The Children(118)

The grass was colorless in the dark. The stars were fat salt flakes. Guin looked at them because it scared her too much, right then, to look at him.

“It was like she’d pushed a seed of an idea right into my brain. I was too young to know that was exactly what she’d done. I backed up, away from her, and she—” Ennis paused, resumed in a hoarse whisper. “Remember the bees, in the hall? That was Mother. I didn’t know she could . . . but she did, she changed right in front of me, like a—firework. I ran from her, down to the second floor. I banged on all the doors, yelling at them to wake up, please, wake up.”

His voice rose into a plea, rough and childish and twisted with pain. Guin knew then that the night of the fire was a room he carried inside himself, whose door would not stay locked.

“I got you out and went straight back inside. I thought if I didn’t move fast enough Mother would—scoop you out, the way she and Edith did to Dad. Make you hollow. The bees hounded me, they made it so I couldn’t think, couldn’t hear. They didn’t sting me, though, not once. Not when I turned the gas on and blew out the pilot light. Not when I started the fire. Mother wasn’t trying to stop me. She watched me set that fire, and she made sure nobody woke up to put it out. What I’d really done, what she wanted me to do, was free her. Burn down the cage the cunning woman made.

“I didn’t know that until it was done. Mother isn’t bound to a house anymore. She’s bound to me. The only key to Mother’s room is made of me, and I can make a door anywhere. And that is why I left you and never came back.”





Sixty-Five




In the grass, in the dark, a little wary of each other now. Guin said, “You love her. Don’t you?”

Ennis blinked at her a few times. “I’m not made for ordinary love.”

She sat up. Her lips trembled so she could barely form the word. “What?”

“I’m a . . .” Half his mouth went up, a horrible marionette lift. “You know what I am. What I did. Our parents and Jonathan and—all those people, seven people . . .”

Guin shook her head, a small dizzying motion. “What she made you do. What you were tricked into doing.”

“It’s more than that night. What about after? I could’ve chosen to die.” He yanked savagely at the grass. “But I didn’t. Our parents were gone and you were—I couldn’t risk going near you. What I had, all I had, was Mother.”

Guin flinched. Ennis didn’t notice. He said, “I think I would have died, though. I couldn’t keep hurting people. After I ran away from boarding school I lived in a state of obliteration. Blackout by any means. When I wasn’t with Mother I was working shit jobs, making just enough to live. I drank, all the money I made spilled out of my pockets like water. I got mugged one night, beat up a little. I kept yelling, Do it! Kill me, you cowards!” He laughed, a chilling titter. “I think it scared them off.”

She felt him moving away from her, into the memory. Sensed that for a long time he’d been moving away from everyone, punting out into a lonesome sea. His very cells irradiated by what he knew, what he’d done.

“I wandered around awhile, bleeding and drunk, until I found a green place. Soft. I lay down and fell asleep there, and when I woke I was in a garden.

“I couldn’t hear anything. No cars or voices, just that heavy sound summer makes. That dense kind of vibration. I thought I was in Mother’s country. Or the Ninth City. Or Heaven. I lay there beneath—something, some kind of flowering plant that goes up and comes down like,” he showed her with his hand, an indecipherable swoop. “It smelled so good. There were so many bees I felt like I was in the orchard again. I kept my eye on the fattest one. This little black-and-gold grub with wings, tracked him flower to flower. Taking little bits of nectar here and there. And it . . .” He laughed softly. “It saved me, Guin. The answer had been there all along, in the orchard beneath her windows. Edith couldn’t see it.”

She swallowed dryly. “What answer?”

“No more sacrifices,” he said. “Only—tithes.”

“Tithes?”

He didn’t elaborate. “I began painting again. I hadn’t touched a brush since before the fire. I didn’t want to use what Mother gave me, not like that. After the garden I began to experiment. I learned that I can make anything into a door. I started hiding them in the pieces I sold. Later I’d put a door into every show. It draws them in. The right people, the bright ones, they’re drawn into a kind of communion with it. In that state, that almost dream state, Mother can reach over the threshold and take what she needs. A little bit. Like a bee in a garden.”

“So you only take a piece of a person’s soul.”

He seemed so fragile, one foot in another world. When she said this, his gaze clarified.

“What about our souls?” This, too, had the ring of recitation. A thing he’d asked himself many times. “Our faces and our names and our . . . didn’t we deserve to be whole? To have”—he struck his chest hard with his palm—“a place inside us no one could reach? This is that place. Where no one can get to us, a place that’s ours.”

His eyes shone like lenses. Blue eyes, such an ordinary miracle. Like the sky was inside of him. “I’m so tired, Guin. I don’t want fame anymore. I want this. There’s so much more than what you’ve seen. There’s a forest and a city and a sea so shallow you can swim forever and still touch the sand. There are cliffs of white stone. And secrets. There are stories in the land, we can follow them to their roots. Mother will send us on quests if we ask her, our whole lives could be an adventure. It’s everything we ever wanted.”