All Our Pretty Songs aops-1 Read online

  “Who’s that?”

  “We’re going to find out.”

  We sidle between a couple of dudes in high tops and flannel, identical manes of long brown hair. The boy with the guitar touches the strings, and a hush falls across the garden. And then he begins to play.

  A single note, faint and sweet, travels all the way from the stars to fall lightly to earth, and then another, scattering soft as rain. His music is like nothing I have ever heard. It is like the ocean surging, the wind that blows across the open water, the far call of gulls. It catches at my hair, moves across my skin and into my mouth and under my tongue. I can feel it running all through me. It is open space and mountains, the still dark places of the woods where no human beings have walked for hundreds of years, loamy earth and curtains of green moss hanging from the ancient trees. Salmon swimming against the current, dying as they leave their eggs, birthing another generation to follow the river back to the sea. Red-gold blur of a deer bounding through the woods. Snowmelt in spring, bears lumbering awake as the rivers swell, my own body stirring as though all my life has been a long winter slumbered away and I’m only now coming into the day-lit world. As he plays the party stills. Birds flutter out of the trees to land at his feet and he is haloed in dragonflies and even the moonlight gathers around him as though the sky itself were listening. The music fills every place in my body, surges hot and bright in my chest. At last he stops. Aurora’s mouth is open, her cheeks flushed. One of the flannel shirts is weeping openly. I can’t catch my breath.

  A stranger is standing beside me now, very still. He is tall and so thin he’s just a rattle of bones wired together. He’s dressed in elegant, close-cut black clothes and a long black coat despite the summer heat. He is staring at the guitar player with a fixed intensity; not the awe or sorrow marking the faces of everyone around us, but something that looks more like hunger.

  “That was beautiful,” I say to him, wanting to acknowledge somehow what we’ve witnessed even though the words feel worse than inadequate. He looks down at me and nods. For a moment I think there is red fire where his eyes should be, burning in the sockets of his cadaver’s face, and I bring my hand to my mouth in shock; but he blinks, and then he is human again. I back away from him, into Aurora, and he smiles a smile with too many teeth. He looks past me, sees Aurora, and his eyes widen. That same hunger, but even more focused. He nods at me again, and then he turns away from me and walks back across the garden.

  “Whoa,” Aurora says. “Do you know that guy?”

  “No,” I say, shaken. Around me the party slowly comes to life again, people shaking themselves and blinking, dazed and forlorn. Aurora takes my hand and leads me closer to the guitar player. He puts the guitar away in a battered case, stands up, stretches, sees us.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Hi,” Aurora says. “We’re your future. I think you should tell us everything.”

  His name is Jack. He’s come here from somewhere in the South, he won’t say where, and he thinks the summers are nice here but the winters are too cold, and he’s lived all over, and he plays for money wherever he goes. Sometimes the money is good. Most of the time it isn’t. He’s here to take his chances with the big leagues, like everyone else who got off a bus downtown in the last few years. He lives in a little house in town, washes dishes all day to pay the rent, plays every night until the stars begin their long fall into sunrise, does the whole thing again. Aurora is standing like a colt, one foot turned inward. She looks at him through the white curtain of her hair, which has come loose from its knot and hangs around her like a cloud. “Come away with us.”

  “Right now?” he asks. She nods. “Isn’t this your party?”

  “These people,” she says, contemptuous. “They’ll be fine.”

