Starling House, page 22
Then came Ulysses Wright, the son of Tennessee sharecroppers. He and his parents arrived in the early thirties, after their employer sold the land out from under them. His parents died of regular old age, but Ulysses was found with the sword still in one hand. Next were Etsuko and John Sugita in ’43. They were originally from California, but met in Jerome, Arkansas. After about six months of unlawful detention they climbed the camp fence and followed the Mississippi north. They had two daughters in the house before Etsuko was found floating down the Mud River. After them came Odessa Dixon and her wife, then Eva Jackson, then Lynn and Oscar Lewis.
Can you guess what happened to all of them? Are you starting to see the pattern?
A Warden falls. The house calls someone new—someone lost or lonely, someone whose home was stolen or sold or who never had a home in the first place. It calls them, and they come, and they are never homeless again.
All it costs is blood. I mean that very literally—Arthur’s notes mention some kind of blood oath (God, that’s embarrassing to say) to become Warden.
But it doesn’t stop there, does it? It takes more blood, and more, until another Warden is dead and some other poor bastard starts to dream of staircases and hallways and locked doors. Again and again, faster and faster.
It sounds okay at first, even sort of noble: a house for the unhoused, a home for all the people whose homes were stolen from them. It’s like a fairy tale, a dream. But then it eats them alive.
In her diary Etsuko called Starling House their “sanctuary.” But it’s not a sanctuary. It’s a grave. And Opal: it won’t be yours.
TWENTY-ONE
The last time I heard a story about Starling House I was sitting inside it. The night pressing at the windows, Arthur’s blood on my hands, his eyes wild on mine. It had all sounded so grand and so terrible, like a modern-day myth.
Told here, sandwiched between the cornfield and the football field in the mean light of noon, it just sounds sad and strange.
Jasper is watching my face closely. “Well?”
“Well, what?” I lift one shoulder and let it fall, showily unconcerned. “I got fired, remember? Haven’t been back since. I appreciate your concern, but this is all extremely old news.”
“Have the dreams stopped?”
I tuck my hair behind my ear. “What dreams?”
Jasper rubs his face so hard it looks like he’s trying to physically mold it into an expression of patience. “There are two more things you should know. The first one is that whatever’s going on in that house is getting worse. I looked at all the dates, went through more newspapers…” He rubs his face again, this time like he’s trying to remove something from it. “The Wardens are dying faster.”
My own pulse is suddenly loud in my ears. “Since when?” Screw waiting for a text, I’m going to call Arthur over and over until he picks up, warn him—but then I remember Arthur’s oath to be the last Warden, the pure panic on his face when I mentioned my dreams, and realize: he already knows.
“I don’t know, like the early eighties? But here’s the second thing.” Jasper turns until he’s facing me, his eyes heavy on mine. “All these people, every Warden, had a choice. They chose to act on their dreams, to follow the fucking starlings or whatever. They chose to swear themselves to that place—even Arthur.”
“Maybe.”
“No, not maybe. Look, there was something else tucked in the notes.” For the first time in this conversation, Jasper looks a little guilty. “I know I shouldn’t have read it, because of privacy or whatever, but…”
He pulls his Algebra II textbook out of his bag and withdraws a very familiar piece of notebook paper. I recognize the faded blue of the lines, the plain handwriting, the torn edge. But this isn’t the page I found before, the one that ended midsentence: This is your birthright, Arthur. That’s what I told you the night you ran away, isn’t—
This is the other half of the letter. I take it from Jasper without speaking, and read.
it? But—God forgive me, because I doubt you can—I was wrong.
There’s no such thing as a birthright. All you have inherited from us are your cheekbones and your stubbornness. You are free to make your own life, build your own home, fight your own battles. This House has no heirs; the next Warden will be whoever takes up the sword.
I’m sorry. I have loved this place for so long, and fought so hard for it, that I got all confused. I thought I was fighting for a home; I was only ever fighting for you.
