All that comes out is a small “Maybe.”
“Maybe nothing,” he says. “That lab explosion was a blessing in disguise. It made us all face facts. Live for today, while you can.”
That’s enough for Gabriel, who grabs my arm and moves me away. I’m shaking all over, and there’s something angry that won’t make it to my lips; all that comes out is a frustrated grunt that seems to shake the walls as I stomp from the room and up the stairs. Maddie and Nina move to approach me, but quickly think better of it and go back to their game of trying to weave through the banister.
There’s nowhere to go but Silas’s room. Gabriel trails after me and closes the door. He reaches for me, but I’m pacing, moving my mouth and trying to get the words out. I can barely see straight. Finally I blurt out, “Smug.”
I ball my hands into fists. “He has no right—who does he think he is?”
“He shouldn’t have called you naïve,” Gabriel offers, trying to help.
“It isn’t that,” I say. “I mean, yes, that’s part of it, but—he said the explosion was a good thing.” I stop pacing and chew on my knuckle, feel the bone between my teeth. “My parents were killed in that explosion, Gabriel. They were killed because they believed they’d find a cure. And they were doing such good things in the meantime! They were caring for newborns, and taking in pregnant girls who had nowhere to go, and—” My voice cracks. Through tears I glare out the window, where Silas is going into the shed. He breathes into his red hands for warmth, fidgets with the lock, and disappears inside.
From up here he seems so small. He’s a petal of ash tumbling toward the sky, all that’s left of the flames.
Strange how easily things disappear.
Once upon a time there were two parents, two children, and a brick house with lilies in the yard. The parents died, the lilies wilted. One child disappeared. Then the other.
“It’s okay,” Gabriel says. His hand hovers near my arm, but I think he’s afraid to touch me.
“My parents would have done more good things,” I say. “Great things.”
“I know,” Gabriel says.
“They didn’t want this for Rowan and me. My brother—he’s smart. They were teaching him to become a scientist, but after they died, he gave up. He gave up because we had to take care of each other.”
I stare at my reflection in the glass, and I can see two versions of myself: the twin sister, and the bride.
“It was supposed to be better than this,” I whisper.
When Gabriel and I announce our plans to head into the shipping district, Claire doesn’t question it. Silas mumbles something into his tea about how he’ll never see us again. He thinks we’re abandoning Maddie. But Maddie either knows this isn’t true or doesn’t care, because she can’t be interrupted from her game when I pass her on my way out.
The walk feels twice as arduous as it did yesterday. My legs are stiff and heavy, and I keep my head down to avoid the blinding sun. Gabriel doesn’t press me for conversation. Sometimes he’ll reach over and rub circles on my back. I think he expects me to cry or something, but I am beyond crying. Beyond feeling anything. Beyond thinking of anything but the most immediate of actions: Cross the bridge. Start with the factories closest to my home and then work my way along the shoreline. Do not pay attention to the water—it is full of memories and sunken continents, and many places in which a person’s mind can drown.
In every office of every building, I deliver the same quick speech. I’m looking for my brother. His name is Rowan Ellery. About this much taller than me. Blond hair. One blue eye, one brown eye. You’d remember him if you saw him, probably.
But no one does. Over and over it’s the same thing.
Until we reach a food processing plant, and a first generation man with freckled skin, a hairnet, and a stained shirt with the word “supervisor” on the chest knows who I’m talking about. He goes on an angry tirade about how Rowan—he’s made up a less-than-charming nickname for him—worked for him right up until he stole one of the delivery trucks with a rather expensive supply of canned soups inside it. This man is so angry, his words so heated, that he ignores my next question each of the several times I ask it. Finally Gabriel takes over for me, places a hand on the man’s shoulder. Manages to calm him down with his placid, easy expression, his blue eyes making contact but holding no aggression. “How long ago?”
The man blinks. “Months,” he says. “I knew something was off about that kid. Always muttering to himself, disappearing for an hour once. But he got deliveries done quick enough, so I kept him around.”
I try to reconcile my brother with the person this man is describing. Rowan always had a quick temper, and if he was particularly upset, he would mutter under his breath the things he wished he could have said to fix the problem. Mostly unkind things, but lucid at least. He would only stop when I put my hand on his arm, talked softly to him. After the Gatherer broke into our home, my brother was furious for days. Pacing. Worrying. And just when I thought he was calming down, he shattered a window with his fist. But I never considered how deep his anger could go, or if his tirades could stop making sense if he went about it long enough.
Just as he had always been there to protect me, like that night the Gatherer held a knife to my throat, I had always been there to calm him back down. I was the only one who could do it.
