About a Girl (13 page)

“He lives up on the bluffs,” I said.

“Off Cook?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“It’s pretty up there.”

“It’s kind of lonely,” I said.

She looked over at me. “I live just on the edge of town,” she said. “You’re welcome to come over for dinner, if you want. I can give you a ride back afterward.”

There was something I was supposed to do about dinner, but I couldn’t remember what it was. It occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten all day, and was in fact ravenous—another indication that something had gone wrong with my reasoning skills; I had never missed a meal in my life. “Sure,” I said, hoping I did not sound as eager as I felt. “That would be great.”

Maddy lived in a clearing at the end of a long dirt road through the thick woods at the outside edge of town. She parked and I got out, Qantaqa almost knocking me over as she leapt free from the truck. I stopped to admire Maddy’s huge garden—neat rows of emerald-green chard with its rubine stalks, broad-leaved kale, something anise-smelling and wispy that must have been fennel. Onions and the cheery tops of carrots, broccoli and cabbages nestled close to the ground, a tidy line of butter lettuce and red-leaf lettuce and green lettuce. At the far end she’d planted a circular garden of herbs; I could pick out sage and rosemary and basil, but most of the rest I didn’t recognize. “Wow,” I said.

“It’s easy to grow things out here.”

“It’s amazing.”

“Thanks. My landlady lives through the woods,” she said, pointing. “In a yurt.”

“A what?”

“It’s a thing out here. Sort of like a cross between a cabin and a tent. She’s a witch. Not a good one.”

“Like she’s evil?”

“Like she’s inept.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed. “That’s not as exciting.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Maddy said. “Come on inside.”

Her house was tiny and neat as a ship’s cabin: a single small room with a miniature kitchen, a round table and two chairs, a bookshelf, and a loveseat with an old quilt thrown over it. In the far corner a wooden ladder led to a square hole in the ceiling. “You can look,” she said. I half-climbed the ladder and poked my head into the second story, a loft whose ceiling slanted at the far end nearly to the floor. Her bed was just a mattress on the plank flooring, but it was tidily made with another quilt. Bunches of drying plants hung from the ceiling beams. Her house smelled like her—lavender and clean air off the water, with something headier underneath it; incense and sweat and girl. There were lanterns everywhere, old-fashioned ones with glass chimneys and bases full of lamp oil. There were no electric lights in her house, or outlets—did she live out here with no
electricity
? There wasn’t a bathroom, either.

Downstairs, she’d put a big pot of water on the stove—which she lit with a match—to boil. “Pasta okay?” she asked. “I can use basil and tomatoes from the garden, and I have mozzarella from the farmer’s market.”

“That sounds amazing. This place is great. How long have you been here?”

“Oh, you poor hungry thing,” she said to Qantaqa, who was lying on the floor making pained noises. “Has it been a thousand years since anyone fed you? Hold on,” she said to me, “let me take care of the dog.” She filled a bowl with kibble from a bucket next to the kitchen sink. Qantaqa whined eagerly, but she didn’t eat until Maddy set the bowl on the floor and pointed to it. “Go pick some basil, why don’t you, and a couple of tomatoes,” Maddy said to me.

When I came back in from the garden she had the water boiling, and garlic cooking in a pan of butter on the stove. The kitchen was too small for me to be of much use, and so I curled up on her couch and watched her, humming to herself as she cooked. “Where’s your bathroom?” I asked.

“Outhouse,” she said. “Out behind the garden.”

“A what?”

“Outhouse?” She turned around to look at me and whatever my expression was, it made her laugh out loud. “You better go before it gets dark.”

Alarmed, I obeyed, but the outhouse—a half-moon carved in the wooden door, like something out of a pioneer movie—was not as traumatic as I feared. Back in her kitchen, she was spooning pasta and sauce into two bowls.

We ate outside, cross-legged in the grass, our knees almost touching but not quite. It was later than I had thought and the sun was sinking, the sky deepening into twilight. The pasta was delicious, the tomato sauce warm and tasting of summer, and with it cool slabs of mozzarella drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with fresh basil. As I was finishing the last bit of my second bowl an unearthly howl echoed out from the woods behind her house, and I jumped. Qantaqa lifted her head, sniffing the air and whuffing softly, before resting her chin back on her paws.

