, trying to combat a foreign bacteria that isn’t there. Perhaps you’ve tried medication. That will have the same effect, which is to say none at all. Your nerves are losing sensation. Extremities inexplicably numb, especially upon waking.”
