All Our Pretty Songs

by Sarah Mccarry

  “Girl musicians, too,” Cass said, and got that face she gets when she is done talking. “You want to date, baby girls, go for accountants.”

  But that’s not how it happens when your heart gets in the middle. Jack is like a light turned on in a room I didn’t even know was dark. It’s always been Aurora who’s loved boys with danger written under their skin. Until now, I’ve never loved anyone except Aurora. It’s more than his music, more even than the smell of his skin. More than the way his body is like a magnet calling all the iron in my blood. He’s a drug that’s hooked me on the very first trip. I knew it, the first time he kissed me, knew I was caught. Who am I, to fight the hand of fate? I already know what happens to people who tell the gods how to do their job.

  When I get home from the ocean Aurora is asleep in my bed and Cass is gone. The apartment is quiet and cool. Aurora is curled tightly in on herself, her arms crossed on her chest. I tuck the blanket around her shoulders. She makes a soft anguished noise in her sleep and then opens her eyes, staring at me without seeing. “He’s here,” she says. I walk to the window and look out. The street is empty.

  “There’s no one,” I say, but then I see a shadow that is darker than all the other shadows and at its center a spark of red. Like the skeleton man’s eyes, the man from Aurora’s party. I close the curtains. “He can’t get in.”

  “Who can’t get in?” Aurora asks behind me. She sits up, blinking. “Who are you talking to?”

  “No one. Never mind.” I climb into the bed and put my head in her lap and she tangles her fingers in my hair, smoothing it away from my face.

  “You smell like boy.” She squirrels down next to me and I tuck my chin against her shoulder. “Tell me everything,” she says, and I tell her.

  “You like him.”

  “I like him.”

  “Don’t go away from me,” she whispers. “Everybody goes away from me.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” The curtains move although there is no wind. Everything else has gone still. I close my eyes and all I can see is him: his face, his eyes, his hands with the knife, cutting into the peach. His hands on my skin. “I’m not going anywhere,” I say again, this time less certain. I put my arm around Aurora, curl up against the curve of her back, and wait for dawn.

  In the morning the world seems ordinary again. I leave Aurora asleep and pad into the kitchen, where Cass is at our scarred wooden table with a tarot spread in front of her and her hands around her favorite chipped blue mug. The kitchen is so familiar, so shabby and un-mysterious. This is our apartment, the ancient green stove whose left burners only work when they have a mind to, the tangle of houseplants in their net hammocks dangling from the ceiling, trailing leafy streamers down the cheery yellow walls. There are the wooden shelves lined with mason jars full of Cass’s herbs and roots and flowers. If I opened the cupboards I would find plates that did not match, jam jars doing double duty as water glasses, mugs from the Salvation Army that say things like WORLD’S #1 TEACHER and FORTY AND LOVING IT! I can smell bread baking. Nothing sinister could possibly happen in this kitchen. I pour myself a cup of coffee, the one vice Cass allows, and sit at the table, tucking my feet up underneath me. Cass looks tired, the lines around her grey eyes more pronounced. She stares at the cards, chewing on her lip.

  “You look like Fate is not on your side this morning,” I say.

  “I was asking about Maia. It never changes much.” She sweeps the cards into a pile, shuffles them, puts them away in their carved wooden box, and shakes herself. “Let’s talk about happier things.” I can’t stop the smile that spreads across my face.

  “I met a boy.” Boy is the wrong word. She laces her long fingers together.

  “A boy,” she echoes.

  “At Aurora’s party. He was playing music in the garden. It was––I’d never––” I falter. I can’t describe what happened that night when Jack played. “It was better than anything I had ever heard. And then he talked to me, and yesterday we went to the ocean after I got off work, and we had a picnic.” Describing it in our homely kitchen makes it seem as though what’s happening to me is ordinary, too. I am a girl, it is summer. I like a boy. In the fall I will start school again. There is no room for skeleton men in this kitchen, no place for songs that are like spells. For a moment I can stop thinking about Jack’s mouth. But Cass’s eyes are serious now.

