About a Girl Read online

  “Dreams are just the garbage disposal of your subconscious,” I said sententiously. Aunt Beast laughed.

  “Where do you get this stuff? Serves us right, we few proud New Age freaks, that we should end up with such a determined rationalist for a kid.”

  “If you knew more about the universe, you wouldn’t need to believe all that weird stuff,” I said. “You don’t need the supernatural when you understand how beautiful real things are.”

  She smiled at me and pulled me to her side in a one-armed hug. “You know,” she said, “I loved Aurora with all my heart. But you, hands down, are the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.” I put my head on her shoulder and she kissed the top of my skull.

  “You didn’t even want kids,” I said into her shirt.

  “I wanted you,” she said. “I just didn’t know it until I met you. Anybody else, I would have sent back. Tally, you know I love you. More than anything. I’m sorry Shane is being—well, to be honest, he’s being seventeen. I know it’s hard. Please come have some cake?” I let her tug me to my feet and propel me into the kitchen, where Raoul and Henri sat anxiously at the table, and Dorian Gray pranced about howling, and my cake waited for me: the Very Large Array, rendered in white frosting with black piping for the outlines.

  “Dim sum,” I said, “I want dim sum,” and Raoul’s and Henri’s faces lit up, and I saw how easy it was to make them happy, how much they loved me, how much there was still here for me, even as it felt as though the whole world was moving away from me at a nightmarish, terrifying speed, dark energy pushing the universe out into the waiting void until there was nothing left but ice and silence, nothing left of us at all. At the edge of my vision I saw the girl again, the girl I’d seen in Mr. M’s apartment: short dark hair, white shirt, huge eyes—I turned, squinting, and she was only a trick of the light, the kitchen curtains moving. But there isn’t any breeze, I thought, and then Henri and Raoul were hugging me, Aunt Beast calling in our takeout order and demanding I cut my cake. “We’ll have dessert first,” she said, “it’s your birthday,” and I willed myself to stop thinking about what I was missing and be at peace instead with what I had.

  But that night, back in my room, I thought of the picture Mr. M had shown me, Jack’s voice aching in the dark, all the sorrows of the world echoing through each shimmering note, and I thought about coming home and telling Shane that the greatest musician in the world was my father.

  “I’m going,” I said out loud into the still, warm air. When I fell asleep I dreamed awful and discomforting dreams.

  * * *

  I went back to see Mr. M a few days later. “Come in,” he said, “let me get you some water,” and I followed him into his library and fidgeted in a chair while he disappeared and came back what felt like hours later with a pitcher of ice water and a plate of cookies shaped like pinwheels. I ate four cookies and drank my water and wriggled about in a frenzy.

  “I did find him,” he said, and I stopped my impatient dance at once. “I’m afraid I took a bit of a liberty.”

  “You talked to him,” I said.

  “I didn’t. But I bought you a plane ticket. It’s fine if you’d prefer not to go.”

  “Of course I’m going to go. Where is he?”

  “Outside Seattle. You’ll have to take a ferry, and then a bus—it’s a small town, out on a peninsula. Very out of the way.” I thought about this. I’d never been to the city where Aurora had grown up, never even thought of that corner of the world as a real place. It seemed like something out of a John Wayne movie. Like people would ride horses in the streets and carry derringers and run in and out of saloons between their gun battles. I imagined a chorus line of floozies, prodigious bosoms bursting from their tight-bodiced velvet dresses. Did people even have electricity out there? Before Shane had played Jack’s tape for me, I’d had no idea he even existed. And now here I was with a plane ticket and the more-than-suspicion that this random, near-mythical stranger was my father. The only way to find out was to go.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me until you talk to him.”

  “Right,” I said, unsettled. I would worry about that part later. “I can pay you back for the ticket.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “You’ve already done so much.”

  “I told you,” he said, “don’t thank me. I have done very little for you.”

  “How will I find him, though?”

  “I’ll give you his address.”

  “But I mean—I should just show up? At his door? Isn’t that kind of weird?”

