There are so many thoughts in my head. Ones I should avoid. Ones I should gravitate toward. All of them fluttering like orange blossom petals in this morning fog. I can no longer discern which thoughts are useful and which are dangerous; all I know is that I’m sick of being stagnant. So, not knowing what else to do, I start walking.
Even a few yards down the street, I can hear the children and clattering dishes inside the orphanage. I turn off Dawn Avenue, though, and they vanish. There is nothing but the distant whoosh of city traffic, the faraway tide. A gust of wind picks up, and I hug my chest.
I’m wearing a brown-and-pink-striped sweater that itches everywhere. It was not made especially for me. It is not inlaid with pearls and diamonds.
I’m so busy trying not to think that I don’t hear him calling for me—not until the sound of my name echoes against the empty street with his footsteps. “Rhine! Wait up.”
I stop walking, don’t turn around, and wait for him to catch up.
“Oh, good,” I say, once Silas is beside me. “You’re wearing a shirt.”
He huffs indignantly and shakes the curls from his eyes. They’re blond almost to the point of being completely white. They take on the soft blue morning glow, and the frizz gives them a frothy ocean look.
This is what girls like about him, I guess. The too-cool-to-care thing. Normally this would be the time he’d disappear from the house to be with one of them. In the toolshed or elsewhere in this neighborhood, letting their hands swing between them as they walk away. But that’s his business, and I don’t care. I’m only happy he’s considerate enough to keep his escapades out of Claire’s home, especially since we share a bedroom.
“Thinking of running away from our fine establishment?” he asks as we start walking again.
“No. Just going for a walk,” I say.
I try to stay out of Silas’s hair. If he goes to bed before I do, I busy myself with chores until I’m sure he’s asleep. And if I go to bed first, I pretend to be asleep as he tiptoes over my body. I have also done my best to give him no indication of the bright bits of light that swim around before me at the worst moments, when hope feels impossible. Right now, for instance.
Gabriel has been concerned about me too, but I don’t need to avoid him, because he isn’t intrusive. He asks, I change the topic, and that’s the end of it.
If Silas questions my state again, I am fully prepared to run away from him. I am scouting potential alleys as we go.
It’s not until he speaks again that I realize there is another reason I’ve been avoiding him. It’s so I won’t have to try to answer his question—the one that’s been hiding in his sleepy, disinterested-looking eyes from day one. “Gabriel’s not really your husband, is he?”
The least exhausting thing would be honesty. And I have so little energy to spare these days. “No,” I say. “But you knew that.”
“Mm,” he says.
“How?” I ask. “You always look at us like you know, but how?”
“It isn’t a lack of affection; you obviously care about each other, or whatever,” Silas says. “If I say this, you’re going to think I’m crazy.”
“No,” I say. “Trust me, I won’t.”
“How do I explain it?” he says. “It’s like there’s an invisible cord on that wedding band, and it doesn’t lead to him. It’s like you’re tethered.”
Tethered. That’s a good way to put it. Thoughts of my husband and sister wives, and even my deranged father-in-law, seem to never truly leave me.
“I ran away,” I say. “I was Gathered, and I escaped, and I came home, and my family was gone.”
I don’t realize how badly I’ve needed to say those words until they’ve left my mouth. They hang in the air. And all I want now is to be away from them. To leave the truth behind. Because if I can’t do anything about it, I certainly don’t want to face it.
I turn off the main road and start walking downhill, careful not to slip on the grass that’s slick with dew. In a brighter city, with cleaner air, this would be a place flowers might bloom. Instead there’s nothing at the bottom other than a trickle of a river and some bony tangled shrubs. I thought about that when I came here the other day. I needed to get away from the chaos of the orphans for a while, and this little area seemed safe to me, shrouded in sun, bearing the damp, earthy smell of spring.
Today there is a different smell. I don’t recognize it, not right away, until Silas is gripping my arm and telling me not to look.
But it’s too late. I’ve already seen the dead girl lying faceup in the shallow water, her eyes full of clouds.
There are so many bright pieces of light that it hurts my eyes. I just stand there, mouth shut, staring through them. I do not see this girl’s features, the color of her hair. A bizarre thing happens. I see her bones instead. I see right through her skin, to the blood and tissue that’s blackened and still. I see the torn muscle that used to be her heart. That’s where the Gatherer’s bullet hit.
Silas talks to me as though through glass. He pushes me, tries to make me move. I can’t feel my body, though, and I’m like his marionette, arms and legs moving limply as he forces me uphill. Then he sits next to me on the sidewalk curb, watches as I brace my hands on either side of me.
