I wonder if she’ll answer, or if she’ll stay spiteful until the very end. But she says, “I had a right.” She chews hard at her own lips. “I wasn’t from here, but I wasn’t from anywhere really, and after everything I thought I deserved to be from somewhere. Like my starlings—they didn’t come from here and nobody liked them much, but they stayed. Why couldn’t I?”
It’s a familiar story, a tune I’ve sung to myself many times: a little girl who loves a place that doesn’t love her back, a child making a home when she was never given one. I clear my throat. “They’re still around, your starlings. There are thousands of them now. They bother the hell out of the whole town.”
An unnatural bending occurs somewhere around Eleanor’s mouth, which must be as close as she gets to a genuine smile. It unbends quickly. “And there are still Gravelys.”
I clear my throat. “Yes.”
Her voice goes low and bitter. “And they’re still rich, still riding high on everybody else’s misery.”
“Yes.” I hesitate, then: “My mother was a Gravely, actually.” Eleanor looks straight at me for the first time since I entered the room, her body recoiling like a cornered animal. “And so were you, until you decided different. So did my mom. And so did I, I guess.” My mom lied to me about a lot of stuff, but this is the only lie that was also a gift: she cut away the rot of the past and gave me a life made only of right-nows and tomorrows. She let me grow up nameless and homeless, and now I get to choose my own name and make my own home.
But Eleanor is still rooted deep in her own terrible history. She’s been down here festering and hating, punishing and poisoning, and it’s still not enough. Even now she’s looking at me like she might sink her baby teeth into my throat. I let my voice go very low and soft. “The men who hurt you are long dead.”
“So I should let their descendants go unpunished? Let them profit off their father’s and grandfather’s sins?”
“I mean, no,fuck them.” I think of Don Gravely, looking at me with those dead gravel eyes. Only very belatedly does it occur to me that I, too, am one of their descendants. “I just think maybe you should leave it to the living.”
Eleanor’s tiny jaw goes mulish. “They don’t know what I know. They’ve twisted the story, forgotten it on purpose. None of them know the truth—”
“That’s why you wrote The Underland, isn’t it?”
“I—” Her nostrils widen. There is a motion in her chin that might, in a real child, be called a quiver. “I wanted them to see. To know. I thought maybe if. . .” The quiver vanishes. Her eyes narrow. “How did you know the title.”
I pull both legs onto the bed and turn to face her, so that we’re sitting like two kids up too late at a sleepover. “Because I read your book. Everyone has. It’s famous.” Her eyes are very wide now, ringed in ivory. “There’s a plaque in front of your house with your name on it. The name you chose.”
Liquid sheens her eyes and pools on her lower lashes, refusing to fall. “But no one believed it, did they. They thought it was just a silly story. They didn’t understand.”
“Most people probably didn’t,” I agree, evenly. But I think of E. Starling’s Wiki page, of the long list of related works beneath her inaccurate bio. One girl’s pain transmuted into generations of beautiful, terrible, unsettling art. “But some people did. I did.”
The tears are so thick now that her pupils are magnified, huge and black in her face. I slide my hand across the mattress, not quite touching her, and lower my head until I’m looking at her straight and level. “I’ll tell them, Eleanor. About the Gravelys and the Starlings and you. I mean I’ve been sort of collecting all the stories, all the lies and half-lies people tell about Starling House—my friend Charlotte is writing a history, or she was, she’d help me—I don’t know how we’d make sense of it all . . .” I picture that map of the Mississippi again, all the rivers that aren’t anymore but had been once, laid together on the page. It didn’t make for a very good map, but it was the whole truth. Maybe the truth is always messy that way.
I take a little breath. “But I swear I’ll try. I’ll tell the truth.” Sometime, much later, when I’m not caught in the river of dreams talking to a dead woman, I’ll think it’s very funny that all my lying and scheming and cheating brought me to this: promising to tell the truth, and meaning it.