Lauren DeStefano - Sever

I raise my head at that. Linden told me about a time when he was very sick as a child. He could hear his father’s voice calling him back to consciousness, but he was too scared to answer. He’d made the decision to let go, but he survived anyway.

Reed stares at something over my shoulder, his pupils turning to pinpricks. “That poor boy,” he says distantly. “I really thought it was the end of him.”

“What was it?” I ask, and he snaps back to attention and looks at me. “What made him so sick?”

“I can tell you what Vaughn said, or I can tell you what I think,” he says.

I press my eyebrows together. “You think Vaughn was responsible?”

“Not on purpose,” Reed says. “I don’t think he meant to harm him. But I think he was running some experiment that went haywire. I called him out on it, and he asked me to leave.”

“So you did?” I ask.

“I did,” he says. “I’m better off with my own place anyway. I would have liked to take my nephew with me, but Vaughn would have had my head for it. There’s nowhere I could take that boy where Vaughn wouldn’t have found him.”

“I know the feeling,” I mumble.

“Look at that,” Reed says. He slaps his palms on the table, rattling the bowl, startling me. “You asked for an answer to one question, and you got an entire story. Feeling sustained yet?”

In answer I take a bite from the apple.

“Finish your breakfast and then tie that hair back. I have a new project for you.”

“New project?” I say before taking another bite.

“A cleaning project,” he says. He drops his bowl into the sink and then winks at me. “I think you have a knack for making things shine.”

Once I finish the apple and throw the core into the compost pile that Reed started just outside the kitchen window, and swat away a good deal of flies, Reed leads me past the usual shed and keeps going toward the bigger one.

“What I’m about to show you is top secret stuff,” he says. I can’t tell whether he’s kidding. “I wouldn’t want anyone coming out here chopping it up for parts.”

He fiddles around with a padlock, somehow coaxing it apart without a key. Then he pushes the door open, moves aside, and makes a flourishing gesture with his arm for me to enter first.

It’s dark until he flips a switch, and tiny bulbs strung along the ceiling and walls illuminate the space.

“What do you think, doll?” Reed says.

“It’s … a plane. In your shed.” I can’t hide my astonishment. He told me it would be here, and here it is, yet it still surprises me. It’s rusty and mismatched, but it has a body and wings, and it takes up almost the entirety of the shed. “How did you get it in here?” I ask.

“Didn’t,” he says. “Most of it was already here. I figure it probably crash-landed forty, fifty years ago and was abandoned. So I decided to fix it up, see if I could make it fly. Of course the weather proved to make things difficult, so I built this shed over it.”

The whole thing sounds too absurd for him to have made it up. “How will you get it out?” I say. “How will you even start it without being poisoned by the fumes?”

“Haven’t gotten to that part yet,” he says. “But no matter; she’s not ready to fly.”

I stare at it, and for some reason my shoulders shake and I start to laugh. It’s the first real laugh I’ve felt in days. Or weeks. Or months, maybe. Reed is either a genius or completely mad, or both. But if he’s mad, then I am too, because I love this airplane. I’ve never seen one up close before, and the stories I’ve heard never prepared me for the power such a magnificent thing implies. I want to climb inside of it. I want it to carry me up, the grass getting greener and greener the farther away it becomes.

Reed is grinning when he tugs the handle of the curved door. It looks like it once belonged to a car and was melted into shape. With a horrible rusty noise, it opens from the top, like a curled finger rising to point at me.

The door opens to a small cockpit. There are monitors and buttons and what appear to be two half-circle steering wheels. “The supply room’s in the passenger cabin,” Reed says, pointing me to a curtain that serves as a door.

The passenger cabin is all beige and red, like a mouth. It seems almost human. When I was bedridden in the mansion, Linden read a story to me that was about a scientist named Frankenstein who created a man from the body parts of the dead. Somehow Frankenstein gave this creation a pulse and made it breathe. I imagine it must have looked like this odd assemblage of pieces.

The plane is a lot bigger than it looks from the outside. The ceiling is high enough that Reed, who’s taller than me, can nearly stand up straight. There’s some room to walk around. The seats are red, mounted to the wall. There are four of them, in pairs of two, facing each other. The carpet is beige and stained, like the walls.

What Reed calls a supply room is actually a closet. Opening its door reduces the passenger cabin by half. “Needs to be organized,” Reed says, standing at the curtain that separates the cockpit from the passenger cabin. He watches as I open one of the cabinets. Shoe boxes tumble out at me and spill their contents onto my shoes. “I was thinking that’d be your job.”

It’s easy, repetitive work. Sorting medical equipment apart from the dehydrated snacks and labeling their boxes. Reed works on the outside of the plane. I hear him banging parts into place and smoothing them down, trying to blend all the pieces together. He says he’s going to paint it when he’s done. He says it’ll be beautiful. I think it already is.

I open another box, and it’s full of cloth handkerchiefs. I recognize them immediately. They’re exactly like the ones at the mansion: plain white, with a single red sharp-leafed flower embroidered onto them. Gabriel gave me a handkerchief with this pattern, and I kept it for the remainder of my time at the mansion. The same flower that marks the iron gate.

“Oh, those?” Reed says when I ask him about them. He doesn’t look away from his work. He’s sitting on one of the wings, pressing down a sheet of copper and using a screwdriver to mark where the screws will go. “I thought they’d make good bandages; put them with the first aid stuff.”

“Where did they come from?” I ask.

“They used to belong to the boarding school,” he says. “A ton of things were left behind when my parents bought the building—handkerchiefs, blankets, things like that.”

“But what kind of flower is it?” I say.

“It’s a lotus,” he says. “Doesn’t look exactly like one, if you ask me, but that’s the only logical thing it could be. The school was called the Charles Lotus Academy for Girls.”

“Charles Lotus? As in, his name was Lotus?”

“Yep. Now get back to work making things sparkle. I’m not letting you live here eating up all the apples and oxygen for free, you know.”

The rest of the day is a malaise of chores. I pack the handkerchiefs away and bury them at the bottom of all the medical supplies. I don’t want to ever see them again. It’s my fault for hoping they symbolized something important. For believing anything that comes from the mansion could mean anything good.

I take a shower and go to bed early. The sky is still pink, undercooked. I bury myself beneath the blanket. It isn’t very thick; I shiver most nights, but right now the blanket feels like the heaviest thing in the world. It comforts me. I don’t just want to sleep; I want to be crushed down until I disappear.

In the morning there are voices. Something hissing and spitting on the griddle. Footsteps are pounding up the steps, and a voice calls after them, “Wait!” but the footsteps don’t comply. My door is pushed open, and there’s Cecily. The sunlight touches every part of her, making her into an overexposed photograph. Her smile floats ahead of her, a double bright line. “Surprise,” she says.