About a Girl

by Sarah Mccarry

  * * *

  The next morning Jack drove me to the airport and I went home. I thought the journey should be more momentous: mythical creatures to slay, deserts to cross, a quest to fulfill. But that’s not how airplanes work. We said little during the long drive to the ferry. I asked him if he was going to play real shows again, and he said he would think about it. “I have this friend,” I said, “who would be excited if you did.” He only smiled.

  When he pulled up under the DEPARTURES sign and got out to hand me my bag, we stood looking at each other awkwardly, and then we both lurched forward at the same time, and instead of hugging him I hit him in the chest with my bag, and he laughed and so did I, and we tried again with more success. He held me tightly, and I felt tears well up as I seized him in return with a force that surprised me. When he let me go I had to pretend I had something in my eye, and he pretended not to notice. “Thank you,” I said. “For everything.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “For coming all this way. For reminding me—” He stopped and cleared his throat, and I realized his eyes were not any drier than mine.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I think I know what you mean.” We regarded each other, and then he swept me up in another hug.

  “Come back,” he said. “Anytime you like. I mean it.”

  “I think I will,” I said, and then he let me go, and we smiled at each other, and he gave me a little push.

  “Go back to your bright future, young lady,” he said. “Tell your aunt I said hello.”

  “Tell her yourself,” I said, and went into the airport.

  * * *

  I had meant to stay awake on the plane, to think about what I had learned, maybe write myself an essay about it in my journal, “What I Did on My Summer Vacation,” with lessons bullet pointed or flowcharted in a scientific manner, but I fell asleep instead. I did not dream about my mother; I did not dream at all.

  Raoul and Henri and Aunt Beast were all waiting for me at the gate. I was surprised how glad I was of it. They hugged me all at once, and I hugged them back, and we were stiff with each other and did not know what to say. Walking out of the airport was like walking into an open mouth full of unbrushed teeth, and I winced; I’d forgotten what real heat was like, and the stink of the city. Back at the apartment we milled around in uncomfortable silence until I took my bag into my room and shut the door. I could imagine them, sitting on the couch, hands folded on their laps, waiting for me to emerge again.

  At dinner that night we were mostly quiet. Raoul had made enchiladas, with the mole sauce his mom sent him sometimes from the desert. Even Dorian Gray was uncharacteristically subdued; he’d been aloof and disdainful since I came home, largely ignoring me until I gave up making overtures. “He thinks you should have called more, too,” Raoul said. After dinner we sat without speaking for a moment. Henri got up to clear the table.

  “I don’t understand why you didn’t just tell me,” I blurted. Aunt Beast and Raoul looked at me, and Henri looked at the three of us.

  “I think I’ll leave you to this,” he said, and took a load of dishes into the kitchen, and then he went into his and Raoul’s room and shut the door gently.

  Aunt Beast got up and poured herself a glass of whisky. “Come into the other room,” she said.

  They sat on the couch, and I sat in the shabby old armchair—after Jack’s house, our furniture looked particularly dilapidated—and pulled my knees up to my chin and glared at them.

  “You’re angry at me,” Aunt Beast said, “and I understand why. You think I lied to you.”

  “You did lie to me.”

  “I didn’t tell you the whole truth. But you have to understand—Tally, some of the things that happened then, to me and Aurora, they’re not the kinds of things most people believe in. I told you what I knew was true, which was that we had lost touch.” She paused, and I saw the tears welling up in her eyes, and it was hard to stay angry at her. They’re not the kinds of things most people believe in. I knew about that. It was too much to tell them, too much to say out loud; I didn’t know how much of what had happened to me out there I believed in myself, from the safety of my homely apartment, surrounded by my family’s love. I had never kept secrets from them before, but this did not seem so much like keeping a secret as telling the story a different way.

  “I dreamed about her,” I said, “when I was out there. In this apartment by the ocean, with this man. She was so alone, and sad. But it was like—it was like I could finally let her go. Like I knew what she was, finally, like what all of you kept telling me about her—that she just couldn’t make it work, as a person. It hurt her too much to live in the world the way she was, and so she went somewhere else.” Aunt Beast wiped her eyes—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her cry, Aunt Beast hated crying even more than I did—and I went over to the couch and curled up between them the way I’d done when I was little, although I was so tall now that I had to push them to both ends of the couch to fit, and even then I was half in Aunt Beast’s lap. She stroked my hair out of my eyes and sighed.

  “That sounds like her,” she said.

  “He told me he’d never loved her,” I said. “Jack. Not like that. Not like he loved you.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, and I wondered if I’d said the wrong thing, and then she smiled down at me. “I know,” she said. “I doubted it, back then. But I always knew, somewhere.”

  “No more secrets,” I said, and she nodded. But I was lying, too: I had secrets from them already, and I knew, whatever she was telling me now, that there were a thousand pages of her own story I would never be able to read. Before, that knowledge would have eaten at me, but now I understood the thing I’d never been able to see before: that our stories are our own, even when they overlap with other people’s, and that sometimes keeping them safe is a part of keeping ourselves whole. Maybe someday I’d tell them about Maddy, tell them about what I’d done out there, tell them about falling in love with a tidal wave, a monster, a monster who was also a girl. Tell them about what it had felt like to be with her, the whole world blown wide open, the smell of her skin. But probably I wouldn’t. I caught Raoul looking at me thoughtfully, and I smiled at him, and he smiled back.

