There are double shifts to work and pockets to pick; social workers to mislead and frozen pizzas to snap in half so they fit in the microwave; cheap inhalers to buy from sketchy websites and long nights to lie listening to the rattle and hiss of Jasper’s breathing.
Then, too, there’s the cream-colored envelope that came from a fancy school up north after Jasper took the PSAT, and the savings account I opened the day after it arrived, which I’ve managed to grow using the many and considerable skills my mother left me—wiles, theft, fraud, charm, a defiant and wholly misplaced optimism—but which still isn’t enough to get him out of this place.
I figure dreams are like stray cats, which will go away if I quit feeding them.
So I don’t make up stories about Starling House or ask anyone else for theirs. I don’t linger when I pass by the iron front gates, or look up with my heart riding high in my chest, hoping to catch a glimpse of that lonely amber light that seems to shine from some grander, stranger world, just for me. I never pull the grocery bag out from under the bed.
But sometimes, right before I fall asleep, I see the black shadows of trees rising up the motel walls, though there’s nothing but asphalt and weeds out the window. I feel the hot breath of Beasts around me, and I follow them down, and down, to Underland.
TWO
It’s a gray Tuesday evening in February and I’m on my way back to the motel after a pretty shitty day.
I don’t know what made it so shitty; it was more or less exactly the same as the days that preceded it and the days likely to follow it, a featureless expanse of hours interrupted by two long walks in the cold, from the motel to work and back. It’s just that I had to work eight entire hours with Lacey Matthews, the human equivalent of unsalted butter, and when the drawer came up short at the end of our shift the manager gave me an I’ve-got-my-eye-on-you glare, as if he thought the discrepancy was my fault, which it was. It’s just that it snowed yesterday and the dismal remains are rotting in the gutters, soaking through the holes in my tennis shoes, and I made Jasper take the good coat this morning. It’s just that I’m twenty-six years old and I can’t afford a goddamn car.
I could’ve gotten a ride from Lacey or her cousin Lance, who works nights at the call center. But Lacey would proselytize at me and Lance would pull over on Cemetery Road and reach for the top button of my jeans, and I would probably let him, because it would feel pretty good and the motel was pretty far out of his way, but later I would catch the scent of him on my hoodie—a generic, acidic smell, like the yellow cakes of soap in gas station bathrooms—and feel an apathy so profound, so perfectly flat, that I would be tempted to pull out that grocery bag beneath the bed just to make sure I could still feel anything at all.
So: I’m walking.
It’s four miles from Tractor Supply to the motel—three and a half if I cut behind the public library and cross the river on the old railroad bridge, which always puts me in a strange, sour mood.
I pass the flea market and the RV park, the second Dollar General and the Mexican place that took over the old Hardee’s building, before I cut off the road and follow the railroad tracks onto Gravely land. At night the power plant is almost pretty, a great golden city lit up so bright it turns the sky yellow and throws a long shadow behind you.
The streetlights are humming. The starlings are murmuring. The river is singing to itself.
They paved the old railroad bridge years ago, but I like to walk on the very edge, where the ties stick out. If you look down you can see the Mud River rushing in the gaps, a black oblivion, so I look up instead. In summer the banks are so knotted with honeysuckle and kudzu you can’t see anything but green, but now you can see the rise and fall of the land, the indentation of an old mine shaft.
I remember it as a wide-open mouth, black and gaping, but the city boarded it up after some kids dared each other past the DANGER signs. People had done it plenty of times before, but the mist rose high that night—the mist in Eden comes dense and fast, so heavy you can almost hear it padding along beside you—and one of them must have gotten lost. They never did find the body. 3
The river sings loud now, siren sweet, and I find myself humming along with it. I’m not truly tempted by the cold black of the water below—suicide is a folded hand and I’m no quitter—but I can remember how it felt down there among the bones and bottom-feeders: so quiet, so far beyond the scrabbling, striving, grinding work of survival.
It’s just that I’m tired.
I’m pretty sure this is what Mr. Cole, the high school guidance counselor, might call a “crisis point” when I ought to “reach out to my support network,” but I don’t have a support network. I have Bev, owner and manager of the Garden of Eden Motel, who is obligated to let us live in room 12 rent-free because of some shady deal she cut with Mom, but isn’t obligated to like it. I have Charlotte, local librarian and founder of the Muhlenberg County Historical Society, who was nice enough not to ban me after I faked a street address to get a library card and sold a stack of DVDs online. Instead she merely asked me to please not do it again and gave me a cup of coffee so sweet it made my cavities ache. Other than them it’s just the hellcat—a vicious calico who lives under the motel dumpster—and my brother.
I wish I could talk to Mom. She gave terrible advice, but I’m almost as old now as she was when she died; I imagine it would be like talking to a friend.
I could tell her about Stonewood Academy. How I transferred Jasper’s transcripts and filled out all the forms, and then sweet-talked them into saving him a spot next term so long as I pay the tuition by the end of May. How I assured them it wouldn’t be a problem, talking bright and easy like she taught me. How I have to quadruple my life savings in the next three months, on the kind of minimum-wage job that carefully keeps you under thirty hours a week so they don’t have to give you health insurance.
But I’ll find a way, because I need to, and I’ll walk barefoot through hell for what I need.
My hands are cold and blue in the light of my phone. hey punk how’s the book report going
great, Jasper writes back, followed by a frankly suspicious number of exclamation points.
oh yeah? what’s your thesis statement? I’m not really worried—my little brother has an earnest, determined brilliance that’s won over every teacher in the public school system, despite their expectations about boys with brown skin and curls—but hassling him makes me feel better. Already the river sings softer in my skull.
my thesis is that I can fit fourteen marshmallows in my mouth at once
and everyone in this book needs a long sitdown with mr cole
I picture Heathcliff hunched in one of the counselor’s undersized plastic chairs, an anger-management brochure crumpled in his hands, and feel a weird twist of sympathy. Mr. Cole is a nice man, but he doesn’t know what to do with people raised on the underside of the rules, where the world turns dark and lawless, where only the canny and cruel survive.
Jasper isn’t canny or cruel, which is only one of the several hundred reasons I have to get him out of here. It ranks right below the air quality and the Confederate flags and the bad luck that slinks behind us like a mean dog, nipping at our heels. (I don’t believe in curses, but if there was such a thing as a cursed family, it would look a lot like us.)
that’s not a thesis. My fingers snag on the cracks that spiderweb across my screen.
i’m sorry what did you get in 10th grade english again??
My laugh hangs in the air, ghostly white. i graduated with a 4.0 from the School of Fuck You