The Children(10)

“I won’t be blindsided. I’ll be fine.”

A pause. Then instant, easy retreat. “Okay. You know better than me.”

“I do.” Hearing and hating the shirtiness in her voice.

He sighed and said, “I want to hold you. You got time for that? Maybe around lunch? I’ll come to wherever you are.”

“You don’t have time for that.” Hank was a public school teacher in Fort Greene. His lunch was a turkey sandwich he took bites of in between mediating altercations among second graders.

“I’ll make it. I’m forgetting what you look like. You’re a talking head to me now.”

Guin leaned against the glittery marble front of a theater building, shading her eyes. “I told you I’d be slammed for a couple weeks around pub. You told me you wouldn’t watch.”

“I did, didn’t I. And now I’m being a big baby about it.”

“Well. Who doesn’t like babies?” She said it without thinking, then tipped her head back and mouthed a curse.

Hank’s voice turned twenty degrees warmer. It chilled her. “Who indeed. You’re my baby, and I miss you.” He let his Brooklyn accent thicken. “And if any other talk show hosts try to mess with you, tell him you know a guy. And he’s good at breaking things.”

“Mateo?” She named his five-year-old nephew, a tornado of Pokémon facts and uncut hellfire.

Hank laughed, a good sunshine laugh. It made her feel miserly, made her want to give him something.

“Samantha Brice is an actual robot, by the way. She turns off when the camera does. I think I saw a plug in her back.”

“Oof, don’t tell Patty.” His mom, a daytime TV addict. “It’ll break her heart.”

Guin heard a beep and pulled the phone from her ear. The call was coming from H&C Regina. Regina Coleman, longtime head of publicity for Hart & Crane. Mid-fifties, with the coiled air of an old-school fixer. Regina was deliciously indiscreet, loud and funny and mean as a snake. She was also intensely protective—not of her authors, of the house. Guin felt actual fear, anticipating Regina’s response to her performance on Brice.

“Hart & Crane’s calling. I should take it.” She had no intention of taking it.

“Don’t let ’em give you any shit,” Hank said. “Remember, you’re the talent.”

Guin flinched. But he didn’t mean anything by it. Rather, he meant it. As if spending a few months feeding anecdotes to a ghostwriter qualified as talent. “I won’t.”

“Good. Call me later, okay? I love you.”

“Yes.” Flustered, always, by how casually he said it. “Me, too.”

She hung up on him. Lovely Hank.

The thought was almost resentful. He was slumming it with her, and he didn’t seem to notice. Three months ago, he’d coaxed her into a windy walk along the waterfront at Brooklyn Bridge Park, took out a ring box, and got on his knees. Both knees, not one. He’d been too nervous to keep his balance.

The ring was small and pretty, a carved sapphire with delicate diamond shoulders set in white gold. Guin liked it. And she was surprised every time she saw it. In the mirror when she washed her face or glinting over a cutting board. It got turned around constantly, scratching her cheek when she slept, biting a red line up Hank’s back the last time they had sex.

Not everything is a metaphor. She loved him. And it was intoxicating having someone rely on her. Not on what she could do for them but on her continued existence, alongside theirs. A first in her adult life.

Even if she wasn’t entirely sure whether their engagement was a commitment or an experiment. Probably should’ve figured that out before she took the ring.





Six

1998




Spring in Vermont stretched endless, fresh as peeled sapwood and clean on the tongue. Even on sunny days Llewellyn lit a fire in the great room and sent the children to bed with hot water bottles at their feet. Summer felt like a myth, then a creeping tide. It rose inch by inch and drowned the long saw edge of May.

Each warm day the children went a little farther. First to the wildflowers that sprang up overnight, circling the house like the crown of a wild bride. Then to the orchard. Then the woods. They were questing for the border, searching for the place where their newfound freedom would hit a wall.

They didn’t find it in the orchard or the woods. They followed the road awhile, looking, until a car passed so fast and close Ennis yanked Guinevere backward into the brush.

It wasn’t its nearness that scared her most, or its awful speed. It was the fact that it existed at all. A blistering metal reminder of a world they no longer lived in. If—she was forgetting again, already—that other world existed at all. Manhattan was hallucination, Venice a briny dream. All of life was contained within these few acres of wind-combed Eden. It was an Eden then, though that would be hard to believe later.

All that first summer she followed her brother. He was forever ahead of her, parting the drowsing trees, his narrow back browned then burned then peeling. The soles of his feet flickered callus orange as he scaled each climbable tree, leading her to a place where the leaves moved in green waves, shushing like librarians. The rippling grasses were sea swells, the trees great ships—or houses, hot-air balloons, floating islands in the Utter East. It went without saying that Ennis was captain of every endeavor, Guinevere first mate or swab boy, depending on his largesse. She didn’t care, she only wanted to be near him.