About a Girl (16 page)

“You knew Aurora,” I said. We had not spoken for so long that at first I thought he hadn’t heard me, but as I gathered myself to ask him again, he cleared his throat.

“I did.”

“Well?”

“No.” He was avoiding my eyes. “I only knew her for a summer, years ago. Before I went to Los Angeles.”

“And became a famous rock star.”

He laughed; it was a bitter sound that cut across the wind. “If that’s what you want to call it.”

“What was she like?”

“I can’t tell you much.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“How would I know that? Can’t you ask your father?”

“No,” I said. “I never knew my father.”

“Neither did I,” he said, with no apparent irony.

I tried another tack. “Why did you move all the way out here?”

“To forget,” he said, without hesitation.

“Forget what?” He did not bother to answer. “Do you practice somewhere else? I never hear you play.”
Because you’re never home,
I could have added, but elected not to. I had often been told that discretion was the better part of valor, although it was not an approach that I myself employed regularly; but there is no time like the present for frolicking in undiscovered country.

“I don’t play anymore.”

I was dumbfounded. “At
all
?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it was…” He trailed off, and something complicated passed across his face; I thought I recognized a hint of the fuzzy confusion that clouded my own thinking out here, the weird blurry wall that made it impossible to remember anything for any length of time, or say out loud the thoughts that scampered fleetingly through my skull and then vanished again. “It brought too many bad things,” he said in a tone that did not encourage further enquiry. The sail snapped in the wind and Jack jumped up to adjust it, and I looked out over the water—black, sharp-beaked birds, diving neatly before the boat as it flew across the water; a tangle of seaweed, which Jack deftly maneuvered past; a slick log bobbing in the waves. I pressed one thumb against my shoulder; pale flash, then pink. I was getting a sunburn. Jack sat back down again, the sail safely negotiated, his face serene—we’d been talking about something, something that I felt certain was important, but it had slid out of reach again, and I did not know how to get it back.

“Everything okay?” I said.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “You know, I don’t know anything about astronomy, but I know most of the constellations. We’ve been navigating at sea more or less the same way since the ancient Greeks. More technology now, obviously, but I like to do it the old way.”

“Jason was supposed to be the first person who navigated with the constellations.”

“Jason?” His voice had gone strange.

“Of Jason and the Argonauts.”

“I know the one,” he said. Something about his expression made me stop talking at once, and he looked out over the water, refusing to meet my eyes. I had no idea what I’d said to upset him, but we were silent for the rest of the afternoon.

*   *   *

After the day on the boat Jack disappeared again, leaving me to my own devices. I went back to prowling around and pretending I wasn’t lonely. Early one afternoon I came into the cool quiet of the bar to find a slim girl in a black jacket on Maddy’s usual stool, and my heart flip-flopped in my chest like a fish; but she turned at the squeak of the door’s hinges, curious, and I saw at once that she was someone else, less scruffy and with none of Maddy’s fierce, animal shimmer. She had shiny dark hair pulled up in a high ponytail on her head and hammered silver hoops in her ears, and the feet propped on the bar stool’s rung were shod in fashionably battered boots that she had certainly not purchased here. The natives ran toward clogs and rubber-soled sandals with nylon-and-Velcro straps worn with white socks. I did not much myself care about clothes, but that did not mean I did not miss being around people who did. And even I should never have stooped so low as
athletic sandals
.

“Hi,” she said; maybe she was from here, then. Nobody else would have been so friendly. The bar was empty, and it seemed unnecessarily rude to stalk off to a spot by myself, so I climbed onto the stool next to her and ducked my head in what I hoped was a convivial manner.

“Hi,” I said. Up close she was older than I’d first thought, maybe in her late twenties or early thirties, with a sharp, clever, pretty face. She raised a hand to Kate, pointed at her empty glass to signal another; the way she moved made me think of the crows in Jack’s yard. The fat crow had left me a quarter that morning; I fingered it in my pocket and thought about going home.

“You just move here?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “only visiting. You live here?”

“From here. My dad owns the movie theater”—she pointed out in the general direction of the street—“down the street, the Rose. But I live mostly in New York.”

