Starling House(42)
When I turn around, the narrow staircase is behind me. I brush my fingers along the wallpaper in silent thanks.
Arthur’s room isn’t messy after all. It’s bright and clean and hot, floorboards baking in the lavish light of May. There’s a desk beneath the window and a bed under the eaves, quilt tucked neatly around the mattress because of course he makes his bed every morning. I consider rumpling his sheets just to be a pill, but the thought makes me feel suddenly sweaty and restless, and anyway the hellcat is curled in the middle of his bed giving me a one-eyed glare. I stick my tongue out at her and look elsewhere.
On the wall at the head of the bed, hanging in a heavy bracket, there’s a sword. It doesn’t look like a toy or a Ren faire prop. The blade is rust-mottled, chipped and scored, but the edge is sharpened to invisibility, like the point of a snake’s tooth. There are symbols running from hilt to point, inlaid in soft silver, and I know with chilled certainty that Elizabeth Baine would have a seizure if I sent her a picture of it. I turn to the desk instead.
The surface is painfully tidy, all the pens nib-down in a coffee cup, all the books stacked and sticky-noted. The top drawer contains an array of overlong needles and pots of ink, a few paper towels stained a watery red. It should have occurred to me before now that the nearest tattoo place is in E-town. That he must sit up here with his sleeves rolled high and his hair hanging in his eyes, pressing the needle into his skin again and again.
I shut the drawer too hard, feeling irritable, overwarm.
The next drawer is full of pencil shavings and little stubs of charcoal. The third drawer is empty except for a ring of keys. There are only two keys on the ring, both old and ornate.
Just as my fingers brush the iron, there’s a muffled thud behind me. I flinch—but it’s just a freckled black bird at the window. It flaps querulously at the glass, as if offended to find an entire house this high in the air, then vanishes. It leaves me with my heart ping-ponging against my ribs and my eyes very wide.
Every inch of the wall around the window is obscured by paper and thumbtacks, as if an entire art museum had been crammed onto an attic wall. At first I think they must be early drafts of the illustrations for Underland and my stomach does a nauseous somersault—but no. Eleanor Starling worked in brutal black-and-white, her lines biting like teeth across the page, and these drawings are all gentle grays and soft shadow. There are Beasts stalking across the pages, but they’re subtly changed. Arthur’s Beasts have an eerie elegance, a terrible beauty that Eleanor’s never did. They step gently through quiet woods and empty fields, obscured sometimes by graphite knots of briar and honeysuckle.
They’re good drawings—so good I can almost hear the rattle of the wind through the branches, feel the give of the loam under my shoes—but the perspective is odd, tilted down instead of straight-on. It takes me a minute to realize this is how the world looks seen from the windows of Starling House.
I remember myself suddenly as I was: walking alone down the county road in my red Tractor Supply apron, looking up at this amber-lit window and hungering for the home I never had. Now I know Arthur was sitting on the other side of the glass, just as alone, dreaming of the world outside.
My throat tightens. I tell myself it’s the dust.
There’s a small sketch pinned just beneath the window, rougher and quicker than the others. It shows the woods in winter, the pale bellies of the sycamores, the doubled ruts of the drive. There’s a figure emerging from the trees, her coat oversized, her face upturned. All the other pictures on the wall are strictly pencil and charcoal, but this one contains a tiny shock of oily color, the only bright thing in a sea of gray: a smear of rich, arterial red. For her hair.
Something small and delicate goes ping in my chest. I snatch the keys and run.
I clatter down the stairs and back into the hall, not thinking about the keys in my hand or the fancy phone in my pocket or the way his face might’ve looked as he drew me: half annoyed, half something else, dangerously intent.
On the first floor I get turned around and find myself in the chilly mudroom behind the kitchen, tripping over cracked rubber boots, and the next door I open takes me out into the humid light of spring.
The sky is hazy blue and the air is spangled gold, as if the sun is shining from everywhere at once. I peel off my tennis shoes—I would peel off my skin if I could—and step away from the shadow of the house, headed nowhere, anywhere.
I walk, following a faint trail worn in the grass, studying the mad pattern of vines up the stone walls. There are leaves on the vines now, still translucent and damp-looking, and fat clusters of flower buds. The honeysuckle by the motel is already a ferocious, man-eating green, so this must be something else.
I turn a corner and stop abruptly, stunned by the sudden riot of color. Flowers. An uneven circle of lilies and daisies, lavender bursts of chicory and pale constellations of Queen Anne’s lace. A hot red riot of poppies, wildly out of place among the gray stone and shadows of Starling House.
Arthur is kneeling among them. There’s a pile of weedy green beside him and his hands are black with earth. Rows of gray stones surround him, stark and sinister among the riotous flowers. It’s only when I see the name STARLING repeated on the stones that I understand what they are.
Arthur is kneeling beside the newest and largest gravestone. It bears two names, two birth dates, and a single date of death.
I should say something, clear my throat or scuff my bare feet on the grass, but I don’t. I just stand there, barely breathing, watching him as he works. All the twist has gone out of his face, gentling the line of his brows and the arch of his nose, unpinching his lips. His hands are tender around the fragile roots of the flowers. The ugly, brooding Beast I met on the other side of the gates has disappeared entirely, replaced by a man who tends his parents’ graves with gentle hands, growing flowers that no one will ever see.