About a Girl

by Sarah Mccarry

  “Hi,” I said. Up close she was older than I’d first thought, maybe in her late twenties or early thirties, with a sharp, clever, pretty face. She raised a hand to Kate, pointed at her empty glass to signal another; the way she moved made me think of the crows in Jack’s yard. The fat crow had left me a quarter that morning; I fingered it in my pocket and thought about going home.

  “You just move here?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “only visiting. You live here?”

  “From here. My dad owns the movie theater”—she pointed out in the general direction of the street—“down the street, the Rose. But I live mostly in New York.”

  I was as happy as if she’d told me she had a winning lottery ticket in her pocket with my name on it. “I’m from New York,” I said.

  “Really?” she said, with a flash of recognition that I knew at once: that strange and funny solidarity of New Yorkers, as though we were anthropologists from the same place who had spent too much time alone amidst a pleasant but ineffably foreign people and had at last stumbled upon a kindred spirit with whom to exchange commentary on the inscrutable customs of the native population. (“Can you believe what they eat? Everyone has a car! There are washing machines in their houses!”) “What part?”

  I told her, and she told me where she lived, in a fifth-floor walk-up in a part of Brooklyn I knew well (“Do you get the falafel at that place on the corner?” “Oh, and that bodega on Twenty-first and Fifth that has the most amazing tacos!”), and we spent a happy fifteen minutes chattering at each other about all the places we had in common, the overlapping Venn diagram of our New York circles. She was an actor, mostly stage work but more and more television (“It’s not rewarding intellectually but god, it pays”), and I knew most of the places where the shows she had been in had filmed.

  “It’s funny,” she said, taking a sip of her drink—her second now—“things were going badly there for me for a while, couldn’t get work, shows canceling everywhere, and I almost threw in the towel and came back here. Of all places. It’s been hard a lot, you know—I think sometimes all that kept me there was refusing to admit I’d been bested, and then things always got better—but that time was the worst, and I was so tired, it was winter and I was living in this terrible apartment with no heat, landlady on the first floor who was this crazy old Polish woman who didn’t speak a word of English and would come into our apartment when we weren’t there and steal the lightbulbs, if you can believe that, and then one morning I was in the shower and part of the tiled wall just fell on me, and there was this great gaping blackness behind it, this huge hole, and I screamed and almost broke my leg jumping out of the tub”—we were both laughing—“and I was like, ‘Jesus god in heaven, fuck this. No career on earth is worth this.’” She looked thoughtfully at her glass.

  “What happened?” I prompted.

  “I called my psychic,” she said.

  “Your psychic?” I echoed, certain I’d misheard.

  “This woman in Colorado,” she said. “They’re all different, you know, how they access you—this woman I used to see channeled an alien being called Kotak, and she was good—she told my friend one time to check the right front tire of her car and she went outside and there was a nail in the tire, can you believe that? But she only told me practical stuff, so I found this other woman who talks to your angels. ‘They have so much to tell me about you, they’re so excited, they’ve been chattering at me before you even got on the phone,’ she said, and then she went on to tell me all these things about how I was going to have a great career, and I had a gift, and—oh, it’s embarrassing, you don’t need to know what they said. I was crying within minutes. But anyway, I stayed. I come back every summer for a few weeks to run the theater so my dad can have some time off, but I’m so glad I didn’t move back here for real.”

  “You stayed in New York because your angels told a psychic in Colorado that you were going to have a good career,” I said. Everyone here, I thought, was utterly batshit, even this totally normal-seeming person, well put together and smart, who had managed somehow to get herself off the peninsula to a civilized place like New York and yet still took the advice of people who thought they were talking to angels. She laughed.

  “You haven’t seen the bumper sticker yet,” she said. But I had: WE’RE ALL HERE BECAUSE WE’RE NOT ALL THERE, plastered on decaying VW buses and battered station wagons captained by decrepit old hippies who looked as though they’d be likely to fumigate you with patchouli. “But I tell you what, she was right.”

  She finished her drink and dug some bills out of her wallet, left them on the bar with a wave to Kate and a nod to me. “See you around,” she said, and I waved back as she left.

  “How’s Jack?” Kate asked, sliding another bottle of beer across the bar to me.

