All Our Pretty Songs

by Sarah Mccarry

  I wait until Aurora comes up for air and then I sidle over. “I’m out.” The bassist’s a skeeze, but he’s pretty tame compared to some of the dudes Aurora ends up with. These people seem nice. They’ll take care of her if anything goes wrong. Hold her hair out of her face while she throws up their shitty whisky. I’m far from home, but not too far to walk. She looks up at me.

  “Take my car.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’ll walk.”

  “I don’t want you to walk.”

  “I like walking.”

  “Serious.” She rummages through her purse, looking for her keys. I dig them out of my pocket and try to give them to her, but she closes my fingers around them. “Serious,” she says again. “I’ll get a ride home with—” She stops, turns to the bass player. “What’s your name again?” For a second, he looks hurt, and then his face is cool again. She’ll eat him for breakfast, I think, and I can’t help grinning. She knows why I’m smiling, and she throws her head back and laughs. “I’ll be fine, Mom.”

  “Okay.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  To my surprise, Cass is waiting up for me. She takes a bowl of stir-fry out of the refrigerator. “I can heat it up,” she offers. I shake my head, sit at the table, and shove forkfuls of vegetables and tofu into my mouth. Cass has been a health freak for about as long as I’ve been sentient. She quit doing drugs when I was a kid. Unfortunately for me, she also quit sugar, television, and fun. She insists the human body is meant to live on raw food, but I told her I’d run away from home if she got rid of the stove, so we compromise. She makes me stir-fry and herbal tea, and I don’t tell her when I go to Chinatown with Aurora and eat sixteen different kinds of meat swimming in grease. That way, everybody’s happy. Mostly. I would give anything to have a secret stash of, say, pork rinds, but Cass can sniff out Yellow #5 the way some moms suss pot and dirty thoughts. She was nineteen when she had me, and most of the time she feels like an annoying friend you can’t shake and not like a mom at all. But when it comes to restricting my toxin intake, she’s a holy terror.

  “You out with Aurora?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good show?”

  “Yeah, they were awesome. We hung out with them for a while. She’s still there. Not really my scene, though.” Cass snags a red pepper out of my bowl.

  “You worried about her?”

  “Like, all the time. But not tonight.”

  “Okay.” Her face goes distant and I know she’s thinking of Maia. Aurora would be better off in the custody of a potato. At least she could eat it if things got dire. “You let me know, though, if—” She trails off. If what? I want to ask. If Aurora gets loaded every weekend and goes home with boys who are basically strangers? Kind of late in the game for team D.A.R.E.

  “It’s cool. She’s cool. I keep an eye on her.”

  “That’s my girl.” Cass reaches over to ruffle my hair, and I duck. I hate it when she tries to be a parent. It doesn’t suit her.

  Lately I have been dreaming about a river and a dark forest. In the dream I am standing on a path that winds through trees that are white as bone and without leaves. I am barefoot, and my feet are covered in blood. The only light comes from the trees themselves, an opaline glow like that of a luminescent fungus. The path stops at a river that is too broad for me to see the far bank, and the water moves swift and smooth and has an oily sheen to it. I know there is someone waiting for me on the other side, someone I must find, but I do not know who it is. In the distance I can hear howling. Wolves, I think, or dogs. The bare branches of the trees clatter against each other although there is no wind. I take a step forward, but before my foot breaks the surface of the water I wake up. It is always a long time before I remember where I am.

  After Aurora’s father died, when I was still very small, Cass and I lived with Aurora and Maia for a while. The house was always full of people and music then. Maia was a silent shadow, worn wraithlike with grief. She moved further and further away from us, into her own twilit limbo outside space and time. Sometimes a skeleton-thin man in a long black coat would come to the house and sit in her room with her for hours. Cass told us he was her doctor, but we didn’t know then the kind of medicine he was working with his suitcase full of needles and glassine bags. Aurora and I weren’t allowed in Maia’s part of the house, but we stole into it once. I remember candles everywhere, and dark walls without decoration, and a great canopied bed draped with silk and satin and scattered with velvet pillows. Maia slept tangled in the sheets, her arms akimbo, her mouth slack, her nut-brown skin ashen. “Is she dead?” I whispered.

