Starling House(106)
The sitting room shifts around us, becoming the room I know in the world above. The wallpaper fades and the plaster cracks. The floor polish turns dull and scratched and stains bloom on the bare wood. The narrow Victorian furniture is replaced by a sagging couch, and the walls are crowded with mismatched portraits. The atmosphere shifts, accumulating years of long sunsets and deep winter evenings, rainy afternoons and bitter midnights, decades of striving and hungering and fucking and letting the coffee go cold because your book just got good. Whole generations of living, leading down to Arthur, and then to me.
“Starling House might have been yours in the beginning, Eleanor, but it’s mine now.” I say it as gently as I can, but Eleanor flinches as from a hard slap.
But she bares her small, sharp teeth at me, and says, “Take it, then. I don’t care.” Her eyes shine with an awful light. “You already lost everything else.”
Then she runs from me, disappearing into the House, and I follow.
I don’t have to hurry. I can hear Eleanor’s small feet slapping the stairs, doors slamming behind her, but this is my House now. It will take me wherever I want to be, and no lock will hold against me.
I find her back in the attic room, perched back on her bed with her Beast beside her. The Beast is small and fragile now, like an underfed stray, and it watches me from beneath the safety of Eleanor’s elbow.
“What did you mean?” I ask her, and I am calm, so calm.
That mad gleam still shines in her eyes, triumphal, terrible. “I mean it’s over. I mean that black lake—the ash pond, you called it?—was never built the way it should have been. So many little cracks and fissures, so many places it could break, with just a little bad luck.”
How many times has Bev ranted along the same lines? All anybody has to do is say “coal keeps the lights on” in her hearing and she’s off, showing them pictures of Martin County on her phone. The dirt turned to gray sludge, the houses stained with arsenic and mercury, the ghostly white bellies of the fish floating for miles down the Big Sandy.
The House shakes around me. I breathe carefully. “Eleanor, listen to me. If that stuff hits the river—”
“Then they’ll get what they deserve.”
“Who will, for fuck’s sake?” I’m not breathing carefully anymore. The pipes are whining in the walls, the curtains billowing. “Not Gravely Power, that’s for damn sure. They’ll pay a fine and reopen in two weeks.”
For the first time, Eleanor looks unsure. I sit beside her on the bed, the mattress dipping beneath me. “Why did you stay in Eden, Eleanor?”
I wonder if she’ll answer, or if she’ll stay spiteful until the very end. But she says, “I had a right.” She chews hard at her own lips. “I wasn’t from here, but I wasn’t from anywhere really, and after everything I thought I deserved to be from somewhere. Like my starlings—they didn’t come from here and nobody liked them much, but they stayed. Why couldn’t I?”
It’s a familiar story, a tune I’ve sung to myself many times: a little girl who loves a place that doesn’t love her back, a child making a home when she was never given one. I clear my throat. “They’re still around, your starlings. There are thousands of them now. They bother the hell out of the whole town.”
An unnatural bending occurs somewhere around Eleanor’s mouth, which must be as close as she gets to a genuine smile. It unbends quickly. “And there are still Gravelys.”
I clear my throat. “Yes.”
Her voice goes low and bitter. “And they’re still rich, still riding high on everybody else’s misery.”
“Yes.” I hesitate, then: “My mother was a Gravely, actually.” Eleanor looks straight at me for the first time since I entered the room, her body recoiling like a cornered animal. “And so were you, until you decided different. So did my mom. And so did I, I guess.” My mom lied to me about a lot of stuff, but this is the only lie that was also a gift: she cut away the rot of the past and gave me a life made only of right-nows and tomorrows. She let me grow up nameless and homeless, and now I get to choose my own name and make my own home.
But Eleanor is still rooted deep in her own terrible history. She’s been down here festering and hating, punishing and poisoning, and it’s still not enough. Even now she’s looking at me like she might sink her baby teeth into my throat. I let my voice go very low and soft. “The men who hurt you are long dead.”
“So I should let their descendants go unpunished? Let them profit off their father’s and grandfather’s sins?”
“I mean, no,fuck them.” I think of Don Gravely, looking at me with those dead gravel eyes. Only very belatedly does it occur to me that I, too, am one of their descendants. “I just think maybe you should leave it to the living.”
Eleanor’s tiny jaw goes mulish. “They don’t know what I know. They’ve twisted the story, forgotten it on purpose. None of them know the truth—”
“That’s why you wrote The Underland, isn’t it?”
“I—” Her nostrils widen. There is a motion in her chin that might, in a real child, be called a quiver. “I wanted them to see. To know. I thought maybe if. . .” The quiver vanishes. Her eyes narrow. “How did you know the title.”
I pull both legs onto the bed and turn to face her, so that we’re sitting like two kids up too late at a sleepover. “Because I read your book. Everyone has. It’s famous.” Her eyes are very wide now, ringed in ivory. “There’s a plaque in front of your house with your name on it. The name you chose.”