Starling House, page 20
“But it’s getting worse. You have to leave—”
“I will.” Jasper turns away again. This time he makes it all the way to the door before he pauses. In a much softer voice, he says, “But she won’t. So if you can stop this, whatever it is—now’s the goddamn time.”
It’s past time. Opal handed him a vital, final clue—befriend the Beasts—and he spent a week pickling himself in self-pity and booze, just because he was too cowardly to pursue it. To unlock the door he’s been trying to unlock for his entire adult life, and follow the Beasts down into Hell and make war on whatever he finds there.
He doesn’t know what it is. He suspects there’s a locus or a source, something that sends the Beasts up to do their bloody work, and he hopes that it’s mortal enough to be stopped by a sword through its heart. All he knows for sure is that there have been other places plagued by foul mists and invisible Beasts—until they weren’t. Until someone stopped them.
Even now, Arthur should be arming himself, pursuing that dedication, making ready. Instead, he’s been delaying. Drinking, because then he would sleep, and when he sleeps the House sends him dreams of her, of them, of a future they won’t have.
How selfish, how fundamentally silly, that he should start wanting to live right when he ought to die.
When Arthur finally looks up, Jasper is gone.
It’s only much, much later—after Arthur has swept up the glass and puke, emptied the rest of the bourbon down the bathtub drain, opened the fridge, puked again, and begun to assemble everything he’ll need for his final descent—that he realizes: his notepad is gone, too.
NINETEEN
I must fall into actual sleep at some point, because I dream of the house again. Except— for the first time—Jasper is there. He’s standing in front of the gates, eyes accusatory, both palms red and wet. As I watch, the wrought-iron beasts of the gates begin to move. They coil and writhe, reaching for Jasper, wrapping their metal limbs around him, opening their rusted mouths to swallow him whole.
My own scream wakes me up. The dream fades, but I remember snatches of Jasper’s real voice, the worry and fear in it, and think, with disgust: Enough.
I take the trash out that evening, embarrassed by the flaccid, stringy feeling of my muscles. On the way back from the dumpster I lift two middle fingers in the direction of Bev’s office. The blinds snap back into place.
The next morning I shove my feet into my tennis shoes, trying not to notice the drips of Antique Eggshell scattered over the tops, and slouch across town.
The air is wet and vivid and the sky is a cheery almost-summer blue that makes me want to crawl back to room 12 and hibernate. But the light sinks determinedly into my skin, driving out the gloom of the last week and leaving a slightly depressing normalcy in its place. Everything I know about myself and the world itself has shifted, but nothing’s really changed. I know my name, but I’m still nobody; I know where my nightmares come from, but I can’t make them stop; I know how Arthur tastes, how his hand feels at my waist, but I can’t have him.
Charlotte is peeling pastel flower decorations off the library windows when I turn up, and it occurs to me that I missed Mother’s Day. Jasper and me usually play cards and split a cigarette on the riverbank, in memorial. I wonder if he was with the Caldwells this year, if he picked flowers or made pancakes or whatever kids are supposed to do on Mother’s Day.
Charlotte beams when she sees me. I feel like a grub exposed to strong sunlight. “Hey.”
“Hey.” She says it low and sullen, the caricature of a teenager. “It’s business hours. How come you aren’t housekeeping for Sweeney Todd?”
“How come you aren’t bringing my holds to the motel anymore?” It’s a clumsy dodge, but it works.
Charlotte sets her box of decorations on the sidewalk and crosses her arms. “Oh, I didn’t realize I worked for you! I haven’t got a paycheck yet so maybe you should figure that out and get back to me.” Her voice is two degrees past teasing, sharper than I’m expecting.
I fiddle with a stray thread on my shirt before muttering, “Sorry,” and going inside. I get my holds from the high school volunteer behind the desk, who greets me with a youthful effervescence that ought to be criminalized, and slink back out the double doors with my shoulders hunched around my ears. My reflection looks like someone else. I refuse to consider who.
“Opal.” Charlotte stops me before I can stalk dramatically past her.