  “We went sailing once,” I said, and stopped. When had we gone sailing? Yesterday? Or had it been days ago already? Time was sliding away from me, messy and strange. “But otherwise he’s never around and I never see him. Do you know why he doesn’t play anymore?”

  Kate gave me a sharp, unreadable look. “No.” You’re lying, I thought.

  “It seems strange, doesn’t it? I mean, who does that? Wasn’t music his whole life?”

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  “I did.” But some people had come into the bar and Kate was already turning away from me, overeager to greet them, and by the time she came back to me I had lost my train of thought, and so I told her about my crows instead: the circle they’d made around their dying friend, the way they’d watched me, the way the biggest one had taken, now, to leaving me gifts and trailing me as though I was the corvids’ Pied Piper.

  “They do that,” Kate said, “keep vigil over the dying; I’ve never heard of them following anyone, but they’re clever birds. You must have impressed them.”

  “Speaking of animals,” I said, “I keep meaning to ask—what are those animals? On the beach, the long green ones? They look like snakes? I think they must be something that only lives in the water, because they all seem like they might be dead?”

  Kate raised a quizzical eyebrow. I found a pen and drew the serpentine thing with its odd flat ribbony crown that I’d seen on the beach. Kate peered down at my drawing and hooted with merriment, laughing so hard she had to prop herself up on the bar. “Oh, city mouse,” she said. “That’s kelp.”

  I blinked with embarrassment. “I’m not stupid.”

  “I’m sure you aren’t,” Kate said, chuckling. I kicked sullenly at the rung of my bar stool, thinking up ways to ask about Maddy. “She’ll come in again,” Kate said. “How much longer are you here for, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I have to—” What did I have to do, anyway? It didn’t seem likely I was going to get any more out of Jack than I had already. I could confront him, but that seemed overly dramatic. But I did not like the thought of going back to Mr. M empty-handed, after all he had done to send me out here, and I did not like the thought of failure, either. And if Aurora was still running around somewhere, and Jack knew—did I want to know? I chewed on this for a moment while Kate watched me with her keen eyes. Which was worse, an Aurora who was gone forever or an Aurora who didn’t care enough to look me up? It was a question I’d given surprisingly little thought to over the years; I hadn’t even known I cared until Mr. M had given me that picture and set my adventure in motion. “I have to talk to Jack more, I guess,” I said. “I keep forgetting things out here. It’s weird.”

  “That’s why people come out here,” she said. “To forget.”

  “That’s what—” I frowned, thinking. “Jack said that, I think. And Maddy.”

  “Maddy has more to forget than most people.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The door opened and we both looked up; there she was, wild-haired, in the same clothes she’d been wearing the first time I saw her, as if Kate had conjured her up.

  “Well, well,” Kate said. “S
peak of the devil. We were just talking about you.”

  “I know,” Maddy said. “I thought you’d be here,” she added, to me. “Are you doing anything? I’m on my way to the beach to get oysters, if you want to come.”

  “Okay,” I mumbled, ecstatic.

  “You be good to her,” Kate said.

  “I’m good to everyone,” Maddy said.

  “That,” Kate said, and her voice was sharp and cold, “is not true.” Maddy stared Kate down, and Kate looked away first.

  “Let’s get out of this dark old place,” Maddy said to me, and I was only too happy to follow her outside.

  Qantaqa barked happily from the truck as we approached, both paws on the windowsill, tail waving madly. She nearly fell out the door when Maddy opened it. The passenger side was unlocked, and I got in. “You have a coat or something?” she asked. “It’ll get cold when the sun sets. We can stop by where you’re staying on the way.”

  “Sure,” I said, “that would be great.”

  She found the way to Jack’s again without my directing her, followed me into his house and paced the circumference of the main room like Dorian Gray when we let him out of his carrier at the vet’s; I could almost see her bristle and sniff, her hackles raised. She picked things up off Jack’s shelves and turned them over in her hands and put them down again, carefully and in the same place. I heard a door close and a second later Jack appeared, leaning easily on the doorframe to the hallway.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while,” he said to me.

