About a Girl

by Sarah Mccarry

  You could say that, I thought, grateful Raoul could not see my flaming cheeks.

  “It’s nice here,” I said neutrally.

  “You promised, Tally.”

  “I know. I keep—” It did not seem advisable to tell him I kept forgetting. “I’m having a hard time with, um, time.”

  “Your aunt is furious. Furious, Tally. She almost left her retreat—”

  “You can’t let her do that!”

  “I talked her out of it. But only just.”

  “I—okay. Thanks.”

  “Jenn and Molly called.”

  “Jenn and Molly?”

  “Your employers?”

  Oh shit, I thought. “Oh. That Jenn and Molly.”

  “They offered their condolences about your cousin but were hoping you’d be feeling well enough to come back to work soon.”

  “Work,” I said stupidly.

  “You never told me you had a cousin.” His tone was arch.

  “Distant cousin.”

  “Now deceased. Tragically. Cancer, was it? Of the conscience? You still have a job, but I don’t know that you deserve one.”

  “Raoul, I’m sorry. I just … I can’t even think out here. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I have to find out something. Anything. I can’t just come all the way out here and then turn around and come back with nothing.” I can’t leave Maddy, I thought, but I could hardly tell him that. “Tell them—oh, man.”

  “You tell them.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “How is Jack?”

  “Mysterious.”

  Raoul made a noise somewhere between a snort and a cough. “Nothing new there. Did he take you to the city?”

  “Not yet. I mean, I drove through it on the way here from the airport. But not since then. Maddy might—my friend might take me. We were talking about going.”

  “Your friend?”

  “I met this—girl. Out here.”

  “Hmm,” he said, but he didn’t push it. “Tell your friend to take you to the market. Your aunt and I used to work there, once upon a time.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Raoul?”

  “Yes?”

  “When did you know that you were in love with Henri?”

  There was a long pause. “Is this an abstract question?” he said. “Or an immediate one?”

  “I just—when did you know?”

  “The second day we spent together,” he said. “Our first date lasted for a long time; I hope you are not too scandalized.”

  I laughed. “Surely you didn’t sleep together before you got married.”

  “Oh dear,” Raoul said. “Several times, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t see how I can face you again in person. Seriously, though. How did you know?”

  “We went out to breakfast,” he said, “the morning after our first date, and then he took me to Central Park, and we sat on a rock and watched the swans paddling around in the lake, and I looked over at him and thought, Oh shit, here I go. That was it. I knew I was going to fall in love with him. And then I did.”

  “Did you love other people? Before Henri?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think I could—do you think someone could be in love with more than one person at a time?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Do you want to tell me what this conversation is about, Tally?”

  “I met someone,” I said. “This girl. She’s—I feel—it’s different.”

  “Than how you feel about Shane?”

  “Yes,” I said. “No. I mean, yes. He’s so … solid. He’s just Shane. He’s always there. I’ve known him forever. We know everything about each other. This girl, she’s like—she’s like a wild animal. That’s an embarrassing metaphor. Scratch that from the record.”

  “Scratched.”

  “She’s—I don’t know how to explain it. She’s, like, old in her heart. I mean, she’s not old. Like an old soul.” I had no idea how old Maddy was, but I thought if I told Raoul that I would probably worry him unnecessarily.

  “You met her through Jack?”

  “I met her in a bar,” I said without thinking.

  “I see.”

  “Not like that. You know me. The squarest square in squaretown. But around her I’m like—I feel—I don’t even know. She’s like this magnet.” Raoul laughed. “What?” I said.

  “I would never malign the power of the magnet,” he said, still laughing.

  “It’s not funny,” I said, wounded.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you. Do you think you’re falling in love?”

  “I don’t know how to tell,” I said. “I just feel crazy all the time.”

  “Well,” he said, “that sounds about right. It’s never easy to learn how to love, especially the first few times you try. Take good care of yourself, Tally. You know we’re always here. All of us.”

