The Children(60)

After Nisha left her on the sidewalk, Guin took a book from her bag. In its pages a trio of adults drove to the beach beneath soporific Italian sun. In exacting language, the author described the water, the sand, the shifting sexual loyalties.

She couldn’t dig past the varnish. With the harrowing thirst of a dry drunk she craved Neverland. Narnia. Pern. Unrealities that would seal like syrup over her head. She craved—viciously she dragged a thumb over the forgotten lighter—the Ninth City.

It was half past noon when she stood and made her way toward Second Avenue. The sky tinted as she walked to an ominous violet. Storm-scented breezes came up from the grates and down through the man-made canyons, hot little zephyrs that stirred the litter and the leaf debris. Everyone she passed looked furtive, opaque. She kept her eyes down, hurried her step until she was moving almost at a run. By the time she reached her apartment, rain was pocking her clothing in soft bursts.

The woman at the front desk buzzed her in before she could dig out her keys. Guin kept her eyes down, nodding thanks as she hustled to the elevator. Half to herself, she said, “Wild day out there.”

The woman, Tracee, perked up. “It’s spooky, isn’t it?” Then, a little shyly, “Say hi to your brother for me.”

Guin stopped, finger over the elevator button. “What?”

“I said, say hi to your brother.”

Guin wasn’t one of the friendly tenants. Her reserve of congeniality was drained by public life; she refused to draw debits on it every single time she exited or entered her own building. She assumed everyone who manned the front desk disliked her. And she lived with that, to avoid conversations like this one.

“I’m sorry,” she said slowly. “You want me to say hi, to Ennis Sharpe, from you.”

Now Tracee’s smile was gone. “Yes? My apologies, I assumed you knew he was here.”

Guin paced to the desk in four long strides and gripped it with both hands.

“What. The fuck. Are you talking about.”

Tracee tucked her chin. “Excuse me? I’m not paid enough to be cussed at.”

Guin’s eye tic’d with an unnerving electrical cadence. She pressed a fingertip to the place. “I have no relationship with Ennis Sharpe. I do not know him. Who is in my apartment?”

Tracee looked alarmed. “It’s—he said—he has keys.”

Guin fumbled for her phone, pulling up a photo of Hank. “Is this who you mean? Is this who’s up there?”

“Ms. Sharpe, I know who your brother is. I know what he looks like. He’s . . . kind of well-known.” Tracee paused, then went on reluctantly. “And he’s been here before.”

Guin laughed. It was a bad sound that startled both of them. “How many times?”

“I can’t speak for Russ and Angel, but on my shifts . . . this is the third time. In the year and a half I’ve been here.”

Guin bounded to the elevator. Jammed her finger into the button, thinking of the sliver of time Ennis might use to escape by the stairs while she was heading up. As the doors closed after her she yelled, “Don’t let him leave!”

The elevator ascended killingly slow, then it opened and she was out. Her apartment door was closed, locked, no sign of forced entry. There wouldn’t be, if he’d gotten his hands on a key. How had he gotten a key? She fumbled the knob, almost falling in, then elbowed the door shut behind her.

“Ennis!”

It was the work of a minute to check everywhere. Even the unlikely places: linen closet, showers. Eerie stormlight poured through the windows and cast her panic in the colors of the end of the world.

The apartment was empty. She could see no alteration in it, nothing moved or taken. But it didn’t feel unchanged. It held an unmistakable aura of artificiality. As if Ennis’s passage had turned it into a replica of itself: a simulacrum of a home. She was seeing it through his eyes.

No books. Little furniture. Devoid not just of clutter but of Guin. I like it this way, she wanted to tell him. Did that make it any better? The place she called home was as indifferent to her as the hotel rooms she stayed in on the road.

As she stood in the apartment’s center, scanning its defamiliarized lines, memories stacked themselves in her mind. Lightweight things she’d noted and brushed away. The Brita moving itself to the wrong place in her fridge. A blanket she left in a puddle on the couch folded up so prettily the next time she noticed it, tidier than she ever did it.

There were other, earlier proofs. Once, maybe a year ago, she’d gone to the closet for her typewriter and found it set one shelf below its usual place. Not something she was imprecise about. And the morning—windows frosted, heat on, it must’ve been winter—when she woke to find a glass of water by her bed. Not unusual, except she’d woken up so thirsty in the middle of the night, wishing for a drink that wasn’t there, before falling back into sleep. She’d been uneasy enough to pour it, untouched, down the drain.

All these shifts and inconsistencies that seemed to mean nothing now formed a picture of a life witnessed by someone unseen. The old weight settled on her shoulders, one she’d carried since her earliest comprehension of their sideways fame: the spider-sticky feeling of being surveilled.

How long had he been tracking her? Had he ever followed her, through this city or another? Did he know she was engaged? Did he care? Guin felt no sense of violation. Not then, not ever. Some part of her must have believed it was Ennis’s right to trespass this way.