“If you make me stay, I’m going to ask all the questions I like, until you’re sick of me,” I warn.
“Deal.”
“And you have to answer them,” I say.
“Shoot.”
I don’t have to think about it; there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask him. “Have you ever been married?”
“No,” he says. “I rather like being by myself. Had a dog for a while; it followed me around and never talked. I imagine a wife wouldn’t grant me that level of peace.”
“You never wanted children?” I ask. “Not even before they knew about the virus?”
“Having children seemed like a reckless thing for someone like me to do,” Reed says. “Now that we know about the virus, it’s worse than reckless. It’s cruel. No offense, doll; you had as much a right to be born as any first generation, but if I wanted to watch something live its course and die, I’d get another dog.”
I don’t know why, but that makes me laugh. Dogs. I’ll only live a few years longer than a dog. All that effort to save my sister wife, and the bloodstain she left in the backseat will be around longer than she will anyway. Reed has had his solitude disrupted by a house full of kids, and in a few years we’ll all be dead, though he’s the one with tired eyes and wrinkled hands and gray hair. We are young and energetic, but in six years there won’t be a trace of us. The absurdity of it all.
Reed frowns at me.
“Your brother has been filling everyone’s head with promises of a cure,” I say, recovering from my laughter with intermittent hiccups of it. “He builds all of these hospitals and secret lairs. But not you.”
“My brother is mad,” Reed says. “Completely off his rocker. Don’t get me wrong, but if you strip all of that away, he just doesn’t want to bury another son. I have to hold on to that thought, or else I wouldn’t believe he was human at all.”
“And when he can’t save Linden, he’ll move on to Bowen,” I say.
“Bowen and Linden,” Reed says, clapping his hands against the steering wheel and staring straight ahead. “Those are two names I thought I’d never hear in the same sentence.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Vaughn doesn’t like to talk about the past, you understand,” Reed says. “Poor Linden has no idea that his son is named after his dead brother.”
That night Cecily is discharged from the hospital. It rains. Reed goes speeding down twisty back roads, the tires of his old car squealing at sharp turns. Through the windshield I can’t see a thing, and I wonder how, or even if, he can.
Linden sits in the front seat holding Bowen, and patiently says things like “Uncle Reed, please” and “That was a stop sign.”
Cecily’s eyes are closed, and she’s curled up in the backseat with her head on my shoulder. I can tell that she’s awake by the way she tenses when we hit bumps, but she doesn’t make a sound, and I know what’s keeping her subdued.
When she’d gone into premature labor, she’d been unconscious, hanging to life by a thread. But the doctors had chemicals to do the work for her. Dilate the cervix. Loosen the muscles. Force everything out. I remember from one of Cecily’s childbirth books a drawing of a fetus at four months. In the drawing it was sucking its thumb, eyes closed, knees curled, and ankles crossed. Even when Cecily began to get stronger a few days ago, she asked me to stay with her. I was at her bedside when she and Linden asked the doctor about their stillborn child—if they could see it, if it had been a boy or a girl. The doctor said it was long gone, donated to the hospital research lab, which would take anything it found worthy of analysis. The doctor said it should be a comfort to them, knowing their loss might help find a cure.
I remember that both of their expressions went blank. They were so bereft already that there wasn’t room for new grief. Linden’s hands were shaking when he held his palms to his temples.
They’ve both endured the worst of it with wayward defiance. The silence between them is like a dam about to burst.
The car squeals to a stop.
“Wait for me to get the umbrella,” Linden says. “Cecily, love, pull your hood up.”
She sits up, groggy, half of her hair rumpled. I help her with the hood of her coat. “We’re here?” she murmurs.
“Yes,” I say. “And you can go to bed now. I even came by this morning and washed the dust out of the sheets.” I don’t tell her about the blood.
“She did,” Reed says. “Who knew the washing machine actually worked? I’ve been using it to store food.”
“I made the bed.” I frown and push the hair from her face. “The sheets are tucked in extra snug, the way you like them.” It was a pathetic gesture to comfort her, too little in the grand scheme of all she’s been through.
“Thanks,” she yawns. Her head tilts sleepily. Linden pulls up the hood of Bowen’s plasticky raincoat and hands him to Reed before helping Cecily out of the car, holding an umbrella over her. Once we’re inside, he tries to carry her, but she brushes him off.
“Wait,” Linden says, but she moves down the hallway ahead of him. There’s been a distance behind her eyes since her heart stopped that night. She somnambulates beyond human reach, ignoring voices that call after her. She has stopped talking about her nightmares, but she never truly awakens from them.
