The Children(9)

“Because I’ve forgotten my manners.” Then his eyes narrowed. “What’s that?”

He was looking at the carved hand. Guinevere had forgotten she was holding it.

“You better hold on to that.” He cast a quick glance toward the house. “Don’t bring it out here. Keep it inside, so it doesn’t get lost.”

“Why?”

He winked without smiling. “Good luck charm.”

“Really? How do you—”

The man cut her off with a chirp that brought the dog to quivering attention. Guinevere itched to run her fingers through all that strawberry fur. But she wasn’t the kind of animal you were allowed to pet.

“Have a nice vacation,” the caretaker said, and headed back into the woods.

Guinevere watched man and dog disappear, then looked down at the wooden hand. It was obvious now: the thing was radiant with good fortune. She brushed her lips over its scented fingertips.

They returned by way of the orchard, matted grass and hidden divots and the occasional surprise of a ground creature scuttling. If no one lived full-time in the house, who had planted the peaches? Already hard green lobes hung from the branches, dreaming their hot-weather dreams. When Guinevere touched one it felt velveted and firm, like the back of a fist.

The sky had darkened when they weren’t paying attention. From out of the woods rose a lonesome two-tone whistle: the man, talking to his dog. Ahead of them, a row of third-floor windows was lit. Their mother’s shape moved slowly through the golden boxes.

The night, the cold, the silver scoop of the moon. A sky crowded with stars you could actually see, and ahead of them a house she already loved.

There was a secret pressing against Guinevere’s ribs from the inside, making her breath catch. Or maybe it was a wish. She held her wooden hand tightly and wished it.

I want to stay here. I want to live here forever.





Five

Five days until Mother




Guin slammed out the studio doors and onto Forty-Fourth Street in a face full of TV makeup. She felt drunk. Her body kept moving at a wobbly diagonal. She teetered toward an ugly piece of canary-painted metal she suspected was public art and perched there amid the miseries of Times Square.

The email Regina had sent about Ennis Sharpe’s announcement was long and riddled with her usual formatting eccentricities. Guin scrolled past all of it to the attached press release.

Last year, not long after her brother’s legal issues began, he was dropped by his gallery—not in response to the wrongful death lawsuit, but to the interview he gave about it weeks after. Where the release would formerly have opened with “Andrew Merchison Gallery is pleased to announce,” it read:

On August 13, following an opening reception, Ennis Sharpe will present his fifth exhibition, Mother. An immersive experience in line with the artist’s previous presentations The Door Museum, Live at the Evernight, and Film Still, Mother exceeds them in scope and ambition. The show will take place in Brooklyn, location to be announced one hour before doors open at 9 p.m.



Oh, a whole hour. Guin rolled her eyes.

Beneath this slender description unspooled the standard boilerplate on her brother’s career. It was followed by his biography, which had the arresting shape of a road novel: a dropout’s two-year drift around Europe, funded by stints of physical labor and the sale of drawings and small paintings, which he peddled at markets and beaches for fifty bucks a throw. Then discovery by a Stockholm-based art dealer, followed by his first solo show at age twenty-one. Any mention of his extraordinary parentage or childhood was neatly excised. He might have sprung into existence at eighteen.

Guin was crouched on bad art staring at her phone when it rang in her hands. She startled, nearly dropping it into a toxic yellow puddle. Urine? Melted Popsicle? Both? This was why everyone hated Times Square. When she saw who was calling, she blew out hard. Massaged her cheeks so she could smile and Hank could hear it.

“Hey, you,” she said.

“Sweetheart,” her fiancé replied, and Guin knew. She rapped a fist hard against sun-hot metal.

“You said you wouldn’t watch.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But I couldn’t not call after that.”

His voice hummed with concern and threatened to undo certain latches she needed to keep shut. “I’m fine. I shouldn’t have let her throw me like that.”

“Your brother,” Hank began tentatively. Guin’s family was terrain he rarely breached, wrapped in caution tape. “Is he really doing a show about your—”

“No.” She stood and started walking, weaving around clusters of tourists holding M&M’S store bags, visibly grappling with Paris syndrome. “He wouldn’t. I mean, he really would not. It’s gonna be one of those modern art things. Mother, like, metaphorically. He’ll, I don’t know. Have people enter through a giant plaster vagina. Or he’ll do something with the moon. Make a—make a tide pool. Or something so conceptual critics will have to pretend they get it, to be cool.”

Guin was babbling. He broke in gently.

“Are you sure you’re okay? The way you stood up when Samantha said—”

She laughed irritably. “Hank, I remember. I was there.”

“I don’t want you blindsided, that’s all. In case it’s not a giant vagina and a tide pool.”