The Children(74)

Though born and raised in New Jersey, Jonathan affected British phrasings, stopping just short of a full-on invented accent. The upper-class twit, Llewellyn called him.

Guinevere shrugged.

“Hmm? What’s that?”

She enunciated each word. “I don’t know.”

“You must feel something. Think of all those little girls who wish they were you.”

A horrid vision: an army of glassy-eyed children in pinafores, clutching Ninth City books to their chests. “Nobody wishes they were me.”

He snorted. “Don’t be so humble, darling, you’ve got fan mail to the ceiling. Don’t worry. You always send a nice letter.”

“I do?”

Jonathan’s disarming diffidence could harden very quickly into something cold and alive. A floating log that was a crocodile all along. “Of course you do, Miss Sharpe. You’re every little girl’s best friend. Your star is on the rise. In fact . . .”

From the leather hold-all at his feet he pulled out a magazine. A perfumed brick of ads and pouting women that fell open to the place where he’d cracked its spine, revealing a full-page photo in fizzy black and white. He set the magazine on the table and watched her face.

Her throat sparked with acid, her head with slowly popping stars. The photo was them. Her and Ennis.

The trick with Jonathan was to never let him see you react. She focused on her breathing, her feet pressed bare to the floor. She was here, standing in the kitchen. And she was there, in the pages of the magazine. And there, back in that day two months ago. She felt skittish sun, breathed in the fragrance of stone fruit. Watched a man with a shaved head and a camera for a face running toward them over the grass.

Click

He’d captured them standing in the mouth of the woods. Their bodies half turned, their near-identical faces grave. Sun turned the archway of leaves into a loose black glitter. They didn’t look like themselves, they looked like fiction. Book Ennis and Book Guinevere, leading the way to a secret door. What a wonder it must be, the photo said. To live at the Farmhouse, to be Ennis and Guinevere. Even she felt a tender knot in her throat.

The headline on the opposite page read “Meet the Ninth City Dreamers.” She didn’t look at the article below it. The photo was story enough, a tale set in the enchanted country of childhood.

“That’s not . . .” She almost said, That’s not me. In a very real way, it was true. “They shouldn’t be allowed to do that,” she said instead.

“I don’t entirely disagree.” Now that he’d sprung it on her and she hadn’t cried or fled, Jonathan seemed oddly deflated. “It’s an evocative photo. Quite striking.” His pale eyes flicked toward her and away. “I can hardly believe it’s you.”

Guinevere was reminded, suddenly, that she stank. That her hair was tangled and unclean. It was happening faster these days. The smell of her sweat was sharper, her shoes so bad she left them outside the back door. Then understanding washed over her, aloe cool.

Jonathan was jealous. He wanted to be the one in the pages of a glossy magazine.

Years later she would learn Swisher Sweets were a classist joke, a trashy gas-station pickup for heshers and suburbanites. She would wonder who Jonathan really was. How much of him had been self-invention. Right then his naked longing made her brave enough to say, “Why are you even here? You’re always here. Don’t you have a life? Are you even happy?”

Jonathan made a gulping sound, then coughed hard. When he dropped his hand from his lips he was laughing. “From the mouths of babes. There’s no such thing as happiness, dear. It’s an invention.”

Guinevere made a disgusted sound. In books grown-ups said things like, Who wants hot cocoa? or What’d you do at school today? At the Farmhouse they said shit like this. “Who invented it then?”

He took a drag. “Mickey Mouse.”

She rolled her eyes. “Lots of things are an invention. Books. Coffee. Cigarettes.”

“Goodness gracious, you’ve just described happiness. Maybe it is real.” He dropped his filter into an ashtray, eyes narrowing against a shallow ruffling of interest. “Are you happy?”

The question was unexpectedly troubling. You don’t ask frogs if they’re happy. You don’t ask sparrows. “Yes,” she said, hard as a stamp.

“Isn’t that a relief.” Jonathan turned back to his printed pages. He was done toying with her, he wanted her to disappear. She lingered, until he said, “What.”

She pointed offhand at the magazine. “Can I look at that? I’ll give it back later.”

As if he would be fooled. But he was bored of the game, and slid it over with an arch look.

All day she kept returning to the photo. The radiant simplicity of it, the way it made Ennis and even herself seem like strangers. She was jealous of it, almost, in the same way she was secretly jealous of Book Guinevere. She didn’t show Ennis, though he’d see it soon enough.

Everyone would. The photo would be famous, it would come to define them. Their selves, their whole childhood, that green Eden destined to end in flames. One perfect shot before the fear came in. She would think of Jonathan every time she saw it, for the rest of her life.





Forty

Two days until Mother




Guin knew what it felt like when an ending breathed down your neck. When it wrapped its hands around your reality and squeezed. After the call with Regina, she asked herself, coldly as she could: What if this version of her life was over?