Back in North Carolina, the dreams didn’t come to me when the bank took the house away. They didn’t come when we missed rent in the trailer park, either. It was only when I knew you were on the way that I started dreaming of Starling House, because that’s when I decided I needed someplace nobody could take from me.
I chose. So will you.
I love you.
Mom
P.S. Your father wants me to remind you to trim the roses before the last frost and stake the foxgloves by June. I told him you weren’t coming back and he said that’s fine but I should tell you just in case.
P.P.S. Wherever you go, I hope you’re not alone. If I was ever strong—if I ever did a single good or brave thing in my life—it was only because I had you and your father to be strong for.
* * *
The letter leaves a catch in my throat, an ache in my chest.
All this time, I still thought Arthur was trapped, cursed to carry on his mother’s work. But he wasn’t. He came home to bury his parents and found a letter setting him free. He never had to take up the sword.
Right now, he could be living in a cute two-bedroom apartment in Phoenix, haunted by nothing more alarming than mice. He could be working nights and dating a dental hygienist. He could be a professor or a happily starving artist or anything he wanted.
But he’s here, all alone, paying a terrible price so that no one else has to. And if he has made mistakes—if he let a monster slink out into the night, hunting Gravely blood—hasn’t he paid enough for it?
I fold the letter carefully along the tattered lines and slip it in my pocket. I swallow twice. “You’re right. You shouldn’t have read that.”
Jasper’s eye roll is almost audible. “Okay sure, but I did, and so did you, and now we both know the truth.”
“That we are criminals and degenerates?”
“That every Warden makes a choice. It’s not inherited or destined or whatever. A few of them had families, right? And do you know what happened to their kids? They moved away and got married and had normal lives! Nothing kept them here, not fate, not blood.” Jasper is leaning toward me now, speaking clearly, like a teacher talking to a sullen and slightly slow child. “The Wardens chose that place. And that means we can choose, too.”
“I get what you’re saying but”—someone hits the brakes in my brain, tires squealing—“we?”
Jasper looks at me for a long time then. Long enough for me to notice the spongy, sleepless bags beneath his eyes, the new lines carved beside his mouth, the wispy not-quite-stubble of an unshaven teenager. Then he says, horribly slowly, “You aren’t the only homeless kid in this town, Opal.” In his eyes I can see the reflections of doors and stairs he’s only seen in dreams, the ghostly map of a house that isn’t his.
All the air seems to evaporate out of my bloodstream. I’m dizzy, breathless with emotions I can’t even name. Fury, maybe, for the years of secrets between us, and fear for what happens next. But also something acid and viscous, bubbling noxiously in my throat: envy.
“You can’t ever go back there. Promise me you won’t.” My fingers are biting into the turf, ripping roots.
Jasper is closing his laptop, sliding it between the textbooks in his backpack, zipping it shut. He stands, looking at me with that tired, distant expression back on his face. “Why? Because you want me safe, or because you want the house for yourself?”
“Oh, go to hell—”
“You haven’t been able to make up your mind, have you? But I have.” His smile is strangely gentle. “Nobody—not you, not that house—is going to tell me what to do with my life.”
Jasper picks up his blue plastic tray and leaves me alone at the edge of the field.
* * *
I waste the rest of my lunch break kicking rocks at the Tractor Supply dumpsters, periodically shouting swears. It doesn’t help; by the time I clock in I’m still so mad that Frank opens his mouth to bitch at me for being late and then slowly closes it and scurries down the cat toy aisle instead.
I ring up four customers without making eye contact. I don’t look up until a cool, not-from-around-here voice says, “Good evening, Opal.”
I hadn’t seen her approach the counter: a pretty woman with her watch turned to the inside of her wrist and a smile that looks like it was clipped out of a magazine and glued to her chin.
I’m not surprised; I always knew Elizabeth Baine wouldn’t give up easy.
I greet her with the aggressive apathy of a cashier on the sixth hour of her shift. “Find everything you need, ma’am?”
