All Our Pretty Songs (9 page)

I draw a flight of shorebirds winging their way up his spine and a cluster of sea urchins spiking across his shoulder. I draw an osprey, stalled in midair with its wings crooked, in that still moment before it begins its dive. I draw waves rising between his ribs. I draw fish winking silver through the depths, kelp winding around them in thick glossy coils. I thought I knew my own desire, until the wind changed and a storm blew in and remade the sky, dredged mystery from the deep.
I put a spell on you
, Nina Simone croons. His back rises and falls as he breathes, and it is all I can do to keep myself from dipping my head and licking his skin. When the record ends I get up and turn it over. Nina Simone sings about sorrow and love, and the gold of her voice fills the air around us. When I am done I set the brush aside and put one hand over what I’ve drawn, fingers spread, not touching. Rousseau’s lion watches over us, wide-eyed, solemn. Desire rises in me, humming like a song. The room is very still. I blow on his skin to dry the last of the ink and he shivers, catches my wrist. “Is it good?”

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

“Show me,” he says.

“Do you have a mirror?”

“Not like that,” he says. “With your hands.”

You think that the world we live in is ordinary. We make noise and static to fill the empty spaces where ghosts live. We let other people grow our food, bleach our clothes. We seal ourselves in, clean the dirt from our skins, eat of animals whose blood does not stain our hands. We long ago left the ways of our ancestors, oracles and blood sacrifice, traffic with the spirit world, listening for the voices out of stones and trees. But maybe sometimes you have felt the uncanny, alone at night in a dark wood, or waiting by the edge of the ocean for the tide to come in. We have paved over the ancient world, but that does not mean we have erased it.

Once upon a time, girls who were too beautiful or too skilled were changed into other things by angry gods and their wives. A cow, a flower, a spider, a fog. Maybe you boasted too loudly of sleeping with a goddess’s husband. Maybe you talked too much about your own talents. Maybe you were born dumb and pretty, and the wrong people fell in love with you, chased you across fields and mountains and oceans until you cried mercy and a god took pity on you, switched your body to a heaving sea of clouds. Maybe you stayed in one place for too long, pining for someone who wasn’t yours, and your toes grew roots into the earth and your skin toughened into bark. Maybe you told the world how beautiful your children were, and the gods cut them down in front of you to punish you for your loose tongue, and you were so overcome with grief your body turned to stone.

You know as well as I do that those things don’t happen anymore. Girls stay girls, no matter how pretty they are. No matter who lusts after them. But in this time, like in any time, love is a dangerous game.

Who among us has not wanted to be transformed? I had lived all my life surrounded by extraordinary people, and some nights I would fall asleep wishing to wake up worthy of them. Not a painter, but an artist, someone who could capture life in a single perfect line, render the movement of light on water with the stroke of a brush. But the lesson in stories is always that metamorphosis comes with a price. Think of Midas, who asked for the power to turn the world around him into gold, only to sit alone in his palace full of riches, meat and wine turning to metal in his mouth. Think of Icarus, builder of wings, who flew too close to the sun and plummeted in one last fall. Think of Aurora’s father, who woke up one morning with his songs playing on every radio in the world. He was never happy again after that, and now he’s dead. The old gods do not give kindly; what delights them most is taking away.

Both of them, Jack and Aurora, burned like stars, and light like that draws things that are better left alone in the dark.

When I let myself into the apartment the next morning I know right away that I am in trouble. Aurora is sitting next to Cass on the couch, her knees drawn up to her chin. Cass is holding a mug of coffee. “Where the
hell
were you,” she says, her voice tight.

“I thought you were
dead
!” Aurora cries. She’s still wearing her slip, her barrettes askew. There’s a blanket around her shoulders. They must have spent the night on the couch.

“You could have at least called,” Cass says.

“There wasn’t a phone,” I say.

“You were with
him,
” Aurora says. “You left me at the club and didn’t tell me where you went and I came here at three in the morning and told Cass I couldn’t find you. We almost called the cops, and all you can say is that there wasn’t a
phone
?” Cass puts her hand on Aurora’s shoulder.

“Aurora, sweetheart, why don’t you go sleep, and I’ll deal with this.” Without looking at me, Aurora runs into my room and slams the door behind her. “Come into the kitchen,” Cass says. I follow her, sit in my favorite chair as she gets down her jars, measures out herbs, puts water on the stove to boil. The silence is like a third person in the room.