“Coyotes,” Maddy said. “There’s a ravine back there where they spend their nights. When the moon is full the whole pack of them sets to singing; it’s something else. You’ll have to come back and hear them.”

She was looking straight at me, but I didn’t have the nerve to meet her uncanny eyes. Whatever I’d thought I would find out here, it sure hadn’t been this girl. “Sure,” I said. “That would be—fun.”

“A lot of old magic, out here,” she said, still looking at me.

“Is that why you moved out here?”

“I moved out here to forget.”

I did not know what to make of this. “I don’t believe in magic.”

“No? I wouldn’t have guessed.”

Was she teasing me? Flirting? I couldn’t have begun to tell. “I like science,” I said.

“Ah,” she said, “a little Aristotle.”

Now she was definitely making fun of me. “Aristarchus,” I said, nettled, “more likely.”

“You want to study the movement of the stars?”

I did not often come across people who knew who Aristarchus was. “More or less,” I said.

“I see,” she said. In the long shadows the tattoos on her arms flickered, the crows’ wings shifting as though in flight. “You’re here visiting family?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” I said. And though I had just met her I found myself telling her the whole story, leaving out the part about Shane: Mr. M, and the newspaper picture, and Jack, and Aurora, and what I was here for. She was quiet while I talked myself out, and when I was done, she stretched—me trying not to stare at the long graceful lines of her body—and leaned back on her elbows in the grass, one hand terrifyingly close to my thigh. I swallowed and looked up, anywhere but at her. There was Vega, springing to life against the twilight—though of course we imagine the stars’ heat backwards; it’s the blue stars that burn the hottest and most bright, and the cooling red giants who are nearing the end of their massive lives. To astronomers, stars don’t look like stars at all; for all the time I’d spent memorizing constellations, the stories of stars’ violent births and blazing deaths, when I got to the real work of astronomy I’d look not at the stars themselves but at the spectrographs that mapped the elements of their making, graph after graph and table after table—not at the heavens, but at the raw data of their hearts.

“You think he’s your father?” I had no idea what she meant for a moment, and then I remembered what we’d been—I’d been—talking about, and flushed at the thought that I’d spilled out my whole history to this glorious girl I barely knew. She must have been bored senseless. With effort, I met her molten-gold gaze in the gathering dark, and realized she was waiting for my answer.

“I don’t know. But it seems likely. He disappeared last night before I could ask him anything,” I said. There was something else he had—“Oh
shit
,” I said aloud. He had told me to meet him that night for dinner.

“What?”

“I keep forgetting things out here—I was supposed to have dinner with Jack.”

“This is a strange place,” she said.

“Strange how?” But she only shook her head, and that was all I got out of her; for a moment, in the setting sun, she had seemed, if not ordinary, at least approachable, but now the aloof wall was back up again.

We finished our dinner. She heated water on the stove and I did the dishes for her, acutely conscious of the warmth of her body as she stood behind me and dried them, the dizzying scent of her skin. I missed Shane, with an unexpected pang; I wondered what he would think of this half-feral girl, inscrutable and imperious and gorgeous, and then I wondered why I cared. He was the one who had bailed on me, after all, and here I was in her house, and if she had any interest in me I couldn’t yet tell, but I knew I wanted to find out. She moved around the room, lighting her glass lanterns, but instead of brightening the cabin they seemed to bring darkness crawling out of the corners, and in their murky, dim glow her house took on an eldritch air. The shadows deepened and liquefied at the edges of the room and the walls dissolved—I was standing in the forest from my dream, white branches clacking in the hot night and the dog howling once, twice, three times—the girl just ahead of me again, moving too quickly for me to keep up, and her name was at the tip of my tongue but I could not remember it, could not remember anything; the darkness swallowed me up like a great mouth and something touched my shoulder, burning white-hot as a brand. I yelped aloud and jerked away from it, and the thick black night whirled upward around me like a tornado of wings—and then I was back in Maddy’s house again, holding a clean plate and panicking. She was very close to me, one hand hovering over my shoulder, the tattoos on her forearms alive in the low light. The flames of her lanterns flickered in their glass chimneys and outlined the curve of her neck in liquid gold. She was so beautiful I did not know where to look. “I’m sorry,” she said. My heart hammered in my chest.

