Dirty Wings

by Sarah Mccarry

  “I know I’m a shit,” he says unexpectedly. “I know. I’m sorry. I try—I try to be something else. You know, like a decent person. I get mixed up. I don’t know how. I—” He falters.

  Cass pushes her hands through her dirty hair. He’s like a stray dog, bristled big to hide the staring ribs and mangy pelt and life of too many kicks. Jason might think he’s special, but she’s met a hundred boys like him.

  “You’re lucky Maia likes a project,” she says curtly. “And I meant what I said about your dick.”

  Later that night he plays for them, as if in apology. They sit at the tideline under an upended bowl of stars, the night warm and luminous around them. Jason plays Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen, the Kinks, a song Cass doesn’t recognize. “Who is this?” she says.

  “The Vaselines,” he says, looking out at the ocean. He cracks his knuckles, and then he plays them songs of his own. They are both like and unlike the songs his band played, each of them a little world that the three of them step into together. The loneliness, the ache, in Jason’s voice is so raw that Cass cannot watch him play; it’s like walking in on someone naked. Alone, he is even more compelling than he is with the band. The night beach around them drops away. Cass thinks of meadows and bumblebees, the sound of rain falling in the forest, the sun warm on her back, swimming naked in an alpine lake. The warm smell of pine and earth in the high passes of the mountains out on the peninsula. They built a fire earlier but the flames have died down to coals, and the night is close around them. Against her will Cass admits it: She can see this thing in Jason that Maia sees, this spark. She does not want to feed him or coddle him or ensure his safety or comfort, but even she is moved a little by his music. At the edge of the circle of Jason’s voice she sees something shift in the darkness, lifts her head.

  The man in the black coat is watching them, his pale face expressionless, his dead eyes flat and full of hunger. The red glitter of rubies at his throat, his white fingers curled into fists. “No,” Cass says aloud, sitting up, “no, that’s not right,” and Jason, startled, falters on a chord, the jangling noise harsh and sudden.

  “What’s wrong?” he says.

  Cass scrubs at her eyes with the heel of her palm, searches the darkness. Whatever it was that she saw, it’s gone. “Nothing,” she says. “I thought I saw something.”

  After their confrontation Jason is more gracious most days, offering to go into the village to buy more water or food, bringing back candy for her, or fruit, or woven bags from a roadside vendor. Cheap things—and who does he think he’s kidding, he’s bought them with Maia’s money—but the sentiment is worth more than the gift itself. He’s like a toddler, aggravating but without malice. No matter how much she resigns herself to him, though, she can’t forgive him the worst offense of all: stealing Maia from her and transforming her into a near-zombie version of her former self. She takes on his opinions, his affectations, even his vocal tics. His drawling, sarcastic “Yeaaaaah,” his chortle, his peninsula hick’s disdain for people who care about clothes or good food or money. Which is, of course, an easy spite to carry if it’s someone else’s money you’re living on. But Maia won’t hear a word against him, and Cass is on unstable ground, since she herself has been living off Maia’s savings since they skipped town. He’s divided and conquered them as efficiently as someone bringing a cleaver down on the ties that have bound them together in the last month. Wherever he goes, Maia’s eyes follow him, adoring, her face turning after him like a leaf following the sun, until Cass has to look away. They will have to leave here, soon, drive north with what little they have left and figure out what comes next, and she has the sinking feeling the rest of the story will have Jason’s name scribbled all over its pages.

  He follows her into town one afternoon, scuffing his feet and whining, though she tries her best to dodge him. He’s hungry but doesn’t want shrimp, doesn’t trust the roadside vendors—this though they’ve been eating from carts all week—thinks they probably have the kind of cheese he doesn’t like, or flour tortillas instead of corn. “There’s only one kind of cheese,” Cass says, but he doesn’t hear her. What does he expect, Monterey Jack to appear out of the ether like somebody abracadabraed it? Cass might be a witch, but she’s no I Dream of Jeannie. The sun pounds down on their burnt shoulders. Jason’s unpleasable, sulky, intolerable. They’re standing in the middle of the dusty street, which is thankfully deserted; Jason makes her embarrassed to be white. “I don’t want to go back to the beach without something to eat,” he says.

