Burn (Pure #3)(95)

“Is that right?” Maybe she has power and Beckley is challenging it, for Lyda’s sake or hers.

Lyda’s mother turns; her skirt flares around her. She grabs her pocketbook, and says, “I can’t work under these conditions! I’m a professional.”

She’s here working? She’s a professional mother? Pressia doesn’t understand.

Lyda’s mother walks to the door. “I want the nursery dismantled. I want it all hauled away and everything replaced. Every last thing. You hear me?” Her voice is cold and distant.

Beckley doesn’t answer. He unlocks the door and holds it open wide. As she steps through it, she glances back at Pressia. She doesn’t look angry now; it’s as if that emotion has suddenly faded and what’s surfaced in its place is fear.

Pressia likes it. She thinks of El Capitan—fear is power. No wonder he liked it all those years. It made him feel protected and safe.

Beckley closes the door behind Lyda’s mother and turns to Pressia. “I’ll get the Culp family out of here,” he says. “You can go down that hall. Lyda’s probably in the nursery. The door on the right. It’ll be locked.”

“Thanks, Beckley,” she says.

“For what?” he says.

“You know.” He stuck up for her.

He nods and walks to the kitchen.

As Pressia walks down the hall, she smells something familiar—smoke.





LYDA





PROOF




No.

Partridge will come for her. They’ll start a new life. He loves her. She remembers walking with Partridge to the subway car, the dusty wind kicking up her cape. He kissed her, quickly, before Mother Hestra could catch them. After they lay with each other in the warden’s house, Partridge was the one who wanted her to come with him. The way he looked at her, the way he touched her, the way it felt when they were near each other—that was love, wasn’t it? Can love just disappear?

She was the one to tell Partridge to marry Iralene—to stop people from killing themselves. Wasn’t it the right thing to do? Was it a setup? Did Partridge want permission to betray her?

She looks around the nursery—the dismantled crib, the small mattress tilted against a wall next to a stack of ripped-up baby books and the bowl of ash where she burned page after page, the pile of spears she whittled from the slats, the shavings littering the floor, and the bags of yarn and knitting needles brought in by Chandry.

She looks down at her torn dress, the tightness of it around her waist where her belly will continue to widen… This is the room of a crazy person, and she’s the crazy person within it. Has she just been so sleep deprived that she couldn’t see it clearly for what it is?

She picks up the scraps of her dress. She’ll throw away the dress, and no one will see what she’s done to it. “I can change back,” she whispers. “I can be my old self again.” She picks up the bag of knitting supplies. “I can do this.” She walks to the stack of ripped-up baby books, wanting to hide them, but accidentally kicks the bowl of ashes, which scatter across the floor. She kneels down and tries to brush the ashes back into the bowl, but she streaks the floor with blackened soot. The more she rubs it, the darker the stain seems to become.

There’s a knock at the door.

No, no. “Who is it?” It’s her mother. She knows it. Her mother is coming back to tell her how ashamed she is, how wrong Lyda’s been, what a terrible child she’s raised. She’ll tell Partridge all about the insane nursery.

“Lyda.”

It’s not her mother. It’s a voice she recognizes but can’t place.

Lyda stands up and quietly walks to the door. She touches the wood with her fingertips, lightly, like a water spider on the surface of a pond. She remembers seeing them as a child—pushing and gliding, light as air. “Who is it?”

“It’s me. It’s Pressia.”

No, it can’t be. It’s a trick. She shakes her head. “I don’t believe you.”

“Lyda, it’s me. We have to talk.”

How long has it been since she really slept through the night? Maybe the sleeplessness has made her paranoid, or maybe she should be paranoid. “I don’t trust you!” She stares up at the corners of the room where she’s covered the cameras. “Just leave me alone. Just tell Partridge…” But she can’t finish the sentence. What would she want someone to tell Partridge?

“I can prove it’s me,” the voice says. “Ask me something only I would know.”

She thinks back to the times when they were together. “The farmhouse,” she says. “Tell me.”

“We were all there. Illia too. She killed her husband.” Illia. Lyda remembers her in the tub, her glistening fists shaking in the air.

“She’s dead,” Lyda says. Maybe people in the Dome know that already. She needs something more specific. “The wallpaper,” Lyda says. “Tell me about the wallpaper in the operating room.”

“Boats,” Pressia says. “The wallpaper was covered in little boats because it wasn’t always an operating room. It was once a nursery.”

Lyda looks around her own baby’s nursery. Is that why she asked? The wallpaper was proof that Illia had once thought she would have a baby and then for whatever reasons there was no baby.