“Yeah?”
“You know I’ll have my master’s degree by the end of the month.”
“Congratulations.” The word comes out sour, teetering on the edge of sarcasm. If Bev were here she’d throw something at me. I’d deserve it.
Charlotte runs her tongue across her teeth. “I wanted you to know that I’ve been applying for other positions. In other counties.” My guts twist. If I were a cat my spine would be hunched, my fur poofed out. “I thought, if I get a call back … I thought maybe you might want to move with me. We could split rent, for a while.”
I am aware, in a distant, intellectual way, that this is an act of kindness. I should be flattered and warmed by it. I should be relieved, to be handed a way out of a town that’s trying to kill me. I shouldn’t want to put my fist through the glass at all.
When I fail to answer, Charlotte adds, “You could do better than this place. You know you could.”
I know she’s right. When people drive through Eden—and they rarely do—all they see is a little bad-luck town scrabbling on the surface of Big Jack’s bones, like a parasite on the carcass of a whale. They don’t know about the Gravelys or the Starlings or the things that prowl in the mist, but they sense something off, something spoiled. They keep driving.
Anywhere would be better. But: “Maybe I don’t want better.” Charlotte opens her mouth. I cut her off. “Anyway, Jasper’s still in school. He needs me.”
She looks at me with that gentle, insufferable sympathy and asks, softly, “Does he?” and I am amazed how much a question can feel like a sucker punch.
It leaves me panting, reeling. “He does, he needs me. I can’t leave. This is my—” The word catches in my throat and burns there, a choking sweetness, like wisteria in bloom.
It’s funny: I always wanted to be from somewhere, to come from something other than a red Corvette and a motel room, and now I do. I’m a goddamn Gravely—my ancestors have been here for generations, digging their roots deeper and deeper into the earth. They’ve written the history of this town in blood and coal, and the town has buried them, one by one.
So how come I can’t say the word? How come it still tastes like a lie?
There are no more flowers left on the front doors. Charlotte tucks the cardboard box under one arm and studies me with a tired sort of pity. “Home is wherever you’re loved, Opal.”
“You come up with that yourself or did you see it on some soccer mom’s Instagram?” I’m all spite now, hissing and spitting. “So, what—you aren’t loved enough around here? Is that it?” I try to make it mocking but I wonder if it’s true, if that’s why everyone keeps leaving me.
For a moment Charlotte’s calm cracks and I see the wound running beneath it, raw and red. She stitches it closed again. “Apparently not. Just think about it, alright?”
“Sure,” I say.
But I won’t. I’ve made it twenty-six years—despite the Beasts, despite Baine, despite everything—and I’ll be damned if I’ll cut and run now.
* * *
I fully intend to go back to room 12 and continue wallowing at an Olympic level, but when I open the door it strikes me less as a room and more as a den. The floor is scattered with the plastic carcasses of a dozen meals and the sheets have a greasy sheen, like hides. The air is still and meaty.
Room 12 has never meant much to me, but it doesn’t deserve this. I rest my head on the sun-warmed metal of the door, wondering if Starling House is falling into decay in my absence and reminding myself firmly that it isn’t my problem and never will be, before sighing and stripping the sheets off both beds.
In the movie version of my life the scene would collapse here into a cleaning montage. You would see me rolling up my sleeves and hauling wet laundry out of the washer, dragging the motel cleaning cart across the parking lot, discovering half a granola bar stuck to the carpet and shoving it furtively in a trash bag. The soundtrack would turn peppy, indicating the heroine’s renewed resolve. But reality never skips the boring parts, and I’m not sure I have renewed resolve so much as a real stubborn streak, just like Mom. Survival is a hard habit to break.
By the time Jasper turns up the room smells like bleach and Windex and there’s a feast laid out across his bed like an apology: canned peaches and gas station pizza, a pair of Ale-8s, a king-sized Reese’s to split. I know it’s not much, but maybe it’s enough, because maybe home is wherever you’re loved. The worst thing about cheesy slogans is that they’re mostly true.
