About a Girl Read online

  We waited to look through a telescope—enthusiastic astronomers nearly hopping with excitement, pointing out stars and planets that could be easily seen with the naked eye, running back and forth with handouts that it was too dark to read—Raoul and Henri patient, me less so, until at last it was my turn. The astronomer stewarding the telescope pointed to a scatter of stars overhead. “That’s Orion,” she said, kneeling down so our faces were level. “Do you see? There’s his belt, and those stars there are his sword.”

  I squinted upward. “I don’t see a belt,” I said dubiously.

  “Ah,” she said, “you have to draw the lines with your imagination. Try again.”

  I stared intently at the tip of her finger and then, at last, I saw it. “There he is!” I said. I knew who Orion was already; someone, probably Aunt Beast, had got me D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths as soon as I was old enough to read it. The astronomer pointed to a blurry greenish smudge along the tip of his sword. “That’s the nebula,” she said. “That’s what you’ll see through the telescope. Are you ready?”

  She adjusted the telescope so that I could look through it, and I put my eye to the eyepiece, and she brought the lens into focus—and then, like that, the course of my life altered. Through the telescope I saw the faint smear coalesce into a cloud of blazing sparks, and I understood in an instant that the world would never look the same to me again. Those distant points of light in the sky were not strangers, but stars; the telescope put me among them, as if they were merely guests at a garden party, cool and aloof but close enough that I could touch the silvery gossamer of their clothes with the tips of my fingers. Prior to that night I had wanted, I am told, to be a marine biologist, an actor, a spy, and the president. “I’ve changed my mind. I want to be an astronaut,” I said to Henri after our turn at the telescope was over, gazing serenely about me at the milling crowds of people, the joyfully frenetic astronomers. “I think you have to go into the military,” he said. “They only take fighter pilots.” I was, at that time, a pacifist and a vegetarian. “Then I shall become an astronomer,” I said. I did not change my mind again.

  Later I would learn that the Orion Nebula is a kind of cosmic nursery, a great cloud of gas and dust birthing uncountable infant stars in a nest so fantastically large it would take a half-million years for the fastest imaginable rocket to cross it. The time scale of star birth is nothing like the hummingbird flicker of a human life; we’d have to take a picture every thousand years to track the course of the nebula’s shifting, its slow yield of fire and light, but it’s enough for me to know that out of a dead cloud particles spin themselves into hundreds of thousands of suns. Our own bodies are mattered out of the same dust: the leftover bits of supernovae billions of years old that time’s turned to human heartbeats. Rainwater and skin and bones, the grey sea and the shore upon which it breaks, mountains and snow and Dorian Gray: all of it, quilted out of the hearts of stars. I am not like my family, lost in their superstitious witchery, because the truth of the universe is so sublime I don’t need magic or ghosts to teach me wonder. Aunt Beast insists the moon’s pull twitches the tides of our inner workings, hooks its mysteries into the movement of our blood, but I knew the first time I looked at the waxing half-moon through a pair of binoculars that its real miracle was the sharp-edged outlines of craters and valleys sprung into sudden relief, its rotation and revolution neatly twinned so that the same silvery face is always turned toward us.

  The moon’s unmoved nature meant it was no great work to memorize its landscape—and I did. I learned the map of the moon as I memorized the lines of the subway; I could pick out the Apennines before I could conduct myself to Central Park alone. There was no point in explaining to Aunt Beast that the moon’s effect on the movement of oceans was a simple side effect of proximity, not magic, and that we’d have to be thousands of miles tall before we felt any matching pull in our saltwater bodies. She lights her candles every month anyway, shut up in her room with crystals and incense that stinks the apartment up like the old head shops in the East Village.

  After that night in the park I was a goner. Raoul told me I’d gone home with them and demanded to be shown the entirety of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, which the astronomer had mentioned I might find edifying. For thirteen nights in a row Raoul and Henri took turns dozing next to me on the couch as I absorbed, shining-eyed and rapt, the nuances of cosmology and its various theories of the universe’s birth and life and possible death. Aunt Beast bought me binoculars and then, when it became clear my madness would not abate, a real telescope, for my thirteenth birthday. I learned to love winters best; when everyone around me lamented the freezing days and muddy grey-white light, the endless months of dirty snow crusting and refreezing, the sodden toes and runny noses, I lived for the season of long nights, when full dark fell by six and the sky opened up to inquiry.

