About a Girl (17 page)

“We went sailing once,” Maddy whispered.

“I don’t think we’ve met; you must be thinking of someone else,” Jack said, but his eyes did not leave hers.

“You sang to us over the water, and everything was blood—but it was such a long time ago—” Maddy shook her head. “I don’t want to remember!” she cried, her voice full of pain. The pot slipped from her fingers and shattered on the wooden floor, and we all jumped. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, and Jack said, “It’s no trouble,” which did not seem like the right thing to say, and so I said, “I’ll get a broom,” but I didn’t know where Jack kept one, and he went to fetch it instead, and in all the jumble the strange moment was forgotten and the weirdness went out of the room like a guest sent home for being too unruly. Maddy shook herself like a cat who had gotten its paws wet by accident and went back to being a girl again—not ordinary, but not sparking with terrifying electricity, either—and then Jack, blinking and slightly confused, wished us a pleasant afternoon and went back into the room he’d come out of. It was not until Maddy and I were back in her truck and driving away that I realized I had altogether forgotten to fetch my sweatshirt.

Qantaqa panted happily in my face for the rest of the drive to the beach, as much of her front end as she could manage wedged into my lap. I patted her head. She was the sort of dog you had no choice but to get used to. “Don’t let her boss you around,” Maddy said. “She’s already spoiled rotten.”

We drove for a while through a labyrinthine network of narrow two-lane roads, thick green woods occasionally giving way to the bald scars of clear-cuts dotted with smoking piles of brush and splintered trees. Here and there the trees would part enough for me to see a cobalt flash of water, and there was nowhere we went that the smell of the sea did not come in through the truck’s open windows. Maddy turned off on a potholed dirt road that rolled bumpily down to a gravelly dead end. She parked the truck, and Qantaqa barked happily.

“Here we are,” Maddy said, reaching over to ruffle her behind the ears, “your favorite place. You can let her out, Tally.” Qantaqa nearly squashed me flat in her gleeful scramble out the door. I followed more slowly, wincing as the circulation returned to my legs. Qantaqa was already crashing through the underbrush. Maddy got a bucket and two pairs of knee-high rubber boots out of the back of the truck, and we went after Qantaqa with slightly less enthusiasm. We came through a stand of evergreens to a rocky half-moon of beach, sheltered on one side by a high bluff and on the other by forest. The tide was out, muddy flats stretching half a mile before us. “Perfect timing,” she said.

We pulled the boots on over our shoes, and Maddy led me out onto the tide flats as Qantaqa bounded up and down the beach and crashed off again into the woods. At first the ground was firm, but soon we sank up to our ankles in thick, viscous mud that smelled of rot and salt and something deeper.
Sex,
I thought, and blushed. The feeling of it was disorienting, the sucking mud pulling at my boots and making each step a laborious struggle to keep them on my feet. The tide was coming back in by the time Maddy decided we had enough oysters, and we took turns carrying the heavy bucket back to the beach as the water obscured the tide flats behind us.

Maddy sent me to collect firewood and went back to the truck, returning with blankets and a bulging cloth bag. She showed me how to make a pyramid of smaller twigs and dried grass and coax it into flame before gently adding bigger pieces of driftwood. “This time of year, the oysters aren’t as good,” she explained, “so they’re better cooked. Come back in the winter and you can eat them right out of the water.” Despite the sun, the afternoon was chilly, and I was glad of the fire. Maddy dumped out our oysters and refilled the bucket with salt water to wash them. I was used to oysters from a restaurant, halved and neatly arranged on a bed of ice; these seemed a different thing altogether, over-large and muddy and crusted in barnacles. We both cut our hands washing them, and Maddy pressed her bloody palm to mine. My heart thumped frantically in my ribs, and I licked my dry lips. She watched me, her huge yellow eyes unblinking. I was the first to look down. “Palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss,” she said, and took her hand away. I curled my fingers around its absence, her blood drying on my skin, and thought I might never wash my hands again.

