The lobby is crowded. The chairs that line the walls are full of the coughing and the sleeping and the wounded. This is one of the few research hospitals in the state; my father-in-law often boasts about it. They take the wounded, the emaciated, the pregnant, or those who are dying of the virus—depending on which cases are interesting enough to be seen, and depending on who is willing to have blood drawn and tissue sampled without being compensated for it.
A young nurse is standing with a clipboard, trying to decide who is in the worst shape. Cecily was hurried down that sterile hallway not because of her condition but because her father-in-law owns this place. They know Linden here; last I saw him, someone was trying to console him as he wrestled away in pursuit of his wife.
I shouldn’t have Bowen in a place like this. His superior genes will promise him a life free of major diseases, sure, but he isn’t completely immune to the germs that are surely hovering around us. He could catch a cold. Someone has to think of his health, and suddenly that task has been placed in my hands, along with his chubby little body.
I raise my head and search for Reed. Eventually I spot him emerging from the same hallway that took my sister wife. Linden is pacing ahead of him, head down, face drained of color. I rise to meet them, and I realize my knees are trembling. And suddenly I don’t want to hear what they have to tell me. I don’t want to return Bowen to his father. I want to take him and run away from here.
Linden’s hands have been scrubbed of the blood. His face is splashed wet. The hem of his shirt is wrinkled, and when he begins twisting it in his fist again, I understand why.
“They couldn’t get a pulse—” he says, and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, hard. “I wanted to be with her, but they pushed me away.”
All I can think is that Cecily was supposed to outlive us all.
But when I open my mouth, what comes out is, “Bowen shouldn’t be here.”
Reed understands. Reed has always understood me. He takes the baby, and he’s so careful with him, even smiles at him.
“She was fine when I kissed her good night,” Linden says.
I should be saying something to comfort him. That was always my role in this marriage, to console him. But we aren’t married anymore, and I can’t remember how to be.
“I don’t want them to dissect her,” I say. I know I shouldn’t be so morbid, but I can’t stop myself. If Cecily is dead, then all the rules are broken. “I don’t want your father to have her body. I don’t—” My lip is quivering.
“He won’t get her,” Reed assures me.
Linden whimpers into his palms. “This is my fault,” he says. His voice is strange. “We shouldn’t have tried for another baby so soon. My father said it would be okay, but I should have seen it was too much for her. She was already so—” His voice breaks, and I think the word he croaks out is “frail.”
In more rational circumstances, hearing the intimate details of what went on between my sister wife and my former husband would embarrass me, but feelings of any sort are miles from me now.
“I need air,” I say.
“Wait,” he starts to say, but I stumble on anyway, until a pair of hands grabs my arms. I stare at the nurse’s name tag, uncomprehending, unable to read. He’s probably younger than I am. There were nurses at the lab where my parents worked too, and it always astounded me how serious they could be, how well they knew medicine.
“Mrs. Ashby?” the nurse asks, his voice too gentle.
I shake my head, eyes on the floor. “Sorry,” I whisper. “No.”
Linden comes up behind me. He says words I don’t understand. And the nurse says words I don’t understand. And I can’t catch any of what’s being said until I hear a cruel pang of hope in Linden’s voice when he asks, “Can we see her?”
I whip my head around to stare at him. He wants to see her? Doesn’t he understand that a body isn’t a person? Doesn’t he understand how awful that would be—how awful it already was to watch her get swept away a few moments ago?
“But it will be a while yet before she’s lucid,” the nurse says. And suddenly—I don’t know why—his name tag makes sense. Isaac. The whole world reemerges from the darkness that had been closing in around me.
My heart starts pounding in my ears, my throat. I try to hang on to what’s being said now.
Somewhere, on a table in a sterile room, my sister wife took in a sharp breath. It happened just as they were drawing the sleeves from their watches to call a time of death.
Her heart forced blood out from her chest, back to her brain, her fingertips, her cheeks.
Cecily. My Cecily. Always the fighter.
A squeaking noise escapes through my teeth, joy and relief.
We’re guided down a hallway, our footsteps echoing around us at all angles like claps.
Linden and I huddle together to see her through the small window in her door. We can’t go in yet. She can’t be agitated. Her body is still working through the shock of losing a pregnancy in its second trimester; all of this is fascinating to the promise of research, which is what this hospital is all about. The doctors want to know everything about the new generations, and such a violent miscarriage invites all sorts of interest. There are monitors recording her heart rate. The nurse is explaining that her temperature will be checked every hour. They’re taking thorough notes on any slight change in her body chemistry.
