About a Girl

by Sarah Mccarry

  I picked the easier question to answer. “I don’t know. I think he is, yeah.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  The old Tally would have lied, or said nothing. The old Tally would have buried it. But this Tally had come all the way out here, and fallen in love, and started to wonder if she was maybe off her rocker, and a lot of other things besides, and so this Tally said, clear and strong, “Because I was pissed at you, Shane,” and surprised herself when it was not nearly so hard as she had imagined it might be.

  “Why?” he said, and the genuine bewilderment in his voice made me want to reach through the phone and slap him.

  “Because,” I said. “Because of what happened. That night.” Silence. He was going to make me say it out loud. “Because you—because I—because we—you know what we did with each other, and then you didn’t come over on my birthday for the first time in ten years, and you never even said you were sorry—you never even tried to say you were sorry. You didn’t even just pretend things were normal. You disappeared.”

  There was a silence. “Do you want me to say I’m sorry?” he said quietly.

  “For standing me up? Goddamn right I do, you dick.”

  “For—what we did.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I don’t—I don’t know. I wanted you to be there afterward, how about that. Even if you didn’t”—I took a deep breath and squeezed my eyes shut, as if he could see me—“even if you didn’t mean it the way I did. Because I, um, meant it.”

  I could hear the hoarse rasp of his breath on the other end of the line. “I went to this lecture,” he said, “at the Museum of Natural History, on making a candle with a supernova—”

  “Standard candle with type 1a supernovae,” I said automatically.

  “I had no idea what they were talking about, I just went because it seemed like something you would like—”

  “But it’s not hard to understand at all, it’s just a process of finding a variable star with a standard—”

  “Tally, I don’t care what a standard candle is. What I’m telling you is that I miss you like crazy and I went to this stupid lecture and sat through the whole thing just thinking how much better it would have been if you were there with me, and I still wouldn’t have understood a word but you would do that thing you do where you act like only a total idiot would have no idea what these guys are talking about, and then I would get mad at you for like five minutes—”

  “What do you mean, mad at—”

  “—and then we’d forget about it and go look at the dinosaurs and get pancakes after at the Candy Shop—Tally, I think about you every day, and sometimes when I wake up in the morning I forget that you’re gone and the whole day is so much bigger because it’ll have you in it, and then I remember how far away you are, and I don’t understand why you can’t just come home.” His voice cracked. Was he crying? “Tally, come home.”

  I had no idea what to make of this new, loquacious Shane, or what was veering dangerously close to a discussion of our feelings. “I will,” I said. “Soon. I will soon. I just have to—I can’t leave until I know.”

  “What if he never tells you? Are you just going to stay there forever? What about school?”

  “I still have time. I’m not going to stay here forever. I promise, okay?”

  “Please come home.”

  All the time I’d spent imagining this conversation, and now that I was having it I felt as though my heart was going to come apart in my chest. It was too much to choose from, too much to think about: Maddy, her mouth on my skin, her laugh in the dark, her witch’s hands. Jack. Who he was and who I was and what the fuck I was doing here, among strangers, away from the people who loved me, who knew me—away from the people who were my family. Not blood, but home. And Shane—however Shane felt about me, however I felt about him now, he was still the person I knew best in all the world, the Castor to my Pollux, my twinned, steady-burning star. There was so much I wanted to tell him and so much I didn’t know how, and so instead I said again, “Soon. I’ll come home soon.”

  “If you go to college without saying goodbye to me I’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

  “I won’t do that. It’s me.”

  “I don’t know who you are anymore.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” I said, and the surge of irritation was wonderful in its homey, comforting familiarity. “That’s an asinine thing to say. We’re not in a movie. You know just fine who I am.”

  “You’ve been gone so long I almost forgot what an asshole you are.”

  “You’re the asshole who didn’t call me.”

  “You’re the asshole who skipped town.”

  “Well then,” I said.

  “I got a show,” he said. “A real show, at Brownies. Promise you’ll come.”

  “When is it?”

  “Next week. We’re opening for some dumb rock band, these total heshers, but I don’t care, you have to come.”

  “Next week? I don’t know—”

  “You have to come. It’s my first real show ever. I have a band now. A lead singer. You’ll like her. I’ll tell them you’re in the band, otherwise you can’t get in, it’s not all-ages.”

  A hot flash of jealousy raged through me, leaving me breathless. “What lead singer? What band? When did you get a band?”

  “A lot has happened since you left.”

  “Yeah? A lot has happened here, too.”

  “It’s not a contest.”

  “You made it a contest.”

  “You are fucking impossible. Say you’ll come.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll try.”

  “Do or do not. There is no try.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “You do,” he said, and hung up on me. I threw Jack’s phone at the wall with a satisfying crash.

  Jack leaned through the open door, his eyebrows raised. “Everything okay?”

  “I dropped something.”

  “It sounded like you threw something.”

  “It’s fine.” I didn’t want to look at where I’d thrown the phone, in case I’d dented his wall. “I was thinking about leaving soon.” He came into the room and sat on my bed, glancing idly over the various possessions I’d slowly strewn about until his guest room looked much like my own room at home, disorderly and marked as mine. His gaze sharpened suddenly. “Where did you get this?” He picked up Aunt Beast’s knife from the nightstand. I’d left it there when I’d half unpacked, that first night in his house.

