The Children(29)

Stiffly he made his way into the great room, where he shunted more logs onto the fire and stood there dripping, arms held out like a snowman’s sticks. When he thawed enough to speak all he said was, “Motherfuckin’ lock was frozen.”

The bad word carried a thrill, even debarbed by his accent—fookin’, they would repeat later, until it didn’t sound like a word at all. Right then it only made a pale thud against Guinevere’s consciousness. They were well and truly snowbound.



* * *




Guinevere couldn’t remember seeing Edith at all that day. She would try, afterward, to place her—with them at the window, watching Llewellyn struggle through the snow. Reading by the fireplace. Eating bacon egg and cheeses with them at dinnertime, by which point their dad had regained his cheer.

“Which of you will I eat first, when we’ve run out of meat?” he said. “You’ll be nice and tender, my fairy. But your brother will make for a bigger roast.”

“What about Mom? Let’s eat her.”

Guinevere wanted to see how he’d reply. He shook his head and said, “Salt and bitter herbs are none too nourishing. And you can’t eat me.” He slapped his belly twice. “I’m too pickled.”

Then he seized and held her across both arms like a party sub, pretending to take bites out of her side while she screamed.

Edith wasn’t with them at bedtime, either, when Guinevere lay with her brother beneath extra blankets and watched their father bank the fire.

He started a new book that night: The Magician’s Nephew. Llewellyn always began their nighttime readings sitting on the bed and ended on his feet, the words moving through him, animating him. He might rouse himself to shouting, move himself to weeping, invent a cast’s worth of character voices on the spot. He’d come out of it laughing at himself. Your old mad dad.

Tonight she saw strain at the corners of his mouth. It must have been the cast of the firelight. He squeezed every drop of genteel villainy out of Uncle Andrew, and made them shiver at the ringing of the bell that awakened Jadis.

Right as all hell was about to break loose he set the book on the mantel with a Joker stuck in as a bookmark. He kissed them both, Guinevere’s cheek and Ennis’s forehead. Ennis allowed it, for which Guinevere would always be glad. At the door Llewellyn hesitated, his beloved shape painted orange by firelight. He breathed in, as if to speak. Then he backed into the hall and softly closed the door.

He would not open The Magician’s Nephew again. It would stay right there on Ennis’s mantel, untouched. Maybe it was there until the very end. Guinevere forced herself to stop noticing it after a while.

Later she would see the book from time to time, face out at a bookstore or in a person’s hands on the subway, and wonder. The first chapters were etched in diamond type on her mind. She didn’t know what happened next, how it ended. She never would.



* * *




Guinevere dreamed. In her dream she stood before the blank wall in the bad room on the third floor, and it wasn’t blank anymore. There were seams in it that became a door, the light behind it warm and moving. Half awake, half asleep, she made her hand into a fist. Raised it.

Something hit her, hard and sharp, between the brow and socket of her right eye.

She woke up.

Ennis’s back was to her, rising and falling with sleep. Her eye felt wet and warm, and she touched it, checking her fingers by banked firelight. Too dim to say whether it was blood. She sat up and saw on her pillow the carved wooden hand. Her good luck charm. Before sleeping she’d tucked it under the pillow.

Ennis must’ve moved it. Only his hair showed above the blanket, a sight that made her feel too tender to disturb him. Tapping gingerly at her eye—bleeding, she was pretty sure—she crept to his bedroom door and opened it.

A ghost was moving past her, down the hall.

Guinevere had seen ghosts in the palazzo. Young women, shy and sad and not at all frightening. But this one slunk on bare feet. It moved with an offhand rhythm. This time she was afraid, until it turned its head and became Edith.

The fear didn’t go away completely. Edith’s eyes were an animal’s eyes, black with pupil.

“Hey.” A little sense came into her expression as she stepped closer, touching her daughter’s brow with two fingers.

Guinevere stayed very still as she did it. The place where her mother’s third finger should be, and wasn’t, held a kind of black static. A witchery. She was sure you’d feel something there, if you touched it.

“What happened?”

Edith seemed disarmed, somehow. As vulnerable as Guinevere had ever seen her. She lied anyway, out of habit. “I fell out of bed. I need Dad.”

“Your father’s sleeping.”

“Can you wake him up?”

Her mother looked toward her own bedroom door. “Yeah. Okay. Wait here.”

Guinevere watched her open the door just enough to slide through. She lined her feet up along two seams in the parquet, second position. She waited.

When Edith stepped out of the unlit room it was impossible not to recall what Llewellyn said about the first time he saw her: Edith as Persephone, emerging from the dark. Queen of Flowers. Queen of Hell.

“He’s dead asleep, sweetie. Come on. I’ll clean you up.”