The Children(19)

Her head was stuffed with thoughts too big to name or hold. The time she spent traveling between road and lawn had the taffy-like consistency of time in a dream. She thought her whole family would be out on the grass with flashlights, calling her name, but the lawn was empty. The windows held only light.

Guinevere stood cold and hungry by the peach trees, until a flash of motion made her turn. A figure barreled toward her, caught and held her. Ennis, smelling awful and breathing hard into her hair.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I called you a liar. I’m sorry I hit you. I’ll never do it again. Never.”

She’d been so angry with him. That was gone.

“It doesn’t matter that Dad has other kids,” he said. “We only need each other. It’s only us, okay?”

He was the one crying, the one trying to assure himself. His face was wet and scared, while she felt calm and still.

Tomorrow she would wake up and pick a cleanish shirt and eat her cereal in the great room. Then she’d go looking for her dad. He could’ve had a dozen daughters stashed in a dozen houses, but she was the one whose cuts he stitched, the one who told her to squeeze her eyes tight, tighter, when he read the mermaid’s lagoon bit in Peter Pan.

Right now, though, her brother needed her to nod and say, “Okay. You have to promise, though, that we’ll stay here. We’re not going back to New York.”

“Good,” he said fervently. “I don’t care anymore what Dad wants.”

“And we have to build our house. We have to be ready.”

“For what?”

She blinked and the black bear was waiting in the dark. Paws up, rising slow as a curtain. If one day you’ve got to run like hell. “I don’t know yet. We’ll know when it gets here.”

Never had she been so bold with her brother. He nodded soberly, allowing it this once.

An hour later she was in her bedroom, exhausted and awake. She sat a long time at the window, sure that if she waited long enough, something would happen below. The woods were a storybook, full of great bears and tiny cottages, mysterious men and clever dogs with no name.

The moon lit the peach trees and all was quiet. The woods had no more tales tonight.





Eleven

1998




Summer reached its height. The heat was heavy as a carpet, the clouds moved like ruminants. The berries the children ate off the bushes were so heavy with juice their velvet capillaries popped at a touch, staining their hands to the wrist.

Llewellyn became minorly obsessed with the orchard. Despite conditions of absolute neglect the fruit fattened, ripened, fell, and rotted, luring in a hovering apiary of bees. Their nectar beaded into syrup around the stem, a sweetness that hit your back teeth like ice cream.

In July they ate peaches until their mouths tasted like Sweet’N Low. In August Llewellyn baked tarts and pies and buckles. He made inventively flavored preserves—peaches with thyme, almond extract, Earl Grey. Horrible! He was the only one who ate them, with knobby loaves of homemade soda bread. For all his efforts he barely made a dent in the harvest. All the fruit that was left by September belonged to the bees.

That first summer hung on like a drunken belle, perfumed and raging. Autumn came on tiptoes, running fiery fingers through the leaves.

One night in early October Guinevere and her brother lay belly down in front of the great room’s cold fireplace, playing a desultory game of Sorry! Llewellyn was flat on his back beside them, whiskey glass balanced on his ribs, humming “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” with such resonance she felt it through the boards.

When Edith walked in, stopping a few paces past the doorway, neither child looked up. Ennis mumbled, “Sorry,” sending one of his sister’s pawns back to start.

Llewellyn jumped to his feet, tumbler hitting the floor. “Edith!”

They looked. Their mother stood on the other side of the couch. She had the distant expression of a person listening for music from another room. Her right arm was stiff at her side, her left curled against her chest, palm up, as if cradling an invisible egg. In a steady, empty voice she said,

“I’ve lost my finger.”

Guinevere’s eyes went to the cradled hand. What she’d taken for shadow was blood.

“You’ve—what?” Llewellyn strode toward her. “Jesus God!” He reached for her, stopping short with his own hand raised. “It’s . . . where is it?”

“I don’t know.” He might’ve been asking what she’d dreamed the night before, for all the urgency in her voice.

“You don’t—how did you—” His voice trembled and spiked. “Where did you lose it? Edith?”

She shook her head, then said, “Out.”

“Out. Out where? Love?” When she didn’t answer, he turned to the children. The whites of his eyes looked yellowish in his drained face. “Go find it. Now.”

“Find her finger?” Ennis hadn’t stood, just rolled onto his back like a stunned pill bug. “Where are we supposed to look?”

Llewellyn’s voice rose to a panicked shout. “I don’t know, do I? Follow the blood!”

Guinevere caught her brother by the hand and pulled him to his feet. They slid sideways past their mother, who stood like a kidnapped idiot in a fairy story. Bloody and deranged and—god, was she smiling? Yes, faintly.