“Give me a chance to prove it you,” I say. “Give me time.”
“For you, always.”
He sits up straight to look out past the nose of the plane, and the happiness that was starting to form on his face is gone at once. Through the window I can see Vaughn’s limo winding down the back roads that lead to the house. The only car on the road. From up here it’s like a fish that’s swimming upstream. “My father,” Linden says. And so ends his rush from his greatest act of rebellion. He understands that no matter where he runs or how high he flies, he will always have to come home.
“I’ll never hear the end of this one,” Reed grumbles. “Back in your seats, kids. I have to figure out how to land this thing.” He shoos Cecily and me through the curtain.
The plane was already shaking, but by the time we get to our seats, Reed’s landing attempt has Cecily and me clinging to each other in horror. I feel it when we hit the ground, and then it’s like we’re speeding hopelessly through the field behind Reed’s house, and I shut my eyes and will us not to go careening into the house.
I brace my legs against the adjacent seats, but when the plane makes its final jolt, despite my best efforts I go flying across the tiny cabin, and Cecily crashes into me. The storage cabinet flies open and rains little foil packets of food and lotus-embroidered handkerchiefs.
There’s a moment of stillness. The engine has stopped, but things are still plinking and hissing under our feet.
“Everyone alive?” Reed calls to us.
We’re stumbling as we all pour through the cockpit and out onto the grass. My shoulder is aching, but I’m otherwise intact. Cecily is inspecting her wrist that I’m guessing is sore from the way she braced herself in the last second.
Linden puts his hand to his temple, and it comes back bright with blood that’s trickling down the side of his face.
“Oh!” Cecily says. “You’re bleeding. Come here; let me see.”
He takes a step toward her.
Everything happens in slow motion after that. He raises his foot for the next step, and then he’s falling. I swear I can hear the sound of his bones hitting the dirt.
Blood is frothing in his mouth, and his eyes are closed and he’s having convulsions.
Cecily drops to his side and she’s screaming his name, but she’s too afraid to touch him. I’m too afraid to move at all.
Reed takes a step forward but stops when he sees Vaughn running toward us. “Linden!” Vaughn is calling. “Son— Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him!” He says those words over and over, gasping them, whispering them as he drops into the high grass and forces Cecily out of his way. She crawls a few feet back and then watches, unsure what to do with herself.
Linden is still convulsing, making strained noises, and I’m not sure, but I think he’s trying to breathe. And Vaughn, the only one of us who should know how to fix this, looks absolutely panicked. His hands hover over Linden’s face, wanting to touch him, to soothe him, but he knows better. He can see that his son’s injury is far more serious than the outer wound implies.
Blood is streaming out of Linden’s ear, and it’s so awful, so unimaginable, that my mind is trying to tell me it’s only a trick of the light. Only, I know it isn’t. Blood in his mouth, too. He’s drowning in it.
There’s a man who would drown for you, Annabelle the fortune-teller said, the light of all her metal and plastic treasures jumping around us.
And then Linden goes still, and Cecily is moaning, “Oh god, oh god, Linden,” because she realizes before the rest of us that he isn’t breathing. Vaughn tells her to shut up, and she does. He’s checking for his son’s pulse and then clearing the blood and the foam from his mouth. He’s feeling for broken ribs, and then he’s pressing his fists to the chest and forcing oxygen into the still lungs. For all the tools he has used, the equipment he has engineered, and the solutions he has concocted, all he has to save his son with now are his bare hands.
It isn’t enough. Even I know that. The sun is coming down and everything is painted gold. The tiny airplane. Linden’s curls.
Vaughn is persistent. It goes on like that forever and ever. But I know it’s over when I hear his sob, baritone and booming. I’ve never seen him cry; I didn’t think he could. It would have to take something greater than the end of the world to reduce Vaughn Ashby to tears.
Chapter 25
I WATCH VAUGHN scoop his son into his arms the way he probably did when Linden was small. I watch unresponsive limbs hanging slack, an open, motionless mouth that once told me “I love you.” I watch Vaughn carrying him to the limo and yelling at the driver, who runs out to help what can’t be helped. I watch the door close. I watch the limo getting smaller until it disappears.
And then, only then, I fall to my hands and knees.
When Vaughn returns after dark, the front door bursts open. His footsteps are thunderous and his voice is a hiss, and he’s telling Reed that he’s never, never going to let him see the children again. The children he’s talking about are Cecily, Bowen, and me. Reed is broken. He says nothing. He’s in his kitchen surrounded by mason jars, where watermelons and sprouts are growing beautifully according to his plan. He has always been the one to make things live while his brother was the wrong one. His brother was the one who killed and prodded and destroyed. That was the way it always was, who they always were.