  “Be careful,” she says.

  “I will.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “It feels like I do.” Is that true? I don’t know. Something in me recognizes something in him. His body brings my body home. If that’s not a kind of knowing, I don’t need to know what knowing is.

  She sighs and runs her hands through her hair. There is grey in it now, which still surprises me. Cass has always seemed barely older than I am. She refuses to dye her hair dark again, which I think is funny, considering how many unnatural colors it was when she was younger. “That’s a different kind of vanity,” she’d said when I pointed that out. “I’m not afraid of growing up.”

  Now she scowls at me. “That’s always how it feels.”

  “This is different.”

  “You’re seventeen. You think everything is different when you’re seventeen. How old is he? What does he do?”

  “He’s a musician.” I ignore the first question.

  “Stay away from musicians.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Of course I worry. I let you do whatever you want, I let you grow up without––” She stops. She had been about to say without a father. “I let you run around with Aurora,” she says instead. “Be careful.” Her face is impossible to read.

  “I promise.”

  “Is someone baking bread?” Aurora asks from the doorway. She’s sleepy-eyed and tousled, her shirt slipping off one shoulder, her white hair disordered.

  “It should be about done,” Cass says, and gets up to check the oven. Aurora takes a mug out of a cabinet, pours the last of the coffee. She has never commented on the fact that my house has four rooms and hers has forty, or that you can see the floorboards through our fraying rugs, or that nearly all the beautiful things we own are things Aurora bought for us. She gave me a Kiki Smith print for my birthday last year that’s worth more than everything else in our house put together.

  “God, I had the weirdest dream,” she says, sitting down.

  “What did you dream?” Cass asks.

  “I was being chased by this man, and his eyes were made out of fire, and he wanted something from me but I didn’t know what it was. I was running through this weird apartment with all these windows and on the walls were these terrible paintings of people being tortured, and everywhere there was this music and it was getting louder and louder. And all I wanted was to stop and go to sleep there and forget everything, but I knew if I stopped the man would never let me leave again.” As she talks a cloud moves across the sun and the light in the kitchen dulls. Cass closes her eyes, reaches forward, touches Aurora’s forehead with two fingers. She whispers something, opens her eyes, takes her hand away.

  “I’ll make you some tea.” She takes away Aurora’s coffee mug. Aurora makes a noise of protest as Cass pours the coffee down the drain and sets the kettle on the stove.

  “Humor her,” I say.

  Cass takes jars down from her shelves, measures out herbs. “Will you tell me if you have that dream again?” Like me, she’s trying to keep her words light, but I know she is as unnerved as I am.

  “Sure,” Aurora says, yawning. “Can I have a little coffee?”

  “Later,” Cass says.

  “It was like I wanted the man to catch me, though,” Aurora says. “In the dream. Like I knew he could give me something in return, for whatever it was he was going to take, and I wanted to know what it was. There was something beautiful about him, too. The whole thing felt so real.”

  “It’s a mask,” Cass says quietly with her back to us. “Beauty like that is always a mask.”

>   “It was a dream,” Aurora says. “Can I have some bread, at least?”

  Later, after Aurora goes home, and Cass takes her cards and her crystals and her charts and goes to meet a client, I try to draw Jack. I rifle through my records and put on the Gits, smooth the blank sheet of paper with my palms, get out my pencils, arrange and rearrange them, pick them up and put them down again. Whenever I close my eyes all I see is him. I draw a line and it’s wrong, another line and it’s worse, turn the paper over, try again. I can see him in my mind but not with my hands. Everyone at the party had moved toward him when he played, unseeing, their mouths open, their eyes blank. My work does not have that kind of power, or anything close. There is no magic in anything I ever draw; only labor, and love, and sometimes a grace that becomes larger than the paper or the canvas, so that you can see for a moment the person inside as though they are about to speak to you or come alive. But that does not happen very often, and most of the time my pictures are only pictures, and a lot of the time they are not very good at all. I put the pencil down. I don’t want to draw him. I want him here, in my room, his hands across my skin again, his mouth. I want him to play me songs. I want tangle my fingers in his hair. I want things that make me blush. It is unseemly, I think, to want someone this much. I can’t draw what I’m seeing. I would have an easier time trying to draw the shape of a cloud moving across the sky.

