About a Girl (26 page)

“I have been waiting for you for so long, my Tally,” she said, and I dropped to my knees before her and put my head in her lap, and she wound her cool fingers through my hair, and I felt a great shuddering sob rise up through me and burst in my throat as I wept into her bony thighs. She let me cry for a long time, saying nothing, only stroking my hair over and over, until at last the gentle, rhythmic motion soothed the last hiccupping sob out of me and I could raise my head and look at her. Her eyes were fixed on my face and the sorrow in them was awful to see.

“It was brave of you to come here,” she said. “But you cannot stay long.” The ice-eyed man watched us without blinking. “Leave me alone with my daughter,” she said, but he did not move. She turned her head away from us both to look out the window, where the white scorch of the full moon burned in the dead black sky and glittered on the flat black sea. There were so many things to ask her: who my father was and why she had left me, and how she had come to this terrible place, and what could possibly be better about sitting in this ugly chair in hell than spending all her life with me. I did not know where to start, and so I said instead, “I came here to get you,” which I had not realized until I said it out loud, and then it seemed obvious; I had come here, and that was not possible, and so it was surely no more impossible for me to bring her away again.

“I left once,” she said, “and it was all I could manage. I cannot leave again.”

“When?” I said, and then I thought about it. I lived in an apartment in New York with people who had come together to be my family. I looked through telescopes. I was going to study the origins of the universe. She had taken me out of this place and into that one, that world of gardens and summers and too-furry cats, that world of music and light, and heartbreak, and sweat and real death and pancakes and love. “You left to bring me to Aunt Beast.”

“He wanted you, too,” she said, as if the ice-eyed man were not standing next to us, listening; but maybe she had spent so long at his side that she no longer cared. “But I would not let him have you.” He must have been furious, I thought, that she had so defied him, that she had somehow found the strength to escape him long enough to deliver me from his reach. She shifted in her chair, and I saw a glimmer of silver at her foot, a thin cruel line of chain that circled her ankle and trailed off into the darkness behind her, and she smiled again at my face.

“It’s not so bad,” she said. But her lightness could not hide the tapestry of pain woven into her words, and I understood in an instant that all the time I had spent hating her, all the life I had lived refusing to admit her as mine, I had been wrong, and more than wrong: she had given up any chance she had ever had to get away from this place herself in order to give me a life outside it, and she was trapped here now like a ray of light sucked into the maw of a black hole. “It’s not so bad,” she said again, putting one cool hand against my tearstained cheek. “I came here first of my own will. I would have liked to see you in the daylight, just once, but to see you here is enough. Tally, you brave and wondrous thing—you are so much more like her than you are like me, and it’s her strength that will carry you away from me again. You must go on being brave. You must not look back on me here, in darkness.”

“Why did you come here?” I cried. “How could you leave—how could you leave the green grass? And the water? And all those trees? How could you leave the stars—and Aunt Beast—and me? How could you give all that up?”

“Because I was lost in the past before I came here; because I was lost in loss. Not all of us are made for the world above, sweet child—but I would release you from the mistake I made of looking only backward, of living in regret over what is already done. ‘What is to give light must endure burning’—”

“That’s a physicist, who said that,” I whispered.

“That was a poet,” she said. “I could not bear the fire. But you are made of stronger stuff than I. You are so much more than the sum of the mistakes I have made—you are yourself, Tally, your own bright and wild star, the best thing I could have hoped for. I have watched you in dreams; I am so proud of you. And you must go back to the world above and carry your light wherever you go—there is so much that is still possible for you. Do not spend your life in the sun weeping over me.”

Was there no one in the world who had not been unraveled by the past? Jack and Maddy trying to forget it, Kate erasing it, Aurora lost in it, Aunt Beast refusing to speak of it, Raoul heartbroken by it. And I saw, finally, that how I lived with it would come to define me, too, but it did not have to be a trap so much as one of the many stories I would someday learn to tell. Like looking at galaxies at the far edge of the known universe: The light of what has come before can show us where we are now and how we got here, but it is no place to return to, no place to call home. The ice-eyed man shifted, his cold stare laden with menace, and I knew I could not stay any longer if I was going to make it back to the world I wanted to live in. “I love you, Tally,” she said. “I have loved you every day of your life, and I will love you long past the end of it,” and I thought the sobs that came out of me then would tear apart my whole body. I shook in her arms, and she let me cry myself out, and then she said, “You are loved by more, and better, than me. Go back to the world I gave you. Go home.”

