The Children(120)

“Then you will be exactly who you want to be,” he said fiercely. “You owe them nothing. Nothing. So long as you never have children, you won’t owe anyone shit. You can be a writer again, you won’t have to hide. I’ve been going about it so stupidly, but I’ve figured it out now. I’ve given Mother so many doors, one at a time. Why not a thousand? Why not ten thousand doors, all at once? I have a plan. A deal we can make, with Mother. We’ll be happy, all three of us. Guin. Do you believe me?”

She thought she’d already stopped fighting. But when she let go of that final resistance, she understood how hard she’d been working to be someone she wasn’t made to be. Relief wiped that person clean away. A new road opened at her feet: a greased and glorious slide into a place past empathy, beyond regret.

No, before them. A second childhood.

Every child is an artist. Anne said that once. The line had come to seem trite, if sweet. Guin realized it was neither. Children and artists take. They soak up the world, skinless, defenseless. They hoard and they steal: information, incident, gesture. Like Ninth City pickpockets, they’ll take the words right out of your mouth.

Children use what they take to build their grown-up suits, inch by inch. Artists use it to make things nobody knew to ask for. In this second childhood Guin wouldn’t waste one second on growing up. She would do, with anything that hurt her, what Anne told her to do: Use it.

The moon looked down on the Sharpe kids, that lovely Marla moon. Hanging on the dark, here and there then all around them, were freckles of moving, blinking gold. Guin breathed in the mysterious odor of lightning bug: ozone and clean dirt. The same in Mother’s land as it was outside of it.

Ennis’s smile was small and fleeting, but of course she saw it. Anticipating her brother was once the work of her life. “I’ll tell you everything,” he said. “First, though. Come meet Mother.”



* * *




Their linked hands swung between them as they walked. Guin could see moonlight through the trees, expanding until it became the lit top of the orchard, its fruit-heavy boughs tipped white. Mist ran over the ground and stirred around the bases of the peach trees. And beyond all of that, the Farmhouse.

“Guinevere! Ennis!”

Edith’s voice, strong and clear. The whole night existed for her to call their names through it.

Ennis said, “Come on,” and they ran through the grass, wet and green as naiads’ hair.

The figure waiting for them held the back door open with her hip. She wore clothes Guin recognized. Fatigues and a black T-shirt, silver moons in her ears. Her hair was short and black, her feet long and bare, toes pressed into the soft wood of the threshold. The dark house behind her was full of good things: a fireplace big enough to stand inside, fronted by a pincushion couch. Ornate wooden staircase, kitchen hung with black cowboy skillets like animal heads on the wall.

Mother wore Edith’s face lightly. Or maybe she just did different things with it. Brows up in soft black arches, smiling as they came, her teeth white against the dim of the doorway.

“Guinevere.”

It really was Edith’s voice. That carbonated sweetness, that hoarseness at the base, all the sharpness in it filed away. Mother opened her arms and Guin stepped inside them. Her skin was warm and still. She said, “Shh, shh. Bright girl.”

They held each other in the doorway, Guin outside and Mother in. Though they stood eye to eye now, it was just as Guin thought it would be. Fitting her head in that soft nook between shoulder and neck, against that warm, still skin.

Mother pulled back to see Guin’s face. Her eyes and earrings caught the starlight, and when she spoke her breath was scentless. “Almost there.”

Guin was ready. Afraid, too. She braced her back against the scariest version of how it might go. When Mother’s lips peeled back like a horse’s lips, revealing a horse’s flat teeth, she found the reality was scarier.

Guinevere Sharpe held her left hand out to meet her future, exactly as she’d offered it on a warm spring evening an eternity ago, when a man she was already forgetting proposed on his knees. Mother’s breath felt whiskery on her fingertips. Her own breath came in thin bursts, fear embroidering her vision with a fine silver netting. She clung with the other hand to her brother’s and readied herself for the crush, the wrench, the sever.

But Mother loved her too much for that. In the end it didn’t hurt at all.

When it was done the children walked into their Mother’s house. The three stood together awhile, marveling. In the kitchen onions melted, spitting golden oil. Music played from the great room in a bittersweet big-band swoon. Guinevere laughed with relief, swaying with her family in the dark.





Epilogue




An assistant met them in the lobby. Clean-shaven, no more than twenty-three. His eyes flicked between their faces.

Guin wore a suit the color of charcoal dust. Her hair was knotted at the neck. She wore rings on seven of her fingers, all but the thumbs. Ennis, too, wore a suit, though his was wrinkled and thinning at the elbows.

What are you, the Shining twins? That was the first thing their publicist said, when they met her on the street.

They looked wilder, Guin thought, than they had as children. It was the polish on top that did it. Like raw emeralds glazed to a shine.

In the mirrored elevator she could see the assistant’s gaze turned resolutely upward. When the doors opened on sixteen he turned smoothly to let them out first, taking the opportunity to cast an eye discreetly over their hands. “Right this way,” he murmured.