  Aurora’s too drunk. “I’ll drive,” I say. She pouts, but she gives me the keys. We roll down all the windows in her car and let the night in. He sits in the back, leans his elbows on the headrests of our seats. His mouth is inches from my ear. I take us to the park Aurora and I loved best when we were children, rolling grassy hills at the very edge of the water, next to an abandoned factory surrounded by a chain-link fence. The buildings loom alien and strange in the moonlight. We walk to the place where the grass ends in a thin strip of sand at the edge of the water. Aurora collapses gracefully. I follow, less so. He lies between us in the grass. My skin hums electric, so close to his. Some key connection shorts out in my head and my brain goes dark, neatly wiped of reason. I want to roll over and take a bite out of his shoulder. Pummel him with my fists. I can hear the beat of his heart, I swear. The fabric of his shirt whispers as he breathes. All the cells in my body rearrange, compass needles pointing to his north. I could do anything, anything, anything, wonderful things, terrible things, all the things. Hit him, grab him, kiss him. Smell him. Eat him. Seize his hands and drag him off into the night. Put my head on his shoulder and sleep there until the sun rises and makes the world real again. Does he want to touch me? Is he trying to touch me? If he were trying to touch me he would touch me. If I moved my arm a hair’s breadth it would be touching his arm. Should I move my arm? If I moved my arm would he know it was on purpose or would he think it was an accident? You should definitely, definitely touch me. I send this message with so much force my eyes cross.

  “We could live here,” Aurora says sleepily, “and never go home. We could sleep inside a velvet tent and have midnight picnics.” Jack strokes the inside of my wrist with his thumb and I nearly startle out of my skin.

  “A velvet tent wouldn’t be much good against the rain,” he says. My fingers rest in his broad palm, and I feel the charge running between us.

  “Wherever I go,” she says, “it’s always summer.” After that we are quiet. For the first time in my life I wish Aurora weren’t here. I wish I could straddle him, tear off his clothes. Chew away the flesh to the muscle beneath. Rip him open, take him inside. Nothing I have ever felt in my life has readied me for hunger like this. I can smell him: wood, earth, smoke. The stars wheel overhead in their quiet, orderly way. Here they’re veiled by the nightglow of the city, but you don’t have to go very far out of town before they blaze white and thick across the sky. I want to do everything, everything, everything, but I leave my hand in his and tamp all that desire into a hot coal at the center of my chest. If I never see him again I will definitely go Juliet. Knife to the chest, fade to black. What is happening to me? I am not this girl. I am half monster, with spite and bile where normal girls nurture kittens and kind feelings. I do not fall for strangers, do not come unmoored in the dark at a single touch. Already I am cataloguing all the things I would be willing to give up for him if he asked. The night cools and a chill creeps in across the water. It’s only when I sit up at last, ready to go back to the car, that I see he’s holding Aurora’s hand, too.

  When I was smaller, sometimes I wanted my life to be normal. Mom, dad, puppy, two cars. Goldfish in a bowl. Home videos of my first steps. A baby book with my first words written down. School pictures on the fridge, brothers and sisters, curfews. Grandparents. Thanksgiving with a turkey and everyone getting too drunk and fighting, like a family. That’s the thing you have to understand: None of this seemed that weird to me, because Cass and Maia had already set the bar high.

  After we left Maia’s, Cass and I lived a lot of places. I don’t remember most of them, or they blur together in my mind, one long series of big kitchens full of people, dirty bathrooms, broken instruments. Wooden floorboards with gaps in between them full of dust and windows that never kept out the cold. Walls painted haphazardly in weird, clashing colors. The smell of incense. Communal houses, punk houses, hippie houses. Sometimes there were other kids around, but usually I was the only one. We lived in one house for a while with ten other people. A desiccated cat that someone had found in the basement hung on the wall over the fireplace. It used to give me nightmares. Dinner was always a giant pot of Dumpstered vegetables cooked on the stove all day into a tasteless ma
sh. Too many guests. Travelers, punks, maybe sometimes homeless people who’d wandered in off the street. On the weekends, there would be shows in the basement, so loud the house shook. Cass and I had the attic, low-ceilinged but big, and there was a triangle-shaped window at one end that went all the way from the floor to the pitch of the roof. I’d lie next to it for hours, looking out at the street below. Sometimes in the night I’d wake up, shaken out of sleep by the sound of Cass crying in her bed across from mine.

