The Children

Hank arrives at Guin’s apartment angry that she’s drunk and that he learned about her viral TikTok video from his father. Guin reveals that she has been fired from her book promotion. When Hank presses her about the cryptic warnings she made in the video, she deflects. Frustrated by her secrecy, Hank says that he plans to attend Ennis’s show, Mother, himself. He confronts her about her emotional distance, accusing her of withholding herself from him and wondering whether her practiced warmth with strangers is a way of studying how other people behave. He admits that he lied about not reading her memoir, calling it a “schmaltzy pamphlet,” and says he knows she never truly talks about her mother, Edith. He demands to know how bad her childhood was. Guin offers a canned response about the difficulty of being “raised by a genius” (246), which enrages Hank. He retreats to her bedroom, slamming the door.

In a flashback to 2004, an 11-year-old Guin wakes at the Farmhouse, uneasy from a dream she can’t recall. Ennis is missing, and the house itself feels menacing. After seeing her father with another woman, she spots her mother watching her from a window, making the house feel intensely alert. Ennis returns late, having used Llewellyn’s credit card for groceries, and they argue. That night, Guin has a recurring dream of the Farmhouse containing infinite doors that open into the worlds of her stories, including ones she had forgotten. She wakes briefly to find Edith stroking her hair and asking about the dream. Guin explains that she thinks she’s dreaming the house’s dreams. She falls back asleep and has no memory of her mother’s visit upon waking in the morning, only memories of the dream itself.

The narrative returns to the present. In bed, Hank angrily rebuffs Guin’s attempt to initiate sex to avoid talking. Later, Guin wakes from the pressure of unspoken words and goes to her typewriter, a compulsion she has. She types for hours, creating pages she plans to burn. Hank discovers her and asks if she’s secretly writing the final Ninth City book, which she denies. He reveals that he knows about her habit of writing and burning pages. They argue, and Guin wounds him by saying that he only knows her “to a point” (254). His subsequent fury excites her, and they have intense, aggressive sex on the floor, crushing the pages beneath them. Afterward, they lie in silence. Guin falls asleep and wakes to find herself alone; Hank is gone, having taken her pages. He has left the engagement ring on the floor, trailing its broken chain.

Fifteen months ago, while stranded at a Toronto airport during a storm, Guin is approached by Hank at a bar. Though he isn’t her usual type, she’s attracted to him, and they connect over drinks. Hank shares a story about a premonition that saved him from being arrested with his friends on a recent trip, but Guin deflects a similar question by claiming that her own life has been completely normal. Their connection leads them to spend the night together in an airport hotel. The next morning, what seemed like a simple one-night stand is complicated when they discover that they both live in New York City and have been rebooked on the same flight home. Instead of parting after their flight, Guin goes to Hank’s apartment and ends up staying for two days, beginning their relationship.

In 2004, 15-year-old actress Maeve Carter arrives at the Farmhouse several hours late to spend time preparing for her role as Guinevere in the upcoming Ninth City film adaptation. Guin resents that no one consulted her feelings about the casting, and she’s further irritated by the presence of Jonathan Froud, whose obsession with the Hollywood project has grown consuming. Once Maeve’s mother departs after the first night, Maeve sheds her polished, girlish appearance and begins directing most of her attention toward Ennis, now 13 and noticeably changed—taller, harder, and with his blond hair shaved off. When Maeve’s scheduled departure passes without her leaving, Guin slips into her messy guest room to snoop. While there, she begins to wonder where Maeve and Ennis are. Following instinct, she heads toward the siblings’ private hand-built structure in the woods and discovers Ennis and Maeve having sex. Guin retreats without being seen, experiencing a sharp, grief-like pain at the violation of what she considered her and Ennis’s shared, private space. She forces herself to minimize what she witnessed as she makes her way back to the house. She pushes open her bedroom door to find Edith sitting on her bed, reading Guin’s private notebook.

Continuing the flashback, Edith praises Guin’s talent and attempts an apology for her parenting, but Guin panics and refuses to discuss it. Citing Guin’s writing skill as proof that she needs a better education, Edith abruptly announces that she’s sending her to boarding school. Guin protests, but Edith is dismissive and firm, leaving without answering her daughter’s frantic questions about what will happen to Ennis.

After hiding in her room all day, Guin privately weighs her despair against the idea that boarding school could be an escape from her suffocating life. That night, Ennis comes to her room. When Guin tells him that she’s being sent away, he becomes furious and immediately leaves to confront their mother.

Back in the present, Hank is gone, having taken Guin’s manuscript pages, leaving her to anxiously await his verdict on both her story and their relationship. Guin turns to the internet and discovers the widespread fallout from Nisha’s leaked video. The public’s obsession with her family’s tragic history is reignited, with old theories about the fatal fire now supplemented by viral accusations branding Ennis as a murderous arsonist responsible for his parents’ and Marla’s deaths.

Guin is sickened by the online speculation but also feels a grim satisfaction that no theory comes close to the actual truth. She reflects on her past, admitting to herself that the idealized childhood she has promoted was a lie created for her own benefit, not her mother’s—a deception she knows Ennis could never forgive. She also recognizes that she originally agreed to promote Edith’s work partly in defiance of Ennis, choosing to retreat into their shared past when he chose to flee it. Contemplating his imminent art show, Guin feels a sense of dread. The show’s title triggers a clear memory of her brother speaking that formal, weighted word, “Mother,” recalling that it was very nearly the last thing she ever heard him say.

