Fever

Page 19

And when she invites us to stay the night in the home she and her husband have above the restaurant, I’m sure of it.
As Gabriel rests against me, in some worrisome twilight that has him mumbling and twitching his leg (which only stops when I rest my hand on his thigh), Elsa pulls up a chair to talk to me. But while her words are for me, her eyes are on Gabriel. Thoughtful, even adoring. “Poor thing,” she coos. “He hardly looks twenty-five.”
This is because Gabriel is eighteen, but I don’t say that. In fact, that might not even be true. I have known him for nearly a year, and perhaps he let his birthday slip quietly by, the way Jenna did. The way I did. One year closer. I tighten my grip on him, knotting the fabric of his pants in my fist.
I open my mouth to say that he’s managing it, that he’s holding on longer than I’d expected, but I stop myself. I no longer want to carry on this lie. There is so much death in the world, everywhere, every day, looming over this lovely new fake generation that Gabriel and I were born a part of, that I don’t want to contribute.
In fact, out of nowhere, I feel like crying.
But I don’t. I finish my soup and listen to Elsa talk about a boy named Charlie. “My Charlie.” As in, “My wonderful, sweet, poor Charlie.” I guess he’s her son. Or was her son, because now Elsa is saying how much Gabriel looks like him, and how hard it was in his final weeks, and how she can hear his ghost in the halls. His words, she says, got trapped in the wallpaper, and they leap between the little blue flowers of it, echoing, playing with one another.
Maddie is transfixed by this woman’s words, her head canted all the way up, watching Elsa’s lips move. I wonder if Elsa and Maddie are on the same wavelength. If Maddie could speak, would she tell of laughter in clouds, or ghosts in her hair?
Elsa assumes Gabriel is my husband when she sees my wedding ring, says her son never married. She says she’d love to find a girl for him, one day, who can reach him in death. And then she asks me if I know how to sing.
But she doesn’t ask about my eyes, how I got them or if I’m malformed, which I appreciate. Maybe because in her world everything is out of sorts.
Greg, who heard Elsa speaking, comes and leads her away, saying, “Come on, dear. There are tables to bus.” His presence breaks whatever magical spell Maddie was under, because she freezes when he approaches, and slinks under the table when he goes. She won’t come out, no matter how many times I ask, so I give up. I make a game of tapping my foot against the floor in the rhythm of a song I remember from one of Linden’s parties, and then, without warning, I’ll tap Maddie’s leg instead.
She likes this. I can hear the bubbling breaths that, I come to realize, are her way of giggling.
“Important,” Gabriel murmurs into my neck, too far gone for me to reach him. I know it’s going to be a difficult night.
“You’ll have to excuse my wife,” Greg says, returning and wiping his hands on a dishrag. “She has a hard time discerning people from stray kittens.” I suppose this is supposed to be a joke, because he laughs. Maddie is clinging to my leg under the table, and when Greg crouches down and waves at her, I can feel her nails digging through my pants like talons, and I’m sure she’s drawing blood.
“We do have a spare room she likes to rent out,” he says. “We’ll expect payment, but that’s something we can work out in the morning.”
He has a kind face. Sad, dark eyes like his wife has. Laugh lines. Gray-brown hair and a close shave. But when he smiles at me, something about it makes me want to climb under the table myself. Not to hide with Maddie but to protect her.
Chapter 14
AFTER the restaurant has closed, sometime after ten p.m., I rouse Gabriel from where he’s been slumped over the table for hours, spluttering in a lake of drool. I coax a little of someone’s leftovers into him as we wash dishes. Maddie, standing on a lemon crate, dries them with surprising care. Something tells me that the sound of shattered glass would set her off and that she knows it.
Elsa skips her way up the steps to their upstairs apartment, which consists of two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a small bathroom on one long hallway that sections off into a tiny seating area with couches and a television.
The wallpaper in the hallway is patterned with tiny blue flowers, and Elsa taps them with affection as she shows us to our room. Gabriel raises his eyes to me, and I shake my head.
The bedroom has only one creaky twin bed, and I’m about to suggest we let Maddie have it, when she takes her mother’s bag, yanks a pillow from the pristinely made-up covers, and climbs under the bed. Used to the perpetual state of hiding that Madame forced on her, I guess.
I let Gabriel shower first, thinking the hot water might help him come out of his torpor a little. I leave the bedroom door open, listen to the odd splashes of the water falling off his body. Maddie scuttles around under the mattress, and then she pokes her head out at me.
“We need to get you cleaned up,” I say.
Using the first aid kit from under the kitchen sink, Elsa re-dresses Maddie’s broken arm. Maddie lets her, sitting on the edge of the pale blue counter that’s a shade darker than her eyes. She holds her little arm up in offering, starry-eyed while Elsa hums and smiles at her and says she always wanted a granddaughter. She washes Maddie’s smooth dark hair over the sink, and then she even takes a pair of scissors to it, fixing all the mismatched angles Lilac must have cut herself. She scrubs the layer of grime from Maddie’s arms and face, humming, sometimes singing in a language I’ve never heard. Perhaps she made it up. Maddie moves her lips, and I almost think she’s going to sing too, but of course she doesn’t.
