“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.
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 water 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,