The Gravelys have history. The whole town still tells stories about them, and the photo album shows me a parade of family dogs and Christmas trees and birthday cakes. Cousins and uncles and dour-looking grandparents all standing in front of that big brand-new house.
The last picture in the book is a teenage girl leaning against a car the color of a maraschino cherry. Her legs are long and freckled, crossed at the ankle. Her face looks different, younger and softer than I’d ever seen it, but her smile has a brazen, reckless tilt I know better than the backs of my own hands, and her hair—you don’t forget hair like that. It’s redder than the car, haloed gold by the sun, so that she looks like a woman on fire.
Mom. My mom. Standing beside the ’94 Corvette that was always too nice for her.
It took me a couple of weeks after the funeral to make myself go out to the junkyard to collect her stuff. By then the inside of the car was black with mold, the seats lightly furred. Greasy brown water poured out of the glove box when I opened it. I grabbed the dream catcher and signed the rest over for scrap.
I find, somewhat to my surprise, that my hands are moving. They’re sliding the picture out of the plastic and flipping it over. On the back of the photo someone has written Delilah Jewell Gravely, 16 in blue ballpoint.
I think: I always hated my middle name. Then I stop thinking.
But my body is still moving. It’s kneeling on the motel carpet, right on the bare spot where my feet land every morning. It’s reaching under the bed, toward something I haven’t touched in eleven years and—when did I lose track of the days? When did my life become more than a long tally of days endured?
The plastic bags have gone brittle. The dream catcher is cracked and broken, the beads dangling on loose threads. The book looks different than I remember, smaller and shabbier. There are fractal blooms of mold across the cover, bruise-black, and the pages have the rotten smell of clogged gutters. But the title is still stitched along the spine in bright silver—The Underland—and the initials on the inside cover are still the same: DJG.
I asked Mom once if she was DJG. She laughed and called me Little Miss Encyclopedia Brown, which is what she called me when I was being nosy. I asked what her real initials were, and she said whatever the hell I want them to be with such an edge to her voice that I shut up.
Now I kneel on the floor with names tumbling through my skull like dominoes, or Old Testament genealogies. John Peabody Gravely was the brother of Robert Gravely who begat Donald Gravely Sr. who begat Old Leon who begat Don Jr., brother of Delilah Jewell Gravely, who begat me, Opal Delilah—
I balk. I’m no Gravely.
I’m a cheat and a liar, a trickster and a tale-teller, a girl born on the ugly underside of everything. I’m nobody, just like my mother before me.
But that name would make us somebodies. I can feel my own story shifting around me, the arc of my life bending out of true.
Maybe that’s why I turn the page. Maybe I’m looking for a story that still feels familiar, or maybe it’s just muscle memory.
The next page is empty except for the dedication, which always felt like secret code, a letter written specifically to me:
To every child who needs a way into Underland. Befriend the Beasts, children, and follow them down.
I turn the next page, and the next, reading until all I can see are monsters drawn in scrabbling black ink, until all I can hear is my mother’s voice, soft and warm as cigarette ash.
Once there was a little girl named Nora Lee who had bad, bad dreams. The dreams were full of blood and teeth, and they frightened her very much, but I will tell you a secret: she loved them, too, because in her dreams the teeth belonged to her.
You see, Nora Lee had been left in the woods when she was a baby, where a wicked fox found her. The fox took her back to his home and fed her sweets and watched her with hungry eyes. She knew one day soon he would gobble her up.
Nora Lee begged the other animals to help her, but no one listened. The fox always wore a coat and tails when he left the house, and smiled often, and no one believed that the owner of such a fine coat and such a wide smile could have such unseemly appetites. They told Nora Lee to hush and be a good girl.
So Nora Lee, who was not a good girl, ran away.
She ran until she came to a wide green river. She didn’t know how to swim, but she thought a wide green river must be better than a fox. Just as she was about to walk into the water, a hare passed by.
“Little girl,” he said, “what are you doing?”
So Nora Lee told him about the bad dreams and the wicked fox.