The Children(90)

She thought the words. They echoed like she’d heard them. She had the sudden wild notion that if she opened her eyes she would see—

The images that strafed her were disjointed. Some old, some imagined. A shape in a window, raising its hand. A face all cupped in shadow. The clean chop of a finger.

Guinevere opened her eyes fast, a gumminess along the lashes making it sting.

The hall was empty. Light pooled over the animals carved along the ceiling, a mother rabbit curled around a pair of bunnies, the trio circled in turn by crocuses. She was alone.





Forty-Eight

2004




The day after Edith jumped her in the hall, Guinevere found Llewellyn in his studio.

“Dad.”

He was facing a canvas as tall and narrow as a looking glass and didn’t turn. “Guinevere.”

“Did Mom find her necklace yet?”

Her father tossed a wry look over his shoulder and said nothing. Edith had torn their bedrooms apart, as promised. Then she’d moved on to the rest of the house. She called her film agent to reaccuse Maeve and went on a crying jag. When Jonathan offered to go to the city to buy a replacement necklace, she whipped an ashtray at his head. It missed him by a mile and made a dent in the wall. Pity, Llewellyn said dryly.

Guinevere watched him work for a while, her eyes aching. She craved dreamless sleep like it was a cup of cold water. After a few minutes passed she tried again.

“D’you remember, when we first got here, how you didn’t like the house?”

His brush stopped moving. Then started again. Without turning he said, “Didn’t I?”

She shook her head, though he couldn’t see her. “That first year, before the . . .” Snowstorm. She didn’t say it. “That first year, you were always out here. You didn’t go inside until Edith made you.”

“Don’t say Edith, she’s your mam.”

“And once,” she continued doggedly, “you told me you were having the same dream every night.”

He turned, blinking as his eyes adjusted to their new subject: painted figure to real girl. The look on his face was frankly afraid. Only for a moment, before melting into neutrality. “I don’t remember telling you that.”

He hadn’t, of course. He’d told Edith. It’s every night, it’s the same dream. Door after door after—

Arthur Borelli, though, he’d said it right to her. And I just keep having the same damned dream.

Now Guinevere. “The house,” she said.

“What about the house?”

God, he was looking waxy. Like a wax statue of himself, too much yellow mixed into his skin. Was he sick? She revised the question: Was he sicker?

“I loved it,” she said. “Lately, though . . .”

Lately its windows were eyes that watched her. Its wooden halls mouths set to swallow. All its secrets—carved hands, hidden rhymes, the way the third-floor passage seemed forever to be singing, a funny buzzing music of light fixtures and pipes and things that came together into something organic—were creepy. They always had been, she just hadn’t seen it before.

Oh, she’d loved it here. Until the house’s hold became strangulation. She smeared her tears away. “It’s scary. I’m scared.”

Her father stood slumped in the clean studio light. One side of his handsome face hung a little lower than the other, dragged down by unspoken sorrow. He opened his arms, and in spite of everything she went to him, pressing her cheek to his shirt. It smelled like his studio. Turpentine and cigarettes left burning and his models’ perfumes. Two-faced odors of orange blossom and oud. He held her long enough that she thought, Maybe.

Then he released her and said, “I’ll dig out the ol’ night-light, yeah?”

“Night-light?” She pulled away. “That’s it?”

His cheeks stained red. He wouldn’t look at her. “You’re a big girl. Little Miss Eleven. Some things you have to sort out yourself.”

She shook her head slowly. Tears made heated tracks over her cheeks. “You’re pathetic.” It was the first time she’d allowed herself even to think it. “God, Dad, you’re—don’t you even remember anymore? How you used to be?”

“Oh, my fairy.” He said the old words softly. “Would you want me to?”

The pain beneath her breastbone was sharp and terribly tender. Guinevere shook her head. She didn’t hate him that much. She never could.

“I’m sorry.” Gentle as an eraser, she swept the truth away. “I’m really tired, is all. I keep—now I’m having the same dream all the time. I can’t even—”

“What dream.”

He said it flatly, hard and alert. His soft bulk gone dangerous, in the way it had right before he hit that party guest. This alertness in him was rare and it scared her, enough that she said, “Just a dream. About boarding school.”

He settled onto his back foot, blinking. “Boarding school? Planning to escape us, are you?”

She felt her face slacken. Edith hadn’t even told him. Sending Guinevere away was either an empty threat, or it really mattered to her mother that little. “Never mind,” she mumbled, looking past him at the painting on his easel.

It was awful. All his paintings were. His fruit looked like plastic fruit, his landscapes like the apocalypse. His people were worst of all. They had death-mask faces, even when their eyes were open.