On any other night I’d lie to her, tell her I’m saving up money, dreaming up some grand future. But maybe telling the truth is like any other bad habit, which gets harder to quit the more you do it. “Maybe. But Eden is . . .” I don’t know how to finish the sentence.
“I know,” Charlotte says, softly. “I thought I might set down roots here, too.” When most people in Eden talk about their roots they’re waving rebel flags and making bullshit arguments about the Second Amendment, but it sounds different in Charlotte’s mouth. It makes me think of an apple seed spit carelessly by the side of the road, sprouting despite the bad soil and the fumes, clinging hard to the only patch of earth it was ever given.
She sighs. “But when I finish this degree . . . well.” She exhales as she turns away. “People aren’t trees, Opal.” Her shoes tap across the blacktop.
“Hey. Could you send me that transcript, if you get a chance?”
Charlotte hesitates. She nods once. “Don’t spread it around. I know where you live.”
By the time I make it back to the motel I still haven’t thought up a good story to explain how late I am, but I shouldn’t have worried: Jasper’s bed is empty. My heart seizes before I see the note on his pillow. Went over to Logan’s, will catch the bus with him tomorrow.
Logan’s dad is a roofer and his mom works in the county clerk’s office, which means the Caldwells have a pool table in the basement and name-brand coke in the fridge. They’re members of the PTA and the Rotary Club and they always bring tinfoil vats of mac ’n’ cheese to the church dinners and send out color-coordinated Christmas cards full of foster kids, even though they’re only a few years older than me.
I hate them.
The note ends with a cold P.S. We’re out of cereal instead of his usual x’s and o’s, so I’m pretty sure Jasper’s pissed at me. I should text him and find out why, but I’m tired and overcaffeinated and secretly relieved to have the room to myself tonight.
I don’t have to wait for my brother to fall asleep before I can sit cross-legged on the bed and prop the laptop on the radiator. I close the open tabs—job search engines, a special effects tutorial, the Gravely Power website, for some reason—and open “document 4.”
I wait. After a while, an email appears from the Muhlenberg Public Library staff account. The subject line reads: Interview 13A—Calliope Boone.
I open the attachment and read it again.
This is the truth about Starling House.
Once there were three brothers who made their fortune in coal, which is to say: flesh.
The Gravely brothers built themselves a nice big house on the hill, with two staircases and real glass windows, and then they built a row of rude cabins on the banks of the river. The first person they purchased was a man named Nathaniel Boone, from the Winifrede Mining Company. Nathaniel taught his fellows how to dig deep, how to shore up the shafts, how to wring coal from the earth like blood, and for a number of years the Gravelys did very well. But every mine runs dry, given time, and every sin comes home to roost.
By the middle of the century the easy coal was gone and profits had declined. The Gravelys might have scraped by another few years, making their living on the backs of better men, if it hadn’t been for the election of 1860. If it hadn’t been for Antietam and the proclamation that came after, and the way Nathaniel and the other miners paused sometimes at their work, as if they could feel the great gears of the world shifting beneath their feet.
The Gravely brothers determined to get as much coal out of the ground as they could before their time ran out. The oldest brother was the worst of them, a man with skin like sour cream and a heart like anthracite. Under his gaze Nathaniel and his men dug deeper and faster than they ever had before, driven down and down into the earth. When Nathaniel Boone spoke of those months, even decades later, his eyes would blacken as if he were still stuck in the lightless deeps of the mines.
They heard rumors, now and then, that the Constitution had been amended, but the Constitution didn’t seem to apply in Eden. Each dusk Nathaniel went to sleep in the same rude cabin, and each dawn he shuffled into the same dark earth, so that the sun itself became a stranger to him, harsh and foreign. One of the younger men evinced his hope that someone would take note of the chains around their ankles and object, and Nathaniel laughed at him; there had been chains on his ankles for ten years, and nobody in Eden had ever objected.
There was nowhere to go but down, so Nathaniel kept digging. He dug so deeply and so desperately that he reached the bottom of everything, and even then he didn’t stop. He kept digging until he fell through a crack in the underside of the world, straight down into Hell itself.