The Children(117)

“What is it like? What is she?”

“I don’t . . .” He looked helpless, adult again. “I used to think goddess. An old fertility goddess, something like that. Now, I think, what if she was a mother? A human mother, from when it was harder to keep your children alive. I don’t know for sure. She’s . . .” He breathed in slowly, chest swelling. “Old.”

The picture was coming into focus. Detail by detail, like one of Llewellyn’s Polaroids. “Oh, my god.” She squeezed his hand. “Mom wasn’t even a real writer.”

Against everything else, how ridiculous that it could cause her pain. There must’ve been one last crooked piece of her that thought, At least my mother and I shared this.

“I’m not a real artist.” He whispered it, taking her other hand. “Guin, I didn’t plan it. I didn’t understand it until it was already happening. That’s not an excuse, it’s . . .”

She made a low and meaningless sound, meant to stop him. He sped on.

“I meant to smash up her typewriter. The night you told me she was sending you away, I had to punish her. Then something made me think of her necklace, on the way to the stairs.”

His tone had changed, become a fast and flat recitation. This was the part he’d practiced: the confession. “I unlocked their door with a hanger. I cut the chain off her neck with Dad’s old sewing shears.”

Guin saw the open metal mouth, moon colored in the dark. Scraping so close over Edith’s neck all the fine hairs of it must’ve stood up. Snap.

“I didn’t look too close at the necklace,” he said. “I was focused on the typewriter. But the second I stepped into her writing room the charm grew hot. Like a hot swimming pool, blood temperature. I looked at it and said to myself, I know where Edith’s finger went.

“Then the thing uncurled, and it was a key. I don’t know how I knew it, I just did. I walked to the wall, to the place where Dad took the photo, remember? There was nothing there, then a keyhole. When I turned the key, there was a door.

“Behind the door was a room, and in it a woman who looked—and I didn’t know this then, I found out later—she looked like Edith’s mother.”

“Like Bitsy?” Even as she said it, Guin understood. That was how Mother would’ve looked to Edith. It was so awful it was almost sweet. Edith and Ennis had been netted by the same trap, baited with the same promise. A love they could not get by natural means.

“It was only for a second, then she changed. She became Edith. Edith completely, except full of love. Like she’d look in a dream I might’ve had, when I was little. I was halfway to knowing she had everything to do with Dad changing and Anne dying and all the rest of those unlucky bastards, those artists who came to the Farmhouse to bend the knee and got ruined instead, and still I let Mother hold me. I was thirteen. I was feeling around in the dark.”

His face was luminous, remembering. “She knew things even you don’t know. She knew me. She held me and told me what I’d already guessed: I had a void in me, same as Edith. That was why I could come to her, using Edith’s key. But if I wanted to keep coming, I had to do what Edith did. What the cunning woman did before her. I had to sacrifice a piece of myself to make my own key. Then I would belong to her.”

But you belonged to me. Guin didn’t say it.

“When Mother told me how it worked, what it would cost—I liked the idea. All those sick, careless people who laughed when we got drunk and saw how we lived and did nothing. The people who kissed me and danced with me, and the ones who touched me or tried to back when I didn’t even understand it yet. Please, I said. Please, let me help you instead. Forget Edith, let me bring them to you, so you can drain them dry. I said . . .” He faltered, took a hitching breath. “I said, My sister will come, too, okay?”

He touched her cheek with his pillaged hand. “But you’re not like me and Edith, Guin.” His voice was so tender. “You’re the bright kind.”

Guin pulled her knees into her chest. She folded herself up small, like a child waiting out a lightning storm.

“You had those dreams, didn’t you? Mother was set on you. That’s why Edith wanted to send you away. She would’ve given in eventually, though. She would’ve traded you for book six in the end. The only way I could see to stop her doing it was to take her place. Become Mother’s child.

“After the Vogue shoot, after the last party, I went to her. I watched her destroy Edith’s key before I let her make mine.”

He looked at her through his shelf of dirty hair, the echo of some considering hunger in the angle of his neck. “The thing is, once I was truly Mother’s child, I could see you like she did. Sense you below us, glowing like a sacrifice. I knew then that she’d never give you up. I told her no. I said I’d kill myself first. And Mother said, ‘Sweetheart, Edith has nine more fingers.’”

The starry twilight had unhooked itself, was lowering into night. Guin thought, It’s because he wants it to. He doesn’t want me to see his face.

“I told Mother I would run with you. She loved me, she needed me, I thought if I threatened her she would bend. We always knew we’d have to run eventually. I wasn’t sure, though, how far her power spread. As far as the woods? As far as the world? Then she said something I remember word for word. She said, ‘As long as my house is standing, I will find her.’”