Starling House(30)
I don’t remember letting go of her hand, but I must have done it. I must have crossed her name off the list in my head and swum for the surface, abandoning her to the river bottom, because the next thing I remember is vomiting on the shore. Clay beneath my fingernails, grit in my teeth, ice in my chest. The shine of the power plant through the bare branches, a cold sun that refused to rise.
I drifted away from myself, dreaming, and in the dream I was not cold at all. I was not the bad-luck daughter of a bad-luck mother, an accident washed up on the shore of a poison river. In the dream I was held tight, safe and warm inside a pair of arms that didn’t exist.
Later, the ER nurse told me that’s how you feel right before you freeze to death.
They discharged me after forty-eight hours, but for weeks afterward I could feel this coldness in the middle of me, like something in my chest had never quite thawed. I even went back to the hospital and made them x-ray my lungs, but they said everything looked good. I guess that’s just how it feels to find out what kind of person you are; to know, when it comes right down to the mean wire between living and dying, what you’ll do.
“Opal?” Baine says my name gently, as if she’s concerned about me, as if she didn’t engineer this entire sick experience. I want to dig my fingernails into her cheeks. I want to open the car door and leap out rather than linger another second in the candy-apple stink of this car.
I keep my hands very still in my lap. I might be sick and dizzy and suffering from classic PTSD, but I still know better than to bleed in front of someone like Elizabeth Baine. “Yeah. Jewell.” My voice sounds ordinary, almost careless. “I’m named after her, sort of. She picked my name off a list of birthstones, so we’re both jewels. Get it?”
Baine sits back a little, studying my face. It’s hard to focus on her features, so I close my eyes.
“Is that how she picked Jasper’s name, too?”
His name runs through me in a dark current, tensing my jaw, curling my fingers into fists. When I open my eyes Baine is smiling again. This one says: Bingo. “There’s no need to be alarmed. We’re a research group. We just did our research.” Her tone is soothing, hands palm up. “And we were hoping you would help us do a little more.”
“I don’t un-understand.” My tongue feels foreign in my mouth, a wet muscle fumbling against my teeth.
Baine slides the tablet off my knees and swipes through several screens very quickly. “It won’t take much of your time. We just want to know more about your employer and his residence. If you could just answer a few questions for us, keep in touch—maybe send a few pictures, tell us if you see anything interesting—we would be very grateful.” On the word “grateful” she shows me the tablet again. The URL blurs unpleasantly in my vision, but I’m pretty sure I’m looking at my own PayPal account, except there’s an extra comma in the balance. My stomach coils tight.
I don’t know what she wants, but I already know what I’m going to say. When somebody turns up in a fancy car and knows way too much about you—where you work and how your mother died and your little brother’s given name—you say whatever will get them to leave you the hell alone.
It shouldn’t even be hard. What do I care if some out-of-towners get pictures of Starling House? What do I owe Arthur, other than forty hours a week of housecleaning?
But the answer gets lost somewhere between my brain and my tongue, caught in my throat. His coat feels very heavy on my shoulders.
Baine takes her tablet back. “Oh, and if you bring anything else off the property, we’d like to purchase it from you.” The gate key burns cold against my breastbone. I’m careful not to reach for it. “There will be no need for Jasper to list anything else on eBay. Stonewood has very high standards of behavior, after all.” Her voice is delicate, almost apologetic, as if she dislikes the game she is playing but is obliged to win it anyway.
Somewhere beneath the haze of panic and fury, I almost admire her efficiency. She might be a doctor reading an X-ray of my innards, pointing precisely to each wound and fissure. My answer comes out soft and easy, then. “Okay.”
Baine pats my knee. Hal pulls over near the front gates and idles while I tell them everything I’ve seen or thought or guessed about Starling House. I do a pretty shitty job of it—telling things out of order and doubling back, stumbling over my consonants and trailing off, my thoughts derailed by the sour taste of betrayal and fake apple flavoring—but they don’t seem to care. A little red light winks at me from the tablet.
Eventually I run out of words and sit swaying and blinking in the sickly heat. Baine reaches across me to open the door. “Thank you, Opal. We’ll talk more soon.” I scrabble back into the clean winter light, feeling the air like cold hands cupping my face.
The trees shiver above me. A cloud of birds rises from the branches, scatters, coalesces, screams down at us.
Baine leans out the window, watching.
“They do it to evade predators, apparently.” I cannot, in that moment, imagine what she could be talking about. “The way they flock. We brought in an ornithologist, and he said these are a genetically distinct population, but not a remarkable one. Except that they do this”—a nod at the sky, where the starlings twist and wheel like smoke in the wind—“more often than is typical, given the low number of natural predators nearby.”