All Our Pretty Songs aops-1

by Sarah Mccarry

  “Death,” he says. “That’s heavy.”

  “Not always. This is the past.” I point to the Fool. “This” —the Lovers— “is the present. And the third card is the future.”

  “Death is the future?”

  “It doesn’t mean literal death. Not usually. The Fool is someone who’s a dreamer, who wants big things. You’ve set out on a journey on a new road. You’re about to discover new things. But you can’t keep your head in the clouds forever. You have to make the right choice. You’re fearless, but also naive.”

  “How will I know the right choice?”

  “That’s up to you. The Lovers is—”

  “—Kind of obvious?” He smirks at me, and I blush.

  “Not like that. I mean, it can be. It’s another choice card. It means part of the choice is a temptation. You can pick the thing that is comfortable, or go somewhere that’s scary but can take you to what you really want. It can mean falling in love, too.” I can’t quite look him in the eye.

  “And Death?”

  “Death is change. It’s a trial, but also renewal. It means transformation, new ideas. A new opportunity.”

  “So I’m making a choice that will change my life.”

  “That’s what the cards are saying.”

  He’s quiet for a long time. “That sounds about right,” he says. Here’s my heart, beating out a tattoo rhythm. I could take it out and hand it over. But maybe I’m not what he’s thinking about at all.

  “I didn’t know my father, either,” he says. I wait, but he doesn’t elaborate.

  “Did it bother you?”

  “I never knew anything else. Did it bother you?”

  Aurora and I lived in a world without fathers, but full of men: musicians, our mothers’ lovers, our mothers’ friends. A father seems so much tamer and less interesting than the pack of wolves who raised us.

  “No,” I say.

  “Did you know Aurora’s dad?”

  I think of the drummer, asking me the same question the night Aurora took me to that show. A million years ago. I was a different person then. A person without Jack. “Not really,” I say. “He wasn’t around long enough to count.” He’s silent, thoughtful.

  “Do you think it makes a difference?”

  “Having a dad? I don’t know. Do you?” Raoul has a dad, but he never talks about him. Tracy, the normal girl whose house I used to go to, had a dad. A dad like in a movie, who came home in the evenings in a suit he changed out of. Raoul seems happy. I don’t know if Tracy was. Jack tilts his head, thinking.

  “It must. But then we would be different people.” I wait for him to say something else, but he’s done.

  I know Jack’s voice, and his body. I know his music. I know the way he looks at me, and I know how to make him laugh. I know the books he likes and that he doesn’t drink and that he is old enough for me to be a lot younger. I know about the restaurant where he works and the crazy waitress who comes in every night shaking from too much speed and the cook who drops fifty-dollar steaks on the floor before he puts them on the plate when he doesn’t like the customers. But about Jack’s life before he came here, I barely know anything at all. It’s like he began when I met him and before that he didn’t exist. How much do you need to know to love someone? I used to think you had to know them inside and out, the way I know Aurora; that you had to know every story that went into them, every place they had been. But it turns out love is easier, and infinitely more complicated. It turns out I don’t know much.

  Jack blows out the candle. The cards scatter beneath us like leaves. He runs his hands along my bare thighs, slides a thumb under the elastic of my underwear. Where he kisses me, my skin turns to fire. We do not talk about fathers after that.

  AUGUST

  The three of us are in my room. Jack is sprawled on the floor, long legs everywhere, too big for the small space. I’m curled up in a corner, drawing Aurora. She’s sitting on my bed, smoking, with her knees drawn up to her chin. Long bony arms, long fingers, beautiful bird-sharp face. The cuts on her knuckles have healed to faint red lines. You wouldn’t think they’d both be so hard for me to draw, considering how much I look at them. We’re planning her birthday party. Our made-up world is animated on the opposite wall, the evening light playing tricks. The dragon flies over a choppy sea. Aurora reaches over and stubs out the cigarette in a candle. “What’s for dinner?” she says, yawning.

  “Cass said there was stuff for stir-fry.” I put down my sketchbook. “Story of my life.” Cass is out doing a reading for a client, told us to eat without her. Cass hates Jack with an intensity that is as palpable as it is irrational, but she tolerates his presence in the house.