  “She’s fine,” Aurora said. “She sleeps a lot.”

  Slowly Aurora’s father’s bandmates and their friends drifted away, escaping their orbit around the black hole Maia had become. There were no more parties, where Aurora and I darted in between the legs of grownups, stole bites off plates and sips out of glasses and fell asleep, giddy and a little drunk, on Aurora’s lawn. No more circles of musicians playing guitars together in the garden until the sky glowed white with dawn. No more lanky-limbed, long-haired men and women twirling us around while we squealed with glee, lifting us to their shoulders and parading us up and down the sweeping marble staircase, or teaching us to slide down the banisters when Cass wasn’t paying attention. The house went still and dead as a tomb.

  After that, Cass took me away from Aurora’s palace in the hills. Aurora and I stayed twin-blooded, wearing each other’s clothes and finishing each other’s sentences, but Cass and Maia never talked again. I don’t know what happened in that vast house, or if anything happened at all. Maybe Cass gave up trying to pull Maia out of darkness and settled for bringing me to a brighter world instead. Sometimes I wish Cass had fought harder, had taken Aurora and Maia with us. I know it was hard for Cass to get clean, and maybe that’s why she left Maia there; she wasn’t strong enough for them both. I’m not like that. I will never let go of anything I love.

  Aurora and I have lived in this city all our lives. If you came here you would know that it is a young city, out on the edge of the world, just a few hours away from where the earth drops off into the grey ocean that reaches all the way to the far edge of the sky. It is a city of hills and water, ringed in mountains that are capped with white even in the dead of July. The summers are sweet and golden, bookended with long rainy seasons where the sky brushes the earth with a blanket of cloud.

  Aurora and I used to spend our days roaming, picking out books at the huge old bookstore downtown with its creaking wooden floors and innumerable rooms, trying on Doc Martens and buying Manic Panic at the punk store under the viaduct, stuffing ourselves with fish and chips on the pier and drinking coffee until our speedy hands shook. We haunted the curio store down on the waterfront, visiting Sylvia and Sylvester, its glass-cased mummies (Aurora insists they are real; I say no way). Even now we still love putting quarters in the fortune-telling machine and watching the turban-swathed mannequin inside move its jerky mechanical hand and spit out fortunes printed on cardboard squares. Aurora always gets the good ones. On the curiosity-laden shelves a fetal pig bobs in a bath of formaldehyde next to a stuffed two-headed lamb. The store manager once let me take Aurora’s picture with the lamb.

  We love best the coffee shop up on the hill, a veritable stable of goths and artists. Tall, many-paned windows let in the light, and the red-painted walls are lined with bookshelves. When we were kids Aurora and I would bum cigarettes off cute boys playing guitar at the outdoor tables. She’d pen tortured poetics in her journal while I surreptitiously tried to draw everyone around us. The baristas with their multicolored hair and deliberately ragged clothes, most of them stained with paint or some other indicator of artistic temperament. The strung-out rockers, blinking into their coffee. The street kids hitting us up for quarters and trying to get Aurora’s phone number.

  It was easy to pretend I was an adult in those moments: the rain-dampened streets outside the window
, the air hazy with cigarette smoke, the whir of the espresso machine, the low murmur of people talking around us. An adult with a bookstore job, maybe, and a musician boyfriend who would write songs about me. We would stay up all night smoking pot and having sex, and we would only allow our apartment to be illuminated by candlelight. Every room would be hung with glittering beaded curtains. Cass had no tolerance for my preadolescent passions; when I brought home a stack of Jane’s Addiction records she scoffed. “Smacked-out posers,” she said disdainfully. I couldn’t explain to her that there was something in that wash of noise that felt like home to me. Cass and Maia had lived for punk shows when they were our age, but Cass never even went out anymore. Never went with us to the dirty all-ages clubs we spent our weekends in, or the bars we started frequenting as soon as Aurora was old and charming enough to get us past the door. Cass still had all her old records, but I never heard her play them. Finally, one day a few years ago, I dragged them all into my room and kept them there.

