I pass white crowns of honeysuckle and don’t wonder whether those vines are blooming at Starling House. I kick dandelion heads by the side of the road and don’t see animal shapes in the pale clouds of seeds. I eat my picante chicken ramen in the break room and don’t remember the warm smell of soup simmering in a cast-iron pot. When I see starlings flocking, I don’t try to read the shapes they make in the sky.
It’s only the dreams I can’t get rid of, like stains left behind even when the floodwaters recede. My nights are full of dark corridors and twisting staircases, rooms I remember and others I don’t. Sometimes the hallways turn into caves and I realize too late that I’ve wandered into Underland, that the mist is coiling into spines and skulls. Sometimes the house remains merely a house, and I spend hours running my fingers along the wallpaper, looking for someone I can’t seem to find.
Either way, I wake up with his name in my mouth.
“You could take something,” Jasper says one morning. “To help you sleep.” His eyes are fixed carefully on the back of his cereal box.
“Yeah, maybe I will.” And maybe I would, if I wanted the dreams to stop.
My life is already so much dimmer without Starling House. I feel like one of those maidens stolen back from the fairies, blinking the glamour from her eyes to find that her silken gown was made of cobwebs and her crown was nothing but bracken. Or maybe like one of the Pevensies, an ordinary kid who was once a king. I wonder if the feeling will fade. If the memory of a single season will be buried beneath the weight of ordinary years, until it is just a story, just another little lie. If I will learn to be content with enough, and forget that I was ever foolish enough to want more.
I buy a bottle of Benadryl at the gas station the next day. It sits on my windowsill, unopened.
TWENTY
The last week of May is so hot that the mini-fridge sweats and the soles of my shoes stick to the asphalt. Jasper and me take cold showers before bed and wake up with salt crusted to the collars of our shirts. It gets bad enough that Jasper threatens to go live with Logan, so I drag myself over to the front office for the first time since I slammed the door in her face.
Bev is sagging in her chair, a box fan pointed directly at her face and a cold soda pressed to her forehead. A small pool of sweat has gathered in the divot of her throat. “Well, well, well. If it isn’t Little Miss Cold Shoulder.”
“You’ve got to turn the AC on, Bev. It’s a human-rights issue.”
Bev asserts that I’m being dramatic, and furthermore that her granddaddy didn’t turn the air conditioner on before June and neither will she.
“Your granddaddy didn’t live to see global warming.”
“No thanks to the Gravelys.” A chill falls between us. If I squint I imagine I could see frost sparking in the air. Bev grunts, “Mail came.”
She tosses a rubber-banded roll of mail at me and I turn on my heel, flicking through life insurance ads and threats from debt collectors. There’s a cream-colored envelope addressed in handwritten ink that causes me to stop breathing very briefly, but it’s not his handwriting. It’s swirling and feminine, and there’s an embossed seal on the back with the words “Stonewood Academy” circling the edge.
I rip it open in a fumbling rush—did my last payment get lost in the mail? did Elizabeth Baine pull something dirty?—but it’s just a card with thank you printed across the front in elegant gold.
Dear Mrs. Gravely,
As the principal of Stonewood, I would like to extend my personal thanks to you for making such a generous long-term commitment to our school. Jasper’s tuition has been paid in full, and the additional funds will be made available for room, board, and medical needs, as per your request. We can’t wait to welcome Jasper this fall!
The card ends with a heartfelt request that I call on the principal personally if Jasper or I need anything at all, and a flourishing signature. I have to read it several times before I understand what must have happened, and then several more before I understand who must have done it.
The card crimps in my hand. “Oh, that jackass.”
Here I am, doing my damnedest to fold myself back into the grim dimensions of reality, to forget him and his crooked face and the cold taste of the river in my mouth—here I am trying to wake up from the wild dreams of the spring because dreams aren’t for people like me—
“You alright?” Bev is squinting at me from under the coke can.
I bite my tongue, very hard, and give her a big, mean smile. “Just fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“Neither do you, but I didn’t like to mention it.”
“Look.” Bev smacks the can on the counter. “I know it’s a shock finding out who your mama was, but you been walking around like your best friend ran over your dog and now you’re crying over a thank-you card—”
“Jesus,mind your own business!” I slam the door as I leave, because if you’re going to act like a hormonal teenager you might as well commit to the role.
I make it two steps out of the office before my legs go. I sit hard on the curb, pressing the tears back into my eyes with the heels of my hands, wondering why Arthur keeps trying to pay that unpayable debt, and why it hurts so much to see him try. And why I’m so damn relieved that he hasn’t fallen into Underland, at least not yet.
A shoe scuffs beside me, and I smell tobacco and Febreze. Bev settles on the curb next to me with the harassed sigh of someone whose joints no longer appreciate low seats.
We sit in sweaty silence for a minute before she says in a rough voice, “Remember when I first met you?” I shrug at the pavement. “You got yourself stung by a wasp, one of those nasty red ones. What were you, seven?”
I unpeel my palms from my face. “Six.”
“But you didn’t cry. You just sat there, biting your own lip, waiting it out.” Denim scrapes on concrete as Bev turns to face me. “It didn’t even occur to you to ask for help.”
“I was an independent kid.”
“You were a stupid kid, and now you’re a stupid woman.” Bev has called me stupid at least twice a week for most of my life, but she’s never done it with her jaw squared and her eyes pushing hard into mine. “How in hell is anybody supposed to help you if you won’t ask?”
Because asking is dangerous, I could tell her. Because to ask is to hope that someone answers, and it hurts so bad when nobody does. I stiffen my spine instead. “I take care of my own shit, okay? I don’t need anybody’s charity.”
Her lip curls. “That so?”
“Yes.”
She huffs like I hit her and I think: Finally. If I can’t shout at Arthur Starling then a good old-fashioned parking lot slap-fight with Bev will have to do.
I’m tense and ready, darkly eager, but Bev just watches me with that weary disgust. “Do you still think,” she asks, and I’ve never heard her sound so tired, “at almost twenty-seven years old, that I let you stay here all this time because I lost a bet?”
If this was a fight, I lost it. I’m laid out flat, gasping for air, feeling furious and ashamed and everything except surprised. Because I guess this is another thing I already knew. I knew Bev didn’t let me stay because she had to. She did it for the same reason she slapped wet tobacco on my wasp sting as a kid: because I needed help, even if I never asked.
I’m bent over, arms crossed around my own chest, as if I might come apart at the seams if I don’t hold myself tight. “Why didn’t you tell me? That I was—that Mom was a Gravely.” My voice is small in my ears, very young.
Bev sighs beside me, and her body sags into it. “I don’t know. Never seemed to be a good time for it, I guess.” She wipes sweat off her upper lip. “Or maybe I just didn’t want to tell you. Your mama was the only Gravely I ever met that was worth a damn, and they cast her out, and you too. I took you in.” I risk a look at her face and find it just as hard and mean as always. But she scoots her foot toward me until the sides of our shoes are pressed together. “Finders keepers.”
A weird warmth moves from her shoe to mine, chasing up my limbs, settling in my chest. It occurs to me that I was wrong, that Bev never looked away. She helped us even though we never asked. And if home really is wherever you’re loved—