Eventually she exhausts herself and falls into a sleep so fragile that I wake her once with my breathing. Night deepens. There is no one to turn on the hall lights. No dinner is brought to us. There is no one keeping us trapped in this room, and it seems impossible that I ever could have wanted it that way.
I’m woken from my half sleep when Cecily moves toward me. My back is to her, but I can feel the mattress shift. Her breathing is matched by the heaviness of rain that has started outside. She weaves her fingers into my hair. She thinks I’m sleeping, and she doesn’t want to wake me. She only needs to touch my hair, to make and undo little braids so that her hands can stop shaking. She only needs to not be alone.
And I stay very still, because I need it too.
Last year I was lying in this bed, half-asleep, when Linden climbed in beside me. He was warm, and he smelled like alcohol and the chocolate éclairs we’d brought home with us. This was where he burrowed against me and asked me not to leave him.
I thought I had it all worked out. I would run away. I went through every scenario I could think of. But I never thought that he would be the one to leave me. I never thought being without him could hurt this much.
My muscles tighten. I break with a sob, and I’m surprised to hear his name come out of my mouth.
Cecily sobs too. We make horrible sounds echoing each other. I don’t know how long this goes on before she crawls out of bed. The bathroom light comes on, but she closes the door, reducing the light to slivers.
She runs the water for a very long time. I listen as her sobs taper down to sniffles and intermittent coughs. She opens the bathroom door several minutes later, shaking, silhouetted. Her hair and hands are dripping.
“Tell me about the twins,” she urges.
“What?”
“You and your brother,” she says. “When your parents died, what did you do? How did you get to a place where you could just carry on? Tell me. Tell me, because I’m sure that feeling this way is going to kill me.”
The last time I told her about the twins, she betrayed my trust. But she was a different girl all those months ago, still so easily coerced by Vaughn’s promises that we’d all be a happy family. She’s brutally wiser now.
“A feeling can’t kill you,” I say. “The twins thought the same thing as you, and they’re both still alive.”
“How?”
I go to her, and I mean to steer her back to bed, but she says that she needs air, and she leads me out into the hallway, and then onto the elevator. We go through the labyrinth of hallways, through the kitchen, out to the rose garden. I think she was hoping to find something here, but it’s missing.
“I can’t breathe,” she says, gripping the railing of our wedding gazebo. Her words are fast and tight.
I stand beside her, all sympathy and guilt, remembering a day when I thought this demanding child of a bride was incapable of feelings.
“You are breathing,” I tell her.
She shakes her head.
“I know what you’re feeling,” I say.
“Not like this you don’t.” She slides forward until her face is on the railing. Her back heaves with the weight of her breaths. All around us is the smell of damp spring, everything still wet from the recent rain. She’s reduced to whispers. “Not like this.”
I don’t dare to touch her. Loss is a knowledge I’m sorry to have. Perhaps the only thing worse than experiencing it is watching it replay anew in someone else—all its awful stages picking up like a chorus that has to be sung.
It takes her such a long time to understand that her lungs and heart and blood are going to keep working. Nothing will stop. No feeling can be the end of a person, or else the virus would hardly be our biggest threat.
I sit on a wet step to wait for her, and to hold myself together. My own breaths are shaky; my head feels swimmy and light. I try to find shapes in the stars—only, they don’t make sense tonight. I can’t remember what they mean.
For a while everything feels still and unreal. But then I’m filled with thoughts of what the morning will have to bring. I’ll make the bed, and then what?
When Cecily comes to sit beside me, we rest our heads together and I tell her a final story about the twins. The one whose grief drove him to set the country ablaze. And the one who found a way to love her captor.
Chapter 26
THE LIBRARY has the best view of the orange grove.
The morning is a gray photograph of a gray world where it is always raining; Cecily and I are standing at the window, watching Vaughn dig his son’s grave.
“The orange grove is a good place,” Cecily says, and her voice cracks. “Rose will be able to find him there.”
Many deaths have happened in this house, but none of the bodies were ever buried. Linden once told me that his father said the virus might be detrimental to the soil, and I never quite believed that. I believed that the bodies became Vaughn’s experiments. But after twenty-two years of working to save him, Vaughn is finally going to let Linden be at peace.
Linden is wrapped in a white sheet on a gurney, and for some reason I can’t rid myself of the worry that he’s going to be soaked by this drizzling rain.