About a Girl

by Sarah Mccarry

  There were a thousand questions I could have asked her, but I didn’t know where to start, and so I left them all buzzing in my mouth like bees battering a windowpane. We drove for a long time along winding roads through thick woods, sunlight spattering down to land patchily all around us. The trees were enormous and very green and in some places drew so close to the road that it seemed as though we were hurtling through a dim emerald tunnel. We came out abruptly into the blue day, onto a long low bridge resting directly on an expanse of water. I made a happy noise, and Kate looked over at me and grinned. “Hood Canal Bridge,” she said. “Third-longest floating bridge in the world. Sank right into the water in 1979. We’re crossing over to the peninsula. Not much like this in New York, I’ll bet.”

  “We have a lot of bridges, but it’s not the same,” I said. (Thinking: the Q across the river, steely glitter of skyscrapers catching the afternoon light, broad ribbon of water below striped white with the wakes of dozens of boats, as far away from this stretch of sky and sea as the Ganges, or the Amazon.) The metal grating of the bridge deck thumped like a metronome under her truck’s wheels. On one side of the bridge the water moved choppily; on the other, it was flat and densely silver as mercury, rising and falling in voluptuous movements as if it were breathing. A wooded shore stretched along the far edge of the indigo water, dotted here and there with grey and black specks that must have been houses. “It’s beautiful,” I added, unnecessarily.

  “Yep,” she said. “Although if you’re ever here in the winter, you might change your mind.”

  “It stops being beautiful?”

  “You can’t see shit for all the rain nine months out of the year. You came at the right time. Listen, I can give you a ride wherever you’re going, but when we get into town I’ll have to stop at work for a bit—I need to open up the bar before the evening bartender comes in.”

  “I can get a cab,” I said. She laughed.

  “Maybe,” she said. “If he isn’t drunk. Where you staying, anyway? You have family in town?”

  “Friend,” I said cautiously. “Old musician my—” I stalled on the word. “My mother knew. She used to live in LA.”

  “You mean Jack?”

  I looked at her in surprise. “How’d you know?”

  “It’s a small town.”

  “How do you know Jack?”

  “Everyone knows Jack. I’m just the only person he talks to.”

  “Oh,” I said. There was a silence. “And you, um, work in a bar?”

  “I own the bar.”

  “Which bar?” As if I’d know.

  “It’s the only bar.”

  “Oh,” I said again. If she was curious why I was visiting Jack, she did not ask. Was she Jack’s girlfriend? She wasn’t at all pretty, but she looked competent. The muscles in her forearms rippled as she steered, and underneath the ugly clothes she was solid and strong. She looked like someone you would want with you on an expedition to the Arctic. Maybe if Jack had been in love with Aurora he’d decided to move on to a more sensible model. I could hardly blame him. Aurora herself had elected to leave me with a fitter candidate.

  After the bridge the road climbed again, into trees and more trees, and then a sprawling valley checkered with farmland, and then more trees. All the extraneous trees of the world seemed to have been gathered here for safekeeping. I wondered if I’d be able to see the sky at all, when we got where we were going; it would be a shame to be all the way out here, a hundred miles from anything like a city, and have all that blessed darkness obscured by a stupid branch. We drove through another green tunnel until the trees opened up to an ugly stretch of road—shabby gas station, dispirited-looking convenience store, my heart sinking in disappointment. (Was this it? Why on earth had Jack come here?). Then we came around a corner, and I inhaled sharply.

  We’d crested a tall hill that spilled downward into what looked like the edge of the world—a tiny strip of town, old red-brick buildings, and past them more blue: blue water, blue sky, blue mountains in the blue distance. It looked like a movie set, not a real place.

  “That’s the downtown,” Kate said. “I’ll take you the long way—the bar’s down there, but you might as well see a few of the sights first.” She turned left off the main road and made a confusing series of turns—more hills, more trees, more long windy stretches. Wooden houses in a row. A field strewn about with tall, jagged-leaved flowers—“Opium poppies, they grow like weeds around here; come September half the town’s stoned out of its mind,” she said—and a big lagoon. A cemetery with white headstones in perfect lines.

