The Children(61)

Maybe that was the message he was trying to send in coming here. You were mine. Remember? And you were mine, she thought. He seemed to have forgotten that.

Then she saw it. The gift Ennis left for her.

Odd that it took her so long to notice. Or maybe it was a matter of camouflage. The thing was nearly white, set against the white marble backsplash of the kitchen island. It had no place here, shouldn’t even exist anymore: the carved hand she’d dug out from a trunk in the Farmhouse attic. It stood on its severed wrist like a Hand of Glory.

She’d forgotten the unlikely luminosity of its wood. Pale as the trees that grew sunless beneath the Ninth City’s surface. It was an object of power. Guin corrected herself. It had been, in their imaginations, when they were children. They’d used it as a divining rod, held out by its stump, palm flattened over the land. And it was true that sometimes it led them to some oddity: a trio of hewn and weathered stones that might have marked graves; a jay’s head mounted on a sharpened stick, its eyes two beads of black milk. But a child can always find secrets in the woods.

For years she’d slept with the hand under her pillow. It kept her safe when the wolves were below, playing records, getting drunk, climbing the stairs in the thunderclap silence that followed the dawn. The hand ensured that none of them ever stopped at her door. Rattled the old lock loose. Let themselves in. Or so she once believed.

Guin turned from the hand without touching it. She opened the fridge, took out one of Hank’s weird flavored seltzers, and downed half of it, sinuses searing with fizz. Outside her windows the skin of the city split, releasing a storm that lashed the glass. Guin didn’t hear it. She was lost in older sounds. Soughing wind and drowning grasses, an ocean of treetops shivering chandelier drops over the earth.

There’d been other pieces, besides the hand. God, she’d almost forgotten.

That first spring a bird got caught in the great room’s chimney. Llewellyn opened the flue and bellowed some nonsense—Come down, oh you light-winged dryad of the trees!—then leaped back, robe flapping, as something dropped hard into the ashes. Not the bird. A pale wooden foot, ash-smeared but unburned.

Another piece, Jonathan found. She could see him still, the fineness of his white shirt with the sleeves rolled back. Cigarillo in his teeth, chunk of carved wood in his hands, identifiable by its intentional curves and translucent glow. Edie, darling. Is this some kind of modern art?

Shoulder, Ennis thought. Guinevere insisted it was part of a butt. Their parents didn’t seem to connect it with the foot in the flue. She’d been sure that if they looked long enough, they’d have found every piece. Shoulders and torso, another hand and foot. Somewhere, horribly, a head.

The story they’d spun for themselves was vague. A woman of some devious order, a witch or enchantress, had been carved in effigy and broken to pieces: an attempt to break her power. A witch’s power, Ennis said with great sagacity, is concentrated in her hands and feet. Guinevere added, And her butt.

Standing in her luxury kitchen, years and miles away, Guin pressed her hand to the carved one, palm to palm.

Its surface was warm, slightly tacky. The last time she’d done this her fingers fit against the wooden ones exactly. Now they curled up and over its indents of nail.

Nothing happened.

Guin moved to the sink, scrubbing her dread away with lavender soap and hot water. When she pictured her brother in these rooms, she saw him as a boy. Ennis at twelve, treading her parquet floors, gaze too challenging for his forming face. To what end was he provoking her, dragging her back toward a past he’d so thoroughly disowned?

The advance copy of her memoir was on the counter behind the sink. She’d flipped through it before her last round of interviews, refreshing herself on what exactly was in its pages. As she took another swallow of seltzer her eye fell on its cover.

She breathed bubbles, seeing what Ennis had done. When she was finished coughing, she looked again. Neatly her brother had blacked out the word Memoir and replaced it. The new title read: Ninth City Dreamer: A Fairy Tale.

Guin laughed. Genuine and loud, all alone. Then she pressed both hands to her burning heart. The pain she felt was that of a body warming after it has been dangerously cold. Awful and affirming, it told her, You are alive.

For years Ennis had floated so far above her, with his vaunted art and his impenetrable silence. Even the wooden hand was an offering too gnomic to perceive. This she could get her nails into. A defacement so petty and personal it almost felt like love.





Nine Months Ago




“Tell me about your brother.”

They were lying in Hank’s bed, rain drumming the skylights. It was a top-floor room, roof slanted like a Parisian garret’s. Guin had been dissolving into sleep, trying idly to recall whether she’d taken her birth control pill. When Hank spoke, she stiffened.

He said, “You don’t have to answer.”

She could hear the need beneath it. They’d been dating six months and he still wasn’t sure what kind of person she was. If only, Guin sensed him thinking, he could have some context. Something a little more relatable than dead celebrity parents, literary musedom, low-level international fame. She thought a long while before she answered, tracing fingers over his chest.

“We were a cult. A two-person cult. He was the only other kid I knew.”

“Yeah,” Hank said after a gap. “I can see that.”