  “You poor deprived thing. I’ll buy you takeout.” Aurora waves a hand over my protest. “It’s a salary. I’m putting you to work. We have to figure out the guest list and the decorations and the menu and the bands. And what caterer to use. And how much food we should get. And what we’re going to wear. And we should design the invitations if we want to get them printed. Don’t you think we should have them printed? I think that would be extra classy. Printed invitations.”

  “Aurora, your birthday is in a week and a half.”

  “Then we’ll have to plan efficiently.”

  We order a feast from my favorite Chinese restaurant and eat it in the kitchen. Mu shoo pork, six kinds of dumplings, noodles slippery with sesame oil and tossed with scallions and prawns. Aurora bosses us around, makes me unearth three sets of almost-matching silverware and put out cloth placemats and napkins. She lights candles, turns out the lamps. In the gentle glow we are even more beautiful. We fill our plates over and over again until Aurora wails aloud and pushes herself away from the table. “I’m going to die,” she cries, “if I eat any more.” Jack leans forward and steals a prawn off her plate and she smacks the back of his hand with her fork. They smirk at each other, the air hopping with electricity. I look away. “I want you to play at my party,” she says.

  “I’d be honored.” The warm light falls across his dark skin, his shoulders, the sharply defined muscles of his forearms that flex and tense as he gathers up the plates and carries them to the sink. I imagine the two of them together, her white hair tangled with his black, their long limbs entwined. They belong with each other more I than I belong with either one of them. The thought creeps in like poison from a sting. I shove back my chair and get up, measure milk and honey and herbs into three mugs. When the tea is ready we take it into the living room. I put on New Order and Jack sits close to me on the battered couch. Aurora sits on the floor with a pen and a page torn out of one of my sketchbooks, going on about decorations and cocktails and the different kinds of food she should order, and should there be a costume theme—“Masks,” Jack says, his breath warm against my ear. Aurora likes that and writes it down.

  “Masks,” she repeats, tapping the pen against her lower lip. Jack’s hands are on my belly, fingers winnowing under the waistband of my jeans. I want to throw Aurora out of the room and arch my hips to meet them. I close my eyes. “I wonder if we could get hummingbirds somewhere,” Aurora says. “Wouldn’t that be cool? A flock of hummingbirds?” If anyone could get a flock of hummingbirds for her birthday party, it would be Aurora.

  Later, in my room, after Aurora goes home, he unbuttons my jeans and tugs them off my hips, pulls my shirt over my head as gently as if he is undressing a child. Touches the amulet but leaves it there. “Which one of us do you like best,” I ask, and he hushes me.

  “You silly thing. How could you even ask me that?” He kisses his way down my throat, pausing in the hollow at the base of my neck. What is happening to me?

  “I love you,” I say, but so soft I don’t know if he hears me, and I don’t want to say it again in case he did. His skin tastes of honey. He whispers my name, over and over, and when I begin to cry he does not ask why, only kisses the salt tracks the tears leave on my skin until I fall asleep in the circle of his arms.

  When I wake up
my bed is empty and the room is cool. I draw aside the curtain and look out. The patch of sky I can see is as black and starless as obsidian.

  The skeleton man is where I know he will be, a shadow darker than shadow. He raises one bony hand to me in a salute, and I know, although I cannot see his face, that he is laughing.

  “You are such a fucking goner,” Aurora says at the beach the next day. She’s coating her limbs with baby oil, running her hands up and down her legs carelessly while all around us people try not to watch and fail. “You’ll never get a tan if you don’t take your shirt off,” she adds.

  “I am not and I’m fine,” I snap, hugging my knees and glaring.

  “Oh my god, look at you!”

  “I am fine.”

  “You’re a pasty little bitch and you’re in love.”

