The Seeds of Wither

by Lauren DeStefano

  Is this what my future as a bride will look like? Being so entrapped I’m not even allowed the freedom of death?

  I sit beside her, overwhelmed by the smell of medication and decay, and beneath that, something pleasant. Potpourri—perfumed, dehydrated flower petals. That melodic smell is everywhere, surrounding us, making me think of home.

  “You’re a liar,” the woman says. “You didn’t come to bring my medicine.”

  “I never said I did.”

  “Well, then, who are you?” She reaches her trembling hand and touches my hair. She holds up a lock of it for inspection, and then a horrible pain fills her eyes. “Oh. You’re my replacement. How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” I say, again startled into honesty. Replacement? Is she one of the House Governor’s wives?

  She stares at me for a while, and the pain begins to recede into something else. Something almost maternal. “Do you hate it here?” she says.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Then you should see the verandah.” She smiles as she closes her eyes. Her hand falls away from my hair. She coughs, and blood from her mouth splatters my nightgown. I’ve had nightmares that I’ll enter a room where my parents have been murdered and lie in a pool of fresh blood, and in those nightmares I stand in the doorway forever, too frightened to run. Now I feel a similar terror. I want to go, to be anywhere but here, but I can’t seem to make my legs move. I can only watch as she coughs and struggles, and my gown becomes redder for it. I feel the warmth of her blood on my hands and face.

  I don’t know how long this goes on for. Eventually someone comes running, an older woman, a first generation, holding a metal basin that sloshes soapy water. “Oh, Lady Rose, why didn’t you press the button if you were in pain?” the basin woman says.

  I hurry to my feet, toward the door, but the basin woman doesn’t even notice me. She helps the coughing woman sit up in the bed, and she peels off the woman’s nightgown and begins to sponge the soapy water over her skin.

  “Medicine in the water,” the coughing woman moans. “I smell it. Medicine everywhere. Just let me die.”

  She sounds so horrible and wounded that, despite my own situation, I pity her.

  “What are you doing?” a voice whispers harshly behind me. I turn and see the boy who brought my lunch earlier, looking nervous. “How did you get out? Go back to your room. Hurry, go!” This is one thing my nightmares never had, someone forcing me into action. I’m grateful for it. I run back to my open bedroom, though not before crashing into someone standing in my path.

  I look up, and I recognize the man who has caught me in his arms. His smile glimmers with bits of gold.

  “Why, hello,” he says.

  I don’t know what to make of his smile, whether it’s sinister or kind. It takes only a moment longer for him to notice the blood on my face, my gown, and then he pushes past me. He runs into the bedroom where the woman is still in a riot of coughs.

  I run into my bedroom. I tear off the nightgown and use the clean parts of it to scrub the blood from my skin, and then I huddle under the comforter of my bed, holding my hands over my ears, trying to hide from those awful sounds. This whole awful place.

  The sound of the doorknob awakens me this time. The boy who brought my lunch earlier is now holding another silver tray. He doesn’t meet my eyes; he crosses the room and sets the tray on my nightstand.

  “Dinner,” he says solemnly.

  I watch him from where I’m huddled in my blankets, but he doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t even raise his head as he picks the sullied nightgown off the floor, splattered with Lady Rose’s blood, and disposes of it in the chute. Then he turns to go.

  “Wait,” I say. “Please.”

  He freezes, with his back to me.

  And I’m not sure what it is about him—that he’s close to my own age, that he’s so unobtrusive, that he seems no happier to be here than I am—but I want his company. Even if it can only be for a minute or two.

  “That woman—,” I say, desperate to make conversation before he leaves. “Who is she?”

  “That’s Lady Rose,” he says. “The House Governor’s first wife.” All Governors take a first wife; the number doesn’t refer to the order of marriage, but is an indication of power. The first wives attend all the social events, they appear with their Governors in public, and, apparently, they are entitled to the privilege of an open window. They’re the favorites.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Virus,” he says, and when he turns to face me, he has a look of genuine curiosity. “You’ve never seen someone with the virus?”

