All Our Pretty Songs

by Sarah Mccarry

  Let them go. I wish it.

  “Take her, then,” says the god of hell. I can see eternity in his bored blue eyes, all the dusty centuries that have passed while he waited in this room for something to happen. No wonder he likes to fuck with people. We’re the daytime soaps for him. The Real World: Hades. “Take her, and see how far you get, child.”

  I don’t wait for them to change their minds. When I try to stand my legs buckle, and the pain in my knees makes me suck my breath in quick and sharp. Minos reaches out one bony hand but I shrug it away, struggle to my feet alone and stand there breathing hard until the room stops spinning.

  “Aurora,” I say. “We have to go.” She doesn’t stir. Nobody said this was going to be a free ride, but I wish I had at least a couple of crafty fates on my side. I take a deep breath and pick Aurora up like I’m a newlywed carrying her across a threshold. One of her arms slung around my shoulder. Her white hair spilling down my back. She murmurs something and opens her eyes at last.

  “Babycakes. You came.”

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I say into Aurora’s cheek. I carry her out of that room with my own two hands, and I do not look back.

  The ferryman is waiting where we left him, silent in his dark boat. I heave Aurora’s legs over the side, sit her in the front of the boat. Aurora slumps forward, and I climb over her. We sit like that, her nearly unconscious, me expectant, but the boat doesn’t move. I rack my mind for fairytale passwords, but everything I know is out of Grimm’s. “Open sesame” is probably a little au courant for these purists. I’m still freezing, and the empty night is not particularly cheering. Somewhere in the distance a dog howls, and I shudder. That thing, I do not want to see again.

  I don’t hear Minos, don’t see him crossing the plain. One minute he isn’t there and the next he is. You have to pay the ferryman. Cross the river and follow the path. It will take you a long time. But I think you are stronger than you look.

  “Pay him what?” But Minos won’t answer. “Why are you helping me?”

  Minos steps forward and reaches over the gunwale, rests one hand on Aurora’s forehead. He bends down and kisses her at the place where her dark roots meet her brow. It has been a very long time. But once I too knew how to love. He reaches into his black coat and hands me my sketchbook and brushes. These are yours.

  “Thank you.”

  He shakes his head. You will not thank me. In his dead eyes there’s something like a very human sorrow. He raises one hand, in farewell or in benediction, and then he is gone, nothing where he stood but the empty plain and the dark palace in the distance.

  I have to pay the ferryman. Maybe the ferryman wants blood. But when I take Jack’s knife out of my pocket, flip open the blade and press it against the thin pale skin at my wrist, the ferryman shakes his head. He leans forward, the hood still covering his face, and touches Aurora’s hair.

  “No way,” I say. “That’s not up to me. That’s hers.” I offer him Cass’s amulet, Raoul’s rosary—not that that’s mine to give either. The knife. My hoodie, my sketchbook, my boots. But he ignores me. “Goddammit,” I mutter. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “It grows.” I put Jack’s knife to her hair and start to cut. The knife is sharp but too small for what I’m using it for, and Aurora has a lot of hair. Long moments pass as I saw away, hanks coming off in my hands. I cut my finger and yelp, put it in my mouth for a moment. When I go back to cutting the white of Aurora’s hair is stained with my blood. At last I have a pile of pale strands, a larger mass than I would have thought possible. I offer it to the ferryman. “Rumpelstiltskin,” I say, but if he gets the joke it doesn’t register. These guys don’t have much of a sense of humor.

  The ferryman poles us back to the other shore. Maybe it’s imagination or fear, but the crossing seems to take too long. The boat’s sluggish, the current strong. I chew on my fingers and close my eyes. I can feel the palace pulsing behind me, tugging at me with some unsubtle force. You will not thank me.

  The boat scrapes against sand at last. “I could use your help,” I say to the ferryman, but he doesn’t move. He has Aurora’s hair in his lap, stroking it as though it’s a pet. It quivers like a living thing under his touch. I watch for a moment, fascinated, and then heave Aurora to her feet, careful not to rock the boat. To get her out I’ll have to more or less throw her. “You have to help me,” I say to her, shaking her. She lifts her head, opens her eyes. Looks right at me.

