About a Girl (14 page)

In the morning, Jack was gone again, and the crow in his yard was dead.

*   *   *

Jack was never, ever home. I had no idea where he went during the day; if it had always been his habit to stay away for hours, for days, or if my presence had chased him out to his own devices; or if he was indeed home, shut away behind the firmly closed doors I did not have the courage to knock against. Sometimes, late at night, I’d hear the soft creak of footsteps, the snick of a door closing, and blink awake in the dark, uncertain whether it was him I’d heard or some polite, unobtrusive ghost. If he was not home, I could not ask him about Aurora; but he couldn’t ask me to leave, either, and so this bizarre impasse continued without detente.

In town, everyone said hello and no one was anyone I wanted to talk to. I found a bike shop down by the harbor, where a friendly blond girl with blackberry vines tattooed across her shoulders and a charming gap between her front teeth helped me patch the flat back tire of Jack’s bike. I rode around downtown and went for two-hour walks and waited for the dark to come and give me something to do. I read Newton’s
Principia,
which even for me was slow going, and I often found myself with one finger tucked between the pages to mark my place, staring off into space with no memory of how much time had passed or what I had been thinking about. A hateful restlessness took hold of me, an unsettled, anxious boredom that had never besieged me in New York, where I could go to museums or eat dumplings in Chinatown or fall asleep in Shane’s bed as we listened to music or make Raoul and Henri tell me how to be a grown-up or go to meetings of the Amateur Astronomers’ Association or poke through a dozen different bookstores or sit on my stoop and watch a hundred different kinds of people—shapes, sizes, genders, nationalities, ethnicities, political affiliations, religions, language families, possessed of equally myriad types and quantities of pets—amble past in the space of an afternoon. Out here there was nothing to distract me from the essentially displeasing heart of myself.

I meant to call my family; I really did. I would remember it unexpectedly in the middle of an epic ramble, miles from town, and then forget again as soon as I was back at Jack’s. Or I’d remember in the middle of the night, thrashing awake in a panic—what was I thinking, they’d be killing themselves with worry, had I lost my mind—but it would be three or four in the morning in New York, and if I called at that hour they’d think it was the police telephoning to inform them I was dead. My thoughts grew slippery as fish, and I could not hold anything in my head for more than a few seconds at a time; not the impulse to tell my family I was, if not entirely content, at least quite safe; not my desire to go outside and look at the stars; not even my reason for coming in the first place, the conversation I’d traveled three thousand miles to have. The tiny voice of reason, barely managing to keep itself alive in New York, had faded to a faint mumble almost as soon as I had stepped off the plane. It did not help that I could not seem to make it through a single night without falling into some version of the same awful dream: the howling dog, the white forest, the dark-haired girl with her huge, pleading eyes. Wine-dark sea and cold empty apartment with its tall windows looking out into darkness. Sometimes the girl would be speaking to me in a language I did not understand, or in words I could not quite make out; sometimes I would be running after her—to catch her, to warn her, to tell her we were not safe—but always she would move away from me, faster and faster, until I was left alone in the dark, sobbing into Jack’s pillow and only slowly coming back to myself again, to his quiet house and the low continuous hum of the sea moving endlessly against the beach below.

The only things I did manage to think about for any length of time were Maddy and Shane. Maddy was a mystery that I was hell-bent on unraveling, and Shane—I hated myself for caring and then hated myself for hating myself. Of course I should care. Of course I shouldn’t. Of course he was terrible. Of course I was being stupid. What had happened between us was nothing, how could he possibly have behaved as though what had happened between us was nothing, we were growing apart anyway, we were growing up, we had been too old for each other ages ago, we were only neighbors, he was tearing apart my life with his heartlessness, he was an awful friend, I was an awful friend, I had embarrassed myself, I could never look him in the face again, I didn’t want to anyway. Everything would be better at college. Except that Shane wouldn’t be at college, and I had made a mess of everything. Around and around and around. The circle was made out of a wall, and its circumference was marked out by me at its center, caged with my own stupid self.