“Not better,” I said. “Only different.” I would not let go of her hand.
Home,
I thought—home. Shane and Raoul and Henri, Aunt Beast, sad old Mr. M. My family, my real family, the people who had let me come here, who had woven a ladder for me out of love all the way to the stars, the people who would be waiting for me always, on the other side, when I came through this place and back to where I belonged. And Maddy. Maddy was waiting for me, too. All of my life in front of me and all I had done, to come here, lay behind: I remembered, remembered my own name and who I was and that I was alive and whole and the next step in the story was mine to choose.

“I love you, too,” I said. “Thank you. And—goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Tally,” she said, and I let go of her hand at last. She let me stand on my own, without helping me, and when I was sure of myself I turned my back on her and walked, proud and strong and whole, out the black door and across the white plain, back to the cold dark sea and the white scar of the moon road home. My heart quailed when I took the first step. The moon was low in the sky, and I could not see my way out of the dark. I began to run, faster and faster, willing all my laps of the park with Aunt Beast to matter, but the moon was sliding toward the horizon fast and merciless, and the white road began to break up below me. My foot plunged through it into searing death-cold water, and I tripped and fell forward, staggered to my feet again.
Run, fucking run, oh god oh god,
my heart pounding in terror and exertion.
Don’t let me die here, please don’t let me die here alone in the dark
—I thought of that awful place, locked in my own frozen chair next to Aurora for the rest of all time, under the cruel uncaring gaze of the ice-eyed man—
Don’t fucking let me die—
but it was too late, the road dissolving below me, I was sinking into the frozen nightmarish depths of the black sea. “
Maddy!
” I screamed, “
Maddy!
” And then my mouth filled up with water and I choked. Hands wrapping around my ankles, pulling me deeper, the empty sky gone mad with howling, whirling demons, laughter rising up around me and impossible things winking in and out of life around me—a bull-headed man roaring, a three-headed dog with teeth as big as my hand, triplet mouths open and howling, a huge swan beating a terrified girl bloody with its wings.
I will not die,
I thought, and fury welled up to replace my terror, a fury so hot I thought it would burn away the dark water around me. I thought of Maddy, her yellow eyes, her skin, her mouth, her magnificent strength: Maddy, beloved, for all of what she was, for what she’d given me and what she’d taken away. I willed her into life before me, reaching my hands out to touch her, the tattoo on my arm blazing with light—and there she was, in the white dress I’d seen in my dreams, blood soaked, her knife in one hand and the other hand held out to me.

“
Fight,
” she said, her voice a huge bell tolling. “
Tally, fight,
” and I kicked my legs and swam toward her—
naked girls, bloody limbed and screaming, tearing a man who looked like Jack to pieces as he bellowed in pain
—and there was Maddy, waiting for me, and I was not going to die. I
refused
to die. Our fingers touched and at last her hand closed around mine and pulled me up, up, up out of the dark water into the less-dark night.

