The Children(107)

They reached their abandoned playhouse, transformed by the night and its horrors into a thing that was no longer forlorn but patient. It had been waiting for them.

“Get in.”

Ennis half whispered, half hissed it. As if someone were at their heels and might hear them. Who would hear them? Everyone who could’ve followed them was dead.

Guinevere was on the ground, Ennis holding her tightly. She couldn’t remember falling. Had she shouted something? He kept saying “shh, shh,” and the pain in her throat was worse.

The open door of the little house bled cold odors, sap and ammonia. It should’ve been empty, but she could see inside it a sinister crowding of unknown things. Ennis took a flashlight from his pocket and switched it on, and the things grew names.

There were two rolled-up sleeping bags, two packed duffels. A camping lantern, a tote bag glinting with bottles of water. Guinevere saw a hoodie she thought she’d lost and a stack of books. Ennis had been planning this.

“It’ll be okay,” he said, and kept saying it. Kneeling in the drafty, malodorous space, touching the things he’d packed like they were beads on a rosary, whispering this prayer: It’ll be okay. Guinevere needed him to be quiet so she could fold in on herself, but he wouldn’t stop talking. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone. You have to believe me. I wasn’t trying to hurt them. Do you believe me?”

There it was, her cue. She was sunk too deep to answer. Then something tugged her up again: around his neck, glinting like treasure, a necklace.

She crept forward on her knees. Ennis didn’t move as she reached out and touched the chain, following it with her fingers to where it disappeared beneath his coat. Roughly she pulled it into view.

The charm he wore looked very much like the one he’d stolen from Edith. It wasn’t hers, though. It was just a little smaller, its gold clean and new.

She had never been allowed to look closely at their mother’s necklace charm. Sometimes, when it slipped into view, she’d felt a pinch of recognition at the nape of her neck. A tap. Tap. Scraaape. Finally, looking at Ennis’s, she knew it for what it was.

A curled-up finger. Like a flower caught in frost, it was cast thinly, perfectly, in gold.

She dropped it. Where the towel fell loose around his bleeding hand she could see it was his left ring finger that was gone. Same as Edith. When she searched his face for something, some explanation or remorse, all she saw was a bleak righteousness.

The shadows that circled him were buzzing like a fluorescent light, in time with the noise in her head. The dark expanded, shrinking Ennis in her sight, until it seemed she saw him from the bottom of a well. It was safe down here. Windless.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

He said it as if that were the thing that broke his heart. Guinevere broke, too. Something in her, some final tether. The lid went over the well. She saw and felt and knew nothing.





Fifty-Eight

2004




The ground was cold but her dreams were made of leaping flame. She woke sweating beneath a sleeping bag. There was no period of confusion. She knew immediately where she was and what she’d lost.

Ennis sat hunched in the doorway of the little house, bathed in gray light. His face was filthy, his eyes scooped out. When he saw she was awake his expression didn’t change. He nodded toward the water bottle that lay beside her in the dirt.

There was no relief as she drank. Every contraction of her throat brought pain. She emptied the bottle then squeezed it, cheap sides staving in with a crackling sound.

He said, “They’re gonna split us up.”

Guinevere didn’t reply.

“They will,” he said sharply, as if she’d disagreed. “We’ll go into foster care in two different houses. Or maybe one of us will go to Mom’s parents in New York. And the other one’ll go to Wales. I think one of Dad’s aunts is alive. Nobody takes two kids. This is it, so you better listen to me. Even if you hate me now. Listen.”

His skin was smeared with dirt. Or maybe it was smoke. It had billowed from the house in a great stinking sea, bits of burning material rising through it like fish.

“The Ninth City books are poison.” The words pierced her fugue state. “Edith is poison.” He recoiled a little, maybe against his own use of the present tense. “I tried to fix it, and it didn’t work. All of this, what I did, all those people. It didn’t. Work.”

He broke off then and sobbed. Dirty face to dirty knees, a little boy again at last.

Dully she watched him, drawing thick breaths from the air. All her bones were cold and heavy, packed with wet sand. When he reached for her, she shrank back. His expression seared her.

“It’s okay,” he said softly. “I understand. You’re gonna be okay. Only . . .” He dug his fingers into the dirt. All nine of them, braced against the earth as he gathered himself. “You have to stop writing stories. Do you hear me? Promise me. Promise you won’t write anymore, ever.”

This was unexpected enough to threaten her stasis. Later she would feel the notion as a taint, frizzing through her system. Targeting one of the things she loved best about herself, blackening the green. Right then she closed her eyes and floated in the space behind her lids, where his words could not touch her.

“It shouldn’t have gone like this,” he said. “No one should’ve—they were supposed to wake up, they were supposed to . . .”