There was very little to do at Jack’s, and the weather was so magnificent it seemed almost sinful to be indoors anyway. I was used to the sticky, clinging summers of New York, perspiration and the city’s filth mixing into a grey sheen on my skin, cold showers three times a day just for a brief respite from the misery, drenched in sweat again before I even turned off the water. Summer out here was a revelation. People wagged their heads over the raging heat wave if the mercury topped seventy-five, the sky was a crayon-solid blue, and the beaches were so clean you could eat off them. Every morning I woke up around eight or nine and made myself coffee in Jack’s spotless kitchen and then rode his bicycle into town, where I went and got coffee again at a shop I had found down by the marina, and ate a bagel with butter—the cheapest thing on the menu; I was determined to make my meager savings last. After, I would stop by Melville & Co., and although its gruff and crotchety owner did not offer up any further overtures of friendship after that first day when he’d given me the
Metamorphoses,
one day after I mentioned my investment in the heavens I went in to find that he had gone through the stacks and set aside all the books about astronomy, and I smiled to myself in quiet triumph.

Mostly, though, I wandered around. I ranged far afield, traversing beaches and tramping through woods; I hiked into the hills, where the old labyrinth of sinister World War II bunkers Kate had told me about on my first night in town erupted out of a tangle of creeping ivy. Closer in to the park, they were just eerie, but the farther afield I ranged, the creepier they got: lightless cement mouths yawning into the hillside, rusted iron doors, low cement ceilings, cement walls sprayed with decades of layered graffiti: mostly quasi-Satanic and ineptly spelled ramblings of bored teenagers (
HILE SATAN
), romantic declarations (
MEG C
+
DAMON S 4EVR
), and total nonsense (
PETLET AND CAKELING VERSUS THE UNLIGHTS
).

When I got spooked by the bunkers I walked down to the harbor and looked at all the boats tethered in their moorings, or sat on the beach and basked in the gentle sun. Time had a different quality out here than it did in the city, slowing down or speeding up of its own volition, so that a ramble I’d thought had taken me hours would turn out to have been a short stroll, or a few minutes leafing through paperbacks in Melville & Co. would slide away into an entire afternoon. I lost track of what day it was completely within hours of arriving at Jack’s.

The thought of seeing Maddy again was equal parts terrifying and elating. She had told me, when she dropped me off at Jack’s, that she would see me soon, but she had left me no way to get hold of her, and someone who was willing to live without electricity was not likely to have a telephone anyway. The thought of turning up at her house, alone and unasked, was unthinkable. But after a day or two I gave up pretending to myself that I was not looking for her and took to lurking at Kate’s in the afternoons, sipping the single bitter-tasting beer for which Kate never charged me and gazing morosely at the dark polished wood of the bar, hunkered on my stool in the dim light while outside the sun buttered the sidewalks and a cool lively wind filled the white sails of boats, tiny sharp triangles against the blue water. I had no doubt Kate knew why I was there, but she did not mention it. Maddy did not come.

The crows from Jack’s yard had begun following me around. Not all of them, and not all at once—there was one fat black one in particular, larger and more gregarious than its fellows, who seemed especially to like me, and often in the mornings I would find some small silver thing—a nickel or a quarter, a wadded-up ball of tinfoil, the glinting wrapper from a candy bar—left conspicuously in my path, and one of the crows watching me from a tree. They did not like downtown, but whenever I was out in the woods they were not far behind me, and though at first I found them discomfiting, after a while I got used to their presence, and even grew to like them. I had buried their dead friend while they watched, and said over its grave some paraphrased lines from
Hamlet
(“Goodnight, sweet prince / and flights of, um, crows sing thee to thy rest”), while they watched from the branches above, and when I was done they cawed amongst themselves and then flapped off in a flurry of black wings. These days, they were the closest thing I had to friends.

I carried my copy of the
Metamorphoses
everywhere, stuffed into my pocket like a talisman, but I did not open it once.

