The Children(108)

His voice dropped out. Like the radio used to when Llewellyn drove them through the trees. Country songs spiking and fading, and their father knew the words to every one. She beat her fist on the dirt until the memory was gone, and barely heard what Ennis said next.

“It’s my fault.” His hands were on his shaven head. He spoke into his arms. “We should’ve just run. I never should’ve tried to convince her.”

Guinevere opened her eyes. Sandy scraping of breath over tongue, and her voice so rusty it scared her. “Who?”

One of her clearest memories would always be this. His face stricken as he whispered it.

“Mother.”

The word was a missed step, a rolled ankle. He’d never referred to Edith that way.

Then something made their heads go up in tandem: the sound of breaking foliage. An inexpert crackling slide that might have been a large and careless animal. A woman laughed. It rode the dawn like an arrow, sounding closer—surely—than it was. And a man’s voice said, “Well, I’m a clumsy bastard. Good thing no one saw that.”

“Oh, so I’m no one?” The woman laughed again. Then she said, “Hey. Wait a sec.”

The air between the children tautened. Neither breathed.

“Do you see that?” Her voice had a wondering sound. “It’s almost like—is that a little house?”

Ennis said, “I love you.” He picked up the shotgun he’d had close by him all this time, that she’d been too numb to notice, and stepped out into the onrushing day.

There came an adult’s surprised shout. A “no no no,” followed by the crack of a shotgun blast.

Guinevere pulled the sleeping bag over her head. She told herself she was lying in the great room, next to the glowing coils of a space heater. In an arc around her, the breathing bodies of her family. She counted them: one, two, three.

It was their very first night in the house, which wasn’t the Farmhouse yet. She was almost six years old. The flues weren’t safe; they couldn’t light a fire. They hadn’t discovered the attic yet, or the orchard or the woods or Art Church. Edith hadn’t written a word. Everything was hopeful; nobody was dead.

Far away from her someone was crying, and a stranger’s voice said, “It’s okay. Oh, sweetheart, it’s okay. You didn’t hurt anyone. My boyfriend’s getting help, it’s all gonna be fine. Here, you want some water? I’m sorry, but is your name—I mean, aren’t you . . . never mind. Never mind. Help is coming. I’ll stay with you the whole time, okay? I won’t leave you alone.”

Ennis said, “I’m not alone. Help my sister.”

Guinevere squeezed herself tighter, reaching for invisibility. Those were the last words she would hear from her brother’s mouth for more than twenty years.





Fifty-Nine

Opening reception of Mother




Guin crossed the threshold of the factory, and the doors swung shut.

Not only the one she’d come through. All around the factory, every entrance closed at once. There was a rising protest, a communal wail, then the sound cut off clean.

They were alone. That was what it felt like: the cattle rush winnowed down to an abandoned few. Maybe a hundred people ringed the edges of the massive space, like swimmers around a pool. The room she’d last seen as a ruin had been emptied, swept, illuminated, walls and ceiling cast in rosy gold. The light barely penetrated the room’s vast heart.

Guin thought: All of this, everything I’m about to see, is for me.

She didn’t immediately notice the man standing inside the factory door. An installation employee, collecting phones. Not one of Ennis’s little art-school minions. This man was tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a striped shirt and a black half mask. His hair, ruddy gold, fell to his chin in thick waves. Guin looked at him and felt a shock that hit like a hunger pang.

Dad.

The illusion broke within a moment—this man’s mouth was cut differently, the cast of his shoulders was wrong—but the rush lingered like sugar in her system. As she approached him, she stared. All she could see through the holes of his mask was a damp glistening. It plucked at her, at some memory. Before she could place it, he’d traded her phone for a check tag and turned to the next person.

Guin studied the tag, an ovoid of wafer-thin wood with a number stamped on one side and the image of a hand on the other. Not a hand. Ennis’s hand. Palm out, four fingers spread, an empty space where its ring finger should be. Or, she supposed, the hand could have been Edith’s.

She shoved the tag into her pocket.

People shuffled farther in, minnows making little darts into deeper water. Guin moved ahead of everyone, toward the room’s dim center. Then she startled back a step. The man who’d taken her phone was striding improbably toward her, from the other side of the room.

Except—this was a different man. Same build, same striped shirt, half mask, and dark gold hair. He carved a path with a shoulder-high tray holding glasses of champagne, sliced fruit suspended inside them in bubbling arcs. He veered neatly around her, offering his tray to other people. They smiled, took a glass, took a swallow.

Guin turned slowly in place. Throughout the room, from every direction, the masked men came, their trays of champagne fizzing like portable fireworks. Built like her father, with hair like her father’s, all wearing the painter’s uniform Llewellyn favored through the final years of his life. People were dispersing through the space. Talking, laughing, looking around with wide eyes. Taking glass after glass from the passing trays, not one of them aware they were being served by a ghost.