About a Girl

by Sarah Mccarry

  “The goddess of the wild places became angry with a lord who lived in that country because he had forgotten her in his sacrifices, and so she sent a great boar to destroy him. The boar was so monstrous no warrior could defeat it, and it killed many people and laid waste to the land. In desperation, the lord called together a great hunt, and the girl went among the hunters, and they laughed at her. Others were angry, for they thought it beneath them to go hunting with a woman. But she ignored them, and when the boar came and rushed upon them, it was she and she alone who stood her ground, and struck it dead with a single arrow.

  “Because she was so strong, and also beautiful, she had a great many suitors, but she had no use for any of them. To get rid of them, she said she would marry any man who could beat her in a footrace; she and everyone else knew there was no such man on earth.

  “But the goddess of love dislikes being thwarted by savage young ladies, and so she gave three enchanted golden apples to an aspiring suitor. No mortal could look upon them and not wish to possess them. He challenged the girl to a race. As they started she left him behind easily, but he tossed the first of the golden apples before her. Entranced, she stooped to pick it up, and he passed her. She soon caught up with him, and so he threw the second apple. Again, she stopped to pick it up, and then caught up with him easily. Finally, at the finish line, he threw the last apple, and it rolled a long way off the course. Unable to resist it, she ran after it, and he crossed the finish line first, and she had to keep her promise and marry him, though she did not wish to.”

  “Whose story is that?” I said, although I knew.

  “Yours, lovely,” she said.

  “I still don’t understand why she had to marry him,” I said. I was calm again, myself. “He cheated.”

  “The gods hold mortals to their promises,” she said, “but they themselves are cheats. It’s the word and not the gesture that binds. Who named you?”

  “My aunt.”

  “She named you after a girl who refused to fall in love,” Maddy said, stroking my hair. “Why do you think she did that?”

  “She tries not to. Maybe she didn’t want me to, either.”

  “Some people say Atalanta sailed on the Argo with Jason,” she said, yawning. “Before Melanion tricked her into marrying him. But nobody puts girls into those sorts of stories, even if they belong there. Only witches get to travel with heroes.”

  “Maybe if Atalanta’d been a witch, she wouldn’t have ever had to marry,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Maddy said. She propped herself up on one elbow and looked at me. “But even witches are made to sacrifice.”

  That night I dreamed about a familiar place I’d never been. A flat expanse of stone, the sun hot on my shoulders. A sea as glossy blue as a jay’s wing, the smell of salt and scorched earth. A circle of crows surrounding me, motionless in the merciless light.

  “If you listen well enough all the stories of the world are written in your body,” Maddy said behind me, and I turned around to face her: bare feet, her arms red from fingertips to elbows, the front of her white sleeveless dress soaked in blood. Her hair was a loose cloud around her brown shoulders. “I told you to listen,” she said, “I told you, I told you,” and her voice rose to a high wordless wail, and I took a step back from her and then another, but she kept coming toward me.

  “Let me go,” I said, “please, let me go,” and she laughed and shook her head.

  “As you wish, little bird,” she said, and I took another step backward and there was nothing beneath my foot but air, and I tipped backward into a hot blue emptiness, falling toward the breakers that crashed on jagged rocks a hundred feet below me. I jerked awake. She was fast asleep, one hand tucked beneath her chin and the other thrown outward as though she was reaching for something I could not see. I watched the rise and fall of her ribs for long minutes. Outside her house a coyote howled, and another answered it, and then the voices of the whole pack rose in an eerie chorus, yipping wails that looped back on themselves, rising and falling and then subsiding at last into silence again.

  “What are you?” I whispered. “What have you done to me? What are you doing?” But she did not stir. In the morning she was just a girl again, kissing me awake, and the dream faded like a ghost in the ordinary light.

  * * *

  “Jack will think I’ve stolen you,” she said one afternoon.

  “I guess I should make sure he knows I’m still alive.” I thought guiltily of my family: They probably thought by now I was dead, too. I could call them again from Jack’s. Maddy dropped me off, kissing me in his driveway for so long I wanted to tell her to turn around and take us back to her cabin, take all my clothes off and make me forget who I was over and over again. With effort I broke away. “Do you want to come in?” A troubled look crossed her face, and she shook her hair out as though she’d seen a bug in the car.

  “No,” she said.

  “You can ask him—” I thought carefully, struggling to remember the words even as I thought of them. “You can ask him about sailing,” I said. “Didn’t you go sailing with him?”

  “No pasts,” she said. “Come back to me.” I nodded. I stood watching her drive away, willing her to look back, but she didn’t. My own thoughts were not comfortable company. I went inside Jack’s house; to my surprise, he was seated at the table, hunched over some old instrument I didn’t recognize, fiddling with its strings.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “You look terrible,” he said. “Where have you been? Are you eating?”

  “I eat,” I said, ignoring his first question.

  “What would your mother think of me?”

  “I don’t have a mother.”

  Jack sighed. “Let’s go sailing.”

