Dirty Wings

by Sarah Mccarry

  She does, and opens her own mouth. “My turn.” They have gone to some world of their own, their eyes on each other, their lips bright with pomegranate. Cass cannot look away from them. The air has gone still, the ocean soundless, the sun dim. Time stops. Cass can feel the deep slow pulse of the earth, the blood moving in her veins, the breath stopped in her lungs. Maia swallows. Cass closes her eyes. A sound, then, like a great bell tolling, somewhere in the deep. Her skin goes cold.

  And then the moment passes and the sky undims itself and the breeze flutters in off the ocean, and the waves murmur against the beach, and Maia and Jason are looking at each other, dreamy-eyed as lovers in a tragedy, just before the knives and poison bring down the curtain. “You want some, Cass?” Maia asks, holding out a blood-colored handful of seeds.

  “What the hell,” Cass says, and opens her mouth wide.

  When she tells the story years from now she will tell it untrue. “That week was the best week of my life,” she’ll say. Sun on the beach, sand, blue water. At night, more stars than she’s ever seen in her short life. Maia: tanned dark and laughing, legs long in her cutoff shorts. Cass will tell it how she wishes it had happened, the three of them kin, Jason a sweet-natured Puck to her and Maia’s Castor and Pollux. As if with her lying mouth she can remake the truth of what she did.

  They go home. It’s time. Nothing seems to have changed. Cass watches closely for traces of demons, signs Jason is spending sleepless nights wandering the paths of Hell. He looks tired, but not in any new sort of way. I imagined that whole weird-ass thing, Cass thinks. Cass’s own dreams are blurry, aimless; sometimes when she wakes her muscles ache unreasonably, as if she’s walked a long way, but if the man in the black coat comes to her again she does not remember when she wakes. Whatever is keeping him from her, she’s grateful. She ran out of Raven’s herbs a long time ago.

  The three of them pile in the car, doing the best they can to brush sand from its seats, from themselves. They are tan and salt-skinned, beachy-haired as mermaids. Cass drives. Jason sleeps in the backseat. The miles flash by in a sunny blur. Maia calls Oscar from a gas station in San Diego while Cass pockets beef jerky, peanut butter crackers, packages of gum. Snacks that will litter the car, unopened, for the rest of the drive home. When Maia gets back in the car her face is still.

  “How’d it go,” Cass says.

  “I got in,” Maia says.

  “Got in?”

  “To that school I auditioned for.”

  “You gonna go?”

  Maia starts to laugh, her shoulders shaking, laughs so hard she has to rest her head on the steering wheel, and then the laughter turns to harsh, choking sobs, and she’s crying, crying her sweet heart out while Jason snores away. Cass touches her shoulder, rubs gentle circles.

  “Hey,” she says. “Hey. Princess. Hey.” But the knotted muscles in Maia’s back don’t loosen, and it’s a long time before raises her head and wipes her nose with the back of one wrist.

  “No,” she says, as if nothing has happened. “I don’t think I will.”

  Maia and Jason get married in a twenty-four-hour roadside chapel in LA, with Cass their only witness and a hungover Elvis impersonator officiating. They’d splurged on a hotel room to celebrate; that afternoon, Maia and Cass had left Jason there, gone to find Maia a dress. They’d found a Salvation Army on Ventura Boulevard and flipped through racks of ridiculous, puffy dresses—“I’m not going to the prom,” Maia said, laughing. Finally she found a white silk slip, edged in lace. She tried it on for Cass, came out of the dressing room twirling and barefoot. The slip was luminous against her clear skin, burnished deep brown by weeks of sun. Her eyes were bright, long legs bare, long beautiful hands poised like a dancer’s. She was so beautiful Cass turned her face away, feeling her own heart splinter in her chest. “How do I look?” Maia asked, grinning. Fury pulsed through Cass’s heart, wild and sudden as a flash flood.

  “Don’t do this,” Cass said. Maia’s smile flickered and died.

  “I want to be happy,” she said softly.

  “You think marrying the first dirty rocker to bowl you over is going to do that?”

  “Cass. Don’t.”

