The Children(112)

The first drawer she tried was locked. And the second, and the third. The fourth—a miniature left hand, extended as if to shake—slid open.

It was full almost to the top with a fine and glittering sand. Guin stuck her fingers in. Stirred. The sand was the luminous white of selenite, the tracks her fingers left glimmered a northern lights green. The grains seemed half air, evanescing off her skin as if repelled by a magnet. She lifted powdery fingers to her nose and was startled. Though the sand wasn’t cold, it carried the unmistakable odor of fresh snow.

Guin was struck by an idea so absurd she had to act on it immediately: scooping up an ounce or so of powder and flinging it over her head.

Her lashes starred. Her nose burned. She felt a cocaine lift so instantaneous it had to be psychosomatic. She gave an uncertain step forward. Then, arms out, a hop.

Nothing. No extra lift, certainly no takeoff. She laughed at herself. Fairy dust, Guin? Really?

Yes. Really. One of the drawer pulls caught her eye, its miniature golden fingertips pursed together in a pinch. As if scooping up its own dose of dust.

With her clean hand she yanked at the drawer. Locked. With her other hand she pinched up a bit of the iridescent sand and sprinkled it over the pull’s golden fingers.

A heartbeat, two. Then, with a nauseated thrill, she watched the golden fingers shift. Flex. And—un-pinch themselves. They settled into handshake position and stopped.

It was a few seconds before she could make herself reach out to take the little hand in hers. This time the drawer opened smoothly, and inside it was—

Guin made a choked sound.

In it was a gilt-stamped card, thick and fine as a wedding invitation. At its center, a design picked out in gold . . .

She knew this card. It was described in detail in the opening pages of The Ninth City. She ran her fingers over its design. It really did look like an abstract map, or an odd compass rose. Better than the prop they’d made for the movie. Where the card in the book read “Admits Two,” this one said “Single Admission.” Its date of travel—today—was already marked.

Guin looked for the hand into which she might slip the ticket: there, held out as if offered to a conductor. The ticket slotted between its fingers and the drawer unlocked.

Now that she understood the game, it went quickly. There were so many keys to fairyland. In one drawer was an undertrain pass. In another a locket on a chain that held in its heart a globe of clear water. She poured it into a cupped metal palm. There was a wooden whistle whose note she couldn’t hear and a tiny glass bell that fit into a hand’s pinched grip. The hand shook, and the bell’s silvery peal rang out like a summons.

From the second-to-last drawer Guin took a round mirror the circumference of an apple. She held it up to the final drawer pull, the desk’s only right hand. It shifted briefly to something molten, then re-formed to match its own reversed image. A left hand. Guin took it by the burnished fingertips and pulled.

When she saw what lay in the final drawer all the giddiness went out of her.

Abruptly she moved to the window. The Ninth City unspooled itself to the vanishing point, and she cooled herself on its distant motion—branches swaying, lights switching off and on, fairground ticking. A woman moving in a window.

Crisply she stepped back to the drawer and scooped up its contents: Ennis’s necklace charm, strung on its golden chain.

As soon as she set it on her palm, it quickened. Subtly, unmistakably. She flung it onto the desk and bent soundlessly over her knees.

When her head started to throb, she straightened. Breathing shallowly through her teeth, she picked it up again, the metal warming instantly to the temperature of her skin. It trembled, then unfurled at last into a boy’s ring finger, caught in a shell of gold. The very last key.

A long time ago her father took a Polaroid of a blank white wall. Guin moved to face that remade section of wall, and the key, the finger, flexed in her hand. It was easy to guide it to the proper place, to feel the click as it pierced and turned a lock where there was no lock, opening a door that wasn’t there.





Sixty-One




Twelve years ago, Guin flew westward across the Atlantic. Eight hours spent chasing the sun, touching down in JFK not much later, by the clock, than when she took off. Disorienting.

She bought currency, then coffee. The coins she got back felt like counterfeits, too wafer-thin to be real. She walked through reunions, past men in suits bearing handwritten signs. Children draped boneless against their parents’ neck pillows and small siblings making idiot arcs around the roller cases, punchy with freedom. Some hidden part of her really had believed someone would be waiting for her, if she ever came home. She headed to the taxi line.

Guin couldn’t drive. Bitsy had no license and couldn’t see why her granddaughter should, either. She paid a driver up front in cash, lots of it, to drive her six hours north to a tiny town in Vermont.

Most of the ride she spent sleeping, all her instincts as a solo woman traveler shut down in the face of a terrified exhaustion. It was stopping that woke her. The driver parked and half turning, strangely reluctant to wake her.

Guin paid him a little extra and stepped out onto the sidewalk. She wore traveler’s clothes and a hiker’s pack that cinched at the waist, rising higher than her head.

The movie theater was gone. The diner and the used bookstore, too, and the small white gallery where Anne once taught. But the granola grocery store was there, its odor of bulk spices and licorice root so utterly unchanged it acted on Guin like a slap. Her grown-up’s shadow lay longer than it should across the mopped wooden floor. She backed out and let the door swing shut.