  I look around me for something to throw at her head but we didn’t bring anything from the car except towels and Aurora’s giant bag. She sees me looking, growls. She tackles me, limbs flying, knocking me back onto my towel. I get a mouthful of her hair and a baby-oiled elbow to the jaw. I’m stronger than she is and we both know it, but I’m scared of hurting her and so I yield without a fight. She straddles me, one eyebrow raised, blows hair out of her face like a gangster puffing a cigar. Behind her the sky is an impossible blue. “Uncle!” she barks.

  “You won,” I point out. “You’re not supposed to say uncle.”

  “You say uncle.”

  “Aunt. Mom. Brother.”

  “Say you’re in love!”

  “Second cousin once removed.”

  “Look at me rolling my eyes. I am rolling my eyes so hard my face might break. At least take your shirt off so I don’t look like a giant slut sitting over here by myself, practically naked.” She is shouting by “practically naked.” I turn my head and catch a batch of frat boys gaping openly.

  “We are definitely fulfilling some kind of girls-gone-wild fantasy happening over there right now.”

  “Stay frosty, motherfuckers!” she bellows at the frat boys, and then she kisses me. Familiar Aurora smell, vanilla and cigarettes; warm skin; soft mouth. Salt breeze on my bare legs, sound of boats creaking in the harbor. She breaks away. “Come on, take off your shirt,” she says again, arranging herself on her towel. “For me. Tell yourself, ‘Here is a tiny sacrifice I, repressed and angry as I am, am still capable of making for my very best friend in all the world.’”

  “Why am I making this sacrifice again?” I obey, trying not to think about the folds of my belly next to the flawless length of her.

  “So I’m not alone. You know I hate to be alone. Are you seriously still wearing that stupid thing Cass gave you?” I look over at her, but her face is turned away.

  “Aurora. Remember, we covered this. There is no one I love more than you.”

  “I was joking.” She wasn’t, though, and I know it, and she knows I know it. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it is stupid. It makes Cass feel better.”

  “Huh.” Aurora sits up, finds a plastic soda bottle in her bag, and offers it to me, smiling brightly now. “Dr Pepper?”

  “That’s not Dr Pepper, Aurora.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Dr Pepper isn’t clear.”

  “Oh, nonsense.” She uncaps the bottle and takes a swig, makes a face. “It is way too early for vodka, you’re right. I’ll wait an hour.” She looks at an imaginary watch, tick-tocks her head at the imaginary second hand, takes another drink, stretches out on her towel. “Much better. What are you doing tonight?”

  “What am I ever doing tonight? Hanging out with you.”

  “Then you’re going to a party.”

  “Oh boy. Sounds great.”

  “You’re a turd. A bratty turd. Come on, it’s friends of Minos’s. It’ll be fun.”

  “Minos has friends?”

  “Minos has lots of friends. Minos has very important friends. Can I ask you something really emo?”

  “Shoot.”

  “How well do you remember my dad?”

  The question is so out of the ordinary for her that I don’t even register it for a second, distracted as I am by the thought of Minos: Minos and Aurora, whatever is going on with Minos and Aurora and whether I want to know or should know or should intervene or am powerless to stop it, is Jack coming to the party, do I want Jack to come to the party if it’s Minos’s party, will Minos steal everyone I care about and make them into creepy skeleton people also, am I insane, is Aurora sleeping with my boyfriend. No way. But if I were my boyfriend I would definitely want to sleep with Aurora, so there is that. Aurora’s dad. Is Jack my boyfriend? Probably. Yes. No. Definitely. Aurora’s dad. What. “Your dad?” I echo, confused.

  “Yeah.” Her eyes are closed, her face still. “Do you remember him?”

  “Not really. You know that.”

  “I think I’m forgetting him. Like all the way.”

  “You were a kid.”

  “I miss him.” She’s as emotionless as if she is telling me the rest of the afternoon will be hot.

  “Of course you do, Aurora.”

  “You don’t miss your dad.”

  “I don’t have a dad.”

  “You can have my dad.”

