All Our Pretty Songs (3 page)

When Aurora and I were kids Cass would take us hiking in the woods outside the city. We’d pick our way across the loamy forest floor, our noses flooded with the green dark smell of moss, of mushrooms coming up out of the damp earth, of fallen trees crumbling into soil and new trees springing up out of the old, their roots snaking through the dead, rain-slick trunks. We’d climb narrow rocky paths up out of the woods, clinging to the sides of mountains, picking our way through alpine meadows awash in monkshood, lupine, and scarlet paintbrush. I loved the immense, vivid silence up there, the way a single marmot cry would echo and echo through the far hills. Up there you felt like you were all alone on the roof of the world, nothing but razor-edged ridges and high peaks as far as you could see in all directions.

These days Aurora isn’t interested in wild places, and Cass rarely has time anymore. As soon as I learned how to drive I started borrowing Cass’s car and going out on my own. I spend the morning panting my way up switchbacks so steep I think sometimes I’ll tip over backward. Later, I’ll drive home through broken-down logging towns with trailer parks full of moldering doublewides, where men lean against the bar in the one restaurant in town even though it’s only three or four in the afternoon. I’ll order hamburgers, or milkshakes, fried eggs and sausage, the kinds of foods Cass never allows across the threshold of our house, and pick at the greasy mess on my plate, wondering how my life would be different if one of those men was my father. Sometimes I see kids my own age. They stare me down, mean-eyed, and I always look away first.

You learn a lot about yourself when you spend most of your time alone. If I’m not with Aurora, I’m never with anyone. Aurora is happiest as the sun at the center of a solar system, and I’m at peace as a quiet moon, no light coming from me but the light that was hers first.

It’s hard if you are a girl like Aurora, easier if you are a girl like me. I’m not the one old gods hanker after, not the one likely to be invited to immortals’ parties. The Fates don’t bother with small fry like me. I was never jealous of Aurora, not of her beauty or her money or her sad fairy-tale life. I loved her with every corner of my dark and crooked heart. People said our names together in a single breath, like we were two halves of the same body, like they could not imagine either one of us on our own.

I was never jealous, I should say, until him.

I’m smoking a cigarette and trying to draw the ocean when Aurora calls. “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable all the uses of the world are seeming. Right? Are you with me?” I make a noncommittal noise. “Exactly. I’m going to have a party. Come over.” I know better than to argue, promise I’ll be there in an hour. I grab my bag and unlock my bike from where it’s chained to a pipe in the alley behind our apartment building. The night feels dangerous and too warm. It’s the kind of dark that makes you reckless, sends an itch creeping under your skin. This summer is the hottest I can remember. The air smells like jasmine and, underneath, the sea. The moon is low and huge in the sky.

I’m tired by the time I’ve bicycled the long miles to Aurora’s house, and I stand for a while in the shadows of her garden, catching my breath. When Aurora was younger there was an assortment of gardeners and assistants to keep up the grounds and take care of the house, but one by one they’ve straggled away over the years. These days, the house is lurching into a kind of derelict glamour. The once velvet-soft green lawn has been overtaken by wildflowers and straggling vines. Thorny hedges of blackberry have swallowed the wrought-iron fence that marks the edge of their property. The house itself is overrun with jasmine and St. John’s wort; yellow and purple flowers wind up the columns of the front porch, obscuring most of the house, and battle for supremacy with the ivy that shrouds the chimneys and hangs in green tendrils across the windows. Aurora seems unconcerned about her house’s slide into disrepair. “I like it,” she says. “Maybe one day my mother will wake up and notice her entire life is falling apart around her, and then she can clean it up.”

The first floor of her house is open and angular, and I can see through the plate-glass windows to the vaulted ceilings and vast white expanses, the huge abstract canvases that hang here and there: a savage red square on a yellow background, a field of blue, another field of white. Behind a slab of marble, a tattooed bartender in an old-fashioned suit pours drinks. In the yard, Aurora has hung paper lanterns in the trees. The roses are blooming. Her house is full of people. Industry people, ostentatiously uncool, making sure you know how much they don’t care about anything except music. Stubble-cheeked boys in cutoff shorts over thermals, hair hanging to their shoulders, talking in big voices about their bands, their tours, their perennially breaking-down vans, telling the same old musician stories. Some of the women are in vacuumed-tight dresses, their mouths painted on in glossy red slashes. I have no idea who they’re trying to impress. Any of these dudes will sleep with you for clean sheets and a free breakfast. No reason to even bother with brushing your hair.

