The Children(87)

Even now the series maintained squatter’s rights on the children’s bestseller list. But people had almost forgotten the captivating, sometimes sordid off-page story that helped make the books so inescapable. Now they were remembering.

The career-ending affair between rising actor Llewellyn Sharpe and New York City schoolgirl Edith Cooper—risqué in 1990, repugnant now. The unlikely transformation of that schoolgirl from third player in the tabloid mini-drama attending Llewellyn’s divorce to wunderkind fantasy author.

The word-of-mouth sensation that was The Ninth City, powered in part by Edith’s use of her own children’s names and images, gorgeously blurring the line between real and not. It allowed the Ninth City to occupy a peculiar twilit space in readers’ imaginations. As Nisha said, Because you and your brother were real, it seemed real, too.

Then the final stanza in the Ballad of Edith Sharpe: the fire.

People began theorizing on day one. Grief-stricken readers and armchair detectives and the unstable. There were the practical hypotheses: the house was old, the wiring chewed on by generations of creatures. No way were the chimneys regularly inspected. And in all extant photos of the Farmhouse there was somebody smoking.

Then the less practical theories. Murder, obsession, revenge, possession. Magic. Could the Ninth City itself somehow have been involved? And the missing finger thing, the centerpiece of many a crackpot’s theory. It was too tantalizing, too strange, to be coincidence. Strangers played the tragedy like a real-life game of Clue. Edith did it, Llewellyn did it, the Architect slipped through and they did it. It was the possessive editor, the spurned model, the jealous party guest. It was Ennis, teenage rebel. Guinevere, bad seed.

Speaking of the children. How did they survive?

The fire started after dark and spread so fast and completely not a single grown-up was spared. How had they escaped it?

For years this avenue of inquiry lay fallow. Now it crackled like a party line. Yesterday Ennis Sharpe was an artist going through a spate of bad press. Today—in certain thrilled quarters of the internet—he was a psychopath arsonist who’d murdered his parents and a house full of people, then struck again last year, pushing Marla Kaufman to her death inside The Door Museum. His own sister knew it and tried to warn TikTok humanitarian @NishaDaily. Reddit ran red with glee.

There was no internet at the Farmhouse. In her first year with Bitsy, Guin’s access to it had been severely curtailed. She’d never experienced with such immediacy the unique awfulness of watching her own history being slit open and unpacked like the belly of a fetal pig.

When Guin had glutted herself, soaking in dozens of theories and multiple takes on that famous photo of her and Ennis (Look at their creepy eyes, they’re like Chucky dolls!), she hid her laptop under the couch and threw up in the kitchen sink.

She didn’t mean to, she’d been leaning over to take a drink. Afterward she felt better. Numb. Wrapped in layer after layer of speculation and jeering and performative sympathy until she felt nothing.

Not quite nothing. What she took away from her immersion in the internet’s endless buffet of poisons, its hot takes ranging from the plausible to the Grand Guignol, was this: the strange and secret satisfaction of knowing not a single one came close to the truth.

Ennis knew the truth. And he’d have heard the audio of her and Nisha. What did he think of her now?

She’d wondered this so often over the years. When she first said yes to Regina—Yes, I will help you promote the work of Edith Sharpe—it was a middle finger held up to her absent brother. If he wanted to run forward, away, to pretend their entire childhood meant nothing, never even happened, then she would run back.

Back into the fungible past. All the cut-glass images that lived in her could, she learned, be softened by handling. Smudged, painted over, past as palimpsest. It would be a lie to say the life story she’d been selling was invented strictly for the paying public.

It was Guin who wanted it to be the true one. Artist parents, busy but ultimately nurturing. Long days full of child-sized adventures, ending in family dinners and wood fires and bedtime stories. This is what Ennis would neither understand nor forgive. Her lies had never been in the service of their mother. Guin did what Edith wouldn’t and Llewellyn couldn’t: gave herself a good childhood.

Tomorrow her brother’s show would open. Everyone expected him to reveal his own take on Edith Sharpe. But Guin couldn’t shake her sense that there was something else happening, something more at stake than a dead author’s reputation.

Mother. Its old-fashioned formality raked nails up her neck. The word was a key. It opened that innermost box around which a person is made, uncovering—what? Maternal love? Hallmark-card, Christmas-commercial love, without flaw or condition. But not for everyone.

Guin was sure she’d heard Ennis turn that key, speak that stiff and weighted word, only one time. The memory was so clear, untouched by the passage of time or her own revisions.

Mother. It was very nearly the last word she heard her brother speak.





Forty-Seven

2004




Guinevere woke to a sound from the hall: a high, fast whirring moving toward her door then past it, resolving into the music of suitcase wheels. Maeve Carter was finally leaving.

She opened her door a crack, in time to see the actress thumping her case down the stairs. From below came a muffled flurry of female chatter, to which Maeve grimly replied, “Yes, Mommy, I know.”