  “Sweet dreams,” he said.

  “You, too.”

  That night I dreamed about her. The two of us in her house, in her bed. Coyotes singing in the ravine beyond, her yard ringed with a circle of crows. She was not bloody, not monster, only girl, in her black shirt and black jeans, looking at me the way she used to: not with love, or hunger, but something older and larger than both alone. I love you, I said to her, I love you, but she only shook her head and said, There is more to this story, lovely, there is more for you to find. I woke up with the dawn. Once he got hold of her, she never had a chance, Jack had said. And Maddy: Even for those of us who are not wholly human, the way out of that place is hard. Those of us. All the pieces of the story, coming together at last.

  I slipped out of the house before anyone else was awake, walked down the street to his apartment; though the sun was barely up he was, as ever, unsurprised to find me at his door. I followed him into his living room and looked around at his shelves for the last time before I sat down across from him. He looked at me, and I knew he knew.

  “I see,” he said.

  “Why did you send me all that way?”

  He raised one shoulder, dropped it again. “We do not know how to do things straightforwardly,” he said.

  Pale as bone and thin as wire knotted together, in his red chair, in his black clothes, his dead eyes; I did not know, now, how I could have ever mistaken him for human. But the answer came to me as quickly as the question: I had loved him, and love makes us more than willing to see the best self the beloved has to offer. He had left the place he was from to come here, to wait quietly down the street for me to find him; he had kept all the secrets of my history from me, unraveled my family and destroyed my mother, and then he had come here, h
oping for what I’d given him without question. Hoping to be seen as something other than what he was. And then he’d sent me away instead, knowing that I would not find what I thought I was looking for, because all along it had been here with him. I wanted to hate him, but I found, to my dismay, that I could not. There’s always a mystery that other people don’t have to reckon with. Was he a good man? An awful one? Would we have loved each other? What did he have to pass down to me, that I had lost?

  “Tell me a story,” I said, and he flinched, but he did not look away.

  “A long time ago,” he said, “a king called Minos ruled a dead country without stars. He had a daughter…” He paused and licked his thin lips. “He had a daughter,” he continued, in a stronger voice, “called Ariadne—as sweet a child as any father could wish for, though he did not see it until it was far too late—and a wife, and they were both lovely and clever, gracious and kind, but he did not see the gifts in the world around him; he saw only what he lacked. He had a lover, too, who betrayed her father for him in the midst of a war, and so when he had defeated her father and watered the earth with the blood of her family he killed her for her treachery, because any woman who would betray her father was no kind of woman at all in his eyes. The certainty that his own life was one of emptiness made him leave emptiness everywhere he went. His wife bore him a son, and he saw instead a monster, and he imprisoned the child under the earth, where he grew into the shape his father believed him to be, and the king fed his son on blood and sorrow until there was nothing left in him that was human.

  “And then one day a hero”—he said hero in a voice of such contempt that I breathed in deep—“landed on that distant shore, and spun a web of lies for the king’s daughter, and went under the earth and killed the king’s son, the monster, with his daughter’s help; because she was so starved for kindness, for love, for attention, that she did not see the hero for what he was—a man whose every word was a lie dipped in honey. When the king’s son was dead, the hero raped the king’s daughter and put her on a ship and sailed away to a lonely island in the middle of the wide dark sea, and there he left her, laughing as she wept. The god Bacchus found her and sent her to live among the stars. The hero went on to do more great deeds, and his name numbers now among the great heroes of old. Hers is nearly forgotten, except to astronomers.” He stopped and closed his eyes.

  “What happened to the king?” I said.

  “He died,” he said, and his voice sucked all the air out of the room, slowed the beating of my own heart; I saw myself again in the cold apartment where Maddy had sent me, the dead starless sky, the black sea. “He died badly, as he deserved, and he went before the god of the dead, and the god of the dead made him into a judge and a collector, a harvester of souls, and that was what he became.”

  “And then you found my mother,” I said, and he opened his eyes.

  “Do you think your mother was anything to me?” he said. “Do you know what I have done, child? Do you know how old I am, and how many treasures like your mother, like your grandmother—do you know what I have gathered, what I have taken, on my long road? I knew once, a long time ago, what it was to love, and I threw it away, and since then my wake has been one of pain and sorrow. But your mother had a child, Atalanta, your mother had you—and I knew I could not begin to undo what I had done, but there you were, like a gift nonetheless. I had destroyed any love that had ever come to me, through all those long dark centuries, but you knew nothing of what I was—you believed in nothing but the order of the universe, the music of the heavens. You were blind to the possibility of real darkness, of the world I lived in and the world I had made. In your company I could mistake myself for a man again; I could give you books and teach you how the stars moved and watch you grow into something even I could not ruin.”