She showed me how to shuck the oysters with a short-bladed knife, but I was hopeless at it and cut myself again and so she did them all, laying them out in a tidy line by the fire as she revealed their quivering grey-pink meat. While the oysters cooked she spread a blanket out for us and pulled a bottle of wine and two cups out of her bag, filling one and passing it to me. I wrinkled my nose and took a sip and was surprised to find that I liked it; it was crisp and cool and tasted of apples. Aunt Beast would be proud of me, loosening up at last. Qantaqa settled behind us with a sigh and put her nose on her paws, and Maddy reached back absently to scratch her ears. “I think they’re done,” she said.

The oysters were delicious, firmed by the fire’s heat but salt-tangy and rich with brine. We ate them all, the whole bucketful. Qantaqa watched sadly as our hands moved over and over to our mouths and Maddy fed her the last one, which she took gently from Maddy’s outstretched fingers and gummed rapturously. Maddy built the fire up again and poured us more wine, and we stretched out on her blanket. She’d pulled her hair back, but wisps of it had escaped and framed her face in a dark halo. The sun was low on the horizon, and the sky was streaked purple and rose, the water gone flat and silver. “Listen,” Maddy said, and after a moment I heard it: the low mournful hoot of some bird in the woods behind us, followed by a ragged caw. My crows. I remembered what I had been meaning to ask her all afternoon.

“You know Jack?”

“Jack?” She blinked, slow and uncertain: stuttering flicker of black lashes, wisp of black hair fluttering against the soft skin of her cheek. I swallowed. “I don’t think so.”

“But you said—in his house you said—” The words were just out of reach, and I fought the murky wave threatening to overtake me. “You said you went sailing, a long time ago—did you know him in California?”

“I’ve never been to California.” She took my hand and brought my knuckles to her mouth without looking at me, and my whole body went live-wired and frantic. I could hardly breathe. “Do you miss the city?” she asked.

“No,” I whispered, and she laughed and looked at me at last, her yellow eyes big enough to drown me, and then she leaned over and kissed me. Her soft mouth tasted of the oysters’ salt and the wine’s tangy sweetness, and we fell into each other, her hands in my hair, running the length of my spine, soft on my skin underneath my shirt, her mouth on my cheek, at my ear, against the line of my throat. Qantaqa gave an aggrieved huff and rolled over, and we broke apart long enough to laugh at her as she panted at us, and then Maddy kissed me again and I thought of nothing but the taste of her skin and the smell of her hair. I shuddered, and she said, “You’re cold,” her mouth at my ear, the low throaty rasp of her voice alone sending me ecstatic, and I said, “No,” but that was a lie; I was shivering, and not just from her touch. The stars were coming out.

“The Dippers,” I said, and could have kicked myself as soon as the words were out of my mouth. She wrapped me up in one corner of the blanket and sat up.
Kiss me more,
I thought desperately, but she did not seem to have Kate’s psychic proclivities; or else—and worse—she did not care to kiss me any longer.

“Do you know them all?”

“Most of them,” I said, but I did not want her to think I was showing off.

“I used to,” she said, looking up at the sky. “There’s Thuban.” She pointed north.

“That’s Polaris.”

“The North Star? That’s not what we call it, where I’m from. Anyway, we can go,” she said, remote again.

“If you want,” I said, wishing more than anything for her to turn back to me, to say that of course that was not what she wanted, what she wanted was to throw me back down on the ground again and take off all my clothes and do to me whatever it was she did to people, this astonishing girl who seemed to know so much more about the world than I did, who had undone me with a handful of kisses and some heavy breathing. But she was already standing up and gathering our things, kicking dirt over the embers of the fire, clucking Qantaqa to her feet. I was out of my league; I had no idea what to say to her or what to do to make her kiss me again. Was she kissing anyone else? Was kissing strange girls just her standard operating procedure? Did she like me? What was happening between us? What was I, to her? Why had she brought me out here only to bring me home again, like a child up past her bedtime? I was not used to not feeling special, and I found that I did not much like the experience. And as I followed her back to the truck, carrying the blanket, I did not ask her the other question burning in my mouth: where could she possibly be from, to think that Thuban was the polestar? Thuban had shifted from that place in the heavens three thousand years ago.

