The Children

In the present, five days before Ennis’s art show, Guin leaves an interview and ignores a call from Regina. She travels to a desolate concrete building in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the supposed location for Ennis’s exhibition, Mother. Finding no sign of preparation, she enters the seemingly abandoned building and smells fresh paint. After hearing footsteps upstairs, she investigates and is stung by a honeybee on her ring finger. In the dim light, she sees a figure that vanishes when she calls Ennis’s name. As a feeling of dread prompts her to flee, a voice calls out “Stop,” halting her at the edge of a large, circular hole in the floor. Guin is convinced that the voice belonged to her dead mother, Edith, though she can’t be certain.

In 1998, the day after the snowstorm, Llewellyn tries to walk to his studio for tea but is defeated by the deep snow and a frozen lock. That night, Guin wakes when the carved wooden hand charm that she had placed under her pillow strikes her hard between the brow and socket of her right eye, drawing blood. In the hall, she finds Edith, whose eyes appear unnervingly dark. Guin asks for Llewellyn, but Edith claims that he’s “dead asleep.” While tending to the cut, Edith wears a new gold necklace and has what looks like fresh grass on the soles of her feet, which seems impossible given the snow. She makes a rare, bitter comment about her own mother and tells Guin that the cunning woman’s original small house stood where the great room now stands—torn down, its fireplace kept, and a new house built around it. When Guin says she doesn’t want to leave, Edith promises that they won’t. Guin is left with the disturbing certainty that her mother’s feet were grassy and that Llewellyn wasn’t in their bedroom.

Back in the present, Guin processes her near-death experience at the abandoned factory by swimming in the ocean. The close call reminds her of the Farmhouse fire 21 years earlier, and she allows the suppressed memories to surface. She and Ennis were found in the woods two miles away, speechless but physically unharmed aside from cuts and bruises. She recalls how they were the sole survivors of the fire, which killed their parents, Llewellyn and Edith, and all their party guests. In the aftermath, the children “weren’t people anymore, they were representatives” (98), transformed into public symbols of their famous mother and reminders of what the world lost with her.

In 1998, the morning after Edith’s strange nocturnal behavior, Guin finds her mother in the great room with Llewellyn, who is lying on the couch. He’s awake but seems unwell, and his gaze fills Guin with an intense, undefined fear. Edith dismisses his condition as exhaustion from his trek through the snow. Over the next few days, Llewellyn doesn’t improve; he becomes emotionally flat and withdrawn, telling Guin that he’s “dead tired” and doesn’t dream anymore. His illness presents a deep change in his personality. One day, the sound of a typewriter leads the children to the seven-windowed room, where Edith is writing. She curtly tells them to shut the door.

From 1998 to 1999, Edith writes relentlessly. In April, exactly a year after their arrival, she returns from a meeting with an editor and excitedly announces a six-figure book deal. Llewellyn reacts with ambivalence, saying, “Of course I’m proud” (103), before offering a sarcastic toast and leaving the room, souring the celebration. After he and Ennis leave, the disappointed Edith tells Guin that the book is called The Ninth City and is about magic and “doors to other places” (104), promising that she can read it soon. Inspired, Guin decides that she will also become an author and begins writing a book in secret. She imagines Llewellyn praising her work and Edith giving her a private look that means, “I see you. And you are the same as me” (104).

In the present, Guin gets drunk at a bar, trying to make sense of her day. She realizes that the title of Ennis’s show, Mother, is from the last line of the rhyme at the Farmhouse. At home, the bee sting on her finger has caused swelling, so she removes her engagement ring. She finds a video of her father performing in a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1988 and is struck by his youth and talent. Overcome with emotion, she calls her fiancé, Hank, and has him watch it before asking him to come over. They have sex, but he senses her emotional distance. Later, a nightmare about the Farmhouse wakes her. The next morning, the tension between them is palpable, and Hank leaves after a strained goodbye. Guin puts her engagement ring on a necklace and reflects on the fact that Hank likely gave the same ring to his former fiancée.

