About a Girl

by Sarah Mccarry

  We only went to the city once, but now we went often to Kate’s, and to potlucks in ramshackle houses in the woods, full of people who wore a lot of down vests and had beards and made foods I barely recognized even after a lifetime of Aunt Beast’s cooking. They were fond of banjos and washboards and something called “old-time music,” which involved a lot of whisky and stomping on the floor and shouting, and not, as far as I could tell, making much effort toward bathing regularly, although I was in no place to pass judgment, since my own hygiene regime consisted largely of sponge baths at Maddy’s sink and the occasional shower at Jack’s when I got so filthy I could no longer stand myself. The hippies were not friends of Maddy’s, exactly; they seemed to regard her in much the same way I did, with a kind of quiet and respectful awe. Her company conferred upon me a kind of invisibility, and I was content to remain so: I ate the hippies’ roots and tubers and grilled fishes, avoided their liquors, eschewed their dancing, and fielded their occasional and largely disinterested enquiries as to my nature and ambitions with a discretion that bordered on sullenness. They were the sort of white people who wanted to talk to you earnestly and at length about their compost. “In New York, we put things in the garbage,” I said once, when I had gotten tired of this line of disquisition, and this riposte proved so effective that none of them ventured conversation with me again. And anyway, next to Maddy I dimmed into nothing: she was the singularity, and I was just another particle in her orbit.

  A few years after the night in Central Park that had made me into an astronomer, Raoul and Henri had taken me to Cornwall to see a total eclipse of the sun. We stayed in a bed and breakfast in Perranporth, booked up months in advance by people who, like us—well, like me—were obsessive enough to travel halfway round the world or farther in pursuit of a single observation. In the morning the landlady made us toast and sausages and coffee and we ate them, blinking sleepily, with the other guests at the bed and breakfast, all of whom were there for the same reason. “All this way,” the landlady said, her accent thick and burry, “for a little spot across the sun.”

  The morning of the eclipse we went down to the beach. The sky was scuddy with clouds and I wondered unhappily if I had come all this way for nothing, if I’d be standing on this crowded shore with hundreds of other strangers staring up at a patch of grey instead of the miracle of physics and luck I’d come to see. It’s only because we are here in this time, this moment out of all the billions of years our solar system has gone flying around the sun’s hell-hot ball, that we get to see eclipses at all: The moon is gradually spinning away from us, out into the dark of space, and only at this point in the history of the solar system does the moon’s distance from us make its size in the sky appear equal to that of the sun. A handful of millennia earlier or later, and we’d never have known that a lifeless lump of rock and dust whose only glory comes from a light not its own could suddenly wipe the sun out of the sky neat as a gunshot. How cruel it would have been—all this confluence of chance, to bring me to the time and place where such a thing was possible, only to have it veiled by something so dumb and everyday as a rain cloud.

  But at the last moment a wind rose up and swept the clouds away, and a ragged cheer rose up from the beach as the sun came out. I’d read about the moments before the moon blocked out the disc of the sun, the way the colors around me would grow richer and more saturated, the way shadows would go crisp and keen-edged; I knew a hush would fall, animals nervous and silent, the whole world still and strange. But being there—thousands of crescents winking into life, glowing like half-moons in the trees; shadow bands, shimmering lines of black dancing around us; the stars flaring into life in the daytime sky—was so alien, so wonderful, that even Raoul and Henri were looking around with their mouths open.

  In the dim shadows of Kate’s bar, Maddy’d had no real background against which to dazzle, but here, among people, I understood that I was not the only one who found her a degree of magnetic that moved past human and into more transcendent spheres. She would have been as regal anywhere else; I could easily imagine her in the middle of my own city, surrounded by equally adoring and far more sophisticated throngs. She was like the exiled princess in the fairy tale who spends her days scrubbing dishes in the kitchen, only to be transformed at night by a series of dresses woven out of starlight, moonbeams, the sun’s rays: She could be hidden away, but there was no keeping her glory secret from the world, no fooling anyone who took a second look—and anyone who saw her once did.

  Maddy presided over the hippies, their undisputed queen; though she was nearly as likely as I was to sit out their thunderous dance reels and elaborate courtships, on occasion she would succumb to their entreaties and rise up as they danced; from the edge of the room I would watch her, the heart-stopping curve of her mouth, the place at her temples where her rich brown roots shaded into the harsher dyed black of her hair, the dangerous glow of her yellow eyes, as she whirled and stomped and around her the room spun into a dark vortex with her its pulsing, neutron heart. I could no more have left her than the earth could skip its orbit around the sun and go frittering off into space.

  My irregular calls home were punctuated by Raoul and Henri’s increasing despair, and finally resignation, as every time I promised myself to be on the verge of purchasing a ticket home and every time abandoned that promise as soon as it was uttered. I understood, in some remaining rational part of my brain, that I could not remain out here forever, driving around in Maddy’s truck and kissing her until dawn and crossing my fingers that Jack would not be home (he was not) on the rare occasions I stopped by his house to bathe or exchange one dirty T-shirt for another—because if he was home he would likely demand to know what I was doing, a question for which I no longer had an answer.

