The Children(51)

Guin did not. But her heart was beating very quickly. “Remind me.”

“My mother owns a gallery in Burlington.” The woman spoke breathlessly. She’d been waiting a long time for this. “She went to some of your parents’ parties, at the Farmhouse. Once, your father invited her to visit his studio, and she brought me with her. We played together, you and me and Ennis.”

“Holy shit.” The words came out in a deeper register than Guin intended. It was returning to her: sifted in among old memories, nonlinear flashes of a stranger’s face. A dark-eyed little girl with half-grown jack-o’-lantern teeth. Guin had honestly come to believe she’d invented her.

The bookseller looked happy. That had to mean her Farmhouse memories were good ones. It was, Guin decided, safe to press.

“I’m so glad you shared that. What do you remember?”

The woman shook her head slackly, as if standing before a piece of wild art. “Everything. The whole place. The mist, the heavy grass. The orchard, all those beautiful untended trees. You could practically stir the bees. I was terrified to go near them, while you and Ennis barely noticed. You were so brave and cool.” She laughed at herself. “I’m a couple years younger than you, which at the time felt like a lot, and you let me tag along anyway. And oh, did I have a crush.”

Guin’s mouth tipped up on autopilot. “On?”

“Everybody. Every one of you. I couldn’t believe people lived like that.”

Around them other booksellers were craning their necks, trying to hear. They saw the narrowing of Guin’s attention and wanted in. “Like what?”

The woman bit her lip. “No, I didn’t mean it like—sorry. What I meant is . . . okay. You know when you’re young and you read, oh, the Boxcar Children, or Mixed-Up Files, or, I don’t know, The Dark Is Rising. And you think it’s only a matter of time before your own life starts, and it feels like that. Like front story. That’s how it felt. You two had stories about everything. Ghosts in the woods and dryads in the orchard and bandits stalking the trees. Oh, and the witch! Do you remember how you made me hide?” She grinned. “I believed every word. You were already a story to me, from the books. Then I met you, and your whole actual life was made of stories.”

Guin felt a sparkling pressure in her head. She hadn’t eaten yet. Hunger combined with this near-impossible thing, a living eyewitness to her own young life, and it pushed her to a place she’d made herself forget. Where the air was thin and the wanting atmospheric.

Across her years at the Farmhouse she was always a little hungry, or cold, or tired. Always healing from another cut, bruise, bee sting, burn. There was always some lack or ache or unappeased appetite, and all of it held her in a perpetual state of noticing. Vigilance, they called it, though she didn’t know that then. Need had pinned her so neatly inside her skin, made her live hour to hour like an animal. She was underfed and isolated; she was envied and dreamed about. Her whole life was limned in shadow and gold.

The woman looked stricken. “Oh,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. You don’t really talk about that in the memoir.”

Guin squinted at the woman’s sympathetic face and realized she’d spoken her thoughts aloud.

She squeezed the stem of her wineglass, thinking Hulk thoughts. Shattering glass, clothes split to rags. Her training held fast, and she winked. “That’s off the record, okay?”

People were waiting for her when she turned. Assailing her from both sides, a tipsy corridor of statement jewelry and shining faces. She couldn’t guess what her expression might be. But when she locked eyes with Fern, the publicist stood at once, sliding toward her like a closing zipper.

“You need a minute?”

Mutely Guin shook her head.

Fern pursed her lips, dropped her voice. “You need to tap out?”

At Guin’s nod Fern snaked an arm around her shoulders and ferried her swiftly from the room. Between dining room and door she must’ve called a car. It pulled up in front of the club right as they were stepping out, and through its open window a bored driver said, “Fern?”

“Like in the movies,” Guin murmured, and the publicist looked at her askance.

“Get some sleep,” she said. “You’re taking tomorrow off. I’ll talk to Regina, there’s nothing on the schedule I can’t move.”

Guin nodded again, climbed into the back seat, and went boneless.

As the car carried her through Manhattan it seemed suddenly unfamiliar, layered over with a vision of her first night in the city. The first she could remember, when she was five years old and had just left Venice.

Her earliest sense of New York was of a place so wantonly stuffed with cars and people it felt like a shaken jar. A slide reel of pungent images: carriage horse pissing in a steaming flow, knockoff purses bright as birds, ants swarming a hot dog bun. A man wading drunkenly among stopped cars, his eyes blatantly dangerous.

Then a glimmering hotel lobby. Llewellyn leaning over white beds to kiss them, the brush of his flammable breath. The shock of her mother’s neck when she cut off her hair.

A desperate feeling arrowed through her. A longing for an anchor to the now. Hank. She recalled his existence with relief, touching fingers to the ring that hung from her neck. When she called, he didn’t answer.