Three months before the novel’s main events, Guin has dinner with Hank. She’s convinced that he’s about to break up with her following an awkward conversation about moving in together. After a tense meal, he walks her to the water, and she prepares for the end of their relationship. To her surprise, Hank gets on one knee and proposes. The idea of marriage has never occurred to her, and the sudden, clear vision of a conventional future as a “Wife” is so powerful that it overwhelms her anxieties. Believing that it’s the easiest path forward and that she does love him, she accepts.

In 2000, Guin meets Anne Read, a painter and neighbor, in the kitchen. Llewellyn, who has trimmed his beard and appears revitalized, greets Anne with a familiar touch that angers Guin. Anne, who is warm and open, explains that she lives two miles into the woods and is helping Llewellyn set up his own painting space. For the first time, Guin identifies herself aloud as a writer, telling Anne, “I’m a writer” (118). Later, Ennis speculates that their father will divorce Edith to marry Anne. Guin replies without thinking that at least then they would “have a mom” (119)—a comment that stuns her brother into silence. Guin herself is unsettled by her own words.

Continuing the flashback, Edith returns from New York to find Anne at the house. The atmosphere is immediately tense as Edith, Llewellyn, and Anne navigate their new dynamic. Llewellyn explains that seeing one of Anne’s paintings in a gallery window inspired him to take up the art form again, as his illness had made him unable to connect with words, and that Anne approached him there. He describes the encounter as an essential moment that helped him feel like himself again. Edith’s reaction is unreadable, but she suggests that they listen to music. As the three adults drink and dance, their gazes shifting between one another, Guin and Ennis feel ignored and retreat to the kitchen.

In the present, four days before Ennis’s show, Guin reads a passage from her memoir, Ninth City Dreamer, which depicts a falsely idyllic childhood. Troubled, she re-watches a hostile interview with Ennis about the death of a student, Marla Kaufman, at his art installation, The Door Museum. In the video, Ennis raises the possibility that Marla’s death was a “choice” alongside “a terrible error,” and states, “There’s a price to pay for real art” (128)—stopping short of explicitly calling her death a necessary price. Wondering if Marla’s death was a suicide rather than an accident, Guin decides to contact the three friends who were with her that night. One friend, Antoinette Kelly, responds with anger. Another, Nisha Dey, a student at New York University, agrees to meet the next morning.

This section details Ennis’s 2024 installation, The Door Museum, held in a textile mill in Los Angeles, California. It’s a disorienting, labyrinthine space of doors and corridors, with windows that seem to look out onto strange worlds. Visitors enter alone and report deep psychological experiences. In April, a film student from the University of Southern California named Marla Kaufman attends with friends but never emerges. Her body is later found on the ground floor, her death attributed to a fall. Marla’s death draws significant public attention, but Ennis’s career truly suffers after an interview in which he speaks about her with shocking indifference.

In 2000, the tense arrangement between Edith, Llewellyn, and Anne continues. Anne advises Guin to channel her parents’ toxic fighting into her creative work rather than internalizing it, telling her to “[p]ut it through the looking glass” (135). She describes Llewellyn as someone with a wound and Edith as compellingly unreachable. One night, Guin overhears Edith and Anne murmuring in the hall, followed by a strange bit of music. The next morning, Anne is gone. Edith evasively calls her Llewellyn’s “girlfriend,” while Llewellyn grows angry when Guin mentions what she heard. He warns her to stay out of Edith’s writing room.

After Anne fails to return for several days, Edith taunts Llewellyn about his “girlfriend,” causing him to get angry and physically pin her against a counter. He only releases her when she kisses him. Later, Guin sneaks into Edith’s writing room and is shocked to see her own name typed on the page in the typewriter. Llewellyn catches her and reveals that he spoke to Anne, who isn’t coming back. Fearing the worst, Guin and Ennis go to Anne’s studio. Her car is parked outside, and through the window, they see a dark, human-shaped form on the couch. Before Guin can process the sight, a horrified Ennis grabs her and forces her to run home. Back in their room, a shaken Ennis asks her to read one of her stories, after which he tells her with genuine admiration, “You’re a writer” (143).