I can feel their eyes on me while I work.
The sun is fat and low by the time I pause to crack my spine and eat a slightly squashed Pop-Tart. My heart sinks: less than half the room could be called clean, and only by someone with a very generous definition of the word “clean.” Standing there with the shadows stretching long and my right arm swinging on the sore hinge of my shoulder, I understand that I wasn’t given a job after all: I was given an impossible task, of the kind a king might set for his daughter’s unwanted suitors or a god might give to a sinful soul. It would take fleets of professionals and several industrial dumpsters and possibly an exorcist to make this place livable, and I’m just a girl who cleans a couple of cheap motel rooms over the holidays, when Gloria and her mama fly back to Michoacán and Bev needs a hand.
I should quit. I should beg Frank for extra shifts. But I can’t pay for Stonewood on minimum wage, and the gate key feels cold and sweet against my chest, and anyway I can’t give the Starling boy the satisfaction of watching me run from him a second time.
I text Jasper—working late tonight, I hid the last picante chicken in the tampon box under the sink—and wring out my rag again. The house sighs around me.
Just before dusk Arthur finds himself standing alone in his mother’s favorite room.
He didn’t intend to be there; he left the library headed for the third-floor bathroom and wound up on the first floor instead, staring at the sagging couch his mother ordered from a catalog. She wasn’t a person who permitted herself many indulgences, but sometimes after a hard night she would sit on that couch and wait for dawn to drive back the mist. Arthur knew she wasn’t a pretty woman, but on those mornings—with her face golden and battle-weary in the rising sun, her knuckles bloody around the hilt of the Starling sword—she was somewhere beyond beauty, tilting toward mythic.
Arthur has let this room rot for almost a decade.
Now it shines fresh and bright, as if all those years were scrubbed out of it. As if his mother might step around the corner at any moment, smiling her soldier’s smile, and his father might call from the kitchen. Arthur takes a step back and the eyes of the former Wardens seem to follow him from their frames, weighing him, finding him wanting.
The floor creaks behind him and Arthur whirls, one hand flinching toward his hip.
Opal is in the doorway, staring at him. Her hoodie is balled up under one arm and her T-shirt is smeared with grime. She’s tied a scrap of something that looks like his kitchen curtain around her left palm, and her hair curls at her temples, dark as blood.
Opal’s eyes flick to his hand, splayed at his hip, then away. She nods at the setting sun. “I’m heading out.”
He tucks the hand very casually in his pocket and adopts his archest tone. “And what did you think of your first day?”
That wry twist of her lips, a glimpse of crooked teeth. “I think I’ll ask Mr. Augeas if he needs his stables cleaned next. Be a piece of cake after this place.”
Arthur blinks at her several times. He doesn’t know what to say, so he says, obnoxiously, “It’s pronounced Aw-gee-us.”
Her smile goes hard and fake. “Oh! My apologies. I must’ve dropped out before we got to ancient Greek.” She shifts the hoodie beneath her arm. It makes a muffled clanking sound.
“I didn’t mean—it’s just that mythology is something of a . . .”—calling, duty, obsession—“. . . hobby. In my family.” Arthur finds he can’t look at her. He withdraws a heavy envelope and thrusts it blindly in her direction. “Your pay.”
Opal folds the envelope into her back pocket and holds her hand out flat for more. “I’ll need extra for supplies.” Her voice is syrup-sweet.
“So you’re coming back. Tomorrow.” Arthur tries to sound neither pleased nor sorry and winds up sounding bored.
“Yep.”
He puts a twenty in her outstretched hand. The hand doesn’t move. He adds another twenty.
The cash disappears into a different pocket and Opal gives him a switchblade smile as she turns away. “That’s the thing about strays.” Her voice echoes back to him over her shoulder. “We don’t quit.”
He’d said it because it was a cruel thing to say. Because it would hurt, and people hate what hurts them, and if she hated him maybe she would run before she got hurt much worse. So there’s no reason regret should crawl up his throat. No reason he should swallow hard and say, far too quietly, “I’m sorry.”
There’s no reason he should wish she’d heard him.
He lingers, after she leaves, breathing in the smell of soap and clean wood. The House shifts subtly, the light tilting and the air chilling, so that the room is precisely as it was that last day. Damn you, he thinks, but the memory is already rising around him, closing like jaws.
He is fourteen. His mother is lying silently on her yellow couch while his father carefully stitches a flap of her scalp back into place. The battle had been a long and brutal one—had it always been this bad? was the mist rising more than it should?—and the skin over her cheekbones is white.
Arthur watches them for a while. His father’s long-fingered hands—the hands of a painter or a pianist, bent instead to the bloody, endless work of keeping his wife alive. His mother, a knotted scar of a woman, already going gray. Her right hand is still resting on the hilt, restless, ready.
Without quite planning to, Arthur announces that he is leaving.
His mother opens her eyes. How dare you, she says. She’s always been stern, but she’s never spoken to him like this, with this furious contempt. They took my home from me—you think you can just walk away from yours—this is your birthright—
His father says her name, gently, and her mouth shuts as if sewn, the stitches overtight. You’re not going anywhere, she says.
But Arthur had. That very night, he’d climbed out the library window and down the wisteria, while the House moaned and wailed. He thought it would try to stop him, but when his foot slipped, his fingers had found an old trellis in just the right place, and when he slid into his father’s truck, he found a backpack full of peanut-butter-and-jellies.
He’d driven himself to the bus station with a heady, dangerous glee, as if he were a kite with its strings cut.
The next time he saw his mother, there had been a thistle pushing gently through the socket of her right eye.
The House shifts again and the memory falls away. Arthur is twenty-eight. He is alone, and he is grateful.
SIX
I toss the spoons on Jasper’s bed when I get back to room 12 that evening. “Put ’em on eBay, please and thank you. The antiques account.”
Jasper appraises the spoons with a clinical eye. He draws a finger down the silver and withdraws it, frowning. “You didn’t get these at Tractor Supply,” he observes.
It’s my personal ambition never to set foot in a Tractor Supply again, actually.
As soon as I counted Arthur’s money I texted Lacey tell Frank i quit :) and called Stonewood Academy to find out where I should send my first payment. The lady on the phone repeated “In . . . cash?” with audible ellipses and helpfully reminded me of the final deadline, as if I didn’t already know it. As if I didn’t repeat the date in my head every time I passed the smokestacks.
“Nope,” I say.
Jasper looks like he might have a few follow-up questions, but we have a deal where he doesn’t ask me anything he doesn’t want answered, so he merely mentions his fervent hope that I’m not doing anything illegal.
I press a hand to my chest, mortally wounded. “Me?”