He sighs at me. “Please stop bleeding on my house.”
I suck resentfully at my lip. “Where did you come from?”
“Walking the walls.”
I squint around him at the winter woods, shadowed and empty except for the white bones of sycamores, and remind myself that this boy and his spooky shit are not my problem. “Of course.”
“You’re cold,” he observes. He’s mocking me, standing there all cozy in his rich-kid coat, his shoulders safe and square against the winter light while I shiver in my secondhand T-shirt, remembering what I’d rather forget, and I’m suddenly, thoroughly, absolutely over it.
“No shit.” I use my real voice rather than my cashier’s chirp. His eyes widen gratifyingly. “See, when you get locked outside by a haunted house in the middle of March, and nobody is around to let you back in because they’re busy doing God knows what—”
He moves past me in two long strides, keys clinking in his hand. He unlocks the door with his face half-hidden behind his collar.
I follow him back into the humid dark of the house, wondering if he’s about to fire me and wishing I didn’t have to care, wishing I’d stolen every last spoon in his stupid house.
But he doesn’t say anything. We stand awkwardly in the hall, not looking at one another. The heat makes me colder somehow, the shivers moving from my jaw to my belly, rattling my ribs. He slides out of his jacket and makes an abortive gesture in my direction before folding it stiffly over his arm.
He scowls at the floor and asks petulantly, “Why can’t you wear a coat?”
I repeat Jasper’s name in my head three times to prevent myself from saying anything nasty. “Because,” I answer, with only the slightest rasp of asperity in my voice, “my brother is using it.”
Arthur’s eyes cross mine, flashing with that terrible guilt. “You have a brother.”
“Yep. Ten years younger.”
His throat bobs. “And you, the two of you live with your father? Your parents, I mean.”
“Oh, are we doing small talk now? Shouldn’t I be cleaning something?” He flinches again, mouth half opening, and I cut across him before he can decide to fire me after all. “Last I heard my dad was driving trucks in Tennessee, but the Child Support people left him alone when I turned eighteen.” I’d been fifteen, actually, but it was worth losing those checks to keep Jasper. “And we don’t know about Jasper’s dad.”
Mom told us he was staying at the Garden of Eden for the summer. She said she liked him because he smelled like fresh-cut tobacco and always opened her beer first, like a real gentleman. Jasper used to ask around every August, until the lady who runs the Mexican place told him that the county sheriff started showing up in the fields and demanding H-2A visas. She heard Jasper’s father went back to Managua.
“And our mom . . .” I look away from Arthur and let my voice wobble. “She’s dead. Car wreck.” Nobody fires you after you tell them your mom’s dead.
I can’t see his face, but I know how people look at you when they find out: with pity, and horror, and that strange, secondhand embarrassment, as if they’ve peeked inside your medicine cabinet and found something shameful inside it. Next will come the stilted apologies and the condolences, eleven years too late.
Instead, Arthur says, “Oh.”
A small silence. For some reason, I fill it. “She wasn’t drunk. I know what people say, but she was a damn good driver. Just—just unlucky, I guess.”
She didn’t think so; she used to list all her near-misses and close calls—the laced pills that landed her in the ER, the jealous boyfriend that barely missed, the fox she’d swerved to avoid—and say she was the luckiest woman alive. I argued that a lucky woman wouldn’t have a list like that. I guess I won in the end.
Arthur has been working on a response for some time. Finally, he manages, “My mother,” and stops. Then, “Her, too.”
And then there’s something sickeningly close to sympathy stuck in my throat, a terrible urge to reach toward him. I clear my throat. “I’m—look, I’m sorry—”
He interrupts, stiff and cold again, “I believe I pay you enough to buy a second coat.”
I want to laugh at him. I want to explain about people like me, about the two lists we have to make and the one list we get to keep, the everything we give up for the one thing we can’t. The way Jasper chews on one knuckle when he edits his videos and the way he stares sometimes at the horizon when he thinks I’m not looking, world-hungry and half-starved, and the email I received last night confirming his enrollment for the fall term. There had even been a personal note from the director of admissions, telling me how happy they were to welcome “students like Jasper” and asking me to send along a photo for their website. I’d sent an old yearbook picture, a few shots of him and Logan at their laptops, a hilarious one where he’s leaning against the hotel in a hoodie, looking like an album cover.
I settle for a shrug. “The money’s not for that.”
“Not for what? Coats?”
“Me.” I try to say it like a joke, but it comes out sounding like what it is: the flat truth. Arthur responds with a cold “I see” that makes me think he doesn’t see at all, and stalks off, coat still trailing over one arm.
I don’t run into him again for the rest of the day. Usually he turns up before sundown, but that evening the house remains hollow and quiet. I find my envelope waiting for me on the sitting room couch.
Beneath the envelope, neatly folded, smelling faintly of winter air and woodsmoke and something else, is a long woolen coat.
Arthur tells himself, firmly and repeatedly, that it doesn’t matter. It’s only a coat. So it was the last thing his mother ever gave him. So he had found her letter in its pocket after the burial, as if she’d climbed out of her grave and slipped it there herself.
(He knew it had been the House playing its little tricks, and in that moment he’d wanted to burn it to the ground for simply existing, for not fighting hard enough for what it loved. He’d torn the letter into two neat halves, instead.)
Still. It’s only a coat.
But a sickly guilt trails him all evening, nipping at his conscience. He knows what to do with guilt.
He takes the sword to a large, empty room that only ever seems to exist when he’s like this: restless and tense, his bones buzzing under his skin. He moves through his drills with a ruthless, graceless efficiency. His mother had been a natural to the sword, as if she had spent her whole life waiting for someone to put a hilt in her hands. She fought like an apocalypse, like a great and inevitable ending. Arthur fights like a butcher, fast and ugly. But still: he works until his shoulders shake and his tendons are hot wires around his wrists.
It isn’t enough. He turns to books next, dragging himself through a tacky guidebook to European cryptids. He pauses to sketch an eighteenth-century headstone, engraved with a depiction of the twisted, sinuous animal that—one foggy night—supposedly dragged a woman to her death. The guidebook claims it was an enormous, bloodthirsty otter, but the locals used the word “ beithíoch.”
Arthur opens a bound journal and records the coordinates, the proximity of the water, the fog, the symbols the natives carved above their doorways for good luck. There are hundreds of other entries, going back all the way to Eleanor Starling herself, generations of frantic research collected into an eccentric bestiary.
But Arthur has added a new column to his pages, titled “Present Activity.” He refers back to the guidebook; the last reported attack was in 1927.
None,he writes, and feels a strange, sharp ache in his chest, almost like hope. Even bad stories end.