Brushing my teeth before bed in Jack’s bathroom, I knew that what I had told him was true: My time here, unsuccessful as it was, was at its end. I did not want to think about Maddy. I dug my unused binoculars out of my bag and slipped quietly out Jack’s front door with a blanket; the trees were too thick behind me to see anything at the horizon, and the moon washed out most of the sky—Why hadn’t I been out here every night? What had come over me, in the last month?—but there was Arcturus, blazing overhead, and Spica in Virgo, and good old Polaris marking out the north, as it would for another few thousand years. That is not what we call it, where I am from. Because it had been a different star. A few degrees to its northwest, half-hidden by the horizon, Castor and Pollux in Gemini; I could not look at them without thinking, once again, of Shane. I heard footsteps on the grass behind me, and then Jack folded himself up next to me on the blanket, and I handed him the binoculars. He lifted them to his eyes and fiddled with the focus. “Oh. Wow.”
“You’ve never tried it?”
“I use a sextant on the boat, but binoculars never occurred to me. Navigation is a different science.”
“You must know all the constellations, all the same.”
“I know most of them.”
“It’s too bad we don’t have a telescope. But look, there’s Lyra, you can find Vega, and just a tiny bit below it you can almost see the Ring Nebula—maybe not with the binoculars—”
“No,” he said, “I see it. It’s just barely there.”
“With a telescope it’s something else.”
“Lyra,” he said, handing the binoculars back to me. “The Lyre.”
“Orpheus’s lyre,” I said. “If you believe that kind of thing.”
“If you do. The stars fell from the harp in spring,” he said. “When I was—younger.”
“The Lyrid meteor shower,” I said. “It’s not that strong anymore, but there are observations on record that go back almost three thousand years.” I paused. “There’s a Chinese record that says the stars ‘fell like rain,’ but that was back around 700 BC.”
“Like rain.” He seemed far away. “That sounds about right.”
“I would have liked it,” I said. “If you had been my dad.”
“I would have liked that, too.” We were both quiet, looking at the stars together, and then we went in to bed.
* * *
The dream that came to me that night was the worst of them all. It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood: Blood all over and the girl again, her dark eyes pleading, and out of the boundless dark a wailing pack of three-headed dogs that set upon her and tore her to pieces as I watched, rooted to the ground in horror. Tally, she gasped as she died in front of me, Tally, you do not have much time—Tally, come to me—and then a slavering dog with awful teeth tore out her throat, and I tried to scream but no sound came out of my open mouth as a hot red wave crashed over me, and I jerked awake in the dark, gasping and flailing for the bedside light. “I’m coming,” I said aloud, into the quiet room. “I don’t know how, but I’m coming.” I left the light on until the dawn came, and I did not try to sleep again.
* * *
Maddy was in her kitchen, stirring something on the little stove. No blood, no nightmares: just her, and the sight of her, as always, enough to make my heart give a dumb, helpless leap—her hands, her mouth, the softness of her skin. I’d kissed her so many times I could taste her now just thinking about her. She looked up as I came in, Qantaqa at her feet, tail wagging.
“I want to go,” I said. “I want you to take me to see her.” She put down her spoon and stepped toward me, cupped my chin in her hand and tilted it upward, kissed the pulse of my throat.
“I know,” she said.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” Maddy said simply.
“Did you know this whole time?”
“Your journey is not my journey, Tally.”
“Tonight,” I said. “And then I have to—go.”
“Tonight,” she agreed, leaving a line of kisses along my collarbone that made my knees shake. “But that leaves us all afternoon,” she murmured, and pulled my shirt over my head and then leaned in to kiss me again. “Come upstairs,” she said, and turned off the stove.
At sunset she drove me down to the beach. We left Qantaqa at Maddy’s; she whined as she watched us leave, wagging her tail anxiously. “The world of the dead is no place for a dog,” Maddy told her. And I thought, This is crazy, but I didn’t say anything out loud. It was still warm enough for shirtsleeves, and I rolled my window down, stuck my head out like Qantaqa, whooped at the twilight wind.
