Starling House(72)

“Oh, gee, that’s awful nice of you, but I don’t have them.” I make the same face I use when I’m telling someone their brand of dog food won’t be restocked until Wednesday. “And, as I don’t work for Mr. Starling anymore, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

Her magazine smile is wadded up now, all edges and angles. “Can’t or won’t?”

This is the moment to cover my ass, to assure her that I’m still the spineless money-grubbing double-crosser she thinks I am. It wouldn’t even be a lie.

But maybe I don’t want it to be true. Or maybe I just don’t think Stonewood Academy would kick Jasper out after cashing the check Arthur sent them; it’s easy to be brave when it won’t cost you anything.

Or maybe I’ve just had a very shitty day. I bare my teeth at her, brazen and stupid, and don’t answer.

She waits, then says, “I see,” and slides her card across the counter.

I tuck her receipt in the bag and hand it over. “You have a nice day, ma’am.”

Baine lingers, studying my face as if she’s looking for the error in an equation. “I misjudged you, Opal.” She says my name like she owns it. “I thought you loved your brother.”

She unfurls a new smile as she says it, the bright white sneer of someone who has never spent a single week without dental insurance, who wins every hand because she has all the cards. It’s designed to put me in my place, to bend me.

Instead, I break.

There’s a hitch in my vision, like a skipping track, and then Elizabeth Baine isn’t smiling anymore. She’s bent double with her hands pressed over her mouth, making a sound like a rusty hinge in the wind. My knuckles are split, throbbing sweetly, and Frank is pointing at me in red-jowled triumph. My hearing has gone funny, but I can read his lips beneath the flying spittle: Get out!

Which is either the second or third time I’ve been fired this month, depending on how you count it.

This time I don’t run. This time I tuck my phone in my pocket and grab a candy bar from the rack. I touch the Butterfinger to my forehead in mocking salute and saunter out into the ripe spring sun.

Jasper and me used to jump off the old railroad bridge when we were kids. Everybody did, even though half the time the water left your skin rashy and red. It was the only satisfactory ending to a summertime double dare, high enough to scare you but not high enough to hurt, close enough to Starling House to send goose bumps down your spine but not close enough to stop you.

I used to like it: the curl of my toes over the edge, the rush of wind, the clap of skin against water and then sudden, plunging silence. It was like falling into another world, escaping the noisy gravity of reality, just for a little while. It was like dreaming.

I haven’t done it since the accident, of course. I’ve cuffed my jeans and gone wading once or twice, but never for very long, and only ankle-deep. The water is always too cold, even in summer, and I have this stupid conviction that I’m going to trip and go under and not come up. Classic PTSD,I guess.

But every now and then I come sit on the bridge. It’s a good time for it: the glazed hour right before sunset, when the heat fades and the shadows stretch like tired dogs across the ground. The first fireflies are pulsing above the river, visible only by their reflections in the dark water, and the steam from the smokestacks is ribboning into the sky. I don’t look at the power plant, because I don’t want to think about who it belongs to.

I look at the old mines instead, almost invisible beneath the kudzu, boards black with rot, before it occurs to me that they’re owned by the same family: mine.

A wave of something like nausea moves through me. I wonder if Nathaniel Boone dug that very mine, and if he really found a way into Hell to escape my great-great-whoevers. I wonder if Eleanor Starling hated her husband or mourned him. I wonder why she put stones in her pockets, or if that’s just what happens when you run out of dreams and have nothing left but nightmares.

That’s how I knew Mom didn’t drive into the river on purpose, no matter what Constable Mayhew thought: she had enough dreams for a dozen people. She was an appetite on two legs, always running from one scheme to the next. Instead of bedtime stories she told our fortunes, with the starry-eyed conviction of a kid with a cootie catcher. She’d marry a pharmacist and we’d live in a big brick house with two bathtubs. She’d win the scratch-off and we’d buy a cottage on the seashore. She’d become a big-time music star and they’d play her songs on 94.3 (The Wolf: Country That’ll Make You Howl) and the three of us would move to one of those fancy suburbs where you have to enter a code to get past the gates.

I guess that’s what she was doing the day she died. Rolling the dice, taking a chance, chasing a dream. She told us she was finally going to turn our lives around, and I guess she meant it—I guess she was going to talk her way back into her daddy’s good graces and give us a last name and a family fortune, make us somebodies after years of being nobodies—but at the time I didn’t believe her. The last thing she said to me, before the wheels screamed sideways across the asphalt, was: You’ll see.

I saw plenty. I saw the mist cleave. I saw the river rise. I saw that dreams were dangerous, so I folded mine up and shoved them under the bed along with the rest of my childhood.

I barely even remember what they were, now. I close my eyes and let the sound of the river fill my skull, trying to imagine what I wanted before I made myself stop wanting. At first all I can think of are little-kid dreams: cakes with thick frosting, matching sheets, that one baby doll that ate plastic cherries off a plastic spoon.