The Children(55)

“Thank you,” she said, “for reading the books. And before anything else I want to say how sorry I am for your loss.” Nisha’s eyelids trembled, an almost roll. Guin soldiered on. “Marla seemed wonderful.”

“Yeah. Marla was”—Nisha positioned her hands like a catcher’s—“a lighthouse. She drew you in.” Faint smile. “Then, when she got bored, her light would turn. And she’d draw in someone else.”

Guin didn’t wonder why Nisha was offering this confidence. Edith’s readers told her all kinds of secrets. “Meaning sometimes you got left in the dark.”

Nisha lifted a shoulder. “We went through a lot of phases. We’d been friends since the second grade.”

“Shit. I’m sorry.”

Nisha checked the lay of her upswept hair, demeanor going businesslike. “Thank you. So, what are we here to talk about? I assume you want to exonerate your brother.”

Guin closed her eyes. Exonerate. Was that what she’d wanted yesterday? To remove her brother from his legal concerns?

No. She’d been looking for something more nebulous, cool and ungrippable: certainty. The assurance that Ennis and his art were not to blame, that they did no harm, to Marla or anyone else. Yesterday this seemed not only possible but obvious.

Today, though. Awash in the past, exhausted from the work of beating it back, what she said was, “The opposite, actually.”

Nisha paused, hands still raised. “Sorry. What’s the opposite?”

Guin was conscious of the diaphanous twentysomething sitting three feet away, curled around a copy of White Teeth. The man droning into his phone about launch dates, eyes on the twentysomething. There was a dog under the table who kept cold-nosing her knees. She cupped a hand over its silken skull and spoke softly.

“What if Ennis is to blame?”

The sky didn’t shake or fold beneath her inconstancy. The sun didn’t darken. She went on.

“Not him, not physically. His art. What if there’s—what if there’s something wrong with it?”

Nisha’s face barely changed. But her posture went taut. “Meaning?”

Fourteen years ago, Guin walked alone through a gallery in Zurich, looking for the first time at the work of Ennis Sharpe. Not the inexpert sketches of the boy she’d loved, imbalanced faces and wobbly landscapes. Stunning canvases made by a stranger.

Though looking was not the right word. She’d felt consumed by the work. Haunted. Considered.

“The thing about Ennis’s art,” she said, “is it watches you back.”

She said it softly, testing the idea. Nisha’s head made a startled jerk. “It follows you home.”

The sweat on Guin’s neck chilled. “What?”

“It’s something your brother said in an interview. Marla sent it to me before she . . . before. He said, ‘I don’t make art you walk away from. I make art that follows you home.’”

The sun hit them in stripes around the intersections of big shade umbrellas. Guin turned her tigered arm and with a feeling of terrible daring said, “I don’t understand how he does it. How he became this person making art that feels . . .”

“Feels what?”

Nisha’s face flashed with an avidity that made Guin remember herself. This was a fact-finding mission, not a confessional. She course corrected.

“Bigger. Than I thought it would feel. Bigger than Ennis.”

After a pause Nisha said, a little briskly, “That’s what art is, right? Of course it’s bigger than the artist, it has to be.”

Briefly the idea steadied her. Maybe all of Guin’s turmoil, her nebulous fears, could be swept away by this: That’s what art is.

The girl was studying her again, stabbing at the ice in her cup. She said, “Look, Marla jumped.”

Startled, Guin said, “What makes you say that?”

“I knew her for a long time. She hated being medicated. Every time she leveled out and felt okay, she’d decide she didn’t need it anymore. She’d feel good for a while, then she’d bottom out. Vicious cycle. And she was . . . not doing well. The last time I saw her.”

“I’m so sorry.” Guin grimaced. Was her sympathy vocabulary so limited?

“So am I.” Nisha took a breath, retightened her hair. “The night we went to The Door Museum, it was actually Marla’s second time seeing the show.”

The words hit Guin like a shove between the shoulders. Nisha didn’t notice.

“She’d gone right when it opened. She called me a few days after, sounding really bad. The bad part of the cycle she was locked in. She kept telling me she’d lost something in the show.”

Guin’s pulse moved light and hollow. “Lost what?”

“She wouldn’t say. But she asked me to fly all the way to LA to help her get it back.”

“Get it back,” Guin repeated. Not find it, like something she’d dropped. Get it back. Like it had been taken.

“I hadn’t heard her like that since high school. Which is why I flew across the country to go to an art show with a person I barely knew anymore.”

“What was it? What did she lose?”

Nisha looked at her with a faint pity. “Nothing. She was fixating. She always did that. Like—okay, she wanted to be a screenwriter. But she’d go so deep into other people’s work she’d get stuck. Watching every Hal Hartley movie in order and reading all these interviews with him and mentally halfway being him, and then she’d be too scared to work on her own screenplays. And she was so good. She was brilliant.