About a Girl (7 page)

I walked home in a daze, stupid with heat. There was something I couldn’t remember, something I had to do—and then I walked in through my apartment door, and Raoul and Henri and Aunt Beast were assembled in the living room and beaming.
It’s my birthday,
I thought.
My birthday party.
“You’re late,” Raoul said. “We thought you must have stopped at Shane’s.…” He was looking behind me, for Shane, and when he saw I was alone he trailed off.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“I’m sure he’ll be over,” Henri said. “Why don’t you call him, just in case.”

There was something wrong with me—I felt high, idiotic; I felt like I was moving forward through a bowl of gelatin. Their expectant faces, their transparent human need. “No,” I said. Their smiles faltered.

“We could just order a pizza,” Aunt Beast said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“But there’s cake.”

“I don’t want cake.” The words were coming out with difficulty, as if from someone else’s mouth, and now they were just staring at me, shocked.

“It’s your
birthday,
” Raoul said.

“I don’t care about my fucking birthday,” I said, and I walked past them, into my room, and shut the door and sat on my bed and waited to feel like a normal person again.

I waited for a long time. The light shifted and dimmed, the shadows on my floor lengthened and blurred into dark; still I sat, staring at nothing, until someone knocked on my door softly and opened it without waiting for my acknowledgment. Aunt Beast came in and sat down next to me.

“We’re still waiting for you to cut the cake, but we got hungry. We were going to order takeout. You get to pick, for your birthday,”

“I don’t want cake,” I said again. Aunt Beast said nothing. “I miss him,” I said.

“I know, sweetheart. I wish there was something I could do. Are you—okay? I mean, obviously you’re not okay. But are you
okay
?”

“I’m not going to go drown myself in the Gowanus, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“You wouldn’t drown. You’d dissolve.”

“Even more reason not to.”

“Raoul told me once that everybody needs to be loved through their first broken heart.”

“My heart’s not broken.” I registered what she’d said. “Wait, when did you get your heart broken?”

“A long time ago.”

“Will you ever tell me about it? Was Aurora there?”

She was quiet for a while. “She was there,” she said finally. “I was your age.”

“What happened?”

“It was years and years ago. Not worth dragging up all that old history.”

“Tell me more about what she was like.”

“She was beautiful,” she said slowly, “and complicated. We used to get in a lot of trouble together.” This I knew about already.

“In bars,” I said. “You went to rock shows in bars.”

“That we did,” she said. “My mother was not the most conventional parent, and your grandmother—well, you know. She did a lot of damage. But in retrospect, things must have been hard for her, too.”

“Did she love—Jason?” I could never manage to say my grandfather’s name without feeling a little silly.

“Maia? I don’t know, honestly. I was so young when he died. Aurora told me once that Maia had wanted to be a concert pianist, which is hard to imagine, but I don’t know anything about what she was like before she started doing drugs.”

“But who broke your heart?”

She went stiff for a second, and I thought I’d pushed my luck too far, but she relented. “Musician,” she said. “He just showed up in town and that was it. I met him at one of Aurora’s parties.”

“She knew him, too?”

“Yes,” Aunt Beast said, in a tone that suggested that if I knew what was good for me I would alter my line of questioning, but I deliberately misread her tenor.

“So what happened?”

“He loved music more than he loved me,” she said. “I was just a kid, I thought love was enough to conquer all, tear down the walls—”

“
I’m
just a kid,” I said, “and
I
know that’s not true.”

“You’ve always been pragmatic. I don’t know where you get it from. Certainly not Aurora.”

“Maybe my father,” I said, shooting a look at her, but if she knew anything she was doing a good job of hiding it. “Do you think she loved me?” I had no idea where this question came from, as unexpected as if someone had come up behind me in the street and punched me in the back of the head, and I nearly put my own hand over my mouth to prevent the further escape of anything so needy and untoward.

“Yes,” Aunt Beast said immediately. “I do.”

“She left me.”