  When Aurora and I were kids Cass would take us hiking in the woods outside the city. We’d pick our way across the loamy forest floor, our noses flooded with the green dark smell of moss, of mushrooms coming up out of the damp earth, of fallen trees crumbling into soil and new trees springing up out of the old, their roots snaking through the dead, rain-slick trunks. We’d climb narrow rocky paths up out of the woods, clinging to the sides of mountains, picking our way through alpine meadows awash in monkshood, lupine, and scarlet paintbrush. I loved the immense, vivid silence up there, the way a single marmot cry would echo and echo through the far hills. Up there you felt like you were all alone on the roof of the world, nothing but razor-edged ridges and high peaks as far as you could see in all directions.

  These days Aurora isn’t interested in wild places, and Cass rarely has time anymore. As soon as I learned how to drive I started borrowing Cass’s car and going out on my own. I spend the morning panting my way up switchbacks so steep I think sometimes I’ll tip over backward. Later, I’ll drive home through broken-down logging towns with trailer parks full of moldering doublewides, where men lean against the bar in the one restaurant in town even though it’s only three or four in the afternoon. I’ll order hamburgers, or milkshakes, fried eggs and sausage, the kinds of foods Cass never allows across the threshold of our house, and pick at the greasy mess on my plate, wondering how my life would be different if one of those men was my father. Sometimes I see kids my own age. They stare me down, mean-eyed, and I always look away first.

  You learn a lot about yourself when you spend most of your time alone. If I’m not with Aurora, I’m never with anyone. Aurora is happiest as the sun at the center of a solar system, and I’m at peace as a quiet moon, no light coming from me but the light that was hers first.

  It’s hard if you are a girl like Aurora, easier if you are a girl like me. I’m not the one old gods hanker after, not the one likely to be invited to immortals’ parties. The Fates don’t bother with small fry like me. I was never jealous of Aurora, not of her beauty or her money or her sad fairy-tale life. I loved her with every corner of my dark and crooked heart. People said our names together in a single breath, like we were two halves of the same body, like they could not imagine either one of us on our own.

  I was never jealous, I should say, until him.

  I’m smoking a cigarette and trying to draw the ocean when Aurora calls. “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable all the uses of the world are seeming. Right? Are you with me?” I make a noncommittal noise. “Exactly. I’m going to have a party. Come over.” I know better than to argue, promise I’ll be there in an hour. I grab my bag and unlock my bike from where it’s chained to a pipe in the alley behind our apartment building. The night feels dangerous and too warm. It’s the kind of dark that makes you reckless, sends an itch creeping under your skin. This summer is the hottest I can remember. The air smells like jasmine and, underneath, the sea. The moon is low and huge in the sky.

  I’m tired by the time I’ve bicycled the long miles to Aurora’s house, and I stand for a while in the shadows of her garden, catching my breath. When Aurora was younger there was an assortment of gardeners and assistants to keep up the grounds and take care of the house, but one by one they’ve straggled away over the years. These days, the house is lurching into a kind of derelict glamour. The once velvet-soft green lawn has been overtaken by wildflowers and straggling vines. Thorny hedges of blackberry have swallowed the wrought-iron fence that marks the edge of their property. The house itself is overrun with jasmine and St. John’s wort; yellow and purple flowers wind up the columns of the front porch, obscuring most of the house, and battle for supremacy with the ivy that shrouds the chimneys and hangs in green tendrils across the windows. Aurora seems unconcerned about her house’s slide into disrepair. “I like it,” she says. “Maybe one day my mother will wake up and notice her entire life is falling apart around her, and then she can clean it up.”

