All Our Pretty Songs aops-1

by Sarah Mccarry

  The inside of the house is a disaster. Streamers hang crazily from the huge chandelier, and the front hall is caked with mud and feathers, bits of fur, the broken pieces of a jeweled necklace with its gems cracked and smeared with filth. Paintings hang at odd angles, the glass in their frames splintered into jagged starbursts. My heart catches when I see the banner I painted for Aurora, torn down and trampled. I pick it up out of the dirt, brush off the worst of the grime, but it’s ruined. I leave it on the back porch and go inside again. “Maia?” I call, climbing the sweeping staircase to the second floor, but there’s no answer.

  I peek in Aurora’s room, hoping against hope that she’s here, lounging in her bed, chugging Dr Pepper and eating Slim Jims and watching eighties movies. Painting her toenails and rolling her eyes at me, demanding to know where I’ve been. Her room’s empty, the bed unmade and strewn with eyeliner pencils and lipsticks. The syringe winks at me from the covers where we must have left it. I rub the crook of my elbow and shiver. There’s not even a mark there.

  I open Aurora’s drawers as if she’s hiding inside them. Just a welter of crocheted bikinis and silk slips, fishnets, a rhinestone necklace. A pair of ancient ballet shoes left over from our brief stint as ballerinas when we were still in the single digits. A paper covered in Cass’s handwriting: Aurora’s horoscope, undated. Mars is less happy in Taurus. Great, Cass, very helpful. Exactly what Aurora needs. I walk down the hall to Maia’s room.

  I think, for a second, that this time Maia really is dead. She’s out cold on her bed, her eyes closed, her skin ashen. A few stragglers from the party are passed out in various states of disarray. There’s a long-haired dude next to her, one arm hanging off the bed, as comatose as she is. “Shit,” I whisper, but then I see the faint rise and fall of her bony chest. “Maia,” I say, but she’s zombied. I say it again, louder. I don’t want to touch her, but I swallow hard and shake her. Her eyelids flutter.

  “Aurora?” she murmurs.

  “No such luck. Maia, do you need a doctor?” At last she opens her eyes and gives me an unfocused stare.

  “You’re not Aurora.”

  “We covered that. We’re moving past 101 now. Are you okay, Maia? Do you need to go to the hospital?” She looks bad but not dying. She looks the same way she’s looked for most of the last decade, minus a bit of zest. I sit on the bed, take her hand. “Maia? How you doing, lady? When did you eat last? How much smack did you do last night?”

  “Where’s Aurora?”

  “She either went to Los Angeles or she went to hell.”

  “What?” But Maia’s barely conscious. She’s more pitiable than anything. Her complete failure to rise to the occasion comes as no surprise. I think of all the times she told us how she was going to get sober, how this time it would be for real. This time she was going to go to a spa in the hills of California, drink lemon juice and hot water for ten straight days, return pure and clear. This time she was going to backpack into the desert, eat peyote and let the spirits take the drugs out of her. This time she was going to stay with some friends on a sailboat, head north to the islands along the coast, learn how to fish. This time she was going to buy a cabin on the beach in Mexico, spend the winters there until the sun bleached all the junk out of her veins. This time, this time, this time. But it always turned into next time, or the time after. Always something came up, something happened. Some old friend came to visit. Some hard day. Some reminder. “This is the day I met your father,” she’d tell Aurora, and then she’d disappear into her room and we wouldn’t see her for days. This day was the day Aurora’s father died. This day was the day Aurora’s father’s bassist told Maia he never wanted to see her again, that she’d been the one who ruined everything. That if it hadn’t been for her the band would still be together and no one would be dead. Every day contained some moment that made this time the time that didn’t count. Next time, next time she’d get clean for real. Oh, Maia. I smooth her greasy hair away from her forehead. Music is playing, so faint it’s only now registering. It’s the remastered album the record label put out, a decade after Aurora’s dad died. All of us hate this album. “Fucking producers,” Aurora said, the first time we listened to it. I never heard her play it again.

  “I guess Aurora went away for a while,” I say to Maia now, my voice catching. “I wanted to make sure you were okay. Do you think you should take a shower or something?”

