The Children(32)
The fire had died in the night. The air was so cold it tasted like mineral water. But the sun was back, shining from an empty sky. It hung in every window as she moved through the house, blanket cape dragging behind her.
No one was in the great room. No one in the kitchen making coffee or tea. She looked out over the back lawn. The wreckage her father made of the snow between house and studio had been shaken out like a bedsheet by the wind.
She heard her mother’s voice. The great room wasn’t empty after all, Edith was hidden by the sofa. Guinevere circled its back and found her mother crouched in front of it, speaking softly.
She would make this trip again in her mind, many times. Toward the old green couch then around it, in a room dusty with light. Edith on her knees, voice gentle, holding Llewellyn’s hand. Guinevere took a few more steps and saw him. Her dad.
He looked correct, if tired. Llewellyn on too little sleep, at the end of his stash of acceptable tea. His eyes open against that hunting sun. When he turned them on his daughter—they were Ennis’s eyes, too, and her own—she felt fear.
It was not of any particular flavor. Not cut by other emotion or fueled by some discovery. Pure. He looked at her briefly, then turned his eyes away.
Guinevere kept staring. Watching him fixedly, waiting for the fear to explain itself or dissipate. He mumbled something to Edith, who nodded and looked at their daughter.
“Your dad’s not feeling well.”
Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes had a plastic shine. She could’ve been the sick one, if she weren’t humming with . . . not health. Something else, hectic and barely suppressed. There was no record in her face of the night before.
“Give him some space today,” she added. Then, to Llewellyn, “This’ll teach you to go flailing around in two feet of snow.”
That bit was said not for his benefit but Guinevere’s. To comfort her, or at any rate stop her wondering. Sometimes the things grown-ups said and did were as mysterious as the choreographed rise of larks from a hedge. And sometimes they were clear as glass.
* * *
Llewellyn didn’t worsen as the days went by. Nor did he get better. He wasn’t coughing or sneezing or calling for soup. He didn’t soak his feet in a hot bucket or breathe mentholated steam from a covered mixing bowl or at the slightest provocation bellow, Ill urged to one that is so ill! before falling into a fretful simmer.
In other words, he wasn’t just unlike himself but unlike the person he was when he wasn’t himself.
“Dad.”
He didn’t turn from the window.
“Dad.”
“What.” He said it flatly. His reflection watched hers in the glass. She was a tiny girl inside it, far away.
“Will you read to me?”
“Can’t. I’m sick, remember?”
“Oh.” She put one foot on top of the other. “D’you want some soup?”
“You know how to make soup now, Guinevere?”
No humor in his voice, no my fairy. It was true no one in the house could cook but him. Just this morning he’d rattled around the kitchen in a bathrobe and a terrible humor, chopping potatoes with angry thunks, muttering, I live with three children.
Softly she said, “No.”
Some of the air went out of him. “Oh, don’t mind your old man. I’m only dead tired.” He faced her, smiling, eyes not in it and mouth bracketed by hard lines. “So tired I don’t even dream. Just—pass out.”
She chewed her lip. He’d said something about dreaming, that night she listened through the door. “Do you . . . mind it?”
“Let’s make a deal,” he said instead of answering. “Let’s fall asleep tonight at precisely 9:01 and meet in dreamland. Somewhere pleasant. Venice.” The word colored with longing, maritime blue. “We’ll walk the bridges and eat gelato, and I’ll feel all better in the morning.”
Guinevere had gotten too old to believe in such fancies. Discovering this right then drove a stake through her heart. She said, “Deal.”
He held his arms out and she went to him, rested her head against his chest. A thin odor rose from his skin. “Don’t worry about me,” he murmured. “Promise?”
“I won’t,” she lied.
* * *
Guinevere lay next to Ennis on the floor of his bedroom, staring at her book without exactly reading. He was sketching the back of his own left hand, palm pressed flat to the floor. The fingers he drew were too skinny at the ends, like carrots. She looked back at her book.
A sound cracked the quiet. A wartime clatter: rat-a-tat! They sat up straight and stared at the ceiling.
It went on, maddeningly arrhythmic and peppered with pauses. It would go on for years. This first time, though, it was unfamiliar. They sprang to their feet and followed it to the doorway of the third-floor room.
Edith sat at the creepy desk, back to them, whacking away at the typewriter. She didn’t pause, didn’t turn. Shadows moved over the gloss of her hair, though everything else in the room was still. After a minute she spoke in a clear voice.
“Shut the door, please. I’m writing.”
Nineteen
1998–99
The typing was relentless. Even when she couldn’t hear it, Guinevere could feel it. Edith smoked while she worked, filling the third floor with a blueish haze. In the worst weeks of winter, beneath a lowering sky of smoke and sound, the house felt like a three-story submarine.