All Our Pretty Songs (2 page)

When the show is over we are soaked and panting, holding each other tight. Aurora’s eyes are huge. “Oh my god. That was, like, the best.” The boy standing next to us is already trying to ask her name, but she ignores him. “Come backstage,” she says to me. “I know that girl.”

This is the part I hate. I like to keep the magic close, not ruin it with people. “I kind of want to go home.”

“Are you kidding? You’re no
fun
.”

I sigh. “Okay.” She takes my hand and tows me after the band. Backstage, she hops in place while they drag their amps offstage, take apart the drum kit and cart it to their van. I stand, awkward, digging the toe of my boot into the concrete floor. The singer comes over to us and gives Aurora a hug. Up close she’s even more beautiful than she was on stage. I’m so shy I don’t know where to look. She and Aurora jump straight into gossip. The bass player, still cool, lurks nearby, pretending not to pay attention.

“You got a light?” It’s the drummer.

“Yeah, sure.” I follow her outside. Behind the club the alleyway is dark. I light her cigarette for her, and then mine. “You guys were great.”

“Thanks.” She smokes like she wants to chew on the filter, taps her fingers against her thighs. She’s wearing a white men’s undershirt. The muscles in her arms ripple as she brings the cigarette to her mouth, patters out a rhythm with her free hand. “You know Aurora?”

“Yeah. She’s like my sister.”

“Same mom? You don’t look alike.”

“No, grew up together.”

“Yeah?”

“We lived in the same house for a long time. Our moms are old friends.” This is not exactly the truth. Our moms
were
old friends. Our moms haven’t spoken since I was a kid.

“You knew her dad?”

“I mean, kind of. I don’t remember him. We were really young when he died.”

“Fucked up.”

“Yeah.” I wait for her to pry. I’m used to deflecting questions about Aurora, about her dad, about her life, about her money. But she drops it.

“Sorry. That’s messed up to ask. I can never think of the right thing to say to people.”

I laugh. “Me, either. Aurora’s the one who’s good at that stuff. I stand around.”

“You play?”

“Me? No.”

“She doesn’t either, right?”

“No.”

“I guess that’s some pretty heavy stuff to carry around. Shit,” she says, exhaling. “There I go again. Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay.”

We smoke the rest of our cigarettes in silence. Back inside, the bass player’s made his move, slinking up to Aurora as she chirps away. The euphoria of the show has worn off. My ears are ringing and I’m tired. I can tell by the way Aurora is leaning into the bass player that it’s going to be a long night.

The band invites us over. I make Aurora let me drive, follow their beat-up van to an old industrial neighborhood down by the water. Their apartment is the whole third floor of an abandoned factory. It’s obviously supposed to be a practice space, but they have a hot plate plugged into a wall and a curtained-off toilet that I guess passes as a bathroom. Every surface is covered with overflowing ashtrays, coffee mugs stuffed with cigarette butts, empty beer cans, half-empty bottles of whisky. There are nests of blankets and clothes in three corners of the enormous room. Somebody, more ambitious than the rest of the band, has gone so far as to hang a moldy shower curtain from the ceiling for privacy. I walk over to the huge windows that overlook the bay and try to ignore the smell. This place must be freezing in the winter, but underneath the filth it’s pretty amazing. I can see the streaming lights of cars on the viaduct, and past that the wine-dark water. Far away, the firefly glow of a ferry moves toward the far horizon.

“Pretty great view, huh?” It’s the drummer again. Behind me the bassist is pouring Aurora a drink. I can hear him apologize for the lack of ice, and she giggles.

“Yeah. I want a place like this someday.”

“What would you do with all this space?”

“I paint.” I try to say it naturally, but it sounds funny.
I’m a painter
. Maybe in my dreams. Lah-dee-dah.

“Yeah? That’s cool. I can’t even draw stick figures. All I’m good at is drumming and washing dishes.”

“People were really into you.”

“There’s a million bands in this city, and at least ten of them are good. Not enough to go around. I might still be washing dishes when I’m thirty.”

“At least you tried.”