  “I know,” I said. “I love you a lot.” I wanted badly to ask him if anything about the way I felt about Maddy was normal; if it was reasonable to be certain that if someone were to leave you, you might curl up and die; if I was supposed to spend every waking moment of every day thinking about the sound of her voice and the movement of her body; if nightmares were a common symptom of love; if being followed by a pack of crows happened to ordinary people all the time. I wanted to ask him about all of it, but I could not even bring myself to begin, and even as I tried to assemble the words they slipped away from me. It was no use.

  “I love you, too,” he said. “We love you. Oh, here’s Dorian Gray. Dorian loves you as well.”

  “Dorian is dumb as a barrel of rocks, Raoul.”

  “Did you hear that?” Raoul said, his voice muffled. “Tally doesn’t understand you, Dorian. But I do.”

  I laughed, really laughed, for the first time in what felt like a long time. “You tell Dorian I’ll bring him a West Coast rat. They’re way fatter and healthier than the Brooklyn ones. He can gnaw on it for days.”

  “He’ll be so pleased.”

  “Even the raccoons here are different from the raccoons in Prospect Park. They seem, I don’t know, more raccoonish. Like they might run you out of your house and take over. I heard them in Jack’s yard one night making all these crazy noises, and I thought it was monsters or something before I went out there and saw them. And there’s a whole family of coyotes that lives in the ravine behind Maddy’s house. They howl at the moon, just like wolves; it’s the coolest thing you ever heard in your life. And the gardens here—you wouldn’t believe all the kinds of flowers that just grow everywhere. And I ate raspberries from the farmer’s market and they were so good. And Jack took me sailing, and I saw otters.”

  “You’re making me miss it out there.”

  “It’s hard to imagine you living here.”

  “It had its disadvantages,” he said. “But there are a lot of beautiful things.”

  “And a lot of white people.”

  “A lot of white people.”

  “I love you, Raoul,” I said again. “I should go.”

  “I love you, too, Tally. Call anytime, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “At least call more often.”

  “Okay. Give Henri a kiss for me. Tell Aunt Beast I’m still alive.”

  “Done and done,” he said. “Tally?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  No, I thought. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You’ll tell me. You know I’ll come out there. Any one of us.”

  “You can’t send Dorian.”

  “I’m not joking right now, Tally.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “You told me you’d put Jack on the phone. You told me you’d call every day. You told me you’d come home in a week. You promised, Tally.”

  “I need a little more time. Just a few more days.”

  He sighed; I could picture him, one thumb rubbing the worn beads of the wooden rosary he always wore, the phone tuc
ked between his chin and his shoulder, his ink-stained fingers—he wrote poetry in longhand, with a fountain pen, but in him the gesture seemed necessary instead of affected.

  “Just a few more days,” I said. “Please.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Just a few more days.”

  * * *

  I did not see Jack again; I went back to Maddy’s that night, and forgot again—her hair, her teeth, her eyes—that I had promised Raoul I’d go home. The next morning I left her in bed, sleepy eyed and tousled, and rode Jack’s bike downtown to the bookstore. “I haven’t seen you in a while,” the proprietor said, looking at me over his spectacles.

  “I’ve been busy,” I said.

  “I see,” he said.

  “Look,” I said, pulling the Ovid out of my bag and putting it on the table in front of him, “I want to ask you something. This book you gave me.” He raised an eyebrow, expectant, and I cleared my throat, feeling stupid. “Do you think—can any of this—I mean, none of this is real, right?”

  “Do pissy gods turn women into birds and stones and flowers? Do inventors build wings out of wax and wood and fly too close to the sun? Do kings cut out the tongues of the sisters-in-law they’ve raped, and shut them away in houses in the woods?”

  “Any of it,” I said. “Is any of it real?”

  “There are historical sources, certainly.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean—the things that don’t seem possible.” He waited. “Look,” I said, “I met this girl here and I—she—I think she—” But I faltered and could not finish my sentence. I think she what? I think she’s put me under a spell? I think I can’t remember anything for more than five minutes at a time? I sounded like a lunatic. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Never mind.”