But I don’t see the intrigue in any of those things. I don’t see more research fodder. All I see is my sister wife, barely hanging on.
There’s a plastic mask over her mouth, misting with her breaths. Her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes lazily rove along the wires that connect the machines to her body. Her heartbeats are small green bursts on the monitor. She looks so alone and lost in her dreams.
I press my hand to the glass, and the ghost of my frowning reflection is superimposed over her bed.
“Will she be all right?” Linden asks. I don’t think he’s heard any of the nurse’s rambling.
“You’ll be able to see her in the morning,” the nurse says.
Old tears still glisten on Linden’s face. His lips move, sending inaudible prayers to phantom gods. The only words I can make out are “thank you.” He takes my hand and leads me to the lobby, where we will wait for the morning light to come and fill Cecily’s hair with its usual fire.
Why did this happen? Any number of reasons. She’s young, the first generation doctor tells Linden. And, superior genes or not, pregnancies in rapid succession can take a toll on a young girl. I can tell he’s being disapproving. So many of the first generations hate what has happened to their children and their children’s children. They look at us and see what we should have been, not what we are.
Doctors speak in impersonal, clinical terms: fetus, infection, placenta, hypothesis, patient. This textbook approach does wonders for taking the emotional edge out of it. The most likely hypothesis here is that the fetus has been dead for days, and, left unchecked, an infection spread through her blood like a wildfire. Eventually her body caught up and worked to expel the source of the problem, and she went into labor. She started hemorrhaging, and, finally, she went into shock. While we were trying to keep her awake in the car, her body was already shutting down. We were inevitably going to lose her without proper treatment. It all sounds so official and possible the way the doctor explains it. Like I’m reading one of my parents’ lab reports.
It’s that simple. It ends there, with no mention of the fact that if she hadn’t mustered the strength to get out of bed and drag herself down the hall, it would have been too late when we found her. How much time would we have squandered, talking about annulments and fraternal twins as she died alone at the other end of the hall? I file that thought as far back into my brain as I can, out of sight.
“I don’t understand,” Linden says. “There were no signs.”
“She was flushed all the time,” I volunteer, remembering how hot her skin was when we shared a bed. And then I run through the checklist: how heavily she breathed and snored, the way her bones seemed to creak when she moved, the bags under her eyes. Linden is surprised by it. He says he had no idea it was that severe. This doesn’t surprise me. Even outside of the mansion, the full picture is lost on him. He sees what he’s been taught to see. I can’t fault him for that.
Later, when we’re alone in the lobby, he says, “This is my fault.”
“No,” I say. “Of course it’s not.”
He’s trembling. I touch his arm.
“She was just so sad when Jenna fell ill,” he says. “The only time she was happy at all was with Bowen. My father convinced me that another baby would make her better.”
“What about you?” I ask. “Was a baby what you wanted?”
He looks at his lap, and the word comes out so small. “No.” He rubs tears from the side of his face. “I just didn’t know how else to make it better.”
Poor Linden. He has had, at once, four wives, whom he adored and maybe even loved. But we frightened him, us girls, with our intensity, the weight of our sadness and the sharpness of our hearts. Rose knew him well. She kept her misery a secret and found a way to love him. Jenna and I hid from him; we smiled across the dinner table, let him sleep beside us, and we mourned when we were alone. But Cecily could only love him the way she knows how: all at once. Everything rushing up to the surface. I’ve seen her sadness, and it’s a frightening thing. As her stomach grew with Bowen, I saw it begin, but it was so much worse after she gave birth and after Jenna was gone.
And then I was gone too.
Linden only wants for Cecily to be happy. He showers her with affection and pretty things. But all the while he knows that even he will have to leave her.
The mattress is at a slight incline when we’re brought in to see my sister wife. Her eyes are murky. The infection brought on by the miscarriage left her with a fever, and she’s glistening with sweat. Her lips and cheeks are hot pink. Her hair is in tangles.
She looks ravaged. Chewed up and spit out.
Linden stands beside me in the doorway, and he fumbles for my hand but then doesn’t grab it. I know he’s trying to respect the annulment, to get used to us being unmarried. But in this moment I wish he would hold on to me. I need his strength and he needs mine, the way it was before.
“Linden?” Cecily croaks.
With that, he rushes to her. “I’m here, love,” he says, and kisses the top of her head, her nose, her lips with a fury of affection that says he’s so glad to have her back that he can’t get enough of her at once. It’s the kind of attention she lives for, but she’s so defeated that all she manages is a weary smile.