  There’s no real dark in the city—or most places, anymore, the night world we live in made a dully glowing violet. But the city’s worst of all. In Manhattan, true darkness never falls: runny pools of gold light falling from streetlamps, streams of headlights moving from sundown to sunup in hissing white rivers, Times Square clamoring with neon billboards, spotlights spitting forth from police helicopters and news choppers, blue-and-white cop cars wailing, ambulances and fire trucks blaring redly. I only knew the Milky Way existed from pictures in Astronomy magazine until the chilly late-autumn weekend I begged Henri and Raoul to take me upstate: me bouncing in my seat on the train north, ecstatic with anticipation, them smiling at me over the pages of their newspapers. The first night was cloudy; Raoul told me that I tantrumed stormy tears and beat my little fists upon the ground. But the second night was perfect, moonless and clear, and I waited in the backyard of the cabin they’d rented as the red sun sank below the horizon and the sky purpled and went black. One by one, the silver stars winked into life above me: steady Polaris marking true north, Andromeda and Pegasus and Pisces, the friends with whom I was becoming more and more acquainted—and then at last the great white sky-long spill of the galaxy sprawling overhead, a dizzying mass of light.

  Raoul and Henri came outside hours later to find me asleep in the grass, murmuring plaintive protests as they gathered me up and carried me inside, and the next day I was so incandescent with joy, talked so incessantly about what I’d seen, that they made a point to take me out to the country more often. Shane usually came with us, waiting outside with me as I fiddled with my telescope and picked out the night’s treasures; in the city, he would spend even the coldest of winter nights on the roof of our apartment building with me, swaddled in a down jacket and nested in a pile of blankets, snoring softly while I followed a single star or planet across the heavens until dawn colored the edges of the sky. I collected sightings the way other children kept glass-jarred butterflies or stamps or baseball cards: constellations, nebulae, Messier’s chart of objects, the Galilean moons of Jupiter—violent, volcano-ridden Io, icy Europa, massive Ganymede, and cratered Callisto—so named after the man who’d first thought to turn a telescope to the stars instead of on his neighbors, as easy to find in the modern age as they’d been in 1610. And once I realized you could make a career out of looking at the sky, I set a tidily charted course for my future. Physics, calculus, science camps in summers, preadolescent fan letters written to astronomers at prominent observatories and universities around the country—most of them, I’m happy to say, wrote back, and I saved their replies in a box I kept under my bed and took out at least once a week to review the steadily increasing pile.

  My family humored my intense and furious drive, their encouragement bolstered by the reports my teachers sent home with me every quarter: Tally’s abilities in math and physics are astonishing. Tally has much to offer the class, although she is often hesitant to share [disinterested, actually] and her social skills need developing. Tally is a truly gifted student, although I am concerned about her refusal [wholly justified] to interact with other students. My family did not care th
at I had no friends, other than Shane. They did not care that I did not invite babbling gaggles of pigtailed girls over for sleepovers, that I did not get myself up in a fetching manner, that boys did not call for me in the evening hours, and that I would rather have run nude through the halls of school at lunch hour than put myself in a dress. If I had cared myself, I am sure, they would have made appointments with guidance counselors or professionals, sent me to therapy, done whatever it is that conscientious parents do when their offspring are bewildered by the various petty traumas of preadolescence—though Aunt Beast and Raoul were unconventional enough that it was hard to imagine them making appointments with psychiatrists or even being aware that such persons existed.

  But I didn’t care. I had Shane, and I had my genius and my books and my telescope, and I had no doubt that once I entered the environs of the university I should find myself easily among equals and friends. My family was bemused by me; it was not that they themselves were not ambitious, but their passions did not lie in the same direction, and we were in many ways as unalike as people could be. I often wondered if my father had been intellectually inclined; whatever I’d inherited from Aurora, it had been neither discipline nor any aptitude for the sciences. I was satisfied but not surprised when, after a decade of single-minded application of myself to my envisioned destiny, I received not one but several offers of full scholarship to eminent colleges, and the only dilemma remaining to me was choosing the finest among them—and, of course, saying goodbye to Shane, from whom I had not been separated for more than a few days since his family had moved in down the hall.

  Up until a month ago my life moved in a route as orderly and logical as if it, too, were governed by Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. The only mysteries I tolerated were the marvelously unexplained bits of the universe: What came first? And where were we going? Was the universe expanding endlessly toward an ultimate long, icy silence, or would it tear itself apart in its final hours? I did not like to admit that something so stupid as my uncontrolled affections for a boy had set me reeling, but even the most determinedly stable person could not have helped being sent off course by a discovery like Mr. M’s picture. I was hurtling westward toward something I did not yet understand, and instead of elation, I felt only an increasing sense of dread. For the first time in my life, I had no idea what the outcome of my actions would be. All the stories I’d teethed on were plentiful with admonishments about the dire consequences of ill-prepared quests. What was I doing, other than making trouble for myself?

  Despite these restless and uncertain thoughts, I fell asleep as soon as I found my seat on the plane, and I did not wake up until the final hour of the flight, struggling out of a thick and disorienting slumber. Below us an endless expanse of flat yellow plain rippled upward into blue foothills, and then we were flying over jagged peaks, cool dark sapphire and edged in snow despite the season. Off in the distance a mountain so enormous it seemed fake towered over the rest of the range, its gleaming white crown shrouded with tattered bits of cloud. I rubbed my eyes and pressed my face against the glass as the mountains gave way and the plane sank toward deep green woods, dotted everywhere with flashes of water that reflected the sun in kaleidoscopic patches. I didn’t stop looking until we touched down and the plane whined its way to a halt outside the gate.

