The Children(86)

Guinevere was so stunned by the injustice it took her too long to find her tongue. When she did Edith was nearly out the door.

“What about Ennis!” Her voice squeaked like a parrot’s. She gripped her hair at the roots. “Is he going with me? Is he staying here? Mom. Mom. Mom. What about Ennis?”

Edith shut the door firmly behind her. Guinevere was so well trained she didn’t even consider that she might open it and follow. When her mother closed a door, it was closed.



* * *




She stayed in her room the rest of the day. For lunch she ate a hazelnut Ritter Sport, for dinner a sleeve of saltines. The sun went down and she felt greasy in the dark, teeth gritty and stomach sour.

But. (She could only think it with the lights out.) What if it wasn’t entirely a bad thing? Boarding school.

Hours ago, she’d heard them come into the house. Heard Maeve, at least, giggling away. Ennis had to have been with her. Didn’t he care at all where Guinevere was?

What if things went on like this? Ennis turning away from her, in on himself. Toward his anger and his art, his own dreams of escape. What would her life be like without her brother’s constancy? Already its sameness was so oppressive even the sky wasn’t big enough to release her. Even the woods were a wiry green fist, closing in.

Boarding school. New bed, new vistas, new air to breathe. Classes, real ones, like she’d seen in the movies. And other girls. That thought carried more terror than thrill. Would they like her? Would they—she tensed—have heard of her?

She rolled over, curled her body up small. Well, what if they had? She’d survive it. Even if they hated her when they found out she wasn’t Book Guinevere, but someone pettier, dirtier, less courageous. She’d survived worse.

Guinevere fell shallowly asleep, hope and despair tumbling her under green-black waves. She woke when her mattress dipped beneath his weight.

The moon was in the middle of her window, where she’d left it. She hadn’t been sleeping long. Ennis was a tense outline at the edge of her bed, unspeaking. Then he lay back. His head was propped on her blanketed legs, his face lit silver. He whispered, “Maeve is leaving tomorrow.”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

“She thought you might’ve been in the woods today. Were you?”

Guinevere calculated. He should be embarrassed, not her. Still, she said, “No.”

Did Ennis believe her? She wasn’t sure. “I’m glad she’s leaving,” he said. “Things’ll get back to normal.”

Normal. She could’ve laughed. When she didn’t reply he tilted his head to see her, eyes troubled. “Tell me a story?”

He hadn’t asked in ages. She used to read her stories to him every night. When she thought about opening her notebook, all she could picture was Edith holding it in her lap, cold eyes razoring up its pages.

“Mom is sending me away,” she said. “She’s sending me to boarding school.”

He was motionless for a moment. Then he swung up, facing her, and in a full daytime voice said, “What?”

She found herself fumbling to explain: Edith in her room, reading her notebook, making her sudden proclamation. There were too many holes in it. How did she know the notebook was there? Why did she care? Why after all this time did she suddenly give a shit?

Ennis listened with a face of stone. When she faltered to a stop, he took a long breath and said, “No.”

He bounded off the bed and out to the hall.

“Ennis,” she whisper-shouted. “Come back!”

It was after midnight. What did he think he was going to do? Wake up Edith, start a fight? Guinevere waited. The moon rose, contracting, a coin then a button then out of sight. He didn’t come back.





Forty-Six

One day until Mother




Hank was gone, her typed pages with him.

His mug was there. His razor was in the shower, his T-shirt printed with the logo of an Austin coffee shop balled up under her pillow. Bottles of Penzeys cumin and cinnamon and oregano, a dinged-up skillet sitting on her cold stovetop. His jeans were in her hamper, and on her bedside table his spatchcocked paperback of Red Harvest.

He was gone, but his things were here, and everything that happened last night had an unreal texture to it. Like a piece of theater, its heat and drama couldn’t stand up under natural light. Had he read her story yet? On the B to Brooklyn, in his classroom, alone. Did he—Guin felt ridiculous even thinking the question—like it?

She pulled on Hank’s T-shirt. She brewed coffee over ice in the Chemex he bought her and poured it into the thermos mug he gave her at the start of summer, wondering all the time whether these things had become relics. The kiss of the shirt’s old cotton, the good bitterness of the beans he picked up at a roaster by his school. The way her apartment’s hermetic air was pierced by his presence.

He’d come back, or he wouldn’t. He still wanted to marry her, or he didn’t. While she waited to find out, Guin took her coffee and that demon box, her laptop, to the couch. There she lay supine, head at a wretched angle—a punishment—and checked in on the state of her public life. It didn’t take long to comprehend what Nisha’s video had done.

Nearly twenty years had passed since Edith’s last book was published. The Wicked Few, the would-be penultimate Ninth City book. Tens of thousands of copies flooded bookstores just three months after Edith Sharpe was mourned by the world.