“Don’t you ever do that to me again,” she says at last. “I don’t ask a lot of you, and I know you—” her voice breaks. “I know you grew up fast. But I’m still your mother, and you live in my house, and if anything happened to you I don’t know how I would keep going. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” She sets a mug in front of me. I drink my tea in chastened silence. Nettles and oat straw. She’s stopped being mad. If she were still mad she’d have given me burdock or something worse.

“Do I need to give you the safe-sex talk again?”

“
Mom
. He didn’t give me a lobotomy.”

She shakes her head. “Go to bed,” she says, “before I kill you myself.”

I think Aurora is fast asleep but when I slide under the covers she puts an arm around me. “I’m still mad at you,” she murmurs.

“You were with that horrible man.”

“He isn’t horrible. He’s nice.”

“How old is that guy?”

She yawns. “Don’t be bourgeois. And you’re not off the hook.” She closes her eyes and burrows closer to me. I hug her close and we fall into a dreamless sleep.

I wake up hours later. The long afternoon is slipping into twilight. I can hear Aurora in the kitchen, talking to Cass. I sit up, run my fingers through my choppy hair, look at my familiar walls covered in drawings and photo-booth strips of me and Aurora, me and Cass, an ancient one of Cass and Maia with their hair spiked and padlocked chains around their necks, flipping off the camera and kissing in the final frame.

When we first moved into the apartment, Cass let me paint one wall of my room a matte cream and draw on it. Over the years, Aurora and I mapped out our own kingdom, its outlines becoming more legible as my drawing skills improved. We’d started at the very center of the wall, a few feet off the floor. We’d been too small to reach any higher. We drew a village of lopsided houses with stick-figure people holding the leashes of stick-figure dogs. As the drawing spread outward, we added mountain ranges and forests, a sea dotted with tall ships, a solitary dragon undulating overhead. We’ve never outgrown it. We’ll get stoned on a sleepy, rainy afternoon and go to work. When Cass was teaching me to read tarot I drew the Queen of Wands with her cat, Strength and her lion, the Empress reclining on her throne. When Aurora first started sleeping with rockers, she added a slew of long-haired boys. Now, we draw people we know: Raoul and Oscar Wilde, Maia, Cass. We’ve never thought to add ourselves.

I root through my dresser for a clean pair of cutoffs and a T-shirt, carry them into the bathroom with me, and turn on the shower. Ink runs off my skin, pooling in the bottom of the shower, reminding me of the night before and turning my legs shaky with desire.
I am not this kind of girl,
I think, trying to be fierce with myself. I am not the kind of girl who ditches her best friend and runs out into the night with a stranger and kisses him until dawn. I am not some lovesick dupe. I am not at the mercy of my new, most favorite vice. I am
not
. I scrub until all traces of the ink are gone and the shower’s out of hot water.

Cass and Aurora are still in the kitchen, stir-frying vegetables. A pot of brown rice simmers on the stove. Hippie dinner. I sigh. Some days, like this one, I wish Cass was not a witch so that we could have steak. After we eat, Aurora follows me into my room and rummages through my records, and I know I’m forgiven. She sprawls across my bed with an old issue of
Magnet
and I take out my sketchbook to draw her. We’re quiet for a while, Aurora turning pages and humming, me laboring over each line, trying for fluid grace and failing miserably. “I have something for you both,” Cass says from the door.

“Presents!” Aurora says happily. “I love presents!” She rolls over, sits up.

“Hey,” I say. “Now I’ll never finish this.” Getting Aurora to hold still long enough for me to draw her is a futile endeavor, but that never stops me from trying. Cass hands us each a bundle wrapped in silk. I unfold the cloth to find a little leather bag on a leather string. She’s given Aurora the same thing.

“What’s in here?” Aurora says, tugging at the bag’s knotted drawstrings.

“Don’t,” Cass says sharply. “Don’t open them. They’re bound.”

“I know it’s bound,” Aurora says. “I want to see what’s inside.”

“Not bound like that,” I say. I take Cass’s witchiness more seriously than Aurora does, although nowhere near as seriously as Cass does herself. “They’re amulets. Thanks, Mom.”

“Amulets for what?” Aurora leaves off picking at the strings, but she’s still eyeing the bag like she thinks it’s full of secret treasures and wants to tear it apart.

