Starling House(68)
If this was a fight, I lost it. I’m laid out flat, gasping for air, feeling furious and ashamed and everything except surprised. Because I guess this is another thing I already knew. I knew Bev didn’t let me stay because she had to. She did it for the same reason she slapped wet tobacco on my wasp sting as a kid: because I needed help, even if I never asked.
I’m bent over, arms crossed around my own chest, as if I might come apart at the seams if I don’t hold myself tight. “Why didn’t you tell me? That I was—that Mom was a Gravely.” My voice is small in my ears, very young.
Bev sighs beside me, and her body sags into it. “I don’t know. Never seemed to be a good time for it, I guess.” She wipes sweat off her upper lip. “Or maybe I just didn’t want to tell you. Your mama was the only Gravely I ever met that was worth a damn, and they cast her out, and you too. I took you in.” I risk a look at her face and find it just as hard and mean as always. But she scoots her foot toward me until the sides of our shoes are pressed together. “Finders keepers.”
A weird warmth moves from her shoe to mine, chasing up my limbs, settling in my chest. It occurs to me that I was wrong, that Bev never looked away. She helped us even though we never asked. And if home really is wherever you’re loved—
I can’t finish the thought.
Bev is speaking again. “You should know. The day before your mama—on New Year’s Eve, she came over. We split a bottle or two and she told me her daddy was dying. She said she was going to talk to him, to make things right for you and Jasper. She said she’d pay me back for all those years in room 12.”
I exhale, not quite a laugh. “She said a lot of things.” I remember all the big talk, and all the broken promises that came after. It occurs to me, for no good reason, that Arthur has never broken a promise to me.
“I know, but this time seemed different.” Bev shakes her head and stands. Her knee joints sound like cap guns. “I don’t know what all’s going on with you, kid, but if you ever . . .” She trails into a sigh, having apparently exceeded her annual quota of public emotions.
She reaches for the office door with her neck bent and her shoulders heavy, and it strikes me that it’s been a long time since I saw her with her chin held high. The buzzed sides of her head have gone shaggy with neglect and the shadows under her eyes have deepened to a sleepless mauve, and I didn’t notice because I was too busy wallowing.
“So what about you?”
She pauses with the door half-open. “What about me?”
“Do you ever ask for help?”
She very nearly smiles. “Mind your own business. Meathead.”
The CLOSED sign jangles against the glass as the door shuts behind her.
I sit on the curb, letting the sun bake the hate out of me, feeling like a rug dragged out for an airing. I reread the thank-you note a few more times and try to picture it: Jasper in a crisp navy uniform, sitting at a desk without cuss words carved into it, breathing air without coal dust in it. Jasper, all taken care of, launched like a ship onto the bright seas of a better world.
I want it, I swear I do. It’s just that I can’t see myself in that picture. I’m somewhere else, off-screen or under water, drifting in whatever abyss waits for you when there’s nothing left on your list. I wonder if I’m truly angry, or just scared.
I slide my phone out of my back pocket and type why did you do it.
He might not answer. He might pretend not to know what I mean. He might have smashed his phone to pieces and gone to make war on Hell itself, because that’s the kind of dramatic fool he is. But I wait, sweating into the sidewalk, phone held too tight in my hand.
Because I didn’t want you to come back.
I type a reply but don’t send it. It sounds too much like asking a question, and to ask is to hope.
But later, when I wake from a tangled nightmare of mist and blood, with the taste of river water in my throat and the shape of his name on my tongue, I press send. i think you do.
He doesn’t answer.
It takes three days before I stop checking my texts every ten minutes, and even then I don’t really stop. I keep my phone tucked beneath the counter at Tractor Supply, hidden behind a roll of paper towels, and my heart seizes every time the screen lights up. (It’s only ever Jasper texting me pictures of friendly dogs or early tiger lilies; he seems to think I need cheering up.)
I don’t even know what I’m hoping for—an apology, a plea, an excuse to go marching up to his front door and ask him how the hell he could let me work under his roof for four months without mentioning the monsters under the floorboards which, by the way, are the reason my mom is dead.
But I suppose he has nothing to say to me, after all. He’s alone in Starling House again, just like he wanted, a mad knight readying himself for a battle he’s bound to lose.
Honestly, I’m lucky I made such a clean getaway. I check my phone again.
“You waiting on a text?” Lacey asks over my shoulder.
“Tell Frank I’m taking lunch early.” I shove the phone in my back pocket and slide out from behind the cash register.
I used to time my breaks to overlap with Lance’s so we could get high and make out behind the Tractor Supply dumpsters, but it turns out the availability of the weed was dependent on the making out, so now I spend my breaks stalking restlessly around town. Today I find myself passing the high school just as kids are shuffling toward the cafeteria, gossiping and bitching and flirting.