  “Did you have fun at the party?” Her head lolls back on her neck.

  “Not really.” The man in her bed mutters, rolls over. Score another point for the living.

  “I saw him,” she says. “I saw him here. Why was he here?”

  “Who did you see, Maia?”

  “The skeleton man.” My whole body goes cold.

  “Do you mean Minos? How do you know Minos?”

  “That asshole. He was always around.” She lifts her head with an effort. “Always around,” she repeats, her voice slurry. “Always making promises. Everyone was going to be so goddamn rich. Everything we ever wanted. I could have had him forever. He used to write me songs; did Cass ever tell you that? Before that stupid album. We were so fucking happy and we couldn’t even see it. Look at me now. Listen to this shit.” She points in the general direction of the stereo. “Don’t let Aurora—” She falters. “Don’t let him take her away. He has the best drugs. I can never say no when he’s here. He told me—last night he told me…” She trails off.

  “Who else did he take away? Maia? Who else?”

  “Who do you think?” She struggles to sit up and I reach forward to help her, but she bats my hands away. “Fucking Cass,” she mutters. “Cass let him in. Cass tried to take my baby, too. You tell Cass I said she can go to hell.”

  “Cass wasn’t here last night,” I say.

  “Not last night. A long time ago.”

  “Cass let Aurora’s dad in?”

  “You aren’t listening to me.”

  “Maia. I don’t understand what you’re telling me. Where did Aurora go? Do you know? Did she go to California?”

  “It’s too late,” Maia says, and starts to cry. “If she went with him, it’s too late. Now I have to go looking for her, too.”

  “Tell me how to find her. Tell me where they went. Tell me what Cass did.” But she’s leaning back into the pillows, coughing, her eyes closing.

  “I have to sleep. I can see him sometimes when I sleep.”

  “Maia. Maia.” Her face is still. I wait for her to say something else, but she is gone again, to wherever it is that she goes. I shut the door behind me and go to find some clothes. I am not looking forward to the bike ride home.

  My apartment is empty, the breakfast dishes washed and drying in the drainer. I have no idea what to do with myself, stand stupidly in the middle of my room staring out the window. I don’t have to work today. If it were any other day, a normal day, I’d be at the beach with Aurora. Post-morteming her party, talking shit about the guests. Who wore what and who paired off, locking themselves in her bathroom for way too long. Aurora nursing her hangover with a bag of Doritos and a raw egg in tomato juice, me making horrified faces while she insists it’s the healthiest cure imaginable. Later, I’d call Jack, and we’d have a picnic in the park or stay up all night in his little house, kissing with the windows open to let the night in. But none of that, now.

  I can’t remember the last time I went running. I unbutton the shirt I stole from Aurora’s closet, wincing at the sharp twinge in my shoulder. I check out my back in my mirror and there it is: an ugly constellation of red punctures, the flesh around them puffy and discolored. I wonder what happens if they get infected, if there’s some kind of first aid manual for the cuts you get in hell. I put on my sports bra and a T-shirt, doing my best not to touch the wounds.

  Outside, I lace up my sneakers and start to run. Head down, legs moving, harder and faster than I’ve ever run before. Running away from last night, the pain in my shoulder, the memory of that river of ghouls carrying Jack and Au
rora away from me. I don’t pay attention to where I’m going, don’t look up even when I crash into a couple pushing a toddler in a stroller. Their startled squawks follow me as I keep going. I run until I think my knees will split apart, until my mouth is open and working and the air is hot on my dried-out tongue. I run until I trip over a rough patch of sidewalk and go flying, the breath coming out of me in a sharp whoosh as I hit the ground full-on. I lie there for a minute, stunned, so winded I wonder if I’m going to throw up, and then I roll over on my side. “Jesus,” someone says. “Are you okay?” A middle-aged man in a suit is standing over me, his expression anxious. “Do you need me to call someone?” Laboriously, I get to my feet.

  “I’m fine,” I whisper, when I can catch my breath enough to get the words out. “Thanks.”

  “You—I think you—I think you might need to go to the hospital.” He points. I look down. The skin on my knees and elbows is gone.

  “Seriously,” I wheeze. “This happens all the time. Thanks.”

