It’s a cool evening, and the fog is already rising off the river in pale tongues, licking over the land. It looks strangely solid in the glow of the headlights, as if I’m driving among the slick white flanks of animals. “Look, Jasper.” I wet my lips, dredging every ounce of sincerity out of my insincere soul. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
I chance a glance at him at the next stop sign. He’s still staring meditatively at the roof. “Are you? Or are you just sorry you got caught?” I don’t answer. He sighs again, far longer than seems physically possible. “That house is bad news. You know that, right?”
“It’s just talk.” I do a gentle, condescending snort, like a skeptic making fun of a fortune teller. “I’ve been working there for months and the worst thing I’ve ever seen is Arthur Starling in a towel.”
I’d opened a door I was positive had been a closet the day before and found Arthur toweling his hair in a second-floor bathroom. He’d made a sound like a wounded car horn, a sort of strangled bleat, and I’d slammed the door so fast I stubbed my own toes. I’d spent the rest of the afternoon blinking away the bright purple afterimages of his tattoos: crossed spears and spirals, a snake bent in a figure eight, a sharp-faced Medusa grinning between two birds.
Jasper’s eyebrows are in danger of disappearing into his hairline. With the air of a person stepping carefully over something unmentionably gross, he says, “And what if it’s not just talk? You know Mrs. Gutiérrez, at Las Palmas? She told me her brother-in-law was driving past the gates one night and he saw that guy in the driveway. Swinging a sword around, at nothing. Looked right at him as he passed. And that same night, her brother-in-law has a heart attack.”20
I offer no comment, trying very hard not to think of the scars on Arthur’s knuckles, the sword hanging in his bedroom.
“And that house is just—not right.” A strange expression crosses his face then, rigid and inward-facing. I’ve sat through over a hundred horror movies with him, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him afraid.
“Look, it’s nothing, okay? I should have told you, but I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Opal . . .” A considerable pause, then: “I’m not your son.”
“First of all, ew—”
“And I’m not your job. Do you get that?”
“Yeah. Yes, I do.” I’m not lying, but I can’t seem to tell him the truth. How do you tell a sixteen-year-old that he was the only reason you got out of bed for weeks and weeks after the crash? That the whole world was sour and ashen except for him, so you committed every kind of forgery and falsification to make sure they could never take him away from you? That he is the only thing on the only list that will ever matter?
We’re on Cemetery Road now, climbing the hill past the Dollar General and the funeral home. “It’s just that you deserve a whole lot more than all this.” I gesture out the window at Eden. At the flickering neon of the drugstore and the fog-choked sidewalks, empty except for mean bursts of thistles and the amber halos of streetlights. “You’re so smart, and your grades are so good—”
“Why do you think that is?” Jasper straightens, staring at the side of my face with a strange, coaxing urgency. “Why do you think I work twice as hard as anybody else in class?”
“Because you want out of here. I know. I’m working on it, just give me a little more—”
Jasper shakes his head and thumps his back against the seat. His mouth is a furious slash in the rearview mirror. “You know what? I’m staying at Logan’s tonight, stop here.”
“Jasper, hey, come on—” But he’s already fumbling for the latch. He stumbles onto the curb while the truck is still moving and gives the door a one-handed slap. He turns back once. “Oh, that lady gave me a message for you.” He says it with the profound disgust of someone who is too old for secret messages and codes and can’t quite believe he’s being forced to participate. “The message is: ten, ten, ninety-three.”
He leaves, hands jammed hard in his pockets, backpack slung over one shoulder.
I idle on the side of the road for so long that the cab fills with greasy fumes and the sky turns to star-flecked soot. I wonder how Elizabeth Baine found out, and if Jasper recognized the numbers, or if even he has forgotten my real birth date. I wonder if the state would let me appeal his guardianship now that I’m a legal adult, or whether they’d whisk Jasper away from me with bonus misdemeanors for forgery and identity theft.