About a Girl

by Sarah Mccarry

  He laughed. “Sorry,” he said. “I get carried away. Being human is not any more complicated than it used to be, I don’t think, but you have the weight of all these repeated plots pushing up against you. I think modernity is something of a burden.”

  “You think it’s harder because people have been doing the same things forever?”

  “Don’t you? It must be limiting, to know for certain that every path you walk is a closed loop.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “People are always making new discoveries. Think about astronomy, about how far we’ve come—we’re approaching the solutions to problems that people didn’t even know existed fifty years ago.”

  “It is only ever the story of a quest,” he said, “all this shuffling along the mortal coil, until you shuffle right off it. I am afraid none of you are so original as you might wish—”

  “None of you? You mean astronomers? Or people in love?”

  “I just think it must be difficult, to have everything one does be so ultimately futile. Fall in love, chase after golden fleeces, pull swords out of stones, sail around to all the islands of the far seas. I used to think it was exciting, all that stink of flesh and death, running around in the dark places under the earth setting traps for the unsuspecting, but I am old and tired now, and I would rather read books and sit by the fire in the winter and practice my French. But you are still young and full of energy, and perhaps to you the world seems as though it might be a different place than it has been to every young person since time began.”

  I stared at him. “You are being dreary today,” I said finally.

  He shook his head and laughed. “I am sorry, my dear,” he said, “when you get to be as old as I am there is no hope for you to be anything other than a pessimist, but you are young still, and should pay no heed to my tedious ranting. Tell me what you have been doing lately, other than having troubles; it’s been a while since I last saw you.”

  I had not been doing much of anything at all, other than sulking, but that was not interesting. I thought of the music Shane had played for me. I knew that I was only talking about it because I wanted to keep talking about Shane, even if Mr. M didn’t know that was what I was still talking about, and I was annoyed with myself for doing it, but I couldn’t stop, either. “My—friend played this tape for me. An old musician who I guess was really famous. Jack Blake. Did you know him?”

  A strange shudder went through him, as though he had gone into a cold room, and though I was not admittedly the most perceptive person I saw that he was making a great effort not to look at me. “Jack,” he said. “That is a name I have not heard in a long time. I did know him, once upon a time. We can listen to the record, if you like.”

  “You have the record?”

  “Of course.” Shane would kill to hear this, I thought, and my smugness distracted me from whatever had come over Mr. M. He crossed the room to flip through his shelves of records and select one, carrying it over to the turntable and sliding it out of its sleeve as carefully as if it were made of glass.

  We listened to the whole record in silence, disturbed only when the first side ended and he got up to turn it over. The record was like hearing the music new again: the sound clearer and even more piercing, the heartbreak in that rich, rough voice filling the whole room until I thought it must spill over into the world outside. We sat for a long time without talking when it was finished. “I had almost forgotten,” he said at last, “how extraordinary he was.”

  “How did you know him?”

  He waved one hand dismissively and looked at me; he was weighing something, I thought, although I had no idea what it was; some arcane decision, known only to him. “I have a picture of him somewhere, if you would like to see it,” he said at last. He got up and went into another room and came back after a while with a framed picture—not a print, something blurrier and faded, maybe cut out of a newspaper—of a group of people, well dressed and sleek, at a party (glasses in hands, laughter, behind them an expanse of what looked like a window—an ocean, maybe?). But my eye was drawn immediately to a sharp-featured dark-skinned man, his dreadlocked hair coiling about him, looking straight into the camera with a cool, challenging gaze; he had one arm around a skinny girl who tilted up to him a rapturous face surrounded by a cloud of white hair. They were magnetic, the two of them; next to them the other people, groomed and lovely as they were, faded into the background like shadows. He was not exactly handsome, but there was something so remarkable, so intense, about his face that you could not look away from him, and the girl was, even in the blurry, faded newsprint photo, so beautiful that it made me want to straighten my clothes and brush my hair, ineffectual though these gestures would have been. And then the shot of recognition, sharp as starlight in my veins: I knew who that girl was, the girl Jack was holding. I had seen her picture on my own wall every day of my life.

  “Oh my god,” I said. “That’s Aurora.”

  “Your mother?” Mr. M said. He did not sound surprised.

  “I don’t have a mother,” I said shortly, and he raised one eyebrow but did not say anything. “‘About a Girl.’ His song. ‘You were ever the only one’—it’s about somebody who left him. Do you think it’s about her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never asked him.”

  “He knew her.”

  “It seems that way.”

  In a flash I understood at once the significance—the picture, the song, Aurora, this man. The way she was looking at him in the photograph: complex, radiant, so electric it came off the paper and charged the air around it. “Look at them in this picture. She’s totally in love with him. It’s all over her face. He could be my father. And then she left—” My mind was a whirlpool. “And then she left. She left me, she left him—that song. He wrote that song for her—do you think he even knows I exist? He can’t possibly know I exist.”

  There was a long silence. “I can find him,” Mr. M said. “If you like.”

  “You know where he is?” I asked, astounded.

  He shrugged his one-shouldered shrug. “There is no one on this earth who can hide from me if I wish to seek him out,” he said.

