The Children(23)

“I decided,” she said crisply, “it was time to tell my side of the story.”

God, she sounded like a pop star in a love triangle, dishing to E! Her side. There was only her side. Ennis wasn’t talking, and everyone else was dead.

Except now he was talking. That’s why she was here, in this lovely space with this lovely woman, who could be off writing about something real, rather than sitting around listening to a D-list stranger obfuscate. “But I’m not really a stranger,” she muttered. “I’m everyone’s best friend.”

“What?” Penelope looked unnerved.

Shit. Okay. “I’m saying—that’s been my role in the culture, right?” Guin could feel the stretch of her cheeks. “People feel like they already know me. Lots of kids grew up wanting to be me. Then my life blew up, and I experienced the opposite of that. Pity, morbid fascination. The glamour of tragedy, all that. I decided”—she circled back to the start, kicking hard under the surface to make it—“it was time to tell my side of the story. Add my voice to the stories people have been telling about me, all these years.”

“Starting with your mother.” The journalist’s expression was serene.

“Right.” Guin resisted the urge to fuss with her cup. “Starting with her.”

“Not to be crass, but being a child strangers identified with, felt ownership of, that must’ve been a mindfuck.” Penelope took a breath, opening her mouth to say more. Then she burped. Not too loud, and not so quiet, either. “Oh, lord.” She pressed a hand to her mouth. “Talk about crass.” Bending over her bag, she dug around and plucked out a tin of Altoids. “Please forgive me. I’m in breastfeeding mode, I’ve been eating like a Viking to keep up.”

Guin made a happy face, tense and bright. “Don’t worry about it! How old’s your baby?”

The journalist beamed like a Madonna. “Almost four months. I’m just back from leave.”

“That’s wonderful. Are you a good mother?” She heard herself and gripped her cup. “I’m sorry. That came out in a tangle. I meant to say, I bet you’re a good mother.”

Penelope sharpened. It was subtle, but Guin had been interviewed enough times to know what it looked like when a journalist scented blood. “I hope I’m a good mom. I’ve got a good role model for it. I was raised by an excellent mother.”

The women watched each other. Sun through the windows heated Guin’s hair.

“So was I,” she replied. “Until I was orphaned at age eleven. I think that trauma has defined the way I respond to notions of motherhood.”

Penelope looked chastened, though there was an edge to it. Emotional manipulation worked better on stupider people. “Makes sense,” she said succinctly. “You were talking about the responsibility you feel to your mother’s work. Speaking as a fan here, does that extend to seeing the series completed? Do you think readers like me will ever get our hands on the final book?”

The question of the sixth book was evergreen. Guin could field it in her sleep.

“My mother worked on a typewriter up to her death. She left no digital record behind, and any notes or drafts she may have written were lost. We can’t ask—we can’t ask Jonathan Froud, either.”

A sour taste on her tongue, and a brief pause to acknowledge the death of Edith’s editor. One of the lions of children’s publishing, reduced in his afterlife to a footnote.

“I’m open to it,” she concluded. “Very. When the right storyteller presents themselves, I’ll be thrilled to see it done.”

“How about you?” Penelope’s fingers pressed into her stomach, absently. “Would you ever consider writing the sixth book?”

Guin smiled. Reflexive lift of the cheeks. Reconsidering the woman in front of her: the beautiful clothes, the exhausted eyes. The sense of intelligence held in check, for the sake of a powerful friend and a fluff piece. For a moment she was sure she heard a secret knowledge in the words. A mockery. She was a journalist, after all, heat-seeking.

Then Penelope’s wrist twitched, eyes flicking quickly to her watch and up again, and Guin’s certainty receded. There was no cruelty here. Just a magazine writer, interested enough if a little careless, asking an idle question of a nobody. A great woman’s daughter.

She laughed lightly.

“God, no. I’m the black sheep of the Sharpe family. The only one without any talent.”





Thirteen

1998




Dusk, mid-November. Llewellyn set tin cans along a sawhorse and put a gun in Ennis’s hand.

Ennis looked at it, rolling his wrist to catch the light on its metal. Guinevere waited for hers, but Dad shook his head.

“Let’s get some more muscle on those twigs first, my fairy.”

It had been a threadbare kind of day, windless and crawling. The evening that followed had the soft opacity of milk glass. Llewellyn showed Ennis what to do then stepped back, draping an arm around Guinevere. His breath smelled sour and his mood was high. When Ennis took his shot—missing the cans by a mile, hissing at the rifle’s recoil—all the mad chorusing crickets went silent.

It was as if the whole night had turned off. In those noiseless moments before they began again, Guinevere heard something. Felt it. A waiting feeling, a kiss at the back of the neck.