  Cass shook her head. “It’s your goddamn funeral, princess.” The hurt on Maia’s face was worse than anything Cass had ever seen. Cass left Maia there, in the white slip, her brown eyes filling with tears, walked straight out of the Salvation Army into the blinding afternoon sun, walked into a liquor store and back out again with a stolen bottle of bourbon thumping gently against her thigh. She drank it all in an alley and threw most of it up again when she was finished, and then she slid down against the stucco wall and buried her head in her arms and cried until there was nothing left in her. When she was done she walked back to the Salvation Army. They were just flipping the Open sign to Closed. Cass pounded on the door until an exasperated-looking woman let her in. “It’s an emergency,” she said. “My friend’s getting married.” The woman studied Cass, scowling, but whatever desperate thing she saw in Cass’s face made her relent.

  “Hurry up,” she said.

  “Thank you.” Cass bought a bouquet of fake roses and a hat covered in silk ribbons. She sat outside on the sidewalk, pulled the ribbons off the hat and the roses off their plastic stems, knotted the ribbon around the roses, piecing them together into a crown. She walked back to the shabby hotel, knocked softly. Maia flung the door open. Jason was asleep on the bed, oblivious to the tiny drama playing out around him.

  “I’m sorry,” Cass said, and gave her the flower crown.

  Maia said nothing, the headdress clutched in one hand, her brown eyes wide and pleading, and Cass took her free hand, curled it into a fist, brought it to her heart. “I’m not much of a flower girl,” she said.

  “You can be my best man,” Maia said, and she finally smiled. She held Cass and Jason’s hands both, on the drive to the chapel.

  The Elvis impersonator looks like Cass feels, and she’s surprised he makes it through the brief ceremony without vomiting or passing out; but then, she’s surprised she does, too. She wears her dirty cutoffs, her spiked dog collar, and a Misfits shirt she’s stolen from Jason. Afterward they order Chinese takeout in their hotel room. They have to call six places before they find one that’s still open and willing to deliver. Cass pulls the covers over her head and falls asleep before she has to listen to Maia and Jason having sex in the next bed.

  In Big Sur they spend the night again in the campground where Maia nearly took a header off the cliff. The stars are thick as paint in the night sky and the ocean roars beneath them. Maia walks to the brink again. Cass follows her and they stand together for a long time, looking out at the heaving wine-dark sea.

  “Can I ask you something?” Cass asks.

  “Sure.”

  “Were you going to jump? That night?”

  Maia is quiet. “No,” she says. “I don’t think so. I thought I—” She pauses, her browns drawn together. “I can’t remember,” she says. “I think I thought there was somewhere to go at the bottom. Someone I wanted to see. It’s hazy.”

  “I’m not going to let you jump,” Cass says.

  “I know.” Maia looks over the edge of the cliff. “It’s not really that far, anyway. I’d just break my legs.”

  “Then I’d carry you home.”

  “Let’s just save ourselves both the extra trouble. Cass?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Yes,” Cass says simply.

  “I never used to,” Maia says.

  “Until?”

  “Nothing,” Maia says. “It’s nothing. Just a dream I had.”

  They haven’t eaten in a while, but Cass pocketed another bottle at the last grocery store before the road wound up into the hills, and they pass it around that night until one by one they drift into sleep. Cass dreams of the bone forest, the black river. The skeleton man is at her side and together they are looking for something, although Cass does not know
what it is they seek. You will know when you find it, he says to her. You have always known you were not like other people. He is walking faster and faster and soon she has to run to keep up with him, and then he is drawing ahead, his black silhouette disappearing into the dark wood. The white trees shimmer sinister against the velvet blackness between them. She is running alone down a dirt path, crying Maia! Maia! Maia!

  Cass starts awake. The sky is edged pale, the stars fading out as the sun rises. The broad silvery mass of the ocean stretches out to the edge of the world. Her head hurts and she’s freezing and her hair is soaked with dew. Next to her, Maia and Jason are curled into the scant comfort of each other; Jason’s fingers are knotted in the tangle of Maia’s hair. Asleep, Maia’s face has none of its new wariness; she looks as young as a child. “I’m sorry,” Cass says aloud, but to whom she is apologizing, for what, she cannot say. She drifts back into an uneasy and dreamless sleep until Maia shakes her awake gently a few hours later, and they get back in the car and keep driving.

