The words sound cheap and plastic, like fake pearls; whatever they gave her must interfere with her natural talent for lying. He molds his face into a careless sneer. “Can’t see why I’d care. Tell them whatever you want.”
He tries very hard to mean it. To recall that it doesn’t matter who they harass or drug or threaten, so long as the gates remain locked. That he is the Warden—the last Warden—and there is more at stake than the well-being of one girl, no matter how many times she comes back.
He leaves her sick and lost-looking in the bathroom, her arms crossed over her middle. Bits of plaster crumble from the ceiling, rapping against his skull like flicked fingers, and he digs his thumbnail into the wallpaper as he passes.
ELEVEN
I spend the next couple of hours laid out flat on the sofa, my face buried in the cushions, letting the springtime smell of the house drive the syrupy taste out of my mouth. I sort of hope Arthur will stomp back in to bitch at me, but he stays away. I hear the front door open two or three times, and the low rumble of his voice, as if he’s speaking on the phone he doesn’t have.
Around noon I get up, puke in the kitchen sink, and drag myself to the front hall with a bucket and a rag. But my mess has already been scrubbed away, leaving nothing but a damp spot and a faint lemony smell.
The rest of the afternoon passes slowly. I swipe half-heartedly at cobwebs and dust things I’ve already dusted. Mostly I just wander, leaning sometimes against the walls, running my palms along the banisters, as if the house is a pet or a person.
If the wall gives a little beneath my shoulder, if the wood feels warm under my hands, I tell myself it’s a side effect of whatever the hell was in that air freshener.
I wind up in the library again. I often do, by the end of the day. It’s the smell, all dust and light, or maybe it’s the quiet I like. There are no echoes or creaks or sudden noises in this room; I have the sense that I could put two fingers in my mouth and whistle, and the room would muffle the sound before it left my lips.
I pick a book not quite at random. I’ve gotten into this weird habit of letting my fingers trail along the spines until one of them feels right, a sort of staticky heat against my palm. (Arthur caught me doing this once and said What are you doing?And I said Nothing!and he glared very hard at the bookshelf, as if letting it know he had his eye on it.)
I settle into the best armchair, the one where the sun always seems to be falling obliquely across the page, and let the book fall open.
It’s a collection of Hopi folklore, printed on cheap yellow paper that flakes and cracks under my hands. The pages are heavily annotated, with the word “sipapú” circled and starred throughout.17 I’m too tired and headachey to actually read much, but something slips out of the pages onto my lap.
It’s a single sheet of notebook paper, pressed flat but deeply grooved, as if it was folded and refolded several hundred times. The handwriting is square and plain. The bottom half has been torn away.
The first two words on the page are Dear Arthur.
Later, I’ll wish I hesitated. I’ll wish I was the kind of person who thought about decency and privacy, right and wrong—but I’m not.
I slide my arms into Arthur’s coat and shove the page deep into the pocket. I walk calmly to the sitting room to collect my pay, and then I leave. The air swallows the sound of my steps.
I pause only once, at the front door. I tell myself I’m just tired and dreading the walk back to the motel, but the truth is that I don’t want to leave, don’t want to step back into that map scattered with red dots, each one a disaster.
I call myself several bad names, including chickenshit and fool,and leave.
There’s a dark shape waiting under the trees. I have a split second’s impression of headlights and tires, Starling House reflected in a wide windshield, and very nearly panic—but the thing parked in the drive is not sleek and black. It is in fact the vehicular opposite of Elizabeth Baine’s car: a prehistoric pickup, its hood dented, its paint gone a powdery periwinkle with age. The tires are matte black, brand-new, but there are orange patches of rust around each wheel well, and spidery lines of dirt crisscrossing every window, as if the entire thing had been overgrown with vines until very recently.
Arthur is standing by the driver’s door, looking cross and bored in a puffy coat that shows several inches of bare wrist. He should be intimidating, blocking the drive with his face stark and half-shadowed in the setting sun, but intimidating men don’t clean up other people’s vomit, in my experience.
I stop when I get close, hitching my hip against the wheel well. “Hi.”
A stiff nod.
I point my chin at the truck. “Whose car?”
His lips ripple. “My father’s. He liked . . .” He trails away, apparently unable to tell me what his father liked. He adjusts the side mirror instead, his hands gentle, almost reverent. “I cleaned it up. Hasn’t been driven much since . . .”
I consider waiting him out, letting the silence stretch him like a man on one of those medieval racks, but I find a small measure of mercy in my soul, or maybe I’m just tired. “What exactly is happening right now?”
Arthur exhales, abandoning the mirror. “What’s happening is that I’m asking you not to walk home.”
“It’s not my ho—” I catch the word between my teeth, bite it in half. “So are you offering to drive me?”
His eyes meet mine for the first time, flashing with an emotion I decline to identify. “No.” He holds out a stiff arm and something clinks in his fingers. It’s another key, except this one isn’t old and mysterious. It’s cheap metal, with the Chevy symbol engraved on the head and a little plastic flashlight on the key chain. “I’m offering you a car.”
My hand, half-outstretched for the key, freezes in midair.
This is not a candlestick or a coat, something a rich boy would never miss. This is a temptation I don’t want, a debt I can’t pay. Mom’s entire life was a house of cards built from favors and charity, bad checks and pills. She never closed a tab or paid a parking ticket; she ripped the tags off in dressing rooms and owed everybody she ever met at least twenty bucks. When she died her house of cards collapsed around us: the junkyard took the Corvette, her boyfriend took the pills, and the state did its damnedest to take Jasper. All we had left was room 12.
But I’m trying to build something real for us, a house of stone and timber rather than wishes and dreams. I work for what I can and steal the rest; I don’t owe anybody shit.
I slip my hand back into my coat pocket without taking the keys. The stolen letter gives a recriminatory rustle. “I’m good, thanks.”
Arthur’s eyes narrow at me, arm still stiff between us. “I didn’t mean forever. Just until your work here is through.” Another flash across his eyes, bitter black. “I don’t like people asking questions about this place.”
“Oh.”
“And take this, too.” He says it carelessly, as if it’s an afterthought, but the piece of notepaper he pulls from his jacket is folded in a crisp square. He tips it into my hand along with the Chevy keys, fingers carefully not touching mine.
“I don’t—is this a phone number?” The sevens are crossed with old-fashioned lines, the area code bracketed in parentheses. Hardly anybody in Eden bothers with the area code because it’s 270 all the way to the Mississippi, and who would visit from farther than that? “Since when do you have a phone number? Or a phone?”