I stand in the doorway all the while, arms folded, knowing that as long as I’m in this place I won’t allow myself to sleep. Not while Gabriel is too beat to keep watch.
Back in the bedroom Elsa has laid out some clothes for us to sleep in, all the clothes of a young man—a baggy T-shirt that swallows Maddie whole, and a shirt for me that falls off my shoulder, and sweatpants that don’t quite stay on my hips even with the drawstring pulled taut.
Gabriel is still showering, and when I sit on the bed to wait for him, Maddie climbs up beside me with the book from her mother’s bag. It’s a children’s book, dog-eared, the brittle pages barely clinging to the spine. I check the copyright date and see it’s almost as old as my parents. And in a child’s unsteady handwriting, in blue crayon, is the name Grace Lottner. Maddie points to it, sweeps her fingers along the roller-coaster path of angles and edges. Then, her eyes watching me, she turns the page. The title page blooms with erratic flowers and scribbles and what I think is meant to be the drawing of a bird. But then, in all that chaos, there’s something else. Something I am just barely able to read, it’s so faded and messy.
Claire Lottner, followed by numbers and a street name, and Residential District, Manhattan, NY.
“Who is that?” I ask Maddie. “Do you know who lives there?”
She sighs the hair out of her face. Now that it’s clean, it’s like the fine fuzz of a dark baby chick.
She turns the page, points to the first word there, above an illustration of two children jumping through puddles, and waits for me to read.
When Gabriel returns from his shower, there is a folded pair of plaid pajama bottoms waiting for him. They fit perfectly, like he’s stepping right into the ghost body of Elsa’s son. There’s also a T-shirt he’s too flushed and achy to bother putting on.
After Maddie has gone to bed—or rather, under bed—he lies on the mattress facing the wall, I think in an attempt to conceal his agony. But I can hear his strained breaths, see his muscles jumping under his skin.
After I’ve finished washing up, I return to the bedroom and lie beside him, rubbing gentle circles on his back. His body is all locked up, like Cecily when we found her on the bedroom floor in the early stages of labor. She had been so stunned by the feel of it, so horrified, that when she’d finally opened her mouth, it was to scream.
But Gabriel makes no effort at sound; I know the wheezing and gasps are beyond his control.
“Am I hurting you?” I whisper. “Want me to stop?”
It takes him a while to get out the word “No.”
My wet hair has dampened the pillow, but I’m too tired to do anything about it. Gabriel mumbles something about it smelling like apricots. “This?” I say, using a piece of my wet hair to paint a watery circle on his bare shoulder. He makes a small noise, like the trickle of water has brought him some relief, so I draw some more wet-hair swirls on his arm, over the hill of his shoulder, across his throat. From where I lie behind him, I can just see the smile swelling his cheek.
I inch closer, the coils creaking with the motion, so that my stomach is not quite touching his back, my forehead pressed against his skull. When I let out my next breath, his skin bristles with goose bumps. And I think: This is his skin. This is the person I wanted to share my freedom with. I should be happy that we have the freedom to be as close to each other as we’d like, to figure out our feelings for each other without worrying about noises in hallways, or my ominous father-in-law, or a basement of human remains, but it seems that a pall still hangs over us both even though we’ve escaped.
I know that I need to focus my attention on the present. I have been too selfish. While he was dealing with the shock of a world without holograms, and bearing the poison of that awful drug, I have been worrying over my sister wives and dreaming of down comforters, missing the taste of June Beans. And that is no good. I left those things behind. It’s time to let them go, tuck them someplace safe in my memories and never speak of them again.
But before I do that, before I leave them behind, there is something I need to know. “Gabriel?”
“Mm?” He is weary, but fully conscious. I feel some hope that the angel’s blood can soon release its hold on him for good.
“When we were in the truck, you said Jenna had talked to you before she got sick. She told you that I was so busy trying to be brave that I didn’t realize I was in danger.”
Gabriel raises his head a little, but doesn’t turn to face me. “I said that?”
I feel disappointment rising up from my stomach. “Did it ever really happen, or was it the drug talking?”
“It happened,” he says. “But I shouldn’t have told you about it. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
This confirms my suspicion that this is none of my business, but I can’t stop myself from saying, “Jenna was keeping secrets from me.” And then I realize the reason I can’t let this go is because I’m angry. “She was a sister to me. I confided in her. What could she tell you that she couldn’t tell me?”
Gabriel takes a long, measured breath. His shoulder spasms; he grips his pant leg, and I manage to weave my fingers through his so that he’s clinging to me instead. He makes a spluttering sound, and my heart wrenches for him. I am about to say I’m sorry for bringing this up, that he should rest, when he says, “She knew that Housemaster—that Vaughn was going to kill her.”