  “Not up close,” I say.

  “Not even your parents?”

  “No.” My parents were first generation, well into their fifties when my brother and I were born, but I’m not sure I want to tell him this. Instead I say, “I try really hard not to think about the virus.”

  “Me too,” he says. “She asked for you, after you left. Your name is Rhine?”

  He’s looking at me now, so I nod, suddenly aware that I’m naked under these blankets. I draw them closer around myself. “What’s your name?”

  “Gabriel,” he says. And there it is again, that almost smile, hindered by the weight of things. I want to ask him what he’s doing in this awful place with its beautiful gardens and clear blue pools, symmetrical green hedges. I want to know where he came from, and if he’s planning on going back. I even want to tell him about my plan to escape—if I ever formulate a plan, that is. But these thoughts are dangerous. If my brother were here, he’d tell me to trust nobody. And he’d be right.

  “Good night,” the boy, Gabriel, says. “You might want to eat and get some sleep. Tomorrow’s a big day.” His tone implies I’ve just been warned of something awful ahead.

  He turns to leave, and I notice a slight limp in his walk that wasn’t there this afternoon. Beneath the thin white fabric of his uniform, I can see the shadow of bruises beginning to form. Is it because of me? Was he punished for making my escape down the hallway possible? These are more questions that I don’t ask.

  Then he’s gone. And I hear the click of a lock turning in the door.

  3

  IT’S NOT GABRIEL who wakes me in the morning, but a parade of women. They’re first generation, if the gray hair is any indication, though their eyes still sparkle with the vibrancy of youth. They are chattering among themselves as they yank the blankets from me.

  One of the women looks over my naked body and says, “Well, at least we won’t have to wrestle this one out of her clothes.”

  This one. After everything that’s happened, I almost forgot that there are two others. Trapped in this house somewhere, behind other locked doors.

  Before I can react, two of the women have grabbed me by the arms and are dragging me toward the bathroom that connects to my room.

  “Best if you don’t struggle,” one of them says cheerfully. I stagger to keep pace with them. Another woman stays behind to make my bed.

  In the bathroom they make me sit on the toilet lid, which is covered in some sort of pink fur. Everything is pink. The curtains are flimsy and impractical.

  Back home we covered our windows with burlap at night to give the impression of poverty and to keep out the prying eyes of new orphans looking for shelter and handouts. The house I shared with my brother has three bedrooms, but we’d spend our nights on a cot in the basement, sleeping in shifts just in case the locks didn’t hold, using our father’s shotgun to guard us.

  Frilly, pretty things have no place in windows. Not where I come from.

  The colors are endless. One woman draws a bath while the other opens the cabinet to a rainbow of little soaps that are shaped like hearts and stars. She drops a few of them into the bathwater, and they sizzle and dissolve, leaving a frothy layer of pink and blue. Bubbles pop like little fireworks.

  I don’t argue when I’m told to get into the tub. It’s awkward being naked in front of these strangers, but the wat
er looks and smells appealing. It’s so unlike the bleary yellowed water that runs through the rusty pipes in the house I shared with my brother.

  Shared. Past tense. How could I let myself think this way?

  I lie in the sweet-smelling water, and the bubbles pop against my skin, bringing samples of cinnamon and potpourri and what I imagine real roses must smell like. But I will not be hypnotized by the wonder of these small things. Defiantly I think of the house I share with my brother, the house where my mother was born at the threshold of the new century. It has brick walls still imprinted with the silhouette of ivy that has long since died. It has a fire escape with a broken ladder, and on its street all the houses are close enough together that as a child I would hold my arms out my bedroom window to hold the hands of the little girl who lived next door. We would string paper cups across the divide and talk to each other in giggles.

  That little girl was orphaned young. Her parents were the new generation. She barely knew her mother, her father fell ill, and then one morning I reached for her and she was gone.