  “It will all work out as it should,” he said. “The fates’ web will catch you.”

  “You know I don’t believe in that stuff.”

  “And yet they continue to weave, despite you,” he said, and smiled. I stood there looking at him stupidly. “Go,” he said gently. “Go, now, into the world. Tell no one. Good luck on your quest.”

  “Okay,” I said, and I went.

  Aunt Beast left that afternoon for an artists’ residency upstate, one of those places where there’s no telephone and everyone works in lofty seclusion in the middle of the woods, communing with their muses, lunch left stealthily in a basket on their doorstep so as not to interfere with their Process. I could tell she didn’t want to leave me in my current state, so I did my best to appear functional and chipper, chattering away while she finished packing—Aunt Beast was not much of an advance planner—until she cut me off.

  “Tally, the pep club routine is not fooling me,” she said. “I don’t have to go away if you need me here.”

  “You’re only going for a month, and I have Raoul and Henri. And I would feel like a total shit if you stayed here for me.” And I’m leaving, too, I thought, and I have a better chance of getting away with it if you’re not around. Anyway, Aunt Beast’s entire sex life in the last couple of years had consisted of steamy, short-lived affairs at artists’ residencies—the last one had been some musician who made whole albums out of looped recordings from the Apollo space missions, which I’d appreciated—and I didn’t need to curse the whole household with celibacy just because I was batting zero in the romance department. Raoul and I sometimes discussed Aunt Beast’s disturbing lack of a personal life when she was out of the house, but she seemed essentially content on her own, wrapped up in her work, sitting for hours in the MoMA or the Met staring at a single painting, running endless laps of the park. Aunt Beast is the most wholly self-sufficient person I have ever met; I have no doubt she loves us, but if an apocalyptic plague wiped us from the map, she’d be the one to calmly hole up in the apartment with a shotgun and a pit bull, occasionally emerging to perhaps eat one of the downstairs neighbors or make a run to the art supply store, happy as Dorian Gray in front of a newly opened tin of wet food.

  She hefted her bag experimentally and winced. “I should have just shipped this crap,” she said. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

  “You already called the car service. Henri will make me eat, Raoul will nurture my minimal emotional needs; if I totally freak out we’ll call the residency phone and they can go fetch you in your cabin.”

  “That’s frowned upon.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen. I’ll just go to the bookstore—” Shit, I thought, what am I going to tell Jenn and Molly—“and put on a brave face, and—and—I don’t know, maybe he’ll call me and grovel and everything will be normal next week.”

  “You could call him.”

  “He stood me up on my birthday. I’ll call him when hell freezes over.”

  She looked at me with frank amusement. “The stubbornness, I’m afraid, you got from me.” There was a honk outside the window. “That’s the car—are you sure, Tally?”

  “Yes,” I said. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and a brief hug that knocked the air out of my lungs, and dragged her bag out of the room. I watched out her window until she reappeared in the street below, then waved to her, but
she didn’t look up. One down, I thought.

  That night Henri had a client, and so I ate dinner alone in the kitchen with Raoul, Dorian Gray meowing pitifully at our feet until I shoved him brusquely with my toe. He gave me an offended look and stalked away with his tail lashing. Raoul frowned at his plate, but I ignored him. Raoul is largely unwilling to acknowledge Dorian Gray’s multitudinous faults; I do not agree that loving Dorian Gray means overlooking his inadequacies as a pet.

  “Shane played me this tape,” I said. Mr. M hadn’t said not to mention Jack. “This musician, Jack—I think he knew Aurora?”

  Raoul looked up from his soba noodles, his expression unreadable. “He did, yes.”

  “Did you know him too?”

  “Not well.”

  “Did he know Aunt Beast?”

  “We were all—we all knew each other, then,” he said slowly. “You’ll have to ask her if you want to know anything about Jack.”

  “Was he Aurora’s boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know. He—” He paused. “He left town the same time she did,” he said, but I thought it wasn’t what he had meant to say originally. “You have to ask your aunt about all of that.”

