About a Girl

by Sarah Mccarry

  “Fight,” she said, her voice a huge bell tolling. “Tally, fight,” and I kicked my legs and swam toward her—naked girls, bloody limbed and screaming, tearing a man who looked like Jack to pieces as he bellowed in pain—and there was Maddy, waiting for me, and I was not going to die. I refused to die. Our fingers touched and at last her hand closed around mine and pulled me up, up, up out of the dark water into the less-dark night.

  She’d dragged me up onto the beach—the fire still burning, all around us quiet, the mad visions behind me. I took a huge gasping breath, and it turned into a cough, and then, heaving, I threw up salt water, coughed, breathed again, coughed. “Come here,” she said in my ear, helping me to my feet. “Let’s get you dried off before you freeze to death.” She sat me down by the fire on a blanket, and I hugged myself while she built it up again and then found me a dry shirt and pants in her bag, helped me out of my wet clothes, night air cold against my colder skin. I couldn’t stop shivering. She held me tight while I shook, and when I began to cry again she did not say anything, but she held me even tighter and kissed my cheeks where the salt of my tears mixed with the salt of the water. When at last the shaking subsided she kissed my mouth, my throat, my shoulder, and I felt hunger coming awake in me where moments before there had been only loss, and I kissed her back, still crying, and let her take off the clothes she’d just helped me into and kiss her way down the plane of my belly and bury her face between my legs, and her hands were everywhere and all of her through and through me, all the light in the universe splintering—in the first moments of the birth of the universe, the hot plasma of its origins ballooning outward in waves of light faster than anything before or since—and when I came again, again, she held me, pulled herself up to kiss me again with her mouth that tasted of the salt tide of my own body, and I was still crying, I thought might cry until the final moments when the universe rent itself into nothing at the end of time. She wrapped me in the blanket and murmured nonsense into my sweaty salt-drenched hair, and I clutched at her even as she rolled away from me, pulled a cigarette out of her pack and lit it, blew smoke at the lowering fire. She had a flask of whisky, too, in the bag she’d brought down to the beach, and she fed it to me in sips, and I did not even mind the burn.

  I did stop crying, eventually. I was so tired I thought I might die of it. I rested my head on Maddy’s shoulder and thought about how to say goodbye. “I saw her,” I said finally.

  “Was it what you wanted?”

  “I don’t know. I wanted—I thought I could bring her home.”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  “I know. But I thought maybe—I thought I could. If I tried hard enough.”

  She was quiet for a while, her breath warm against my ear. “You don’t have to be like me,” she said. “Living as a memory of loss. Alone with all the demons I made and the demons I’ve chosen. Becoming a monster is only one way to survive.”

  “I don’t think you’re a monster,” I said, and I felt her smile.

  “I like being a monster,” she said. “But you are young, and there is still room for you to be a girl instead.”

  “It’s time for me to go home,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Maddy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you love me?”

  She lit another cigarette. Inhale, slow exhale. Inhale. “Anything I love I bring to ruin,” she said.

  “That’s not a no,” I said, greatly daring.

  “It’s not a yes, Tally.” She let me go, and I sat up, and she smoked in silence while I laboriously put on my clothes again. I was so exhausted I could barely move, and it took me a couple of tries to stand up and feebly shake out her blanket. She stood, too, but made no move to help me as I handed it back to her.

  “You went a long way,” she said.

  I thought of Aurora in that cold empty room, looking out eternally on an endless black sea, and squeezed my eyes shut before I started crying again.

  “I came back,” I said.

  “Not many people do.”

  “Maddy? Why did you move here?”

  She opened her yellow eyes wide and looked at me. Overhead, Ursa Major was sinking into the sea, and I knew it was almost dawn.

  “Sweet thing,” she said, “I was waiting for you.” She offered me her hand, and I took it, and we walked back to her truck.

  She drove me to Jack’s and made no move to get out of the truck when we got there, didn’t even turn off the engine. I stared at her dashboard, gathering myself, wanting to ask and not wanting to ask. I thought of the plants hanging in her house, of the mornings she had kissed me awake in her blankets and brought me coffee, of all the times she had made me certain I was the only girl in the world only to turn away again. She was more herself than anyone I had ever met: more sure, more fearless, more capricious, more reckless—and all across it, the girl that she was, the wash of blood: the rabbit the deer the knife, the child with a red gape where its throat should have been—but I was strong now, I’d always been strong; I wanted her to see it. I’d been to hell and back in a single night, and I was still walking around. “Will I see you again?”

  “The ocean is a vast thing,” she said, “but all its drops are connected, one to the other.”

  “That’s not a yes.”

  “It’s not a no.”

  I forced myself to look her in the eye. “I love you,” I said. “Thank you.” Yellow eyes, tangle of dark hair, crooked grin. “Say goodbye to Qantaqa for me.”

  “Qantaqa doesn’t believe in goodbyes.”

  “But you do.”

  “I’ve been around for a long time.” I waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t, and so I got out of her truck and shut the door and stood there, squeezing my hands into fists and then dropping them helplessly again by my side, and I waited for her to turn around and look at me as she drove away, even though I knew better, even though she never did. The sun was coming up, and my old crow flapped out of a tree and came to land next to me.

