The Children(103)

A young woman with heavy lashes and center-parted sixties hair was trying to get Llewellyn to dance with her, while glancing sideways at the man she’d come with—an edgy debut novelist, currently wrapped in heavy flirtation with a sculptor. When Llewellyn couldn’t be tempted, the woman turned to Ennis and held out a hand.

To Guinevere’s great surprise, he laid his sketchbook down and took it.

The woman pulled him to the center of the room. A new record played, Gallic singer and a driving beat. As she and Ennis began to dance, the party seemed to concentrate, coming together around the grown woman and the tall and beautiful boy, moving together to French pop.

And Guinevere’s vision periscoped. It bounced off the spectators and onto her brother, so all at once she could see him the way other people did. Ennis looked so much like her own reflection she tended to take his looks for granted. But it wasn’t his beauty she saw with sudden clarity. It was his armor.

It had begun as a callus, built up over years of protecting himself from everyone but her. It shielded his curiosity, his hopefulness, his wild and tender heart. It had grown so impermeable she wondered if he could take it off. If he even remembered anymore what it was hiding.

Her whole rib cage ached with understanding. There would be no going back. No earlier, softer place. Time ran in one direction; they would never be children again. They would only get harder. More jaded—she knew what the word meant now—more like these awful adults who bobbed around them, wrecking their lungs and their heads. Going to the bathroom in pairs, returning hyped up and glossy-eyed, rolling their shoulders, or furtive, adjusting rumpled clothes. She wanted . . . she wanted . . .

She wanted to burn it all down.

The novelist’s long-haired girlfriend knew she had the room’s attention. She preened, wrapping one hand around the back of Ennis’s neck and the other around his waist. How old did she think he was? Guinevere caught herself. Everyone knew how old the Sharpe children were.

She moved to the record player, seething. She’d rip the needle right off the platter. Before she could, a sobbing began. Low at first, then gaining in strength.

Everyone looked toward the kitchen. Toward an unseen Edith, crying so wretchedly you could hardly hear the words she was saying.

“Never,” she gasped. “Never.”

The children locked eyes. Ennis detached from his dancing partner and went to his sister’s side. Edith was screaming now.

“There will be no sixth book! I’ve lost it, it’s done! I’m locked out, I’m—I’m . . .”

Back to sobbing. Guinevere looked to where Llewellyn sat on the couch, his face wiped clean of any response. He might’ve been listening to a stranger crying on the radio.

Someone else moved to the record player. The hot young writer with his mustache and flat cap, looking like a Guess Who? card. “Shit,” he said, hand poised over the spinning album. “Should I . . . ?”

Then Jonathan came charging in. His blond hair lay flat over his forehead. He was laughing a false laugh. “Apologies, all!” His hands flew over the row of vinyl standing between two rabbit-shaped bookends on the floor. “Please forgive Edith, she’s having her quarterly crisis. They come like clockwork, every book. Sorry you had to see it, friends! It’s how the sausage gets made.” He’d dropped the British act, was trying for something folksy. “We appreciate your discretion!”

His hand must’ve been shaking. The needle skidded and fizzed, dropping partway into the first track of the album he’d chosen, Mick Jagger turned up to drown out Edith’s weeping.

—see a red door and I want it . . .

“Whoo!” Jonathan yelled.

Guinevere’s heart banged in toxic time. She squeezed her brother’s hand.

They’d been there as Edith wrote her books, all of them. She paced sometimes. She stewed and brooded and bitched if they ran out of coffee, and shouted if you were too loud in the hall. But she never cried. She set about the writing of each book with the anointed confidence of a crusader, her certainty unflagging. Jonathan was lying.

It swept over Guinevere again, that feeling of imminent change. The ground beneath them shivering with crack after crack until it had to give way, dropping them into the widening gyre: a deeper, wilder change whose approach she could sense like a lightning storm.

Jonathan bounced along to the Stones awhile, stinking of flop sweat, to no avail. The party was toast. A lucky few drifted to their cars, preferring a drunken drive over winding black roads to staying here. The rest found empty beds.

Four. Four guests stayed in the Farmhouse that night, not including Edith, Llewellyn, and Jonathan.

Guinevere was locked in a state of vigilance, watching everyone’s faces for some clarity or cue. Nobody would look back. There was an atmospheric embarrassment, people moving as quietly as they could, retreating to their corners. She watched them scatter in a state of gentle delirium, waiting for something to happen.

When nothing did she followed her brother to his room. He lay on the bed, on top of the covers, eyes closed. She leaned against his doorframe. Before she could ask, he said, “Sleep in here.”

She crossed the room and set her body down next to his, lightly as a paper doll’s.

After a minute he sighed and said, “I think Mom broke Jonathan.”

Guinevere laughed before she could catch herself, turning her mouth into the pillow. When she closed her eyes, Jonathan was there, hair sweat-pasted to his temples, dancing like he’d be shot if he stopped. “I hate him. All of them.”