Starling House(34)

My hand, half-outstretched for the key, freezes in midair.

This is not a candlestick or a coat, something a rich boy would never miss. This is a temptation I don’t want, a debt I can’t pay. Mom’s entire life was a house of cards built from favors and charity, bad checks and pills. She never closed a tab or paid a parking ticket; she ripped the tags off in dressing rooms and owed everybody she ever met at least twenty bucks. When she died her house of cards collapsed around us: the junkyard took the Corvette, her boyfriend took the pills, and the state did its damnedest to take Jasper. All we had left was room 12.

But I’m trying to build something real for us, a house of stone and timber rather than wishes and dreams. I work for what I can and steal the rest; I don’t owe anybody shit.

I slip my hand back into my coat pocket without taking the keys. The stolen letter gives a recriminatory rustle. “I’m good, thanks.”

Arthur’s eyes narrow at me, arm still stiff between us. “I didn’t mean forever. Just until your work here is through.” Another flash across his eyes, bitter black. “I don’t like people asking questions about this place.”

“Oh.”

“And take this, too.” He says it carelessly, as if it’s an afterthought, but the piece of notepaper he pulls from his jacket is folded in a crisp square. He tips it into my hand along with the Chevy keys, fingers carefully not touching mine.

“I don’t—is this a phone number?” The sevens are crossed with old-fashioned lines, the area code bracketed in parentheses. Hardly anybody in Eden bothers with the area code because it’s 270 all the way to the Mississippi, and who would visit from farther than that? “Since when do you have a phone number? Or a phone?”

It’s difficult to pull off a really convincing sneer after giving a girl your number, but Arthur makes an admirable effort. “Just because I didn’t give you my number doesn’t mean I don’t have one.” He slides a matte black square out of his pocket as proof, pinching it awkwardly between thumb and forefinger. There’s a filmy look to the screen. He hasn’t even peeled the plastic cover off yet. “If those people bother you again . . .” He shrugs at the paper in my hand.

“Okay.” I blink down at the keys and the phone number, feeling disoriented, suspicious, as if Bev just asked to adopt me or Jasper brought home a B+. “Okay. But who are they? And why do they want—oh, come on.”

But his shoes are crunching past me up the drive, his shoulders pinched tight. He disappears back into Starling House without looking back.

I slide into the driver’s seat of the truck, hands strangely clammy. I never got my license—a fact I will withhold to share with Arthur later, whenever it seems funniest—but I know how to drive. Mom taught me. You’d think, the way she loved that Corvette, that she wouldn’t have put a preteen behind the wheel, but she was the kind of person who didn’t like to eat dessert unless you had some too. The last time I had my hands on a steering wheel she was in the passenger seat, head tilted back, eyes closed, smiling like nothing had ever gone wrong or ever would.

I look up as I turn the key in the ignition. There’s a single light flickering from the highest window of the house, soft gold in the near night. A lonely figure stands silhouetted behind the glass, his back turned to the world.

Jasper still hasn’t come back (I’d texted him hey lmk if you’ve been murdered or joined a cult, and he’d replied not murdered and then, by the grace of Lord Xenu), and room 12 is too quiet without him. I wake often that night.

The first time it’s the sound of tires on wet pavement that gets me, and the sudden conviction that a sleek black car is pulling into the parking lot. The second time it’s the old, bad dream, the one where Mom is drowning, her mouth open in a soundless scream, her hair drifting like red kelp, and I’m rising away from her, leaving her to the dark.

I turn up the heat and wrap myself in that ridiculous coat before getting back under the covers, driving back the cold memory of river water in my chest.

The third time it’s the hellcat who lives under the dumpster. She wakes me with her usual strategy of sitting on the sill outside and staring at me with such predatory intensity that some ancient mammalian instinct makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I ooch down the bed and kick the doorknob open with my bare foot, but she remains perched on the windowsill, looking out across the parking lot as if it’s pure chance that she was staring holes through my screen at dawn.

I glare at her hunched-up shoulder blades, marveling that anything so desperately needy could be so willfully unpleasant, and then I fish Arthur’s number out of my coat pocket.

The letter comes with it.

I hadn’t forgotten about it; I just hadn’t felt like reading it when I got back to the room. Apparently reading the stolen correspondence of someone who has just cleaned up your vomit and given you his father’s truck was too low, even for me.

But now it’s lying right there on the bed, a scrap torn from Arthur’s vast quilt of secrets, and nothing’s really too low for me.


Dear Arthur,

I hope you don’t get this letter for a long time, but I know you will. I’m not much for reading, but I’ve read everything the other Wardens left behind, and they all felt like this at the end: worn down, wrung out. Like when you sharpen a knife too many times and the blade goes thin and brittle. And then one bad night, it breaks.