“I know, sweetheart. She left me, too, before you were born. I thought I would never forgive her for it. And it took a long time. But she did love me, of that I have no doubt. And I have no doubt that she loved you. You know,” she said, “I dreamed about her. The night we found you. It felt like more than a dream—it felt like she was here. Or that I was there. Where we were, in the kitchen in the house I grew up in. Raoul dreamed about her, too.”

“That’s a funny coincidence.”

“It didn’t feel like a coincidence, Tally, that’s what I’m telling you. It felt real.”

I rolled an inner eye. Aunt Beast was nowhere near as batty as Cass, who, I knew, fancied herself something of a witch, but she had a ludicrous faith in omens and portents, read her horoscope religiously, and still kept a tatty old pack of tarot cards, left over from her youth, on her dresser with an assortment of leaves, rocks, candles, crystals, and small statuary that she referred to as her “altar.”

“Dreams are just the garbage disposal of your subconscious,” I said sententiously. Aunt Beast laughed.

“Where do you
get
this stuff? Serves us right, we few proud New Age freaks, that we should end up with such a determined rationalist for a kid.”

“If you knew more about the universe, you wouldn’t need to believe all that weird stuff,” I said. “You don’t need the supernatural when you understand how beautiful real things are.”

She smiled at me and pulled me to her side in a one-armed hug. “You know,” she said, “I loved Aurora with all my heart. But you, hands down, are the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.” I put my head on her shoulder and she kissed the top of my skull.

“You didn’t even want kids,” I said into her shirt.

“I wanted
you,
” she said. “I just didn’t know it until I met you. Anybody else, I would have sent back. Tally, you know I love you. More than anything. I’m sorry Shane is being—well, to be honest, he’s being seventeen. I know it’s hard. Please come have some cake?” I let her tug me to my feet and propel me into the kitchen, where Raoul and Henri sat anxiously at the table, and Dorian Gray pranced about howling, and my cake waited for me: the Very Large Array, rendered in white frosting with black piping for the outlines.

“Dim sum,” I said, “I want dim sum,” and Raoul’s and Henri’s faces lit up, and I saw how easy it was to make them happy, how much they loved me, how much there was still here for me, even as it felt as though the whole world was moving away from me at a nightmarish, terrifying speed, dark energy pushing the universe out into the waiting void until there was nothing left but ice and silence, nothing left of us at all. At the edge of my vision I saw the girl again, the girl I’d seen in Mr. M’s apartment: short dark hair, white shirt, huge eyes—I turned, squinting, and she was only a trick of the light, the kitchen curtains moving
. But there isn’t any breeze,
I thought, and then Henri and Raoul were hugging me, Aunt Beast calling in our takeout order and demanding I cut my cake. “We’ll have dessert first,” she said, “it’s your birthday,” and I willed myself to stop thinking about what I was missing and be at peace instead with what I had.

But that night, back in my room, I thought of the picture Mr. M had shown me, Jack’s voice aching in the dark, all the sorrows of the world echoing through each shimmering note, and I thought about coming home and telling Shane that the greatest musician in the world was my father.

“I’m going,” I said out loud into the still, warm air. When I fell asleep I dreamed awful and discomforting dreams.

*   *   *

I went back to see Mr. M a few days later. “Come in,” he said, “let me get you some water,” and I followed him into his library and fidgeted in a chair while he disappeared and came back what felt like hours later with a pitcher of ice water and a plate of cookies shaped like pinwheels. I ate four cookies and drank my water and wriggled about in a frenzy.

“I did find him,” he said, and I stopped my impatient dance at once. “I’m afraid I took a bit of a liberty.”

“You talked to him,” I said.

“I didn’t. But I bought you a plane ticket. It’s fine if you’d prefer not to go.”

“Of course I’m going to go. Where is he?”

“Outside Seattle. You’ll have to take a ferry, and then a bus—it’s a small town, out on a peninsula. Very out of the way.” I thought about this. I’d never been to the city where Aurora had grown up, never even thought of that corner of the world as a real place. It seemed like something out of a John Wayne movie. Like people would ride horses in the streets and carry derringers and run in and out of saloons between their gun battles. I imagined a chorus line of floozies, prodigious bosoms bursting from their tight-bodiced velvet dresses. Did people even have electricity out there? Before Shane had played Jack’s tape for me, I’d had no idea he even existed. And now here I was with a plane ticket and the more-than-suspicion that this random, near-mythical stranger was my father. The only way to find out was to go.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me until you talk to him.”