  They take turns at the wheel and drive straight through for the next fourteen hours. Cass has always thought the most disorienting part of any journey is not the trip out, but the road home. After everywhere they’ve been, Cass and Maia, it’s unnerving to see the familiar lights of Seattle on the horizon. None of them has talked about what would happen when they actually got here, as though they can stave off the inevitable by refusing to discuss it. Maia’s driving as they cross the city limits, her hands so tight on the wheel her knuckles are white. Cass wants to reach forward from the backseat, put one hand on her shoulder.

  “I guess you can just drop me off at the house,” she says instead. She’d told no one she was leaving, and she’s told no one she’s coming home, but there’s always a place for her somewhere, there. She can sleep on the floor if some other miscreant’s stolen her bed. She’s not picky. Maia bites her lip.

  “Maybe I can stay there, too,” she says. “Until we figure something out.” Where Jason lives exactly has never been clear, but he certainly doesn’t have a place of his own.

  “Find a phone,” Jason says. Maia pulls off at the next exit, drives them to a gas station. Cass is beginning to feel as though she’s spent her entire life in gas-station parking lots. Jason is on the phone a long time, gesticulating with one arm. Cass can’t make out his expression in the dark. When he gets back in the car he seems triumphant.

  “We can stay with Percy and Byron,” he says. He’s grinning like a banshee.

  “What’s up, baby?” Maia asks. Cass flinches at the “baby.”

  “They want us to make a record,” he says.

  “Who does?”

  “Some big shot producer. Got our demo, says it’s the best thing he’s heard in years.”

  “Are you serious?” Maia’s elated. “That’s amazing!”

  “I guess that means your band didn’t break up with you,” Cass says sourly. Jason turns his radiant face to her.

  “I told you,” he says. “They need me. They know that. We’re going to be rich.”

  “I doubt that,” Cass mutters, but he ignores her. His eyes are distant.

  “I knew it would happen,” he says. “I knew it would happen just like this. I’ve waited for this my whole life.” He touches Maia’s cheek. “It’s happening just the way I wanted it. You’re my good-luck charm. Let’s go home.”

  Cass directs them to her house. Maia gets out of the car to hug her tight. “Thank you,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “For everything. For taking me with you.”

  “You took me with you.”

  “We took each other.” Her skin smells sweet. Cass holds her tighter, buries her face in Maia’s hair.

  “I love you.” But she shapes the words without speaking them, mouthing them into Maia’s tangles like a benediction. I love you. I love you. They will leave her here and drive away together, and she will never see Maia again, and she had thought she knew what it was like to weather hurt but any wound she’s borne before this one was nothing like pain at all. The mess in her chest now is so real she can feel it, a monster knitted together out of barbed wire and broken glass.

  “I want to get a house with you,” Maia says. “When we have a little money. Can we?”

  With Jason? Not fucking likely, Cass thinks. “Yes,” she says aloud. “That sounds really good.”

  “Patchwork curtains.”

  “Patchwork curtains,” Cass agrees.

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  “Sure.” Maia lets her go. Cass does not watch them drive away.

  The house is candlelit and noisy. Cass had been hoping to slink unnoticed to some corner, curl up and lick her wounds in peace, but there’s a seated circle of whooping black-clad trouble in what once was a living room when this was a house for real people.

  “Hot fucking damn!” Felony yells, her eyes wide. “Where the fuck did you go, bitch?”

  “Road trip,” Cass says.

  “Road trip my ass,” Mayhem says, grinning. “You got your knickers in a twist and ran off with that little rich girl.”

  “Something like that.” Cass drops her bag by the door. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “We’re playing spin the bottle!” Felony bellows in glee. Cass sees now that there’s an empty fifth of Potter’s at the center of their circle. “I already got seven minutes in the closet with Chainsaw, but that fucker wouldn’t put out.” She pouts across the circle at Chainsaw, who shoots her a look of unadulterated terror.

  Cass laughs, suddenly gladder to see these people, her people, than she’s ever been in her life. “Aren’t those two separate games?”