“Where was I—what
was—
” But whatever had just happened to me, I was no longer sure I wanted to know. Her mouth was so near to mine that I would have had only to lean forward to kiss her. She took the plate from my hand and moved her dishtowel across it, and the moment was broken.

“Let me take you home,” she said. I knew a dismissal when I heard one, and I followed her out to her truck.

On my way back into Jack’s house I nearly tripped over a black bundle in his yard, and it was only the bobbing flicker of Maddy’s headlights as she pulled away that caught out whatever it was before I kicked it. I knelt down in the grass for a closer look. It was a crow. Its eyes were dull and its beak gaped and it did not move away from me, and I knew immediately that it was dying. Around me the darkness rustled, and when I looked up I caught the glittering black eyes of a dozen of its kin, ringed around us in a half-circle and watching, alert. “Hold on,” I said to them, “I won’t hurt your friend.” I ran into Jack’s house and flipped open cabinets until I came up with a silver bowl and the bread I’d found that morning; I tore off a chunk of the least moldy end of the bread, filled the dish with water, and brought these offerings back out to the crow. It did not move as I knelt over it again, but looked up at me, unblinking. “You’re much more attractive than a pigeon,” I said, and then worried that I had offended it.
Look at you,
I thought,
only in the sticks for a day and already talking to birds
. The other crows, still in their formation, stared at me unnervingly. “I’ll check on him in the morning,” I said. “Her? Do crows go to the vet? I’m sorry your friend is sick.” They seemed to be waiting for me to do something else. “I’ll, uh, pray for him,” I said, vaguely aware from books that this was a service one performed for the nearly deceased. “Her.” The crows did not move when I went back inside. The house was dark and still, the only lights the one I’d turned on in my search for the crow’s succor. If Jack had made dinner, or sat around waiting for me, or come home at all, there was no sign of it. But there was no note telling me to pack up or get out, either, and my bag was in the guest room where I’d left it, untouched. I brushed my teeth and put on an old T-shirt and decided to leave any further mystery for the morning.
Call your family,
said the voice in my head.
Later,
I told it.

I had never prayed before and was not sure how to go about it. “Dear universe,” I said into the cool darkness of my room, feeling more than a little silly—but I had promised. “Please take care of my—friend. The crow,” I added, for clarity, in case the universe thought I meant Shane. The universe did not respond. I had not expected that it would, but could not help a faint tinge of disappointment as I climbed into bed. I had imagined my first foray into the world of the spiritual would be marked with more fanfare. Aunt Beast would have swooned to know that I had called upon nonrational forces for assistance.
Call home. Tally. Call home.
“Later,” I said aloud, and resolutely closed my eyes.

That night I dreamed that I had known Jack all my life and we did not have secrets from one another. We were walking along a stream somewhere in the mountains, although I have never been in the mountains in the waking world, and I could hear the high clear call of some bird that was unfamiliar to me, and a quiet breeze moved through the needles of trees I somehow knew were fir.
It was never easy to be a father to you,
he said. His lips did not move but I could hear his voice somewhere deep in my bones, humming through me like a chord, and then he spread his arms wide and his soft shirt flapped open into black wings and his features sharpened and lengthened into a black beak and his skin sprouted glossy black feathers and like a rent across the sky he rose upward, a great crow beating its wings and inking out the sun until I was standing alone in darkness. The stream at my feet went viscous and black as oil, and the bark fell away from the trees around me, and they glowed bone-white against the sudden night. In the distance a dog howled, deep and mournful, three times.
If you follow me here,
the voice that was no longer Jack’s voice said, in the hollow of my chest where my heart beat a staccato tattoo,
there will be no one to lead you out again—

I woke in a tangle of sweat-drenched sheets, my mouth open as though I had been gasping for breath. All around me was an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar and too-quiet dark, and then I remembered I was in Jack’s house above the sea, and my pounding heart slowed to a normal rhythm. The silence in the room was like another person waiting. I pulled the blankets over my head and cupped my hands over my ears and listened for the faint soothing echo of my own blood moving in my veins, and it was a long time before I fell asleep again.