“Protection,” Cass says. “Safe travels through dark places.” Her voice is even. A chill runs through me, and for a moment the room is very still. Aurora stares at Cass. I can the challenge in the set of her chin. The leather bag is warm in my hand, warmer than the heat of my skin.

“I don’t need amulets,” Aurora says. They are watching each other like cats raising hackles, growls starting in the backs of their throats. I look from Cass to Aurora and back again. Whatever is happening here, it definitely bypassed go and went straight to really fucking weird without collecting two hundred dollars.

“Hey,” I say, but they ignore me. Cass blinks first and Aurora looks away, the corner of her mouth curving up in a malicious smile. “Hey,” I repeat. Cass shakes her head as if she’s walked into a spider web.

“I can only help you if you let me.”

“I don’t need anyone’s help.” Aurora hands her amulet back to Cass. “Thanks, though,” she says in a normal voice, and some of the tension seeps out of the room.

“You’ll wear it,” Cass says to me.

“Sure.” She looks at me. “
Okay
.” I loop the leather over my head. The bag settles between my breasts. It’s heavier than it felt in my hand.

“Don’t take that off,” she says. “Good night.”

“’Night,” Aurora says to her retreating back. “God,” she yawns when Cass closes the door behind her. “Your mom is such a fucking weirdo.”

“Tell me about it,” I agree, touching the leather bag.

“I should go.”

“Spend the night.”

“Nah.” She looks almost furtive. “I have to be somewhere.”

“Where?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Aurora.”

“No, really. Just this dumb thing.”

“You want me to come?”

“You would hate it,” she says.

“I’ll still come.”

“I know.” She smiles. “You’re the best. I’ll spare you.”

“Okay,” I say. “Have fun.” After she goes I sit on my bed, staring at nothing. We’ve always had secrets, me and her. But we’ve never had secrets we didn’t share.

Aurora calls me late the next morning, talking nonstop as soon as I pick up the receiver. “What are you doing? Go to the window. Go to the window right now.” Dutifully, I carry the phone across the room.

“And?”

“And look outside. Look! Outside!” I peer down the street.

“I’m looking?”

“Tell me that is not the most magnificent motherfucking morning you have ever seen in your natural life, sweet child of mine. We are going out into it, you and I. Call Jack.”

“Jack doesn’t have a phone.”

“Then send him a missive of the heart. We are coming to fetch him. He’s going to busk for us.”

“I don’t—”

“Perfect, I’ll be there in ten.”

I’m still laughing when she pulls up outside my window, honking furiously. I grab my backpack and take the stairs two at a time. “What are you wearing,” she says.

“Clothes.”

“God grant me the serenity to accept the disastrous fashion choices of my best friend in all the world, who elects to garb herself in rags even when being transported by her faithful chauffeur to the abode of her beloved, possibly the foxiest man in the

entire—”

“He is not my beloved. Lord. What’s wrong with my clothes?”

Aurora snorts and takes a corner so fast I nearly go through the open window. “Seatbelts are recommended,” she says.

Aurora leaps up Jack’s steps and pounds briskly on his front door. He opens it, blinking sleepy-eyed at the morning sun. “Come on!” she yells. “Get your guitar! Come on!” She’s on the verge of jumping up and down. Jack looks at me over her shoulder.

“It’s like saying no to a tornado,” I tell him.

“I see,” Jack says. Obediently, he fetches his guitar from next to his bed, puts it in Aurora’s trunk, gets in the backseat.

“We’re going to the canal!” Aurora says, gleeful as a toddler. “You can busk and we’ll pass a hat around. And then we’ll make garlands out of flowers and put them on your head. And everyone will love us and you’ll be famous.”

“I think the steps to fame are typically more complex,” Jack says, but he’s grinning.

“Nope,” says Aurora. “Stick with me. I’ll make you a star.”

The grassy parkland along the canal is packed with people. It’s a farmer’s market day. Hippies tote babies and trail dogs on hemp ropes, and wholesome-looking types are weighed down with cloth bags overflowing with greens. Cass’s idea of heaven. If I had the power, I’d send the lot of them straight to hell. Aurora buys a still-warm loaf of bread and some goat cheese and shoves chunks of bread in her mouth as she directs us to a clear spot next to the water. Jack takes out his guitar, tunes it. No one pays much attention. “Play a happy song,” Aurora says through a mouthful of cheese.