  “You look unhappy,” he said.

  “I’m not crazy,” I said. “I know I sound crazy. I’m the most rational person—” I raised one hand and dropped it with a helpless gesture.

  “This is a strange place,” he said. “Stolen land—I mean, of course, all the land we live on is stolen, but some of these places are more full of ghosts. Out there”—he waved his arm behind him—“is some of the last wilderness in this country, and I mean real wilderness, not some game park. You wouldn’t be the first person to see a few strange things in the woods.”

  “She told me she came out here to forget,” I said. “And Kate, too, at the bar—Kate said that. And Jack.”

  “Then perhaps there is something that ties them all together,” he said. “All your friends. A quest in which a glamour has been placed upon the key constituents.”

  “What?”

  He smiled. “Why have you come here? To forget, as well?”

  He was a stranger; I had barely exchanged a handful of words with him, and I had no reason to trust him with my secrets and wild imaginings. But there was something about him that invited confidence, and all the things I had meant to tell Raoul but hadn’t were still built up in me, threatening to spill over, and I thought if I did not talk to someone ordinary, or at least wise, I would burst with what I had been carrying around. I did not tell him the whole story, not by a long shot, but I told him how Jack and Maddy seemed to know each other, except that they didn’t, and how I could no longer go outside without being followed by a bevy of crows. I told him that I had been having very, very bad dreams. He did not interrupt, although I had to go back several times and start over when I left out something important, and sidetracked, as was my wont, into a rather more elaborate explanation of the early moments of the universe than was probably entirely relevant to my narrative. I am sure I made very little sense, but it was such a relief to unburden myself that coherence seemed a tertiary goal. “You think I’m out of my mind,” I said when I had talked myself out.

  “Not at all,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “I think there are different kinds of stories, and different kinds of knowing. And different kinds of sailors, too—you know, the native peoples of this peninsula were great navigators.” I thought about the morning Maddy and I had gone to see the canoes land. “They had a lot of stories about Raven, for that matter,” he added.

  “My crows.”

  “Perhaps. I think you are in the middle of a story whose ending you cannot yet see; but that’s true for all of us, isn’t it?”

  “But none of this—I mean it can’t be—it can’t be real.”

  “What is real, exactly? You of all people should know that real is relative—we’re barely even here, any of us, we’re just empty space and particles flying around—”

  “That’s not exactly—” He cleared his throat. “It’s more complicated than that,” I said, unwilling to let him get away with an inaccuracy.

  “You are willing to make space for mystery in the universe. Why not mystery closer to home?”

  It was a valid question, and one I couldn’t answer. I could have said any one of a dozen things I’d have said at the beginning of the summer; I could have quoted Shakespeare: They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. I could have pointed out that science was based on empirical evidence, not baseless conjecture. If he’d known his stuff, which he seemed to, he could have quoted Shakespeare right back—we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear—and, more relevant, he could just as easily have pointed out that if the empirical evidence is so wild only the impossible theory fits it, the impossible might just, as it had done time and time again in the history of cosmology, turn out to be the truth. I went out again into the sunny afternoon no less confused than I had been when I’d gone in to see him, and a lot less sure of myself, too.

  THE RETURN VOYAGE

  All my life I had let my own stubbornness carry me, that and the gifts I was sure of, the strength I’d been born with. I knew what languages were spoken in the world I wanted to inhabit, and if I was not yet fluent in them, if I needed years still to untangle the grammar and syntax of thermodynamics, the poiesis of astrophysics and particles and the movement of light, I understood nevertheless the alphabets in which they were inscribed. I had thought that I knew exactly what I did not yet know: unlearned equations like missing volumes on a shelf, to be slotted in neatly as I acquired them. I had been unable to bear anything like disorder, and no wonder—the word cosmology itself comes from the ancient Greek kosmeo, which means “to order,” “to organize”—the universe is worthy of study because it operates in patterns, and our understanding of them is, fundamentally, a kind of organization, a fact which suited my tidy nature well.