  I was inconsolable, that girl having been my first true friend. I still think of her bright blue eyes sometimes, the way she’d toss peppermints at my bedroom window to wake me for a game of paper-cup telephone. Once she was gone, my mother held the string we had used for our game of telephone, and she told me it was kite string, that when she was a little girl she would spend hours in the park flying kites. I asked her for more stories of her childhood, and on some nights she gave them to me. Stories of towering toy stores and frozen lakes where she would skate swanlike into figure eights, and of all the people who had passed beneath the very windows of this very house when it was young and covered in ivy, and when the cars were parked in neat, shiny rows along the street, in Manhattan, New York.

  When she and my father died, my brother and I covered the windows with burlap potato and coffee bean sacks. We took all our mother’s beautiful things, all our father’s important clothes, and stuffed them into trunks that locked. The rest we buried in the yard, late at night, beneath the ailing lilies.

  This is my story. These things are my past, and I will not allow them to be washed away. I will find a way to have them back.

  “She has such agreeable hair,” one of the women says, scooping warm cupful after cupful of frothy water over my head. “Such a lovely color, too. I wonder if it’s natural.” Of course it’s natural. What else would it be?

  “I bet that’s what the Governor liked about her.”

  “Let me see,” says the other woman, cupping my chin and tilting it. She studies my face and then gasps, letting her hand flutter spasmodically against her heart. “Oh, Helen, look at this girl’s eyes!”

  They both stop bathing me long enough to look at me. Really look at me, for the first time.

  My eyes are usually the first thing people notice, the left eye blue and the right eye brown, just like my brother’s. Heterochromia; my parents were geneticists, and that was the name they gave my condition. I might have asked them more about it when I grew older, if I’d had the chance. I had always thought the heterochromia was a useless genetic glitch, but if the women are right and my eyes are what the Governor noticed, heterochromia has saved my life.

  “Suppose those are real?” one woman asks.

  “What else would they be but real?” This time I speak aloud, and they’re startled, then delighted. Their doll has a voice. And suddenly they’re all questions. Where am I from, do I know where I am, don’t I just love the view, do I like horses—there’s a lovely stable—do I prefer my hair up or down?

  I answer none of these. I will share nothing with these strangers—however well intentioned they may be—who are a part of this place. The questions come so fast that I wouldn’t know where to begin anyway, and then there’s a soft knock at the door.

  “We’re getting her ready for the Governor,” one of the women says.

  The muffled voice on the other side of the door is soft, gentle, and young. “Lady Rose would like to speak to her right this moment, please.”

  “We’re only half done bathing her! And her nails—”

  “Excuse me,” the voice on the other side of the door says patiently, “I have a direct order to bring her now, whatever condition she may be in.”

  Lady Rose is apparently someone who has the final say in things, because the women are tugging me to my feet, patting me dry with a pink towel, brushing my wet hair, and slipping me into a robe that feels like waves of silk against my skin. Whatever was in that bathwater has heightened my neurons, left me feeling unpeeled and exposed. I still feel as though bubbles are popping against my skin.

  When the door opens, I see that the voice belongs to a little girl, barely half my height. She is dressed like the older women, though, in the feminine version of the white blouse Gabriel wore, with a tiered black skirt, where Gabriel had worn black pants. Her hair is braided into a circle around her head, and her cheeks bloom into apple shapes when she smiles at me. “You’re Rhine?”

  I nod. “I’m Deirdre,” she says, and puts her hand in mine. It is cool and soft. “It’s just this way,” she says, and leads me out of my room and along the hallway down which I made my brief escape yesterday.

  “Now,” the girl says, nodding seriously, her eyes focusing ahead. “Just speak if spoken to; she doesn’t like questions, so you’d do best not to ask any; refer to her as Lady Rose; there’s a button above her night table, a white one—press it if she becomes ill. She’s in charge of things. The House Governor will do anything she asks, so be sure to stay on her good side.”