  “That’s the Fort up there,” she said, pointing from a four-way intersection at a big hill that rose behind a huge field lined with Victorian houses.

  “Fort?”

  “Used to be a military base, up until the end of World War Two. Lot of bored soldiers hanging out with cannons in the bunkers, waiting for somebody to try to attack Seattle. Nobody ever did. It’s been a park since the fifties.”

  “It’s pretty.”

  “Those houses are the old officer’s quarters. Up on that hill are all the abandoned bunkers. They have conferences and that kind of thing in the Fort itself and rent out the houses, but the hill’s all wild. Some kids broke into the old dance hall on the hill and put on a production of Marat/Sade last summer. Cut a hole through the floor and smuggled everybody in at midnight and lit it with candles. They even got a bathtub in there somehow.”

  “Bathtub?”

  “For Marat. Stabbed in the tub? You don’t know the story? It’s very Greek.”

  I was not sure if she was telling me this anecdote to illustrate the intrepid nature of the local youth or their level of boredom. “That sounds interesting,” I said neutrally. A car honked behind us and Kate waved apologetically and moved forward through the intersection.

  How was this place even real? How had no one discovered it? “Oh, they’ve discovered it all right,” Kate said, though I hadn’t said anything out loud. “Million retirees moving up from California, buying up all the real estate and sending the prices sky-high. And the whole town depends on tourism. Back in the day it was just a half-dead old mill town—mill’s still here—and a handful of people moved out here to grow weed in the woods and live off the land. But now—” She shrugged, in a manner that was apparently meant to convey the entire weight of the town’s present tragedies, whatever they might be. I nodded as if I understood and wondered again how the hell Jack had ended up out here.

  We’d come to the miniature downtown: a few blocks of pretty old buildings and a gull-dotted wharf. Kate parked her truck and I followed as she unlocked the front door of a building on the water side of the street. Her bar was dimly lit and lovely—I’d been imagining a scraggly dive, but the walls were paneled wood and the long polished bar was wood, too, with a mirror and shelves of liquor bottles behind it like an old-fashioned saloon. The floorboards were broad and ancient. “They don’t make ’em like that anymore,” Kate said. I was getting tired of her uncanny habit of reading my thoughts. I wandered the bar’s length. It ended in a room just big enough for a few booths and a pool table. A glass door led to a balcony that hung out over the water.

  “You want anything to eat?” Kate asked from behind the bar, where she was busying herself polishing glasses and counting through liquor bottles. I thought of my tiny stash of cash, already depleted by the taxi to the ferry. “Don’t worry about it. On me.”

  “You don’t have to do all this.”

  She shrugged. “Can’t have you starving on my watch, city mouse. You get too skinny and the coyotes’ll drag you off into the woods.”

  “Coyotes?”

  “Big old things. Like wolves, but meaner. They eat people.” I stared at her, and she laughed. “Joking, city mouse. Joking.”

  “They don’t eat people?”

  “They don’t come near people. Lots of ’em in the woods around here, though. They do eat cats. And other pets that leave their good sense at home.” I thou
ght of Dorian Gray, masticated in the jaws of a ravening wolflike creature, and winced. I sat at one of the bar stools—handsome, leather capped and ringed in brass, heavy and solid—and watched Kate as she bustled about the bar, engaged in various preparatory activities. She disappeared for a while through a set of swinging doors and came back with a hamburger on a white china plate, ringed with a pile of fries.

  “Whoa,” I said, “you don’t have to—”

  “Hush,” she said. “Ketchup?”

  “Yes, please.” It was three hours later in New York—Henri and Raoul would have come home by now and seen my note. I thought, I should call them. Kate met my eyes.

  “Eat up,” she said.

  I should—I should—I shook my head. There was something I needed to do, but I couldn’t remember what it was and the hamburger looked amazing, so rare it was almost bloody—“I like it when they’re still calling for their mothers,” I said happily.

