The Children(114)

The sky Guin walked beneath was filled with those secret stars. The path carried her to the right—eastward, she thought—as a sound of bells drifted from the left. Like wind chimes, only sweeter, wilder.

The sound sent a longing through her. Soles up, like the shock of jumping off a swing at its apex. Fairy bells on a fairy bridle. She wrote that into a story once.

A veil fell over her. It was that physical, this sense of recognition. Akin to the bodiless moment when you catch sight of a person in a mirror and realize that person is you. It wasn’t until she saw the dogwood tree that she was sure.

The tree wasn’t much taller than her, its crown the shifting white-green color of dollar bills. Growing impossibly off its branches, among the leaves and flowers, were countless rolled-up maps.

Guin watched them sway, remembering the night she read this story aloud to her brother. “The Tale of the Map Tree.” She could still see the wedge of his eyelashes, tipping toward his sunburned cheek. The map she reached for hung so low and inviting, and made such a beautiful snap when she took it. She unrolled it, orienting herself with the dogwood and moon as her markers.

As Guin walked she passed a hickory hung with black ribbons. A ring of chalky gravestones circling a hill. She traveled through an avenue of birches that leaned together to make a tangled ceiling, their branches weeping a constant pale-green rain. Rabbits moved in sly streaks through the underbrush, their eyes the uncanny color of cell phone screens lighting up in the dark.

Her own inventions, all of them. All these beguiling unrealities she wrote into her notebooks and shared with Ennis, stitched onto a woods she knew, that existed.

Her skin flashed hot and cold, with hope and exposure. What was this place? It looked and felt and tasted real. Yet as she walked an uneasy suspicion surfaced. A sense that the land, rather than being discovered by her, was responding to her. Like the map she held, it seemed to unroll as she walked it.

If—Guin paused to consider it—she were to run, as fast as she could, would she reach an end? She envisioned a black precipice diving down into a fathomless nothing, like medieval renderings of a flat Earth. If she closed her eyes and wished for it, would a lilac bush appear right there, past that tree, when she opened them?

She looked. No lilacs. But on the back of her neck, a pale pressure. She put a hand there. It was nothing. It was the land, watching her. The trunks, the shadows, the purple neon of the twilight, all drawing closer. Concentrating into a point so fine . . .

She breathed like a fish, held in place by panic. This was the feeling she once named the spotlight, when she’d lie on the floor of the great room writing stories. That voluptuous focusing of the world.

Good girl. Bright girl.

Guin was moving before she decided to do it. She’d lost the shoe-leather soles she had in childhood, her feet were burning, but it wasn’t much farther. A short sprint, map clutched tight, and her path ended in a bowl of grass.

In real life their clearing had been more of a lopsided saucer, mostly dirt and rocks, what grass there was sprinkled over it in Troll-hair clumps. Here it was dreamy and thick, turf ripped from the land of Nod. In the middle of the clearing was one more invention.

This one she and Ennis made up together. The tiny house they’d spent half their childhood building and rebuilding, its windows casting golden cutouts over the gloaming. They’d intended to run to it one day. And they had, hadn’t they? At the end. Shell-shocked orphans of less than an hour, stinking of smoke and blood.

This wasn’t the house as it truly had been, in all its iterations—splintery and amateur, built by two daydreaming children. It was the house as they’d imagined it. A platonic ideal of a fairy-tale cottage, leaf-green shutters and mossy roof. Guin stood on its threshold, an adult aching in her head and heart.

She knocked. Two raps and a pause.

Her brother opened the door.



* * *




Later she would hold this moment up to the night she saw the black bear on the road. Recalling the feeling of that compact picture-book notion, bear, exploding into the reality of the actual animal.

Ennis had been contained so flatly in her mind. Standing in front of her, he was realer than anyone she’d ever seen. The sheer physical presence of him moved her like a burst of wind.

There were details she’d forgotten. Things she once knew like she knew the days of the week. The wayward hair at his crown that bent in three directions. The acne scar like a dimple in his cheek. He stood exactly as he had when he was a boy, one shoulder a little higher than the other. It was the shoulder that used to dislocate, braced instinctively against pain.

The burn at the end of his brow.

The restless way he flexed his hands, like a cat in a rug.

And, god, his missing finger. She pressed her hand to the charm where it hung around her neck, a small insistent heaviness.

Ennis cleared his throat, a tiny sound of shocking clarity.

“Hi, Guin.”

She hadn’t known, anymore, what he sounded like in the world. She said, “Ennis—”

Then stopped. Watched him breathe that one word in, like her voice was oxygen. His face surprised the way a lottery winner’s is surprised, hearing her speak his name. And every story she’d told herself about him fell away.

Solitary genius, art-world sophisticate, indifferent stranger. All these nightmares that followed her, wearing his face, flared up and were gone. What was left between them was a clean emptiness. She recognized its quality: that void into which you sacrifice your ordinary self, your insufficient existence, so you can imagine a better one. Make believe.