  “You’re at least going to college?” Raoul took to asking, in a tone that was initially accusing and soon became almost desperate.

  “Yes, of course,” I said, and then made no move whatsoever to remove myself. Aunt Beast had had to be prevented several times from boarding a plane and coming out to forcibly extract me from my new environs. But the only person who could have sent me home was Maddy, and she did not seem to care about much of anything—how long I was planning on staying with her; what was happening between us (which was, some part of me knew, largely one-sided); whatever the hell was happening to me, a formerly ambitious and upright young citizen-scientist with a promising future who without warning found herself forgetful as an amnesiac and content to spend whole days at the beach, staring mindlessly out over the blue waves while Qantaqa frolicked in the surf and Maddy dozed in the sun.

  It was Kate, of all people, who called my bluff. One night Maddy was restless and bored, pacing the circumference of her house like a tiger until I thought I might shake her, and so I said, “Let’s go do something.” We drove into town in Maddy’s rattling truck, and she sat at Kate’s bar and, chain-smoking, drank one whisky after another while I nursed a single beer and watched the muscles of her throat move as she swallowed, wishing it would not get me thrown out of the bar to lick the sharp, graceful edge of her collarbone. The other bartender, Cristina, was working, too; she had a boyfriend, one of the hippies, called for some arcane hippie reason “Timber,” who regularly visited her for the duration of her shifts, and they would stare moonily at each other over the bar in the moments when Cristina was not serving drinks. I could not help but be jealous of their relationship, which, while it did not appear to be intellectually stimulating, was at least an example of the kind of transparency I found myself longing for. Cristina, I thought, did not sit up nights agonizing over where she stood—over whether her lover had, at heart, any real interest in her at all.

  We had been there for a while when Maddy got up to go to the bathroom, and as soon as she was out of earshot Kate spun around like an ungainly top to stare me down.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked. I tried to look stupid, but she was having none of it.

  “I don’t k
now,” I said, truthfully. I’m in love with her, I thought, though I could not bring myself to say it out loud. Kate gave a disgusted snort.

  “You and everyone else,” she said. “There should be a global support group for all you poor fools. That’s not what you came here for.”

  “That’s what happened.”

  “You,” she said, an accusatory finger coming dangerously close to poking me in the eye, “have a life you left to come here. You have a family. You have a place to go from here, do you not? You will do what I brought you here to do, and then you will go home.” As if she’d summoned them, I thought of Henri and Raoul, side by side on the couch in our apartment, holding hands and looking anxious; Shane, staring at his phone—Shane, Shane. I remembered with a sharp pang the green-grass smell of the park in summer, underneath the city’s swampy stink; the bitten-nailed fingers of Shane’s hands as he played the same chord progression over and over again, writing it deep into his muscles until he could play it a final time without thinking; Dorian Gray howling petulantly outside the door of my own room in my own apartment, my family in the other room, doing the crossword and bantering. That girl, that ordinary and lovely girl, that girl who could not turn her face away from the stars—that girl in that life, loved by those people, was me. “You do not have much time left,” Kate said. “Do not waste what has been given you.”

  Maddy came back from the bathroom and slid onto the stool next to me and put her face in the curve where my neck met my shoulder. “Take me home,” she said, and my heart skipped at the feel of her mouth there as she pressed her keys into my hand, but I was conscious of Kate’s eyes boring into my back as we walked toward the door, and that night my thoughts were clearer and I did not dream, and Maddy, too, was almost distracted as she undid me and put me back together again in her bed. Afterward I put my head on her chest, and she wrapped me up in her bony arms and sang to me, and I said, “What’s that song?” and she said, “It’s what they sing where I’m from,” and when I asked her where that was she fell quiet again.

  “A long way,” she said.

  “A long way where,” I said. She moved restlessly, and I sat up and looked down at her. “A long way where.”

  In the lamplight her eyes were very large. “I don’t want to remember that,” she said. “I want to rest for a while.” Her voice had a note in it so heartbroken, so plaintive, that my own heart ached dumbly; I could not bear the thought of anything that had hurt her enough to make her sound like that, but I could not let go of what I wanted, either.

  “Maddy. How do you know Jack? When do you know him from?” She did not answer. Ask her, Kate’s voice hissed in my ear. Ask. “Did you know Aurora? How old are you?”

  “That,” she said, “is not a question you want the answer to.”

  The dark of her room was still and close. It is time, Kate said. No more secrets. I leaned down to kiss Maddy. “Tell me a story,” I said into her hair. A coyote howled once in the dark and was answered in chorus.

  “I told you no pasts.”

  “You don’t tell me anything at all.”

