The Children(91)

It was a style, what he made in spite of himself. His unsettling paintings did sell. She had trouble imagining anyone wanting to hang them. This new one depicted a man both barrel-chested and lanky, with red-gold hair. The figure from the neck down was faintly blurred, its face too clear: the face of a living dead man.

“Is that . . . ?”

“Your old man, yeah. New series. Self-portraits.” He shifted, arms crossed over his striped sweatshirt, mouth lifted in a faint smirk. “I call them my Hollow Men.”

Guinevere glanced at him. In Edith’s books, a Hollow was a visitor who stayed too long in the Ninth City. Hollows don’t grow up. Nor do they live forever. What’s left when the Architect is through with them is as empty as a golem and as light as a leaf. All it takes is one spark, thrown off a match or lamp or firework, and they go up in flames.

Hollows love bright places. They seek the light until it consumes them.

The echo had to be unintentional. Like Ennis, Llewellyn made a point of avoiding his wife’s books. Guin looked at the canvases against the walls, half lost to shadow, and saw they were all Hollow Men. Llewellyn standing or reclining, nude or dressed, his face an empty room. “I like them,” she said bravely. “They’re really good, Dad.”

Like a child, he brightened. Llewellyn could be drowning and he’d take a compliment over a rope. “You think?”

He looked back at the canvas in front of him, a self-portrait so desperately sad Guinevere chewed her cheek to keep the tears away.

“You might be right,” he murmured. “I suppose I should get back to it.”

She made a break for it. Not to the house or the woods, just sprinting back and forth across the grass to work the poison out. An insect whirred its wings in the branches above her and it sounded like an evil clock, hands rattling as they circled, counting down to some unspeakable thing.

Something was about to break. Maybe everything. Ennis was growing up and away from her, Edith was spinning out, Llewellyn kept cracking her heart into smaller pieces.

The boarding school threat, feeling more and more like a promise, had brought into focus the strange impoverishment of her life. With a hot, heady daring she thought, I want it. By which she meant more.

Of all the things she’d said to Edith yesterday in the hall, she regretted only one: claiming she hated herself. Guinevere didn’t hate herself, not even a little. She could run like a deer and whistle on a grass blade and write stories so good that one day Edith would be nothing more than an asterisk, on the story of Guinevere Sharpe.

She stopped pacing and looked defiantly at the house.

It looked back.





Forty-Nine

One day until Mother




Around noon Guin was struck by a thought that propelled her up off the couch: What if Mother wasn’t real?

This was more than wishful thinking. The show was set to open tomorrow. Less than a week ago the factory in Red Hook had been filthy and perilous. Could Ennis really have transformed it so quickly? Maybe the whole damned thing was a hoax, aimed specifically at her. To knock her off-balance, punish her for the memoir. That schmaltzy pamphlet you’re calling a memoir.

She shrugged Hank’s words away, glanced at the blank screen of her phone. He hadn’t called or texted since slipping away, but Guin had no time to dwell. She was moving now, getting dressed, calling a car, her spirits lifted by the possibility that Ennis’s show might be a grand bluff.

It had rained again overnight. She rode with her face to the open window, breathing wet leaves and gasoline. When they were close she tipped her head back, watching the stained concrete crown of the factory rise. The car turned the final corner and she hissed in a breath, one hand gripping the rim of the window.

The stillness that hung over the place had broken like a sleeper’s curse. In its place, a sense of fevered industry. All the factory entrances were open, rolled up or propped with bricks. Moving in and out were people in ripped jeans, overalls, jumpsuits, the working clothes of the artsy proletariat. The muzzy iridescence of the first-floor windows had been power-washed away. They made a ring of clear black eyes, winking in the sun.

It was real, then, the show. It was happening. Guin climbed out of the car and passed two small construction vehicles parked haphazardly between building and road, compact and duck yellow as children’s toys.

The workers she could see were oddly homogenous in their youth and good looks, as if Ennis had Pied Piper–ed the population of an art school’s studio class from there to here. She chose a wiry, sandy-haired one, leaning against the wall with an unlit rollie lodged between the pinkie and ring finger of his right hand. His other fingers cradled a large iPhone, thumbs flying over its screen.

“Hey,” Guin said, pointing in a random direction. “I’m looking for Ennis. Did he go that way?”

The boy glanced up blankly. “Ennis Sharpe? Sorry, ma’am. He’s not here.” Ma’am! The little prick. “Want me to tell someone you’re looking for him?”

She smiled. “That’d be great. Or you could point me toward whoever would know? Whoever’s in charge?”

“Uh.” His thumb twitched, he wanted to get back to his phone. “Yeah, I’m not actually sure who that’d be. We’re kind of a roundtable.”

Her smile felt like stiffening papier-m?ché. “A roundtable.”