The Children(116)

Guin’s heart made an ugly knocking. Bad news at the door. “Ennis.”

His chin was down, his eyes two blue cuts. “What Mother needed, the kind of person she could use, was someone with a particular kind of light. Someone so bright. The way—the way Dad was bright.”

“Ennis.” She said it again, sharply. “Wait.”

He didn’t. He went on, low and pitiless. “Remember when we’d play pretend? The way it made things bigger, more? Mother can do that, but for real. She can make a whole land. And she can give the light away, too.” Her brother touched his lips, then his eyes, as if Mother dispensed stolen brilliance like greasepaint. “The cunning woman was a woodworker. Mother made her an artist.”

Guin felt a sudden heat in her center. At the same time her hands went cold. She knew. Of course she did. She’d have pretended forever that she didn’t, if only it remained unsaid. She stood on gummy knees, crossed to the door, and let herself out.

The clearing was perfect. The clearing was horrible. Dreamy twilight was stuck in place like a bug on a pin. It would persist, she sensed, until Ennis was done with it. That was the nature of this place; it was made for him. Revulsion gripped her as she perceived what it was made of.

Again she had the sense of being watched. Of a canny intelligence beneath the immaculate night, some great director anticipating her desires. She stiffened, wondering how deeply it could know her, this thing Ennis called Mother. Could it see her wayward thoughts, sense her disgust like a splinter in its skin?

Guin went to her knees. Ripped up fistfuls of grass and held them to her nose, bit a blade to taste the chlorophyll. Looking—as she’d looked in the lobby at Film Still—for the flaw in the construction.

Dirt lodged lushly under her nails, made loamy smears on her palms. The grass tasted as green as lime Kool-Aid and smelled like itself. It was real, entirely real.

What in this place was made of Llewellyn, what was Anne? Or maybe their sacrifice had been burned through long ago. Marla Kaufman, then: Was she the moon, the breeze, the bells?

She fell back limply, fingers pressed to her eyes. Remembering a night when the Farmhouse was frosted to the sills in snow, and Edith’s feet wore blades of grass.

The very next morning Llewellyn had changed. His light burned out. Or: stolen. And Edith. She began writing a book.

Beneath the rushing of the breeze Guin heard the homey creak of the cottage door, and her brother crossing the clearing to lie beside her. For a moment neither spoke. Then Guin reached out and took his hand.

It was a grown-up’s hand, callused and unfamiliar. It scared her, that empty place where his finger should be. She sensed that if she pulled away from it, flinched at all, it would kill him. So she held on tightly and said, “Tell me the rest.”

His voice came quietly, close inside the cupped palm of the grass.

“The cunning woman. The woodworker. She started selling to people in the city, to rich men. One of those rich men was Edith’s great-grandfather. She became his mistress. He had the cottage torn down and built in its place a house of the woman’s design. She filled it with her work and with visitors, and she and Mother were happy there for a long time.”

The time we like the best of all

Is when the shadows creepy crawl.

Guin didn’t think the words. They crawled through her head. One after another.

“Then she got sick. Our great-great-grandfather was dead and the cunning woman couldn’t work anymore and the visitors stopped coming. It was like it was at the beginning, just her and Mother.”

And we’re left alone with Mother.

“The woman was afraid. She thought Mother would leave her. So she did a terrible thing.”

She had, Guin thought, already done so many terrible things.

“She’d made a carving she never sold, though lots of people tried to buy it. It was a carving of Mother. The way Mother looked to her. The woman broke it into pieces and bound them with frankincense and hid them all over her house, so Mother couldn’t leave it. Like I said, she knew how to do things she’d never been taught.

“When she died there, Mother was left alone. Waiting in the dark. Waiting for someone she could love. And for someone with the right kind of light. Years passed, years and years. Until one day, we came home. Edith and Dad. You and me.” His voice was sad and sweet. “Mother was so happy to see us.”





Sixty-Four




They rolled onto their sides to face each other. His cheek was blue and striped in wavering shadow. Young then old then young again. It was to the child Ennis that she spoke.

“This thing. It was in our house.”

“Mother. It was her house.”

“But. She . . .” Was there. Always there. Through the early years, goldening the light. And later, every time the house seemed to hold her too tightly or watch jealously as she fled toward the peaches. When floaters in her eyes made it seem as if something was moving where there was nothing, that was Mother, too. Waving at Guin through a window, watching over her shoulder as she wrote.

A corroded image: a woman with a shadow for a face, cradling her head as she floated up from sleep. What were you dreaming of?

“Ennis,” she said tightly, “what the fuck. What did she do to you? What did she make you do?”

“It’s not like that.”