For my fourth or fifth birthday Mom got me a copy of The Underland—one of the old nineteenth-century editions, the cover bound in cloth the color of cobwebs, the title sewn in silver. It was secondhand, probably stolen, and somebody else’s initials were written on the inside cover, but I’d read it so many times the pages were coming unsewn.
The story is pretty paint-by-numbers: a little girl （Nora Lee） discovers another world （Underland） and hallucinatory adventures ensue. The illustrations aren’t great, either—they’re a series of stark lithographs that fall somewhere between eerie and nightmarish. But I remember staring at them until their afterimages lingered on the insides of my eyelids: black landscapes stalked by spectral Beasts, pale figures lost among the tangled trees, little girls falling down into the secret places under the earth. Looking at them felt like stepping into someone else’s skull, someone who knew the same things I knew: that there were sharp teeth behind every smile, and bare bones waiting beneath the pretty skin of the world.
I used to trace the author’s name with my fingertip, draw it idly in the margins of my C+ schoolwork: E. Starling.
She never published another book. She never gave a single interview. The only thing she left behind other than The Underland was that house, hidden in the trees. Maybe that’s the real reason I was so obsessed with it. I wanted to see where she came from, prove to myself that she was real. I wanted to walk through her secret architecture, run my fingers over her wallpaper, see her curtains flutter in the breeze and believe, for a moment, that it was her ghost.
It’s been eleven years and forty-four days since I last opened that book. I came straight home from Mom’s funeral, dumped it into a doubled-up grocery bag along with half a pack of Newports, a moldy dream catcher, and a tube of lipstick, and shoved it all deep under my bed.
I bet the pages are all swollen and mildewed by now; everything in Eden goes to rot, given time.
I still dream about the Starling place sometimes, but I no longer think it means anything. And even if it did—I’m a high-school dropout with a part-time job at Tractor Supply, bad teeth, and a brother who deserves better than this dead-end bad-luck bullshit town.
Dreams aren’t for people like me.
People like me have to make two lists: what they need and what they want. You keep the first list short, if you’re smart, and you burn the second one. Mom never got the trick of it—she was always wanting and striving, longing and lusting and craving right up until she wasn’t—but I’m a quick learner. I have one list, with one thing on it, and it keeps me plenty busy.
There are double shifts to work and pockets to pick; social workers to mislead and frozen pizzas to snap in half so they fit in the microwave; cheap inhalers to buy from sketchy websites and long nights to lie listening to the rattle and hiss of Jasper’s breathing.
Then, too, there’s the cream-colored envelope that came from a fancy school up north after Jasper took the PSAT, and the savings account I opened the day after it arrived, which I’ve managed to grow using the many and considerable skills my mother left me—wiles, theft, fraud, charm, a defiant and wholly misplaced optimism—but which still isn’t enough to get him out of this place.
I figure dreams are like stray cats, which will go away if I quit feeding them.
So I don’t make up stories about Starling House or ask anyone else for theirs. I don’t linger when I pass by the iron front gates, or look up with my heart riding high in my chest, hoping to catch a glimpse of that lonely amber light that seems to shine from some grander, stranger world, just for me. I never pull the grocery bag out from under the bed.
But sometimes, right before I fall asleep, I see the black shadows of trees rising up the motel walls, though there’s nothing but asphalt and weeds out the window. I feel the hot breath of Beasts around me, and I follow them down, and down, to Underland.
TWO
It’s a gray Tuesday evening in February and I’m on my way back to the motel after a pretty shitty day.
I don’t know what made it so shitty; it was more or less exactly the same as the days that preceded it and the days likely to follow it, a featureless expanse of hours interrupted by two long walks in the cold, from the motel to work and back. It’s just that I had to work eight entire hours with Lacey Matthews, the human equivalent of unsalted butter, and when the drawer came up short at the end of our shift the manager gave me an I’ve-got-my-eye-on-you glare, as if he thought the discrepancy was my fault, which it was. It’s just that it snowed yesterday and the dismal remains are rotting in the gutters, soaking through the holes in my tennis shoes, and I made Jasper take the good coat this morning. It’s just that I’m twenty-six years old and I can’t afford a goddamn car.