  “I saw my dad.” Her voice is clear and high.

  “Aurora, you couldn’t have. Your dad’s dead.”

  “Everyone here is dead.”

  “Not you. And not me. Can you take a big step? Over the side?” She obeys. The boat tips madly as she steps out, and I think for a second I’ll go flying, but I hop clear before I can lose my footing.

  “He’s going to teach me to play the guitar,” she says happily. “Like Jack.”

  “Aurora. We have to walk now.” Her eyes roll back in her head and her knees buckle. She tumbles forward into my arms, nearly sending me backward into the river. She’s out cold. It wouldn’t be hell if it was easy. “Piggyback it is,” I tell her.

  She’s so light I barely notice her weight at first, as I move through the forest. But by the time I reach the tunnel my shoulders are beginning to hurt. I hitch her body up against my back, get my hands more firmly underneath her thighs, walk into that yawning mouth. Begin to climb.

  If I thought the way down was long, it is nothing compared to the way back up. Aurora’s limp body is a dead weight. My shoulders burn, my thighs ache, my calves knot. Sweat runs down my chest, drips from my forehead and into my eyes, but I can’t move my arms to wipe it away without dropping her. I put my head down, think about putting one foot after the other. One step, one step, one more step. My throat is so dry I can’t swallow, my lungs are on fire, my hands are cramping, one step, one step, one step. I have no idea how long I’ve been climbing or how long I have left. Pain travels up my spine and shuts down reason, shuts down everything but one step, the next step, the next step, the next. The walls of the tunnel closing in. Suffocating heat, darkness, silence. One step, one step, one step. My feet are wet, and I wonder dully if I stepped in the river after all, if the taint of that water is enough to keep me in this hallway forever, doomed like Sisyphus to carry my burden until the end of time. The darkness presses against me. I can feel raw fear rising in my chest and threatening to choke me, but if I stop now I will never start again. I close my eyes. It makes no difference. But there’s something about the darkness behind my own lids that’s strangely comforting. Cass’s amulet burns against my chest. One step, one step, one step.

  I am beyond hope, beyond light, so certain that I have moved into a world where I will be climbing forever that when the tunnel ends I walk smack into hot metal and stand for a moment, reeling, before I let Aurora’s limp body slide down my back. When I try to move my hands the pain is so intense my knees buckle and I crash into the metal again. A long time passes before I can work my hand forward enough to touch the surface. To brush my fingers against something round and smooth, waist-height. Doorknob. I am standing at a door. It takes more than a few tries before I can close my hand around the knob, turn, push.

  The flood of sunlight is so bright I turn my head away in pain and behind me, in the tunnel, Aurora cries out. I totter there for a moment, leaning on the door, eyes screwed shut against the glare, until the green flash behind my lids seeps away and I dare to crack one eye open, still squinting. Concrete. Parked cars. A street. I am looking at a street. I am looking at the street in front of Minos’s club. I take a step forward, shaky-legged as a toddler. Across the street, men are filing into Ortiz’s Meats. Going to work. Like it’s some kind of ordinary morning. I try to call out but my voice comes out as a croak. One of them turns, sees me, stares. Says something to another man and both of them walk toward me, cautious.

  “Lady, what happened to you?” he says when he gets close enough for me to hear him. He’
s staring at my feet in horror. I follow his gaze. My boots are gone and my feet are covered in so much blood I can’t see skin.

  “My friend,” I say, pointing behind me, and then a dark haze rises up and swallows me whole.