“Not many other options.” I nod. We’re quiet again. She takes out another cigarette, smokes it, taps. I wonder if she twitches in her sleep. She’s waiting for me. We are entering the realm of adult transactions. But I don’t want to sleep here, and so I don’t say anything. I bring my shoulders up to my ears and make the silence hard and without invitation. I hear Aurora’s laugh again, and the noise of more people coming into the loft. Someone puts on an old punk record, something loud and fast that I don’t recognize. A shot of nervousness runs through me and I chew on my lip, curl my toes in my boots. The drummer leaves me at the window. I don’t want to turn around, deal with strangers. I want to grab Aurora and get out of here. I turn enough to see what she’s up to. Kissing the bass player on the couch while people sit on the other end, ignoring them, drinking beer and handing around records. Oh, Aurora. For a young dog, her tricks are pretty old.

I wait until Aurora comes up for air and then I sidle over. “I’m out.” The bassist’s a skeeze, but he’s pretty tame compared to some of the dudes Aurora ends up with. These people seem nice. They’ll take care of her if anything goes wrong. Hold her hair out of her face while she throws up their shitty whisky. I’m far from home, but not too far to walk. She looks up at me.

“Take my car.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll walk.”

“I don’t want you to walk.”

“I like walking.”

“Serious.” She rummages through her purse, looking for her keys. I dig them out of my pocket and try to give them to her, but she closes my fingers around them. “Serious,” she says again. “I’ll get a ride home with—” She stops, turns to the bass player. “What’s your name again?” For a second, he looks hurt, and then his face is cool again. She’ll eat him for breakfast, I think, and I can’t help grinning. She knows why I’m smiling, and she throws her head back and laughs. “I’ll be fine, Mom.”

“Okay.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

To my surprise, Cass is waiting up for me. She takes a bowl of stir-fry out of the refrigerator. “I can heat it up,” she offers. I shake my head, sit at the table, and shove forkfuls of vegetables and tofu into my mouth. Cass has been a health freak for about as long as I’ve been sentient. She quit doing drugs when I was a kid. Unfortunately for me, she also quit sugar, television, and fun. She insists the human body is meant to live on raw food, but I told her I’d run away from home if she got rid of the stove, so we compromise. She makes me stir-fry and herbal tea, and I don’t tell her when I go to Chinatown with Aurora and eat sixteen different kinds of meat swimming in grease. That way, everybody’s happy. Mostly. I would give anything to have a secret stash of, say, pork rinds, but Cass can sniff out Yellow #5 the way some moms suss pot and dirty thoughts. She was nineteen when she had me, and most of the time she feels like an annoying friend you can’t shake and not like a mom at all. But when it comes to restricting my toxin intake, she’s a holy terror.

“You out with Aurora?”

“Yeah.”

“Good show?”

“Yeah, they were awesome. We hung out with them for a while. She’s still there. Not really my scene, though.” Cass snags a red pepper out of my bowl.

“You worried about her?”

“Like, all the time. But not tonight.”

“Okay.” Her face goes distant and I know she’s thinking of Maia. Aurora would be better off in the custody of a potato. At least she could eat it if things got dire. “You let me know, though, if—” She trails off.
If what?
I want to ask.
If Aurora gets loaded every weekend and goes home with boys who are basically strangers?
Kind of late in the game for team D.A.R.E.

“It’s cool. She’s cool. I keep an eye on her.”

“That’s my girl.” Cass reaches over to ruffle my hair, and I duck. I hate it when she tries to be a parent. It doesn’t suit her.

Lately I have been dreaming about a river and a dark forest. In the dream I am standing on a path that winds through trees that are white as bone and without leaves. I am barefoot, and my feet are covered in blood. The only light comes from the trees themselves, an opaline glow like that of a luminescent fungus. The path stops at a river that is too broad for me to see the far bank, and the water moves swift and smooth and has an oily sheen to it. I know there is someone waiting for me on the other side, someone I must find, but I do not know who it is. In the distance I can hear howling. Wolves, I think, or dogs. The bare branches of the trees clatter against each other although there is no wind. I take a step forward, but before my foot breaks the surface of the water I wake up. It is always a long time before I remember where I am.

After Aurora’s father died, when I was still very small, Cass and I lived with Aurora and Maia for a while. The house was always full of people and music then. Maia was a silent shadow, worn wraithlike with grief. She moved further and further away from us, into her own twilit limbo outside space and time. Sometimes a skeleton-thin man in a long black coat would come to the house and sit in her room with her for hours. Cass told us he was her doctor, but we didn’t know then the kind of medicine he was working with his suitcase full of needles and glassine bags. Aurora and I weren’t allowed in Maia’s part of the house, but we stole into it once. I remember candles everywhere, and dark walls without decoration, and a great canopied bed draped with silk and satin and scattered with velvet pillows. Maia slept tangled in the sheets, her arms akimbo, her mouth slack, her nut-brown skin ashen. “Is she dead?” I whispered.