  “Did you think I would never find out?”

  “I knew that you did not believe in what I was,” he said. “And that as long as you did not believe, I would be only what you saw. But when you came to me, with that music, I knew I could not keep you any longer, and so I sent you to him, and I see that you found there more than what you bargained for. I did not mean to cause you pain.”

  “How can you—you’re the one who taught me first about physics,” I said. “About astronomy. If you’re—if you’re—” I could not quite bring myself to say it. “Why do you bother with science? If it’s not even real where you’re—from?”

  “You know Georges Lemaître,” he said, “the cosmologist—”

  “Of course,” I said, with a spark of my old irritation. “He was the first person to theorize the Big Bang model. Everyone knows that.”

  A ghost of a smile flickered across his face. “Indeed. I am sorry; I did not mean to insult you. But as you know, he was also a priest—he took great care to ensure that his careers as cosmologist and cleric never intertwined, but he was as much a man of faith as he was of science. Do you know what he said about living in both worlds all his life? ‘There were two ways of arriving at the truth. I decided to follow them both.’”

  “I saw her,” I said. “My mother. I went to—that place.”

  “I would have spared you that,” he said. “If I could.”

  “How else could I have seen her? You left her there,” I said. “You brought her there, and then you left her, too.”

  To his credit, he did not look away. “Yes,” he said. “I did. I hope you can forgive me.”

  I felt old and tired, and I did not want, anymore, to be strong; I wanted to be a kid again, the kid I’d been before he sent me away, the kid who knew everything about the world because she’d never before seen how big the world truly was. I thought I understood at last what Maddy had meant, about choosing to be a monster, because being anything else at all had to be easier than being human. There was no part of my life that had not been colored by her absence, no corner of my heart that was unmarked by the missing of her—my mother, Aurora, the girl he had ensured would never become a woman, the girl he had sent under the earth and away from me, the girl who would never have a chance to let me tell her about quasars, or make me clean my room, or give me advice about Shane, or sit with me and listen to my grandfather’s music, or grow up into a person of her own. My mother. I had a family, and I loved them and was lucky in them; but because of him, I would never have her.

  “I don’t,” I said, my voice clear in the still air. “I forgive everyone but you—I forgive my mother, and Jack, and Aunt Beast, and Raoul—they were all doing the best they could with what they had been given. Even my grandparents—but you—you knew what you were and what you were doing. They were only human. But you have no excuse.” There was more I wanted to say, but I did not know how to say it, and trembled with the rage that had taken hold of me. What would Maddy do, I thought, and the answer was probably cut his throat, but I wasn’t Maddy, and anyway I didn’t have a knife. The tattoo she’d given me burned as hot as the night I had gone to hell and she had saved me. You don’t have to be a monster, something said inside me, in her voice—slow blink of yellow eyes—you, lovely, you alone among us are brave enough to be a girl.

  “That is true,” he said, and I did not know if he was answering me, or if he had heard her, too, and I thought he would say something else, but he did not.

  “What does it mean, for me?” I asked. “That I am—that I am not entirely—” I could not bring myself to say it; of all the impossible things I had come to believe in that summer, that thought was the most impossible yet.

  He laughed, a dry rustling sound without a hint of happiness in it. “In a different time, child, it meant something, but now…” He tilted his head at the bookshelves behind him. “Eritis sicut deus, scientes bonum et malum,” he said softly. “In the words of Doctor Faustus: ‘You will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ There are no secrets that can be kept from you.”

  “I thought Dr. Faustus was the devil,” I said.

  “There is always a catch,” he said. “Atalanta, you do not
need the magic of the old gods any longer. We do not make things; we can only transform what is already made into a shape that we like better, and orchestrate the lives of your kind to suit us, and collect those among you who bring us pleasure. But the race of men—”

  “And women,” I said sharply, and he smiled.

  “Yes,” he said. “And women. You grubby little animals with your tiny brains find questions in the heavens larger than those we have ever thought to ask. You have discovered the language of the universe and written out its laws. You built a machine under the earth seventeen miles in circumference and used it to shatter light into the smallest particles that exist. And even still you write symphonies, and paint pictures, and till the ground and make it fertile. It is not enough for you to have a single flower; you must breed a thousand kinds of rose. From our mountains, from under the earth, we can only covet what you have done with the short lives you have been given.”

  “We didn’t discover the language of the universe,” I said. “It was already there.”

  “But you have named it,” he said. “You have used it to write a story that can be told and told again. Newton’s equations hold true, at the greatest of distances and at the smallest scales, across the breadth of the universe; do you not think it is remarkable that your people are capable of such a marvel, Atalanta? All this rot and death surrounds you, and still you tilt your heads back to look at the stars, and say how beautiful, and teach yourselves to sail by their light, and even that is not enough; you must know what it is that makes them burn. Why do you ask these questions? Why do you make art? These labors have no bearing on your survival.” He tilted his head at me quizzically and I saw that the question was not rhetorical; he meant for me to answer, to explain to him what it meant to live for joy.