About a Girl (20 page)

“I know,” she said.

After that, the party was a blur. How we must have looked—our hair in tangles, our eyes alight, drunk with sex like maenads, like furies. A glittering host of curious eyes. I drank a beer and then another and said nothing, and Maddy was mostly quiet, too. Somebody’s toddler was underfoot, running in and out of a forest of legs looking for a mother. I pretended not to see it. The bonfire washed away the dark, made faces lovely in its light, but none so marvelous as hers—her soft skin, the fox-fine bones of her face, her huge yellow eyes. I could not look away from her. I did not talk to anyone, and nobody talked to me; it was as if she’d woven a force field around me, so that anyone who tried to come close would catch fire with the power of the charge she’d set.

“I want to go,” I said finally. I couldn’t even remember why we’d come here.

“Back to Jack’s?” I looked at her, helpless with lust, and she smiled.

“I see,” she said, and drove me back to her house instead.

After that was a blur: her body, her skin. Sweat and salt and teeth. I couldn’t remember anything from one moment to the next, couldn’t remember my own name or hers, or whose hands were between my legs, whose cat-quick tongue, or where I had come to, or how I had gotten here; and then it would come back to me again in a swift flood like a storm surge, and I’d remember—my name is Tally this is Maddy this is Maddy’s house—and recede as swiftly as it had risen. I couldn’t stop crying. The air tasted of blood, and I didn’t know why—white dress silver knife—and I screamed out loud, and she stopped kissing me and held me tight. “Hush,” she said, “you’re safe now, you’re here.”

“Tell me a story,” I said against her soft mouth. “Please. Tell me something true.”

“Long ago,” she said, her voice low and heavy, calming the flutter of my heart, “when the gods came down among the people and made trouble, a king who wanted a son had a daughter instead. He was so angry he left her on a mountain to die. But a bear found her and nursed her, and with a bear for a mother, the girl grew up strong and without fear. She could run as fast as any animal in the forest. Finally the bear knew it was time for the girl to go live among her own kind, and so, though it grieved her, she gave her human daughter to some hunters. The hunters taught her to shoot true, to move silently through the woods, to live wisely and alone.

“The goddess of the wild places became angry with a lord who lived in that country because he had forgotten her in his sacrifices, and so she sent a great boar to destroy him. The boar was so monstrous no warrior could defeat it, and it killed many people and laid waste to the land. In desperation, the lord called together a great hunt, and the girl went among the hunters, and they laughed at her. Others were angry, for they thought it beneath them to go hunting with a woman. But she ignored them, and when the boar came and rushed upon them, it was she and she alone who stood her ground, and struck it dead with a single arrow.

“Because she was so strong, and also beautiful, she had a great many suitors, but she had no use for any of them. To get rid of them, she said she would marry any man who could beat her in a footrace; she and everyone else knew there was no such man on earth.

“But the goddess of love dislikes being thwarted by savage young ladies, and so she gave three enchanted golden apples to an aspiring suitor. No mortal could look upon them and not wish to possess them. He challenged the girl to a race. As they started she left him behind easily, but he tossed the first of the golden apples before her. Entranced, she stooped to pick it up, and he passed her. She soon caught up with him, and so he threw the second apple. Again, she stopped to pick it up, and then caught up with him easily. Finally, at the finish line, he threw the last apple, and it rolled a long way off the course. Unable to resist it, she ran after it, and he crossed the finish line first, and she had to keep her promise and marry him, though she did not wish to.”

“Whose story is that?” I said, although I knew.

“Yours, lovely,” she said.

“I still don’t understand why she had to marry him,” I said. I was calm again, myself. “He cheated.”

“The gods hold mortals to their promises,” she said, “but they themselves are cheats. It’s the word and not the gesture that binds. Who named you?”

“My aunt.”

“She named you after a girl who refused to fall in love,” Maddy said, stroking my hair. “Why do you think she did that?”

“She tries not to. Maybe she didn’t want me to, either.”

“Some people say Atalanta sailed on the Argo with Jason,” she said, yawning. “Before Melanion tricked her into marrying him. But nobody puts girls into those sorts of stories, even if they belong there. Only witches get to travel with heroes.”