  “Why?”

  He made a helpless, exasperated face. “There’s a lot that’s not mine to tell,” he said.

  “Then it’s her fault for not telling me.”

  “I’ve brought that up with her before.” I looked at him with new interest; they’d always presented a united front, but whatever I had started had caused Raoul to split ranks in my presence for the first time.

  “Do you think Jack might be—” I was almost afraid to say it out loud. “Do you think he might be my father? I mean, could he be?”

  I’d surprised him. “I don’t know, sweetheart,” he said. “I’ve never—that’s never even occurred to me. But I barely knew Aurora, and I never saw her again after she went—” He paused. “After she went away. I don’t know if anyone knew her, to be honest. Maybe your aunt.”

  “Who would want to know her? She was a jerk.”

  “You could look at it like that, yes. She was never happy, in the time that I knew her.”

  “She gave me away, Raoul.”

  “I know, sweetheart. I know. I’m so sorry you’ve had to grow up with that. But from where she was, it probably looked like the best thing to do.”

  “Where could she have possibly been that leaving her kid behind seemed like a good idea?”

  “She was in hell,” he said simply.

  I kicked at the floor. “I’m not ever going to forgive her,” I said.

  “I don’t blame you, and you don’t have to. But I don’t think she didn’t love you. I think she knew she couldn’t take care of you. She didn’t leave you just anywhere; she left you with us. She left you with the most responsible people she knew—”

  “The only responsible people she knew.”

  “Probably,” Raoul conceded. “But she left you with us because she knew we would love you, and she knew we would take care of you.”

  “She foisted me off on you.”

  “I know it feels like that to you. But that’s certainly not what it felt like to us—we loved you the moment we saw you. If Aurora were here, I’d thank her every day for leaving you with us. But for her—I don’t think that’s how she saw it, either, as hard as that might be to believe. I think for her it looked like the best decision she could have made, under the circumstances.”

  “It was a terrible decision.”

  “Sometimes all the decisions available are terrible decisions.”

  “That’s not true at all,” I said. “Everybody has a choice, all the time—anyone can make good decisions. You just have to want to.”

  “You might find out as you get older that things are more complicated than that.”

  “Now you’re patronizing me.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of patronizing you, Tally.” He paused. “Have you heard from Sh—”

  “No,” I said, so fiercely that he bit down on the end of the word and looked at his plate.

  “I’m sure he’ll—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Very well,” he said. “Can you pass me the salt?”

  Long after I turned out the light that night I looked up at the faint glow of my ceiling constellations, wishing there was some map in them that could navigate me like a sailor safely through what lay ahead.

  When I finally fell asleep I dreamed of the girl I’d seen in Mr. M’s apartment, the girl I’d seen on my birthday: I was running after her, through a forest in the dead of night, running barefoot, leafless branches white as bone clacking all around me although there was no breeze. “Wait!” I called after her. “Please wait!” However far we’ve come / you were ever the only one. But she did not turn or slow, and though I was running as fast as I could she drew away from me, vanishing among the trees. I tripped and fell, landing hard on my hands, panting—and then a terrifying howl split the darkness, once, twice, three times—something coming closer through the trees—“No!” I shrieked aloud, and woke myself up, frantic and tangled in the sheets, soaked in sweat. It took me a long time to fall asleep again.