  Not my fault, I thought. “I made a friend,” I said instead. “Do you know Maddy?” He looked past me; she was holding a clay pot from one of the side tables, and when their eyes met her whole body went rigid, and he froze. The whole room went electric with the force of their locked gazes, her yellow eyes suddenly wild and the air around her bristling with a staticky charge. I took a step away from them, putting out one hand as if to fend off an unseen attacker.

  “We went sailing once,” Maddy whispered.

  “I don’t think we’ve met; you must be thinking of someone else,” Jack said, but his eyes did not leave hers.

  “You sang to us over the water, and everything was blood—but it was such a long time ago—” Maddy shook her head. “I don’t want to remember!” she cried, her voice full of pain. The pot slipped from her fingers and shattered on the wooden floor, and we all jumped. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, and Jack said, “It’s no trouble,” which did not seem like the right thing to say, and so I said, “I’ll get a broom,” but I didn’t know where Jack kept one, and he went to fetch it instead, and in all the jumble the strange moment was forgotten and the weirdness went out of the room like a guest sent home for being too unruly. Maddy shook herself like a cat who had gotten its paws wet by accident and went back to being a girl again—not ordinary, but not sparking with terrifying electricity, either—and then Jack, blinking and slightly confused, wished us a pleasant afternoon and went back into the room he’d come out of. It was not until Maddy and I were back in her truck and driving away that I realized I had altogether forgotten to fetch my sweatshirt.

  Qantaqa panted happily in my face for the rest of the drive to the beach, as much of her front end as she could manage wedged into my lap. I patted her head. She was the sort of dog you had no choice but to get used to. “Don’t let her boss you around,” Maddy said. “She’s already spoiled rotten.”

  We drove for a while through a labyrinthine network of narrow two-lane roads, thick green woods occasionally giving way to the bald scars of clear-cuts dotted with smoking piles of brush and splintered trees. Here and there the trees would part enough for me to see a cobalt flash of water, and there was nowhere we went that the smell of the sea did not come in through the truck’s open windows. Maddy turned off on a potholed dirt road that rolled bumpily down to a gravelly dead end. She parked the truck, and Qantaqa barked happily.

  “Here we are,” Maddy said, reaching over to ruffle her behind the ears, “your favorite place. You can let her out, Tally.” Qantaqa nearly squashed me flat in her gleeful scramble out the door. I followed more slowly, wincing as the circulation returned to my legs. Qantaqa was already crashing through the underbrush. Maddy got a bucket and two pairs of knee-high rubber boots out of the back of the truck, and we went after Qantaqa with slightly less enthusiasm. We came through a stand of evergreens to a rocky half-moon of beach, sheltered on one side by a high bluff and on the other by forest. The tide was out, muddy flats stretching half a mile before us. “Perfect timing,” she said.

  We pulled the boots on over our shoes, and Maddy led me out onto the tide flats as Qantaqa bounded up and down the beach and crashed off again into the woods. At first the ground was firm, but soon we sank up to our ankles in thick, viscous mud that smelled of rot and salt and something deeper. Sex, I thought, and blushed. The feeling of it was disorienting, the sucking mud pulling at my boots and making each step a laborious struggle to keep them on my feet. The tide was coming back in by the time Maddy decided we had enough oysters, and we took turns carrying the heavy bucket back to the beach as the water obscured the tide flats behind us.

  Maddy sent me to collect firewood and went back to the truck, returning with blankets and a bulging cloth bag. She showed me how to make a pyramid of smaller twigs and dried grass and coax it into flame before gently adding bigger pieces of driftwood. “This time of year, the oysters aren’t as good,” she explained, “so they’re better cooked. Come back in the winter and you can eat them right out of the water.” Despite the sun, the afternoon was chilly, and I was glad of the fire. Maddy dumped out our oysters and refilled the bucket with salt water to wash them. I was used to oysters from a restaurant, halved and neatly arranged on a bed of ice; these seemed a different thing altogether, over-large and muddy and crusted in barnacles. We both cut our hands washing them, and Maddy pressed her bloody palm to mine. My heart thumped frantically in my ribs, and I licked my dry lips. She watched me, her huge yellow eyes unblinking. I was the first to look down. “Palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss,” she said, and took her hand away. I curled my fingers around its absence, her blood drying on my skin, and thought I might never wash my hands again.