Now her fingertips drag along the wall. Her steps are slow, shaky, but purposeful.
Reed, who has just pulled the cord that illuminates the stairwell with flickering light, steps aside to let her pass. She stops in front of him, more than a head shorter than he is, and meets his eyes. “I’m sorry for how I acted,” she says. “I was awful, and you’ve been nothing but generous. Thank you for letting me stay in your home.”
And Reed, who muttered angry things whenever she left the room, softens. “Think nothing of it, kid,” he says. Cecily gives him something like a smile and then pushes herself up the creaky stairs.
In the bedroom she collapses facedown on the mattress, and Linden removes her muddy shoes. She turns onto her back, limp as a rag doll, watching with dull eyes as he unbuttons her coat, slides it from her arms, and rubs warmth into her fingers.
He’s murmuring nice things to her the whole time, saying that she’s important and that she’s strong, but she doesn’t react, not even when he tells her he loves her.
And then I hear her slight gasp, see the way her bottom lip curls back with a sob. The dam is finally breaking.
When Linden peels away the covers, I backpedal from the doorway and into the hall. They should be alone. Husband and wife. There’s no room for an awkward, unmarried third. And I’ll be leaving soon anyway. If Cecily knew I was staying for her sake, she’d be pushing me out the door. But I can’t leave until I’m sure she’s well.
I go down to the kitchen, where Reed is attempting to feed Bowen a bottle while working on some project that involves soil and glass jars. “Compact watermelons,” he tells me, not looking up. “If I can make the seed grow in a jar, it’ll take its shape. No bigger, no smaller.”
“I like it,” I say. “Modifying something without changing its genetics.”
“Clever you,” he says. “Too bad you won’t stick around to see how it turns out.”
I take Bowen, surprised at how heavy he is for someone so small, and sit in a chair to feed him the rest of his bottle. I watch his lips move, the milky formula that pools between them without ever spilling over. His eyes are winking. He’s a perfect little machine, I think, flawlessly engineered, except for one pesky glitch.
It’s quiet for a while, and then Reed says, “That child looks like she’s been to hell and back.”
I like that Reed sees Cecily for what she is.
“She’s been to hell,” I agree. “I don’t know about back.”
Reed reaches into the jar and presses a seed into the layer of soil that lines it.
“She’s convinced that Vaughn wanted her dead,” I say. “She won’t have him anywhere near her.”
“Is that so,” Reed says, not sounding at all surprised. “What do you think?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” I say, tilting the bottle so Bowen doesn’t suck up any air bubbles. I remember this from watching my mother handle newborns in the lab. “If a second pregnancy was dangerous to her, maybe he didn’t have to do anything; maybe he could just sit back and let it take its course. What I don’t understand is why. Maybe he has realized he can’t control her anymore, but for her to be dead? What would he gain from that?”
“I heard there used to be hunters,” Reed says, “who’d use the whole animal. Cook with its fat, eat its meat, wear its pelt, preserve its organs, and worship its skull. My brother is like that—nothing wasted, nothing without purpose.”
“You’re thinking of the Inuit,” I say. “They used to carve sculptures out of the bones and make thread from the sinew.” I read about them in one of my father’s encyclopedias years ago. They lived in Canada’s arctic regions and survived almost entirely on sea life. Even now I can see the glossy photographs of their heavy fur coats, the long trail of footsteps in the snow behind a little girl in black braids as she held up a fish. I remember how strong they seemed, and how beautiful. It pains me to compare them to Vaughn, but it’s accurate. He would gut me and my sister wives like fish, but every organ would have a purpose.
Anger bests me for a moment, and my hand shakes; the bottle slips out of Bowen’s mouth, but he sucks it back into place. It doesn’t seem right that I’m holding such a fragile creature while I’m thinking such ugly thoughts.
“You know a lot of things, doll,” Reed says. “You can’t trust everything the history books tell you, though. They lie.” He shakes a little glass bottle of seeds, holding them up to the lightbulb that’s swinging over his head. The seeds are tiny, unborn things, and I resent them. They’ll be planted and they’ll grow into exactly what they’re meant to be.
“Rhine?” Linden’s voice is soft. He’s standing in the doorway, pale as death.
“I’m almost done feeding Bowen,” I say. “Then I’ll bring him up. Unless you want to take him right now?”
“No, let him finish,” Linden says, his tone never changing. “Just put him in the bassinet when he’s through, if you don’t mind. I’ll see you in the morning.”
He doesn’t wait to hear my reply. He turns around slowly and with precision, like he’s balancing porcelain plates on his head, and disappears into the darkness of the hall.