The Children(109)

There was a noise in Guin’s head. She mistook it for an approaching migraine until she saw a man tugging at his ear, looking around with a hunted expression.

It was a soundtrack, set almost below the level of perception. One note: the ceaseless buzzing of bees.

Guin didn’t think of the bees in the orchard. She thought of the storm in the second-floor hall. Black-and-yellow bodies pelting her like hail, sheeting down dead when they hit open air. Even back then she’d filed it speedily under delusion, but that soothing lie was unraveling.

Her back bumped up against one of the massive concrete columns, wrapped in garlands of glossy leaves and tiny fairy lights. She pinched a leaf, dug a nail in to be sure: real. Another allusion she alone would perceive, to the night Edith had the whole orchard hung with string lights for a party. Llewellyn worried they would hurt the new green fruits. They didn’t. There was never a single summer when they didn’t have a bumper crop.

People were carrying their drinks toward the walls, drawn in by gallery-style lights. Guin followed. Five days ago she’d stood in this derelict place, smelling fresh paint in the dark. Now she could see what Ennis had made.

On the wall ahead of her was a great black bear. It stood on hind legs on a narrow night road, the moon in its fur rendered in clippings of titanium white. Around the animal, green woods. In front of it, crookedly parked, a blue car.

Guin’s eye swept from animal to car to trees to moon. She could’ve sworn she never told Ennis about the bear. That she’d kept this one secret, to punish him for the night she got lost in the woods.

The next image depicted a vast stretch of forest. Surveying the scene from its top left corner was a man’s small figure, crowned in willow whips. A dog with the slinky elegance of a kelpie heeled at his side, her fur the same red as his hair.

All the paintings, lined up along the walls in lavish tapestry-sized panels, were scenes out of a fairy tale. Like a sleepwalker Guin moved among them. In one a ghost child swung its legs from the branches of a hazel tree. In another a witch cut herbs with silver scissors. One showed a girl sleeping by a forest pool overhung with birches.

Painting by painting Ennis told a story of their childhood, approximately as true as the one in Guin’s memoir. Mixing memory and invention, the woods as they were overlaid with the stories she wrote. If a child were to fall asleep at the edge of a great wood and dream, as Alice dreamed, of following a psychopomp into a forested wonderland, their dreams might look like this.

A woman laughed, so loud and close to Guin’s ear she reared around, startled. The woman’s arm was slung over her friend’s shoulders. There was lipstick on her teeth. Guin watched her drain what was clearly not her first glass of champagne, tipping the syrupy peach slice from its bottom into her mouth.

She’d stared too long at the walls. The crowd had changed when she wasn’t paying attention.

People were touching the paintings, running their palms over the walls. Loose and laughing, holding each other upright. The room had the feeling of a party at its glittering height, everyone coming together into one organism. But this one had an aberrant shape, headless and unpredictable.

When she was ten or so, at a Farmhouse party, Guinevere watched two men place tiny slips of paper on their tongues. They did it with such reverence she couldn’t help but stare. One of them saw her and said, You want to try? In his outstretched hand a white square, printed with a cartoon elephant.

She shrugged. Okay. The elephant melted on her tongue like the paper on the back of candy dots. Like the wafers passed out to Catholics in Mafia movies.

But if it were a host, it was that of a god capable of dread transformations: as the night went on, her parents’ guests became monstrous. A teeming circle of bacchantes and green men, waving elongated limbs. She was too terrified to move.

It was Jonathan who realized what had happened and dragged her roughly away. Little idiot. He shoved her toward the kitchen sink. Her tooth clinked against the porcelain, chipped. Drink some water.

That lost night was coming back to her now. There was no music playing, nothing to dance to, yet the factory crowd swayed together drunkenly. Sticky skin, open mouths flashing white teeth, red tongues. Heedless, hedonistic.

A familiar weakness came over her. A sinking drowning breathlessness. Guin looked around for something, some support or escape. For Ennis. She saw the stairwell door she’d walked through five days ago and made her way head-down through the revelers.

One of the masked Llewellyns stood at attention beside it. She thought he would block her way. He only opened the door with a chivalrous flourish, smiled at her, and in a resonant Welsh voice said, “Alright, fair one. Go find your brother.”

His hand between her shoulder blades was warm as he pushed her through and shut the door firmly behind her.

Guin turned immediately and yanked at its handle. Locked. A windowless metal fire door that didn’t even rattle when she tried to shake it. And anyway that wasn’t her father, just another disorienting trick. Llewellyn was dead and ghosts belonged to crumbling Venetian palaces.

The stairwell smelled of mold, the kind that messed up your lungs forever. After the bees and the people, the silence filled her ears like oil. Even the stairs were noiseless as she climbed them, like stairs in a dream. The way to the third floor was chained off, and above the second-floor door an Exit-style sign read enter.

She did.





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