The Children(46)

Anne was twenty-eight when she entered the orbit of the Sharpe family. And she was twenty-eight when she died—Guin confirmed it later—by suicide.





Twenty-Six

Four days until Mother




Regina texted around noon. Added some Interviews to your SChedule, with a link to the Google doc. Guin cursed silently as she scanned it: back-to-back podcast recordings starting in half an hour, phone call with a print journalist, cocktail hour live chat with the host of a celebrity book club. Then straight to a booksellers’ dinner at a club in Soho.

She touched her filthy hair and headed to the shower.

Lipstick, ring light, yet another coffee. But when she reached for her glossy public face, her Guinevere Sharpe persona, she couldn’t find it. Everything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours had stripped her with the briskness of a nurse.

You have one job, she thought, glancing at the time. Put your mascara on and tell some used-up anecdotes.

She could do that. She would talk and laugh and answer questions about her mother, smiling in front of a blurred backdrop as she pretended to sip rosé. Then she’d go play parasocial bestie to a roomful of teary-eyed strangers, gripping her arms with their special-event fingernails and offering unsolicited secrets. God knew she’d done it before.

And she did it again today, goddammit. But she could feel herself moving on a slight delay. She’d misplaced the art of deflection, of replying not to the question you were asked but the one you wanted to answer.

Whatever. This wasn’t a movie junket, Regina shouldn’t have overscheduled her. The cocktail hour at least was easy: a giddy grid of top-tier book club members cheesing at her as their celebrity host lobbed gentle questions. For the last fifteen minutes the host unmuted the women—they were all women—for an audience Q&A. One swept bleached bangs from her face and said, “When you were, um. When you were a kid. What’s the first thing you remember from after the fire?”

Foolishly, Guin hadn’t prepared for this. The memoir tiptoed around the night of the fire like a Code-era director around a sex scene, and her interviewers had so far done the same. She watched her own face onscreen, going, “Uh.”

After several eons the celebrity host chirped, “Alright, y’all, community guidelines! Let’s move on to the next question.”

The chat bumped along without further issue. At the end Guin smiled her face off, waving as she quit the app. Then she went horizontal, face pressed hard into the couch.

What’s the first thing you remember from after the fire?



* * *




For a time she remembered nothing, existing in a post-traumatic state akin to twilight sleep. The world came back to her in pieces.

The day nurse who taught her how to play cribbage. A kitten she was allowed to cuddle for the length of an afternoon, then never saw again. The iPod Shuffle her therapist gave her, the first she’d ever seen, its color the dull silver of the foil on a yogurt cup. Books—adventure stories, mainly, populated with children who gathered rainwater in tarps and dug animal traps and survived with the use of a hatchet.

And Bitsy. Her mother’s mother, born Elizabeth Keen Cooper. Despite the Hamptons nickname she was a working-class Jersey girl who went to Vassar on scholarship. She’d dreamed of becoming a playwright, then gave it up to marry into Manhattan banking royalty at twenty-one. Her husband envisioned a trio of sons, but nature and Bitsy did not cooperate. Edith was their only child.

The first words Guin spoke in her grandparents’ home, four days after she moved into her mother’s old room—her old bed, even, crowned by a starched purple canopy—were “Where’s Ennis?”

Bitsy never fidgeted, never obfuscated. Crisply she told her granddaughter Ennis was gone. While Guinevere slept her days away, coddled in sedating drugs like a jewel in velvet, her brother had been shipped off to a Connecticut boarding school. Two months into the semester, a year too young. It was their granddad’s alma mater.

“He said goodbye,” her grandmother told her. “You were very tired.”

Guinevere wanted to scream, threaten, cry. But she didn’t know the rules here yet. At the Farmhouse there were no rules, which really meant there were lots of them, all left unspoken, so you had to learn them the hard way one by one.

For the first time since waking up here, she began to calculate. What did her grandmother want from her? What would she do if she didn’t get it?

“Oho, I recognize that face.” Bitsy arched a brow. She looked a lot like Edith and exactly like Cyd Charisse. “Blank as a paint chip. You learn that one from Edie?”

Her voice closed around her daughter’s name like she’d bitten down on a tender tooth. And her expression changed. Crumbled a little, as if some load-bearing interior part of her had given way.

“Honey, it’s alright.” She spoke quietly, casting an eye toward the door. Maybe her husband was home, though he wouldn’t hear them. Guinevere could count the times he’d walked into this room on one finger. “All of it. Anything. Whatever happened. Whatever you did, or had to do. It’s alright.”

Guinevere couldn’t speak. This was scarier than anger would have been. What was Bitsy saying? What did she know? Was there any place in this apartment where she could disappear?

Bitsy lifted her hand. When Guinevere flinched, she stopped mid-motion, looking startled. Then reached out slowly, smoothing her granddaughter’s temples, the space between her brows. The gumball pearl on her opposite hand cast little lights over the bed’s white sheets. Guinevere watched them as Bitsy spoke in a voice made for the shyest of animals.