  She sighed and put one cool hand on my back. “Once there was a girl,” she said, “who was born in a kingdom on a distant shore, and who taught herself the language of the wind and the song of the earth and the music of the sea. She could make magic out of herbs and a handful of words and call birds to land upon her shoulders and tell her about the farthest reaches of the sky, but she did not know anything about what it was to love. Her father held a treasure so great that no one in his kingdom had ever looked upon it, and guarded it so jealously that he had no room in his heart for the daughter he had sired or the wife who had borne her, and his absence was like a canker in his daughter’s heart, though she could not have named the loss that pained her.

  “One day a boat full of heroes came to her country; it was the lure of her father’s treasure that called them, but though she knew the patterns of the clouds and the names of the stars, she knew too little of the ways of men to recognize the greed that had swallowed their hearts whole. The worst of them, the most beautiful, took one look at her and saw a girl who was a path to what he wanted, and the words of love he spoke to her caught her as surely as a hare in a hunter’s trap. I will make you my queen, he said, you beautiful girl, you have only to give me your father’s greatest treasure for a dowry; and what little thing is this, compared to the bounty I lay before you? And she believed him, and so she helped him. But he knew her father’s treasure was twofold: the wealth he hid away, and the magic that lived in his daughter, who could undo the hearts of kings with a word, who could sing down the wind and the rain, who could fell whole kingdoms with a breath. But she was very young, and all her power was not enough to keep her safe from love, the most terrible sorcery of all.

  “And so for him she distracted her father by killing her own brother, for him she murdered the kings who opposed him, for him she left the only home she had ever known, and when she landed at last on the shores of his country he made her not his queen but his concubine. He would not name her as his wife in front of his people, and the warriors she had sailed with turned their backs on her and laughed behind their hands when she came into the hall where they feasted: at that dark-skinned foreigner, that bloody-handed witch, that whore who thought she could be a queen. She had thrown over everything she loved for a love that betrayed her; she had borne the hero two sons he would not acknowledge; she was, in her new country, wholly alone and unwanted.

  “And then that great hero told her he had found a girl to make his wife, a slip of a girl, a fair king’s daughter whose skin shone paler than milk. And so the witch wove a dress out of fire and spite that was more beautiful than any garment that child had ever seen, and when the little queen put on her raiment it turned to flames, and her screams drew her father to her side, and he burned with her. And the witch called her children to her and cut their throats rather than leave them, and when all around her was ashes and blood she summoned to her a chariot drawn by serpents and rode it into the sky.” Maddy stopped talking, but her hand moved up and down my back in a slow hypnotic rhythm.

  “What happened after that,” I said, my voice catching.

  “She wandered,” Maddy said, and the low terrible note in her voice swelled and filled the darkness until her whole room hummed with it. “She wandered for a long time, until she came to a place at the end of the world and tried to forget. But our pasts do not let go of us so easily, in the end.”

  “Whose story is that?”

  “Look at me,” she said, and I turned my face to hers on the pillow. “You know whose story that is, Tally,” she said. “You know what I am.”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered, “I don’t,” and she said, “Loss burns like a beacon in you. You want to see her. You have wanted it all your life; I see the longing in you the same way I see the curve of your mouth or the color of your skin. I can take you to her. Wherever she is, I can find her.”

  “She’s dead,” I said. “She has to be dead. She’s been dead for years. That’s the only reason”—I would not cry—“that’s the only reason no one knows where she is anymore. If she was still alive, one of us would have to know. And I’m fine. I’ve never needed her before. It was a waste of time to come out here.” The crow Maddy had tattooed on my arm burned as hot as the night she’d inked it into my skin. Her expression was unreadable.

  “As you wish. Sweet dreams, then,” she said, and kissed me, and I curled myself into her lanky warmth, and her sweet-smelling hair moved around me, and I closed my eyes and wished more than I had ever wished for anything that I would wake up in my own bed in my own apartment, that none of this had ever happened, that everything she had done to me would unmake itself and let me go.

  * * *

  The next morning I rode to Jack’s house and called Shane as soon as I walked in the door, so I would not have time to talk myself out of it, or to forget. He answered on the second ring and a glad rush went through me at his
familiar, raspy hello.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Tally?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where the fuck are you? Where the fuck have you been?”

  “I’m at—” I laughed. “You’re not going to believe where I am.”

  “You’re at his house.”

  “You talked to Raoul?”

  “Of course I fucking talked to Raoul, what the fuck do you think? You stopped talking to me, and I didn’t know what to do, and it had been weeks, Tally, fucking weeks, and I went over to your house because I thought maybe at least Raoul or Henri would tell me what was wrong with you or why you were mad at me or, like, whatever, and then Raoul was all serious and told me you were on a quest and they didn’t even know how to get ahold of you and I was like ‘What the hell is wrong with you, you fucking lunatics, what the fuck do you mean you don’t know how to get ahold of her, she’s my best fucking friend and your fucking daughter’ and Raoul spouted off some total nonsense about how you were on a journey and had I taken careful consideration of how I had mistreated you and you would contact me when it was right for you and I had to respect your boundaries and a bunch of shit I didn’t even understand, and then he told me you went to see Jack Blake because he was maybe your dad and I couldn’t even—I don’t—did I mistreat you? Is he your dad?”