We were quiet in her truck, quiet as she drove back toward town; her walls had gone back up, and I tangled my fingers in Qantaqa’s fur and tried to think of something witty and clever to say, something to make her look at me again the way she’d looked at me on the beach before she kissed me. The light turned red at the intersection on the edge of town, and she sighed from some deep place and shifted in her seat, and the feeling in the truck changed in some way I could not precisely articulate. “Do you want to come over?” she said. I did not know what she was really asking.

“I—sure.” She did not say anything else until we were inside her house. “Do you want tea?” she asked, with her back to me, and I said, “No,” and she turned to me again at last, and smiled. “Do you want to come upstairs?”

“
Yes,
” I said, and she moved toward me again, putting her hands on either side of my face, and my breath caught in my throat.

“You are so young,” she said softly, “you’re just a child—look at you, you’re shaking.”

“I am not,” I said, although I was, and then she kissed me and I kissed her back, fierce and hungry, and she took my hand and tugged me to the ladder, and I followed her.

“This is not what you came here for,” she said into my ear, the hum of her voice going all through me. “Is it what you want?”

“Yes,” I said again, although I was not entirely sure what she was asking me, what she was asking of me; I was not sure, either, that I cared.

Underneath the black shirt she was all over scars, a faded latticework crocheted across her skin; and over that again, more tattoos: the flight of crows, winging from one forearm and across her back to the other, lines written in languages I did not recognize, old star maps, a swarm of bees scattered down her spine. “What happened to you?” I whispered, tracing a knotted line of white tissue where it crossed the sharp edge of her shoulder blade and turned to follow her spine, and she turned her yellow eyes on me and said, “No pasts.” I could have fallen forever into those honey-colored depths: sun on white sand, ocean blue as a swimming pool, white sails snapping in the wind; a man with yellow hair and brown eyes, tanned dark; Jack with his lyre—with his
lyre
?—and then drawn all across it, a curtain of blood—I yelped and jerked away from her, my mouth flooding with the sour iron taste; I had bitten my tongue. Buzzing in my ears. And then she kissed me again, hard, and I forgot what I had been thinking about because it didn’t matter, none of it mattered, the only thing that mattered was her—her hands on my skin and her mouth at the hollow of my throat. At first I could not help compare the feel of Maddy’s body under my hands to what I had known before her: to Shane, the marvels of his own body offset by the familiarity of his heart, so that no matter what new places we found together we could still only ever be two people who had known each other long before we had even known how to be people. But the unmapped landscape I had crossed with him that night in his room compared not at all to the country in which I now found myself, to this girl who moved beneath me and above me like a serpent, lithe and strong, her muscles like cables snapping beneath her skin, the exquisite softness of her mouth a sweet counterpoint to the hard planes of her body; and then all around us a sound rose out of the dark like a swarm of bees humming, and I looked deep into the bright honey of her eyes and found that I had lost myself altogether, that had she not whispered my name over and over as she kissed me, as she made her way from my throat to my breasts to the flat slope of my belly, had she not murmured it against that place that only Shane had ever kissed before her, I should have forgotten it altogether, and it was only the sound of my own name in my her mouth, her tongue shaping it as she shaped me, that brought me back to myself, and not long after that there was nothing left for her to say at all, and I was nothing more than a body singing, a body reborn and born again, utterly hers in the dark.

*   *   *

In the morning I remembered my name and Maddy was still real. She had fallen asleep, finally, after I had done with her all the things I had ever imagined doing with another person, and a few more things that had only just occurred to me, and then she had shown me again and again just how little I knew and how small my imagination was. I had stayed awake after she finally fell asleep, hardly daring to breathe, certain that if I drifted off she would vanish and none of this night would have happened. The sky outside grew light, her lean body coalescing out of the shadows as the dawn crept in. I touched the tall ship etched in black over her heart, its sails billowing. She opened her eyes and smiled at me, and I discovered in that moment that, inspired by her inventiveness and the stunning depth of her knowledge on the subject, a number of new projects I might essay had just occurred to me, and we were occupied with each other for a while after that. In the morning light I mapped out all her tattoos with my hands: more boats and star maps and bees, and a sextant across her ribs, and a bird I didn’t recognize.