There’s an anxious note in her voice that makes his stomach twist with guilt. As if he cares about the state of the House, as if he hasn’t purposefully overfilled the tub when it annoyed him, watching the water drip through the ceiling with black delight.
In the bathroom he settles her on the closed lid of the toilet and hands her a cup of tap water. She drinks and he kneels awkwardly on the tile, close enough to catch the sugary, chemical scent on her clothes. The room is much smaller than he remembers it; he grinds an elbow surreptitiously into the wall. It takes no notice.
“Thanks. Sorry about the mess. I’ll take care of—”
He makes an embarrassed grimace. “Don’t worry about it.”
She nods sloppily, sloshing water. “Okay. Okay sure.” Her forehead is sheened with sweat, her throat flushed.
“May I take your coat? Here.” Arthur reaches up for the top button, but Opal jerks back so hard she rocks the porcelain tank behind her.
“No. It’s mine.” She frowns down at him, blinking as if she can’t quite focus on his features. Up close her eyes look wrong, her pupils swollen and glassy, her irises reduced to slim rings of silver.
“Are you—are you high?” Arthur is almost relieved; so few of his problems are mundane.
She blinks, then she laughs again. It echoes off the tile, hollow and brittle, and leaves her panting. “Oh, go to hell Arthur Starling.” She swallows hard. “Sorry sorry don’t fire me I’m just a little carsick or something because Hal is a shitty driver and I had to read all those headlines. Which is funny because most of the bad luck in this town never even makes it into the headlines. In third grade the ceiling collapsed like three feet from Jasper’s desk16 and the last time I went swimming I got my foot caught in an old trotline and nearly drowned and—” She’s forced to pause for air. “—and I never looked at any pictures of the accident before—it was an accident, Constable Mayhew can go fuck himself—” She pinches her own lips together, hard.
Acid guilt rises from Arthur’s stomach to his throat. There are no accidents in Eden.
Opal unpinches her lips. “I’m not feeling great. And I didn’t really want to spend the morning playing twenty questions about you and your creepy-ass house.”
The pipes whine in the walls and Opal pats the cast-iron lip of the bathtub in absent-minded apology. Arthur pretends not to notice.
He takes the cup from her hands and says, mildly, “Someone was asking about me?”
“Yeah. I was walking along and this corporate lady pulls up in a nice car with a cheap air freshener and tells me—”
“You were walking?”
Opal gives him another unsteady frown. “I just said that.”
“Why were you walking?” He doesn’t know where she and her brother live, but the nearest house is at least a mile away, and it was chilly this morning.
“Because,” she enunciates very clearly, as if Arthur is the one who is drugged, “I had to get to work.”
“Well why didn’t you—” He feels suddenly very stupid. “You don’t have a car.”
Opal curls her lip. “Anyway this lady gave me a ride and then she gave me money to spy on you and that’s why I’m late.”
Arthur’s fingers go numb. He thinks, distantly, that Elizabeth Baine must be cleverer than she seems.
He looks up at Opal, her hands gripping her own knees, her clothes reeking of something sick and sweet, her frown not quite covering the black memory of terror in her eyes.
He recalls in that moment the real reason his mother forbade him from getting a pet: once you open the door, you never know what else might come in. Or what might get out.
As a boy he’d thrown fits over her rules, beating his heels against the walls, half mad with loneliness, but now—shaking with rage on his bathroom floor beside a girl who is not as brave as she pretends, who lies and steals and walks in the cold without a coat to earn money that isn’t for her—he knows his mother was right.
He stands abruptly. The boundary walls will need walking, the wards tending. “I have to go.”
Opal flinches back from the sudden grate of his voice. On any other day she would hide her feelings behind an artificial smile, but now she gives him an honest glare. There’s reproach and betrayal in her face, as if she forgot for a few minutes to be afraid of him and resents the reminder. “I didn’t—” She tucks a coil of hair behind one ear. “I didn’t tell them anything. Promise.”