About a Girl

by Sarah Mccarry

  We were quiet in her truck, quiet as she drove back toward town; her walls had gone back up, and I tangled my fingers in Qantaqa’s fur and tried to think of something witty and clever to say, something to make her look at me again the way she’d looked at me on the beach before she kissed me. The light turned red at the intersection on the edge of town, and she sighed from some deep place and shifted in her seat, and the feeling in the truck changed in some way I could not precisely articulate. “Do you want to come over?” she said. I did not know what she was really asking.

  “I—sure.” She did not say anything else until we were inside her house. “Do you want tea?” she asked, with her back to me, and I said, “No,” and she turned to me again at last, and smiled. “Do you want to come upstairs?”

  “Yes,” I said, and she moved toward me again, putting her hands on either side of my face, and my breath caught in my throat.

  “You are so young,” she said softly, “you’re just a child—look at you, you’re shaking.”

  “I am not,” I said, although I was, and then she kissed me and I kissed her back, fierce and hungry, and she took my hand and tugged me to the ladder, and I followed her.

  “This is not what you came here for,” she said into my ear, the hum of her voice going all through me. “Is it what you want?”

  “Yes,” I said again, although I was not entirely sure what she was asking me, what she was asking of me; I was not sure, either, that I cared.

  Underneath the black shirt she was all over scars, a faded latticework crocheted across her skin; and over that again, more tattoos: the flight of crows, winging from one forearm and across her back to the other, lines written in languages I did not recognize, old star maps, a swarm of bees scattered down her spine. “What happened to you?” I whispered, tracing a knotted line of white tissue where it crossed the sharp edge of her shoulder blade and turned to follow her spine, and she turned her yellow eyes on me and said, “No pasts.” I could have fallen forever into those honey-colored depths: sun on white sand, ocean blue as a swimming pool, white sails snapping in the wind; a man with yellow hair and brown eyes, tanned dark; Jack with his lyre—with his lyre?—and then drawn all across it, a curtain of blood—I yelped and jerked away from her, my mouth flooding with the sour iron taste; I had bitten my tongue. Buzzing in my ears. And then she kissed me again, hard, and I forgot what I had been thinking about because it didn’t matter, none of it mattered, the only thing that mattered was her—her hands on my skin and her mouth at the hollow of my throat. At first I could not help compare the feel of Maddy’s body under my hands to what I had known before her: to Shane, the marvels of his own body offset by the familiarity of his heart, so that no matter what new places we found together we could still only ever be two people who had known each other long before we had even known how to be people. But the unmapped landscape I had crossed with him that night in his room compared not at all to the country in which I now found myself, to this girl who moved beneath me and above me like a serpent, lithe and strong, her muscles like cables snapping beneath her skin, the exquisite softness of her mouth a sweet counterpoint to the hard planes of her body; and then all around us a sound rose out of the dark like a swarm of bees humming, and I looked deep into the bright honey of her eyes and found that I had lost myself altogether, that had she not whispered my name over and over as she kissed me, as she made her way from my throat to my breasts to the flat slope of my belly, had she not murmured it against that place that only Shane had ever kissed before her, I should have forgotten it altogether, and it was only the sound of my own name in my her mouth, her tongue shaping it as she shaped me, that brought me back to myself, and not long after that there was nothing left for her to say at all, and I was nothing more than a body singing, a body reborn and born again, utterly hers in the dark.

  * * *

  In the morning I remembered my name and Maddy was still real. She had fallen asleep, finally, after I had done with her all the things I had ever imagined doing with another person, and a few more things that had only just occurred to me, and then she had shown me again and again just how little I knew and how small my imagination was. I had stayed awake after she finally fell asleep, hardly daring to breathe, certain that if I drifted off she would vanish and none of this night would have happened. The sky outside grew light, her lean body coalescing out of the shadows as the dawn crept in. I touched the tall ship etched in black over her heart, its sails billowing. She opened her eyes and smiled at me, and I discovered in that moment that, inspired by her inventiveness and the stunning depth of her knowledge on the subject, a number of new projects I might essay had just occurred to me, and we were occupied with each other for a while after that. In the morning light I mapped out all her tattoos with my hands: more boats and star maps and bees, and a sextant across her ribs, and a bird I didn’t recognize.

  “Halcyon,” she said, in answer to my unasked question. “A kind of kingfisher. Alcyone lost her lover Ceyx at sea, and threw herself into the ocean after him; the gods changed them both into birds out of pity. The halcyon is a lucky bird, if you see her when you’re sailing.”

  “You like sailing,” I said, though I couldn’t remember how I knew this, or if it was fully true—something about her out on the water, a beach with white sand, hot merciless sun—

  “I used to sail.”

  “Out here?”

  “No. It was a long time ago.”

  “You met Jack. In California?”

  “I’ve never been to California.” A strange flash of déjà vu stuttered through me and was gone again. She yawned and stretched—tangle of dark hair, bright eyes, black tattoos. Overcome, I bit her shoulder, and she laughed and pushed me away. “You like boats?”

  “I’ve only been in Jack’s boat. But I liked it.”