  “It’s your own goddamn problem,” Cass says, “if you won’t eat anything that’s here.”

  “I don’t like anything that’s here.”

  Cass forgets her resolve, what little forgiveness she’s mustered, loses her temper with him altogether. “We should just fucking leave you behind,” Cass snaps.

  To her astonishment, his face goes as slack-jawed as if she’s punched him.

  “You can’t,” he says in a tiny voice. “You can’t leave me behind.” His eyes are full of despair. You and I are more alike than I care for, little man, she thinks. “You can’t leave me,” he says again. “You can’t.”

  “Lucky you,” she says, “it’s not up to me.” She turns her back on him, unable to look at the pathetic slouch of his shoulders any longer, and trudges back toward the beach. He waits for a moment and then runs after her.

  “Promise me you won’t,” he says.

  “Won’t what,” she says.

  “Won’t leave me.”

  She stops and faces him. “I’d leave you in a second,” she says. “I can’t stand you. But like I said, it’s not up to me.” She steels her face against the misery that crosses his.

  “I told you I don’t know how,” he says. “To change.”

  “It would be nice if you learned.”

  “I never really had a mom.”

  Cass snorts. “You seem to have found the equivalent.”

  “I want you to like me,” he says. “I love Maia. I do. I love her. I’ve never met a girl like her. I’m going to marry her.”

  “You’re what?”

  “That’s what people do,” he says, “when they love each other.”

  “Jesus, Jason, you sound like a kindergartener.”

  “Why are you like this?”

  Cass shakes her head. “Give it a rest.”

  “She loves you. But I don’t know how to even make you like me.”

  “You can’t make me like you. That’s not how it works. I have to want to like you.”

  “I’m trying really hard.”

  “You could’ve fooled me.”

  He shrinks back from her, wounded. “You’re kind of a bitch, Cass.”

  She laughs. “Bingo, Jason,” she says.

  There’s nothing she can do about him. He’s like a canker. And now Maia’s leaving her, the way Cass knew she would all along. The hurt of it is not her going. Cass is used to letting go of anything good. The hell of it’s that Maia didn’t quit Cass for her well-paved road to a good and meaningful life; she quit for this snivelly loser, this dirty-haired trainwreck of a boy-man. It’s worse, infinitely worse. It’s like he put something in her water. He has a kind of charisma, Cass will admit; the people here, improbably, love him, find his stumbling hacked-up Spanish adorable, his ineptness endearing. They, like Maia, will frequently attempt to feed him, clearly certain he is unable to do so on his own. It happened the whole drive down, too. Cashiers at gas stations, truck-stop waitresses, random mothers in parking lots. A forty-something woman in a business suit had come up to him in San Diego and handed him twenty dollars, apropos of nothing. Cass has seen it happen before with street punks like her, always white boys who were just the right mix of good-looking and vulnerable, dirt smudged along their pretty cheekbones so artfully it looked intentional. A legion of girls forever trying to nurse them back to health, fix them up, buy them food, give them one more chance. Jason’s power to charm makes Cass want to cut his throat in
his sleep. She has never let anyone take care of her. She has pride and her own wits, gets herself out of the trouble she gets into. She doesn’t understand how boys like Jason can stand themselves. Easy for him to be the edgy artist with a diva’s temper; Maia’s just one of a long line of girls who’ll fatten him up and cover his bills when he blows all his rent money on a new amp. Cass knows all about it. If Maia had ever been out in the world, she’d be able to see it, too.

  She asks Maia about their money, one morning when Jason is swimming in the ocean, and Maia gets serious immediately. “We have to go home after this,” she says. “I guess. I mean, I don’t know where else to go. We’re almost broke.”

  Cass thinks about this, pushing her bare toes through the sand. Home. Back to the squat. Maia could stay there, but would she want to? Does Cass even want to?

