The word “time” doesn’t sound the same to me anymore.
We enter the mansion through the kitchen, which is dimly lit and empty. When my husband and sister wives and I were here, the head cook would be milling about preparing the day’s menu at this hour. By her third trimester Cecily had developed so many food aversions that on an especially bad day she might send back four untouched breakfast trays.
Vaughn leads us onto the elevator. It was here that Gabriel stopped its descent so that I could tell him the story of how I came to be Linden’s unwilling bride. Was Vaughn listening in and collecting information that would lead him to my brother? Looking back now, I realize how foolish it was for me to utter secrets within these walls.
The doors open, and I’m expecting to be met with the wives’ floor; even after I became first wife and earned my key card, that and the ground floor were the only levels I had access to. But something different awaits me this time. Rather than the smell of incense, there’s leather and a spice I can’t exactly explain, but it’s not unlike the smell inside the trunk that held my parents’ things.
I’ve never seen this floor. Rather than lush carpeting, the floors are a dark, glossy hardwood. The walls are green and decorated with photos in gold frames. I immediately recognize the one of a young Rose and Linden in the orange grove. As we make our way down the hall, I watch them play together, run away from the camera with their hands knotted between them. I watch them get married, Rose in a billowing white dress that’s both absurd and beautiful on her child frame, Linden an awkward boy concentrating deeply on the ring he slides onto her finger.
At the end of the hall, their story ends with their foreheads pressed together. He’s got his hands on her swollen stomach, but the picture was taken a moment too soon; she will always be just about to smile.
Rowan isn’t looking at the pictures. His eyes are dark and unfocused. “Rowan?” I say.
“Hm?” He raises his head but doesn’t turn it toward me.
Vaughn opens the door that’s in front of us, revealing a bedroom only slightly different from the ones on the wives’ floor. There are dust-framed rectangles on the wall where pictures once hung. “I expected you might be tired,” Vaughn says, wrapping his arm around Rowan’s shoulders and leading him to the bed. “This room belonged to my son, but even when he’s home, he doesn’t much care for it anymore. Too many memories, I suppose.”
There’s no trace of Linden left in this room. I can see the empty spaces where things might have been once.
Rowan crawls under the sheets, and he’s gone in seconds. Vaughn tucks the covers to his chin, as though my brother is a child in his care rather than a subject exhausted from horrifying treatments.
“He has your fire,” Vaughn says. “I’m impressed that he was able to stand on his feet for as long as he did. Anyone else would be positively incoherent for at least two days following the sedation required for a retinal procedure. But time and again, the both of you exceed my expectations.”
I watch Rowan turn onto his left side. It’s how he’s always slept, turned away from me when we shared a bed.
“You’re looking tired,” Vaughn tells me. “I could bring you to your room, but I was hoping we’d have a chance to talk first. There’s something I’d like to show you.”
After the thriving Hawaiian cityscape and my parents’ notes and my brother, I cannot imagine what’s left to see. But finding out is bound to be more tolerable than facing the wives’ floor alone, so I agree to follow him.
I can’t help but be curious about what’s behind all of the closed doors along this hallway, and wonder what was going on under my feet and over my head while I was trapped on the wives’ floor every day. This level could almost belong to a different house.
We get into the elevator, and I’m not surprised a few moments later when the doors open to reveal the basement. But its chemical smell and flickering lights don’t frighten me this time. I’ll never trust Vaughn, but I can feel that things have changed. The world is not what I thought it was, and my brother is asleep upstairs, and somehow I know that I won’t be harmed by this place this time.
There is a silence so great that I can hear the ice crystals cracking and falling from eyelashes of girls who will never blink again. Girls who used to braid my hair, wrap arms and legs around me in sleep, and ask me what the party lights were like in my rare evenings of freedom. They’re here and not here.
And Spring herself when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Unlike two of my sister wives, I still have a pulse. I feel like a traitor.
As we walk, Vaughn says, “The hallucinations that caused you to harm yourself were very interesting. Your brother did experience some nightmares—I’d asked him to keep a journal—but he was, for lack of a better word, sane. I can’t say the same thing for you.”
He restrained me to a bed and filled me with drugs and took endless notes. The only company I had was my ailing domestic, who appeared to be even worse off than I was. But he wants to talk about sane.
“I’d like to try something different this time,” he says. “I’d like to let you have more freedom. It occurs to me that I’ve treated you like a caged animal. I’d like for you to travel with your brother and me while you receive your treatments. I think you’d enjoy yourself.”