  “But I don’t—I mean, what would I even say to him? If he is my father, he must have no idea.” If he was my father and he knew—but I refused to think about that. I could not—chose not to—imagine the misfortune of being cursed with two biological parents totally indifferent to my upbringing and well-being. I had once seen an episode of that silly old TV show The X-Files—about which Raoul and Aunt Beast were fanatical—where the agents found themselves in a vast, sinister warehouse filled with row upon row of endless file cabinets; I thought that the inside of my own mind must resemble such a storehouse, with all the unruly sorrows I might have otherwise let rampage about within me filed neatly away under M for Mother; A for Abandonment; F for Who the Fuck Knows Who He Is, Or Cares. I did not much like the idea of starting up a new folder. J for Jack, I Think. But it would be nice, all the same, to tidy away that loose end before I started up the rest of my life; like a room put in order, upon which I could shut the door for good.

  “You could ask him about her,” Mr. M said.

  “About Aurora? Why would I want to do that?”

  He looked at me, and I saw that for once I had surprised him. “Aren’t you curious about her?”

  “What is there to know about her? She was an idiot, and she left me. If she cared at all about me she would have come and found me by now, or written, or called, or—I don’t know, anything. If she didn’t love me, I don’t see why I should care about her.” I looked at the picture again. “But if he’s my father, and he doesn’t know—I mean, that’s different, isn’t it? I don’t know anything about him. Henri and Raoul are better dads than anybody could ever ask for. But I guess it would be nice to know my biological father. Know who he is, at least.”

  “What would you say to him?”

  “I don’t know. Find out what he likes. Doesn’
t like. See if we get along. I could write him a letter.” I stared at the picture, thinking. “Or, I mean—if you know where he is, I could just go there. I could find him. He would have to talk to me, if I showed up on his doorstep. My parents would never let me go, though. Not by myself.”

  “You don’t have to ask them,” he said calmly. I looked up from the picture.

  “Of course I would have to ask them,” I said.

  “None of the great quests ever came out of obedience. It’s epic, don’t you think? The lost father. The grand journey.” I couldn’t tell if he was being serious; his expression was inscrutable, his tone neutral. Had he really known Aurora? I did not know what exactly it was that had led to her and Aunt Beast going their separate ways before I was born—Aunt Beast refused to talk about it, no matter how I pestered her over the years, and Raoul pled ignorance, though I suspected he knew more than he let on.

  “It’s old, bad blood, sweet pea, whatever happened between them,” he’d said to me once. “It hurts your aunt more than you can imagine, even now, and it’s nothing to do with you. What matters is that you’re here with us now.” I knew that Aurora had left the Northwest before I was born, gone somewhere—Los Angeles, maybe; Aunt Beast had never been clear. And that whatever it was that had broken them apart, they’d never spoken again—not even when Aurora had reappeared momentarily, a cosmic flash like a supernova flaring and vanishing again, to leave me at Raoul and Aunt Beast’s door. Sometimes I thought about how hard it must have been for Aunt Beast, to lose her best friend forever, have me dumped on her doorstep with nary an if-you-please, and it made me hate Aurora even more. Aunt Beast and Raoul had never so much as hinted that they were anything other than delighted to raise me, but I doubted either of them would have had children if left to their own devices.

  “When is this picture from?” I asked. “Where did you get it?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly remember,” he said, his face still blank, and I thought, There is something you aren’t telling me. But he was as stubborn as I was, in his odd way, and I wouldn’t get it out of him until he was ready.

  “What was he like?” I asked. “Jack, I mean.”

  “He was one of the greatest musicians in the world,” he said. “He was transcendent. People who saw him play never forgot it as long as they lived. Even me, and I have lived for a long time.”

  “This can’t have been that long ago,” I said. “It must have been taken right before I was born, don’t you think?”

  “Time is complicated,” he said. “You of all people should know that. But Jack was something special. It was too much for him, I think. He was not strong enough to bear the price that came with his gifts.”

  “But he’s still alive?”

  “Certainly.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know,” he said. His black eyes bored into me, and for half a second I thought I saw something eerie flicker in their depths—the walls of the room shifting, a flash of black wings, tall glass windows looking out over a heaving sea, a girl sitting in a chair; my age, close-cropped black hair, huge, haunted eyes; I miss you, she whispered—and then I shook myself and the moment passed. The heat was getting to me; next I’d be hallucinating in the middle of the street.

  “Come see me again,” he said. “In a few days. I will find him for you, and you will go.”

  The fuzziness at the corners of my vision—what was wrong with me? My brain was slowing down, thickening—This is a terrible idea, piped up a feeble voice at the back of my skull, but the way he was looking at me, the force of his black stare—

  “I could go,” I said slowly. “If you found him—you’re right. I could go.”