  “We could try and get an apartment,” Cass says, surprising herself. “Somewhere. Together.”

  “That takes even more money than gas.”

  “We could get jobs.”

  “Like this?” Maia waves a hand at herself, encompassing her dirty hair, shredded clothes.

  “Sure,” Cass says. “We can clean up a little. But plenty of places don’t care. Restaurants, coffee shops. That kind of thing. Maybe a bar if we’re lucky.”

  “We’re not old enough to work in bars.”

  “We’re old enough to lie.”

  “Right,” Maia says. She is quiet for a while. Jason is a tiny dot, far away from them, a speck of black against the glittering sea. “I miss the piano.”

  “I’m sure,” Cass says.

  “I want to play like those boys play. Jason’s band. I don’t know how, though.”

  “Sure you do. You’re really good.”

  “But not like that. They can just make things up. Play together. I mean, of course I’m a better musician than any of them. I don’t think Jason can even read music. But the way they played—it’s like they were talking to each other or something. Like this language I didn’t even know about before. I want that.”

  “You could start a band,” Cass says. “When we go home.”

  “When we go home.”

  “So we are. Going home.”

  “We could stay in LA.” But Maia doesn’t sound serious. Cass considers the idea, discards it. California is for weirdoes and surf rats. The beach is nice, but it’s no place like home. Does she want a real life, now? An apartment with Maia, a bed, a table, a bookshelf. Rent. A real stove. Things people have. Things people could lose.

  “Do you want to go home?” Cass asks, tentative. “I mean, home.”

  “Seattle? I guess I sort of do.”

  “No, I mean home. To your parents.”

  Maia is surprised to realize that already her parents’ house is the last place she thinks of when she thinks of home. Home for her now is just a smear of grey, the choppy water of the Sound, the green trees on the slopes of the mountains. “Jesus, no,” she says. “I miss Oscar.” She stops. “I called him,” she says. “From Santa Cruz.”

  “I figured.”

  “He told me I was afraid of something. Something inside me.”

  “On the phone? That’s kind of heavy.”

  “He’s like that. Do you think I’m afraid?”

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.” Maia’s face is so fierce Cass wants to hold her tight, sing her lullabies until her scowl eases and the tension seeps out of her shoulders. What demons could a spoonfed girl like Maia possibly have? And even if she does carry some burden Cass can’t see, who doesn’t live with darkness in the secret corners of their hearts?

  Cass picks through the various things she could say. Maybe she hasn’t given Maia enough credit, these long weeks, hasn’t recognized that the pieces of Maia that look like her aren’t pieces Cass made, but pieces that were there already. If anything, all she’s done is given them the chance to shake themselves awake.

  “We could call your parents. I mean, you could.”

  “Oscar said he’d tell them I was okay. Anyway, I stole their car.”

  “We stole the car.”

  “I’m not going to blame you for the car,” Maia says. “That would be shitty.”

  “I didn’t stop you. You don’t want to call them just because of the car?”

  “Maybe they won’t say anything about the car. They never drive it. My mom has the BMW.”

  BMW. Cass almost laughs. Oh, Maia.

  “We’ll call them when we go north,” Cass says. “From San Diego. You can tell them you’re okay. See what happens.”

  “We can’t keep going. We need money.”

  “Money helps,” Cass agrees.

  “A little house,” Maia says, dreamy. “A little house for us, on a hill somewhere. It could be brick. A big room for the piano. And we could put patchwork curtains in the kitchen.”

  “I could grow herbs in the back yard,” Cass says.

  “And flowers. Lots of flowers. Dahlias.”

  “You could teach piano.”

  “We could start a band.”

  “I thought you wanted to be a real musician.”

  “I don’t know. I thought I wanted that, too. It’s the only thing I’m good for.”

  “That’s not true,” Cass says. “That’s not even a little bit true.”

  “It’s the only thing I’m good at.”

  “You don’t know that. You’ve never tried to be good at anything else.”

  “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

  “Sure it is,” Cass says. “Do you love it? Playing?”

