About a Girl (25 page)

“I have to go home,” I said.

“You can stay as long as you like.”

“Thank you. But I—this isn’t my life, out here. I keep forgetting, but I have so much else to do.”

“It’s up to you,” he said. “I wish I could tell you more. I’m sorry. I did not behave well then, and I have not behaved well to you since you showed up on my doorstep.”

“It was sort of a surprise visit, in your defense.”

“That it was,” he said. “It’s getting late. I believe I promised you dinner, the first morning you were here, and have been remiss in following through.”

“There’s nothing in your kitchen to eat.”

“Maybe you would like a hamburger at Kate’s, if you’re not sick to death of them.” That seemed a fine compromise, and I said so.

Maddy was not at Kate’s, but some of the hippies were; they looked me over with disinterest and looked away again. Without Maddy next to me they did not even recognize me. Kate was in a temper and slammed my hamburger down unceremoniously, but Jack raised an eloquent eyebrow at her and she softened.

“Long day,” she said; for her, that was almost an apology, and I accepted it. “Nice to see you out among the living.” Jack flinched, and the look she gave him was freighted with meaning, and I wondered, not for the first time and with some exasperation, if I would ever sort out what strange threads raveled them together, and then Kate turned to me and said calmly, “You have the book already, child; it’s right in front of your face, and the path to what you want, too,” and I said, “What?” but she was already moving across the room to the hippies, who were clamoring for more beer.

You have the book already, child
. That night back at Jack’s I got out the battered copy of
Metamorphoses
. A rustle at the sill of the open window, and there was my crow again, one beady eye trained on me, its head cocked. “Hello,” I said, “this is a bit much, you know,” and it cawed imperiously, and I opened the book at random.
Now in a ship that had been built at Pagasae, the Argonauts cut through the restless waves.…
Golden-haired Jason and his crew: brave Asterion; Erytos and Echion, sons of Hermes; Mopsos the bird-omener; the warrior Oileus, and on and on. And Orpheus, Orpheus the musician, who was said to have charmed rivers from their banks, caused wild oaks to march in order to hear him play—
Supposedly he played one show at the Coliseum in LA, and when he finished the crowd was surrounded by all these animals—wolves, bears, cougars, animals that don’t even
live
in that part of California. Like they had come to see him play.

“No,” I said aloud, and my crow flapped its wings at me, and I turned back to the book.
Sharp-eyed Medea, burned with quickening heat
. Medea who waited, alone and lonely, on the far shore of her father’s country, with her magic and her herbs and her shrine to Hekate—“No,” I said again, but there was no undoing it. It was a story I already knew, the story Maddy had told me, but the Maddy in this book was even crueler and more bloody minded: making daughters cut their fathers to pieces; slitting the throats of kings and flying away in a chariot drawn by dragons; burning Jason’s second wife to ash—
even then her blood-red steel had pierced the bodies of their two sons
—and poisoning heroes. And then:
Medea, ’scaping her own death, vanished in a cloud, dark as the music chanted in her spells
—and she exited the story as swiftly as she’d entered it, and there was no word of her again. It was not possible, but there it was. I closed the book and sat looking at it for a long time, and when I looked up again my crow was gone.

Brushing my teeth before bed in Jack’s bathroom, I knew that what I had told him was true: My time here, unsuccessful as it was, was at its end. I did not want to think about Maddy. I dug my unused binoculars out of my bag and slipped quietly out Jack’s front door with a blanket; the trees were too thick behind me to see anything at the horizon, and the moon washed out most of the sky—Why hadn’t I been out here every night? What had come over me, in the last month?—but there was Arcturus, blazing overhead, and Spica in Virgo, and good old Polaris marking out the north, as it would for another few thousand years.
That is not what we call it, where I am from.
Because it had been a different star. A few degrees to its northwest, half-hidden by the horizon, Castor and Pollux in Gemini; I could not look at them without thinking, once again, of Shane. I heard footsteps on the grass behind me, and then Jack folded himself up next to me on the blanket, and I handed him the binoculars. He lifted them to his eyes and fiddled with the focus. “Oh. Wow.”

“You’ve never tried it?”