  “It’s just something of my aunt’s. Why?”

  His expression was that of a man who has just been shot in the chest; not so much fear, or pain, but a kind of deep, profound shock. “Your aunt? But this was mine—I gave it to—”

  I met him at one of Aurora’s parties. He loved music more than he loved me. Some scientist I was going to make: It was so obvious I couldn’t believe I’d missed it, right there in front of me this whole time—I’d been getting nothing out of him because I’d been asking him the wrong questions all along. I stared at him, dumbfounded with revelation. “That song,” I said. “‘About a Girl.’ That song’s not about Aurora at all, is it?”

  He looked up from the knife and blinked at me, seeming completely at a loss. “Is that why you came out here? You thought—” He shook his head. “Your aunt was Aurora’s best friend?”

  “She’s not my aunt, exactly.”

  “Your aunt was my—” And then he really looked at me, for the first time since I had set foot in his house. “You thought I was your father,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Are you?”

  He closed his eyes and put his hands on his knees and sat like that for a long time, as though he had just completed some difficult and draining task—run a marathon, sailed around the world—and was so exhausted that if he did not prop himself up he might fall over, and then he opened his eyes again and looked at me. I had meant to shout at him; it was his stubbornness, his refusal to talk to me, that had gotten u
s to this awkward confrontation. If he had been honest with me—if he had just talked to me—we could have sorted it out the night I arrived. Of course they had all known each other, back then; if I had not succumbed to the hazy amnesia of this strange place—if he had bothered to help me—I would have figured it out immediately. But the pain in his face was so deep and raw that I faltered and found, to my surprise, that the only sentiment I could muster was not outrage, but pity.

  “No,” he said, as I had already known he would. “I’m not your father.”

  “The whole story,” I said. “You owe me. Please.”

  He looked down at the knife again, opening it and closing it without speaking; though it must have been old, its hinge still worked smoothly and silently. I waited. He took a deep breath and began. “I lived in Seattle, for a summer, a long time ago—I went there to try and make a living, as a musician, like a lot of other people in those days. It was a strange time. Your grandfather—no one had ever heard of that city, before your grandfather, and then when he died they were everywhere. Producers, record label executives, hangers-on, dreamers. Like locusts. I thought I knew what I was doing; I thought I was quite something, back then. I was very young.” He passed one hand over his face and his eyes clouded, as if he were trying to remember something. “Aurora was at the center of it—I don’t think she wanted to be, but they wouldn’t leave her alone. So many people. As if they could take from her something that would make them into her father. She was even younger than I was, you know, and her mother—your grandmother—was not…” He paused, and then said delicately, “was not around. As you know. I went to a party at her house with my guitar and my last five dollars in my pocket; I thought if I could play for the people there, there would be someone to hear who could—I don’t know what I thought.” He laughed. “Like they would give me a contract and a million dollars right there; that’s probably what I thought. I told you I was young.

  “So I went. That night. I don’t know what I was expecting—I had never met Aurora, only heard about her; I thought she would be awful. Insufferable. You know, spoiled rich brat, daddy’s legacy, the kinds of things you think. And she was nothing like what I had expected, nothing at all. She was so human and alive, and funny and ferocious and tough in her own way—you couldn’t help but love her, just being around her. She had this radiance—it wasn’t just that she was beautiful, she was, but it was something else—you felt that in her company, the whole world might become magic. Anything could happen. If she had had a chance, if she could have gotten away from those people, there’s no telling what she might have been. I wish I had done something more for her. I should have taken them both that night and run for the hills, but I didn’t know better, then.”

  “Them both?” I prompted.

  “Aurora and her best friend.” He paused again. I took his hand and he tightened his fingers around mine. “Her best friend. Your—aunt, I guess. She was nothing like Aurora; she wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t charismatic, she wasn’t any of those things—she let Aurora do that for her. But she had her own kind of magic, this strength—when I met her, I thought, That is a woman who will die before she lets go of something she loves, and I hadn’t had much of that in my life up until then—and she was funny, too, and stubborn, and tough. I fell in love with her, which was the last thing I expected to do. And then I did get a record deal, and I left her. I left them both.” He took a deep, ragged breath; he was squeezing my hand so tightly I thought the bones of my fingers might crack, but I was terrified he would stop talking, and so I said nothing. “That was a terrible time,” he said. “I will carry what I did then with me for the rest of my life. I let them both go even though I knew that what I had signed on with was something far worse than I had imagined. Your aunt survived it, but only because it wasn’t after her, not directly; your mother—Aurora—it swallowed her up. They swallowed her up. I didn’t even try to…” He looked away from me. “I couldn’t play anymore after that,” he said. “After I knew what I had awakened. I couldn’t let anyone else come to that kind of harm. I couldn’t stand what I had become. I quit playing and came out here, and I’ve been here ever since. I’m sorry I don’t know who your father is. I loved Aurora, but never like that.”

