It’s at that moment that Arthur hears another sound: a thin scratching, like nails on the wrong side of a door.
His left hand fists in the worn cotton of Opal’s shirt. He feels the flesh of his palm splitting. She looks down at his hand and back at him, and he refuses to interpret her expression, refuses to think about the swell of her pupils or the infinitesimal slant of her face toward his.
He hauls her past him, away from the stone door, and shoves her roughly up the stairs.
“Okay, what the hell—”
“Get out. Go home. Don’t stop, and don’t look back.” He retrieves his sword and sets his feet, facing the door with the blade half-raised.
Opal hasn’t moved. She’s looking down at him with the same beaten-nail eyes he remembers from the first night he found her outside his gates, like she doesn’t know what’s coming but she’s ready to split her knuckles about it. There’s a smear of his blood on her shirt.
For the second time, he summons all the malice and madness he can, and says, “Run.”
For the second time, he watches her run away from him, and does not regret it.
FIFTEEN
I drive too fast and park shittily, cutting slantwise across two spots in the motel lot. I sit listening to the tick of the engine and the muffled screaming of the crickets, shaking very slightly. I say, softly, “What the hell.” It feels good so I say it a couple more times with differing emphases. “What the hell. What the hell.”
“Hey, you alright in there?” It’s Bev, thumping on the hood, wearing boxer shorts and a ratty tank top. The mist laps at her bare ankles, thickening fast.
I consider telling her the truth, I really do, but at this point it would take a bulleted multilevel list to account for all the fuckery I have engineered and endured over the last eight hours.
1） My little brother yelled at me, which sucked, but he had a point, which sucked more;
2） I failed to accomplish the task Baine assigned to me, which means:
A） She’s going to do something slimy and awful that might lose me custody of Jasper, which means:
i） I’ll have a homicide to plan on top of everything else.
3） Arthur Starling almost murdered me and then almost kissed me and then tossed me aside like used gum, and I’m not sure which of those things upsets me more.
I settle for “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”
Bev glares through the windshield for another second. “Okay.” She thumps the hood again. “Learn to park, meathead.”
There’s a plastic crate waiting outside my door with a sticky note on top that says Gravely collection, Box #1 in Charlotte’s neat handwriting. I open the door and kick the box across the threshold.
Room 12 is stuffy and mildewy. There’s a faint, hormonal funk in the air that tells me Jasper swung by at some point, either to make up or to grab his stuff, but I was busy housebreaking and getting busted and probably losing my job. The thought is sudden and chilling. How could Arthur keep paying me after he caught me stealing his keys and spying on the side? How could he ever let me set foot inside Starling House again?
It occurs to me that a normal person wouldn’t have this number and intensity of emotions if they lost a housekeeping job. I tell myself it’s just that the money was good and I don’t know how I’m going to pay Jasper’s tuition next year. It’s just that I was going to power-wash the steps and trim back the vines, hang fresh curtains and patch the broken bits of crown molding. It’s just that I’ll miss the warm weight of the walls around me and the irritable sound of Arthur’s footsteps on the stairs.
I want to storm back to Starling House and thump Arthur’s head against the wall until he forgives me or apologizes or presses his mouth against mine just to shut me up. I want to drive over to Logan’s and have a big, loud fight with Jasper, in front of God and everybody. I want to lean my forehead against Mom’s breastbone and cry, and feel the slick lacquer of her fingernails against my cheek as she lies to me. Everything’s okay, babydoll.
I open the storage crate instead, pawing through it at random. Somehow I end up cross-legged with the Gravely family photo album in my lap. I turn the pages slowly, feeling something sharp and green gathering in my throat. Envy, maybe. We never had a family photo album. I used to sneak onto Mom’s phone and scroll back as far as I could in her pictures, but there weren’t any from before I was born. It’s like she sprang from the skull of the world, fully formed and laughing, a woman without a history.