Jasper dumps his backpack with a seismic thud and stares at the food, then at me—upright, showered, coherent—then back at the food. He eats two slices of sausage-and-pepperoni in showy silence, chewing with the expression of a young god weighing an offering at his altar. Eventually he grants me a measured “Thanks.”
“Sure.”
He rubs cheese grease on his jeans. “So. You’re back. What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I say, and burst into tears.
I wasn’t planning to. I had a whole set of slick lies about how I’d finished my contract at Starling House on good terms but then Lance Wilson gave me mono and I was really sorry I’d been so out of it, but I can’t get the words out around the sobs.
The mattress dips and Jasper’s arm settles over my shoulders and I know I should push him away and pull it together because kids shouldn’t have to take care of adults, but somehow I don’t. Somehow I’m smearing snot all over his shoulder—Christ, when did he get so tall—while he gives me tentative pats and says “Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay” even though it obviously isn’t.
I don’t stop crying so much as run dry, hiccupping into silence. “So,” Jasper says casually, “what’s up?”
My laugh is gluey and wet. “I got fired, I guess. A couple of times. And then I quit? It’s complicated.”
“Did you find a dead body? Or like, a murder dungeon?”
“God, I let you watch too much creepy shit when you were little. No, nothing like that. He just—we just—” I can’t think of a succinct or sane way to say we fought an eldritch beast and briefly made out before he ruined everything by revealing his complicity in our mother’s death so I finish, “Disagreed.”
“He’s a real asshole, huh.”
“The worst.” I straighten up and tuck my hair behind my ears. “He’s rude and weird and his face is all”—I make a violent twisting gesture in midair—“and you know I like tattoos but there’s an upper limit. And he’s so full of shit, and so arrogant about it, like he knows what’s best for everybody else—what?”
“Nothing,” Jasper says, but he gives me the sideways, shit-eating smile of a kid who’s about to break into the K-I-S-S-I-N-G song.
I jam my elbow between his ribs and both of us lose it, laughing in the abrupt, overloud way you do when you haven’t laughed in a long time. I have a split-second vision of an alternate world, where monsters aren’t real and Starling House is just a house, where Mom never died and I never dropped out and my brother and I were allowed to be dumb kids together.
When we stop laughing, I say, quietly, “Hey. I’m sorry.”
“It didn’t hurt. You’re like, super weak.”
“I mean for being such a baby about everything and for ignoring you earlier and for—before. For not telling you what was going on.” There’s a whole lot more I could and probably should tell him, but I chicken out. My whole body feels raw and weepy, like a skinned knee.
Jasper sobers. “It’s okay. I mean it’s not, but it is.” An unfamiliar weight drags at the corners of his mouth, a hint of confessional guilt. “Look, Opal, I…”
He draws a deep breath and I’m struck by the suspicion that he’s going to say something heartfelt, that he loves me or forgives me, and I’m too dehydrated to do any more crying. So I say, “Been working on any new videos?”
He closes his mouth. Opens it. “No.”
“Why?”
“Just over it, I guess.” Jasper shrugs. I’d would call it his tell, except his entire body is comprised of tells. He looks out the window; he fidgets guiltily with the wrapper on the peach can.
A sudden thought knocks the smile off my face. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Baine, does it? She hasn’t been bothering you?”
A sharp look through his lashes. “No,” he says slowly. “She hasn’t. And she won’t, because you don’t have anything to do with that house anymore.”
“No. Yeah, I mean, I don’t.” It’s not even a lie. I’m through with Starling House and its Warden, with Elizabeth Baine and her cut-glass eyes, with the whole ugly mess of debts and desires, sins and stories.
I just can’t swear they’re through with me. Gravely blood. “But call me if you hear from her, okay? And”—I reach into my back pocket and withdraw the copper penny I stole weeks ago, which I never quite managed to sell or give back, because I liked the feel of it, the round print it left on my skin—“take this, will you?”
Jasper takes the coin gingerly. He studies the swirling lettering, the faded harp. “Why?”