I’m in the living room, in the dark, on an armchair that reeks of cigars. Cecily has made herself disappear. There’s no lock on the door of the upstairs bedroom, so she barricaded it with the dresser. She didn’t even come out for Bowen, who was wailing for the better part of a half hour before Elle found something to distract him in the library. She really is a skilled caregiver; she can open a textbook about air conditioner models and pretend to be reading from it, pointing to the pictures as she makes up a story about angels and falling stars. I was listening to her earlier, her young voice coming down the stairs as I focused on a crack in the ceiling. It took me away from the ugliness in my head for a while.
Vaughn breezes past me, and at first I don’t think he realizes I’m here, but without looking back at me, he says, “Get everyone out to the car.”
The screen door slams behind him. I hear a floorboard creak, and when I get to the base of the staircase, I see Cecily at the top step. It’s too dark for me to see her face. All I see is the sheen in her eyes that are staring through me. She’s got the fuchsia purse on her shoulder and Linden’s suitcase in her hand. We brought clothes and supplies with us when we went to South Carolina, but things like Bowen’s formula and Linden’s sketch pads were left behind.
“It’s time?” she says. They’re the first words she’s spoken to me all night. They might be the first words she’s said at all since she has become a fourteen-year-old widow.
“Yes,” I say.
“Elle,” she says, not raising her voice, not looking back to see if her domestic is following as she descends.
We don’t say good-bye to Reed, but I look over my shoulder and see him in the kitchen, staring through the table. This isn’t his fault. I want to tell him that. I want to believe that the same way that I want to forget that I was the one who should have been sitting in the copilot’s seat, and that the blood on the windshield should have been mine.
Cecily is quiet as we make our way to the idling limo. She’s been quiet all evening, not a murmur, not a sob. But then she looks into the waiting car, and she sees the wraparound leather seat where the three of us sat just hours before, on our way back from South Carolina. The car smells like the mansion. It smells like the past year of our lives.
She turns around and looks at me, as if to ask what I make of this nightmare.
I can tell that she hasn’t cried at all. I don’t know if this is a healthy response, but I haven’t cried either.
She opens her mouth to speak, but only a feeble croaking sound comes out. Elle and Vaughn are waiting behind us.
“Go on,” I tell her softly. “I’m right behind you.”
She nods, crawls into the seat by the window. I follow her. Then Elle with the sleeping baby. Cecily watches him. “What will happen to us?” she says breathlessly. “I gave Linden everything I had.”
“Don’t be foolish, Cecily,” Vaughn says. “You had nothing to give. You were nothing then, and you’re nothing now.” He closes the door on us.
Don’t you dare believe that, is what I would say to her if I were brave enough to speak. She clenches her jaw, tightens her grip on the purse strap, and stares out her window.
I don’t see Rowan when we make it back to the mansion, and I’m not foolish enough to ask about Gabriel, which would surely invite new wrath from Vaughn. I fear that he would kill Gabriel just to prove some sick point. In any case, Vaughn has vanished by the time an attendant opens the car door for us. We’re guided through the kitchen, which is empty and tidy, though there is the faint smell of food. I think Vaughn had been anticipating a family dinner.
When we get to the elevator, the attendant hands me a plastic key card strung on a silver necklace. The same one Linden gave to me when he decided to make me first wife.
“Housemaster Vaughn has requested that you come with me,” the attendant says to Elle. Cecily takes the baby and the diaper bag from Elle before she’s led away.
There’s only one place in the world left for us to go. I swipe my key card, the elevator doors open, and I push the button that will take us to the wives’ floor.
For what feels like hours, I sit in the library and listen to Cecily’s brutal wails. She’s finally found whatever it took for her to grieve, but whenever I knock on her door and call to her, she falls silent, waiting for me to leave her alone.
I pace the halls, missing the perfumed must of the incense and feeling unwelcome without it. Eventually I crawl onto my old bed and close my eyes against the light of my bedside lamp. Something deep within me cannot summon the wherewithal to grieve. I drift into a dream of Linden on the wet Hawaii sand, gray, eyes closed. The image gets closer like shutter clicks in a camera. A hundred pictures of a boy without life.
With a gasp I open my eyes.
I hear a rustle in the doorway, and I turn and find Cecily standing there. She’s red-faced and wringing her hands. Wet hair sticks to her cheeks like bony copper fingers trying to pull her back. She opens her mouth to speak, but her lips are quivering, and only more tears come.
“Come here,” I say. My voice is hoarse. She takes slow steps, and I pull back the blanket so we can both crawl beneath it.
After a very long time she says, “We’re all that’s left.” And then she breaks down again, and I busy myself with holding her, saying, “I know” and “I’m here,” because if I can just keep on this way, there’s no time for me to face it myself. There is a dark place calling to me, but I will not go just yet. I know I can’t return from it.