  That time didn’t last too long. Cass was working two or three jobs at a time, and it was easiest for us to live in a place where other people could take care of me. She’d taught herself to read people’s cards and make spells years ago, even before she met Maia. She’d turned out to be good at it, good enough to see other people’s lives unwinding in front of them, good enough to untangle the delicate threads of sex and death and money and hope. Our housemates would come to her with their questions, their love problems, their private mysteries and sorrows. I got used to it, dozing late at night in my little bed while Cass held someone’s hand, her fingers moving across their palm. Got used to the shirring sound of her tarot cards as she shuffled them, the low raspy murmur of her voice as she spelled out the future. She never asked for money, but people gave it to her, or other gifts if money was something they didn’t have. A velvet coat, an antique rosary, muffins, a patchwork bag. Presents for me: colored pencils, drawing paper, my first set of oil paints, the tubes half-spent but still good. I remember squeezing out dabs of color for the first time, the sharp tangy smell that is like no other smell in the world. Touching the vibrant paint and bringing my finger to my mouth for the barest taste.

  Cass’s name got around and she started reading cards for people with real money, people who lived in new houses all by themselves. Houses with dishwashers and microwaves and carpet. Refrigerators shone white and clean; inside them were cartons of milk and eggs, neatly ordered condiments, the orange juice I wasn’t allowed to have because it was too expensive. When Cass took me with her I’d sit and draw quietly in a corner while women with shining hair and perfectly lipsticked mouths asked Cass if their husbands were cheating on them, if their kids would get into good colleges, if they’d find love and, if so, where it would be waiting for them. The most boring questions I could imagine. “So well behaved,” they’d say, looking over at me, like I was in a zoo. I didn’t understand how people who lived in houses like that could worry about anything at all.

  As soon as Cass got enough money together we moved into an apartment of our own, the apartment we live in now. I had my own room, my own window. Our own kitchen—“Dear god,” Cass said, when we first moved in, “I thought I’d never see a clean kitchen again”—and our own living room with our own couch. Shabby and small, but it was clean, and it was ours. No guests unless we invited them. No guests really but Aurora, and sometimes men Cass dated for a while, always the same quiet, gentle types who stared moonily at her over the breakfast table and disappeared after a month or two, banished from her orderly macrobiotic world as soon as they got too close. Never, ever Maia. Cass has a guillotine heart, severing ties as neatly as a whistle-sharp blade cutting the head from the body. Like any good revolutionary, she pretends that the casualties mean nothing.

  We were still poor. For a while when things were really bad, Cass and I would stand in line at the food bank once a week, where white-haired church ladies handed out yellow bricks of government cheese and big plastic bags of instant oatmeal. There was always a pile of bread, one or two days stale, from a bakery near our apartment, and meat that came in a can with a silhouette of a chicken. I thought they had somehow put a real chicken in there, that you could open the can to find a pet. I cried when Cass said we didn’t eat that kind of stuff and handed it back. She’d send me over to Aurora’s for dinner, but there was never any food at her house, either. Trips to the grocery store and wholesome meals didn’t make it on Maia’s to-do list between shooting up and sleeping it off. Half the time, Aurora didn’t eat unless she ate with us. All that money might as well have been dust. Sometimes, Maia would get it together enough to hire people to help, but she’d forget to pay them, or they’d end up holing up in her room with her and doing drugs, or one day they’d wander off, and Aurora would be left to run feral again, with only me and Cass to make sure she showed up for school and ate a meal every now and then. When I took Cass’s food stamps to the grocery store around the corner, piled up bulk brown rice and oatmeal and sixteen different kinds of vegetables, the lady who always worked the register would sometimes put a bag of Doritos on top of my groceries, hold her finger to her lips, and wink at me.

  Aurora and I ran wild young. Cass tried to keep us locked down but gave up quick, settling for exhaustive lectures on the functions and maintenance of the human reproductive system; a crash course in what to do when people got too wasted; and firm exhortations to me to keep myself and Aurora not pregnant, free of disease, and more or less sober. “And no junk food,” she’d add. Girls at school wanted in on me and Aurora’s twinhood, our late nights and freedom, our recklessness and our crazy stories. But those girls didn’t understand how good they had it with someone in charge, someone who called the shots, stayed up until they came home, left the porch light on.