  NOVEMBER

  In my dream I am waiting in a white room at the end of a long corridor. For some reason I’m in bed. My feet hurt. The blanket is scratchy and the air smells wrong, like chemicals, and underneath the tang of pee. Aurora is standing over me. Too thin but still beautiful, her face haloed in short black hair tipped with white, her dark eyes huge and sad. I haven’t seen her in a long time, but I can’t remember why. I open my mouth to ask her why she cut her hair, but no sound comes out. She is talking, has been talking for a while maybe, or maybe not. Maybe we just got here. She is wearing a white sleeveless silk shirt that exposes the graceful line of her collarbone, and I am wearing some kind of blue dress, which is clearly not mine because I would never wear a dress if Aurora didn’t make me, and it is made out of thin cheap cotton and I am naked underneath it and I want to know where my underwear is and what is going on, but this is a dream, so maybe that’s why everything is weird. The light is watery and unfamiliar. Too sharp and pale. White around the edges like I am looking at everything through a lens. “I love you,” Aurora is saying, “more than anything. But I miss him so much.” I try to sit up, but there’s a weight on my chest, a pile of stones I can’t see pressing me down. I open my mouth but no sound comes out. She takes my hand and kisses my knuckles. “Don’t be mad at me,” she whispers. And then she’s turning, walking away from me. I watch her back recede down the long, gleaming hall.

  “Aurora,” I say at last, but she’s long gone.

  When I wake up Raoul is the first thing I see and I am so confused I shut my eyes again, open them. But there he is, sitting in a metal chair upholstered in garish turquoise vinyl, reading Optometry Today. He is wearing tight black jeans and a white Depeche Mode shirt that is falling off him in artful tatters and a red beanie that looks as out of place on him as a collared shirt. The room I am in is exactly like the room in my dream.

  “I didn’t know you were interested in vision,” I say. The words come out thickly. My throat is a desert. My mouth tastes like something died in it. He looks up and a slow smile spreads across his face.

  “You better not be alluding to my earthy indigenous spirituality,” he says. “Or else I might make you regret your return to the world of the living.”

  “What,” I say, not so much a question but an irritated protest. There’s a tube coming out of my arm and the pee smell is real, although as far as I can tell it isn’t coming from me. The blue dress is real, too, and I can feel that it’s open at the back because the sheets are scratchy against my bare skin, and I remember where they have dresses like this. It’s not a dress. I am wearing a smock. “Holy shit. Am I in a hospital? How did I get in a hospital?” I try to sit up, and pain shoots through my entire body. “Fuck!” I yell.

  “That’s my girl,” Raoul says. “Do you remember anything?”

  “I remember—I got on the bus—” I stop and think. Raoul took me to the bus. I got on the bus to find Aurora. I got off the bus and ate a hot dog. I went to hell. I cut off Aurora’s hair. “I ate a hot dog,” I tell him.

  “Not recently, you didn’t.”

  “I ate a hot dog this morning. This afternoon. Maybe yesterday. I had some enchiladas. Last night. What day is it?”

  Raoul’s expression is unreadable. “The day after Halloween. A factory worker found you passed out on the sidewalk in front of an abandoned building and called 911 this morning. When they brought you in you were dehydrated and starving and you had pretty much no skin left on your feet. Any of this ring a bell?”

  Ortiz’s Meats. “It wasn’t an abandoned building. It was a club.”

  “I’m telling you what the doctor told me.”

  Something he told me is wrong and I think about what it is. “Wait. How am I starving? I ate today. Yesterday. Recently.”

  “The doctor said you hadn’t eaten anything for at least five or six days.”

  “Raoul, that’s impossible, you know that. You saw me yesterday. The day before yesterday. I mean, I don’t think I ate breakfast—”

  “I’m telling you what the doctor told me,” he says again. “She asked me if you had spent the last week walking here barefoot from Mexico and I said I didn’t think so but that you were a pretty unpredictable kind of person.”

  I ignore this. “How did you get here?”

  “They found my phone number in your pocket and called me when you were admitted.”

  “Oh shit, my mom—”

  “Is trying to get Aurora’s mom on a plane. She’s pretty pissed, so I’d spend the next few hours composing a very comprehensive apology.”

  “Cass went up to Maia’s?”

  “I guess so.”

  “So it’s, like, a big deal that I ran away.”

  “Yes. A very big deal.”

  “Oh.”

  “A very comprehensive apology.”