“Yes, thank you.” She places a pack of gum and a matchbook on the counter, one of those embarrassing souvenirs that says My Old Kentucky Home in blue script. I ring her up and she draws a matte black card out of her purse. She doesn’t hand it to me.
“Anything else I can help you with?”
She taps the card on the counter. “We’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”
“Well, here I am.” If she’s trying to rattle me, she shouldn’t have tried it here. I’ve stood behind this counter and smiled down eight years of lewd suggestions, one attempted robbery, and more than a hundred 4-H-club moms with highlights and out-of-date coupons.
“Can we talk privately? You’re off at six.”
Frank is lurking in the lawn mower belts now, watching us, so I give her an extra big smile when I say, “Fuck off.”
A muscle moves in her jaw. “Then I’ll be quick. Our group has determined, thanks to your cooperation”—she wields the word like a knife, looking for a soft spot—“that it’s worth pursuing the phenomena at Starling House.”
My heart gives a guilty flinch, but my smile doesn’t twitch. “Best of luck.”
“We believe—” Baine inhales, her nostrils pinched white. “—that we need the keys. We are willing to pay you a substantial sum for them.”
“Oh, gee, that’s awful nice of you, but I don’t have them.” I make the same face I use when I’m telling someone their brand of dog food won’t be restocked until Wednesday. “And, as I don’t work for Mr. Starling anymore, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
Her magazine smile is wadded up now, all edges and angles. “Can’t or won’t?”
This is the moment to cover my ass, to assure her that I’m still the spineless money-grubbing double-crosser she thinks I am. It wouldn’t even be a lie.
But maybe I don’t want it to be true. Or maybe I just don’t think Stonewood Academy would kick Jasper out after cashing the check Arthur sent them; it’s easy to be brave when it won’t cost you anything.
Or maybe I’ve just had a very shitty day. I bare my teeth at her, brazen and stupid, and don’t answer.
She waits, then says, “I see,” and slides her card across the counter.
I tuck her receipt in the bag and hand it over. “You have a nice day, ma’am.”
Baine lingers, studying my face as if she’s looking for the error in an equation. “I misjudged you, Opal.” She says my name like she owns it. “I thought you loved your brother.”
She unfurls a new smile as she says it, the bright white sneer of someone who has never spent a single week without dental insurance, who wins every hand because she has all the cards. It’s designed to put me in my place, to bend me.
Instead, I break.
There’s a hitch in my vision, like a skipping track, and then Elizabeth Baine isn’t smiling anymore. She’s bent double with her hands pressed over her mouth, making a sound like a rusty hinge in the wind. My knuckles are split, throbbing sweetly, and Frank is pointing at me in red-jowled triumph. My hearing has gone funny, but I can read his lips beneath the flying spittle: Get out!
Which is either the second or third time I’ve been fired this month, depending on how you count it.
This time I don’t run. This time I tuck my phone in my pocket and grab a candy bar from the rack. I touch the Butterfinger to my forehead in mocking salute and saunter out into the ripe spring sun.
* * *
Jasper and me used to jump off the old railroad bridge when we were kids. Everybody did, even though half the time the water left your skin rashy and red. It was the only satisfactory ending to a summertime double dare, high enough to scare you but not high enough to hurt, close enough to Starling House to send goose bumps down your spine but not close enough to stop you.
I used to like it: the curl of my toes over the edge, the rush of wind, the clap of skin against water and then sudden, plunging silence. It was like falling into another world, escaping the noisy gravity of reality, just for a little while. It was like dreaming.
I haven’t done it since the accident, of course. I’ve cuffed my jeans and gone wading once or twice, but never for very long, and only ankle-deep. The water is always too cold, even in summer, and I have this stupid conviction that I’m going to trip and go under and not come up. Classic PTSD, I guess.