A lead anchor of guilt sinks in my stomach. He’s out there somewhere because I couldn’t reassure him. I couldn’t bring him back from the darkness beyond the edges of his own mind.
My voice sounds a thousand miles away when I ask, “What did the truck look like?”
The man is all too happy to show us his delivery trucks, and to end the tour of the parking lot with “If you ever see that kid again, tell him he’d be an idiot to show his face around here.”
If. If I ever see him again.
On the walk back to Claire’s, I’m the one who’s muttering angrily. About Gatherers. About months and trucks and nonsensical notes left in a burned-down house. And about time—always time—because that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? Time frittered away at the mansion. Time waiting for a twin who isn’t coming home. Time until I die.
I must look as disgruntled as I feel, because when I return, Silas holds back whatever smart comment he was going to make. For a moment our eyes meet, and he gives me a look that isn’t disgust, or pity, but rather of solidarity. I think he knows my search was a fruitless one. I think he understands how that feels.
I would love nothing more than to go upstairs and bury myself in the nest of blankets and fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. This is what I did when my parents died. But there is some small, logical part of me that keeps going, like a lone gear in a broken watch. I move into the kitchen. I help Claire with the dishes. I boil water for the spaghetti. I wipe sauce dribbling from toddlers’ chins. I dust a menagerie of trinkets on mantels and shelves. I shrug Gabriel off when he asks, over and over, if I’m okay.
And over the next several days, I fall into a routine. I begin sleeping normally. The food is still tasteless and it sticks going down, but I eat it. More than once, going into the shed for canned food or the tool kit to fix a leaky faucet, I find Silas pressed against the wall and tangled in the arms of a new girl. “Come to join us?” he teased the first time, and the girl hit his chest. But after that we learned to ignore each other.
Gabriel is popular among the youngest children because he knows how to play a few songs on the piano. I never knew this about him, and when my chores aren’t very taxing, I sit on the bench and watch his fingers move over the keys. He shows me how I can enhance the song by simply pressing the same key over and over. Ping, ping, ping. I focus on just that one note as the rest of the melody washes through the room.
It does not leave me, even after my index finger has left the key. Ping, ping, ping as I gather dirty laundry and haul it to the washing machine. Ping, ping, ping as I am climbing the stairs and trying to be quiet, because it’s dark now and the children are all still with sleep. I can hear the mishmash cacophony of their breathing, and the water hissing through the pipes as Gabriel showers.
Ping, ping, ping— the notes catch with my next breath, and before I know what’s happening, I’ve lost my footing and I’m tumbling forward.
I never hit the next step, though, because Silas has grabbed my arm. I can see his pale skin reflected back in the moonlight. Does he ever wear a shirt? His face is in shadow, but his eyes are light enough that I can see them watching me. They roll to every angle of my face as though deciding something.
“Thanks for catching me,” I mumble.
I remove my arm from his grip, and he lets go, but for some reason I am rooted to this spot.
“You got dizzy, didn’t you?” he whispers. “It’s been happening every day.”
“I’m all right,” I whisper back
“You’re not all right,” he says.
I say nothing, stepping around him to go to the bedroom. How can I explain to him that what he perceives as dizziness is, in fact, a creeping form of madness? Like how the tendrils of ivy probed their way up the exterior of my brick house (the one that is now uninhabitable), I am being overtaken.
How can I explain that the reason I fell was because of the aftershock of a laboratory explosion that killed my parents years ago?
In the morning, while I’m making the beds in one of the children’s rooms, I reach out to close the window. I can see Silas staggering behind the shed several feet below, a girl in his arms. The wind picks up her long dark hair and drops it as though in frustration. I see his lazy smile as her arms coil up around his neck. Her sweater sleeves are striped like the Christmas candy in old storybooks.
For just a second, as I’m stretching up to lower the window’s frame, he raises his eyes to me. He taps his nose, then tumbles around the corner of the shed, the girl laughing all the while, and disappears from sight.
Confused, I touch the skin under my nose, trying to find meaning in the gesture. When I move my hand away, it’s smeared with blood.
Chapter 19
BY MID-FEBRUARY the air starts feeling warmer. The fine layer of frost melts, giving the grass a freshly watered look, and softening the earth. I sit on the curb in front of the orphanage, watching the layer of early fog that swirls above the concrete. I try not to think of the orange blossoms. They would be sleeping in the trees now, waiting to be born.
This time last year I lived in the shipping district of Manhattan. I was barely sixteen. I did not know that I was just days from being Gathered.
I rest my hand on my raised knee and look at my wedding ring. I follow the vines and petals that don’t begin or end.