I’m very quiet. I try to make my breathing inaudible. I know that what he’s saying is important, and I don’t dare disturb him; I think maybe he’s never said these words out loud, and that he’ll never say them again.
“Sometimes it makes me feel less than human,” he says. “I don’t tell my father that. He tells me that I’m the most privileged boy in the world because I’ll be the one who lives. He tells me that everyone else is brought into this world because of the birth control ban, or because other wealthy families are naïve enough to believe they’ll be the ones to produce the cure. He doesn’t even understand that he’s just like them. He doesn’t understand that he has not only wasted his time, he’s wasted mine. I’m just a wasted effort, and he won’t accept that until I’m dead, until I’ve paid the price for his mistake.”
“Don’t say that,” I tell him softly. “You aren’t a waste.”
“Your parents were scientists too, right?” His voice is so placid, I’m not sure if I’ve just imagined that slight tremble in it. “Didn’t you ever want to resent them, even a little, for putting you here?”
“A little,” I admit. “But we aren’t asked into this world, Linden. We’re here whether we like it or not. I can’t let myself think it’s for nothing.”
“If you had been asked,” he says, eyes always straight on the road, “would you have wanted to be born?”
I don’t know what my answer will be until I’ve said it: “Yes.” Soap bubbles between my fingers and words I wrote in window fog and my mother’s fluttery good night kisses when she thought I was asleep, and my heart pounding when Gabriel and I first kissed, the warm buzzing going through my body when I had too much champagne and Linden unbuckled my shoe and told me I was beautiful. “Absolutely yes.”
“I knew you were going to say that,” he says.
“What about you?” I say.
“I don’t know anymore,” he says. “I hear Cecily singing the words of that poem sometimes—‘And Spring herself when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone’—and I think it had the right idea. I think it’s wrong of us to keep trying for something that will never come. I think it was cruel of me to try to have children. There’s nothing out there, Rhine. There’s no world. Only water that’s full of dead things. Why keep trying to fill the empty space?”
Children. He’s had three, and two of them are gone. I saw his eyes when Cecily had the stillbirth. He carried on as though the only thing that concerned him was her health, but I know losing that child devastated him. Our fake marriage taught me to read him very well.
“Try not to think about why so much,” I say. “That poem was written more than three hundred years ago, you know. I bet that back when people lived to be a hundred and the earth was lush and the buildings were clean and new, people still questioned why they were here. I don’t think that started after the virus.”
I think that’s a smile that comes to his lips, or maybe just a wry grin. “I can see why your brother said those things about hope,” he says. “You have a way of looking at things. You make it seem as though everything’s going to be okay. I can’t imagine a more dangerous thing to have than hope like yours.”
In the backseat Cecily coughs and stirs. Linden glances into the rearview mirror. “Are you awake, love?” he asks.
She shuffles around for a while more before she sits up. “Your talking woke me,” she complains. “Are we stopping here for the night?”
“No,” Linden says. “We’re going to try to make it to Charleston before stopping.” I’m mystified by the tenderness of his words. For me he is openly bitter about the truths and troubles of the world, but he still adores Cecily.
“I want to sleep up front with you, then,” she says. I can tell by her slur and stumbles that she’s not entirely awake, but still she manages to climb over the seat and wedge her way between us, trailing a blanket after her.
She settles perfectly to Linden’s side. “You don’t mind getting in back, do you?” she says to me. “There’s not enough room for the three of us.”
Chapter 14
THE MUSIC makes my heart leap onto my tongue before I’m even awake. I’m pushing for consciousness through rainbow scarves and pale limbs and that music, that brass music that every nerve of me remembers.
Cecily is kneeling in the front seat, climbing over Linden to see out his window. “What is it?” she’s asking.
It’s dark. My eyes try to adjust. The car slows to a stop, and Linden says, “It’s a carnival.”
“Drive,” I say. “Don’t stop the car.”
“What’s a carnival?” Cecily asks.
“Drive!”
My tone startles Linden into accelerating. The tires squeal as we go forward, and I’m telling him to go faster, go a hundred-forty like the speedometer says we can, and he’s saying “What, what’s wrong?” as I turn in my seat and watch the shadows through the back window. Shadows that are full of Madame’s guards, and broken girls, and Lilac, whose real name is Grace, who turned herself in so her daughter could be free.
It feels as though we’re going in slow motion. I think we’ll never get away. But eventually the Ferris wheel is far enough away that it could be a moving constellation.
I fall into my seat, breathing hard. “That place,” I get out.
“What?” Linden says.