“Being healthy enough to witness it.”
I can see sadness in his green eyes. I don’t trust it.
How can I, when this is the man who paid the Gatherers so he could have me for the last years of my life? When the blood of those other girls in the van is on his hands?
My sunrises may be limited, but I will not view all the rest of mine as Linden Ashby’s wife.
It’s quiet for a while. Linden’s face is lit up by the early sun, and my wedding band burns in a twist of light.
I hate the thing. It took all my willpower last night not to flush it down the toilet. But if I’m to earn his trust, I have to wear it.
“You know about Japan. What else do you know about the world?” he asks.
I will not tell him about my father’s atlas, which my brother and I hid with our valuables in a locked trunk.
Someone like Linden has no need to lock anything precious, except for his brides. He would not understand the madness of poorer, more desperate places.
“Not much,” I say. And I feign ignorance as he begins to tell me about Europe, a tower clock called Big Ben (I remember the image of it glowing at twilight amidst a London crowd), and extinct flamingos whose necks were as long as their legs.
“Rose taught me about most of these things,” he admits, and then, just as the sunlight is awakening the reds and greens of the garden, he looks away from me.
“You may go back inside,” he says. “An attendant will be waiting to take you up.” His voice catches at the end, and I know that now is not the time to sit and pretend to adore him. I find my way back to the door, leaving him to his new day so he may think of Rose, whose sunrises are numbered.
In the days to follow, Linden barely acknowledges his brides. Our bedroom doors are unlocked and we’re mostly left to ourselves, allowed to wander about the floor, which has its own library and sitting room, but not much else. We aren’t permitted to use the elevator unless he invites us to dinner, which happens rarely; usually our meals are brought on trays to our bedrooms. I spend a lot of time in an overstuffed chair in the library, thumbing through brilliant pages of flowers that no longer grow in this world, and some that can still be found in other parts of the country. I educate myself on the polar ice caps, vaporized long ago by warfare, and an explorer named Christopher Columbus who proved the earth was round. In my prison I lose myself in the history of a free and boundless world that’s long dead.
I don’t see my sister wives often. Sometimes Jenna will take a couch beside me and look up from her novel to ask me what I’m reading. Her voice is timid, and when I look at her, she flinches like I might hit her. But beneath that timorousness there’s something more, the remains of a broken person who had once been assured, strong, brave. Her eyes are often bleary and misting with tears.
Our conversations are measured and brief, never more than a sentence or two.
Cecily complains that the orphanage didn’t do a good job teaching her to read. She’ll sit studiously at one of the tables with a book and sometimes spell a word out loud, waiting impatiently for me to pronounce it and sometimes tell her what it means. Though she is only thirteen, her favorite reads are all about childbirth and pregnancy.
But for all her shortcomings, Cecily is something of a musical prodigy. I can hear her sometimes as she plays the keyboard in the sitting room. The first time, I was drawn to the threshold well past midnight. There she sat, this tiny body with flame red hair, trapped in a hologram of flurrying snow that was projected from somewhere on the keyboard. But Cecily, who is so dazzled by the false glamour of this mansion, played with her eyes closed. Lost in her concerto, she was not my little sister wife in a winged dress, or the same girl who throws silverware at the attendants who cross her on the wrong day, but rather some otherworldly creature. There was no ticking
I can see sadness in his green eyes. I don’t trust it.
How can I, when this is the man who paid the Gatherers so he could have me for the last years of my life? When the blood of those other girls in the van is on his hands?
My sunrises may be limited, but I will not view all the rest of mine as Linden Ashby’s wife.
It’s quiet for a while. Linden’s face is lit up by the early sun, and my wedding band burns in a twist of light.
I hate the thing. It took all my willpower last night not to flush it down the toilet. But if I’m to earn his trust, I have to wear it.
“You know about Japan. What else do you know about the world?” he asks.
I will not tell him about my father’s atlas, which my brother and I hid with our valuables in a locked trunk.
Someone like Linden has no need to lock anything precious, except for his brides. He would not understand the madness of poorer, more desperate places.
“Not much,” I say. And I feign ignorance as he begins to tell me about Europe, a tower clock called Big Ben (I remember the image of it glowing at twilight amidst a London crowd), and extinct flamingos whose necks were as long as their legs.
“Rose taught me about most of these things,” he admits, and then, just as the sunlight is awakening the reds and greens of the garden, he looks away from me.
“You may go back inside,” he says. “An attendant will be waiting to take you up.” His voice catches at the end, and I know that now is not the time to sit and pretend to adore him. I find my way back to the door, leaving him to his new day so he may think of Rose, whose sunrises are numbered.
In the days to follow, Linden barely acknowledges his brides. Our bedroom doors are unlocked and we’re mostly left to ourselves, allowed to wander about the floor, which has its own library and sitting room, but not much else. We aren’t permitted to use the elevator unless he invites us to dinner, which happens rarely; usually our meals are brought on trays to our bedrooms. I spend a lot of time in an overstuffed chair in the library, thumbing through brilliant pages of flowers that no longer grow in this world, and some that can still be found in other parts of the country. I educate myself on the polar ice caps, vaporized long ago by warfare, and an explorer named Christopher Columbus who proved the earth was round. In my prison I lose myself in the history of a free and boundless world that’s long dead.
I don’t see my sister wives often. Sometimes Jenna will take a couch beside me and look up from her novel to ask me what I’m reading. Her voice is timid, and when I look at her, she flinches like I might hit her. But beneath that timorousness there’s something more, the remains of a broken person who had once been assured, strong, brave. Her eyes are often bleary and misting with tears.
Our conversations are measured and brief, never more than a sentence or two.
Cecily complains that the orphanage didn’t do a good job teaching her to read. She’ll sit studiously at one of the tables with a book and sometimes spell a word out loud, waiting impatiently for me to pronounce it and sometimes tell her what it means. Though she is only thirteen, her favorite reads are all about childbirth and pregnancy.
But for all her shortcomings, Cecily is something of a musical prodigy. I can hear her sometimes as she plays the keyboard in the sitting room. The first time, I was drawn to the threshold well past midnight. There she sat, this tiny body with flame red hair, trapped in a hologram of flurrying snow that was projected from somewhere on the keyboard. But Cecily, who is so dazzled by the false glamour of this mansion, played with her eyes closed. Lost in her concerto, she was not my little sister wife in a winged dress, or the same girl who throws silverware at the attendants who cross her on the wrong day, but rather some otherworldly creature. There was no ticking
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