  The night before I left I considered calling Shane, and then squashed that foul treachery of a thought like a bug. He’d find out soon enough, from Raoul or from Henri, that I was gone, and teary goodbyes were for babies, and anyway I had nothing to say to him, or if I did I didn’t want to think about what it might be. I was a scientist, and scientists didn’t have feelings, and that was what was important, because I did not like feelings, which had thus far only inconvenienced me to no end. I stole an old knapsack of Raoul’s out of the hall closet after he and Henri had gone to bed and filled it with a few T-shirts and a couple of pairs of shorts, socks and underwear and a pair of jeans and my favorite old sweatshirt. Running shoes, just in case. I had spent most of my life largely indifferent to the garments with which I garbed myself, and I did not imagine anyone in the country would care much what I dressed like anyway. If Jack wanted to see me in a nice dress he would have to buy me one himself. I looked longingly at my telescope but it was unwieldy, and I didn’t know anything about Jack’s house—Where the hell are you going to stay, Tally, you idiot—but my thoughts went fuzzy again, and the voice subsided. “I’ll find somewhere,” I said aloud. “A hotel.” I’d told Jenn and Molly that I needed a week off from the bookstore because my cousin had died; it was an appalling lie, but if I said anything else I risked them telling my parents. I packed a pair of binoculars instead of the telescope, and my observation journal, and then I was done. I felt like an intrepid explorer.

  I took one last walk through the apartment, as if to memorize it—Just how long do you think you’re going for, Tally—tangly houseplants and well-worn old furniture, battered rag rugs, dried flowers in the windowsills, piles of books in every corner. An apartment, I thought, that looked like what it was: a home where people lived who loved each other. I stopped last in Aunt Beast’s room, drifts of Dorian Gray’s fur moving in scattered flurries across the floorboards—his fur accumulated like nothing else if we didn’t sweep every day—and looked around at her faded quilt, her bookshelf, her dresser-top with its scatter of objects. A sudden wave of preemptive homesickness swept over me, and I snatched the nearest bit of altar detritus—a folding knife, old and scarred, with a long strand of somebody’s bleach-blond hair caught in its hinge—and stuffed it in my pocket. It would cheer me to have something of hers, and I’d be back before she came home; she’d never even know it was gone.

  Back in my room, Dorian Gray writhing in ecstasy as I rubbed his belly with my toes, I wrote Henri and Raoul a note. Brevity, in this case, seemed the best option, but even so I struggled with what to say. I was eighteen, and legally entitled to take charge of my own destiny, but that did not seem the most tactful approach. Please don’t worry about me, I wrote finally, I found out where Jack lives and I’m going to see him—I’ll come back soon and
I’ll call as soon as I can. Don’t kill me. I love you.

  There was nothing else to do but go to bed. I dreamed strange, restless dreams—the forest again, big black birds flitting through the trees; something howling, lonely and disconsolate, this time safely in the distance; looking for the dark-haired girl, knowing that she was moving farther and farther away from me, that I was losing all hope of keeping up. The night lasted for a long time, and I was almost grateful for the hot insistent blast of sun pushing through my curtains the next morning, because it meant I could give up pretending and get up, drink coffee, bleary eyed, with Raoul and Henri at the kitchen table, kiss their cheeks in a quick goodbye as they left the apartment to begin their days—Hold on to this, who knows how long it’ll have to last me—shoulder my backpack, think about the sauna-hot stink of the train platform and why was the Q always late and should I eat something now when I wasn’t hungry or wait until the airport, when I would be, but all potential edibles were sure to be overpriced and repulsive. The long train ride to the airport, mind empty. And at last, at the gate to my flight west, I turned my back on New York and took a deep breath and walked forward, away from the things I knew about and toward the things I didn’t.

  LOVE THE DESTROYER

  When I was seven or eight years old, Raoul and Henri took me to Urban Starfest, an annual amateur astronomers’ gathering in Central Park. To this day, I don’t know what possessed them to do such a thing—neither one has any particular interest in the order of the stars, and I have not known them to do anything like it since. But they were always carting me off to enriching activities as a young person—Shakespeare in the Park, children’s concerts at Carnegie Hall, tours of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum—and so I imagine one or the other of them saw something about it in a paper and thought it sounded promising.

  It was the middle of November, and very cold. All day it had been cloudy, but just before dusk the sky cleared, and by the time we stepped off the train outside the park a few stars shone palely against a clean-scrubbed backdrop of velvety purple. From the Sheep Meadow, where the astronomers gathered, the buzzing glare of the city was dimmed, and though we were barely a mile from the frenetic Technicolor of Times Square I could see more stars than I’d ever managed to pick out in the night sky over the city.