I look for Maia. When she’s more or less sober she likes to prance around, play the queen. She still has all her old party dresses, sequins and leather and lace, though too much speed and too many long nights have stripped the flesh off her bones until she’s skeleton-gaunt, like those scary yoga ladies you see lurking in the aisles of health-food stores whispering about master cleanses and organ detox. Maia still has a faint echo of the glory of her youth, and when she’s on she’s like champagne: a bubbly thing that buoys you along, makes you feel special. I know Maia too well to be charmed by anything she does, but seeing her gussied up at parties is the green flash that shows up on your lids when you close your eyes after staring at the sun. Aurora’s the real deal, but Maia can dazzle you if you’re not used to the light.

I see her at last, leaning against a tree with a tumbler in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. Her straight black hair looks dirty and there are circles under her eyes that accentuate the sharp line of her cheekbones. Not sober, then. “Hi, Maia,” I say.

“Hi, sweetheart. Thanks for coming.” She sucks on the cigarette like it’s her last meal.
When
was
her last meal?
I wonder, eyeing the stark lines of her clavicle. “Aurora’s having a good time,” she says, pointing. Aurora’s across the yard. Her bleached hair is piled on top of her head and she’s wearing a sequined dress that grazes the tops of her long thighs. She hasn’t seen me yet. Maia and I watch her flit from person to person, dipping in like a hummingbird taking sips. “She never talks to me anymore. All grown up now, you girls.” This is not exactly fair; it is hard to talk to Maia, since half the time she is too high to know who either of us are.

“Mmm,” I say. “She’s busy.”

“She have a boyfriend?”

“I don’t think she’s very interested in settling down.”

“You girls.” Her face is wistful. Junkies getting nostalgic. Cute. “You grow up so fast.” She’s repeating herself. We’ve had this conversation before. If I let her, we’ll have it again before the night is out. You think I’m being unkind, and maybe I am, but I’m the one who’s had to get Aurora out of strangers’ houses, track her down when she disappears, sober her up enough to make it home, cover for her when she’s too fucked up for school. Maia loves her, loves us both, but if she were running the show we’d probably both be dead.

“I should see if Aurora needs any help.” I move my arm in a vague gesture that I hope conveys helpfulness.

“Of course, sweetie. Come back and talk to me later.”

When Aurora sees me, she hugs me tight, and I smell her skin: vanilla and patchouli and cigarettes. She is already drunk. From the edge of her garden I can see the still-lit windows of the office buildings far below us, and past that the bay. The moon’s reflection glimmers on the sound, a silver road on dark water. When we were little Aurora and I thought that path of light would take us to some distant, marvelous country. I assume this party will be like every other one of Aurora’s parties, but that’s where I’m wrong. This is the party where we meet Jack, and nothing will be the same again.

In the telling, I want to make up some sign, but the first time I see him is only ordinary. I know right away that he’s beautiful, but there’s no violin swelling, no chorus of stage-left witches spelling out our future when our eyes first meet. He’s leaning on a crumbling stone wall. Long legs, torn jeans, a shirt worn thin enough that I can see the outline of his body through the fabric. His skin is darker than Aurora’s and seems to catch and hold the light that drifts down from the lanterns. His hair snakes in coils to his shoulders. Dreadlocked, I think, but when I get closer I can see it’s hundreds of braids. There’s a guitar next to him. A cool breeze comes up behind me and hisses in my ear. A loose half-circle of people has formed around him, holding their drinks and gossiping idly. “Come on,” Aurora says.

“Who’s that?”

“We’re going to find out.”

We sidle between a couple of dudes in high tops and flannel, identical manes of long brown hair. The boy with the guitar touches the strings, and a hush falls across the garden. And then he begins to play.

