“They won’t believe you.” Eleanor’s voice is low and biting, but her eyes are still wide and wet, full of want.
“Maybe not.” I’m not even sure I believe all of it, and I’m living it. No wonder she wrote it as a children’s book. “But some of them will.”
“They won’t care.” The first tear crests and falls, tracing a shining line down her cheek.
“Maybe not. But some of them will.” I ooch closer, finally catching her hand under mine. She doesn’t pull away. “Wouldn’t that be enough for you? Aren’t you tired?”
The tears are falling fast now, diving one after the other down her face. “They deserve it. All of it.” Her voice is thick and wet.
“Yeah, maybe.” I permit myself to consider, just for a moment, the full weight of what Eden deserves. I think of the Gravely brothers keeping a little girl like a bird in a cage, committing every sin against her in the name of profit; of the men who dug the first mines, their chains rattling in the dark, and all the good God-fearing folk who looked away; of the river that runs rusty brown now and the power plant that pumps ash into the air and the big white-columned house with its cheerful, awful lawn jockey, smiling out at the town. Eleanor’s rage seems to multiply in my head, until it’s only a single white-hot spark in a whole constellation of sins.
My hand tightens on hers. “They deserved everything you gave them, and probably worse.” I brush the lank bangs from her forehead. The skin feels chilled and clammy under my fingers. “But you deserve better, Eleanor.”
She collapses into me, her head like a cold stone on my breastbone, and sobs. I run my palms up and down over the points of her spine and make small shushing noises. I pretend she’s Jasper after a bad dream or a long day, wrung out from holding too much in the brittle cage of his ribs.
“It’s too late,” she cries. “I already—the lake was already coming out, everywhere—”
“It’s alright,” I say, even though it’s not, even though there are tears running down my cheeks now, fast and silent. My poor, broken, sinful Eden, flooded by its own poisonous waters. There’s a rightness to it, in an Old Testament kind of way, but no mercy, and no future.
I lay Eleanor down on the bed and pull the quilt up to her chin. She looks more human than she did before, more like Eleanor Starling than Nora Lee.
Her hand darts out from the covers, her fingers hard and small against my wrist. “I didn’t let it go to the river. I tried—the Beasts guided it away.”
I have to swallow before I can speak. “Where?”
“A hole, they said. An old grave. They said nothing was living there, anyway.”
“Okay. Alright.” I close my eyes and hope, as hard as I can, that she means what I think she does. “You can go to sleep now, Eleanor. It’s all over.”
“I don’t think I know how, anymore.” There are lines on either side of her mouth now, and a few streaks of early gray in her hair. Her Beast has paled to a misty translucence.
I touch the hair on her forehead again, as if she was still that small and vicious child. Then I sing to her.
It starts out being that sad old waltz about the blue moon, but I find the notes wandering, the key shifting. It turns into that Prine song that came out a couple years back, about summer’s end coming faster than we wanted. I never get the words quite right, but the chorus still circles in my head, plaintive and sweet.
“Go on home,” I sing, and Eleanor’s eyelids hang heavy. “No, you don’t have to stay alone, just go on home.”
I know the precise moment she falls asleep, because the room changes around me. The windows lighten to dusky summer. The walls fill with sketches in a hundred shades of char and silver. A vase of poppies appears atop a heavy desk, the blooms red as pricked fingers. The quilt softens beneath me and the floorboards are warm against the soles of my feet.
Eleanor Starling is gone, and this room is no longer hers. It belongs to Arthur now, and Underland belongs to me.
THIRTY-TWO
Starling House sighs around me, a great easing of timber and stone, and I sigh with it. I can feel the House like a living thing again, a great body with joists for bones and copper pipes for veins. I stand, a little unsteadily, feeling older and tireder than it should be possible to feel.
Something white darts off the bed and slips around my ankles. Eleanor’s Beast looks suspiciously like the hellcat now, if the hellcat had fur the color of fog and eyes like the sockets of an old skull.