“She’s fine,” Aurora said. “She sleeps a lot.”

Slowly Aurora’s father’s bandmates and their friends drifted away, escaping their orbit around the black hole Maia had become. There were no more parties, where Aurora and I darted in between the legs of grownups, stole bites off plates and sips out of glasses and fell asleep, giddy and a little drunk, on Aurora’s lawn. No more circles of musicians playing guitars together in the garden until the sky glowed white with dawn. No more lanky-limbed, long-haired men and women twirling us around while we squealed with glee, lifting us to their shoulders and parading us up and down the sweeping marble staircase, or teaching us to slide down the banisters when Cass wasn’t paying attention. The house went still and dead as a tomb.

After that, Cass took me away from Aurora’s palace in the hills. Aurora and I stayed twin-blooded, wearing each other’s clothes and finishing each other’s sentences, but Cass and Maia never talked again. I don’t know what happened in that vast house, or if anything happened at all. Maybe Cass gave up trying to pull Maia out of darkness and settled for bringing me to a brighter world instead. Sometimes I wish Cass had fought harder, had taken Aurora and Maia with us. I know it was hard for Cass to get clean, and maybe that’s why she left Maia there; she wasn’t strong enough for them both. I’m not like that. I will never let go of anything I love.

Aurora and I have lived in this city all our lives. If you came here you would know that it is a young city, out on the edge of the world, just a few hours away from where the earth drops off into the grey ocean that reaches all the way to the far edge of the sky. It is a city of hills and water, ringed in mountains that are capped with white even in the dead of July. The summers are sweet and golden, bookended with long rainy seasons where the sky brushes the earth with a blanket of cloud.

Aurora and I used to spend our days roaming, picking out books at the huge old bookstore downtown with its creaking wooden floors and innumerable rooms, trying on Doc Martens and buying Manic Panic at the punk store under the viaduct, stuffing ourselves with fish and chips on the pier and drinking coffee until our speedy hands shook. We haunted the curio store down on the waterfront, visiting Sylvia and Sylvester, its glass-cased mummies (Aurora insists they are real; I say no way). Even now we still love putting quarters in the fortune-telling machine and watching the turban-swathed mannequin inside move its jerky mechanical hand and spit out fortunes printed on cardboard squares. Aurora always gets the good ones. On the curiosity-laden shelves a fetal pig bobs in a bath of formaldehyde next to a stuffed two-headed lamb. The store manager once let me take Aurora’s picture with the lamb.

We love best the coffee shop up on the hill, a veritable stable of goths and artists. Tall, many-paned windows let in the light, and the red-painted walls are lined with bookshelves. When we were kids Aurora and I would bum cigarettes off cute boys playing guitar at the outdoor tables. She’d pen tortured poetics in her journal while I surreptitiously tried to draw everyone around us. The baristas with their multicolored hair and deliberately ragged clothes, most of them stained with paint or some other indicator of artistic temperament. The strung-out rockers, blinking into their coffee. The street kids hitting us up for quarters and trying to get Aurora’s phone number.

It was easy to pretend I was an adult in those moments: the rain-dampened streets outside the window, the air hazy with cigarette smoke, the whir of the espresso machine, the low murmur of people talking around us. An adult with a bookstore job, maybe, and a musician boyfriend who would write songs about me. We would stay up all night smoking pot and having sex, and we would only allow our apartment to be illuminated by candlelight. Every room would be hung with glittering beaded curtains. Cass had no tolerance for my preadolescent passions; when I brought home a stack of Jane’s Addiction records she scoffed. “Smacked-out posers,” she said disdainfully. I couldn’t explain to her that there was something in that wash of noise that felt like home to me. Cass and Maia had lived for punk shows when they were our age, but Cass never even went out anymore. Never went with us to the dirty all-ages clubs we spent our weekends in, or the bars we started frequenting as soon as Aurora was old and charming enough to get us past the door. Cass still had all her old records, but I never heard her play them. Finally, one day a few years ago, I dragged them all into my room and kept them there.