“Maybe if Atalanta’d been a witch, she wouldn’t have ever had to marry,” I said.

“Maybe,” Maddy said. She propped herself up on one elbow and looked at me. “But even witches are made to sacrifice.”

That night I dreamed about a familiar place I’d never been. A flat expanse of stone, the sun hot on my shoulders. A sea as glossy blue as a jay’s wing, the smell of salt and scorched earth. A circle of crows surrounding me, motionless in the merciless light.

“If you listen well enough all the stories of the world are written in your body,” Maddy said behind me, and I turned around to face her: bare feet, her arms red from fingertips to elbows, the front of her white sleeveless dress soaked in blood. Her hair was a loose cloud around her brown shoulders. “I told you to listen,” she said, “I told you, I told you,” and her voice rose to a high wordless wail, and I took a step back from her and then another, but she kept coming toward me.

“Let me go,” I said, “please, let me go,” and she laughed and shook her head.

“As you wish, little bird,” she said, and I took another step backward and there was nothing beneath my foot but air, and I tipped backward into a hot blue emptiness, falling toward the breakers that crashed on jagged rocks a hundred feet below me. I jerked awake. She was fast asleep, one hand tucked beneath her chin and the other thrown outward as though she was reaching for something I could not see. I watched the rise and fall of her ribs for long minutes. Outside her house a coyote howled, and another answered it, and then the voices of the whole pack rose in an eerie chorus, yipping wails that looped back on themselves, rising and falling and then subsiding at last into silence again.

“What are you?” I whispered. “What have you done to me? What are you doing?” But she did not stir. In the morning she was just a girl again, kissing me awake, and the dream faded like a ghost in the ordinary light.

*   *   *

“Jack will think I’ve stolen you,” she said one afternoon.

“I guess I should make sure he knows I’m still alive.” I thought guiltily of my family: They probably thought by now I was dead, too. I could call them again from Jack’s. Maddy dropped me off, kissing me in his driveway for so long I wanted to tell her to turn around and take us back to her cabin, take all my clothes off and make me forget who I was over and over again. With effort I broke away. “Do you want to come in?” A troubled look crossed her face, and she shook her hair out as though she’d seen a bug in the car.

“No,” she said.

“You can ask him—” I thought carefully, struggling to remember the words even as I thought of them. “You can ask him about sailing,” I said. “Didn’t you go sailing with him?”

“No pasts,” she said. “Come back to me.” I nodded. I stood watching her drive away, willing her to look back, but she didn’t. My own thoughts were not comfortable company. I went inside Jack’s house; to my surprise, he was seated at the table, hunched over some old instrument I didn’t recognize, fiddling with its strings.

“Hi,” I said.

“You look terrible,” he said. “Where have you been? Are you eating?”

“I eat,” I said, ignoring his first question.

“What would your mother think of me?”

“I don’t have a mother.”

Jack sighed. “Let’s go sailing.”

He drove me to the marina in silence. In silence we parked the truck and walked to his boat, in silence we climbed aboard, and in silence I sat in the bow while he pulled in the line and raised the sail and guided us out past the breakwater. Out on the open water the temperature dropped. I wrapped my arms around myself and hunkered down in the bow.

“You’re charming this afternoon. Are you going to tell me where you’ve been? Should I send you home in disgrace? I haven’t had much to do with teenagers since…” He trailed off. “In a long time,” he said. “You’ll have to help me with the details.”

“I’ve been here for ages, and you haven’t told me anything,” I said. “Not a single thing. Not about who you are or about Aurora or about where I come from or how you knew her.”

The sail snapped in the wind and he did not answer me for a while, frowning in concentration as he fussed with the lines.

“I told you I barely knew Aurora,” he said finally.

“You’re lying.” I was too tired to care anymore.

He shook his head. “I’m not, Tally. It was years ago. A lifetime ago. She was young when I met her. About as old as you are now. She was beautiful, which I think for her was more of a curse than a gift. You look like her.”

“I’m not beautiful.”

