The Children(45)

The time we like the best of all

Is when the shadows creepy crawl



“Stay out of your mother’s writing room.”



* * *




They knew how to get to Anne’s studio on foot. Of course they did, no one knew these woods like her and Ennis.

There was something happening that no one was talking about. Odd weather boiling above the cloud cover of their parents’ marriage, their hot-and-cold war. It had to do with Anne going off without a goodbye, and the women’s voices in the hall that night, and Llewellyn’s sudden fury in the kitchen.

Maybe it was connected. All of it. Sometimes her mind lit up like a room in a lightning storm, and she believed it was. Her mother’s new life as an author. Their cozy house with its one bad room, a rotten tooth in a healthy mouth. Even Llewellyn’s diminishment, no name ever given to what he’d become. All markers on a single map, chapters in the same disarranged book.

Then the lightning blinked out. The revelation gone.

Anne’s studio sat about fifty paces from a rutted parking berth that was wide enough for two cars and invisible from her windows. She told them she liked to look out and imagine the modern world had been razed, or never existed at all. She could push it away when she worked, like an unrealized dream.

Her car was there. Scab-colored, secondhand, its driver’s-side window cracked. Guinevere touched the hood for luck.

The studio’s windows were dim wells. Even when the children pressed their faces right up to the glass they couldn’t see much past their own reflections. They circled around to where the sun was less direct. Guinevere visored her hands and peered in. Ennis did the same.

Right up by the window was the coffeepot and the clipped bag of breakfast blend, the ambitious ivy plant. Beyond it an easel with a canvas on it, angled so they couldn’t see its front. In the middle of the room was the couch Anne used for napping and live models. It had a low back, and Guinevere could see something above it. Her nose pressed against mesh. The thing on the couch was humped and smooth. It was dark and light. It stretched the full length of the couch and—

Ennis gasped. The sound broke her focus, made the dread beading along her bones roll together into a tarry mass that settled in her stomach.

He took her hand. “Let’s go.”

“Why?” She tried to pull free and couldn’t.

“Guinevere, now.”

She ignored him, turned back to the window. He yanked her arm, stars sizzling along the seam of her shoulder.

“That hurt!” She slapped him in the chest with her free hand.

“Race you to the house,” he said doggedly. “Winner gets to pick.”

That’s what they always said. It didn’t matter what the winner would be picking. The next time a decision had to be made, the winner got to make it.

He’d already taken off. She wavered a moment, then followed. “Not fair!”

As they crashed through the trees she understood he was leading her away. From what? Something he’d seen, or thought he had. Best not to think too hard. Better to run.

Because she loved her brother she raced through the woods, letting every painful possibility bob up and away. Dispersing through the clouds like lost balloons, where they could hurt no one but the birds.



* * *




In the house, in her room, Ennis paced. His mouth twisted itself around words he didn’t speak. His shoulders seized and shook. The right one was always coming out of its socket. A long fall in the woods had taught it the art of dislocation. Llewellyn knew how to pop it back. Her own joints burst with fireworks when he did it: the runoff of her brother’s pain.

Ennis moved back and forth, wrestling an invisible enemy. Then he knelt in front of the fireplace and made a fire. The day wasn’t cold, but he was shivering. He said, “Read me something.” When she went for the book at her bedside table he shook his head. “Something you wrote.”

He hadn’t asked before. Guinevere slid her notebook out from under the mattress and chose a story. She began to read.

He listened. Nine years old, knobby and somber and striped by firelight. His lovely face, that was her face, framed by a bowl of ash-blond hair. This Ennis would live forever in her mind. Even when she hated him. Even when she wanted to forget. Even when the word brother had become a black hole she could lose entire days inside.

He listened, and that wonderful face opened like a door. “Guinevere.” He looked at her as if she were brand new. “You’re a writer.”





Four Years Ago




Guin was at the Whitney, killing an hour before a lunch date. She was drifting through the fourth floor, looking for the Gertrude Abercrombie she’d come to visit, when a painting stopped her cold.

It wasn’t very big. The size of a flat screen, shimmering with a duochrome iridescence. It looked like the colorized smoke of an old movie flashback. It was so joyous, so playful, she knew beneath her skin who’d painted it.

From the gallery label Guin learned that freckly, funny Anne the artist had been American painter Anne Read. Born in 1972 and dead in 2000, at the age of twenty-eight. She absorbed this then sped to the bathroom, where she rinsed her mouth and ran cold water over her wrists, trying to see her face in the mirror. Shock made white spots pop over her eyes.