“That’s sort of what it’s like,” I agree. Even though my brother and I are both still alive, the longer we’re apart, the more I feel myself changing. It’s like I’m evolving into something that doesn’t include him. I don’t think I can ever be the person I was before all this.
It’s quiet again after that. It’s a comfortable quiet, though. Peaceful. I feel unburdened, and after a while I start to imagine that the divan is a boat moving over the ocean. Sunken cities play music beneath the waves. The ghosts are stirring.
Someone turns on the light, and my thoughts scatter away as I blink at the brightness. This is one of the few rooms with functioning lightbulbs, though they flicker.
“Linden?” Cecily says.
She’s standing in the doorway, her knuckles white from clutching the frame. Everything about her is white: her face, the quivering misshapen O of her lips, the nightgown that she’s got bunched up to her hips as though she’s unveiling her body to us.
But sliding down her thighs is an abundance of red. It’s pooling at her feet, from the trail of blood that followed her into the room.
Linden moves fast. He scoops her up by the backs of her knees and shoulders. She comes alive with a scream so awful that he has to brace his hand on the wall to keep from falling. She’s whimpering while he’s rushing her down the stairs.
I hurry after them down the long hallway, making footprints in the red puddles and thinking about how small she is, about how much blood it takes to keep a girl her size going, how much of it she can stand to lose. Redness is leaking rivers over Linden’s arms like veins atop his skin.
He says my name, and I realize what he wants. I push ahead of him and open the door.
Outside, the night is warm, sprinkled with stars. The grass sighs in indignation as we crush it with our bare feet. Wings and insect legs make music, which moments before had been lovely through the open window in the room full of books.
In the backseat of the car, which reeks of cigars and mold, I take Cecily’s head in my lap while Linden runs off to find his uncle to drive us.
“I lost the baby,” Cecily chokes.
“No,” I say. “No, you didn’t.”
She closes her eyes, shudders with a sob.
“They’ll know what to do at the hospital,” I tell her, though I don’t believe a word of it. I’m only trying to calm her, and maybe myself. I hold her hand in both of mine. It’s clammy, ice-cold. I can’t reconcile this pale, trembling girl with the one who stood before the mirror hardly an hour ago, fussing over her stomach.
Thankfully, Linden is back soon.
The drive to the hospital is rocky, thanks to Reed’s reckless driving and the lack of a paved road. Linden holds Bowen, whose eyes are wide and curious, and shushes him even though he doesn’t cry. I’ve always thought Bowen was intuitive. He just might be the only child of Linden’s to live.
I feel a gentle pressure around my finger, and I look down to realize Cecily is touching the place where my ring used to be. But she doesn’t ask about it, the bride who has always made it her mission to know everything about everyone in her marriage. She has been eerily silent this whole ride.
“Open your eyes,” Linden tells her when she closes them. “Love? Cecily. Look at me.”
With effort she does.
“Tell me where it hurts,” he says.
“It’s like contractions,” she says, cringing as we hit a pothole.
“It’s only another minute from here,” Linden says. “Just keep your eyes open.” The gentleness is gone from his voice, and I know he’s trying to stay in control, but he looks so frightened.
Cecily is fading. Her breaths are labored and slow. Her eyes are dull.
“‘There will come soft rain,’” I blurt out in a panic. She looks up at me, and we recite the words in unison, “‘And the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound.’”
“What is that?” Linden says. “What are you saying?”
“It’s a poem,” I tell him. “Jenna liked it, didn’t she, Cecily?”
“Because of the ending,” Cecily says. Her voice sounds miles away. “She just liked how it ended.”
“I’d like to hear the whole thing,” Linden says.
But we’ve arrived at the hospital. It’s the only real source of light for miles. Most of the streetlights—the ones still standing, anyway—have long since burned out.
Cecily has closed her eyes again, and Linden passes the baby off to me and hoists her into his arms. She murmurs something I can’t understand—I think it’s another line of the poem—and her muscles go lax.
It takes a few seconds for me to realize that her chest has stopped rising and falling. I wait for her next breath, but it doesn’t come.
I’ve never heard a human make a noise like the cry that escapes Linden’s throat when he calls her name. Reed runs past us, and when he returns, he’s got a fleet of nurses behind him, first generation and new. They rip Cecily from Linden’s arms, leave him staggering and reaching after her. I can’t help but think this attention is due to her status as Vaughn’s daughter-in-law. Reed must have made that clear.
Bowen starts to wail, and I bounce him on my hip as I watch Cecily’s body through the glass doors. The hospital lights reveal the gray of her skin. And, strangely, I can see her wedding band as though through a magnifying glass; the long serrated petals etched into it are like knives. They catch every bit of hospital light, the gleam stabbing my eyes. Then she’s laid onto a gurney that turns a corner, and she’s gone.
She’s dead. We’ll never get her back.
The thought hits me in the back of the knees, shaking me with its certainty.
7
I’M SITTING ON the floor of the hospital lobby, waiting. That’s always the worst part, the waiting.
Bowen has fallen into a quiet lull, ear to my heart. My arm hurts from supporting him. But I can’t think about that. I can’t think about anything. Voices and bodies move past.
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