  “I had a feeling,” she said. I ate my hamburger slowly, savoring each bite. A few people straggled into the bar; none of them so much as glanced at me, and I was relieved, for the moment at least, to be anonymous. The bar door swung open again, bringing with it a sudden heady smell—something wild and sweet, like the dried lavender Aunt Beast sometimes hung up in our apartment in the summer—and a skinny black-clad figure stalked past me, taking a stool a few seats down and slapping a pack of cigarettes down on the bar. Gnawing on a fry, I examined the new arrival.

  It was a girl. Not much older than me, from the look of her. She was dressed in tight black jeans, more patch than denim, and a faded black T-shirt, three sizes too big for her and slipping off one shoulder. She kicked at the brass railing at the bar’s base with feet shod in decaying black sneakers. She wore no makeup, save for perfect stripes of black eyeliner that extended in matching upward flicks at the outside corners of her eyes; her knuckles were streaked with dirt; and her bare forearms were alive with black tattoos—a crow in flight, an old-fashioned schooner with its sails unfurled, a compass, a constellation I didn’t recognize—and crisscrossed with pale scars that stood out sharply against her dark skin. A tangle of black-dyed hair rioted down her back in a serpentine mass. Despite her state of dishabille, she held herself like someone who was used to being paid court. “That’s Maddy,” Kate said, jerking her chin toward the girl, and the girl lifted her lovely fox-sharp face toward me, and I saw the most striking of all her remarkable features: her immense, hypnotic, lion-colored eyes.

  “Did you want to take a picture?” she asked drily. Her voice was low and rough, the voice of someone much older than she looked, and there was something at the back of it that made me think she had grown up speaking a language other than English, although I could not have begun to guess which one. Her yellow eyes gleamed with amusement, and all at once I felt shabby and young.

  Flustered, I looked back down at my fries. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Hi.” Without being asked, Kate got a bottle of whisky off one of the shelves behind the bar and poured a drink, set it in front of the girl.

  “You want a beer?” she asked me.

  “I’m not twenty-one.”

  “So I gathered,” Kate said.

  “I don’t—no, thank you.”

  Kate shrugged. “Up to you, city mouse.” Maddy tilted her head back and finished her drink in one swallow, thumped the empty glass down on the bar, and pointed at it. Kate refilled it, and she drank that, too. Kate refilled her glass for a third time; Maddy pulled a cigarette out of her pack (Lucky Strikes, Aunt Beast’s brand), lit it, blew a long satisfied plume of smoke at the ceiling, and sipped her third whisky daintily. I was staring again and so I looked at Kate instead, who was watching me with an expression I could not read.

  The door swung open again, admitting a pretty girl with black hair cut to her chin, big eyes, and what Aunt Beast would have called enviable assets. She trotted past me without so much a glance in my or Maddy’s direction and slid behind the bar. “Cristina,” Kate said, “can you hold down the fort for half an hour or so? I need to give this girl”—she tilted her head at me—“a ride. And you”—this to Maddy—“behave yourself.” Maddy, in the midst of lighting another cigarette, looked up, yellow eyes narrowed. Behind Kate’s back, Cristina rolled her eyes, and a grin flickered across Maddy’s face. I got my bag as Kate came around the bar, half-turning as I followed her out the door.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, but if Maddy heard me, she didn’t acknowledge it. Cristina was already getting down the bottle of whisky as Maddy held out her glass.

  Kate drove us in silence, back past the fort she’d showed me earlier, the blue lagoon, the fields of poppies. We turned, and turned again, and I soon lost track of what direction we were headed in.

  “That girl,” I said. “Maddy. Who was that?”

  “Trouble,” Kate said curtly. I flushed. “I’ve known her for a long time,” Kate added, her voice softer. “I try to look out for her, not that I do much good.”

  “She’s from here?”

  “No.”

  “Are you?”

  “No.” I opened my mouth to ask another question, but I could not think of what I had meant to say. There was a faint buzzing in my ear, like a distant beehive, and I knocked the side of my head gently with one fist. We turned again, onto a long gravel road, rattling around in the truck so that I would have slid into her if I hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, and then we stopped. We had arrived at a wide green clearing, ringed with trees; at the far edge stood a modern one-story white house with plenty of big windows and a garden off to one side. Behind all of this was a stretch of twilit sky where the stars were already coming to life. Kate turned off the truck, and I got out.

