As a result their daughter grew to be fearless. She played among the tents and talked wildly about the ocean and the sky. She had dreams of leaving the country. If the rest of the world were destroyed, she wanted to visit the graves of the other countries. She wanted to start at one end of the world and sail all the way around until she came back again.
Madame blames herself for this. She raised her daughter to be discontent in this carnival of dying and broken girls. When Rose’s father left on research endeavors, Rose pleaded to go along with him, and he most always relented. When Rose was eleven, he took her to the coast of Florida, where he would be meeting with several colleagues. Vaughn Ashby was among them.
“She was supposed to build sand castles on the beach and put her toes in the ocean,” Madame says.
“What happened?” Cecily asks gently. She reaches for her teacup, but I put my hand on her wrist to stop her. Even if Madame is being civil, I don’t trust anything she serves us.
Madame strokes the cloth-swaddled edges of the picture frame.
“There was a car bombing,” Madame says. “I was told it was caused by pro-naturalists who opposed the research being conducted. I was told my lover and daughter were killed.”
She looks at Linden now. He’s so small and weary, and I worry that he’ll collapse, but he doesn’t. He says, “Rose thought that her parents were killed in that explosion. She thought that her mother met up with her father and that they died on their way to her. She had nightmares for—always. She always did.”
“I can’t help noticing”—Madame’s voice is dry and lacking emotion, but ripe with expectancy—“that you are referring to her in the past tense.”
Linden cannot speak. He only looks, bleary-eyed, into his teacup.
“Rose has been gone for a year now,” I say.
“When she would have turned twenty, then,” Madame says. “I let hope get the better of me for a moment.”
“I—excuse me,” Linden blurts, and before any of us can stop him, he’s on his feet and stumbling through the slit in the tent, and Madame is yelling for her guards not to shoot, to keep the fences closed but to let him go wherever he pleases.
Cecily runs after him.
Madame looks at me, and I see a rare moment of humanity about her face. I see her brown eyes, and I understand now why she seemed so familiar to me when we first met several months before.
“Rose looked like you,” I say.
During my time at this carnival, I was subjected to Madame’s whims, treated like one of her girls. But not exactly. She put the pill down my throat but she never forced me to go quite as far as the other girls when I was with Gabriel. I never had to forfeit my virginity. Maybe that was her way of not sullying the image of her daughter. Maybe she still loved her after all.
Madame’s mouth opens and shuts several times. She turns the picture frame over and over in her hands and says, “Vaughn asked me about arranging a marriage between our children. But I thought it would be a waste of time. Vaughn said that we could have grandchildren, but—burying Rose was going to be hard enough. I didn’t want more children to bury.”
This is the real Madame. I can see why she hides herself in accents and gems and exotic perfumes. I can see why she’s grown to hate anything to do with love. She isn’t evil or corrupt the way that Vaughn is. She’s broken. Only broken.
“You remind me of her,” Madame says. “Not just your hair and your face. You’ve both got that restlessness. Your eyes are somewhere else.”
“I only knew Rose a little, toward the end,” I say. “But she wasn’t unhappy. She and Linden loved each other very much.”
“All those years wasted,” Madame says, and her voice is venomous. “I could have had her for nine more years. I could have said good-bye.”
This is a woman who imprisoned me, who drugged me and betrayed me and nearly murdered a little girl right in front of me. And yet I believe that her grief is sincere. I believe that she loved her daughter. I don’t hate her anymore.
“Vaughn lies,” I tell her. “He took me away from my family too. He’s the one I was running away from, not Linden. Linden would never hurt anybody.”
“He was always off,” Madame says. “That Vaughn. Always trying to save the world, never mind what it cost. He has always believed he would cure the virus.” She stares past me for a long time, and then, hesitantly, she asks me, “Did Rose have any children?”
“No,” I say. That pain, at least, I can spare her.
I find Linden and Cecily at the old merry-go-round. Linden is staring at the horses that are impaled by rusted poles. “She told me about these,” he says. “She told me stories about a Ferris wheel and a merry-go-round and women in extravagant dresses. My father told her it had been demolished. He told her that her parents were dead.”
Rose told me many things, but she never told me about her childhood here. Too painful, I suppose. It must have taken years for her to speak of her past with her own husband.
Cecily’s mouth twists as though the pain were her own. She can’t bear to see him so sad.