He doesn’t tell Opal any of this; he doesn’t want to temper her fury with pity. “I saw the Beast rise. It looked at me, right at me, and I . . .” He’d looked straight back into its eyes, a pair of open wounds teeming with terror and fury and barren grief. He hadn’t been scared. How could he be scared of the eyes he saw in the bathroom mirror every morning?
Arthur doesn’t tell her that, either. “I didn’t even try to stop it. I just let it go. I ran after it, once I’d realized what I’d done. Through the gates, across the old railroad bridge. But I was too late. There were tire tracks running off the road, headed down the riverbank . . .” Arthur swallows, savoring this last moment before she hates him, before she knows what his cowardice cost her. “It was New Year’s Day.”
Her breath stops. He wonders if she is feeling the water close over her head again.
“I saw in the paper they said she drove into the river on purpose. But I knew it wasn’t her fault.”
Opal is breathing now, hitched and jagged.
Arthur keeps his eyes screwed shut. His voice scrapes out of his throat. “It was mine.”
Silence, thick and cold. Arthur thinks of food congealing on a plate.
He doesn’t expect Opal to speak to him again—what is there to say, after all, to the man who murdered your mother?—but she does. “You should know. Eleanor dedicated her book to ‘every child who needs a way into Underland.’”
Opal has puked on him and kissed him and told him to go fuck himself more than once, but she’s never spoken to him like this: cool and distant, perfectly detached. “She said to befriend the Beasts and follow them down. Maybe you should try it.” Her voice betrays her on the last sentence, a fatal, furious shake.
Arthur doesn’t know what she’s trying to tell him or why; he’s expending all his attention on keeping his eyes shut and his hands still.
He hears the couch creak, followed by a metallic clink and then, finally, the slap of bare feet on wood floors.
When Arthur opens his eyes several minutes later, his gate key is lying on the floor in front of him, and he is alone. She has run from him a third time, and God, he regrets everything.
EIGHTEEN
The thing is: I already knew. I may not have known where Mom was headed that night or who she really was, but I knew she didn’t do it on purpose. I’d seen something wrong-shaped in the white flash of the headlights. A deer,I told the officers, or maybe a coyote, but I knew it was neither. I knew it was bad luck on four legs, a nightmare set loose by whatever petty and careless god rules over Eden.
But I didn’t know I’d been cleaning his fucking house for four months. I didn’t know I’d betrayed him and bled for him and kissed him, that one day he would be on his knees, neck bowed, eyes closed, speaking in a voice like a shovel biting into earth.
So: I run. Just like he said I would.
The hall is short and straight, but the front door is locked. I rattle the knob and the house moans at me. “Don’t.” My voice sounds thick and wet; I think I must be crying. “Please.”
The door opens.
I run down the steps and along the drive, ribs aching, the gravel leaving teeth marks in my feet. I slip out the front gates and circle wide around his truck. I don’t want to think about the truck or the phone number, the too-high pay, the too-nice coat—so many things I thought were gifts, but which strike me now as desperate attempts to pay down a blood debt. But he’s shit out of luck, because my mother was worth more than he could afford. She was feckless and foolish and beautiful, she drank and she lied and she had a laugh like the Fourth of July and I needed her.
I’ve never stopped. I tried to cross her off my list that night in the river, but if I ran my fingers across the page I know I could still feel the shape of her name, indelible.
By the time I get back to the motel the sky is the color of old denim and the stars are faded flecks of bleach. The crickets have screamed themselves out and the only sound is the river, like the static between radio stations.
My feet hurt. My chest hurts. My eyes hurt. I feel like an open wound, a bruise.
The Underland is still lying open on my bed, bristling with ghosts and beasts. I crawl onto Jasper’s mattress instead.
I dream of Starling House again—an endless, arterial map of hallways and open doors, stairs and balustrades—and I’m grateful. At least I’m not dreaming of the river.
I’ve never really had the chance to wallow. Wallowing is an indulgence you can’t afford if you have thirty dollars left in your checking account and a baby brother watching you like you’re his personal sun, sure to rise. But now I find myself jobless and aimless, with no one counting on me and nowhere to be, so I figure: screw it. I wallow like I’m making up for lost time, like I’m going for the gold in self-pity.
I burrow deep into Jasper’s bed and spend three days in a sweaty cave of sheets and stale deodorant. I wake up to eat and piss and shower, and afterward I sit wrapped in my towel for so long it leaves bumpy pink imprints on the backs of my legs. I watch the tidal motions of the sun across the floor. I study the alluvial stains on the ceiling. I dig my fingers into my bruised ribs, thinking of other, gentler hands, and then I close my eyes and bully myself into a restless sleep.
I dream, and every dream is a bad one. The mist rises. The house falls. Arthur follows the Beasts down and down, just like I told him to, and I wake with wet cheeks. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t told him; sometimes I wish I’d fed him to the Beasts myself.
My phone buzzes every now and then, like a carpenter bee thumping senselessly against a window. I look at the screen the first couple of times, but it’s just the library letting me know my holds are available, or Jasper saying he’s spending another night at Logan’s (fuck Logan), or Elizabeth Baine asking if I received her message. That last one almost provokes an emotion, so I shove the phone under the mattress. I figure if they’re good enough to find my real birth certificate, then surely they can figure out that I’m not working at Starling House anymore.
Eventually the phone goes quiet.
A distant, rational part of me thinks: You know she won’t give up that easy. She’ll never give up, because she’s like me: willing to break every rule and cross every line to get what she needs. An urgency moves through me, a desire to call Arthur, warn him about her—
But then I think of the river. The mud under my nails. The cold place in my chest. I think of all our other close calls and bad nights. All Jasper’s ambulance rides and steroid shots, the ugly bike crashes and the time I tangled my foot in old fishing line and nearly drowned. The time Jasper chased a stray dog into the woods and a hunter’s bullet missed him so narrowly it left a purple welt on his right ear.21
I think about cursed towns and cursed families. I think: Above everyone else, they’ll go after Gravely blood.
I don’t think anything after that.
*
On the third day a fist slams against the room 12 door with an aggression suggesting I am about to be dragged off by men in jackboots.
“Hey kid, you dead?” Bev sounds as if she doesn’t care much either way, but wants to know if she’ll have to rent a steam cleaner. I wonder if she’s already planning to add me to her list of ghost stories—the girl who died of a broken heart and stank up room 12. The meathead who still haunts the motel.
More thumping. “I turned the internet off two hours ago. What’s going on?” There’s a strained note in her voice, perilously close to concern, that sends something white-hot licking up my spine.
I thrash out of bed and whip open the door so fast that Bev says, “Jesus H.—”
“Did you know?” My voice sounds like it’s coming out of a rusted gutter pipe.
She squints at me, hands on her hips. “You look like hot hell. You been eating right? Not that gas station garba—”
“Did you know?”
A flash of wariness, covered by flat irritation. “Did I know what?”