  We stop before the door, and Deirdre reties the belt of my robe into a perfect bow. She knocks on the semi-open door and says, “Lady Rose? I brought her like you said.”

  “Well, then, let her in,” Rose snaps. “And go make yourself useful somewhere else.”

  As she turns to leave, Deirdre clasps both of her hands around one of mine. Her eyes are round as moons. “And please,” she whispers, “try to avoid the topic of death.”

  When she’s gone, I push the door open and step only as far as the threshold. From here I can smell the medications Rose complained of yesterday. I see the assortment of lotions, pills, and bottles on her nightstand.

  She’s sitting up today, in a satin-upholstered divan by the window. Her blond hair is tangled in sunlight, and her skin appears to be less sallow. There’s color in her cheeks, and at first I think she’s feeling better, but when she beckons me closer, I can see the unusual, almost neon pink of her cheeks, and I know it must be cosmetics. I know the red of her lips must not be real either. What are real are her eyes, incredibly brown things that stare at me with intensity, with youth. I try to imagine a world of natural humans, when twenty was youthful, when it was years from a death sentence.

  Natural humans used to live for at least eighty years, my mother told me. Sometimes a hundred. I hadn’t believed her.

  Now I can see what she meant. Rose is the first twenty-year-old I’ve spoken to at length, and though she’s stifling a cough that sprays blood into her fist, her skin is still smooth and soft. Her face is still full of light. She doesn’t look very different from, or very much older than, me.

  “Sit,” she tells me. I find a chair across from her.

  There are wrappers all over the floor around her, and a bowl filled with candies on her divan. When she speaks, I can see that her tongue is bright blue. She fiddles with another candy in her long fingers, bringing it close to her face, almost looking like she’ll kiss it. Instead she lets it fall back into the bowl.

  “Where are you from?” she asks. Her voice has none of the peevishness she showed Deirdre at the door. Her thick eyelashes flutter up. She watches an insect spiral around her and disappear.

  I don’t want to tell her where I’m from. I’m supposed to sit here and be polite, but how can I? How can I when I’m made to sit and watch her die so I can be given to her husband and forced to bear children I never wanted?

  S
o I say, “Where were you from when they took you?”

  I’m not supposed to ask her questions, and as soon as I’ve asked it, I realize I have stepped on a land mine. She’ll be screaming for Deirdre or her husband, the House Governor, to take me away. Lock me in a dungeon for the next four years.

  To my surprise she only says, “I was born in this state. This town, in fact.” She reaches up behind her, takes a picture from the wall, and holds it out for me. I lean in to get a look.

  The photo is of a young girl standing beside a horse. She’s holding the reins, and her smile is so bright that her teeth dominate her face. Her eyes are nearly closed with all the delight of it. Beside her, a much taller boy stands with his hands behind his back. His smile is more controlled, shy, as though he hadn’t meant to smile but couldn’t help himself in the moment.

  “This was me,” Rose says of the girl in the photo. Then she traces her finger over the boy’s outline. “This is my Linden.” For a moment she seems lost in the sight of him. A little smile comes to her painted lips. “We grew up together.”

  I’m not sure what to say to this. She is so lost in this memory, and so blind to my imprisonment. But still I feel sorry for her. In another time, under different circumstances, she would not have needed to be replaced.

  “See?” she says, still pointing to the photo. “This is in the orange grove. My father owned acres of them. Here in Florida.”

  Florida. My heart sinks. I’m in Florida, on the bottom of the East Coast, more miles from home than I can count. I miss my ivy-silhouetted house. I miss the distant commuter trains. How will I ever find my way back to them?

  “They’re lovely,” I say of the oranges. Because it’s true, they are lovely. Things seem to thrive in this place. I would never have suspected that the vibrant girl standing beside her horse in the grove could be dying now.

  “Aren’t they?” she says. “Linden prefers flowers, though. There are orange blossom festivals in the spring. That’s his favorite. In the winter there are snow festivals, and solstice dances—but he doesn’t like those. Too loud.”