  “Yes. Of course,” Maia says quickly, but then she pauses. “I don’t know.”

  “Yes? Or you don’t know?”

  “I don’t know if I really know what love is.”

  “Maia, are you really going to marry Jason?”

  “Did he tell you he asked me?”

  “Did you say yes?”

  Maia raises her hands in a helpless gesture, drops them. “I know it’s crazy.”

  “You met him last week, Maia.”

  “You’re the one who’s always telling me to loosen up.”

  “I didn’t mean yoke your entire life to the first punk boy to come along and whisper sweet nothings in your ear.”

  “He needs me,” Maia says. “He’s just—he’s lost. I know you don’t like him, but you don’t see him when we’re together. When it’s just the two of us.”

  “All seven days you’ve had, to get to know each other inside and out.” Who’s lost, Cass thinks, him or you? But she doesn’t say it. Later, she’ll wonder if it would’ve made a difference, if she had.

  “I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person who could say yes to crazy things,” Maia says. “I never even had the chance before now. It feels so good, you know? To just say fuck it. Fuck all of it. What’s the worst that can happen? We’ll fall out of love and it’ll be over.”

  “Do you love him?”

  Maia is quiet for a while. “I don’t know. I think so. I think I could. Oscar told me so many times I don’t know anything about love that I started to wonder if maybe I would never feel anything at all. I felt like that all the time until…” She trails off.

  “Until what?” Cass prompts.

  “Until I met you,” Maia says quietly, not looking at her. “Everything changed when I met you.”

  Cass’s heart is pounding so hard she’s nearly dizzy with it. “I know what you mean,” she manages, her tongue thick and stupid. Maia is still looking away. “Maia, I—” She cannot get the words out; terror chokes her. All the times in her life she has been unafraid, and this skinny girl on a beach is what undoes her? It seems unfair. Maia turns to Cass at last, her brown eyes unfathomable, and Cass searches her serious face for some sign of what she herself feels reflected there, and then she thinks, Fuck it, just jump, and reaches forward to push Maia’s hair out of her eyes, and when Maia does not move, does not say a thing, just keeps looking at her
with those big dark eyes, Cass leans forward, every breathless inch a mile, and then she is kissing Maia, and Maia is kissing her back, and it is like how she imagined it and nothing like how she imagined it, Maia’s soft mouth and her salt-scented skin and her hands in Cass’s hair and Cass’s hands against Maia’s cheeks and down her shoulders and counting the notches of her ribs. I am devouring, Cass thinks, I am devoured, and Maia is whispering Cass’s name against her mouth as she kisses her.

  And then they hear shouting and Maia breaks away from her and Cass thinks Oh no, oh no, oh never stop, her heart frantic, her hands shaking, and she looks past Maia down the beach. Jason is running toward them, fucking Jason, his hands aloft, yelling. Maia licks her lips and straightens her shirt and looks up at Jason with a smile so fake Cass wants to slap it off her, and Jason is upon them, shouting “Look at this shell! You guys, look at this shell I found,” so oblivious to everything, to everything, to everything. Cass blinks hard at the tears salting the corners of her eyes, moves away from Maia, looks away from them both.

  “How nice for you,” she says, and gets to her feet, and Maia does not stop her when she walks away.

  THEN

  The day after Maia’s first punk show they sleep through most of the morning. Maia has never slept in past nine in her life and when she wakes, sees the hands of the clock marking eleven, she is filled with a luxurious and slightly guilty glee. Hedonism suits her. Who knew. The door to her father’s study is shut. She knocks softly. “Dad?” But there’s no answer. She opens the door a crack and peeks in. Her father is passed out on his desk, his mouth open slightly. She assumes he’s still breathing. If he isn’t, she doesn’t really want to know. She closes the door and goes downstairs to the kitchen.

  She wanted to make Cass breakfast, but she’s never even cracked an egg. So it’s Cass who fixes them omelets filled with cheese and mushrooms and green onion. “You never cook before?” Cass asks her, stirring butter into the pan.