She’d dragged me up onto the beach—the fire still burning, all around us quiet, the mad visions behind me. I took a huge gasping breath, and it turned into a cough, and then, heaving, I threw up salt water, coughed, breathed again, coughed. “Come here,” she said in my ear, helping me to my feet. “Let’s get you dried off before you freeze to death.” She sat me down by the fire on a blanket, and I hugged myself while she built it up again and then found me a dry shirt and pants in her bag, helped me out of my wet clothes, night air cold against my colder skin. I couldn’t stop shivering. She held me tight while I shook, and when I began to cry again she did not say anything, but she held me even tighter and kissed my cheeks where the salt of my tears mixed with the salt of the water. When at last the shaking subsided she kissed my mouth, my throat, my shoulder, and I felt hunger coming awake in me where moments before there had been only loss, and I kissed her back, still crying, and let her take off the clothes she’d just helped me into and kiss her way down the plane of my belly and bury her face between my legs, and her hands were everywhere and all of her through and through me, all the light in the universe splintering—in the first moments of the birth of the universe, the hot plasma of its origins ballooning outward in waves of light faster than anything before or since—and when I came again, again, she held me, pulled herself up to kiss me again with her mouth that tasted of the salt tide of my own body, and I was still crying, I thought might cry until the final moments when the universe rent itself into nothing at the end of time. She wrapped me in the blanket and murmured nonsense into my sweaty salt-drenched hair, and I clutched at her even as she rolled away from me, pulled a cigarette out of her pack and lit it, blew smoke at the lowering fire. She had a flask of whisky, too, in the bag she’d brought down to the beach, and she fed it to me in sips, and I did not even mind the burn.

I did stop crying, eventually. I was so tired I thought I might die of it. I rested my head on Maddy’s shoulder and thought about how to say goodbye. “I saw her,” I said finally.

“Was it what you wanted?”

“I don’t know. I wanted—I thought I could bring her home.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“I know. But I thought maybe—I thought I could. If I tried hard enough.”

She was quiet for a while, her breath warm against my ear. “You don’t have to be like me,” she said. “Living as a memory of loss. Alone with all the demons I made and the demons I’ve chosen. Becoming a monster is only one way to survive.”

“I don’t think you’re a monster,” I said, and I felt her smile.

“I like being a monster,” she said. “But you are young, and there is still room for you to be a girl instead.”

“It’s time for me to go home,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Maddy?”

“Yes?”

“Do you love me?”

She lit another cigarette. Inhale, slow exhale. Inhale. “Anything I love I bring to ruin,” she said.

“That’s not a no,” I said, greatly daring.

“It’s not a yes, Tally.” She let me go, and I sat up, and she smoked in silence while I laboriously put on my clothes again. I was so exhausted I could barely move, and it took me a couple of tries to stand up and feebly shake out her blanket. She stood, too, but made no move to help me as I handed it back to her.

“You went a long way,” she said.

I thought of Aurora in that cold empty room, looking out eternally on an endless black sea, and squeezed my eyes shut before I started crying again.

“I came back,” I said.

“Not many people do.”

“Maddy? Why did you move here?”

She opened her yellow eyes wide and looked at me. Overhead, Ursa Major was sinking into the sea, and I knew it was almost dawn.

“Sweet thing,” she said, “I was waiting for you.” She offered me her hand, and I took it, and we walked back to her truck.

She drove me to Jack’s and made no move to get out of the truck when we got there, didn’t even turn off the engine. I stared at her dashboard, gathering myself, wanting to ask and not wanting to ask. I thought of the plants hanging in her house, of the mornings she had kissed me awake in her blankets and brought me coffee, of all the times she had made me certain I was the only girl in the world only to turn away again. She was more herself than anyone I had ever met: more sure, more fearless, more capricious, more reckless—and all across it, the girl that she was, the wash of blood:
the rabbit the deer the knife, the child with a red gape where its throat should have been—
but I was strong now, I’d always been strong; I wanted her to see it. I’d been to hell and back in a single night, and I was still walking around. “Will I see you again?”

“The ocean is a vast thing,” she said, “but all its drops are connected, one to the other.”

“That’s not a yes.”

“It’s not a no.”

I forced myself to look her in the eye. “I love you,” I said. “Thank you.” Yellow eyes, tangle of dark hair, crooked grin. “Say goodbye to Qantaqa for me.”

“Qantaqa doesn’t believe in goodbyes.”

“But you do.”

“I’ve been around for a long time.” I waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t, and so I got out of her truck and shut the door and stood there, squeezing my hands into fists and then dropping them helplessly again by my side, and I waited for her to turn around and look at me as she drove away, even though I knew better, even though she never did. The sun was coming up, and my old crow flapped out of a tree and came to land next to me.