  “I brought your rosary back.”

  “I know.”

  “Can I see Aurora? Is she awake?”

  Raoul pauses. “Aurora isn’t here.”

  “She’s in a different hospital?”

  “You were alone when they found you.”

  I stare at him, my mouth open. “Raoul. She was with me. I went down there and I got her. I brought her back. She was here. In the hospital. I thought it was a dream, but she was here. We could find her. That couldn’t have been that long ago, when I saw her. She didn’t mean—she couldn’t have meant to leave. I carried her. I carried her the whole way.”

  Raoul doesn’t say anything. He watches whatever is moving across my face now, and when I start to cry for what feels like the thousandth time in a month he takes my hand and kisses my knuckles, the way Aurora did, and holds my fist, there, against his mouth, the way Jack used to. I cry for me, for her, for Jack, for Cass and Maia. For her dad. For all of us. For how stupid I was, down there in the dark, thinking my own love was enough to trump the past. They didn’t stop me from leaving because it had never been me they wanted anyway. Because they knew she was already theirs. You will not thank me. When I’m done crying I sit for a long time, holding Raoul’s hand and hiccupping. “That fucking bitch,” I whisper. But I don’t mean it, and he knows it. The whole of my life stretches out in front of me, the life that is starting now, the life that does not have Aurora in it, and I turn my face away from the emptiness before I start crying again.

  “What was the point? What was the point of going after her?”

  “What is ever the point of love?” I shake my head. He smiles, a smile with so much sadness in it I don’t know where to look. “You did good,” he says. He takes something out of his pocket and hands it to me. The soft leather is familiar. Cass’s amulet. They must have taken it off when I got here. I loop the cord around my neck again and stare at it.

  “So much for that,” I say.

  “You’re here,” he says. “You’re alive. You went there and you came back.” If I look at him I will cry more and I am so tired of crying, tired of myself, tired of my own stupid hope-filled heart. I touch his beanie.

  “I knew it was the one with the red hat.”

  “Well, obviously,” he says. “I wouldn’t settle for less.”

  “Can you hand me the remote control,” I say, and he does.

  When Cass comes there is a lot of shouting. “What the fuck were you thinking,” she yells, over and over again, until one of the nurses comes in and coldly tells her if she doesn’t calm down she will have to leave. Maia is a trembling wraith in Cass’s wake, wobbly but, as far as I can tell, sober. They won’t look at each other. I can’t even imagine what the plane ride was like. They probably sat in separate aisles. Cass subsides at last, explains to me in a low voice the numerous ways in which I have fucked up. I can feel my heart coming apart in my chest. Aurora. Aurora.


  “You’re one to talk,” I say, when I can’t take it any more. Cass stops short. Maia sits on the edge of my bed and takes my hand.

  “You saw her.” I nod. “I did a really bad job.” I nod again. She looks at Cass and snorts softly through her nose. “You were always the lucky one,” she says without rancor. “You could take and take and it always worked out for you.”

  “You had everything,” Cass says. “Everything. You had love. You had money. You had a home.”

  “You have a daughter,” Maia says. Cass winces.

  “So do you,” I say.

  “I’m sorry,” Maia says. “For what it’s worth. You have no idea how sorry I am.”

  Cass sits next to Maia and puts a chin on her shoulder. Maia starts but doesn’t push her away. They look down at me, sad and solemn. I wonder if Aurora and I look like that; if we’ll look like them when we’re the same age, our eyes full of stories, lines at the corners, grey in our hair. They loved each other once, and then they fucked it up, and now here I am fucking it up again. Whether any of us gets a second chance is anybody’s guess. Aurora, why’d you leave me here with the two of them, I think. Aurora. Come back. Come home.

  I turn my face to the wall, close my eyes. “I think she should rest,” Raoul says. “We can talk later.” Maia and Cass stand up. Raoul touches my shoulder, leans forward to kiss my hair. “Don’t forget,” he murmurs, too low for Cass and Maia to hear. “You are still loved. You are anchored here by love.” I cover his hand with mine and sink back into sleep.