The Children(62)

“He wasn’t funny.” She laughed. “Like, at all. He was serious. When we played, whatever we played, he was completely committed. Even if we made something up two minutes ago, he’d die defending it.”

Guin rolled onto her back. Talking about Ennis felt . . . not good, exactly. She felt the way a maple tree might, full to bursting with secret sap, and someone finally coming along to tap it.

“He was so interesting, so inventive. But he wasn’t a joking kind of person. I think he felt it was a form of cheating, to make someone laugh. A cheap way to connect.” She took a breath, held it. “Our dad, though. When he met someone, he couldn’t relax until he’d made them laugh. I remember once, at a rest stop . . .”

The memory played fuzzy as a filmstrip. Her dad clowning around with other people’s kids, acting gallant toward the women, making everyone fall half in love with him. His effervescence drifting like pollen over the scrub. And Edith sitting on the hood of the car, watching him from behind dark glasses. Touching the ends of her newly shorn hair. They’d been driving for the first time to the Farmhouse.

Guin didn’t tell him any of this. She shook her head and said, “That was before he got sick.”

Hank was barely breathing. He didn’t want to scare her off, stop her talking. He’d gone possum the moment she mentioned Llewellyn.

“Maybe Ennis has changed.” He hadn’t, she was sure he hadn’t, and wanted to erase the words once she’d spoken them. “When I knew him, though, he was rigid in the way he saw things. Fierce, very black and white. About most things. But with me, with make-believe—full color. He was, you know, my brother.” She closed her eyes. The word a bullet, a key. “I always wished we’d been born twins. I could hardly bear it that he had to live two years without me.”

She was silent then. Long enough that Hank held her tighter and murmured, “I had to live thirty.”

Guin laughed a wet laugh. “Now picture that raggedy homeschooled kid whose one friend was her brother. Drop her in an upper Manhattan private school. And make it junior high.”

He kissed her forehead, then the scar by her eye. Your blackberry scar, he called it, which made her feel like a bumpkin. “Oh, my poor sweet nerd.”

At some point he’d gotten hold of the idea that she’d been a bashful, introverted teen. It made sense. She was almost thirteen by the time Bitsy enrolled her in school, and absolutely friendless. She knew literally no one outside of her grandparents and the tutor who’d spent a year attempting to correct for the wreckage of her early “education.”

Hank was so fond of that image, that shy and wounded little Guinevere. The truth was, to Bitsy’s relief and her own enduring confusion, she’d been popular. All her obvious advantages—impressive parents, proper clothes, loads of money—were table stakes at her school. But Guin had a singular glamour no one could touch: she was a tragic orphan from the wilds of Vermont, her very existence written into a famous series. In many ways her classmates were older than her. But in certain very crucial ways, they would never be as old as Guinevere.

Hank had been a nerd. A cool one. Athlete, mathlete, editor of the student paper. His mother showed Guin pictures. When Hank was in high school, he wanted to kiss pretty girls and get his nonno’s old Firebird running again. When Guin was in high school, she wanted to burn her fingertips on life like it was a glowing match head.

While he was playing lacrosse and working shifts at his uncle’s deli and getting to third base in a wood-paneled rec room with his first love, a Model UN cutie named Hannah, Guin and her friends were stomping around the city like the entitled brats they were. They went to parties in condemned buildings and got fall-down drunk at unlicensed speakeasies. They swam in a pool made from a construction dumpster in Williamsburg and drank tallboys at pop-up dance parties tucked beneath bridges. It all had an artificial rind of grime, danger, extralegality. Sometimes Guin worried she was the only one who knew they were playing pretend.

Maybe it was that knowledge that held her apart. Or maybe it had no name, the otherness that hung around her like a fog layer, marking her out for something else. Even her most sophisticated friends were a little cowed by her. Performed for her.

And she looked back helplessly through the fog. Desperate to dispel it, to break free of her own singularity. To shake her sense that this life—everything she was living after the Farmhouse and the fire—was only epilogue.

She was still trying to shake it. Guin didn’t want to be numb. Didn’t want all the years of her grown-up life to be tinted that same dun shade of aftermath. She rested her head on Hank’s chest.

“I’m just a nerd,” she said in a breathy Marilyn voice. “What’ll they think when you take me to prom?”

“Whatever it is, they better think it fast.” He wrapped a hand around her naked hip. “Before you go full Carrie on their asses.”

Guin blinked up at him, then kissed him hard on the mouth.





Thirty-Two

Three days until Mother




Guin wrapped the wooden hand in a bedsheet. She wound it around and around until it was a shapeless bundle, then stuck it under the sink in the second bathroom next to a jug of Fabuloso.

The storm had given way to an incandescent golden hour. The corner she could see from her bedroom window was clotted with summer people, their arms and legs bare. Guin squinted at them sullenly and thought of Bosch, of Rachel Kneebone. She yanked her blackout curtain down.