i) I’ll have a homicide to plan on top of everything else.
3) Arthur Starling almost murdered me and then almost kissed me and then tossed me aside like used gum, and I’m not sure which of those things upsets me more.
I settle for “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”
Bev glares through the windshield for another second. “Okay.” She thumps the hood again. “Learn to park, meathead.”
There’s a plastic crate waiting outside my door with a sticky note on top that says Gravely collection, Box #1 in Charlotte’s neat handwriting. I open the door and kick the box across the threshold.
Room 12 is stuffy and mildewy. There’s a faint, hormonal funk in the air that tells me Jasper swung by at some point, either to make up or to grab his stuff, but I was busy housebreaking and getting busted and probably losing my job. The thought is sudden and chilling. How could Arthur keep paying me after he caught me stealing his keys and spying on the side? How could he ever let me set foot inside Starling House again?
It occurs to me that a normal person wouldn’t have this number and intensity of emotions if they lost a housekeeping job. I tell myself it’s just that the money was good and I don’t know how I’m going to pay Jasper’s tuition next year. It’s just that I was going to power-wash the steps and trim back the vines, hang fresh curtains and patch the broken bits of crown molding. It’s just that I’ll miss the warm weight of the walls around me and the irritable sound of Arthur’s footsteps on the stairs.
I want to storm back to Starling House and thump Arthur’s head against the wall until he forgives me or apologizes or presses his mouth against mine just to shut me up. I want to drive over to Logan’s and have a big, loud fight with Jasper, in front of God and everybody. I want to lean my forehead against Mom’s breastbone and cry, and feel the slick lacquer of her fingernails against my cheek as she lies to me. Everything’s okay, babydoll.
I open the storage crate instead, pawing through it at random. Somehow I end up cross-legged with the Gravely family photo album in my lap. I turn the pages slowly, feeling something sharp and green gathering in my throat. Envy, maybe. We never had a family photo album. I used to sneak onto Mom’s phone and scroll back as far as I could in her pictures, but there weren’t any from before I was born. It’s like she sprang from the skull of the world, fully formed and laughing, a woman without a history.
The Gravelys have history. The whole town still tells stories about them, and the photo album shows me a parade of family dogs and Christmas trees and birthday cakes. Cousins and uncles and dour-looking grandparents all standing in front of that big brand-new house.
The last picture in the book is a teenage girl leaning against a car the color of a maraschino cherry. Her legs are long and freckled, crossed at the ankle. Her face looks different, younger and softer than I’d ever seen it, but her smile has a brazen, reckless tilt I know better than the backs of my own hands, and her hair—you don’t forget hair like that. It’s redder than the car, haloed gold by the sun, so that she looks like a woman on fire.
Mom. My mom. Standing beside the ’94 Corvette that was always too nice for her.
It took me a couple of weeks after the funeral to make myself go out to the junkyard to collect her stuff. By then the inside of the car was black with mold, the seats lightly furred. Greasy brown water poured out of the glove box when I opened it. I grabbed the dream catcher and signed the rest over for scrap.
I find, somewhat to my surprise, that my hands are moving. They’re sliding the picture out of the plastic and flipping it over. On the back of the photo someone has written Delilah Jewell Gravely, 16 in blue ballpoint.
I think: I always hated my middle name. Then I stop thinking.
But my body is still moving. It’s kneeling on the motel carpet, right on the bare spot where my feet land every morning. It’s reaching under the bed, toward something I haven’t touched in eleven years and—when did I lose track of the days? When did my life become more than a long tally of days endured?
The plastic bags have gone brittle. The dream catcher is cracked and broken, the beads dangling on loose threads. The book looks different than I remember, smaller and shabbier. There are fractal blooms of mold across the cover, bruise-black, and the pages have the rotten smell of clogged gutters. But the title is still stitched along the spine in bright silver—The Underland—and the initials on the inside cover are still the same: DJG.
I asked Mom once if she was DJG. She laughed and called me Little Miss Encyclopedia Brown, which is what she called me when I was being nosy. I asked what her real initials were, and she said whatever the hell I want them to be with such an edge to her voice that I shut up.
Now I kneel on the floor with names tumbling through my skull like dominoes, or Old Testament genealogies. John Peabody Gravely was the brother of Robert Gravely who begat Donald Gravely Sr. who begat Old Leon who begat Don Jr., brother of Delilah Jewell Gravely, who begat me, Opal Delilah—
I balk. I’m no Gravely.
I’m a cheat and a liar, a trickster and a tale-teller, a girl born on the ugly underside of everything. I’m nobody, just like my mother before me.
But that name would make us somebodies. I can feel my own story shifting around me, the arc of my life bending out of true.
Maybe that’s why I turn the page. Maybe I’m looking for a story that still feels familiar, or maybe it’s just muscle memory.
The next page is empty except for the dedication, which always felt like secret code, a letter written specifically to me:
To every child who needs a way into Underland. Befriend the Beasts, children, and follow them down.
I turn the next page, and the next, reading until all I can see are monsters drawn in scrabbling black ink, until all I can hear is my mother’s voice, soft and warm as cigarette ash.
Once there was a little girl named Nora Lee who had bad, bad dreams. The dreams were full of blood and teeth, and they frightened her very much, but I will tell you a secret: she loved them, too, because in her dreams the teeth belonged to her.
You see, Nora Lee had been left in the woods when she was a baby, where a wicked fox found her. The fox took her back to his home and fed her sweets and watched her with hungry eyes. She knew one day soon he would gobble her up.
Nora Lee begged the other animals to help her, but no one listened. The fox always wore a coat and tails when he left the house, and smiled often, and no one believed that the owner of such a fine coat and such a wide smile could have such unseemly appetites. They told Nora Lee to hush and be a good girl.
So Nora Lee, who was not a good girl, ran away.
She ran until she came to a wide green river. She didn’t know how to swim, but she thought a wide green river must be better than a fox. Just as she was about to walk into the water, a hare passed by.
“Little girl,” he said, “what are you doing?”
So Nora Lee told him about the bad dreams and the wicked fox.
As it happened, the hare did not much like the fox either. So he told her about a place—a secret place hidden way down deep below the world—where even the darkest dreams might come true. He called it the Underland.
She asked the hare how to find Underland, and he told her to follow the river down. “Follow it deeper than the deepest burrow,” he said, “deeper than the longest roots of the oldest oak.”