  “But you were so good,” I breathed. “Music was—it must have hurt, to give it up.”

  “It has nearly killed me again,” he said. “Without it, I am nothing; I am only a sad old man, an empty shell with a sailboat. I am only waiting for the right time to die.”

  “I don’t want you to die,” I said. “I want you to—I want you to play again. After all this time? It can’t do any harm, now.”

  He let go of my hand at last, and I surreptitiously tried to shake some feeling back into my fingers. “You look like Aurora,” he said, “but you are so like your aunt. So stubborn. I don’t know if I could play now, Tally. It’s been so long. What came after me then is very patient and very old. I think it is only waiting—but maybe you are right, and it has turned its attention elsewhere. I don’t know. I am afraid to risk it, even now.”

  “Is that why you’ve been avoiding me?”

  “You haven’t been around much, either, young lady,” he said.

  “You can’t go your whole life being scared,” I said, ignoring that. “Look at you. You just told me—you just told me you want to die. How much worse can it be?”

  “You can’t imagine,” he said quietly, “how much worse it can be.”

  “You have no idea where she is?”

  “I have some idea. But it’s not a place you can go.”

  “What do you mean, you have some idea?”

  “Tally,” he said, “I am telling you, you cannot follow her there. You won’t come back, even if you manage to get to her.”

  “You threw your whole career away, you fucked over my aunt, you left Aurora, you don’t even play anymore—what was it all for? Was it worth it, to be safe here? All alone in your big house with all your money?”

  He did not answer me, and I thought for a moment I had gone too far. “How is she?” he asked, finally.

  “Aunt Beast? She’s okay. She’s fine. You should ask her yourself. We’re in the phone book.”

  He laughed. “Does she still paint?”

  “That’s what she is. A painter.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. I’ve never stopped thinking—” But he cut himself off and stood up, and stretched: lean arms, bony fingers like mine; if he wasn’t my father, who was? If he didn’t know where Aurora was, who did? Who was there left to ask?

  “I have to go home,” I said.

  “You can stay as long as you like.”

  “Thank you. But I—this isn’t my life, out here. I keep forgetting, but I have so much else to do.”

  “It’s up to you,” he said. “I wish I could tell you more. I’m sorry. I did not behave well then, and I have not behaved well to you since you showed up on my doorstep.”

  “It was sort of a surprise visit, in your defense.”

  “That it was,” he said. “It’s getting late. I believe I promised you dinner, the first morning you were here, and have been remiss in following through.”

  “There’s nothing in your kitchen to eat.”

  “Maybe you would like a hamburger at Kate’s, if you’re not sick to death of them.” That seemed a fine compromise, and I said so.

  Maddy was not at Kate’s, but some of the hippies were; they looked me over with disinterest and looked away again. Without Maddy next to me they did not even recognize me. Kate was in a temper and slammed my hamburger down unceremoniously, but Jack raised an eloquent eyebrow at her and she softened.

  “Long day,” she said; for her, that was almost an apology, and I accepted it. “Nice to see you out among the living.” Jack flinched, and the look she gave him was freighted with meaning, and I wondered, not for the first time and with some exasperation, if I would ever sort out what strange threads raveled them together, and then Kate turned to me and said cal
mly, “You have the book already, child; it’s right in front of your face, and the path to what you want, too,” and I said, “What?” but she was already moving across the room to the hippies, who were clamoring for more beer.

  You have the book already, child. That night back at Jack’s I got out the battered copy of Metamorphoses. A rustle at the sill of the open window, and there was my crow again, one beady eye trained on me, its head cocked. “Hello,” I said, “this is a bit much, you know,” and it cawed imperiously, and I opened the book at random. Now in a ship that had been built at Pagasae, the Argonauts cut through the restless waves.… Golden-haired Jason and his crew: brave Asterion; Erytos and Echion, sons of Hermes; Mopsos the bird-omener; the warrior Oileus, and on and on. And Orpheus, Orpheus the musician, who was said to have charmed rivers from their banks, caused wild oaks to march in order to hear him play—Supposedly he played one show at the Coliseum in LA, and when he finished the crowd was surrounded by all these animals—wolves, bears, cougars, animals that don’t even live in that part of California. Like they had come to see him play.

  “No,” I said aloud, and my crow flapped its wings at me, and I turned back to the book. Sharp-eyed Medea, burned with quickening heat. Medea who waited, alone and lonely, on the far shore of her father’s country, with her magic and her herbs and her shrine to Hekate—“No,” I said again, but there was no undoing it. It was a story I already knew, the story Maddy had told me, but the Maddy in this book was even crueler and more bloody minded: making daughters cut their fathers to pieces; slitting the throats of kings and flying away in a chariot drawn by dragons; burning Jason’s second wife to ash—even then her blood-red steel had pierced the bodies of their two sons—and poisoning heroes. And then: Medea, ’scaping her own death, vanished in a cloud, dark as the music chanted in her spells—and she exited the story as swiftly as she’d entered it, and there was no word of her again. It was not possible, but there it was. I closed the book and sat looking at it for a long time, and when I looked up again my crow was gone.