The Children(59)

“Here you are.”

Guinevere spun around, arm up, dashing the teacup Clara was offering her to the floor. Somehow it didn’t break. Together they watched it curve to a stop.

“I’m so sorry.” Her tongue hurt, her words were clumsy. When she glanced back at the painting, the shape she saw—the outline and knob, the low lintel—was gone. “You surprised me.”

Clara nodded. In the dim room the oval of her face was nunlike. Her eyes were heavily lashed and lined, her mouth nearly as pale as her skin. The imbalance was striking.

“You see how it hangs alone? Ennis fought for this. Our director disagreed until she saw it. Who could see anything hung beside it?”

The painting glistered in Guinevere’s peripheral vision. “Has anyone bought it?”

“It was the first piece sold.”

Guinevere absorbed that. A record of the night her life broke in half would hang on someone’s wall, and they would never even know it. Or maybe they would guess. Anyone familiar with Ennis Sharpe’s history would look at these fiery canvases and figure one of them had to be autobiographical. She said, “I can’t picture wanting it in your house.”

Clara looked at it briefly. “It’s brilliant. The best piece in the show.”

No, Guinevere thought. Not the best. It was something other than that. A drain hole, tugging at whatever came near it. Another canvas wouldn’t simply lose its luster placed beside it but the force that kept it together. What else might this painting swallow, given the chance?

The revulsion that accompanied this thought sent her briskly from the room. Past the paintings, back to the vestibule. Night pawed at the windows. She hadn’t removed her coat.

Clara trailed her, holding the second teacup. “You’re leaving?” She sounded bereft.

Guinevere forced a smile. “Thank you,” she said. “So much. The show is incredible. I’ll tell Ennis, when I see him, how much I loved it. I’ll tell him how kind you were.” She was backing up, pushing her way out into the street. “Thank you!” she called again as the door shut behind her.

The city was quiet. She moved through it quickly, slipping in blue snow, heading with purpose toward some undefined point: away. Nothing was familiar, she’d walked crooked miles to get here and she didn’t know where here was.

Why did she feel afraid? He shouldn’t have made that final painting, that was all. And it was only a picture on a wall.

She needed a bright place. A drink, clean sheets, the civilized scent of an upscale hotel lobby. They always smelled the same to her, city by city, a perfume that hit her nervous system like a tranq dart. Guinevere ran until the office buildings gave way to pretty houses that opened in turn onto a road of restaurants and taxis. She climbed into the first one that stopped and let it carry her away.





Thirty-One

Three days until Mother




Almost two years passed between Conflagration and the email from Regina that tugged Guin back into the orbit of the Ninth City, this time to serve as its ambassador. Nearly two years of a wandering so moneyed and formless she nearly dissolved inside it.

Nascent fame hadn’t made Ennis any more findable, but it wasn’t only a lack of leads that kept him from her. There was a new kind of tarnish on her thoughts about her brother. A heaviness she couldn’t dispel, that had to do with how it felt to stand in front of that final painting in Zurich. She hadn’t stopped looking. She’d become afraid of what she might find.

Faced with the awful liberation of the utterly alone, Guin did what so many rich kids had done before her. She outstayed her welcome overseas.

She did all the things an American abroad was supposed to. Drank tiny coffees standing up in smoky French tabacs. Bought used books from outdoor stalls to read in the ribbony light of a park in spring. In a tiled pool in a former church, she swam a slow backstroke beneath the peeling faces of forgotten saints.

There were entanglements, of course. An Albanian man who owned a used bookstore in Paris and probably had a wife. A Brit she met on a fire escape at a party, smoking a joint with a cat in his lap. In Spain she spent the night with a boy in a tiny nook of an apartment and woke to his mother unlocking the door, arms laden with a week’s worth of home-cooked meals. Mostly, though, she was alone.

When the past did find her, it was in manageable pieces. An apartment fire witnessed in Copenhagen, belching twisty gusts of orange-and-black debris. A Julie London song Bitsy had loved, playing through an open window. There was a certain cast of evening light that stirred up the loneliness in her, that muck layer of inescapable solitude.

Equally inescapable: the Ninth City books. She encountered them in a multitude of languages, on bookshelves and in the hands of strangers. Their covers stirred and occasionally wrecked her. It wasn’t until Regina’s request—that she headline a two-week publicity tour, promoting a new illustrated edition of book one—that she reread them. All five, all the way through. Following that binge, more than a decade ago, she retreated from fantasy entirely.

Now she read books as Plutonically distant from Edith’s work as she could get. Story collections, mostly. Reality-based tales in which little happened, relayed in sentences with the surface simplicity of a grade-school primer. They made a cathedral-shaped place in her head, where the words could slowly turn. She allowed herself no more than one a day, decanted like port from a bottle.