I’d expected—I don’t know what I’d expected. Blood sacrifice or a kettle full of newts and bats. But when we got down to the water’s edge she sent me to find driftwood for a fire, got a blanket out of her truck and two bottles of wine and her cigarettes and some bread, for all the world as though we were at an evening picnic. She let me set up the fire and then she lit it with an ordinary match. “We have to wait until the moon rises,” she said, and opened the wine. “What’s the second bottle for?” I asked, envisioning some ritual bath.
“For me,” she said. “While you’re gone.”
“Oh,” I said. “How long will I be—gone?”
“For as long as you go.”
“Oh,” I said again.
The water went silver, and then a deep violet-blue, and then the summer-swollen yellow moon rose high enough for its light to make a white path on the water. She took off her shoes and nodded when I did, too.
“There are many ways into the world of the dead,” Maddy said. “The moon road is only one of them. It will hold for you as long as you can see it on the water.”
“If it doesn’t?”
“You are a little like me,” she said, “but even for those of us who are not wholly human, the way out of that place is hard.”
“I don’t want to stay,” I said. “I just want to see her.”
She took my hand and walked me to the edge of the water, where the reflection of the moon lapped at the pebbly shore. “Don’t I have to do something?” I asked. She smiled.
“No,” she said. “You’re with me.” She stepped out onto the water and I watched, incredulous, as her foot landed on the silver surface, and stayed there. “The longer you take, the less time you’ll have,” she said, and I took the first step after her. The water was cool and solid under my bare feet, and her hand was warm in mine—This can’t be real, I thought, this can’t be—but she took another step, and so did I, and the white road beneath me held firm. “I can only set you on the path. You must walk it on your own.” She let go of my hand. “I’ll wait for you here,” she said. “Travel well.”
“Thanks,” I said, although it didn’t seem the right thing to say to a girl who had just made an ocean solid so that I could walk across it to drop in on a dead woman. The whole night had a surreal, liquid quality; I wondered if I was dreaming, if I’d wake up in her bed, feeling silly. I began to walk.
White moon, black water, time passing. “The formula for omega is two times the deceleration parameter plus two divided by three times the cosmological constant times the velocity of light squared over the Hubble constant squared,” I said, and my voice sounded small in the dark, and so I cleared my throat and tried again. The world at the edges of the path grew darker and darker, and after a while I saw things moving, shadows even deeper than the darkness around them, and I could hear something like the sound of branches clacking in the wind, though there was no breeze on my face. A dog howled in the distance, low and mournful. The darkness shifted, and I looked up.
I was still on the moon road, but the black water around me was not the water I’d started across, and the sky overhead was scrubbed empty of stars. The white strip of light on which I stood led to a larger white blur in the distance ahead of me. I walked for a long time, and the white blur grew larger and larger until I could see at last that it was an endless bone-white plai
n, out of which rose a towering black palace covered in doors that lay open to the night. One step after another, the palace looming ever larger and more awful, and then I took the final step, off the moon road onto the hard white earth. The ground was so cold I winced. The soles of my feet were raw from walking, and I left red-stained footprints behind me on the pale ground. I had seen light like this before—I remembered, during the eclipse in Cornwall, the way the shadows’ edges had grown sharp enough to cut like knives—and then I thought of Raoul and Henri, and Aunt Beast, and the icy grip around my heart lessened. You are Tally, Maddy said, and for a flash I saw her, too: leaning against a log, her long legs stretched out toward the fire, a cup in one hand and a cigarette in the other. You did not walk so far to fail now, lovely.
I could not have said how long it took me to reach the black palace. I stood before one of the open doors, waiting, but the world around me did not change. There was nothing else to do but go inside, and so I did. The doorway’s frigid maw made the cold of the plain seem tropical; it seared the back of my throat and wrapped itself around me until it was all I could do to move forward, down a long greenish-lit hallway cut into the black stone—another door, this one closed, at the end of it, and when I laid my hand on its surface to push it open, the cold burned me and I cried out. The door swung open silently and I walked through it, beyond fear, beyond caring, beyond the memory of ever having been warm.