Gradually the blood starts flowing again. The bits of light dwindle and disappear.
“That could have been me,” I whisper.
Silas is watching me.
“There were three of us,” I add. “Three who got chosen. They shot the rest. Threw them somewhere. Left them to rot in a ditch until someone came to cremate them.”
The words sound so awful when said out loud. I should probably be crying, or even hysterical. But I can’t seem to feel anything. I shake my head violently at nothing in particular.
Silas says, “You have to be careful of ditches. You never know what you’ll find.”
“Maybe it should have been me,” I say.
“Why?” he asks.
“Because I never wanted to be married,” I tell him. “One of my sister wives did. The other—she could at least acknowledge that it was better than death, and she accepted it. But I . . . threw it back. I could have been murdered right there in the lineup, but for some ridiculous reason I was chosen, and I threw it back. I almost got killed, once, trying to get away.”
“Guess you didn’t let that stop you,” Silas says. “I mean, because you’re sitting here now.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t.”
I look over my shoulder, down the ditch, but at this angle I can’t see what’s coasting on the shallow water. Silas places a finger tenuously under my chin, waits a moment, and then turns my head toward him. “Maybe that girl chose death over imprisonment,” he says. “Maybe she looked right down the barrel of the gun and said ‘Screw you.’”
“Doubtful,” I say.
“Stop it. So you ran away. You don’t deserve to die for that.”
I smooth my jeans against my thighs, watch leaves scuttle against the pavement. I think of Linden’s hot, sobbing breaths against my skin. Rose, languid and elegant on her deathbed, ascending gracefully to her end. The blood on the sheets when Cecily was in labor. My heart pounding, sometimes in terror, sometimes in exhilaration. Sharks in the pool. Road maps in my husband’s paper houses. Kisses that tasted like June Beans and autumn winds and stale laboratory air. Permanent. Inescapable.
The girl lying in the ditch will not have memories like these. Her skin will dissolve down to bone, her skull emerging with its grin of teeth. Her hair will fall away. Her ribs and hips and elbows will stay together for as long as they can, but ultimately she’ll be nothing but pieces, in a heap of other pieces, on their way to becoming ash.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, but she can’t hear me.
“Come on,” Silas says, getting up, pulling me along by the wrists. “Let’s go do something fun.”
“Like what?” I say.
He throws an arm around my shoulders in an exaggerated gesture of camaraderie, but I think he’s trying to keep me from falling over. And it’s a good thing, because my head is starting to feel hazy.
“Like fix the broken toilet in the downstairs bathroom. Someone flushed some of the ABC blocks this morning.”
I laugh, in spite of myself. “I’m supposed to be washing the sheets,” I say.
“Lucky,” he says.
We make our way back to the house, prattling about chores and the sticky messes the children leave on piano keys and under tables. The dead girl follows me, a ghost hanging on my back, whispering in my ear, over and over, It should have been you.
Tonight I can’t even force myself to eat. Just looking at this hot chicken soup makes bile churn in my stomach. The noodles, I think, are arms and legs and fingers, pieces that can never be made whole. I excuse myself early, promising Claire I’ll help with the dishes once I’ve taken a quick shower.
She frowns, and the edges of her lips drip down her face like they’re melting. I shudder and hurry up the stairs.
Sore. Every muscle of my body is sore, as though they’re just now reacting to all those surges of angel’s blood, and the running, and the sleeping on the hardwood floor with nothing but a comforter to soften it. I step under the stream of hot water, and it only intensifies this new wave of dizziness. The tiles jolt under my feet, so hard and in such rapid succession that I have to sit down.
As the water rushes over me, I think that maybe I was wrong about springtime coming so soon. Maybe I should have worn a coat over my sweater when I went outside, because this hot water is doing nothing to ease these chills that have found respite deep in my bones, this feeling that if I let go of the towel rack, I’ll completely lose my grasp.
I’m in the bathroom for so long that Gabriel starts knocking on the door, calling my name. I guess he’s been knocking for a while, because I open my eyes and find that I’m still sitting on the wet tile, but the water is cold, and he’s saying, “If you don’t answer me, I’m coming in there.”
“No,” I say. My voice rebounds off the tiles, amplifying the weak, wispy word. “I’m all right.” I reach forward, twist the knob until the water stops with a whinnying jolt. “I’m just getting dried off.”
I must look truly awful, because when I reenter the kitchen, Gabriel’s arm around mine, the orphans scatter. Claire sets down her sponge, towels her hand, and presses the back of it to my forehead.
“You’re burning up, baby,” she says. “Don’t worry about the dishes. Go to bed, and I’ll bring you some aspirin.”