I was as happy as if she’d told me she had a winning lottery ticket in her pocket with my name on it. “I’m
from
New York,” I said.

“Really?” she said, with a flash of recognition that I knew at once: that strange and funny solidarity of New Yorkers, as though we were anthropologists from the same place who had spent too much time alone amidst a pleasant but ineffably foreign people and had at last stumbled upon a kindred spirit with whom to exchange commentary on the inscrutable customs of the native population. (“Can you
believe
what they
eat
? Everyone has a
car
! There are washing machines
in their houses
!”) “What part?”

I told her, and she told me where she lived, in a fifth-floor walk-up in a part of Brooklyn I knew well (“Do you get the falafel at that place on the corner?” “Oh, and that bodega on Twenty-first and Fifth that has the most
amazing
tacos!”), and we spent a happy fifteen minutes chattering at each other about all the places we had in common, the overlapping Venn diagram of our New York circles. She was an actor, mostly stage work but more and more television (“It’s not rewarding intellectually but god, it
pays
”), and I knew most of the places where the shows she had been in had filmed.

“It’s funny,” she said, taking a sip of her drink—her second now—“things were going badly there for me for a while, couldn’t get work, shows canceling everywhere, and I almost threw in the towel and came back here. Of all places. It’s been hard a lot, you know—I think sometimes all that kept me there was refusing to admit I’d been bested, and then things always got better—but that time was the worst, and I was so tired, it was winter and I was living in this terrible apartment with no heat, landlady on the first floor who was this crazy old Polish woman who didn’t speak a word of English and would come into our apartment when we weren’t there and steal the
lightbulbs,
if you can believe that, and then one morning I was in the shower and part of the tiled wall just
fell
on me, and there was this great gaping blackness behind it, this huge hole, and I screamed and almost broke my leg jumping out of the tub”—we were both laughing—“and I was like, ‘Jesus god in heaven,
fuck
this. No career on earth is worth this.’” She looked thoughtfully at her glass.

“What happened?” I prompted.

“I called my psychic,” she said.

“Your psychic?” I echoed, certain I’d misheard.

“This woman in Colorado,” she said. “They’re all different, you know, how they access you—this woman I used to see channeled an alien being called Kotak, and she was good—she told my friend one time to check the right front tire of her car and she went outside and there was a nail in the tire, can you believe that? But she only told me practical stuff, so I found this other woman who talks to your angels. ‘They have so much to tell me about you, they’re so excited, they’ve been chattering at me before you even got on the phone,’ she said, and then she went on to tell me all these things about how I was going to have a great career, and I had a gift, and—oh, it’s embarrassing, you don’t need to know what they said. I was crying within minutes. But anyway, I stayed. I come back every summer for a few weeks to run the theater so my dad can have some time off, but I’m so glad I didn’t move back here for real.”

“You stayed in New York because your angels told a psychic in Colorado that you were going to have a good career,” I said. Everyone here, I thought, was utterly batshit, even this totally normal-seeming person, well put together and smart, who had managed somehow to get herself off the peninsula to a civilized place like New York and yet still took the advice of people who thought they were talking to angels. She laughed.

“You haven’t seen the bumper sticker yet,” she said. But I had:
WE’RE ALL HERE BECAUSE WE’RE NOT ALL THERE
, plastered on decaying VW buses and battered station wagons captained by decrepit old hippies who looked as though they’d be likely to fumigate you with patchouli. “But I tell you what, she was right.”

She finished her drink and dug some bills out of her wallet, left them on the bar with a wave to Kate and a nod to me. “See you around,” she said, and I waved back as she left.

“How’s Jack?” Kate asked, sliding another bottle of beer across the bar to me.

“We went sailing once,” I said, and stopped. When had we gone sailing? Yesterday? Or had it been days ago already? Time was sliding away from me, messy and strange. “But otherwise he’s never around and I never see him. Do you know why he doesn’t play anymore?”

Kate gave me a sharp, unreadable look. “No.”
You’re lying,
I thought.

“It seems strange, doesn’t it? I mean, who does that? Wasn’t music his whole life?”