I was in a big, high-ceilinged room, clean angles and sharp lines, floor-to-ceiling windows all around me that looked out on the white plain, the black sea where the white stripe of moonlight still glittered. It was important, but I could no longer remember why. The girl from my dreams was sitting in a black chair at the far end of the otherwise empty room, and next to her stood a tall man with ice-colored eyes and a face that was so cruel I held my breath when I looked at him. She raised her head when I came through the door, and I crossed the room and stood before her.
I had been told all my life that Aurora was beautiful, but beautiful was not the word for the woman in front of me. Beautiful was a word for human beings. She was something else entirely; next to her, even Maddy would have seemed some shabby copy of the real thing. She was terribly thin, but the planes of her face were smoothly cut, and her skin glowed with a radiant inner light. Her dark eyes were very large. She was still and straight backed in the black chair, which was, I saw up close, cut from some glossy stone. Obsidian, I thought, the word for that is obsidian. Heart, lungs, my own human hands. In this place I had nearly forgotten already what I was.
“I have been waiting for you for so long, my Tally,” she said, and I dropped to my knees before her and put my head in her lap, and she wound her cool fingers through my hair, and I felt a great shuddering sob rise up through me and burst in my throat as I wept into her bony thighs. She let me cry for a long time, saying nothing, only stroking my hair over and over, until at last the gentle, rhythmic motion soothed the last hiccupping sob out of me and I could raise my head and look at her. Her eyes were fixed on my face and the sorrow in them was awful to see.
“It was brave of you to come here,” she said. “But you cannot stay long.” The ice-eyed man watched us without blinking. “Leave me alone with my daughter,” she said, but he did not move. She turned her head away from us both to look out the window, where the white scorch of the full moon burned in the dead black sky and glittered on the flat black sea. There were so many things to ask her: who my father was and why she had left me, and how she had come to this terrible place, and what could possibly be better about sitting in this ugly chair in hell than spending all her life with me. I did not know where to start, and so I said instead, “I came here to get you,” which I had not realized until I said it out loud, and then it seemed obvious; I had come here, and that was not possible, and so it was surely no more impossible for me to bring her away again.
“I left once,” she said, “and it was all I could manage. I cannot leave again.”
“When?” I said, and then I thought about it. I lived in an apartment in New York with people who had come together to be my family. I looked through telescopes. I was going to study the origins of the universe. She had taken me out of this place and into that one, that world of gardens and summers and too-furry cats, that world of music and light, and heartbreak, and sweat and real death and pancakes and love. “You left to bring me to Aunt Beast.”
“He wanted you, too,” she said, as if the ice-eyed man were not standing next to us, listening; but maybe she had spent so long at his side that she no longer cared. “But I would not let him have you.” He must have been furious, I thought, that she had so defied him, that she had somehow found the strength to escape him long enough to deliver me from his reach. She shifted in her chair, and I saw a glimmer of silver at her foot, a thin cruel line of chain that circled her ankle and trailed off into the darkness behind her, and she smiled again at my face.
“It’s not so bad,” she said. But her lightness could not hide the tapestry of pain woven into her words, and I understood in an instant that all the time I had spent hating her, all the life I had lived refusing to admit her as mine, I had been wrong, and more than wrong: she had given up any chance she had ever had to get away from this place herself in order to give me a life outside it, and she was trapped here now like a ray of light sucked into the maw of a black hole. “It’s not so bad,” she said again, putting one cool hand against my tearstained cheek. “I came here first of my own will. I would have liked to see you in the daylight, just once, but to see you here is enough. Tally, you brave and wondrous thing—you are so much more like her than you are like me, and it’s her strength that will carry you away from me again. You must go on being brave. You must not look back on me here, in darkness.”
“Why did you come here?” I cried. “How could you leave—how could you leave the green grass? And the water? And all those trees? How could you leave the stars—and Aunt Beast—and me? How could you give all that up?”
