The Children(119)

Everything they’d wanted when they were children. He was offering her a child’s imagining of a life. Quests, adventures. Beds of moss beneath the stars.

“That’s not real life, En.” She spoke as gently as she could. He looked at her reproachfully.

“In real life Edith stripped us. She made me hate everything about myself because she’d already taken it and given it away. Every day someone reads a Ninth City book for the first or the tenth or the hundredth time, and they take from us. They love her for what she did to us. Not in spite of it, because of it. These people who think they know us, who are always with us, walking around in our heads. Don’t you feel them?”

Slowly Guin shook her head. She hadn’t been that little girl for years and years, who carried the public eye like a brand on her neck. “I learned to tune them out. I had to.”

“I never learned. Since the day that woman kissed me in the woods, the only place I’ve ever felt alone is here.”

Before she could fully metabolize the horror of that statement, he went on.

“I’m helping them, the people I take from. I don’t let Mother do what she did to Llewellyn anymore.” His eyes held that prophet’s sheen she knew so well from their youth. On a grown man it looked like madness. “She just takes a little bit of that . . . hunger, that thing that makes a person so famished and dissatisfied they have to make things so other people will look at them, the way Dad needed to be looked at. Is that a happy thing to carry around? That hunger? Well.” He said it ruefully, with love and sorrow. “Is it?”

She stared at him. Nobody after the Farmhouse had ever guessed at her ambition. That carnivorous shoot inside of her that she tried first to starve, then tame. Hiding beneath the mantle of artist’s child, when she wanted, always, to be the artist. “What are you talking about?”

“Look.” He tipped his chin. “Look all around us. The best parts of this place are you. You actually have what Edith had to take. And all this time you’ve been hiding it.”

It blew open with a bang. The black box inside the black box: Ennis, smeared with smoke. You have to stop writing stories. Promise me.

“Because you told me to!” Her anger rose up at last. “It was the last thing you ever said to me, and I never knew why! What’s changed, En? Why now?”

“Your memoir.” A faint, tolerant emphasis on the word. “Candy got me an early copy. I read it in a day.”

She glared at him, suddenly nervous. “And?”

“And it’s a bedtime story. That you told yourself. Lying the way a kid lies. Lies that are wishes.” His face was lantern-lit with tenderness. “I read it and remembered all these things I never think about. The way you used to drink, sometimes, to sleep. That whole routine you had, to keep yourself safe at night. The divining hand under your pillow and your shirt turned inside out and those same three books lined up in the proper order by your bed. Nobody to kiss you good night or make you brush your teeth but me. I swear I thought I’d kept the worst of it off you. I read the memoir and I knew I was wrong. I couldn’t protect you from any of it.”

“But you did! You always protected me.” It struck her then. The question her anger had kept at bay, all these years. “Who protected you, Ennis?” A horrible flicker of faces in her mind, Edith and Jonathan and the kissing woman in the woods, everyone who’d soiled him with their oily fingerprints. “Who protected you?”

He said, “Mother.”

Guin went still. Later she would look back and believe it was then that she decided. It was probably earlier, though. The moment Ennis opened the door. Or before that, when she walked Mother’s woods and saw those unlikely stars.

“What if we take too much?” She didn’t hear it yet, the way she was speaking as if she’d already joined him. “Like—like with Marla Kaufman.”

His face held sorrow but no remorse. “Some people are only hunger.”

“Then what about—”

“Dad? He was the hungriest man I ever met.”

“I was going to say Anne.”

He slumped. “That was how Edith did it.”

“Before Mother killed her. For not giving her exactly what she wanted.”

His face was immovable. “Mother will give you everything. But it’s an even trade.”

All her objections felt slippery. They scattered like pick-up sticks. “We can’t—I mean, we can’t really control it, we can’t anticipate exactly what . . .”

Ennis caught her by the shoulders. His eyes the blue of a Hockney pool. “If. Occasionally. It goes badly. Guinevere, who cares? Who cares?”

She blinked at him, feeling around for a response. No, feeling for her own conviction. And she breathed in sharply, raked by a realization so subversive it was practically reprogramming.

She wasn’t really asking him to account for all the crimes committed and those yet to come. She was asking for a fiction she could live inside, as airtight as he could make it. Because she didn’t care. Not in her raw and ravenous middle, that all her years of adult life had failed to civilize.

Her heart beat so painfully. This heart that had loved Hank and grieved Llewellyn and held out for Edith far longer than it should have. Could it truly be so wicked?

“I can’t be like her, En. I don’t want to be Edith.”