The Children(24)
She looked up and saw Edith in a third-floor window. Flattened to a featureless outline, raising a hand when she saw her daughter looking. Guinevere waved back, turned away.
Then a bolt of electric understanding hit her, tailbone to skull.
She looked again, and the window was empty. The figure had vacated its frame. But hadn’t its hair been long? Carved in dark waves, against the room’s paler dark? Like her mother as she used to be, before she cut off her hair. Guinevere must’ve seen her wrong.
What was Edith doing all day, up in that room? Working, Llewellyn told them. Give her some space.
Working on what?
* * *
Summer and autumn had come in creeping. Winter dropped like a sheet.
One day she and Ennis could keep warm by running hard. The next day it was Northeast Kingdom cold, the sky a vicious blue and the air shot through with enough snow to make it glitter. The grass froze so fast it went the verdant green of blanched spinach. The ring of protection that circled Llewellyn’s studio, woven of angelica and rosemary and bay, crisped overnight to dead sticks.
After a handful of these strange glittering days, Guinevere woke to a sky covered entirely in scalloped cloud. It brightened from slate gray to dark pearl and stayed there. A luminous, ominous sky.
In the kitchen Llewellyn stood propped against the counter, looking out. “What would you call that color?”
She thought about it. “Elephant leg.”
He grinned at her, pleased. “Well, that’s sorted. Let’s stay in today, shall we?” Then he looked back through the window, at the elephant sky. “On second thought, let’s get out while we can.”
* * *
They walked in the woods. Guinevere, Ennis, and their dad. They stuffed their pockets with pine cones and played Spud on the lawn. The wind bit every place it could reach. Without changing color, the sky grew heavier, pressing on the crowns of their heads.
Ennis had tried to act aloof with Llewellyn since learning he had other children, but he didn’t always remember. Out in the bracing day, he forgot.
After running a few laps around the house, their father shouting encouragement, they went inside. Llewellyn was building a fire when Edith blew in from a supplies run. Her eyes were bright, her skin scrubbed.
“They’re saying it’s gonna be a big one. The worst in years.” She set down a box that rattled. Red wine and Canadian Club, two cartons of Parliaments balanced on top.
“Who is? Those malingering porch sitters down the general store?” Llewellyn pulled out a wine bottle and palmed it, frowning. “It’s the national pastime round here. Predicting the next big one.”
Her expression darkened. “Fine. I’m a gullible idiot. Help me get the stuff in.”
Still holding the bottle, he followed her out, saying, “Edith. Edie. Come on, I didn’t mean—”
The door closed behind them. Guinevere wanted to stay inside, but Ennis said, “Let’s see what she got,” so she shoved her feet back into her boots.
Together they carried in coffee beans, pancake mix, fresh and powdered milk. Cans of fruit, heads of cabbage, bricks of bittersweet baking chocolate, bacon and potatoes and onions and eggs. Local apples and maple syrup and a pound of butter wrapped in grease paper. There were two grocery bags full of damp-smelling paperbacks and a sixty-four-pack of crayons and new waterproof gloves for everyone. Ennis’s had Transformers on them; Guinevere’s, Minnie Mouse. They looked at each other, nonplussed.
“They didn’t have your tea in, Llew. Just swill.” Edith set down a box of Lipton.
Firewood had been delivered a few days ago. Llewellyn sent the kids through the house with matchbooks and boxes of fat white candles, to be placed everywhere in case of a power outage. They were as ready as they were going to be.
Around nine p.m. Ennis said, “Look.”
Snow was falling. The night was so dark, the snow so quiet, they wouldn’t have noticed if it wasn’t clotting in the screens. This snow was nothing like the frigid powder that blew through the enamel-bright days preceding this one. It was soft and thick, gathering on the land like white fur. Slumping to earth and muffling the freeze-dried green. The wind picked up and snow hit the window in gobbets, making an unhealthy sound.
“Blow, winds,” Llewellyn murmured, “and crack your cheeks.” He drained his glass to the cubes. “Bedtime for ducklings.”
They went up the stairs, he and the children. Guinevere looked back once and saw her mother at the window, alone. At this angle the light turned it into a mirror. Edith’s face was reflected perfectly in the glass: absorbed, unreadable. Secretive. Looking out at the rising snow, she smiled.
Fourteen
1998
Snow fell all through the night and into the next day. Soft, relentless. It rimed the glass and blocked the doors and hung in the air like a dirty white sheet. Edith made a fire and stacked the secondhand books she’d bought on the coffee table. Llewellyn passed around cups of milky tea and taught everyone how to play whist. The wind rose and tossed the snow around so you couldn’t tell whether it was falling anymore.
That night Llewellyn put the children to bed in Ennis’s room to save on firewood. He’d stacked logs in the great room and on the front porch and on a tarp in the back of the car. Still he kept an anxious eye on their supply.