The Children(18)

There was a bedtime story Llewellyn told them. At the end of it a little man dressed all in red dances around a red fire set before a red-painted cottage. He sings his own name aloud and, in revealing it, undoes the wicked curse he has set. Confusedly Guinevere pushed the tale aside, as the caretaker opened the door.

The room behind him gave a wonderful impression of warmth and cooking smells. He didn’t invite her in, only touched the dog’s head. “Runaway or lost boy?”

“Lost girl,” she said resentfully.

He smiled at her, not quite warm and devoid of sympathy. “Wait right there.”



* * *




His car was blue, not red. It smelled of French fries, and fast-food wrappers covered the floor. He was just a man after all, never mind his riddling talk and his beautiful dog. The animal sat in the passenger seat, head out the window, tongue flagging in the breeze. Guinevere slouched with crossed arms in the seat behind.

“You sure you weren’t running away?”

“I’d have my stuff if I were.”

“Sure.” He drove one-armed, lazily. “Six pairs of underwear and a bag of apples. Life’s not a storybook. You have to plan your escape months ahead. Years. It’s not hunger you worry about first, it’s exposure.”

He was talking to her like she wasn’t a kid. It softened her. “Exposure?”

“To the elements. Rain, wind, cold. Let’s say you’re . . .” He considered her in the rearview mirror. “Four years old.”

“I’m six!” It was almost the truth. It would be soon.

“Let’s say you’re six. If you want half a chance—half a percent of a chance—of running away properly, you plan ahead. Far ahead. Not the fun parts, what you’ll pack and how you’ll slip away. Plan what you’ll do when you get there. How to stay warm and dry. Then how to feed yourself. And if one day you’ve got to run like hell, you can do it. Start planning now and you might be ready around the time you’re eight.”

Eight? She couldn’t tell if he was teasing her. “Eight is not very old. Also, I don’t want to run away. I love our house.”

“It’s not your house.”

“Yes, it is,” she said irritably. “My bed is like a queen’s bed and all the rooms smell pretty. Every day I eat my cereal in the big fireplace room and every night I leave my window open so I can hear the woods.”

“Uh-huh. And does your whole family love the house? All four of you?”

She hesitated. “My dad says it gives him bad dreams.”

The air in the car tensed. Barely but perceptibly, like water beneath the feet of a skimming insect. “Bad dreams,” the man repeated.

“Yeah. My mom made him promise we’d stay for a year, though.”

“You’ll stay longer.” He spoke definitely. “If you outstay summer, you’ll be here as long as she wants.”

“As who wants? My mom?”

A faint pause. “Yeah.”

“I guess if we go back to New York, we could run away and live in a theater.” She’d gotten this idea from Llewellyn, who claimed to have done just that after running off to London at sixteen. He’d been working for the theater as an assistant set painter and dogsbody—a word that never failed to please her—which probably made it easier to get away with.

“Don’t plan for New York.” The man spoke sharply. “Plan for here.”

He was watching her in the mirror. Waiting. Hands guiding the car around twisty night-dark curves while his eyes stayed on hers. Guinevere had the thought, suddenly, that she should be listening better. Asking smarter questions. That maybe she wasn’t understanding what conversation they were really having. She nodded. He looked back at the road just in time to ease the car to a stop and turn off its engine.

Fear knotted in her throat. The taste of it changed when she saw what he’d stopped for.

A black bear crouched on the road ahead. Its fur singed by the arc of the headlights, its eyes flashing sonar green.

The bear was bigger than she thought an animal could be in a woods shared with houses and people. More real. The realest thing she’d ever seen. As they watched it drew itself up, up, stretched to its fullest height, pawing at the air in a pantomime of rending, then going stone still.

They waited. The dog in the passenger seat had drawn her head inside. The car filled with the sough of trees and the dog’s panting breath. If the bear made a sound they didn’t hear it. Guinevere didn’t feel six or eight or any age. She didn’t feel right now or back then or angling toward some unnamed future. The feeling of waiting for the black bear to decide was one that defied shaping.

Finally the creature dropped its lofted paws to the asphalt, swung its great head, and slipped into the trees on the far side of the road.

The dog whined quietly. The man turned his car back on and drove.

Guinevere couldn’t see the house when he stopped, just its lights through a scrim of trees. She climbed out without speaking, then remembered to turn and say, “Thank you.”

He shrugged. “Wish I could’ve helped.”

“You did,” she began, but his car was already moving away. The last she saw of them was the dog’s red ears and long tongue, tasting the moving air.