  “I can—”

  “I’m fucking fine.” He backs away.

  “I was only trying to help,” he says, curt now.

  “I don’t need your fucking help! I need my fucking friends!” I don’t care how I look, and I don’t care what’s coming out of my mouth. Nothing has ever felt as good as screaming at this total stranger. “I need my best friend! I need my best friend’s mom to quit doing drugs! I need parents and I need my boyfriend back and I need Aurora’s dad to not be a dead fuckup rock star and I need that creepy asshole to leave me and the people I love alone and I need—” Gasping, I run out of steam. The businessman is gaping at me. “Shit,” I mutter. “Sorry. Bad day.” I turn around and limp away. My mouth is so dry it’s burning. I would kill someone for a glass of water. A businessman. I would kill a businessman for a glass of water. Ha ha.

  I walk for a long time without thinking. When I look around I’m standing in front of the big old cathedral at the edge of downtown. Why not? My feet whisper across the red carpet. I’m so thirsty I dip one hand into the marble basin of holy water, make a cup out of my palm, and bring the droplets to my mouth. A lady clutching a rosary next to me hisses in disapproval. The water doesn’t taste like anything. Overhead the cathedral’s arching ribs meet in a dizzying peak, and the light fractures through the stained-glass windows. People file past me, genuflecting at their pews and sliding into their seats, kneeling in prayer.

  I stand in the nave, watching as the priest in his rich white robe edged in gold raises his hands over the congregation, and people begin to sing in Latin. The dead language swirls around me and the sun blazes behind, casting my shadow in a long strip across the red carpet. A few people turn around to look at me, and then keep staring. Someone who looks official—what do you call people who work at a church? They can’t all be the ones who don’t have sex, some of them must be secretaries or something—turns to the man next to him and mimes making a phone call. That’s for sure my cue to split. I stumble back out into the innocuous afternoon, and then there is nothing left to do but go home.

  Cass is sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea, the light streaming in around her in buttery slabs. When she sees me she starts.

  “What happened to you? You’re a holy mess.” She grabs a clean dishtowel, runs it under the tap, sits me down at the kitchen table. I wince as the skin stretches over my abraded knees. She dabs at me with the towel. I push her away.

  “Sweetheart, you look awful. Let me clean you up, okay?”

  “They went without me.” She sets the towel aside and puts her arms around me.

  “Who went without you?”

  “Jack and Aurora.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “Wherever he took them.” I start to cry. She doesn’t ask me who I mean. She holds me while I sob into her shirt, rocking me gently like she used to do when I was small enough to fit on her lap. She doesn’t try to hush me, or tell me everything will be okay. She lets me cry until I have no tears left, and then she gets up and pours me a cup of tea and pushes the mug toward me. I stare at my reflection in the sweet-smelling liquid.

  “What do I do now? How do I find them?”

  “I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.”

  All the days after that pass in an indistinct blur. I catch Cass filling bowls with crystals and salt water and leaving them on the windowsills. She unearths the dog-eared paperback with her spell recipes and mutters incantations over colored candles, pours drops of oil in the corners of every room, burns so many herbs she sets off the smoke alarm. I lay out my tarot cards over and over, but I don’t even know what question to ask. I find one of Aurora’s white hairs across my pillow, and a guitar pick in a bowl of apples. After that, nothing. I listen to Nick Cave over and over because it feels true. I let love in. I let love in. So much there that’s not love, so much there that’s anger. Love and hate are twins. I listen to songs about following your wife into the dark beneath the earth, the music that leads you there. Oh mama. I was such a fool. Such a fool to think I could have either one of them, to think that Jack loved me, to think that there was anything real but the two of them together and me on the outside, looking in.