  I don’t want Aurora’s dad. Or maybe I do. What’s worse: croaker or bailer? Does my dad even know I exist? That would be classic Cass, cutting and running without even mentioning the pending stork. “I remember him in your garden,” I say. I close my eyes, too, trying to project the picture against my lids like an old reel of film playing in a darkened theater. Haze and rain clouds, blurry as Super 8 film, the motions jerky. A sweater. His tangle of bleached hair, his face, his bony arms reaching for me. Green grass in the grey light. Dandelions an electric yellow. But it’s so hard to know, now, if what I see is really what I saw or if it’s pasted together out of magazine covers and posters in record stores. News footage clips and television specials and that documentary someone made about him that none of us will admit to watching but all of us saw. I know Cass has a copy of it stashed away somewhere; I found it, once, when we were moving. I wonder if anything I remember of him is really mine to share with Aurora or if it’s stolen from other people who didn’t know him at all. “It’s just a picture,” I say. “I don’t remember what we were doing.”

  “It’s like that for me, too. Frozen moments. Nothing real.”

  “That’s real.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “What about Maia? Do you ask her?”

  Aurora snorts and doesn’t bother to answer. “What are you going to wear tonight?”

  “Aurora—”

  “I want to talk about something else now.”

  “Changing the subject every time it hurts is going to catch up with you one of these days.”

  “Hasn’t yet. Want to borrow something? It’s a fancy party.”

  “I’ll bring my fancy attitude.”

  “You cannot wear that repulsive Misfits shirt. I will wail and gnash my teeth.”

  “I’ll wear the 7 Year Bitch one. It only has a couple of holes.”

  “You are impossible. Impossible.”

  “I learned from the best,” I say, and take her hand.

  Aurora doesn’t get me in party clothes, but she tantrums at me that night in her room until I let her put makeup on me and festoon me with baubles. “At least look like you are wearing this awful thing on purpose,” she says, scowling and tugging on my shirt. She leans in to draw thick black lines around my eyes. She smears the eyeliner with her thumb, checks her handiwork, shakes her head. “More.” She goes after me with the pencil again. I duck.

  “You always make me look like I got the wrong end of a fistfight.”

  “Hold still! Jesus, you’re like a little kid at the doctor.”

  I acquiesce to her ministrations, tug on the crucifix of the metal-beaded rosary she’s draped around my neck, grimace like a martyr. She mock-slaps me and then pats my cheek.
“There, all better. Let’s go pick up Jack.”

  Jack, Jack. I don’t like to say his name around her, knowing the way my face lights up when my tongue shapes the word. I can’t form the sound without thinking of the taste of him, his hands moving across my body, the way he likes to kiss the place between my breasts and listen there for the metronome of my heart. I’m grateful she’s ahead of me, leading the way to her car, so she can’t see the flush that starts in my cheeks. I stumble at the first stair and she laughs without turning around. “Fucking goner,” she says, “I am never wrong,” and not for the first time I think it is not a blessing to be known so well.

  Jack hasn’t dressed up, either. He’s waiting on his porch, his house dark behind him. He puts his guitar in the trunk and folds himself into the backseat gracefully, kisses my cheek. “Hey, lovely,” he says into my ear.

  “What about me,” Aurora says, and he kisses her cheek, too.

  “You don’t need anyone to tell you you’re lovely.” There’s a hint of reproach in his tone. Aurora puts the car into gear.

  “I tried to get her in a dress,” she tells him in the rearview mirror.

  “I wouldn’t recognize you in a dress,” he says to me mildly.

  “I wouldn’t recognize me in a dress either,” I agree.

  “Sometimes people put an effort into how they look,” Aurora tells the steering wheel.

  “I’m not going to put in an effort for Minos,” I say. Aurora scowls.

  “What is your damage?” she snaps. “He’s fun. Jack likes him.”

  “You don’t like him,” I say to him.

  “I don’t think we should have this conversation right now,” Jack says, although I don’t know which one of us he’s telling to stop. “Let’s have fun.”

  “I’m having fun.” But Aurora’s voice is cold and the air in the car is charged now with some unfamiliar force and all the joy has gone out of the night. I look out the window at the dark empty streets. We’re headed downtown. I lean forward to turn up the stereo, but Aurora slaps my hand away. “I mean it,” she says, “I want you to stop saying shit like that about him.”