  “You will go,” he said again, and the faint voice in my head subsided without further protest. “You won’t tell anyone, and that way they can’t stop you. I will send you to find him, and to—” He stopped short and looked away from me, staring at his bookshelves without seeming to see them. There was something wrong with the air; I couldn’t breathe—and then he blinked and the strange charge ran out of the room and he was just an ordinary old man in his library again, a little sad and a lot lonely, and I—what had we been talking about? About a trip. We’d been talking about a trip. To find my father. I shook my head furiously, trying to knock some sense back into myself. “Would you like some more lemonade?” he asked.

  I walked home in a daze, stupid with heat. There was something I couldn’t remember, something I had to do—and then I walked in through my apartment door, and Raoul and Henri and Aunt Beast were assembled in the living room and beaming. It’s my birthday, I thought. My birthday party. “You’re late,” Raoul said. “We thought you must have stopped at Shane’s.…” He was looking behind me, for Shane, and when he saw I was alone he trailed off.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “I’m sure he’ll be over,” Henri said. “Why don’t you call him, just in case.”

  There was something wrong with me—I felt high, idiotic; I felt like I was moving forward through a bowl of gelatin. Their expectant faces, their transparent human need. “No,” I said. Their smiles faltered.

  “We could just order a pizza,” Aunt Beast said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “But there’s cake.”

  “I don’t want cake.” The words were coming out with difficulty, as if from someone else’s mouth, and now they were just staring at me, shocked.

  “It’s your birthday,” Raoul said.

  “I don’t care about my fucking birthday,” I said, and I walked past them, into my room, and shut the door and sat on my bed and waited to feel like a normal person again.

  I waited for a long time. The light shifted and dimmed, the shadows on my floor lengthened and blurred into dark; still I sat, staring at nothing, until someone knocked on my door softly and opened it without waiting for my acknowledgment. Aunt Beast came in and sat down next to me.

  “We’re still waiting for you to cut the cake, but we got hungry. We were going to order takeout. You get to pick, for your birthday,”

  “I don’t want cake,” I said again. Aunt Beast said nothing. “I miss him,” I said.

  “I know, sweetheart. I wish there was something I could do. Are you—okay? I mean, obviously you’re not okay. But are you okay?”

  “I’m not going to go drown myself in the Gowanus, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “You wouldn’t drown. You’d dissolve.”

  “Even more reason not to.”

  “Raoul told me once that everybody needs to be loved through their first broken heart.”

  “My heart’s not broken.” I registered what she’d said. “Wait, when did you get your heart broken?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Will you ever tell me about it? Was Aurora there?”

  She was quiet for a while. “She was there,” she said finally. “I was your age.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was years and years ago. Not worth dragging up all that old history.”

  “Tell me more about what she was like.”

  “She was beautiful,” she said slowly, “and complicated. We used to get in a lot of trouble together.” This I knew about already.

  “In bars,” I said. “You went to rock shows in bars.”

  “That we did,” she said. “My mother was not the most conventional parent, and your grandmother—well, you know. She did a lot of damage. But in retrospect, things must have been hard for her, too.”

  “Did she love—Jason?” I could never manage to say my grandfather’s name without feeling a little silly.

  “Maia? I don’t know, honestly. I was so young when he died. Aurora told me once that Maia had wanted to be a concert pianist, which is hard to imagine, but I don’t know anything about what she was like before she started doing drugs.”

  “But who broke your heart?”

  She went stiff for a second, and I thought I’d pushed my luck too far, but s
he relented. “Musician,” she said. “He just showed up in town and that was it. I met him at one of Aurora’s parties.”

  “She knew him, too?”

  “Yes,” Aunt Beast said, in a tone that suggested that if I knew what was good for me I would alter my line of questioning, but I deliberately misread her tenor.

  “So what happened?”

  “He loved music more than he loved me,” she said. “I was just a kid, I thought love was enough to conquer all, tear down the walls—”

  “I’m just a kid,” I said, “and I know that’s not true.”

  “You’ve always been pragmatic. I don’t know where you get it from. Certainly not Aurora.”

  “Maybe my father,” I said, shooting a look at her, but if she knew anything she was doing a good job of hiding it. “Do you think she loved me?” I had no idea where this question came from, as unexpected as if someone had come up behind me in the street and punched me in the back of the head, and I nearly put my own hand over my mouth to prevent the further escape of anything so needy and untoward.

  “Yes,” Aunt Beast said immediately. “I do.”

  “She left me.”

  “I know, sweetheart. She left me, too, before you were born. I thought I would never forgive her for it. And it took a long time. But she did love me, of that I have no doubt. And I have no doubt that she loved you. You know,” she said, “I dreamed about her. The night we found you. It felt like more than a dream—it felt like she was here. Or that I was there. Where we were, in the kitchen in the house I grew up in. Raoul dreamed about her, too.”

  “That’s a funny coincidence.”

  “It didn’t feel like a coincidence, Tally, that’s what I’m telling you. It felt real.”

  I rolled an inner eye. Aunt Beast was nowhere near as batty as Cass, who, I knew, fancied herself something of a witch, but she had a ludicrous faith in omens and portents, read her horoscope religiously, and still kept a tatty old pack of tarot cards, left over from her youth, on her dresser with an assortment of leaves, rocks, candles, crystals, and small statuary that she referred to as her “altar.”