But every now and then I come sit on the bridge. It’s a good time for it: the glazed hour right before sunset, when the heat fades and the shadows stretch like tired dogs across the ground. The first fireflies are pulsing above the river, visible only by their reflections in the dark water, and the steam from the smokestacks is ribboning into the sky. I don’t look at the power plant, because I don’t want to think about who it belongs to.
I look at the old mines instead, almost invisible beneath the kudzu, boards black with rot, before it occurs to me that they’re owned by the same family: mine.
A wave of something like nausea moves through me. I wonder if Nathaniel Boone dug that very mine, and if he really found a way into Hell to escape my great-great-whoevers. I wonder if Eleanor Starling hated her husband or mourned him. I wonder why she put stones in her pockets, or if that’s just what happens when you run out of dreams and have nothing left but nightmares.
That’s how I knew Mom didn’t drive into the river on purpose, no matter what Constable Mayhew thought: she had enough dreams for a dozen people. She was an appetite on two legs, always running from one scheme to the next. Instead of bedtime stories she told our fortunes, with the starry-eyed conviction of a kid with a cootie catcher. She’d marry a pharmacist and we’d live in a big brick house with two bathtubs. She’d win the scratch-off and we’d buy a cottage on the seashore. She’d become a big-time music star and they’d play her songs on 94.3 (The Wolf: Country That’ll Make You Howl) and the three of us would move to one of those fancy suburbs where you have to enter a code to get past the gates.
I guess that’s what she was doing the day she died. Rolling the dice, taking a chance, chasing a dream. She told us she was finally going to turn our lives around, and I guess she meant it—I guess she was going to talk her way back into her daddy’s good graces and give us a last name and a family fortune, make us somebodies after years of being nobodies—but at the time I didn’t believe her. The last thing she said to me, before the wheels screamed sideways across the asphalt, was: You’ll see.
I saw plenty. I saw the mist cleave. I saw the river rise. I saw that dreams were dangerous, so I folded mine up and shoved them under the bed along with the rest of my childhood.
I barely even remember what they were, now. I close my eyes and let the sound of the river fill my skull, trying to imagine what I wanted before I made myself stop wanting. At first all I can think of are little-kid dreams: cakes with thick frosting, matching sheets, that one baby doll that ate plastic cherries off a plastic spoon.
And then: a house that feels like a home. A boy, kneeling among the flowers.
A boy who grew up in a hurry, just like me, who spent his life doing what was necessary instead of what was nice. A boy who wanted me—look, I know he did—but not as much as he wanted to keep me safe.
I remind myself firmly that Arthur Starling is also a liar and a coward, responsible for my mother’s untimely death, et cetera, et cetera, but my own voice sounds unconvinced in my head. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen when it happened. All alone except for the awful weight of his choices, the endless halls of his labyrinth.
It was an accident, plain and ugly, and he blamed himself so thoroughly that even I believed him. And now—while I sit here wishing and wallowing—he’s going to follow the Beasts back into Underland. He’s going to be the last Warden and the newest grave.
Unless I do something.
I slide my phone out of my pocket and run my thumb across the cracked screen. I text Jasper first, because a person should have their affairs in order before they do something really stupid, and I don’t want the last words between us to be lies and accusations. hey, we have to talk.
All this time I told myself I was saving him, shielding him from the messy shadow of Starling House, but apparently he’s already in it neck-deep, and the only person I was saving was myself. I didn’t want to tell him he was actually a Gravely, or even a student of Stonewood Academy. I didn’t want him to belong to anybody but me.
I guess I understand, a little, why Bev never told me the truth.
I wait, listening to the green hum of the trees and the throttled song of the river. The sun disappears behind the western bank and the air follows it in a rush, lifting the hair from my neck, cooling my swollen knuckles.
Jasper doesn’t write back, even though I’m pretty sure he’s hanging out with Logan doing exactly fuck all, because school lets out next week and he finished all his finals early.
I call him instead, feeling a little cruel because we generally only call each other when there are legitimate medical emergencies, but it’s his fault for ignoring me. He doesn’t pick up. I wait some more.