“Right,” I said, unsettled. I would worry about that part later. “I can pay you back for the ticket.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You’ve already done so much.”

“I told you,” he said, “don’t thank me. I have done very little for you.”

“How will I find him, though?”

“I’ll give you his address.”

“But I mean—I should just show up? At his door? Isn’t that kind of weird?”

“It will all work out as it should,” he said. “The fates’ web will catch you.”

“You know I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“And yet they continue to weave, despite you,” he said, and smiled. I stood there looking at him stupidly. “Go,” he said gently. “Go, now, into the world. Tell no one. Good luck on your quest.”

“Okay,” I said, and I went.

Aunt Beast left that afternoon for an artists’ residency upstate, one of those places where there’s no telephone and everyone works in lofty seclusion in the middle of the woods, communing with their muses, lunch left stealthily in a basket on their doorstep so as not to interfere with their Process. I could tell she didn’t want to leave me in my current state, so I did my best to appear functional and chipper, chattering away while she finished packing—Aunt Beast was not much of an advance planner—until she cut me off.

“Tally, the pep club routine is not fooling me,” she said. “I don’t have to go away if you need me here.”

“You’re only going for a month, and I have Raoul and Henri. And I would feel like a total shit if you stayed here for me.”
And I’m leaving, too,
I thought,
and I have a better chance of getting away with it if you’re not around
. Anyway, Aunt Beast’s entire sex life in the last couple of years had consisted of steamy, short-lived affairs at artists’ residencies—the last one had been some musician who made whole albums out of looped recordings from the Apollo space missions, which I’d appreciated—and I didn’t need to curse the whole household with celibacy just because I was batting zero in the romance department. Raoul and I sometimes discussed Aunt Beast’s disturbing lack of a personal life when she was out of the house, but she seemed essentially content on her own, wrapped up in her work, sitting for hours in the MoMA or the Met staring at a single painting, running endless laps of the park. Aunt Beast is the most wholly self-sufficient person I have ever met; I have no doubt she loves us, but if an apocalyptic plague wiped us from the map, she’d be the one to calmly hole up in the apartment with a shotgun and a pit bull, occasionally emerging to perhaps eat one of the downstairs neighbors or make a run to the art supply store, happy as Dorian Gray in front of a newly opened tin of wet food.

She hefted her bag experimentally and winced. “I should have just shipped this crap,” she said. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

“You already called the car service. Henri will make me eat, Raoul will nurture my minimal emotional needs; if I totally freak out we’ll call the residency phone and they can go fetch you in your cabin.”

“That’s frowned upon.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen. I’ll just go to the bookstore—”
Shit,
I thought,
what am I going to tell Jenn and Molly
—“and put on a brave face, and—and—I don’t know, maybe he’ll call me and grovel and everything will be normal next week.”

“You could call him.”

“He stood me up on my
birthday
. I’ll call him when hell freezes over.”

She looked at me with frank amusement. “The stubbornness, I’m afraid, you got from me.” There was a honk outside the window. “That’s the car—are you sure, Tally?”

“Yes,” I said. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and a brief hug that knocked the air out of my lungs, and dragged her bag out of the room. I watched out her window until she reappeared in the street below, then waved to her, but she didn’t look up.
One down,
I thought.

That night Henri had a client, and so I ate dinner alone in the kitchen with Raoul, Dorian Gray meowing pitifully at our feet until I shoved him brusquely with my toe. He gave me an offended look and stalked away with his tail lashing. Raoul frowned at his plate, but I ignored him. Raoul is largely unwilling to acknowledge Dorian Gray’s multitudinous faults; I do not agree that loving Dorian Gray means overlooking his inadequacies as a pet.

“Shane played me this tape,” I said. Mr. M hadn’t said not to mention Jack. “This musician, Jack—I think he knew Aurora?”