The downstairs hallway smells like fried lard, becoming more pungent when I reach the kitchen. “Hungry?” Reed asks. I shake my head.
“Didn’t think so,” he says, pouring grease from a frying pan into an old can. “You seem birdlike. Even your hair is like a nest.”
Maybe I should take offense, but I don’t mind this image of me he’s painting. It makes me feel wild, brave.
“Bet you never eat,” he says. “Bet you drink up the oxygen like it’s butter. Bet you can go for days on nothing but thoughts.”
That gets a smile out of me. I can see why Vaughn wouldn’t like his brother, and why Linden would.
“So,” he says, turning to face me. “My nephew tells me you’re still recovering. But you look recovered to me.”
Linden did say his uncle wouldn’t ask many questions, and he hasn’t. But he has a clever way of getting answers with carefully worded statements.
“I am,” I say. “Mostly. I’ll only be a day or two, and I can be useful in the meantime. I know how to keep a house running. How to fix things.”
“Fixing things is good,” he says, walking past me. I follow him down the hallway, out the front door, into the breezy May air. The grass and the bright weeds of flowers sway on the wind like the hologram that came from the keyboard as Cecily played. A stop-motion drawing in colored pencil, unreal.
It’s gotten warmer since this morning, and there’s the almost plastic smell of grass. I think of Gabriel, how this time last year he brought me tea in the library and read over my shoulder. He pointed to the sketches of boats on the page of the history book, and I thought that it would be nice for us to sail away, the water dividing endlessly in the sunlight. Breaking in half and then breaking in half again.
I push back my worries. I’ll come to find him soon; that’s all I can hope for.
Reed shows me to the shed beside his house, which might have once been a barn. It’s enormous enough. “Even things that aren’t broken can be fixed,” he says. The darkness smells like mold and metal. “Everything can become something it’s not.”
He looks at me, eyebrows up, like it’s my turn to say something. When I remain quiet, it seems to disappoint him. His fingers flutter over his head as he presses forward.
It’s hard to see. The only light comes through gaps in the wooden planks that make up the walls.
Then Reed pushes on a far wall, and it swings open. It’s a giant door, and at once the place is flooded with sunlight. Awkward shapes around me become leather straps, guns mounted up by nails, car parts hung like carrion in a butcher shop. The floor is nothing but packed dirt, and there’s a long worktable covered with so many odd things, I can’t make sense of them.
“Never seen anything like it, I bet,” Reed says, sounding pleased with himself. I get the sense that he takes pride in being perceived as mad. But he doesn’t seem mad to me. He seems curious. Where his brother unravels human beings, weighing their organs in his bare palms, prying back eyelids, drawing blood, Reed unravels things. He showed more care with that engine on his table last night, more respect for its life, than Vaughn ever showed with me.
“My father liked to make things,” I say. “And fix things. But woodworking, mostly.”
I don’t know what’s making me talk so much. In the almost year I spent at the mansion, I don’t think I revealed so much truth about myself as I have this morning.
I’m homesick, I suppose, and talking to a total stranger is my way of dealing with it.
Reed looks at me, and I catch the green in his eyes. He’s like his brother there. They both have that distance, living in the world their thoughts create. He stares at me a long time and then says, “Say ‘ridiculous.’”
“What?”
“The word ‘ridiculous,’” he insists. “Say it.”
“Ridiculous,” I say.
“An absolute ghost,” he says, shaking his head and dropping into a seat at his worktable. It’s really an old picnic table with attached benches. “You look just like my nephew’s first wife. You even have her voice, and ‘ridiculous’ was her favorite word. Everything was ridiculous. The virus. The attempts to cure it. My brother.”
“Your brother is ridiculous,” I agree.
“I’m going to call you Rose,” he says with resolution, picking up a screwdriver and working the back off an old clock.
“Please don’t,” I say. “I knew Rose. I was there when she died. I’d find it creepy.”
“Life is creepy,” Reed says. “Kids rotting from the inside out at age twenty is creepy.”
“Even so, my name is Rhine,” I say.
He nods for me to sit across the table from him, and I do, avoiding a gray puddle of something on the bench. “What kind of name is ‘Rhine,’ anyway?” he asks.
“It’s a river,” I say. I upturn a bolt and try to spin it like a top. My father used to make them for me and my brother. We’d spin them at the top of the stairs, and crush our shoulders together as we watched them jump down one step to the next. His always got there first, or else mine slipped through the banister and fell away. “Or it was a river, a long time ago. It ran from the Netherlands to Switzerland.”
“Then I’m sure it still does run there,” Reed says, watching the bolt spin away from my fingers and promptly collapse. “The world is still out there. They just want you to think it’s gone.”
Okay, maybe he is a little bit mad. But I don’t mind. Linden is right. Reed doesn’t ask many questions. He spends the rest of the morning keeping me busy with menial tasks, never telling me what it is I’m doing. As near as I can tell, I’m disassembling an old clock to make a new one. He checks on me sometimes, but spends most of the time outside, lying flat under an old car, or climbing inside to start its engine, which only splutters and creates black clouds through the tailpipe. He hides away in an even bigger shed farther back, higher than the house and more makeshift, as though he built it as an afterthought, to cover what’s inside.
But I don’t ask about that, either.
4
IT’S LIKE THAT for the rest of the day, and the next day, and the next. I don’t ask questions, and neither does Reed. He places tasks before me, and I do them. One piece at a time. Never knowing what I’m assembling. I watch him, too. He spends a lot of time under cars or in that lumbering shed with the door closed.
I never have much of an appetite, and the safest things to eat in his kitchen are the apples, anyway, being that they’re the only things I recognize. They’re not the ultrabright green and red fruit I got used to in the mansion. They’re speckled, flawed, and mealy, the way I grew up thinking they should be. I’m still not sure which way is more natural.
On my fourth morning, when I climb out of bed, I notice that the dizziness and the flecks of light are gone. The pain in my thigh has dulled, and the stitches have started to disintegrate. “I think I’ll leave tomorrow,” I tell Reed while we’re sitting on opposite sides of his worktable. “I’m feeling much better.”
He’s taking a magnifying glass to some heap of machinery—a motor, I think. “Did my nephew arrange for transportation?” he asks.
“No,” I say, tracing my finger around the rim of a mason jar filled with screws and grime. “That wasn’t part of the agreement.”
“So there was an agreement,” Reed says. “Doesn’t seem like it. Seems like you’re just making it up as you go.”
Story