  And then I had come here, and all I had brought with me seemed now nothing like what I needed, what was necessary to make the world clear. I had arrived with a star chart of a cosmos I expected and landed instead in a universe whose physics were nothing like the physics of the world I knew; I had tumbled into a landscape without polestar or cardinal direction, where the tools with which I’d flawlessly navigated my previous life—my memory, my history, my experience of love—were as useless as a compass held over a magnet until its needle spun in circles. Our universe has been expanding since the moment of its fiery birth, and for decades, cosmologists thought that there were only three possible ends to its story: it might balloon outward forever, at an ever-slowing rate; it might one day stop altogether; or its expansion might finally be reversed by the gravitational pull of its heart, leading to its long, slow collapse inward. And then astronomers studying the recessional velocities of supernovae discovered something extraordinary: the expansion of the universe was not slowing down at all, it was speeding up. Propelled by some force whose nature we do not understand, the universe is flinging itself outward like a runaway train. The history of science is a history of those moments in which a single piece of information has torn asunder everything that came before. “The years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels, but cannot express; the intense desir
e and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are only known to him who has himself experienced them,” Einstein wrote; it was something I had underlined without taking to heart years ago, but now its truth was sunk into my bones.

  The obsession with order and elegance at the expense of the truth is a fatal flaw that goes all the way back to the Greeks, who were the first to propose a cosmos constructed out of a set of concentric spheres wheeling about the earth: graceful, harmonious, and totally inaccurate. And the truth—Kepler’s discovery of the planets’ elliptical orbits around the sun, the elegance of the equations he wrote to describe their sweeping arcs—is itself unimaginably beautiful. But the beauty of the truth does not mean that all beautiful ideas are true. I had wanted desperately to believe in order, but I had learned, in the last month, that order was invariably subjugate to its underlying architecture, and the truth was more, and bigger, than I had ever imagined; that uncertainty can be beautiful too, and the unknowable—like dark matter, like dark energy, like, dare I say it, magic—is far greater than the known. If before my mind had been like a warehouse of file cabinets, tidy and organized, Maddy had come along like a cyclone and pulled all the drawers from their casters, scattered the folders to the wide world, and kicked the doors open, and I did not know, any longer, how to put things back in order.

  After she took me to the party in the woods, Maddy and I went out more. She drove us back to the ferry, and we took it into the city and wandered around the old downtown. We ate clam chowder from a stall on the creosote-scented wharf, wheeling seagulls shrieking demands at us all the while; we visited the mummies in the touristy curiosity shop on the waterfront, and Maddy bought me a piece of polished quartz on a cord that was meant to bring good luck; we climbed the hilly streets to a big open-air farmer’s market—which must have been the one, I thought, where Aunt Beast and Raoul had once worked—and found underneath it a warren of shops. Maddy spent a long time in one in particular that reminded me of the witch store in the East Village where Aunt Beast bought her candles and herbs: rows of tinctures labeled in neat cursive, glass cases displaying tarot decks and silver pentagrams and crystals, shelves of books on Magickal Thinking (witches, apparently, being averse to copyeditors) and Guiding Your Dreams. The woman behind the counter had crescent moons tattooed at the corners of her eyes and runes inking her knuckles; though her face had a kind of ageless, serene quality to it, I thought she must have been nearly my grandmother’s age. She watched us both intently as I loitered uneasily by the door and Maddy more enthusiastically perused the herbs and made her selections, reaching for me as the woman measured them out into paper bags; I came to stand beside her at the register and she put her mouth against my ear and her arm around my waist, and I felt her smile at the shudder her breath at the whorl of my ear sent through me. The woman rang her up and then looked directly at me. “Tell Cassandra that Raven asked after her monster,” she said, and I said, “Excuse me?” But she only smiled, her keen dark eyes glittering. “Well met, sisters,” she said to us as we left.