  He drove me to the marina in silence. In silence we parked the truck and walked to his boat, in silence we climbed aboard, and in silence I sat in the bow while he pulled in the line and raised the sail and guided us out past the breakwater. Out on the open water the temperature dropped. I wrapped my arms around myself and hunkered down in the bow.

  “You’re charming this afternoon. Are you going to tell me where you’ve been? Should I send you home in disgrace? I haven’t had much to do with teenagers since…” He trailed off. “In a long time,” he said. “You’ll have to help me with the details.”

  “I’ve been here for ages, and you haven’t told me anything,” I said. “Not a single thing. Not about who you are or about Aurora or about where I come from or how you knew her.”

  The sail snapped in the wind and he did not answer me for a while, frowning in concentration as he fussed with the lines.

  “I told you I barely knew Aurora,” he said finally.

  “You’re lying.” I was too tired to care anymore.

  He shook his head. “I’m not, Tally. It was years ago. A lifetime ago. She was young when I met her. About as old as you are now. She was beautiful, which I think for her was more of a curse than a gift. You look like her.”

  “I’m not beautiful.”

  “If you say so,” Jack said. “But she was, and there is no mistaking you are her daughter. She was…” He paused, trying to think of the right word. “She was heartbroken,” he said finally. “I think when her father died he took some part of her with him. By the time I met her she was already lost.”

  “And then what? What happened to her? How is it that no one knows where she is?”

  “She and I lived in Los Angeles for a while at the same time,” he said. “But I had lost touch with her by the time you were born. She had fallen into—” He stopped.

  “Fallen into what?”

  “Fallen in with some bad people,” he said. “There was a record producer she was … Once he got hold of her, she never had a chance.” Another pause. I waited. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you any more. I don’t know what happened after that. I played music in LA for a while, and then I didn’t want to be a part of that scene so I came here, over a decade ago, and I’ve been here
ever since, and I can’t say I’ve noticed much that’s happened in the world since then. Aurora never tried to find me after we lost touch. I don’t know—I don’t know if she could have, from where she was when I knew her.”

  Did you love her? I thought. Did you love her long enough to make me? Long enough to write that song for her? Do you know if I am your child? Do you even care? He was looking out at the water, not at me, his face inscrutable. I didn’t know how to ask him, or what to ask him, or what he would say if I did somehow find the right question, and so I did not ask him anything at all, and he pointed out some otters winnowing quick as laughter through the waves, their heads popping up in unison to watch us as we sailed past, and the moment was gone. “I’m working up to sailing around the world,” he said after a while. “Next year, probably.”

  “Why on earth would you want to do a thing like that?”

  “To see if it can be done,” he said.

  “Obviously it can be done.”

  “To see if it can be done by me.” He looked out at the mountains, where they were going purple against the cooling dusk sky. “People who sail like that,” he said, “a voyage like that, alone through all that darkness and terror, are either sailing toward something, or running away.”

  “Which one is it for you?”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference,” he said. “Why did you come here, Tally? To find, or to run? We’re not so unalike as you might think.”

  “You’ve had a lot longer than me to run away from things,” I said coolly.

  “Why are you so angry? What good is it doing you?”

  I opened my mouth to answer him and found to my surprise that he was right: I was angry, and I had no idea why. I had been angry at Aurora all my life, I was angry at Aunt Beast for lying to me and Raoul for letting her, at Shane for letting me go so easily, at Maddy for making me fall in love with her, at Jack for being what he was, elusive, evasive, inscrutable. I was angry at myself for coming all this way for nothing. And more than anything I was angry at whoever my real father was, moving around in the world, oblivious or uncaring—and which, in the end, was worse?—or maybe this infuriating chimera of a man in front of me, basically a stranger, who might know more about me and where I came from than anyone else in my life. But here, now, in Jack’s boat, the salt wind in my face and gulls eyeballing me from where they bobbed in the water, hoping for snacks, and loons diving quick and sure away from the bow as we sailed, all my anger seemed overlarge and unnecessary and exhausting.

  “I’ve been angry for a long time,” I said finally. I had not expected myself to be so honest with him, but here I was. “But I don’t think running away is the answer. I don’t think I’m running away.”

  “I never knew my father,” Jack said, and I thought he understood at last what it was I was looking for, but he only meant he’d lost a parent before he’d had one, too. “I thought for a long time that it didn’t mean anything. I knew who I was and what I wanted. A father seemed like an unnecessary burden. Someone else’s expectations for you, someone else’s dreams. A mother was hard enough. But the older I got, the more I wanted to know where I had come from. What it was that had made me. If I was a musician because of myself or because of him. If I was always leaving because he was a leaver, too. Things like that. And when I got older still I realized that loss had shaped me in ways I was still coming to understand. It’s not the end of the world, you know, living without a parent. It’s not like you’re half a person while everyone else is a whole one. But there’s always a mystery that other people don’t have to reckon with. Was he a good man? An awful one? Would we have loved each other? What did he have to pass down to me, that I had lost?” He fell silent, and I held my breath. He’d said more to me in the last five minutes than he had in the last month. He shook his head. “I’m sorry you came all the way out here to find out more about her, Tally. I wish I had more to tell you. She was one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met, and one of the most complicated. She was generous and funny and mean. She didn’t care about what she was—you know, rich, pretty, famous. She never said anything to me about it, but I think she would rather have been anyone else instead.”