  “Get dressed, then. I’ll show you something. Coffee?”

  I did not want to get dressed, and I did not want coffee, and the only thing I wanted to be shown was the miracle of her, over and over for the rest of my life. I should have been happy to starve to death in her bed, redolent of sex and sweat and even still after all our labors the sweet smell of her skin, so long as she was there with me; but she was aloof again, pulling on her clothes with her back to me, ripple of muscle and ink disappearing under her billowy black shirt. I tried to keep my disappointment off my face, but it didn’t much matter; she wasn’t looking at me, anyway, was already halfway down the ladder to her kitchen. I could hear her filling the kettle, lighting the stove. I sighed heavily into her pillow and got up myself.

  Fog had rolled in late the night before. Outside was a grey world through which mist swirled so thick I could barely see thirty feet in any direction. Even Qantaqa clambered into the truck in a subdued manner. I pulled on one of Maddy’s sweaters and took the steaming mug of coffee she handed me, and she drove us down through town to the spit of beach that reached out from the fort. A low mournful noise echoed across the water—“Foghorn,” she said, when I asked—as she parked up by the bluffs, where several people stood looking down at the beach. I followed her as she joined them.

  The cool dreamy light leached away the closeness of the night before, and I was too shy again to touch her or even stand too close; in her black clothes, in the real world, she was as inscrutable and inapproachable as the day I’d met her. She hadn’t put on a coat, despite the chill; the crows on her arms flickered in the mist that beaded on her skin. A rough caw from the trees behind us and a swoop of black: my own fat crow landed in the grass and hopped toward us, its head cocked. “Hi,” I said. It eyed me thoughtfully, cawed a few more times in a distinctly imperious manner, and flapped back up into the trees again. I bit my thumb and chewed miserably at my knuckles, pretending not to notice Maddy refusing to notice me. I could not imagine how she got her eyeliner so perfect; I hadn’t seen a mirror anywhere in her house.

  On the sandy beach below us, six or seven canoes lay parallel, with a scatter of people surrounding each
one. A line of more canoes stretched out across the water and disappeared into the mist, each of them big enough to hold ten or fifteen people paddling in unison.

  “What are they doing?” I asked.

  “It’s the annual canoe journey. The Northwest Coast tribes started organizing it in the eighties, to revitalize the tradition, and now they paddle all the way into Canada, and down almost to Oregon. That’s the Klallam, down there.” She pointed to where a tent was set up, with people milling around under it. “This is their tribal land. Each tribe along the coast hosts the travelers as they make their journey.”

  “I got two kids in one of those canoes,” said the woman next to us. Her clear grey eyes were startling against her brown skin, and she wore a red sweatshirt with a canoe logo. Her features were drawn with worry but still striking in their harmony, and her heavy dark hair fell sleek and glossy past her shoulders. “It’s so foggy out there, I’m a basket case. My youngest is twelve; she was so excited last night she was talking in her sleep.”

  “Did you paddle?” I asked her.

  “Not today,” she said. “Twenty-four miles yesterday. And tomorrow, even farther, when we paddle to Quinault. That’s where I’m from. The fog was nothing like this yesterday. I heard you can’t even see the front end of the canoe from the back out there. That’s a nice dog you got there.” She bent down to pat Qantaqa, who gazed up at her happily, pleased someone had realized she deserved to be the center of attention.

  As each canoe drew close to shore someone would leap out and run up toward the tent pavilion and, panting for breath, ask permission to land on behalf of their tribe. They’d pass the mike over to a rotating member of the Klallam, who welcomed them in a language I didn’t know—“Klallam,” the woman said—and English, crying, “Come ashore! Come ashore! Come ashore!” The paddlers steered their canoes to an open spot on the beach before jumping out, hoisting the canoe to their shoulders, and carrying it carefully ashore. “That fifth one in is cedar,” the Quinault woman said, pointing at the biggest of the canoes; it was beautifully painted, with red and black figures winging across its bow. “The ocean dugouts weigh sixteen hundred pounds, some of them—Oh, thank the Creator, that’s them out there with the flag,” she said. “I better get down to the beach.” Some white tourists were playing volleyball next to the nearest of the canoes, oblivious; a girl in hot-pink short shorts lobbed the ball at one of the kids climbing out of the canoes and shrieked a falsetto, giggling apology. A few of the paddlers were wearing flat, circular hats and beautiful black coats sewn with vivid patterns of birds and fish outlined in white disks—“Buttons,” Maddy said—but most of them were wearing sweatshirts and athletic shorts. All of them looked happy.

  We stood for a long time as the canoes materialized out of the mist, one by one, and glided toward the shore, the people on the beach calling to each in turn: Welcome, welcome, and then the echo in older, richer languages, unfamiliar in their music and pattern. The heavy fog lent the whole beach the weighty, hazy quality of a dream. Grey beach, black boats, silver water. We watched in silence until the last of the canoes was drawn ashore, the last of the paddlers greeted and folded into the circle of family and friends, and then Maddy turned away and, after a beat, I followed. She was careful to keep her face hidden from me but still I caught the snail-traced glint of tears tracking their way down her cheeks.