  I was at a party with Aurora last year. The hosts were friends of friends of people she knew. People who were a lot older than us, and weren’t too interested in hiding how much money they had. “Tacky,” Aurora hissed, fingering sequin-crusted throw pillows and cashmere blankets thrown over the overstuffed couches. Velvet drapes. Scented candles in gold sconces. Cold cuts on cut-crystal plates. A painting on the wall that turned out, on closer examination, to be a Monet. “Of course, it’s one of the lesser-known pieces,” said the hostess with false modesty, coming up behind me.

  Aurora and I were giggling in a corner when a shrink-wrapped babe stalked over to us. Up close, she was total construct, younger woman stapled on top of old bones. Fake boobs straining her satin dress, chemical-plump mouth. Her eyebrows had that surprised look women get after one too many plastic surgeries. “I know who you are,” she said to Aurora, jabbing her with one red-taloned finger. She was very, very drunk. She wobbled there for a moment, glaring at us.

  “I don’t know you,” Aurora said. “Thankfully.”

  “You know my husband,” the woman said. Aurora’s eyes got big. “You think your pert little ass will get you anything you want. You think you’re really something. But you know why men want to fuck little whores like you? Because you’re stupid.” She teetered on her perilous heels and stabbed her finger at us one last time. “Stay away from him,” she snarled. She pivoted, nearly overshooting her spin and coming around to face us again, and stalked away.

  “Oh my god,” Aurora said. We looked at each other and then we both began to laugh. “That was so weird,” she gasped. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I never asked who the husband was. It didn’t really matter.

  After the night in the park I send out a psychic call. I’m so hooked I hijack a pile of Cass’s crystals and leave them under my pillow, willing them to bring him to me, but all they do is give me a stiff neck. Aurora says she has no idea who he is or where he came from. He wouldn’t let us give him a ride home from the park, strode off into the darkness before we came to our senses and asked how to find him again. Rockers are a dime a dozen in this town, but he’s something else again. I’ve never heard anyone play music like that.

  “You’re in love,” Aurora says. She thinks it’s cute. If she’s staking her own claim on him, she’s not saying. She’s sitting in my kitchen, drinking Dr Pepper that she brought over herself. If Cass is home Aurora puts the soda in a mug. She can’t bear, she says, to watch Cass’s face when she sees the can. But we’re home alone and so an unlit cigarette dangles in her fingers and she runs a thumb around the can’s edge between sips.

  “I am not in love,” I snap. “You can’t fall in love with someone you just met.”
r />   Aurora rolls her eyes. “Someone’s never read a fairy tale.”

  “We’ve read all the same fairy tales. This is the real world.”

  “This is the real world. Sure.” Her skin glows gold-brown against her white tank top and her clotted tangle of necklaces. She’s wearing cutoffs that are barely more than underwear, and under the shirt a tiny crocheted bikini that’s so bright I can see it through the fabric like a beacon. “Let’s go swimming,” she says. “Get your suit.”

  The beach is crowded with little kids and their parents, basking in the hot afternoon sun, drunk on the glorious summer. We spread our towels, stretch out at the lake’s edge. Aurora leaps up, bellowing, runs pell-mell into the water with a crash, and then runs back out again and flings herself on her towel. Dads sit up, shading their eyes with one hand, staring after her long legs and white hair. She rolls around on the towel like a puppy and lies there, panting. “The water’s great. We could drive around until we find him.”

  “I’m sure that would work.”

  “Probably better than spirit messengers.”

  “Shut up.” I roll over on my stomach, make a show of ignoring her. If you mapped the inside of my brain, it would go like this: his hands, his mouth, his skin, his face, his palm against mine. But I had no idea it was that obvious. Aurora kicks her feet and laughs at her own joke. “Sorry,” she says. “I never see you being, like, irresponsible. Less than focused. He’s your first boyfriend. It’s adorable.”