  “We make our own rules,” Mayhem says. “Come on. Sit down.” Cass tucks herself in among her own tribe, and they shift to make room for her. Mayhem slings an arm around her shoulders. “Don’t you run off like that without telling us again,” she says, kissing Cass’s cheek.

  “Yes, Mom,” Cass says, trying to hide her smile. “Somebody give me a drink.”

  Byron, Jason’s drummer, and Percy, the bassist, live in one half of a shabby duplex in the Central District. The patchy front lawn is scattered with cigarette butts and empty beer cans. Their battered van is parked in the street. Byron lets them in, giving Jason a dirty look and ignoring Maia altogether. Inside, grubby carpet covers the floor. Curtainless windows stare out into the backyard, where a watery streetlight illuminates a tragic-looking tree leaning toward a chain-link fence as though it is trying to escape. A burn-scarred coffee table sports a collection of overflowing ashtrays, and the room stinks of old smoke and stale beer. Maia’s heart sinks, and for the first time it occurs to her to wonder what she’s gotten herself into. “Maybe I should stay with Cass,” she says, though she has no idea if it would be any better there. Poor little rich girl, all alone in the world, she thinks, imagining Cass rolling her eyes. She misses Oscar with a sudden, awful pang.

  “You’re welcome wherever I’m welcome,” Jason says.

  “You don’t seem very welcome.”

  “They’re just being assholes.” She follows Jason into the kitchen, where Percy is staring at an unboiling pot of water, a package of ramen clutched in his left hand. Jason opens the fridge, takes out a couple of beers without asking, tosses one to Maia.

  “Shit, man,” Percy says, though whether this is approbation or a general commentary on the state of the universe, Maia can’t tell. “You got back just in time. They want us to start recording on Friday.”

  “What day is it now?” Jason asks, taking a long swallow of his beer.

  “Tuesday. Wednesday?”

  “Wednesday,” Byron says, coming into the kitchen. “Hey,” he says to Maia, as though seeing her for the first time.

  “Hi,” she says shyly.

  “We got married,” Jason tells them.

  “What?” Percy drops his ramen. Maia curls her toes inside her boots.

  “Sorry we missed it,” Byron says sourly. Maia shrinks back
against the refrigerator. He looks her over and something in his expression softens. “Hey,” he says again, “come on. You must be tired after all that driving, huh?”

  She nods.

  “We don’t have anything fancy, but the couch pulls out. You want to crash out?”

  “Are you tired?” she asks Jason.

  “We have a lot to talk about. You go ahead and sleep,” he says dismissively. Maia pulls her shoulders up to her ears and looks at the floor. Jason kisses the top of her head and then turns to Percy. “We need to practice, like, all day tomorrow, then,” he says, and Percy nods, and they begin an intense, earnest discussion of which songs should go on their soon-to-be album, as if Jason has not spent the last two weeks with her, swimming in the wide salt ocean and promising her the rest of his life.

  “Come on,” Byron says, touching her shoulder. “We’ll be up all night talking about music. You’ll be bored out of your mind.” She follows him back into the other room, lost as a duckling.

  “I know a lot about music,” she whispers, but he doesn’t hear her, and she doesn’t bother to repeat it. He helps her pull out the couch into a bed. “No sheets,” he says apologetically, “but let me find you a blanket.” He disappears and returns with a grimy sleeping bag, which Maia takes gingerly.

  “He’s like that with everyone,” Byron says.

  “What?”

  “Jason. We put up with it, you know, for the band. But he can be a real asshole. Don’t let it get to you.”

  “I guess it’s working out for you,” she says. “The record deal.”

  He shakes his head. “He always said we would do it, you know? Me and Percy, we only half believed him.”

  “Are you getting paid a lot?”

  “Nah. It’ll probably turn out to be nothing. They’re flying us down and paying for studio time. They’ll get some songs on the air. That’s a big deal, I guess. But you can’t let that stuff go to your head. People get fucked over by record companies all the time. Or they put out an album and no one ever listens to it. Or they record an album and the record company never puts it out at all. “It’s what you get for bowing down to the man,” he says sadly. “I’ve seen it, like, a million times. No good comes of capitulation to the mechanisms of capital.”