  I sleep for what feels like days. Years. The entire rest of my life. I sleep so much that when I’m awake I don’t feel right and the edges of my vision go furry. I dream about her, always, all the time. Aurora in the ocean, her white hair floating behind her. Aurora in a house like a palace, white walls, white-hot sky. Aurora, huge dark eyes looking back at me out of a pool in the earth ringed with flowers. Aurora with Minos’s long bony fingers around her throat. One night I can see her again with the syringe, the strip of silk. She’s in a bathtub the size of a fish pond. Marble-floored bathroom, candles everywhere. Floor-to-ceiling windows and beyond them black sea, black sky. I can see the steam rising off the bathwater, smell lavender and salt breeze and the rich vanilla of Aurora’s skin. She’s skinnier than ever, barely any flesh on her long bones, the line of her cheek knife-sharp. Her white hair like a beacon in the dark. Her lips part and her eyes roll back in her head. She’s sliding underwater, down, down, down. No! I cry, and reach for her, but she’s too far away for me to touch. You left me, she whispers. You let me go. And then she’s gone and I jerk awake, dripping with sweat, in my own dirty sheets, my own bed, my own shabby apartment. Our kingdom glimmers on the far wall, the country that we made together. “Aurora,” I say aloud into the dark, but there’s no one there to hear. “Aurora. I’m sorry. Come back.”

  Cass tiptoes around me, takes to leaving my meals outside the door of my room. I don’t want to eat, but the smell lures me out like a bear to bait. Betrayed again by my animal body and its stupid animal wants: food, friendship, sex, love. Cass and I don’t talk. I’m a chalkboard that’s been erased over and over again until there’s nothing left but a haze of white dust. Before this I never understood how long an hour could take, how many ticks of the second hand are in a minute, how endless the space between seconds can be.

  I can never put together a whole picture of Jack in my head. Shoulders, hips, the line of his belly, the muscles of his back. The soft place behind his knee. Long tendons in his forearms, long fingers, long narrow toes. Sunlight throwing bone into relief: the sharp place at the inside of his elbow, the bird-fine bones of his wrist, the muscles of his thigh moving under his skin like water. The tangle of his hair. I draw pieces of him and tape them together, take them apart again. I draw a single line and already it’s wrong. I draw the angle of his cheek. I draw his palms the way I remember them, but on paper they are nothing I recognize. My desk is piled with crumpled sheets of newsprint, my fingers covered in charcoal dust. Jack cutting fruit in his kitchen, frozen with his knife parting the apple’s green skin. Jack playing me Leonard Cohen songs on his porch, the birds in his garden creeping forward to listen better. Jack in my room, laughing, shirt unbuttoned. Jack watching me draw. Jack’s voice in my ear, low and rough. I don’t know if it’s worse to have a thin
g like that and then have it taken away from you or to never have a thing like that at all.

  My brain’s not shy about coming up with other images that, for all I know, are just as real: Jack and Aurora hand in hand on the California beach, Jack and Aurora in a convertible with the top down, drinking margaritas by the ocean and watching the sun set. Did they go away for Minos, or did they go away for each other? Did they go to get away from me? Does Jack know by now that Aurora loves anchovies and olives on her pizza but would die before touching pineapple, that she drinks her coffee with so much sugar it’s a wonder she has any teeth left? Does he know that The Lost Boys reminds her of her dad for no rational reason? Does he know she learned French so she could read Rimbaud in the original? Has she told him we used to take turns reading The Dark Is Rising aloud to each other every Christmas? Does he have his motorcycle wherever he is now and are they together, her arms around his waist, her hair whipping back from her helmet, are they driving down Highway 1 to Mexico like Jack and I said we were going to do, are they sleeping on the beach and watching the sun rise over the Pacific and learning all the constellations? Is he cutting her slices of peach with his knife, feeding them to her one by one? Does he touch her the same way he touched me? Are they lost, or lonely, and do they think of me, and if he has kissed her does he wish it is me he is kissing, or has her perfect face already wiped mine from his memory? Does he touch her the way he touched me? Every night I go over to my window and look out, at the spot in the shadows where I thought I’d seen Minos before, but the street is empty and dark and even the shadows have no weight. I’m not who he was waiting for.

  Does he touch her the way he touched me.

  At work, Raoul knocks gently on my skull. Anyone home? No. He covers for me while I sit on a crate, staring out over purple mounds of plums. He mothers me back to his apartment, feeds me soup, puts Oscar Wilde on my head to make me laugh. It’s the only thing that works. We smoke pot and watch television and when he brings me more and more snacks I realize he’s getting me stoned so I’ll eat. I tell him I don’t deserve him, and he hushes me.