“Because I was lost in the past before I came here; because I was lost in loss. Not all of us are made for the world above, sweet child—but I would release you from the mistake I made of looking only backward, of living in regret over what is already done. ‘What is to give light must endure burning’—”
“That’s a physicist, who said that,” I whispered.
“That was a poet,” she said. “I could not bear the fire. But you are made of stronger stuff than I. You are so much more than the sum of the mistakes I have made—you are yourself, Tally, your own bright and wild star, the best thing I could have hoped for. I have watched you in dreams; I am so proud of you. And you must go back to the world above and carry your light wherever you go—there is so much that is still possible for you. Do not spend your life in the sun weeping over me.”
Was there no one in the world who had not been unraveled by the past? Jack and Maddy trying to forget it, Kate erasing it, Aurora lost in it, Aunt Beast refusing to speak of it, Raoul heartbroken by it. And I saw, finally, that how I lived with it would come to define me, too, but it did not have to be a trap so much as one of the many stories I would someday learn to tell. Like looking at galaxies at the far edge of the known universe: The light of what has come before can show us where we are now and how we got here, but it is no place to return to, no place to call home. The ice-eyed man shifted, his cold stare laden with menace, and I knew I could not stay any longer if I was going to make it back to the world I wanted to live in. “I love you, Tally,” she said. “I have loved you every day of your life, and I will love you long past the end of it,” and I thought the sobs that came out of me then would tear apart my whole body. I shook in her arms, and she let me cry myself out, and then she said, “You are loved by more, and better, than me. Go back to the world I gave you. Go home.”
“Not better,” I said. “Only different.” I would not let go of her hand. Home, I thought—home. Shane and Raoul and Henri, Aunt Beast, sad old Mr. M. My family, my real fami
ly, the people who had let me come here, who had woven a ladder for me out of love all the way to the stars, the people who would be waiting for me always, on the other side, when I came through this place and back to where I belonged. And Maddy. Maddy was waiting for me, too. All of my life in front of me and all I had done, to come here, lay behind: I remembered, remembered my own name and who I was and that I was alive and whole and the next step in the story was mine to choose.
“I love you, too,” I said. “Thank you. And—goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Tally,” she said, and I let go of her hand at last. She let me stand on my own, without helping me, and when I was sure of myself I turned my back on her and walked, proud and strong and whole, out the black door and across the white plain, back to the cold dark sea and the white scar of the moon road home. My heart quailed when I took the first step. The moon was low in the sky, and I could not see my way out of the dark. I began to run, faster and faster, willing all my laps of the park with Aunt Beast to matter, but the moon was sliding toward the horizon fast and merciless, and the white road began to break up below me. My foot plunged through it into searing death-cold water, and I tripped and fell forward, staggered to my feet again. Run, fucking run, oh god oh god, my heart pounding in terror and exertion. Don’t let me die here, please don’t let me die here alone in the dark—I thought of that awful place, locked in my own frozen chair next to Aurora for the rest of all time, under the cruel uncaring gaze of the ice-eyed man—Don’t fucking let me die—but it was too late, the road dissolving below me, I was sinking into the frozen nightmarish depths of the black sea. “Maddy!” I screamed, “Maddy!” And then my mouth filled up with water and I choked. Hands wrapping around my ankles, pulling me deeper, the empty sky gone mad with howling, whirling demons, laughter rising up around me and impossible things winking in and out of life around me—a bull-headed man roaring, a three-headed dog with teeth as big as my hand, triplet mouths open and howling, a huge swan beating a terrified girl bloody with its wings. I will not die, I thought, and fury welled up to replace my terror, a fury so hot I thought it would burn away the dark water around me. I thought of Maddy, her yellow eyes, her skin, her mouth, her magnificent strength: Maddy, beloved, for all of what she was, for what she’d given me and what she’d taken away. I willed her into life before me, reaching my hands out to touch her, the tattoo on my arm blazing with light—and there she was, in the white dress I’d seen in my dreams, blood soaked, her knife in one hand and the other hand held out to me.
About a Girl Page 20
