The Children(79)

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

She should have kept her mouth shut. But she was too well trained in the art of legacy shaping. She always had to put that cherry on top. Into his shirt she said, “It wasn’t easy, being raised by a genius.”

A misstep. Bad stage dialogue, falling like an oiled ball bearing off her tongue.

Hank practically pushed her away, her whole front suddenly cold from the lack of him. “Oh, fuck you, Guin.”

Hard words, yet they trembled at the edge of crying. She saw him look between his shoes by the door and the hall to her bedroom. With a maddened sound he stood and stalked toward the hall. A moment later she heard the door to her room close hard.





Forty-Two

2004




Guinevere woke up.

Her sheets were smooth. Her body hadn’t shifted from the pose she fell asleep in. But an anxious feeling clung to her. It was something in the dream she’d been having. It receded as she reached for it, grazing with her fingertips its great submerging shape. Gone.

She sat up. The light was dusty and cool, sun still making its way over the other side of the house. Edith was above her, typewriter keys rattling, sending fake Guinevere and her fake brother on another round of fake adventures.

She grabbed Spindle’s End and her notebook. Ennis wasn’t in his room, so she went downstairs. He wasn’t there, either. In the kitchen she made coffee, but she must’ve gotten it wrong: it was as oily black as troll’s blood. Half a cup made her feel like she could smash bricks. She dumped the rest of the pot, ate Cap’n Crunch dry until her mouth was too torn up to continue, and threw herself out the back door.

She walked a few paces and stopped.

Guinevere didn’t like to walk past open doorways with dark rooms behind them. She liked even less to put her back to that dark. It was morning, she was outside, and yet that nighttime feeling gripped her. The Farmhouse, its whole beloved self, seemed to crouch at her back like an unlit room.

She turned.

The house was washed in tender shadows, capped in rising sun. Utterly familiar. Slowly she pivoted to face the trees. And slowly the house regathered itself, regained that lights-out feeling, pressing like an eye on her neck.

She bolted toward the trees.

The summer had been a dry one. The leaves made a piggy-bank rattle as she walked beneath them on a journey to nowhere. She ended up at their clearing, of course, also empty of Ennis. Beside the half ruin that was their playhouse lay a stack of new boards, clean and pale, and in front of them a jug of maple syrup. The syrup was how she knew the house’s onetime caretaker had left the boards.

The man with the red dog remained a mystery. Though they shared their woods with him, he took pains to keep his distance. But he left them offerings sometimes, mainly building supplies. In Guinevere’s stories he was a minor god or a trickster spirit or fairy royalty, his dog a kelpie or a transformed princess.

She squatted beside the stack like Ennis would, trying to imagine how it would look transformed into a tidy shelter. After a minute she gave up, retreating to the shade with her book. There she read until the sun was high and she was too hot to go on. Then she found a tree to climb.

Up here it was breezy and the whole world swayed. She pictured herself a leaf on the branches. But not even height could soothe her: the dream she couldn’t remember sat like a lock in her middle. She kept trying to pick it.

She touched down feeling skimmed and irritable. When she got back to the lawn Llewellyn sat smoking a joint in the grass with a sullen blonde wearing Umbros and a bikini top. King Crimson played from the open studio windows. He called out as she passed, breathing smoke like a dragon. “Hail, Queen Guinevere!”

She reared on him, fists balled. “Don’t call me that.”

The blonde said, “Brat,” and her father said, “Now, now,” and they both laughed their stupid high laughs. Guinevere lifted her chin and stalked on.

She wasn’t ready to go inside, so she circled around to the front and sat on the hood of the pickup. Its metal was hot, she pressed her legs against it like a couple of sausages. From her pocket she took a matchbook and a hard pack of stolen cigarettes. As she lit one, she saw her mother.

Edith stood in the dining room window. She was posed like a fifties housewife keeping an eye on the neighbors: right arm across her middle to support the opposite elbow, left hand up and cupping her own cigarette. When she saw her daughter looking back, she nodded.

Once, right as Ennis kicked at a piece of rotten wood, Guinevere yelled, Don’t! It was too late. His foot made contact and a mass of skittering black insects burst free, waving pincers and blindly swarming as the children screamed. Later Ennis would ask her, How did you know? All she could tell him was that something hung around the wood. A kind of readiness, close and clear as plastic wrap.

Her mother watched her, the house stretching around and above her, and for a moment all of it pulsed with that same transparent alert. Guinevere took a stuttering drag, staring back. Edith’s mouth twisted. Then she stepped out of sight.



* * *




Guinevere sat in the window seat, smoke-throated and thirsty, rereading a story she was working on. She scribbled over it in disgust when she realized she’d stolen half the plot from Pratchett.

The sun was yolky, lowering itself beneath the trees. A low note ran through her—dark approaching, Ennis still not home. Then she saw him, rolling his bicycle up the lawn.