I picture Arthur, surrounded by gravestones. Jasper, telling me the Wardens don’t last as long as they used to. “Why?”
“The Beasts have told me about the black lake they built on the surface, where they keep all their corrupted water.”
“The—are you talking about the ash pond?” I feel my brain twisting, worlds converging. “People say it leaks, but the power company says—”
“Of course it leaks.” Eleanor’s tone is almost amused. “The earth here is porous, full of caves and graves. It leaks all the way down to the river, to me, and we feast on it.” And she actually licks her lips, as if the tailings from a power plant are a special treat. “And now, tonight—with the Warden gone, and the gates unlocked . . .”
She trails away, but I can see it unfolding before me: the Beasts running loose down the streets of Eden. Fires, floods, disasters and deaths out of season. An assault so terrible the town is abandoned, undone, given over to the honeysuckle and kudzu. Soon there will be nothing left but the mist, padding down empty streets on silent feet.
The room darkens around us. The windows blacken, not with night, but with the sleek obsidian bodies of birds, rushing past the panes in an endless flock. Eleanor is watching me, smiling a little.
I feel my chin jutting, my fingers curling into fists. “No,” I say again, but this time I stamp my foot, like a child. The floorboards ripple beneath me. The birds wheel back from the windows.
A small shock moves across Eleanor’s face, there and gone again, replaced quickly by malice. Her Beast rises, filling the room, lips peeling back over long dog’s teeth. And I think:The only monsters here are the ones we make.
That Beast is just a little girl’s dream. So are the walls around us, the windows, the sky. Well, I have dreams, too, even if I spent half my life trying to forget them. I ignored them and mistreated them, did my best to burn them, but they persisted. Even now I can feel them just beneath the surface of my skin, hungering.
It’s easy, really. All I have to do is want.
Iclose my eyes, and when I open them again, the room is changed. There are a pair of twin beds pressed against the walls, the covers rumpled. There’s a microwave from the late eighties sitting beside a half-sized plastic coffeemaker. There are water stains on the ceiling, a map of dark brown blooms I know by heart.
We’re in room 12 of the Garden of Eden, the way I remember it, the way it will be only in dreams, now.
Eleanor is standing now, glaring hard, panting. She looks wildly out of place, like a Victorian portrait come to awkward life. She curls her lip and spits, once, viciously.
I recoil, but she wasn’t aiming at me. She was aiming at the thin carpet of the motel. The spit hisses where it lands. A curl of smoke rises, followed by a thin blue flame. Then fire is racing across the floor unnaturally fast, crawling up the walls, leaping from bed to bed like a mischievous child.
I think:Not again.I close my eyes, but I can’t seem to think beyond the glow of the flames against my eyelids, the heat of my only home burning.
I fumble for the door, fall out into the twilit parking lot.
It’s full of people. Some I know well and some I don’t, all as familiar as the sound of the river or the shine of the streetlights. The mailman. The cook at the Mexican place. Bev and Charlotte. The girl who ratted me out to the teacher in sixth grade. Don Gravely, Mr. Cole, Constable Mayhew, Ashley Caldwell, Arthur.Jasper.
None of them are moving. None of them are speaking. They’re watching me with damp, incurious eyes. I’m choking on smoke, coughing out words likepleaseandhelp.Surely someone will call 911 or find a hose or at least reach their hand out to me and tell me it’s alright, even though it isn’t.
I should have known better. This is a town that turns away from anything troubling or unpleasant, anything that threatens their belief in themselves as decent, upstanding folk: off-season hunting and illegal dumping, hungry dogs and children with five-fingered bruises, even their own poisonous history. Why did I think I would be an exception?
The people in the parking lot turn their backs to me in eerie unison and walk away. Even Jasper.
I feel my attention snag. I stop coughing. Jasper might sulk or swear at me—he might steal the last pack of good ramen or ignore my texts or apply to jobs behind my back—but he would never turn his back and leave me like this.
This is just a bad dream. I have better ones. I close my eyes and reach for something else, a memory so polished and golden it’s become a fantasy. When I open my eyes, the parking lot is gone.
I’m standing on the banks of the Mud River. The sun is dipping low, striking bright sparks off the water. It’s dark enough that the swallows are out, and the fireflies are gleaming in the low places beneath the trees. It feels like the very end of June or the beginning of July, when you’ve lost track of time and it doesn’t matter because you have nowhere in particular to be, when summer stretches so luxuriantly on either side of you that you begin to doubt the existence of other seasons.
Eleanor is standing beside me. Her feet are small and bare in the mud. She’s not glaring at me anymore, but looking out at the river with a helpless, aggrieved kind of love, as if she would carve the love out of her chest if she knew how. She slips her hand into mine and I hold it reflexively, because it’s small and cold, because it reminds me of waiting with Jasper for the bus. I rub my thumb along her knuckles.
Eleanor makes a small noise of disgust, as if she cannot believe anyone would be that stupid, before she pulls me into the river.
The water should be warm as spit this time of year, but it isn’t. It’s a stinging, sapping cold, the kind that cramps muscles and stops hearts. I wrench at our joined hands but Eleanor is unnaturally strong. Her fingernails dig blue crescents into my wrist, pulling me deeper, deeper, until I’m drowning again except this time I want to let go and can’t. This time there’s no one to pull me back to the surface and curl his body around mine.
I catch the edge of that image and hold on to it. Arthur, warm and alive. Arthur holding me while the word “home” ricochets through the cavity of my chest like a stray bullet.
I am not drowning anymore. I open my eyes and I am standing in the cozy sitting room of Starling House, the one with the squashy couch and the pastel wallpaper and the portraits of the Wardens. Except it hasn’t acquired any of those things yet. The floors are shining with fresh polish and the plaster is perfectly intact. The only portrait on the wall is Eleanor herself.
“Really, Opal? Here?” The real Eleanor laughs. “This ismyhome.”
I face her, sick of her mean little laugh and her cold little eyes. “No, it isn’t. I mean maybe it used to be, but not anymore.” Her mouth gets very small and hard in her soft child’s face, like the seed in the center of a persimmon, so I keep going. “You left it behind and it became somebody else’s home, over and over again, and all of them loved it just as much as you did. Probably more.”
