The Children(40)

Languidly Anne arched off the cushion, cracking her back. “What about—”

“Do you tire him out?”

Anne blinked once. “Would you like me to?” Her tone was genuine, polite. Her face never lost its interested expression.

Guinevere slid over on the window seat until she could feel her brother beside her, shoulder to hip. A beat passed, and Edith laughed. “Damn. You are a good friend. Tell me, Llew, how’d you meet your new friend?”

He considered his wife and must have decided she really was asking. “You know how it’s been for me. You’ve seen the way I, the way I can’t—”

His voice skipped like a record needle over a scratch. Over the unfathomable cut of his nameless illness, its litany of changes.

“It’s been hard,” he continued lightly, tapping the side of his head. “Feels like a darkened room up there. Words, you know. They’ve lost their . . .”

He paused, and Guinevere knew he was reaching for something. The right word or line of poetry. But sickness had robbed his memory bank. It was a junk shop no longer.

“The day you left for the city, I got groceries in town. You know that little gallery by the thrift shop? There was a painting in its window. When I looked at it, I felt . . . closer. To my . . .” He laughed helplessly, self-consciously. “To myself. As close as I’ve come in ages, to who I was before.” His voice was controlled; the fist he punched hard to his heart was not. “It hit me, like a poem. Different medium, same response. And I thought, Why not? If words fail me, if I can’t . . . I can move my arms, though, can’t I? It’s years since I picked up a brush, but I’d rather be failing than stuck. I was about to go inside, to babble all of this at some confused receptionist, when a woman sidled up beside me. Paint-stained sweatshirt, face all galactic with freckles. And she said,” his voice dropped deep into Boston, “‘You’ve been staring at my painting for a solid five minutes. I oughta charge you rent.’”

The day tumbled softly down, shadows unfolding themselves over the floor. Her father looked at Anne with an expression so naked Guinevere wanted to run to him and cover it up. Edith saw, didn’t she? What had grown in her absence? Guinevere felt sick, anticipating the explosion. She felt relief that it was finally here.

Edith didn’t seem angry, though, or even surprised. She’d walked in wearing dark city lipstick, and her mouth had undressed itself slowly, on Llewellyn and her children and the rim of her cup. Her smile showed pale behind its last traces.

“Llew,” she said. “Put a record on.”



* * *




If Anne was a joyful machine, a multitool meant for use in all weather, Edith was special order. Kept on a shelf, designed for a very few functions. It was odd to see them dancing in two such different ways to the same song. Their gazes kept catching, repelling, sliding over to Llewellyn where he watched from beside the fireplace.

The children’s plan, to spy and be invisible, worked too well. Edith had taken Anne’s attention away as easily and entirely as an object pulled from their hands.

The music changed tempo, sliding down and darker. Llewellyn pushed his body off the wall, moving toward the women on heavy lion’s feet.

Ennis muttered, “Come on,” and tugged his sister off the window seat.

In the kitchen was brown bread and a sweating wedge of cheddar, marmalade so thick with rind and sugar it made her whole mouth light up. Gifts from Anne. They gobbled them up before the grown-ups could. That morning, when the painter belonged to them, seemed very far away.





Twenty-Three

Four days until Mother




When Hank was gone Guin made a second cup of coffee and took a jittery lap around the apartment. She opened all the windows, turned on the ceiling fan. It wasn’t heat that held her, though, or even restlessness. It was a sense of being marked, somehow, caught beneath some descending thing. A hawk’s shrinking, concentrating shadow. Ennis’s show was one day closer now.

She lit a scented candle.

Lying back with a third cup of coffee, Guin kicked at something that lay half hidden beneath the couch. With a bare foot she nudged it out.

Her advance copy of Ninth City Dreamer. Puffy with Post-its, splayed open to a place near the middle. Had she flipped through it last night, drunk and maudlin? She must have. Hank swore not to read the memoir until she said he could, if he’d been peeking he would have covered his tracks. Gingerly she picked the thing up, flipped it over, and began to read.

“Ennis! Guinevere!”

Our mother’s voice called us home through the twilight. This call marked the end of all our days spent rambling the woods, before firelit evenings where anyone might show up for dinner: musicians, writers, artists, politicians, all of them making the pilgrimage to the Farmhouse.

Though my experience wasn’t that of a typical American child, the privileges of this unusual upbringing far outweighed the more ordinary pleasures I missed. I never shopped for makeup at the mall, but actress Jennifer Cole taught me how to do a smoky eye. No school photos exist of me before age thirteen, but on my bedroom wall hung a portrait drawn by celebrated cartoonist Graham Carson. And while I never got to—



Guin closed the book. The memoir. The story of her life. This copy was an early proof, with a plain white cover. On the actual jacket was a quote attributed to Publishers Weekly. It read, in full: “Riveting.” It was excerpted from a longer line in a review most people—Regina assured her—would never read: “One senses a more riveting story running beneath the surface of this one. It’s unfortunate we may never get a chance to read it.”