  I had come all this way and now did not know what to do with myself; was struck with the intense and sudden conviction that I had reached the apotheosis of the worst idea of my life. I walked out to the sharp green line at the edge of Jack’s yard, where the grass yielded to sky, with some thought of collecting myself, but then I looked down and took a step back, reeling. Jack’s yard ended in a cliff, its muddy brown face a sheer drop down to the rocky line of the beach so far below me that the breakers crashing on the shore looked as though they had been rendered in miniature. “Careful,” Kate yelled from the truck. I took another step back and turned; she’d gotten my bag out of the truck and was walking toward me. “Don’t fall off, city mouse. Nothing left of you by the time you get to the bottom.”

  “There’s no railing,” I said, and she laughed.

  “That’s not how we do things out here,” she said. She carried my bag to Jack’s front door and I followed her, my heart thumping. My anxiety must have been obvious; she gave me a kindly pat on the shoulder. “He doesn’t know you’re coming, does he?”

  “Not technically, no.”

  “He doesn’t bite,” she said, almost gently. She reached past me and rapped on the door before I could stop her. After a moment, it opened, and I had to tilt my head up to look at the man who stood in front of me.

  He was not handsome in the ordinary, catalog-model sense of the word; he was tall and spare-framed to the point of being nearly gaunt, but his face was striking in the sharpness of its features and the severity of its angles. If I had not known already that this Jack and the man in Mr. M’s picture were the same person, I never would have guessed it; that Jack, like this one, was lean and graceful, but that Jack had had, despite the melancholy look in his eyes, a young man’s face, and this Jack had the cast of someone wiser and sadder and much older than the intervening decades alone would suggest. That Jack’s hair had been long and black, and this Jack’s thick, silvering curls were cut close to his skull. His dark eyes were marked with fine lines at their corners, and his forehead was creased in a way that suggested he did not often smile.

  But if he had been—or was still—prone to the various excesses of vice said to be particular to rock stars, they had left him otherwise unscathed. He had none of the aging libertine about him. He looked
hard and stern, like a fisherman, or a soldier, someone who had spent all his life in repetitive, efficient action. If there was any trace of my own features in the slope of his jaw or the high planes of his cheekbones, those similarities did not give themselves up upon first examination. And it seemed unlikely that someone so dark-skinned would produce someone as pale as me, but my grandfather had been white as a mushroom, and genetics is still a science largely marked by mystery and guesswork. It occurred to me for the first time that I would have benefited considerably from preparing some introductory remarks. Where had my brain gone this summer? What was I thinking, coming here; how on earth had I ended up on the doorstep of a total stranger, escorted by a bizarre mind-reading hippie I’d known for all of two hours? “Um, hi,” I said. “I probably should have called first. But I think you knew—I mean, I know you knew—my—” I could not say the word. “Aurora.”

  “Aurora,” he repeated. His voice was deep, and raspy, as if he did not speak aloud often. He looked at Kate, who remained silent, and then back at me again.

  “She was my—she, um, had me. Like, birth.” His face was blank. I sallied forth in the face of his terrifying indifference. “I’m Tally—I know this is unorthodox, but I came a long way and I was hoping to—I thought maybe I could ask you a few questions.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I found her on the ferry,” Kate said. “Take good care of her, understand?” She was looking at Jack with an unnerving intensity; I almost took a step back myself. But he stared her down without flinching, and she shrugged and looked away first. “I have to get back to work now. Come find me at the bar if you need anything.” I watched stupidly as she marched back to her truck.

  “Thanks!” I yelled after her as an afterthought, but she didn’t turn around or acknowledge that she’d heard me. The truck roared to life and she was gone. I took a deep breath. “I was hoping—” I faltered; his expression made me want to crawl under a rock. “Kate said that you wouldn’t mind.” Kate had said nothing of the sort. If Jack threw me off his doorstep—and I would hardly have blamed him if he did—I was stuck in the middle of the woods, at night, in a place I knew nothing about, with no recourse whatsoever.