The Children(35)

She went to YouTube and searched her father’s name again, just his name.

The first few hits were Edith-related. Then a clip, grainy even in thumbnail, titled “Macbeth Macduff London Theatre ’88.” Guin clicked and there was Llewellyn.

The sight hit her in the back of the neck.

The video must have come from rehearsal. Her father wore jeans and a flannel shirt. His feet were bare, and he was young. Two years younger than she was now, hair scooping softly around his collar. And that voice, like a knife scraping lines through honey.

“How does my wife?” he said.

Two men were with him onstage. The younger one said, “Why, well.”

“And all my children?” said Llewellyn. Young and far and beautiful.

Guinevere started to shake.

Numbly she watched as Macduff was informed of his family’s slaughter. Watched her father play so beautifully at love and grief.

My children too?

My wife killed too?

All my pretty ones? Did you say all?

Guin pushed the computer away. She heard him, her father. Not muffled by time and a mid-quality recording, but right in her ear. Hello, my fairy. Where’s that brother of yours?

A ghost traveled through her. An infinitesimal possession. It was her younger self, dirty-haired and small for her age. Pain compacted in her chest like wet Wonder Bread.

“Eleven.” She spoke aloud, her voice broken and strange. That watchful child with the insect limbs, who felt so old and thought she knew so much and was cleansed of this notion by fire. She’d been eleven years old.

Then Guin was alone again, her own ghost departed. When the pain eased, she called Hank.

“Hey, you.”

She’d woken him up, she could tell. But he sounded warm and glad.

“Hey,” she said. “Could you grab your laptop?”

He paused, hearing her. “Baby.”

“Could you?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“I sent you a video.”

“Uh. Let me . . . okay, I got it.” His voice deepened when he saw what it was. “Oh. Guin.”

“Watch it. Please.”

She could make out the faint hum of the actors. When it stopped, she said, “He was good, wasn’t he?”

“He was so good.”

What was Hank’s sense of Llewellyn? Guin tried to remember what she’d told him. She would have leaned into the misty high points. Paint and poetry. The green vistas of the homeland he left at sixteen, ever present in his voice. The way he’d put a record on and swing her little body around the great room, toes skimming the rug. Had he done that lots of times, or just the once? The memory stuck out like a crag on a cliff face.

“Come over,” she said.



* * *




Hank was strong, stocky. Built the way baseball players used to be. He was solid in the dark.

“You taste like a distillery,” he whispered.

She bit his lip, not too gently. “Hush.”

From the start sex had served for her as a place of retreat. She could lose herself in its generalities. It was different with Hank. She moved with him and simultaneously inward, away. Then he would whisper her name, cup her face, kiss the scar beneath her eye. And she would surface from that solitary dream, burning with a feeling like fever.

It was the feeling of remembering all the things he knew. What she’d told him, what he’d guessed. Not everything, not even most of it, but more than anyone else. There was a nakedness deeper than skin, and it terrified her.

Later. In the dark.

“Where do you go?”

Guin turned her head. Sleep held her in silken fingers, tugging her down.

Hank rested a hand on her bare stomach. “Guin. Where do you go?” Self-conscious as he repeated the phrase. Pat, too poetic, yet getting at something real. Something that hurt.

She murmured, torporous and a little drowsier than she really was, and reached for him.

Again, again. He tasted of salt, and she thought of the long swim she’d taken as the last of the sun glazed the water. The way it felt at the end, when her body was almost too tired to reach shore. Her hair was dirty mermaid’s hair, greasing her pillowcase.

I almost died today.

Of course she didn’t say it. Kissing his mouth and then his eyes with the feeling of closing them against something dangerous.

What came next didn’t feel like sleep. She closed her eyes, that was all, and when she opened them she was somewhere new.

No. This was an old place, one she’d been to many times. An old dream.

In the dream the Farmhouse hallway stretched long before her, lined on either side with closed doors. All was quiet. There was nothing to repel her, nothing to fear. She was filled with such rapid horror it tore her straight out of sleep.

She was in bed again. Hank was holding her, saying, “Guin. Honey, wake up. Sweetheart, wake up.”

Guin shook, dry-eyed, in his arms. She didn’t cry out. Her eyes were so wide it was like she had night vision. The room was iced with moonlight, bright as a pale gray noon. After a long time she said, “I’m fine. Bad dream.”

He said nothing, but his arms slackened. After a while his breathing evened out, and she slid from his grip to the edge of the bed. She lay there watching the light change, swaying in and out of sleep until morning.