“If you say so,” Jack said. “But she was, and there is no mistaking you are her daughter. She was…” He paused, trying to think of the right word. “She was heartbroken,” he said finally. “I think when her father died he took some part of her with him. By the time I met her she was already lost.”

“And then what? What happened to her? How is it that no one knows where she is?”

“She and I lived in Los Angeles for a while at the same time,” he said. “But I had lost touch with her by the time you were born. She had fallen into—” He stopped.

“Fallen into what?”

“Fallen in with some bad people,” he said. “There was a record producer she was … Once he got hold of her, she never had a chance.” Another pause. I waited. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you any more. I don’t know what happened after that. I played music in LA for a while, and then I didn’t want to be a part of that scene so I came here, over a decade ago, and I’ve been here ever since, and I can’t say I’ve noticed much that’s happened in the world since then. Aurora never tried to find me after we lost touch. I don’t know—I don’t know if she could have, from where she was when I knew her.”

Did you love her?
I thought.
Did you love her long enough to make me? Long enough to write that song for her? Do you know if I am your child? Do you even care?
He was looking out at the water, not at me, his face inscrutable. I didn’t know how to ask him, or what to ask him, or what he would say if I did somehow find the right question, and so I did not ask him anything at all, and he pointed out some otters winnowing quick as laughter through the waves, their heads popping up in unison to watch us as we sailed past, and the moment was gone. “I’m working up to sailing around the world,” he said after a while. “Next year, probably.”

“Why on earth would you want to do a thing like that?”

“To see if it can be done,” he said.

“Obviously it can be done.”

“To see if it can be done by me.” He looked out at the mountains, where they were going purple against the cooling dusk sky. “People who sail like that,” he said, “a voyage like that, alone through all that darkness and terror, are either sailing toward something, or running away.”

“Which one is it for you?”

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference,” he said. “Why did you come here, Tally? To find, or to run? We’re not so unalike as you might think.”

“You’ve had a lot longer than me to run away from things,” I said coolly.

“Why are you so angry? What good is it doing you?”

I opened my mouth to answer him and found to my surprise that he was right: I was angry, and I had no idea why. I had been angry at Aurora all my life, I was angry at Aunt Beast for lying to me and Raoul for letting her, at Shane for letting me go so easily, at Maddy for making me fall in love with her, at Jack for being what he was, elusive, evasive, inscrutable. I was angry at myself for coming all this way for nothing. And more than anything I was angry at whoever my real father was, moving around in the world, oblivious or uncaring—and which, in the end, was worse?—or maybe this infuriating chimera of a man in front of me, basically a stranger, who might know more about me and where I came from than anyone else in my life. But here, now, in Jack’s boat, the salt wind in my face and gulls eyeballing me from where they bobbed in the water, hoping for snacks, and loons diving quick and sure away from the bow as we sailed, all my anger seemed overlarge and unnecessary and exhausting.

“I’ve been angry for a long time,” I said finally. I had not expected myself to be so honest with him, but here I was. “But I don’t think running away is the answer. I don’t think I’m running away.”

“I never knew my father,” Jack said, and I thought he understood at last what it was I was looking for, but he only meant he’d lost a parent before he’d had one, too. “I thought for a long time that it didn’t mean anything. I knew who I was and what I wanted. A father seemed like an unnecessary burden. Someone else’s expectations for you, someone else’s dreams. A mother was hard enough. But the older I got, the more I wanted to know where I had come from. What it was that had made me. If I was a musician because of myself or because of him. If I was always leaving because he was a leaver, too. Things like that. And when I got older still I realized that loss had shaped me in ways I was still coming to understand. It’s not the end of the world, you know, living without a parent. It’s not like you’re half a person while everyone else is a whole one. But 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?” He fell silent, and I held my breath. He’d said more to me in the last five minutes than he had in the last month. He shook his head. “I’m sorry you came all the way out here to find out more about her, Tally. I wish I had more to tell you. She was one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met, and one of the most complicated. She was generous and funny and mean. She didn’t care about what she was—you know, rich, pretty, famous. She never said anything to me about it, but I think she would rather have been anyone else instead.”