In 2004, Maeve Carter and her mother are leaving the house. An enraged Edith—who has already called Maeve’s film agent to reaccuse her—confronts them at the door, demanding that they empty their luggage before they go. After they leave, Guin realizes that Ennis stole Edith’s prized necklace. When Edith confronts Guin, grabbing and slapping her, Guin unleashes years of resentment. She tells her mother that she hates her life and that the children in the books are fake and threatens to expose Edith’s lies and parental neglect to the world. Pushed to a reckless edge, Guin vaguely accuses Edith of having done something to her father and others, including Arthur. Rather than denial, Edith’s face flashes with an expression of pride. She warns Guin there are worse things than boarding school and demands that the necklace be returned by sundown. After Edith leaves, a distraught Guin feels a strange, comforting presence from the house itself, as if she’s being embraced.

The day after Edith’s violent outburst over the missing necklace, Guin confronts her father in his studio. She attempts to connect with him over her growing fear of the house, reminding him that he once disliked it and suffered from a recurring dream. Llewellyn looks waxen, and Guin wonders internally if he’s sicker than usual, though he’s emotionally distant and dismisses her fears. When Guin mentions that she’s now having “the same dream” (283), he becomes suddenly alert and dangerous, frightening her into lying and saying that the dream is about boarding school; this reveals that he’s unaware of Edith’s threat to send her away. He shows her his new series of unsettling self-portraits, which he calls his “Hollow Men,” a title that unintentionally echoes a term for soulless beings in his wife’s books. Distraught, Guin leaves and reflects on her family’s collapse. The idea of boarding school now feels like a promising escape, and she’s filled with a new sense of defiance. She stares down the house, which seems to watch her in return.

In the present, Guin, suddenly suspecting that Ennis’s upcoming show might be an elaborate hoax to punish her, travels to the Red Hook factory. The sight of the bustling site dispels her hoax theory—the show is real. However, a conversation with one worker raises a deeper suspicion. He tells her that the installation on the upper floors is complete and off limits, even though Guin knows the space was untouched just days ago. While observing the scene more closely, Guin realizes that the workers are too inexperienced and that the construction vehicles look like props. She understands that the entire construction scene is a performance, the show’s opening act. This insight triggers a larger, more critical revelation: Ennis’s art is literally impossible for human hands to build, a truth that she now realizes she has subconsciously suspected for years.

In 2019, Guin impulsively flies to Seattle, Washington, to see Ennis’s new, highly acclaimed art installation Film Still. The exhibit is an immersive, flawless recreation of a golden-age movie palace. Unsettled by the hyper-real atmosphere, which reminds her of the Ninth City, Guin feels that the entire project is built in bad faith. The installation’s main feature allows visitors to walk directly into movie scenes created with lighting effects. As Guin approaches the first set, a black-and-white thriller, a masked musician in the orchestra pit seems to silently warn her not to enter. After dipping her arm into the grayscale space, Guin is overcome with an animalistic terror and flees the building, convinced that she has had a near miss with a great danger. Weeks later, her fears are confirmed when she reads online comments from other visitors who report feeling creatively blocked and seeing the world as “flat” and colorless since experiencing the exhibit. Guin is left contemplating her own hand and its brief entry into that world.

In the present, after leaving the factory, Guin struggles to find a way to stop Ennis’s show. She decides to contact someone from her brother’s past in the art world: his ex-girlfriend, Arlene Fitzpatrick. Guin meets Arlene at her crowded New York apartment, where Arlene confirms that she hasn’t heard from Ennis since he broke up with her and has no way to contact him. Instead of ending the conversation, Arlene offers Guin insight by describing Ennis’s past art shows. She recounts his last painting exhibit, Whirlybird, which featured a hidden room with an unplugged red telephone. When Arlene picked up the receiver, a mysterious female voice began speaking to her. Arlene felt that this strange element was the only truly meaningful part of the show. She then begins to describe the installation that followed, an abandoned motel project called Live at the Evernight.

In 2022, after Arlene and Ennis have a fight, Arlene goes to his project at the Evernight Motel and overhears him speaking in a deferential tone to someone else. Arlene recognizes the second person’s voice as the same one from the phone booth in Whirlybird. Frightened by the voice, she accidentally makes a noise and flees. She returns to Ennis’s Airstream, pretends to be asleep when he comes back, and then drives to his Los Angeles home. There, she finds his assistant, Candy, waiting outside with all her belongings packed and the locks changed. Ennis has blocked her number, ending their relationship without another word. 

In the present, Arlene reveals that the mysterious voice she heard speaking with Ennis sounded exactly like Guin’s mother, Edith Sharpe.

Guin and Arlene drink together, discussing the voice from the factory. Guin privately connects it to the voice she herself heard at the factory four days earlier. Arlene asks Guin if the Ninth City is real, which Guin denies. Arlene then reveals strange details about Ennis, describing how he would seem to disappear and reappear, how he sometimes smelled of pine or fire after working, and how he wore a mysterious ammonite-like necklace that he never took off. Based on this, Arlene speculates that the Ninth City is real, that Ennis visits it, and that the voice she heard was the Architect. Guin again denies the city’s existence but makes a critical revelation, whispering to Arlene that there was a real Architect. 

Guin gets drunk at the ensuing party and has a hazy conversation with another guest. She insults this person, calling them a talentless showman, and adds that if they had any real talent, Ennis would have taken it. She then passes out.

In 2004, a phone call reveals that a Vogue photo crew is arriving at the Farmhouse the next day, sending the family into a panic. The timing is terrible, as Edith is distraught and erratic because her necklace is missing. While Jonathan, Llewellyn, and Guin frantically clean the house and prepare for the magazine feature, Ennis remains missing. Late that night, Guin is awakened by a crash and finds Ennis in his room. He appears stunned, his hair wet and the shoulders of his shirt marked with a spotted dampness smelling of rain, even though the night sky is clear. He tearfully resists her questions, cryptically promising that he will “fix it.” He asks Guin to believe in him, as she always has, before telling her to sleep but “be ready.”