  She showed me how to shuck the oysters with a short-bladed knife, but I was hopeless at it and cut myself again and so she did them all, laying them out in a tidy line by the fire as she revealed their quivering grey-pink meat. While the oysters cooked she spread a blanket out for us and pulled a bottle of wine and two cups out of her bag, filling one and passing it to me. I wrinkled my nose and took a sip and was surprised to find that I liked it; it was crisp and cool and tasted of apples. Aunt Beast would be proud of me, loosening up at last. Qantaqa settled behind us with a sigh and put her nose on her paws, and Maddy reached back absently to scratch her ears. “I think they’re done,” she said.

  The oysters were delicious, firmed by the fire’s heat but salt-tangy and rich with brine. We ate them all, the whole bucketful. Qantaqa watched sadly as our hands moved over and over to our mouths and Maddy fed her the last one, which she took gently from Maddy’s outstretched fingers and gummed rapturously. Maddy built the fire up again and poured us more wine, and we stretched out on her blanket. She’d pulled her hair back, but wisps of it had escaped and framed her face in a dark halo. The sun was low on the horizon, and the sky was streaked purple and rose, the water gone flat and silver. “Listen,” Maddy said, and after a moment I heard it: the low mournful hoot of some bird in the woods behind us, followed by a ragged caw. My crows. I remembered what I had been meaning to ask her all afternoon.

  “You know Jack?”

  “Jack?” She blinked, slow and uncertain: stuttering flicker of black lashes, wisp of black hair fluttering against the soft skin of her cheek. I swallowed. “I don’t think so.”

  “But you said—in his house you said—” The words were just out of reach, and I fought the murky wave threatening to overtake me. “You said you went sailing, a long time
ago—did you know him in California?”

  “I’ve never been to California.” She took my hand and brought my knuckles to her mouth without looking at me, and my whole body went live-wired and frantic. I could hardly breathe. “Do you miss the city?” she asked.

  “No,” I whispered, and she laughed and looked at me at last, her yellow eyes big enough to drown me, and then she leaned over and kissed me. Her soft mouth tasted of the oysters’ salt and the wine’s tangy sweetness, and we fell into each other, her hands in my hair, running the length of my spine, soft on my skin underneath my shirt, her mouth on my cheek, at my ear, against the line of my throat. Qantaqa gave an aggrieved huff and rolled over, and we broke apart long enough to laugh at her as she panted at us, and then Maddy kissed me again and I thought of nothing but the taste of her skin and the smell of her hair. I shuddered, and she said, “You’re cold,” her mouth at my ear, the low throaty rasp of her voice alone sending me ecstatic, and I said, “No,” but that was a lie; I was shivering, and not just from her touch. The stars were coming out.

  “The Dippers,” I said, and could have kicked myself as soon as the words were out of my mouth. She wrapped me up in one corner of the blanket and sat up. Kiss me more, I thought desperately, but she did not seem to have Kate’s psychic proclivities; or else—and worse—she did not care to kiss me any longer.

  “Do you know them all?”

  “Most of them,” I said, but I did not want her to think I was showing off.

  “I used to,” she said, looking up at the sky. “There’s Thuban.” She pointed north.

  “That’s Polaris.”

  “The North Star? That’s not what we call it, where I’m from. Anyway, we can go,” she said, remote again.

  “If you want,” I said, wishing more than anything for her to turn back to me, to say that of course that was not what she wanted, what she wanted was to throw me back down on the ground again and take off all my clothes and do to me whatever it was she did to people, this astonishing girl who seemed to know so much more about the world than I did, who had undone me with a handful of kisses and some heavy breathing. But she was already standing up and gathering our things, kicking dirt over the embers of the fire, clucking Qantaqa to her feet. I was out of my league; I had no idea what to say to her or what to do to make her kiss me again. Was she kissing anyone else? Was kissing strange girls just her standard operating procedure? Did she like me? What was happening between us? What was I, to her? Why had she brought me out here only to bring me home again, like a child up past her bedtime? I was not used to not feeling special, and I found that I did not much like the experience. And as I followed her back to the truck, carrying the blanket, I did not ask her the other question burning in my mouth: where could she possibly be from, to think that Thuban was the polestar? Thuban had shifted from that place in the heavens three thousand years ago.