  I draw a line instead, a line of trees that becomes a dark wood with eyes peering out of it, shadows moving through the trees, dark shapes flitting from one branch to another. The afternoon shades into evening, and my room dims. The figures in the trees seem to move without my drawing them, as though they have taken on a life of their own, reaching out to me, whispering my name. I can see into a world without sunlight, a darkness so dense I can shape it with my hands. My bare feet are on a rough dirt path through the trees and the air has gone cold. Thick vines bristling with thorns wrap around the trunks, a viscous sap dark as blood running down the bark where the thorns have pierced it. The darkness around me is alive, creaking and rustling. The branches of the trees are bare and dry as bones. I hug myself, shivering. I am at the river again, the river in my dream. It gleams with a dull sheen as though it were made out of oil. I am looking for someone. Someone I must find, before it is too late. I can hear the dog howling. A figure steps onto the path between me and the river, a darkness blacker even than the darkness around it, and it speaks my name aloud in the dark and reaches its arms toward me. I scream and jerk backward, and my room floods with light from the hallway, and I hear my name again, over and over, Cass running through the open door. The darkness is an ordinary darkness again, my own small room with the lights off, my unmade bed, my stereo, my windowsill lined with candles and dried flowers, the disintegrating rag rug underneath my feet. “I didn’t hear you come home.”

  “I thought you were asleep, and then I heard you scream.”

  “I was drawing.” I turn to my desk to show her the forest but the paper is blank.

  She lets go of me and walks into the kitchen. I wonder how long I was in that forest. Where that forest was. Cass brings me a steaming mug of something bitter and sharp-smelling. I climb into my bed without taking off my clothes and she sits with me while I drink the tea, stroking my forehead, and when I fall asleep at last I do not dream again.

  “You have got it bad,” Raoul says. I’m so dopey with lust I’ve been tripping over fruit crates all day. We’re sitting in the street behind the stand now, on a smoke break, watching the fish-stall boys chuck salmon. They look good and they know it. They’re like a tribe of Norsemen, all bulging muscles and piercing blue eyes. Tourist ladies are always trying to get their pictures taken with the handsomest ones. Not so much my speed, but I like to watch Raoul flirt with them. Across the street, the pierogi girls are reading each other’s palms. Occasionally the summer breeze brings me a whiff of their patchouli.

  Raoul is wearing tight black leather pants, despite the summer sun, and a black tank top that hangs soft and loose and shows off his tattoos and the wooden rosary I’ve never seen him without. Me, threadbare black T-shirt, black jeans, black boots. The fish-stall boys call us the vampire twins. “Vampires be happy!” the one with the green hat likes to shout at us. “Cheer up, vampires!”

  “You don’t even know,” I say now. I want to fling myself across something but I settle for flailing my arms. “He’s, like, I don’t even know. Oh my god.”

  “Like so good he takes away your capacity for intelligent speech,” Raoul suggests.

  “Shut up.” I pretend to chuck a peach at him.

  “He’s pretty hot.”

  “Right? But it’s more than that. He has this, like, power. Like a magnet. I wish you could have seen him play.”

  “A magnet. Wow. That must be so compelling.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “What do you talk about?”

  I blush. “Um. Not a whole lot, so far.”

  “Ah, yes. The magnet.”

  “You are such a dick.”

  “I would never malign the power of the magnet.” He stubs out his cigarette on the bottom of his boot and tucks the butt in the compost pile.

  “Raoul.”

  “What?” he says, a portrait of innocence. “Just doing my part for the earth.”

  After work I follow Raoul home like a puppy. He heats up tamales, and I eat mine with my fingers. Raoul eats his tamales with a pair of chopsticks and turns on MTV.