“You’ll have to ask him.”

“I did.” But some people had come into the bar and Kate was already turning away from me, overeager to greet them, and by the time she came back to me I had lost my train of thought, and so I told her about my crows instead: the circle they’d made around their dying friend, the way they’d watched me, the way the biggest one had taken, now, to leaving me gifts and trailing me as though I was the corvids’ Pied Piper.

“They do that,” Kate said, “keep vigil over the dying; I’ve never heard of them following anyone, but they’re clever birds. You must have impressed them.”

“Speaking of animals,” I said, “I keep meaning to ask—what are those animals? On the beach, the long green ones? They look like snakes? I think they must be something that only lives in the water, because they all seem like they might be dead?”

Kate raised a quizzical eyebrow. I found a pen and drew the serpentine thing with its odd flat ribbony crown that I’d seen on the beach. Kate peered down at my drawing and hooted with merriment, laughing so hard she had to prop herself up on the bar. “Oh, city mouse,” she said. “That’s
kelp
.”

I blinked with embarrassment. “I’m
not
stupid.”

“I’m sure you aren’t,” Kate said, chuckling. I kicked sullenly at the rung of my bar stool, thinking up ways to ask about Maddy. “She’ll come in again,” Kate said. “How much longer are you here for, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have to—” What
did
I have to do, anyway? It didn’t seem likely I was going to get any more out of Jack than I had already. I could confront him, but that seemed overly dramatic. But I did not like the thought of going back to Mr. M empty-handed, after all he had done to send me out here, and I did not like the thought of failure, either. And if Aurora was still running around somewhere, and Jack knew—did I want to know? I chewed on this for a moment while Kate watched me with her keen eyes. Which was worse, an Aurora who was gone forever or an Aurora who didn’t care enough to look me up? It was a question I’d given surprisingly little thought to over the years; I hadn’t even known I cared until Mr. M had given me that picture and set my adventure in motion. “I have to talk to Jack more, I guess,” I said. “I keep forgetting things out here. It’s weird.”

“That’s why people come out here,” she said. “To forget.”

“That’s what—” I frowned, thinking. “Jack said that, I think. And Maddy.”

“Maddy has more to forget than most people.”

“What does that mean?”

The door opened and we both looked up; there she was, wild-haired, in the same clothes she’d been wearing the first time I saw her, as if Kate had conjured her up.

“Well, well,” Kate said. “Speak of the devil. We were just talking about you.”

“I know,” Maddy said. “I thought you’d be here,” she added, to me. “Are you doing anything? I’m on my way to the beach to get oysters, if you want to come.”

“Okay,” I mumbled, ecstatic.

“You be good to her,” Kate said.

“I’m good to everyone,” Maddy said.

“That,” Kate said, and her voice was sharp and cold, “is not true.” Maddy stared Kate down, and Kate looked away first.

“Let’s get out of this dark old place,” Maddy said to me, and I was only too happy to follow her outside.

Qantaqa barked happily from the truck as we approached, both paws on the windowsill, tail waving madly. She nearly fell out the door when Maddy opened it. The passenger side was unlocked, and I got in. “You have a coat or something?” she asked. “It’ll get cold when the sun sets. We can stop by where you’re staying on the way.”

“Sure,” I said, “that would be great.”

She found the way to Jack’s again without my directing her, followed me into his house and paced the circumference of the main room like Dorian Gray when we let him out of his carrier at the vet’s; I could almost see her bristle and sniff, her hackles raised. She picked things up off Jack’s shelves and turned them over in her hands and put them down again, carefully and in the same place. I heard a door close and a second later Jack appeared, leaning easily on the doorframe to the hallway.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” he said to me.

Not
my
fault,
I thought. “I made a friend,” I said instead. “Do you know Maddy?” He looked past me; she was holding a clay pot from one of the side tables, and when their eyes met her whole body went rigid, and he froze. The whole room went electric with the force of their locked gazes, her yellow eyes suddenly wild and the air around her bristling with a staticky charge. I took a step away from them, putting out one hand as if to fend off an unseen attacker.