The Children(34)

It was ideal for her purposes, malodorous and populated by solitary drunks. Dusty Christmas lights were strung along the wall, underscoring a permanent air of last call. She could see her face in pieces in the bottle-lined mirror behind the bar. Salted hair, the itchy flush of a settling sunburn. A certain madness in the eyes. She set her phone down in front of her and googled her brother’s name.

The early consensus was that Mother was a publicity grab. A naked attempt on Ennis’s part to drown out the bad press around the lawsuit. Skimpy press release aside, there was no actual information.

His former gallery offered a stiffly worded statement of measured support. His best-known ex, a canny art-world hydra named Arlene Fitzpatrick, managed to shill for two of her own projects in the course of a single quote. Candy, of course, had no comment.

The rising narrative did make sense: embattled prodigal son of famous parents exploits his past! Like Regina had said, He’s opening a show called Mother. It’s absolutely about Edith.

And yet.

Guin turned her phone over, ordered a shot and a beer. Someone a few stools down gave her a dirty look, and she realized she was smacking the bar with an open palm. Ba-bang ba-bang ba-bang, a secret rhythm she’d been carrying all day. Ever since Samantha Brice spoke the name of her brother’s show out loud.

She transferred her palm to her knee and kept tapping, letting the rhyme she’d been summoning crawl at last into the light. Another century’s nursery chant, carved over Edith’s door.

The time we like the best of all

Is when the shadows creepy crawl

Her shot came. She double-tapped the glass before throwing it back.

One after another

The gesture wasn’t hers, it belonged to her father. And it was his recitation she heard in her head.

When the golden sun sinks down in the west,

And the tired birdie flies home to its nest,

And we’re left alone with mother.



* * *




The moon was high and her phone nearly dead when Guin stepped out onto the sidewalk. It was drenched in that deep city dark that happens sometimes in summer, when the streetlights get caught in the leaves. They glowed above her in surreal flotillas of Lite-Brite green.

With the last of her charge Guin called a car. By its dome light she saw her bee sting swelling, puffed up above her engagement ring. As the cab rolled northward, she managed to shimmy it off, dropping it into the coin pocket of her wallet. Half an hour later she was unlocking her apartment door.

You wouldn’t look at Guin’s apartment—spacious and spare, pleasant in the nonspecific way of a boutique hotel suite—and think it was a place bought with book money. A few years ago she brought a guy back at the end of the night. He did a slow circle on the parquet floor, under the recessed lights, and said, “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em.” He checked her face, and his smugness washed away. “John Waters quote,” he muttered.

Anyway, Guin didn’t fuck him. She thought of him, though, the first time Hank came over. When she was alone the space felt serene. After spending hours amid his apartment’s friendly clutter, she worried it was soulless. And when he’d seen all its rooms he did say, in a wondering tone, “You don’t have any books.”

Guin went to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, pressed her cheek to his chest so she was looking out at the city. She said, “They make me think of my mother.”

The truth. One piece of it. He held her very tightly and didn’t ask again.

Now her windows were open. The apartment was high enough above the city that its sounds took on an oceanic quality. Height distilled the odors of the street into a thin exciting scent she could never break down into its parts. Guin opened the fridge, reaching in a practiced motion for her water pitcher. It wasn’t there.

Rather—she frowned, peering through tipsiness—it wasn’t in the door, where she kept it, but centered on the bottom shelf.

She’d been doing this lately. Little things. Hand soap moved to the wrong side of the sink, knives upside down in the block. Minuscule seeds of discord, sowed into her own engraved routines. Book release stress, she told herself. Or subconscious self-sabotage.

In the course of pouring herself a drink Guin dropped the pitcher, knocked the glass into the sink, and spilled water all over the floor. Ah, well. Dropping a towel on the puddle, she headed for the couch.

She lay back with one foot pressed to the floor, bracing herself against the room’s drunken sway. There was a reason she rarely had more than one. She’d done enough drinking in her life to know that too much made her feel raw. Skinned like a grape.

Her father was like that. His tendency toward Welsh melancholia—his hiraeth, as he called it—could be fed into a river by drink. Or, just as easily, kept at bay. It was a roulette wheel he’d spun every day.

Her dad. Llewellyn Sharpe. Literary husband, gentleman painter of little distinction. Former stage actor. What was it the journalist called him? Transcendent.

Guin knew he’d performed on Broadway and in the West End, knew he’d done Shakespeare in the Park. She was aware of his good voice, his rugged beauty, and distantly recalled the high ambitions and bombastic weathers that predated his chronic illness. But for so many of her years with him, he’d been such a reduced man.

She opened her laptop. Blinking drunkenly to focus, she typed llewellyn sharpe hamlet into search. There were some old reviews, PDF’d in smudgy newsprint or cut in half by a paywall. The praise was high, but it bounced like blunted arrows off her brain. Who knew what impressed people in 1990? Guin never liked Hamlet much anyway.