  “When I was little I thought everyone’s best friend’s aunts and uncles were in music videos,” I tell him.

  “Yeah? That’s kind of weird.”

  “You want weird, try being Aurora.”

  Raoul’s apartment is much smaller than mine, one room with tiny bathroom and a tinier kitchen. He’s covered the walls with velvet and dried roses and white Christmas lights, crucifixes and paintings of saints. On a table sits a big wooden Virgen de Guadalupe surrounded by candles and flowers and ceramic skulls and rosaries, crystals and cones of incense and miniature bottles of liquor. He has a Pendleton blanket folded on his bed, triangles of color that repeat themselves mosaiclike, and an old acoustic guitar his father gave him. I am not allowed to touch the blanket. When Raoul looks at it his face glows.

  I often wonder what it is like for Raoul here, in this city where white people spring everywhere from the damp earth like fungi, but I never ask. I love Raoul because he does not treat me like a teenager, and because he is funny and kind and wise, and because he makes me weird techno mixtapes, stuff like Autechre and Orbital and Plaid, the Chemical Brothers, Carl Craig. I know his family lives in Arizona, and he grew up in the desert, and he spoke Spanish before he spoke English, and he is teaching himself Navajo, which his dad never spoke at home because he got beaten at the reservation school for using it when he was a kid. But that’s about all Raoul’s told me about his life before he came here. I know he misses living somewhere the sky is so big it makes you feel like a speck of dust, and I know his mom sends him mole sometimes, because when she does he makes chicken in mole and it is so good it almost makes me cry. Oscar Wilde jumps in my lap, angling for tamale. “Uh-uh,” I say, pushing him away, and he flicks his tail at me in disdain. Raoul smiles.

  MTV is playing hair metal, and we laugh at the outfits. “I need me some of that,” Raoul says, when the singer prances across the screen in a leopard vest. I imagine Raoul shirtless in a fur vest, deliberately overcharging tourists for their plums. It’s a glorious picture. When I get up to go home Raoul stops me. “You be careful with those older boys,” he says. His voice is teasing but his eyes are serious. I think of Cass in our kitchen with those same eyes. When all the adults in your life are telling you the same thing, I know you’re supposed to pay attention. But you know what Aurora says? The hard way is my favorite way to learn.

  When Aurora and I were little girls we slit open our palms in the room where her father died, pressed our hands together. Palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss. We were cl
umsy with the knife and cut too deep, and the blood ran down our arms and fell in fat red droplets to the floor. We both still have the scars, matching white slashes, and if you push aside the rug in that room you can see where the blood left a stain.

  When we were fourteen, Aurora almost died, too. We were drinking Maia’s bourbon and watching a movie. I fell asleep, woke with a start when the credits began. Aurora wasn’t there. I wandered the whole house looking for her before I thought to go outside. She was lying facedown in the grass, her skin cold, her face in a puddle of her own vomit. When the paramedics came, they said if I had found her any later there would have been nothing they could have done. “What were you thinking?” I asked her, when she woke up in the hospital with tubes coming out of her nose. Even like that she was beautiful.

  “I thought I could see him if I got far enough toward the other side,” she said. I didn’t have to ask who she meant.

  “Aurora,” I said, and then I didn’t know what to say after that. She looked at me and her eyes were very old.

  “I guess it runs in the family,” she said. Only much later did it occur to me I hadn’t even thought to call either of our mothers. It was the hospital that called Maia. She’d shown up disheveled and confused, and she held my hand in the hospital room while Aurora slept. “I’m so sorry, baby,” she’d whispered, over and over again, until finally I asked her to stop. I’d told the paramedics I was Aurora’s sister. I never told Cass about it at all.

  After that I tried not to get drunk around Aurora. One of us would always have to know when to stop, and I understood after that night that it was never going to be her. One of us had to learn how to say no, figure a way out, count the exits. It was up to me to keep her safe. There was no one else who could.