  * * *

  When the fog cleared Maddy drove us to the farmer’s market downtown, and we bought raspberries in a pint box and cider, salmon out of a cooler full of ice and a lettuce as big as my head, because the lettuces in Maddy’s garden were done for the year. I picked up a bunch of deep velvety purple-green kale as big as a baby. The vegetables here did not look anything like the vegetables at the farmer’s market in Prospect Park, which seemed shabby cousins in comparison. Maddy laughed at my big eyes.

  “We don’t have vegetables like this where I’m from.” She looked at me as though she was on the verge of asking me something, and I would have given anything to know what it was—since I’d blurted out my whole history to her, that first evening at her house, she’d asked me nothing about myself or what I was doing here or what I planned to do next, as though to do so would be to violate some unbreakable, unspoken rule, commit some trespass against me, or against herself. If she was not curious about me, I thought, it was because she did not wish to evoke any answering curiosity about herself.

  “There are a few perks to living in the middle of nowhere,” she said.

  “Maddy? Why did you move out here? To forget what?”

  But she was walking too fast, and I had to half-run to catch up with her—“Oh look,” she said, “we should get some of this pesto, too.” We bought the pesto, and coffee, and I did not ask her any more questions.

  “That’s my landlady,” Maddy whispered with a jerk of her chin toward a stall full of brown glass bottles and baskets of herbs. The woman behind the table didn’t look much like a witch; she was short and stout, with long, curly dark hair and a sour expression that looked to be more or less permanent. I knew, from living with Aunt Beast and Raoul, that the bottles were tinctures; Aunt Beast had gone through a dreadful phase of making her own herbal salves, which involved a lot of melting things and burning pots and stinking up the kitchen. The witch landlady gave us a basilisk glare, and I collapsed into giggles. Maddy grabbed my hand. “She’ll hex you!” she hissed, laughing, and pulled me away.

  * * *

  I did not much feel like going back to Jack’s, and Maddy did not suggest it. Time had lost all meaning, and I had no idea if I had been at her house for days or for weeks; nor did I care. At Maddy’s house my dreams were even worse than they’d been at Jack’s. Over and over, the dark-haired girl, the bone forest, the dog. And uglier things, now, too: a ship full of men with hard mean eyes; a one-eyed monster the size of a house; a child, eyes wide in terror, screaming wetly even as a crimson fountain poured forth from its cut throat. All my dreams ended in blood: hot red rivers of blood, blood poured over me, blood washing across a white-sand beach; I’d wake up screaming, Maddy’s hands knotted in my hair, her mouth at my ear, hushing me in a language I did not know. When I was too afraid to go to sleep she’d keep me up, telling me stories about old gods while she drank whisky out of the bottle and smoked cigarette after cigarette, or in other ways: her fingers inside me and her mouth on my skin, the salt taste of her body its own ocean mapped in scars, until my nightmares were forgotten and I could not think of anything other than her lavender-scented skin, her raspy voice, her bitten-nailed fingers, cigarette hanging loosely between her knuckles.

  One afternoon she sent me out to the garden to pick kale, and when I walked in the front door of her cabin I smelled the metallic tang of blood. She was in the kitchen, where I’d left her, her arms red to the elbows, a knife in her hand, a rabbit on the counter in front of her cut open from its throat to its tail. Its guts spilled across the counter, the red kernel of its heart pulsing fast as a hummingbird’s wings. It looked up at me and blinked, its nose twitching in panic. “Come in, sweetheart,” Maddy said. “What’s the matter?” I stumbled back out the door and made it ten feet before I threw up in her garden. I sank to my knees, doubled over, but there was nothing left in my stomach, there’d been barely anything there to begin with, and so I retched spittle onto the rich dark earth, my stomach still heaving long after my mouth was dry. There was nowhere for me to go, so I went back inside. She was in the kitchen still, thumping out dough on the cutting board, her hands white with flour. The counter was clean save a dusting of flour where she kneaded.

  “Where is it?” I asked thickly.

  “Where’s what?”

  “The rabbit,” I whispered.

  “What rabbit?” She came toward me and I let her kiss me, her soft mouth tasting of raspberries and salt. She tugged my shirt over my head, and my body came alive under her hands. Everywhere she touched me she left a dusting of flour across my skin. Something stirred inside me, some memory—dar
k night, blood all over, a child in her arms. What child? Maddy didn’t have a child. I was dreaming again, dreaming while I was awake.

  That night we ate lentil soup and fresh-baked bread and went to bed early. She fell asleep before I did, and I watched the bone ladder of her ribs rise and fall as she breathed. She slept like a child, curled in on herself away from me, and if sometimes she seemed a thousand years old, at night, like this, after we had come together and then she had fallen into sleep, she looked even younger than me. “What are you?” I said to her softly, but she did not stir, and even if she had heard me I was not sure I wanted to know the answer. I got out Metamorphoses for the first time since the man in the used bookstore had given it to me and opened it at random.

  Gods of the dark-leaved forest and gods of night,

  Come to my call. When you have entered me,

  As if a miracle had drained their banks and courses,

  I’ve driven rivers back to springs and fountains.