Lauren DeStefano - Sever

But sliding down her thighs is an abundance of red. It’s pooling at her feet, from the trail of blood that followed her into the room.

Linden moves fast. He scoops her up by the backs of her knees and shoulders. She comes alive with a scream so awful that he has to brace his hand on the wall to keep from falling. She’s whimpering while he’s rushing her down the stairs.

I hurry after them down the long hallway, making footprints in the red puddles and thinking about how small she is, about how much blood it takes to keep a girl her size going, how much of it she can stand to lose. Redness is leaking rivers over Linden’s arms like veins atop his skin.

He says my name, and I realize what he wants. I push ahead of him and open the door.

Outside, the night is warm, sprinkled with stars. The grass sighs in indignation as we crush it with our bare feet. Wings and insect legs make music, which moments before had been lovely through the open window in the room full of books.

In the backseat of the car, which reeks of cigars and mold, I take Cecily’s head in my lap while Linden runs off to find his uncle to drive us.

“I lost the baby,” Cecily chokes.

“No,” I say. “No, you didn’t.”

She closes her eyes, shudders with a sob.

“They’ll know what to do at the hospital,” I tell her, though I don’t believe a word of it. I’m only trying to calm her, and maybe myself. I hold her hand in both of mine. It’s clammy, ice-cold. I can’t reconcile this pale, trembling girl with the one who stood before the mirror hardly an hour ago, fussing over her stomach.

Thankfully, Linden is back soon.

The drive to the hospital is rocky, thanks to Reed’s reckless driving and the lack of a paved road. Linden holds Bowen, whose eyes are wide and curious, and shushes him even though he doesn’t cry. I’ve always thought Bowen was intuitive. He just might be the only child of Linden’s to live.

I feel a gentle pressure around my finger, and I look down to realize Cecily is touching the place where my ring used to be. But she doesn’t ask about it, the bride who has always made it her mission to know everything about everyone in her marriage. She has been eerily silent this whole ride.

“Open your eyes,” Linden tells her when she closes them. “Love? Cecily. Look at me.”

With effort she does.

“Tell me where it hurts,” he says.

“It’s like contractions,” she says, cringing as we hit a pothole.

“It’s only another minute from here,” Linden says. “Just keep your eyes open.” The gentleness is gone from his voice, and I know he’s trying to stay in control, but he looks so frightened.

Cecily is fading. Her breaths are labored and slow. Her eyes are dull.

“‘There will come soft rain,’” I blurt out in a panic. She looks up at me, and we recite the words in unison, “‘And the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound.’”

“What is that?” Linden says. “What are you saying?”

“It’s a poem,” I tell him. “Jenna liked it, didn’t she, Cecily?”

“Because of the ending,” Cecily says. Her voice sounds miles away. “She just liked how it ended.”

“I’d like to hear the whole thing,” Linden says.

But we’ve arrived at the hospital. It’s the only real source of light for miles. Most of the streetlights—the ones still standing, anyway—have long since burned out.

Cecily has closed her eyes again, and Linden passes the baby off to me and hoists her into his arms. She murmurs something I can’t understand—I think it’s another line of the poem—and her muscles go lax.

It takes a few seconds for me to realize that her chest has stopped rising and falling. I wait for her next breath, but it doesn’t come.

I’ve never heard a human make a noise like the cry that escapes Linden’s throat when he calls her name. Reed runs past us, and when he returns, he’s got a fleet of nurses behind him, first generation and new. They rip Cecily from Linden’s arms, leave him staggering and reaching after her. I can’t help but think this attention is due to her status as Vaughn’s daughter-in-law. Reed must have made that clear.

Bowen starts to wail, and I bounce him on my hip as I watch Cecily’s body through the glass doors. The hospital lights reveal the gray of her skin. And, strangely, I can see her wedding band as though through a magnifying glass; the long serrated petals etched into it are like knives. They catch every bit of hospital light, the gleam stabbing my eyes. Then she’s laid onto a gurney that turns a corner, and she’s gone.

She’s dead. We’ll never get her back.

The thought hits me in the back of the knees, shaking me with its certainty.

I’M SITTING ON the floor of the hospital lobby, waiting. That’s always the worst part, the waiting.

Bowen has fallen into a quiet lull, ear to my heart. My arm hurts from supporting him. But I can’t think about that. I can’t think about anything. Voices and bodies move past.

The lobby is crowded. The chairs that line the walls are full of the coughing and the sleeping and the wounded. This is one of the few research hospitals in the state; my father-in-law often boasts about it. They take the wounded, the emaciated, the pregnant, or those who are dying of the virus—depending on which cases are interesting enough to be seen, and depending on who is willing to have blood drawn and tissue sampled without being compensated for it.

A young nurse is standing with a clipboard, trying to decide who is in the worst shape. Cecily was hurried down that sterile hallway not because of her condition but because her father-in-law owns this place. They know Linden here; last I saw him, someone was trying to console him as he wrestled away in pursuit of his wife.

I shouldn’t have Bowen in a place like this. His superior genes will promise him a life free of major diseases, sure, but he isn’t completely immune to the germs that are surely hovering around us. He could catch a cold. Someone has to think of his health, and suddenly that task has been placed in my hands, along with his chubby little body.

I raise my head and search for Reed. Eventually I spot him emerging from the same hallway that took my sister wife. Linden is pacing ahead of him, head down, face drained of color. I rise to meet them, and I realize my knees are trembling. And suddenly I don’t want to hear what they have to tell me. I don’t want to return Bowen to his father. I want to take him and run away from here.

Linden’s hands have been scrubbed of the blood. His face is splashed wet. The hem of his shirt is wrinkled, and when he begins twisting it in his fist again, I understand why.

“They couldn’t get a pulse—” he says, and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, hard. “I wanted to be with her, but they pushed me away.”

All I can think is that Cecily was supposed to outlive us all.

But when I open my mouth, what comes out is, “Bowen shouldn’t be here.”

Reed understands. Reed has always understood me. He takes the baby, and he’s so careful with him, even smiles at him.

“She was fine when I kissed her good night,” Linden says.

I should be saying something to comfort him. That was always my role in this marriage, to console him. But we aren’t married anymore, and I can’t remember how to be.

“I don’t want them to dissect her,” I say. I know I shouldn’t be so morbid, but I can’t stop myself. If Cecily is dead, then all the rules are broken. “I don’t want your father to have her body. I don’t—” My lip is quivering.

“He won’t get her,” Reed assures me.

Linden whimpers into his palms. “This is my fault,” he says. His voice is strange. “We shouldn’t have tried for another baby so soon. My father said it would be okay, but I should have seen it was too much for her. She was already so—” His voice breaks, and I think the word he croaks out is “frail.”