The Children(28)

Guin breathed thickly and watched it come. Lofting and lowering, carving secret patterns into the air. Its buzzing was faint, but it set off a tremor at the back of her skull. A vision: Ennis in a doorway, reaching for her. The air behind him shimmering and alive.

Slowly she raised her hand, palm out like a sleepwalker. The honeybee hovered, dipped, and alit.

Its weight made it seem less insect than animal. Its little feet tickled, tippy-toeing over the pads of her fingers, almost too tender to bear, then up and over the back of her hand. Down her index finger and across, turning until it sat on her ring finger like a second, gaudier setting. She breathed lightly through her teeth, tracing its alien anatomy.

Pain hit like an itch. Guin snapped her wrist instinctively, startling the little asshole into the air. It had stung her, right above her engagement ring. Stupid, so stupid, what did she think it would do?

Dying now, the bee buzzed back in the direction it had come from. Toward a shape standing motionless in the half-light.

Guin stopped breathing. The figure stood beside a metal strut that curved from floor to ceiling like the rib bone of a whale. They were facing away, Guin thought. She was looking at their back. A moment passed, and she was equally sure they were looking right at her. Another moment and she didn’t believe the shape was a person at all.

The sun must’ve been setting, the light must’ve bullied its way through dirty glass, because the figure was cast in a dim orange glow. The throb in her finger sharpened, cut her free of time’s flow. In that unmoored instant she called her brother’s name.

It was a raw appeal, full of hope and fear. A younger Guinevere, calling across the years. The sound of it frightened her.

The figure drew away from the strut that partially concealed it. A person, unmistakable.

Then—gone. The person, the light.

Guin startled back, arms out, muscles seizing with the shock of it. “What the hell.” She whispered it angrily, laughing under her breath.

A minute passed. Nothing happened. Tentatively she approached the place where the figure had been.

Her head started to ache, a gentle pressure. A few steps more and all the little noises she’d been hearing without hearing them—creaks and distant water, the occasional shouting from a baseball diamond somewhere below—dropped out.

Another step. She was close, her armpits prickling with heat. Closer.

A few steps short of the strut, Guin stopped. Turned heel. Ran.

Her stung finger pulsed as she wound around abandoned materials and odd construction. The traces of a bygone enterprise, not entirely wiped away. She nearly collided with a pile of dusty brick, hip high, skirting it to move along the eastern wall. A few more steps, and a voice called out:

“Stop.”

Guin stopped. Heart pumping terror chemicals, eyes prismatic. She knew that voice. She knew that voice. It did not belong to Ennis.

Then she saw what lay in front of her feet.

A hole. Not a break in the floor, a circular hole, plunging down into dark. Eight feet across, if she had to guess. It was close to the wall and probably ran all the way through the first floor. Maybe it held grain, back in the day. Sawdust, or dry cement.

She saw it in black and white, how it would have been if she’d run a couple steps farther. Flickering like a trick in an ancient cinema reel: The woman is here. The woman is gone.

The voice that stopped her was a woman’s voice, calling across an impassable divide. It was—Guin swore it—her mother’s voice.





Sixteen

1998




The back door opened to reveal a wall of snow higher than Guinevere’s shoulder. Llewellyn considered it, and said, “Plan B.” Following a lengthy battle with the glass in its old wooden frame, he climbed out the kitchen window.

The children watched with delighted envy as he put down one booted foot, then the other. For a wondrous moment it seemed the snow’s surface, tempered by sun into a blinding crust, would carry his weight. Then he went through to mid-thigh.

Llewellyn shouted, then laughed. His body was encased in a pair of rubbery overalls he’d found in the attic. Waders, he called them. He was determined to make it to his studio and its stash of proper tea.

“What are you, nuts?” Edith said when he proposed this journey the night before. She gestured out a window. “Even if you can get through the snow, you won’t be able to open the door.”

That sealed it. Guinevere’s parents were engaged in a brittle kind of war. They smiled hard smiles and spoke in prickling tones and did exactly what the other told them not to do.

She and Ennis watched their father’s slow, high-stepping progress. They watched him tire, saw his slapstick struggles slow into a dogged grind through snow as indifferently vicious as open water. He stopped throwing thumbs-ups over his shoulders. In black coat and waders, he fought his way through a changeless white sea.

Ennis squeezed Guinevere’s hand when their dad reached the studio. Her breath made excited clouds on the glass; she kept rubbing them away. They watched Llewellyn bow over the knob and stay there, unmoving, his posture that of a man recognizing his own folly. He turned, revealing a crescent of chapped face, and began the slow return.

He almost couldn’t lever himself back through the window. When he finally did, he rolled clumsily over the counter and landed hard on the floor. His face was red and white and rubbery, scorched into Silly Putty by his journey through the void.