  “I don’t understand how she could have left me,” I said. “If her dad dying messed her up so much, how could she do that to me? How could she not know better?” He changed the angle of the sail, and we moved back toward the harbor.

  “We don’t always see the mistakes we make as repetitions until long after we’ve made them,” he said. “It’s getting late. Let’s go in. I’ll buy you a hamburger at Kate’s.”

  When we walked into the bar together, people turned around to look at us and then sat, staring. He ordered bitters and soda for himself and two hamburgers and raised his eyebrow when Kate passed me a beer but said nothing. Kate’s was crowded; some kind of open mic night. An old lady in a purple skirt was singing a warbly but enthusiastic cover of a Bob Dylan song; after her, a pimple-faced black-clad teen played a few morose acoustic compositions; after him, some bearded guys in suspenders played bluegrass. Jack chewed his hamburger and watched, impassive. “Nobody in this town would last five minutes in New York,” I said when they were done and carrying their instruments off the stage.

  “Ssshh,” he said. Three hippie girls were adjusting the microphones—pretty, white, more or less indistinguishable from one another. Long, shiny brown hair and long gauzy skirts in three slightly variant earth colors, embroidered tank tops that made it clear none of them had much use for undergarments. The attention of the bar had shifted to the hippies, evidently the reason so many people were here.

  “Thanks for coming,” the middle one said in a breathy, sultry voice that made me giggle. She licked her pink lips in an affectedly sexy manner that had a profound impact on a number of gentlemen sitting near me, who were sitting open-mouthed and rapt. “We’re the Sirens.” The other two stepped up next to her and the three girls linked hands—Cute, I thought—and looked as one at some point over the heads of the audience, and then they began to sing.

  Whatever language they were singing in, I didn’t know it, but it didn’t matter. Their voices wove in and out of one another, moving like water, like the wind in the sails of Jack’s boat, sweet and sad and longing, carrying us all out of that dim room and into a place I had no words for. As they sang they grew more and more lovely, until I had to shut my eyes lest I leap up and throw myself at their feet; next to me, Jack shifted, and I knew he felt it, too. Sing my name, I thought, sing my name and I will follow you anywhere, follow you into the wheeling spheres of the stars, and each note wrapped itself around my heart in tighter and tighter coils until I thought I would weep from the exquisite pain of it. How long the music lasted, I could not have said—a moment, an hour, a thousand years—and when the last perfect harmony faded into the still room you could have heard a hummingbird’s heart beating. Around me more than one person was crying. The girls’ unearthly beauty slid away until they were just three chipper hippies standing on a stage again, looking at each other as though they were all in on some private joke, and then they took a bow and left the stage. No one even clapped; we stared, mouths open, speechless and stunned as rabbits.

  They were the last act, and it took a long time for the room to go back to ordinary, for chatter to start back up again, people shaking themselves as if out of a dream and getting up to order more drinks. Jack’s eyes were closed, and he held his drink on the table as tightly as if it were a lifeline. “Are you okay?” I asked, and my voice sounded strange in my ears, harsh and ugly after the lilting glory of their song.

  “Yes,” he said, opening his eyes but not looking at me. “I’m fine.” I didn’t quite believe him, but I didn’t know him well enough to say anything else. “Let’s go,” he said, standing up and stalking toward the door with his long strides without looking to see if I was following.

  “Okay,” I said to his back, scrambling after him and waving goodbye to Kate at the bar, who was bu
sy with customers and didn’t see. Outside, a boy in a baseball cap and a white apron was smoking on the curb; I recognized him as the busboy from Kate’s. He was wearing a faded old T-shirt with my grandfather’s band emblazoned across the front.

  “I like your shirt,” I said, and he looked up, a slow shy smile spreading across his face.

  “You know this band?”

  I almost laughed. “Sure,” I said.

  “My favorite album is the first one,” he said eagerly, “the EP, you know, not the full length. We drive down the coast all night / count the stars in your eyes / baby’s gonna be all right,” he sang, making drumming motions with his arms.

  “That’s a good one,” I said. Jack was watching us, his eyes sad. About what, I wondered. Me? Music? This poor lonely kid? “My friend’s waiting, I should go.”

  “You have a good night,” he said, and I smiled.

  “You, too,” I said. “See you around.” Jack was silent for the entire drive back to his house, silent once we got in the door, and silent as he walked away from me, down the hall, and shut himself in one of his secret rooms without a backward glance. If I wanted to get anything real out of him, it was going to take a while. Maybe more time than I had.

  The next morning, I called my apartment from Jack’s phone and Raoul answered on the second ring. “You’re a week overdue,” he said.

  A week? I thought. How had I only been at Maddy’s for a week? How did I not even know what day it was? I rubbed my eyes with the heel of one hand. “How did you know it was me?”

  “The telephone had a guilty ring.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I hope your negligence of your loving family is due to an overabundance of joyful exertion on your part.”