  “I came back,” I told it. “But now I have to leave again.” It ducked its head—I saw a glint of silver, and then it was flapping away again, cawing hoarsely. I leaned down to pick up what it had left me. A silver heart locket on a chain; inside, a tiny picture of a cat that almost looked like Dorian Gray. “Someone’s going to miss this,” I called after the crow, but if it heard me it was not interested in my commentary. I smiled to myself, put the necklace in my pocket, and went inside.

  Jack was in his kitchen, making coffee. He turned around as I came in and started. “What happened to you?” he asked.

  I considered and discarded various explanations and finally settled on the truth. “I went to see my mom,” I said.

  He studied my face, saw that I was serious, and nodded slowly. “Why don’t you have some coffee,” he said. “You look like you could use it.” I almost told him no, that I was tired of him and all his bad memories and his sorrow, that I still had not decided whether to forgive him for leaving my family—all my family—behind, that what I really wanted was to sleep for a thousand hours and then wake up and get on a plane and never come back here again, but then I thought, Why not. I sank into a chair at his kitchen table and he brought me a mug of coffee and poured one for himself and sat across from me. I took a sip. He made his coffee strong, like Henri.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I frowned into my cup. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I want to go home.”

  “I decided to play a show,” he said unexpectedly. I looked at him with new interest.

  “A big show?”

  “I thought I’d start with the open mic in a couple of days and see how it goes. If you want—if you’re not angry at me—I mean, even if you are angry at me, I don’t blame you, but I’d like you to come.” I thought of Shane, a continent away, and what he would say if I called him up and told him I was going to see Jack Blake play, for the first time in decades, in a bar at the edge of th
e world, with a bluegrass band and an old lady who did terrible Dylan covers, and I laughed out loud.

  “You’re not off the hook,” I said. “But yeah, I’ll go.”

  * * *

  I was so tired that I could not get out of the chair on my own, and Jack had to help me back to my room, and take my shoes off for me over my sleepy protests, and heave my legs up onto the bed as though I were a very small child. I was asleep before he had even covered me with a blanket. I did not sleep for a thousand hours, but I slept for a long time, all through that day and most of the next night, and when I woke up Jack’s house was dark and still and so I went back to sleep again. When I woke up for the second time it was morning. He wasn’t home, but he’d left me a note in the kitchen.

  T: Checking the boat. Meet me down at the harbor later? I’ll take you for a farewell cruise. Bought you a ticket home for tomorrow. —J

  The coffee in the pot was still hot and he’d left me a croissant (From where? Who knew?) on the counter.

  I ate my croissant and drank my coffee and tested out my limbs. There was no part of me that did not ache, but the sleep had done me some good. My mouth still full, I called home. Raoul answered on the second ring. “Tally,” he said, and the relief in his voice nearly undid me.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m coming home. For real this time.”

  He sighed. “Good,” he said. “We miss you.”

  I heard something behind him, and then Henri’s voice: “Is that her? Is that her?” I felt terrible.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I should have—I didn’t think—”

  “You’re okay,” Raoul said, “and that’s what matters, but if you ever do anything like this to us again at least one of us will skin you alive.”

  “I won’t,” Henri said indistinctly from behind him.

  “Is Aunt Beast home?”

  “She’s at the studio. She’s worried sick about you, too—but I’ll tell her—god, it’s been more than a month, Tally, you’re unforgivable—when are you coming home?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? Are you sure?” Henri behind him: “Tomorrow? She’s coming home tomorrow?”

  “Jack bought the ticket.”

  “Did you find…” Raoul paused. “Is he?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said. “Well.”

  There wasn’t much to say, after that. They made more disapproving noises, and I made apologetic ones, and I told them about Shane’s show and how we were all going to go to it, and if they were surprised to hear that I’d talked to him they didn’t say so. When I hung up I was so homesick I could feel it inside me, heavy as a pulsar. Tomorrow, I thought happily, tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow. But I still had today to get through.

  I went into my room and packed my things, which did not take long, and then sat on my bed and watched the light move across the wall of Jack’s room, the way the shadows almost looked like black wings. Maybe I can be just a bit monster, I thought. Just enough. I went out and got Jack’s bicycle and rode down to the harbor.

  He was on his boat, sitting on the deck in the sun with his eyes closed like a cat. I studied him again, seeing what I’d chosen all summer not to see: There was no mark of his face in mine, nothing about him that suggested we were blood. Was I mad at him? Happy we’d come to some kind of peace? Had we, even? And then I decided I wasn’t sure, and it was fine not to be sure, and maybe I would see him again after today and maybe I wouldn’t, but I had come here for something other than what he had to give me, and anything after this was up to him. “Hey,” I said, and he opened his eyes and stood up and reached out to me, helping me onto the boat. I thought, belatedly, that I ought to have made him give me sailing lessons, while I was out here. But I’d been distracted. I did not want to think about Maddy, and so instead I thought about whether there would be otters again.

