My hand’s on the front door, ready to push, when Gemma shouts my name from up on the giant novelty rocking chair that families like to sit on and pose for a single picture that costs them $29.99. She’s taking a selfie. I quit even harder.
“Hey, Maybell! Are you going on break?”
This is it.
You suck astronomically and I will miss you the least. You screwed with my head, abused my trust, and had the audacity to be so nice that it will never not confuse me. You’re a rock in my shoe. An out-of-order bathroom stall. A traffic jam. A loose handful of gumballs in a trick-or-treat bucket.
Anybody else would say that—and worse. But unfortunately I’m me, a passive doormat who probably will miss her, so I wave back with a tight smile.
“Yeah. See you in a bit.”
And then I’m out the door, my back turned to her. My last words to Gemma Peterson weren’t brave, but it lifts a weight off my shoulders to know they’re the last. A new smile, one that is small but one that is real, tugs at my lips. The last time I wore a real smile . . . it’s been long enough that I can’t remember it.
There’s a superstition about luck, and it goes like this: a run of bad luck is followed by a run of good luck. This is the silver lining, the softening edges. I spent my teenage years in dingy motels or on sofas belonging to whoever my mother was dating at the time, carted behind her all over Tennessee, missing chunks of school. I’ve picked all the wrong, cheating boyfriends and should have accumulated a hard shell of trust issues, but my heart’s too cowardly and still runs jumping into whoever’s arms will open for it. I’ve scrubbed toilets and been demeaned and ignored and promoted as a consolation prize, only to be shoved aside yet again. My best friend isn’t my friend at all. The love of my life doesn’t exist.
My heart has been humiliated. Pulverized. And here, right out of the sky, drops my run of good luck.
I’m making my fresh start at Falling Stars.
* * *
• • • • • • •
TOP OF THE WORLD is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it unincorporated community in Blount County with a population too meager to warrant a school or a post office. Growing up, I thought it probably wasn’t really called Top of the World—probably, it was just a local nickname—but then I found it in a phone book. And I thought that was simply the most enchanting thing ever.
The last time I was here I was wedged in the passenger seat of a blue ’91 Toyota Camry, ten years old and crying my eyes out. Mom couldn’t focus, she was so mad, lurching horribly in a stop-go-stop-go frenetic escape from town, checking the rearview mirror like a thief on the lam to make sure no relatives were on our tail. Part of me has never recovered from my disappointment that we weren’t followed.
Now I’m in the driver’s seat of that same car, and it all looks so unreal through rock-bottom Maybell’s grown-up eyes. Both different and the same, like the image has been flipped and I’m viewing the scene from the opposite side. A storage tote, three boxes, and a gym bag squished into the trunk and backseat contain all of my worldly possessions. You don’t amass too many worldly possessions when you work for minimum wage and you’ve spent most of your life with someone who helped themselves to whatever you had.
My GPS leads me through twinkling dusk back into nowhereland, trees breaking every now and then to reveal a breathtaking view of mountains. Headlights splash across a fluorescent dead-end warning that someone’s repainted to read Hannobar Lane, and my blood hums with awareness. We know this place, we know this place, my instincts sing, nostalgia too large to fit properly inside the brief time that spawned it, which couldn’t have lasted longer than four months. One familiar landmark jump-starts recollection of another, and another, and even though memories of my surroundings were obscured by grainy film fifteen minutes ago, this terrain has become back-of-my-hand in a snap. The Civil War–era smokehouse that leans at forty-five degrees and the cemetery with time-smoothed gravestones are old friends. I know where the dented guardrail’s going to be before it enters my field of vision, and I know who dented it.
Around one last bend, beams from a rising moon surge down like stalactites and I automatically slow, squinting to make out a succession of threatening signs. no trespassing. private property. beware of dog. beware of bears. you’re under surveillance. My heart beats in my throat. Tears spring to my eyes, but they won’t fall.
You should have come back long before now, I think. She might have needed you. Now it’s too late.
And then I hold my breath, because:
Falling Stars sprawls grandly before me. The manor’s pink masonry is the color of twilight on a hydrangea sea, four chimneys jutting against a cold, black sky carved out of mountainsides. Every tree and flower, every blade of grass and stepping stone, is precise. Intentional. Short, neat hedgerows border an obsessively manicured lawn.
Years one through nine of my life were a blur of “Don’t touch that” and “You can have the sofa tonight, but tomorrow you have to find somewhere else to go.” I was the burden in guest rooms, top bunks, and at kitchen tables, the kid without a seat belt because the car was already packed with cousins we had to cram into the back of a sedan. From years eleven to seventeen Mom and I couldn’t depend on family anymore, having alienated them all by asking for help so many times, so I roughed it with my mother and grew up fast. When I think about the dozens of roofs I’ve ever had over my head, there is one to rule them all, to which I have compared every other roof. Nothing can live up to it.
For one glorious summer, I was welcomed and wanted. We established our own unique family rituals straightaway: bird-watching in the morning, stories before bed. I helped water the violets that burst along pathways, feeling like the little girl from The Secret Garden, learning the names of all sorts of plants I’ve since forgotten. I wasn’t merely being cared for, I was building a life.
The reason my imagination is such a runaway is because no matter what’s happened and where I’ve gone since then, in the back of my mind I’ve always known a place like this has been allowed to exist. Well maintained and ageless, a world locked inside a snow globe.
Except it isn’t.
What used to be rolling hills with an edge of woods is now overrun by them, that once-distant forest so close that it’s now in danger of eating up the house as well. Vines have overtaken the manor. They crawl the walls, chipping stonework away. My headlights pour through ground-floor windows, smashed out, blades winking like shark’s teeth.
Strips of black-spotted plaster hang from ceilings. The walls peel. Strange, dark shapes rise all the way up to the chandeliers. Falling Stars has been consumed by disease, more like Sleeping Beauty’s castle after the curse took hold. The house isn’t even pink anymore: it’s silver gossamer.
I exhale a sharp denial. “No.” Violet took such amazing care of her house—daily dusting, vacuuming, mopping. Never a burned-out lightbulb left sitting in a fixture, never a book put away crookedly in the library. Beds were made as soon as you woke up, plates were washed right after you ate off them, and you folded your clothes when they were still warm from the dryer. This estate was her pride and joy. She ran it like a queen.