I don’t know how to answer. I’m scared to admit to myself that I might be willing to do as he asks. I do want to see what more is out there. I am starting to believe in the methods he’s using to find this cure.
“You don’t have to answer me now,” Vaughn says. “Before we get to that, there is the matter of my son and grandson.”
We’ve stopped before a closed door, and my heart starts pounding. My palms fill with sweat. Whatever is behind that door, I know it’s going to be a bargaining chip.
I find my voice to say, “I can’t force them to come back here; Linden has to decide for himself.”
“So modest,” Vaughn says, rapping his knuckle against the tip of my nose. “Still refusing to see the power you have over my son. And, perhaps more important, over your former sister wife.”
“Cecily?” I say.
“Something tells me that she plays the biggest hand in keeping Linden and Bowen away from home. It’s such a surprise because she used to be the obedient one.”
I never would have described Cecily as obedient. But I suppose that’s what she was to Vaughn. He earned her trust by being the parent she’d never had, and when she finally saw that she was being used, she ran as far and as fast as she could. Nothing will bring her back now.
“She’ll listen to you,” Vaughn says. “She’ll follow you anywhere.”
“She wouldn’t follow me back here,” I say.
“Let’s just hope that she does,” Vaughn says, and he opens the door.
At first I don’t register what it is I’m seeing. I’m too afraid to let my eyes focus. But then I see a room like the one that kept me imprisoned the last time I was here, complete with a fake window that would show a fake horizon if it were turned on. Instead the screen is turned off. What’s the point when there’s no one to look at it?
There are several machines surrounding a bed, all of them with wires leading to a still body that breathes rhythmically. Colored fluids jolt back and forth through IV tubes. His skin is gray. His skin is gray, and my brain won’t register what this is. Won’t accept that this is happening, that the boy on that bed is the very same to give me my first kiss, and to show me the atlas with a river that has my name.
Gabriel. I rush to his side.
But there’s nothing that my presence here will do. He doesn’t feel it when I sweep my hand along the length of his face. He doesn’t even know that I’m here.
“What have you done to him?” I say.
“He’s seen my most valuable research. I couldn’t very well let him run loose.”
“How long has he been here?” My fingers make a fist around the bedsheet.
“Oh, goodness,” Vaughn says, like it’s a chore bothering to try to remember. “However long you were here. You wouldn’t have known he was with you on the drive back home; you slept like the dead the whole way. He’s fine, though, if that’s what you’re wondering. It’s an induced coma, easy enough to undo.”
“So undo it,” I say through gritted teeth.
“I’m certain that once he awakens, we can all be one big happy family again,” Vaughn says. “Once my son is home, of course.”
“Rowan,” I whisper. It used to be that a whisper would have him sitting bolt upright. The slightest noise would send him into high alert. But Vaughn’s treatments have changed him. I crawl onto the mattress beside him and shake his shoulder. “Rowan.”
He winces, and it takes a few seconds for the sleep to leave his eyes, and then concern takes over. He sees that I’m rattled. “What is it?”
“I have to go,” I say.
He sits up. “Go? Go where?”
“I have to find my ex-husband.” Ex-husband. The word sounds too strange and simple to tell the whole story.
“Are you worried about something happening to you?” he says. “I’ll go with you.”
Right now that would be the only thing to comfort me. But I shake my head. “You can’t. House—” I hesitate. What do I call the man who’s at the root of all this? Housemaster Vaughn? Dr. Ashby? But in the end it sounds strange to say it any other way than how I was taught. “Housemaster Vaughn says that you need to stay here and rest so he can monitor your progress.”
“That’s crazy. I feel fine,” he says. “I’ll talk to him—”
“No,” I say. “Just do as he asks. Please.”
I can’t raise my eyes to meet his. I can’t let him see that there are things I want to say to him, if only I trusted the privacy of these walls. I can’t let him see that I’m being manipulated. I can’t do anything to jeopardize Gabriel’s safety.
But Rowan already knows something is up.
He puts his hand on my shoulder and stares me down until I raise my eyes. “Do you want me to come with you?” he asks.
Yes. A million times yes.
“I’ll be all right. Housemaster Vaughn is sending his driver with me. He wants to supervise you and make sure you’re all right.” What I don’t tell him is that Vaughn wants to allow me as much time as possible to convince his son and daughter-in-law to return to his clutches, and that I have to do as he says or Gabriel won’t ever open his eyes again. “I’d feel better if you stayed here and rested. Besides, as you’ve pointed out, Housemaster Vaughn is doing so much for the both of us. We should trust him, right?”