  The first floor of her house is open and angular, and I can see through the plate-glass windows to the vaulted ceilings and vast white expanses, the huge abstract canvases that hang here and there: a savage red square on a yellow background, a field of blue, another field of white. Behind a slab of marble, a tattooed bartender in an old-fashioned suit pours drinks. In the yard, Aurora has hung paper lanterns in the trees. The roses are blooming. Her house is full of people. Industry people, ostentatiously uncool, making sure you know how much they don’t care about anything except music. Stubble-cheeked boys in cutoff shorts over thermals, hair hanging to their shoulders, talking in big voices about their bands, their tours, their perennially breaking-down vans, telling the same old musician stories. Some of the women are in vacuumed-tight dresses, their mouths painted on in glossy red slashes. I have no idea who they’re trying to impress. Any of these dudes will sleep with you for clean sheets and a free breakfast. No reason to even bother with brushing your hair.

  I look for Maia. When she’s more or less sober she likes to prance around, play the queen. She still has all her old party dresses, sequins and leather and lace, though too much speed and too many long nights have stripped the flesh off her bones until she’s skeleton-gaunt, like those scary yoga ladies you see lurking in the aisles of health-food stores whispering about master cleanses and organ detox. Maia still has a faint echo of the glory of her youth, and when she’s on she’s like champagne: a bubbly thing that buoys you along, makes you feel special. I know Maia too well to be charmed by anything she does, but seeing her gussied up at parties is the green flash that shows up on your lids when you close your eyes after staring at the sun. Aurora’s the real deal, but Maia can dazzle you if you’re not used to the light.

  I see her at last, leaning against a tree with a tumbler in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. Her straight black hair looks dirty and there are circles under her eyes that accentuate the sharp line of her cheekbones. Not sober, then. “Hi, Maia,” I say.

  “Hi, sweetheart. Thanks for coming.” She sucks on the cigarette like it’s her last meal. When was her last meal? I wonder, eyeing the stark lines of her clavicle. “Aurora’s having a good time,” she says, pointing. Aurora’s across the yard. Her bleached hair is piled on top of her head and she’s wearing a sequined dress that grazes the tops of her long thighs. She hasn’t seen me yet. Maia and I watch her flit from person to person, dipping in like a hummingbird taking sips. “She never talks to me anymore. All grown up now, you girls.” This is not exactly fair; it is hard to talk to Maia, since half the time she is too high to know who either of us are.

  “Mmm,” I say. “She’s busy.”

  “She have a boyfriend?”

  “I don’t think she’s very interested in settling down.”

  “You girls.” Her face is wistful. Junkies getting nostalgic. Cute. “You grow up so fast.” She’s repeating herself. We’ve had this conversation before. If I let her, we’ll have it again before the night is out. You think I’m being unkind, and maybe I am, but
I’m the one who’s had to get Aurora out of strangers’ houses, track her down when she disappears, sober her up enough to make it home, cover for her when she’s too fucked up for school. Maia loves her, loves us both, but if she were running the show we’d probably both be dead.

  “I should see if Aurora needs any help.” I move my arm in a vague gesture that I hope conveys helpfulness.

  “Of course, sweetie. Come back and talk to me later.”

  When Aurora sees me, she hugs me tight, and I smell her skin: vanilla and patchouli and cigarettes. She is already drunk. From the edge of her garden I can see the still-lit windows of the office buildings far below us, and past that the bay. The moon’s reflection glimmers on the sound, a silver road on dark water. When we were little Aurora and I thought that path of light would take us to some distant, marvelous country. I assume this party will be like every other one of Aurora’s parties, but that’s where I’m wrong. This is the party where we meet Jack, and nothing will be the same again.

  In the telling, I want to make up some sign, but the first time I see him is only ordinary. I know right away that he’s beautiful, but there’s no violin swelling, no chorus of stage-left witches spelling out our future when our eyes first meet. He’s leaning on a crumbling stone wall. Long legs, torn jeans, a shirt worn thin enough that I can see the outline of his body through the fabric. His skin is darker than Aurora’s and seems to catch and hold the light that drifts down from the lanterns. His hair snakes in coils to his shoulders. Dreadlocked, I think, but when I get closer I can see it’s hundreds of braids. There’s a guitar next to him. A cool breeze comes up behind me and hisses in my ear. A loose half-circle of people has formed around him, holding their drinks and gossiping idly. “Come on,” Aurora says.