A single note, faint and sweet, travels all the way from the stars to fall lightly to earth, and then another, scattering soft as rain. His music is like nothing I have ever heard. It is like the ocean surging, the wind that blows across the open water, the far call of gulls. It catches at my hair, moves across my skin and into my mouth and under my tongue. I can feel it running all through me. It is open space and mountains, the still dark places of the woods where no human beings have walked for hundreds of years, loamy earth and curtains of green moss hanging from the ancient trees. Salmon swimming against the current, dying as they leave their eggs, birthing another generation to follow the river back to the sea. Red-gold blur of a deer bounding through the woods. Snowmelt in spring, bears lumbering awake as the rivers swell, my own body stirring as though all my life has been a long winter slumbered away and I’m only now coming into the day-lit world. As he plays the party stills. Birds flutter out of the trees to land at his feet and he is haloed in dragonflies and even the moonlight gathers around him as though the sky itself were listening. The music fills every place in my body, surges hot and bright in my chest. At last he stops. Aurora’s mouth is open, her cheeks flushed. One of the flannel shirts is weeping openly. I can’t catch my breath.

A stranger is standing beside me now, very still. He is tall and so thin he’s just a rattle of bones wired together. He’s dressed in elegant, close-cut black clothes and a long black coat despite the summer heat. He is staring at the guitar player with a fixed intensity; not the awe or sorrow marking the faces of everyone around us, but something that looks more like hunger.

“That was beautiful,” I say to him, wanting to acknowledge somehow what we’ve witnessed even though the words feel worse than inadequate. He looks down at me and nods. For a moment I think there is red fire where his eyes should be, burning in the sockets of his cadaver’s face, and I bring my hand to my mouth in shock; but he blinks, and then he is human again. I back away from him, into Aurora, and he smiles a smile with too many teeth. He looks past me, sees Aurora, and his eyes widen. That same hunger, but even more focused. He nods at me again, and then he turns away from me and walks back across the garden.

“Whoa,” Aurora says. “Do you know that guy?”

“No,” I say, shaken. Around me the party slowly comes to life again, people shaking themselves and blinking, dazed and forlorn. Aurora takes my hand and leads me closer to the guitar player. He puts the guitar away in a battered case, stands up, stretches, sees us.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Aurora says. “We’re your future. I think you should tell us everything.”

His name is Jack. He’s come here from somewhere in the South, he won’t say where, and he thinks the summers are nice here but the winters are too cold, and he’s lived all over, and he plays for money wherever he goes. Sometimes the money is good. Most of the time it isn’t. He’s here to take his chances with the big leagues, like everyone else who got off a bus downtown in the last few years. He lives in a little house in town, washes dishes all day to pay the rent, plays every night until the stars begin their long fall into sunrise, does the whole thing again. Aurora is standing like a colt, one foot turned inward. She looks at him through the white curtain of her hair, which has come loose from its knot and hangs around her like a cloud. “Come away with us.”

“Right now?” he asks. She nods. “Isn’t this your party?”

“These people,” she says, contemptuous. “They’ll be fine.”

Aurora’s too drunk. “I’ll drive,” I say. She pouts, but she gives me the keys. We roll down all the windows in her car and let the night in. He sits in the back, leans his elbows on the headrests of our seats. His mouth is inches from my ear. I take us to the park Aurora and I loved best when we were children, rolling grassy hills at the very edge of the water, next to an abandoned factory surrounded by a chain-link fence. The buildings loom alien and strange in the moonlight. We walk to the place where the grass ends in a thin strip of sand at the edge of the water. Aurora collapses gracefully. I follow, less so. He lies between us in the grass. My skin hums electric, so close to his. Some key connection shorts out in my head and my brain goes dark, neatly wiped of reason. I want to roll over and take a bite out of his shoulder. Pummel him with my fists. I can hear the beat of his heart, I swear. The fabric of his shirt whispers as he breathes. All the cells in my body rearrange, compass needles pointing to his north. I could do anything, anything, anything, wonderful things, terrible things, all the things. Hit him, grab him, kiss him. Smell him. Eat him. Seize his hands and drag him off into the night. Put my head on his shoulder and sleep there until the sun rises and makes the world real again. Does he want to touch me? Is he trying to touch me? If he were trying to touch me he would touch me. If I moved my arm a hair’s breadth it would be touching his arm. Should I move my arm? If I moved my arm would he know it was on purpose or would he think it was an accident?
You should definitely, definitely touch me.
I send this message with so much force my eyes cross.