“I use a sextant on the boat, but binoculars never occurred to me. Navigation is a different science.”

“You must know all the constellations, all the same.”

“I know most of them.”

“It’s too bad we don’t have a telescope. But look, there’s Lyra, you can find Vega, and just a tiny bit below it you can almost see the Ring Nebula—maybe not with the binoculars—”

“No,” he said, “I see it. It’s just barely there.”

“With a telescope it’s something else.”

“Lyra,” he said, handing the binoculars back to me. “The Lyre.”

“Orpheus’s lyre,” I said. “If you believe that kind of thing.”

“If you do. The stars fell from the harp in spring,” he said. “When I was—younger.”

“The Lyrid meteor shower,” I said. “It’s not that strong anymore, but there are observations on record that go back almost three thousand years.” I paused. “There’s a Chinese record that says the stars ‘fell like rain,’ but that was back around 700 BC.”

“Like rain.” He seemed far away. “That sounds about right.”

“I would have liked it,” I said. “If you had been my dad.”

“I would have liked that, too.” We were both quiet, looking at the stars together, and then we went in to bed.

*   *   *

The dream that came to me that night was the worst of them all.
It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood:
Blood all over and the girl again, her dark eyes pleading, and out of the boundless dark a wailing pack of three-headed dogs that set upon her and tore her to pieces as I watched, rooted to the ground in horror.
Tally,
she gasped as she died in front of me,
Tally, you do not have much time—Tally, come to me—
and then a slavering dog with awful teeth tore out her throat, and I tried to scream but no sound came out of my open mouth as a hot red wave crashed over me, and I jerked awake in the dark, gasping and flailing for the bedside light. “I’m coming,” I said aloud, into the quiet room. “I don’t know how, but I’m coming.” I left the light on until the dawn came, and I did not try to sleep again.

*   *   *

Maddy was in her kitchen, stirring something on the little stove. No blood, no nightmares: just her, and the sight of her, as always, enough to make my heart give a dumb, helpless leap—her hands, her mouth, the softness of her skin. I’d kissed her so many times I could taste her now just thinking about her. She looked up as I came in, Qantaqa at her feet, tail wagging.

“I want to go,” I said. “I want you to take me to see her.” She put down her spoon and stepped toward me, cupped my chin in her hand and tilted it upward, kissed the pulse of my throat.

“I know,” she said.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” Maddy said simply.

“Did you know this whole time?”

“Your journey is not my journey, Tally.”

“Tonight,” I said. “And then I have to—go.”

“Tonight,” she agreed, leaving a line of kisses along my collarbone that made my knees shake. “But that leaves us all afternoon,” she murmured, and pulled my shirt over my head and then leaned in to kiss me again. “Come upstairs,” she said, and turned off the stove.

At sunset she drove me down to the beach. We left Qantaqa at Maddy’s; she whined as she watched us leave, wagging her tail anxiously. “The world of the dead is no place for a dog,” Maddy told her. And I thought,
This is crazy,
but I didn’t say anything out loud. It was still warm enough for shirtsleeves, and I rolled my window down, stuck my head out like Qantaqa, whooped at the twilight wind.

I’d expected—I don’t know what I’d expected. Blood sacrifice or a kettle full of newts and bats. But when we got down to the water’s edge she sent me to find driftwood for a fire, got a blanket out of her truck and two bottles of wine and her cigarettes and some bread, for all the world as though we were at an evening picnic. She let me set up the fire and then she lit it with an ordinary match. “We have to wait until the moon rises,” she said, and opened the wine. “What’s the second bottle for?” I asked, envisioning some ritual bath.

“For me,” she said. “While you’re gone.”

“Oh,” I said. “How long will I be—gone?”

“For as long as you go.”

“Oh,” I said again.

The water went silver, and then a deep violet-blue, and then the summer-swollen yellow moon rose high enough for its light to make a white path on the water. She took off her shoes and nodded when I did, too.

“There are many ways into the world of the dead,” Maddy said. “The moon road is only one of them. It will hold for you as long as you can see it on the water.”

“If it doesn’t?”