“For luck.” I say it lightly, but I hold his gaze until he slides the penny into his pocket. Maybe when he falls asleep I’ll stitch an Eye of Horus into the lining of his backpack; maybe I can find a horseshoe somewhere to hang over the door to room 12. Maybe all Mom’s stupid little charms and superstitions were the reason she made it as long as she did.
I have a sudden, sick memory of her hair tangling with the plastic beads of that dream catcher, the night her luck ran out.
“So.” Jasper makes a visible decision to sidestep all my weird shit. “What’ll you do now?”
Get you the hell out of here. Before Baine gets creative, before Arthur throws open the gates of Underland, before the mist rises again. Which means cash. Which means—“I’m going down to Tractor Supply in the morning. Figure I’ll get my old job back from Frank.”
Jasper swallows and the whatever-it-was vanishes. “Didn’t you quit without notice and text him a middle finger when he asked where you were? You think he’ll hire you back?”
I smile one of my least charming smiles, all sharp angles and teeth. “Yeah. I think he will.”
* * *
He does. I mean, the first thing he says when he sees me walk through the door is “No,” followed shortly by “Absolutely not,” and then “I will call Constable Mayhew and have you removed from the premises,” but he comes around. All I have to do is mention my familiarity with child labor laws and the documented fact that he paid me for more than thirty hours per week while I was a minor. His face goes blotchy pink and he disappears into the back office. He returns with a contract balled in his fist and warns me that he’ll call Constable Mayhew anyway if I try any more “funny business.” He finishes with an admirable attempt at an intimidating glare, and I pay him the courtesy of not laughing in his face. I’ve gotten used to a higher class of monster, this spring.
I spend the next two weeks wearily reassembling the life I’d had before Starling House, like a hurricane survivor returning home after the water recedes. I open the laptop and drag “document 4.docx” to the recycling bin. I wrap Underland back in its shroud of grocery bags and shove it deep under the bed, except this time I add a long woolen coat. It’s too hot for it, anyway.
I charge my phone and make a call to Stonewood Academy to confirm that they received my final payment. I ask about summer courses and discover that, for some reason, room and board is twice as much as the regular term. The bursar suggests, delicately, that we might consider an installment plan. I agree, even though I have no idea how I’ll make the payments. Then the bursar suggests, even more delicately, that Jasper might want to enroll in noncredit courses the first term. “They’re designed to help students like Jasper catch up to their peers.”
“Oh, no, his grades are great.”
“I’m sure they are! Stonewood only accepts the best, after all.” But she keeps talking, circling and insinuating. She mentions culture shock and his background and how hard they’re working on their retention rates for underrepresented demographics.
I find myself picturing those boys on the rowboat, the oversaturated blue of the sky behind them. I bet none of them ever took a noncredit course; they were the lesson Jasper was supposed to learn, the blueprint he would spend the next two years studying.
Eventually I manage, through a suddenly tight throat, “Thank you, we’ll look into that.”
I go through my missed texts, including six or seven from Bev asking if I’ve talked to Charlotte lately and telling me the guests in room 9 left half a pizza behind if I want it. I don’t reply.
I block Elizabeth Baine’s number without responding to her last message. I make sure to walk fast across the motel parking lot. I never see her, but sometimes I feel the sharp press of eyes on the back of my neck.
I hesitate before tapping the conversation labeled Heathcliff, my chest seizing with hope or hate or maybe simple hunger, but his last message is weeks old. Good night, Opal. I wonder if he’s sitting in that big empty house, just waiting for a misty night. I wonder if he’s been sleeping at all. I wonder if I’ll ever see him again.
I take the long way to work. At least it isn’t cold anymore; by the end of May the air pants against the back of your neck and the sun lands like a slap.
I pass white crowns of honeysuckle and don’t wonder whether those vines are blooming at Starling House. I kick dandelion heads by the side of the road and don’t see animal shapes in the pale clouds of seeds. I eat my picante chicken ramen in the break room and don’t remember the warm smell of soup simmering in a cast-iron pot. When I see starlings flocking, I don’t try to read the shapes they make in the sky.
