The Children(100)

Lying in bed each night was like that. She hung in awful anticipation, not over a tumbledown fairground but the open mouth of the waiting dream. A dream about the house. Or the house’s dreams about her. She couldn’t decide.

What does a house dream about? Happy families, little feet, a light in every room? Not this house. Staying awake was not an option. She couldn’t resist the drag of sleep. Click click. Click. And down she went.



* * *




Something hit the floor. On the other side of the wall, in Ennis’s room, such a crash it scattered her dream and sent her to her feet.

If it was Edith again, throwing shit around and looking for her idiotic necklace, Guinevere wasn’t going to lie here and ignore it. But when she opened her brother’s door it was him standing there, posture a little stunned, feet covered in a sliding mess of sci-fi novels and monographs. He’d knocked over a bookshelf.

She glared at him. “God, Ennis. Where have you been?”

He turned to face her. Fear yanked the drawstring of her throat.

His pupils were little black dots. His hair was wet, and the shoulders of his shirt, though not shower wet. It was a spattery, spotty kind of damp. She moved closer, kicking books aside, reaching out gingerly to pat his hair and the cotton over his shoulders. She wrapped her arms around her unresponsive brother and held him, breathing in.

Rain. That’s what he smelled of, that papery perfume of rain on dirt. Which meant the irregular bloom of damp on his shirt was raindrops. She turned her head to see the moon, shining through a dry and cloudless night.

His arms came up around her. They held each other tightly, the author’s children, breathing in the odor of impossible weather. “Where were you?” she whispered.

Ennis exhaled hard, almost a laugh. There was something sweet on his breath, faintly tannic.

She squeezed him. “En. Why do you smell like rain?”

In a gravelly whisper he said, “You won’t believe me.”

Guinevere thought of her mother on that long-ago night, patching a cut on her daughter’s brow. Kneeling on tile in the heart of a blizzard, her feet pasted with grass. With absolute conviction she said, “I’ll believe you.”

“You’ll say I’m lying.”

“When have I ever said that? I would never say that. Ennis. Tell me.”

He was crying. His thin shoulders shook. An hour ago she’d have said, My brother never cries, but the sound of it dredged up memories she’d tucked away.

Ennis in the woods, when she told him about Llewellyn’s other children. Ennis bursting from the kitchen, furious, wiping his eyes, Jonathan sitting at the table behind him wreathed in smoke and smiling like the devil. She wanted to go back in time and stub out that smile with the glowing end of a Swisher Sweet.

“I will believe you,” she said in a furious whisper. Then, spurred by deep instinct, “I will protect you.”

And he laughed, actually laughed, into her shoulder. Not a happy sound. “I protect you. Remember? Guinevere, I think I—never mind. No, it’ll be okay. Okay?”

He pulled away and his eyes were dry after all. Her beautiful Ennis. Thirteen now, alert and alive. Ropy arms, long monkey feet bare, his shins a mess of scars and scrapes she could have catalogued, annotated. She loved him like a limb loves its body. She believed there was nothing at all she wouldn’t do for him, nothing that could truly part them.

“I promise you,” he said. “I’ll fix it.”

“Fix what?”

“Guin. Everything is going to be okay. Do you believe me?”

How many times had he asked her that? The creek is deep enough, the ice is thick enough, there are trolls in the woods, there’s a sibyl in that cave. Look, over there. You missed it, two baby deer were looking right at us. If she paused, if her faith seemed for a moment to waver, his chin would jut and his eyes become a prophet’s eyes. Do you believe me?

As if his little sister’s belief was the fairy dust that made their reality run. And it was. That was the thing. It worked every time.

“I believe you.”

“Good. Go to sleep, Guin.” He whispered it, right into her ear. “But be ready.”





Fifty-Three

Sixteen hours until Mother




A siren blazed by somewhere below, doppler effect turning it into a scream that pulled her from sleep. In the welling dangerous beat before the world came in it was the scream of a rabbit in the Farmhouse woods.

Guin lay with a racing heart, finding herself one context clue at a time. The air was close, smelling faintly of garbage. Thin sunlight spilled over her legs. Someone kicked her.

She sat up. In Arlene’s apartment, on her balding velvet couch. The person who’d kicked her lay sleeping at its other end. A girl she had no recollection of ever seeing before, one leg hooked up onto the couch’s back and glitter makeup weeping from the corner of her visible eye.

The thought that was circling her, wasplike, landed: it was Wednesday. Mother opened tonight.

The enchantment of the night before had cracked. White wax pooled over the coffee table, stained with ash. Cups and plates littered every surface—cheese dregs, grape stems, rinds of dried wine. The cake looked as if it had been systematically destroyed by a toddler.

In a bathroom stuffed with overpriced products Guin studied her reflection for some mark of the night before. What had she said, what had she done? Even her conversation with Arlene had fuzzy edges. A headache was making its vicious way across her scalp.