“You are a little like me,” she said, “but even for those of us who are not wholly human, the way out of that place is hard.”

“I don’t want to stay,” I said. “I just want to see her.”

She took my hand and walked me to the edge of the water, where the reflection of the moon lapped at the pebbly shore. “Don’t I have to do something?” I asked. She smiled.

“No,” she said. “You’re with me.” She stepped out onto the water and I watched, incredulous, as her foot landed on the silver surface, and stayed there. “The longer you take, the less time you’ll have,” she said, and I took the first step after her. The water was cool and solid under my bare feet, and her hand was warm in mine—
This can’t be real,
I thought,
this can’t be—
but she took another step, and so did I, and the white road beneath me held firm. “I can only set you on the path. You must walk it on your own.” She let go of my hand. “I’ll wait for you here,” she said. “Travel well.”

“Thanks,” I said, although it didn’t seem the right thing to say to a girl who had just made an ocean solid so that I could walk across it to drop in on a dead woman. The whole night had a surreal, liquid quality; I wondered if I was dreaming, if I’d wake up in her bed, feeling silly. I began to walk.

White moon, black water, time passing. “The formula for omega is two times the deceleration parameter plus two divided by three times the cosmological constant times the velocity of light squared over the Hubble constant squared,” I said, and my voice sounded small in the dark, and so I cleared my throat and tried again. The world at the edges of the path grew darker and darker, and after a while I saw things moving, shadows even deeper than the darkness around them, and I could hear something like the sound of branches clacking in the wind, though there was no breeze on my face. A dog howled in the distance, low and mournful. The darkness shifted, and I looked up.

I was still on the moon road, but the black water around me was not the water I’d started across, and the sky overhead was scrubbed empty of stars. The white strip of light on which I stood led to a larger white blur in the distance ahead of me. I walked for a long time, and the white blur grew larger and larger until I could see at last that it was an endless bone-white plain, out of which rose a towering black palace covered in doors that lay open to the night. One step after another, the palace looming ever larger and more awful, and then I took the final step, off the moon road onto the hard white earth. The ground was so cold I winced. The soles of my feet were raw from walking, and I left red-stained footprints behind me on the pale ground. I had seen light like this before—I remembered, during the eclipse in Cornwall, the way the shadows’ edges had grown sharp enough to cut like knives—and then I thought of Raoul and Henri, and Aunt Beast, and the icy grip around my heart lessened.
You are Tally,
Maddy said, and for a flash I saw her, too: leaning against a log, her long legs stretched out toward the fire, a cup in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
You did not walk so far to fail now, lovely.

I could not have said how long it took me to reach the black palace. I stood before one of the open doors, waiting, but the world around me did not change. There was nothing else to do but go inside, and so I did. The doorway’s frigid maw made the cold of the plain seem tropical; it seared the back of my throat and wrapped itself around me until it was all I could do to move forward, down a long greenish-lit hallway cut into the black stone—another door, this one closed, at the end of it, and when I laid my hand on its surface to push it open, the cold burned me and I cried out. The door swung open silently and I walked through it, beyond fear, beyond caring, beyond the memory of ever having been warm.

I was in a big, high-ceilinged room, clean angles and sharp lines, floor-to-ceiling windows all around me that looked out on the white plain, the black sea where the white stripe of moonlight still glittered. It was important, but I could no longer remember why. The girl from my dreams was sitting in a black chair at the far end of the otherwise empty room, and next to her stood a tall man with ice-colored eyes and a face that was so cruel I held my breath when I looked at him. She raised her head when I came through the door, and I crossed the room and stood before her.

I had been told all my life that Aurora was beautiful, but beautiful was not the word for the woman in front of me.
Beautiful
was a word for human beings. She was something else entirely; next to her, even Maddy would have seemed some shabby copy of the real thing. She was terribly thin, but the planes of her face were smoothly cut, and her skin glowed with a radiant inner light. Her dark eyes were very large. She was still and straight backed in the black chair, which was, I saw up close, cut from some glossy stone.
Obsidian,
I thought,
the word for that is obsidian
. Heart, lungs, my own human hands. In this place I had nearly forgotten already what I was.