About a Girl Read online

  Some tourists entered in a noisy babble; I didn’t have to be from here to recognize what they were immediately. Tourists are the same the world over; I could imagine these exact people, in these exact clothes, shrieking with laughter and photographing themselves going through the subway turnstiles in Union Square at rush hour while people clotted up behind them, apoplectic with rage. Kate was polite as she took their orders, but when she turned her back on them I saw her expression was tinged with menace.

  “We’re thinking of relocating here,” the tourists’ patriarch informed us.

  “How nice for you,” Kate said.

  “It’s so lovely,” agreed his wife, spray-tanned a virulent pumpkin color, batting lashes mascaraed into unnerving spikes.

  “This time of year,” Kate agreed.

  “The winters can’t be so bad,” said the patriarch. In startling contrast to his wife, he was pasty as a block of tofu, save a fluorescing patch of peeling sunburn that spread unevenly across his cheeks; it was not hard to imagine him clammy to the touch.

  “No,” echoed his wife. “Not so bad. What’s a little rain? Forty or fifty degrees sounds downright balmy.” She giggled.

  “The winters here have destroyed far better men than you,” Maddy said in a conversational tone. The patriarch looked at her, puzzled. I hid a smile behind my hand.

  “Sure,” he said. “I bet you’re right. I bet we’d just love it here.” The tourists collected their beers, eyeing Maddy nervously, and transported them to a table by the windows overlooking the water.

  “Dipshits,” Kate said under her breath. “Can’t shoot ’em, can’t stay in business without ’em. It’s enough to make me take up secretarial work in the city.”

  “Is it really that bad here in the winter?” I asked when I was sure the tourists were out of earshot.

  “It’s like living with a rain cloud ten feet above your head,” Kate said. “It gets dark at four. It’s so damp everything molds. The wind comes in off the water and freezes you straight through. The only colors you’ll see are fog and wet tree. For nine months solid.”

  “It can’t be as bad as where I’m from,” I said. “We have blizzards. It gets down to ten or twenty degrees sometimes. If you spend the night outside without a coat it can kill you.”

  “What we have out here,” Kate said, “is despair, which is a different thing than cold, and a much slower and more miserable death.”

  “The reason Kate does so well,” Maddy said, “is that everyone who lives in this town year-round is an alcoholic. Where are you from?”

  “New York,” I said. “How about you?”

  “A lot farther than that,” she said. I waited, but that was apparently the closest I was going to get to an answer. If she was curious what I was doing there, she didn’t ask, and I didn’t feel like offering. There was something about her that was as unsettling as it was compelling; those eyes, that face, the way she moved, like an animal that had been in a cage too long. I couldn’t stop looking at her, but she did not seem to have anything else to say—had lost interest in me altogether, as far as I could tell. She lit a cigarette and looked out the window, away from me.

  “Want another one?” Kate asked, nodding toward my bottle, which I had emptied without noticing.

  “No,” I said, “thank you.” I had no excuse left for sitting at her bar, so I got up. I dug in my pocket for my wallet, but she shook her head.

  “On the house,” she said. “Welcome to the country, city mouse.”

  “Thanks,” I said again. Everyone I came across seemed committed to giving me things for free; I could not imagine anything more unlike New York. Maddy did not say goodbye—did not so much as look up—when I left, and I did not like how this fact made me feel. I had had just about enough feelings for the rest of my life. The beer had made me stupid, but I found I did not mind.

  I wasn’t ready for the silent loneliness of Jack’s house, and so I wheeled his bike to where the main street dead-ended into the harbor, leaned it up against a telephone pole—so far, he’d been right about no one trying to steal it—and walked down a narrow, sandy path through sharp-bladed grass that came to my knees in green spears.

  The beach here was alive with unexpected things, nothing like the syringe-strewn and admittedly filthy sands of Coney Island, where Aunt Beast had taken me to ride the Cyclone and eat cotton candy in the summers when I was small, and where Shane and I would sometimes go when we were older with pilfered beer (for him) and Dr Pepper (for me) to bake ourselves in the hammering July sun. Drifts of seaweed were heaped up and down the shoreline, miniature clouds of bugs humming over them and hopping madly on various bug errands. I was alarmed by some slick emerald-green animal I didn’t recognize, long and skinny and snakelike, and jumped back in fright; but it didn’t move as I got closer, and I thought it must be dead. I turned over a rock and a tiny crab, no bigger than my thumbnail, brandished its miniature pincers at me before scuttling away to safety.

  When I tired of adventuring amidst the flora and fauna I sat on the beach and looked at the distant mountains, all a purple smear save a single white-sided peak that stood taller than its fellows—the mountain I’d seen from the plane? But no, the direction was wrong, and that one had been even bigger. It had begun to occur to me that the objects we were accustomed to referring to as “mountains” on the east coast much more closely resembled large hills, and that “forest” had something of a different definition in this part of the country as well. I caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up, expecting another beachcomber; instead, it was a deer and her tiny, drunken-legged fawn, spotted white and stumbling along at its mother’s heels as though it had just learned to walk the day before. I sat forward to see them better and both deer turned to look at me, the doe calm, the fawn wide-eyed and panicked. It scampered after its mother, who sauntered away from me in a desultory manner, nibbling at a low-hanging branch before picking her way daintily back into a stand of trees that grew down to the stony shore. The fawn, with one last look in my direction, huge ears flicking back and forth, leapt after her with an endearing, inept lurch.

  The back tire of Jack’s bicycle had gone flat. I remembered the way to his house, at least—it would be a long walk, but not an unpleasant one, and I could do with the exercise. I didn’t have much choice but to make the best of it. I wheeled the bike away from the businessy bits of town and back uphill, past houses with big, pretty gardens. Raoul would have loved all these flowers—phone call. I hadn’t called them yet. “I’m sorry!” I said aloud, as if that would help. They were likely killing themselves with worry, no matter what sort of note I’d left them—even if I was eighteen—and then I thought, unbidden, of Maddy. Yellow-eyed girl and her yellow dog; the tangle of her hair; her brown hands on the bar—long slender fingers, knuckles dotted with white scars—and as if I’d summoned her with the force of my will, a truck pulled up next to me, big yellow dog with its head out the open window, yellow-eyed girl in the driver’s seat, and I forgot all about calling my parents. “Hey,” she said. “Need a ride?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That would be great.” Keep it cool, I thought, keep it cool, keep it cool. Her truck was, like Kate’s, a battered old thing that looked as though someone had driven it to the moon and back again several times, at least once through a dust storm. I put my bike in the bed and climbed in the cab next to Qantaqa, who listed up against me happily, panting in my ear. Her breath was not pleasant; neither was Dorian Gray’s, of course, but he had a lot less of it and a much smaller head besides. I found myself unaccountably panicky and wiped my sweaty palms on my shorts.

  “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 r
ide 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 w
hat 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.