The Children(31)

“Don’t worry. We won’t.”



* * *




Tucked up again beside Ennis, Guinevere closed her eyes. She turned and turned, too hot, too cold, too restless for sleep. In her mind Edith slipped into her dark bedroom and out again, back and forth. Queen of Flowers, Queen of Hell. He’s dead asleep, sweetie. She could not shake the feeling that, had she opened their door herself, she’d have found an empty bed in an empty room.

She thought again of what she’d seen on her mother’s feet. Though it didn’t seem possible, she was certain now. Clinging to their soles like the remnants of an unlikely dream, in defiance of the whiteout snow: blades of grass.





Seventeen

Five days until Mother




Had Guin almost died? Horribly, alone in the dark?

She asked herself this as she retraced her steps over dust and industrial decay, down the stairs and through the ground floor with its stink of wet paint, her skin as tender as if she’d just broken a fever. Brine filled her nose as she stumbled back into the light.

The sky was painful to look at. Breeze roughened her hair, and the water of the canal moved in softly blackening rills, like the coils of a rising creature. It was too bright, too much, her every sense felt flayed.

But the voice she’d heard was fading, and with it that moment of bizarre certitude: that it was Edith speaking to her. One word, called out over the borders of time and death.

Guin shuddered. She’d been saved by some other trespasser, that was all. A stranger she would never see again. She would forget how it felt, this cellular gratitude that made her ill and ecstatic at once. But now she made her way to the ocean, stripped to her underwear, and walked in.

Salt scorched her tongue as she stroked toward the horizon, the minty shape of the Statue of Liberty bobbing mirage-like to her right. The water iced her throbbing finger. When she was far enough out, she turned onto her back and closed her eyes.

Maybe, she thought, there’d been no voice at all. No shadowy figure. She might’ve inhaled some odorless hallucinogenic, a heavy-metal forever chemical that hovered in the factory like gas over a bog.

The hole, though. That was real. She knew, because she could still feel its breath. The starry exhalation of the end. She’d felt it once before: Death moving by her, so close and swift her skin goose-bumped in the breeze of its passage. Twenty-one years ago, on the night the Farmhouse reduced itself to a blast zone of ashes.

If she allowed it to, the past would approach. Stealing around her, a vaporous cat, black mouth opening until it yawned beneath her like that hole in the factory floor. Most days she pushed it away.

Here, adrift in dark water and the dazzling miracle of survival, she let it come.



* * *




The morning after the fire, not long past dawn, she and her brother were found in the woods two miles away. Speechless and stinking but physically unharmed, aside from the cuts and bruises of an active childhood. Some scars. Lots of scars. They’d grown up at the edge of the woods, after all. One strange thing: the injury on the boy’s hand. That was an older wound, though, nearly healed over.

By the time two strangers calling themselves the children’s maternal grandparents showed up at the hospital to claim them, Edith and Llewellyn had been dead for nearly twenty-four hours. The story was out, spreading fast, swelling in stature with each revelation. First it was a house fire in a remote patch of Vermont. Then a fire at Edith Sharpe’s famous Farmhouse. Then a fatal fire that broke out during a house party full of glittering attendees.

Finally, there was the slow march of names, delivered to a world waiting with mingled horror and thrill. Edith Sharpe, dead. Llewellyn Sharpe, dead. All of them, everyone at the party, Edith’s editor, another author, a stage actress and a sculptor and a model. Dead.

And what about the children? Ennis and Guinevere Sharpe. Wild ones, door seekers, travelers through that luminous dream city. Everyone knows they’re not really the kids in the books, though sometimes it’s hard to remember.

Alive. Just them. The sole survivors of a house fire so voracious there was nothing left to bury.

Though the fire hadn’t touched them it served as a crucible, burning away what little humanity their fame had allowed them. They weren’t people anymore, they were representatives, of their dead mother and her shuttered land. Reminders of what the world had lost when it lost Edith Sharpe.

Guin’s limbs heavied as she floated. She flipped over and found she had drifted. It took a long time to make her leaden way to shore.

There was a dog playing in the surf, owner watching from the rocks as Guin dragged herself from the water. The animal kept submerging herself to the chest and running out again. Twisting her body like a seal, biting at the foam, face split into a crocodile smile. Guin had never seen a happier creature.

She dried her hands on her abandoned shirt. The sun was gone, the air suffused with light. She sat in her underwear on the rocky sand, salt pricking her skin as it dried. Thoughts moved through her, mute as visions. She followed the distant passage of a container ship, like a moving sheet of Cubist glass.

The air was a still blue bath. The present had been scrubbed away by cold water. Her mind burrowed deeper, back and back.





Eighteen

1998




The morning after she met Edith in the darkened hall, Guinevere slept late and woke alone.