*   *   *

I had been at Jack’s for days before I finally found the will—and the mental acuity—to call Raoul and Henri. I’d remembered on the bike ride back from downtown, and remembered too that I had a pen in my back pocket—I was supposed to be making notes in the margin of the
Principia,
which had not proven a successful resolution—and I dismounted from Jack’s bicycle and wrote
CALL HOME
in block letters on the back of one hand. And a good thing, too, since I’d already forgotten again by the time I got back to Jack’s. He was, as always, nowhere to be found; I went on a brief expedition in search of a telephone, and discovered an old-fashioned rotary phone wedged inconspicuously between two stacks of books in the main room of the house. I looked at it for some time, curious as to why I had been so intent on finding it, and then reached for one of Jack’s books and saw the letters on the back of my hand and remembered again.
I am losing my mind,
I thought.

It was with no small amount of dread that I dialed my number—I had gone an unforgivable length of time without calling them, there was no excuse for it—and when Raoul’s familiar “Hello?” answered on the second ring the worry in his voice was like a knife to my gut.

“It’s me,” I said.

“
Tally
. Where in god’s name are you?” There was so much at war in that handful of words—relief, fury, exhaustion, anxiety—that I took a deep breath before I said anything else.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know it’s been—”

“Where
are
you? Do you have any idea how worried we’ve been? I thought you were
dead,
Tally, I can’t even tell you what you’ve put us through, Henri’s beside himself—”

And then, in the background, I heard Henri crying out “Is it her? It’s her?” and a muffled exchange between the two of them, and then Henri’s breathless “Tally? Is that you? Where are you? Tell us where you are and we’ll come get you—” and then another jumbled exchange.

“Do tell us, Tally. Where are you?” Raoul, this time—Henri was no good at discipline; I could talk him out of being cross with me in a matter of seconds. I really was in trouble, then.

“I’m in this little town—I’m outside of Seattle—it’s a long story. I found Jack.”

“You’re on the
peninsula
? How the hell did you get out there?”

“I flew—”

“When did you get a plane ticket? When did you plan all this?”

It seemed best to leave Mr. M out of this conversation; I already had enough explaining to do. “I, um, found this old newspaper article with a picture of Jack and Aurora. And I thought—I know it sounds crazy, but I thought he might be my dad. Or at least he could tell me about her, or maybe he knows where she is, or something. Anything. And so I, um—” I thought fast. “I went to that record store that you and Shane are obsessed with, and they had a—a magazine that had an article about him, and it said he was out here, and I bought a plane ticket and just, um, went. I didn’t plan it ahead, I swear, I knew you wouldn’t let me go and so I just—I knew it was dumb but I couldn’t—I just had to.”

“Where are you staying?” Raoul’s voice was deadly.

“With Jack.”

“With
Jack
? Is he
there
? You put him on the phone
right now
.”

“He’s not here much. Mostly I just, um, go for walks.”

The silence following this remark was excruciating. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Raoul asked finally. “What were you thinking?”

“I thought you wouldn’t let me go. I mean, you wouldn’t have, would you?”

“Tally, that’s not even the point. I don’t know. Probably we would have, yes. But running away like that—” He sighed. “It does seem to run in the family.”

“That’s low,” I said sharply.

“Not Aurora. Your aunt. A long time ago. And don’t distract me from my lecture.”

“You hadn’t even gotten going yet.” Silence. “I’m so sorry. I am. I didn’t think.”

“You always think. We had gotten used to it.”

“I know. It’s a big step, doing something totally irrational.”

“When are you coming home?
Are
you coming home?”

“Of course I’m coming home. I just want to talk to him. I just want to know. If he’s my dad. If he can tell me anything about Aurora. I know this was a stupid thing to do, and I shouldn’t have scared you, but I’m okay, I promise, and this is—I need to know this stuff.”

“I just wish you would have told us, Tally. We’ve been worried sick.”

“I know. But I’m here now. It would be just as stupid to turn around and leave again without finding out anything. It’s my—” I was seized by inspiration. “It’s my quest. Going after the Golden Fleece. Jack even has a boat.” I paused. “Aunt Beast is going to kill me, isn’t she?”

“Your aunt is not in a position to point fingers in this case, but Henri and I certainly are,” he said tartly. “Oh, Tally. I understand why you went. But don’t ever do anything like that to us again. If something happened to you—it doesn’t bear thinking about. Is that clear?”