  Jack did not talk about anything like family, or history, or what had happened to me in hell. Instead he pointed out the mountains on the horizon. “That’s Baker, those are the Sisters—that range is the Cascades. The Olympics are the ones behind us.” He paused. “If you come back next summer, I can take you hiking, if you like,” he said without looking at me; offhand, trying not to make the words matter too much.

  “That sounds nice,” I said, and he relaxed.

  The hippie girls were at Kate’s again, giggling softly together at a table in the corner. Jack—who’d dug his guitar out of his truck, wedged carelessly in its case behind his seat—did not acknowledge them, but they looked up when he came in, and then at each other. The Bob Dylan lady, dressed in an eye-searing purple full-length skirt, a blouse spackled with tiny mirrors, bells, and an enormous appliquéd daisy, and a floppy velvet hat, gazed eagerly at the makeshift stage. I had tried, without success, not to hope that Maddy would be there. She wasn’t.

  The Bob Dylan lady went first—Neil Young covers this time, and rather more of them than I would have preferred—and then some more teenagers, and then the bluegrass band again, who were giving Jack unmistakably nervous glances, and did not do well with any of their songs, although it was hard to tell, with bluegrass, whether or not they were supposed to sound like geese. And then it was the hippie girls’ turn again; they rose from their table as one, and looked at Jack, and to my surprise he took his guitar out of its case and joined them onstage, pulling up a barstool and settling his guitar in his lap. You would not guess, to look at him, that he’d spent the last twenty years or so refusing to play music, that tonight was anything other than one more ordinary night in a series. I heard a dog bark outside, and my traitor heart seized in my chest; there she was, in the doorway, backlit by a streetlamp, her black hair a halo, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I kicked my chair and thought about going over to her and sat on my hands and didn’t.

  Jack played a single chord, as if he were thinking about something, and then another, and the notes settled softly around us, and the hum of conversation in the bar died until we were sitting in total silence. I recognized the song immediately; I’d been carrying it around in my head all summer, thinking it was for someone else—You were ever the only one, he sang, and if his voice was older and even more weary and soaked in sorrow than the voice on the record Mr. M had played for me what felt like a lifetime ago, it was no less beautiful. He played with the same surety and careless grace with which he sailed, each movement economical and precise, and the rich timbre of his voice filled the little bar like a golden cloud until every corner glowed with the light of it. I thought of Aunt Beast, solid and practical and entirely devoid of the quirks and eccentricities said to be endemic to artists (save, of course, for her tofu scrambles and sage smudges), her unremarkable countenance and workmanlike body, and I thought of the man in front of me so wrecked by the loss of her that he made music this heartrending, and I thought, not for the first time that summer, that there was very little I understood about love. It was strange to think of one’s parents as they might once have been, foolhardy young people very much like oneself; stranger still to imagine Aunt Beast such a creature—but this song was about a woman who’d stitched her way into the fabric of Jack’s heart, and that woman had been Aunt Beast, and the way he played it now left little doubt in my mind how he still felt about her. When the song was over I was far from the only person in the bar furtively wiping my eyes. He looked over at the hippie girls and nodded, and they began to sing.

  I had never in my life heard anything like that music and I knew, even as I listened to it, that I would never hear anything like it again. In their singing, in his playing, was all the longing in the world: decades of wandering, of unfulfilled searches and lost and broken hearts, a yearning so immense it swallowed whole the night, the hushed bar patrons weeping into their beers—and I saw them as they once were, on the broad-planked deck of a boat at sea, under a hot yellow sun—saw the halcyon circling, the white sails full of wind, Maddy with a girl’s gentle face, her yellow eyes full o
f hope and Jack playing ballads for the open sky, all around them the open horizon, the whole world new and possible, before everything she had once loved was gone and drowned in blood. He played for her, for me, for all of us, for every regret that hung behind us in a shimmering curtain of loss, and the Sirens’ voices spiraled and dove and soared again through the aching chords, and I thought I could not bear it if they played for another second, any more than I could bear it if they stopped. I had no idea how long they played; it could have been a moment or a year, so enraptured was I by the spell they wove, and I would have done anything that song asked of me—flung myself off a cliff, taught myself to fly, gone running out toward the wide horizon where the blue bowl of the sky met the grey-blue plane of the sea. I was half out of my chair, ready to give myself up if they asked it, the flawless bell jar of their music dropped over me and sealing me in; instead of oxygen, I was breathing sound, my blood turned to song, my heart beating one note after another, and still they played.

  When Jack’s final chord dropped into the still air at last, I opened my eyes and looked around me. The bar was full of crows and coyotes; I blinked, thinking I was seeing things, but they were still there. I turned to look back at Maddy; her cheeks were streaked with tears, gleaming in the low light of the bar, and the naked anguish on her face was enough to break my heart all over again, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at Jack, and he was looking at her. “I remember,” he said to her from the stage, his voice rough and low in the quiet of the bar, and she raised one hand to him—a farewell or a benediction—and then she was gone. I got up to go after her, but beside me one crow stretched its wings, and then another, and then all around me they rose, turning the still-silent air into a blur of black, and moved out the door in a whirl of feathers, and the coyotes went after them, slinking out one by one, and I sat back down and wiped my eyes and let her go.