  I had my resolve and my backpack and two hundred dollars I’d been saving toward a new lens. I was trying not to have any expectations about what would happen next, so I stopped thinking about it as I followed the airport signs to a line of yellow taxis waiting outside. This part, at least, was familiar. The sky outside was a clear summery blue and the air was warm; not the thick, swampy density of New York but something more pleasant and friendly, even on the cement expanse outside the airport—line of taxis idling, buses trundling past with a squelch of exhaust. “Hello there,” a man’s voice said, and I turned to see a sleepy-eyed traveler in some sort of skirtlike garment made out of pleated canvas with a tool belt around his waist, wearing white socks and sandals and carrying a backpack even larger than mine.

  “What?” I said.

  “Where you going?” he asked. He was trying to strike up a conversation with me; to what end, I had no idea.

  “I know how to get there,” I said shortly, and turned back to the line of taxis. In New York there was always a wait, but here the drivers stood outside their cabs, leaning idly against the doors and chewing on unlit cigarettes.

  “I was just—” began the man in the skirt, but I ignored him and strode toward a cab in a purposeful manner, and he did not pursue me.

  The drive to the ferry took a long time. The taxi driver hummed quietly along to his radio and didn’t ask me any questions. I looked out the window as a stretch of industrial buildings and warehouses flashed by, beyond them the round blue arc of water—“What’s that?” I asked the driver, and he looked at me, surprised, and said, “The Sound,” as if I should have known—and then we were approaching a tiny cluster of skyscrapers. Next to New York this city looked like a dollhouse. The driver dropped me off at the ferry terminal, and I made my way across a broad-planked boardwalk to the ugly white building where he’d told me to buy my ticket. The air smelled salty and clean, and the breeze off the water carried with it the high keening calls of gulls.

  I stood on the front deck of the ferry as it chugged away from the dock and out across the Sound, the damp cool wind tugging at my clothes and knotting my hair into salty tangles. Tourists photographed each other all around me, but I did not feel like a tourist; I felt in some strange way as though I had come home, although I had never been here or anywhere like it and could not have previously imagined that a place like this existed. Off on the horizon more mountains made a ragged line against the sky.

  “Nice view, isn’t it?” someone said next to me, and I put up my best New York wall, expecting another pest like the skirted man at the airport. The speaker was a white woman, tanned so dark I was pale in comparison, her yellow hair clumped into uneven dreadlocks. She wore a shapeless corduroy skirt and a Grateful Dead shirt several sizes too large for her. “Look,” she said, leaning on the railing and pointing out across the water. I followed her finger and gasped aloud in spite of myself at the sleek black shapes moving through the waves. “Orcas,” she said, in response to the question I hadn’t asked. “Whole pod out there.” I watched the sinuous curves of the whales’ backs as they breached and dove again, their acrobatics punctuated with bursts of spray, their slick dorsal fins making sharp triangles against the blue of the water. The whales were moving away from the ferry, fast and graceful, and their silhouettes faded into the distance until I could no longer make them out.

  “You’re not from here,” she said; it wasn’t a question.

  “No,” I said, irritated.

  “Visiting family?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  I almost told her to mind her own business, and then I remembered that all I had were a vague set of directions to my destination in Mr. M’s elegant scrawl—something about a bus, after the ferry, and a series of transfers, and then I’d have to find a taxi once I got to Jack’s town. My destination seemed very close all at once, and I had no clearer an idea of how to get there than I’d had when I got on the plane that morning. “Do you know anything about the bus?” I asked instead. “To the peninsula?”

  “Where are you trying to go?” I told her. “I live out there,” she said casually. “Happy to give you a ride.” She caught my expression and laughed. “All the serial killers stick to the I-5 Corridor; you’re safe out this way,” she said. “I can show you the bus stop on the other side, if you want, but it’ll take you four hours to get there instead of one and a half. I’m happy to drop you off wherever you’re going in town.”

  Her hand brushed mine, casual but deliberate, and a shock went through me as though I’d stuck my finger in a light socket—whole world tilting, white flash—a glimpse of that girl again, the dark-haired girl from my dream
, the dog howling, the white trees—“We’ve been waiting for you,” the woman hissed, in a rough low voice that went through me and through me—I jerked my hand away, and the world went back to ordinary.

  “What?” I gasped.

  “We wait the whole year for tourist season,” she said, her voice normal again and her words light. “And then we complain about it the whole summer. You don’t look like much of a tourist, though. Anyway, it’s no trouble to give you a ride.” Go home, wailed the voice in my head, get on the ferry going back the second this one lands on the other side, go home, go home. I scowled.

  “Sure,” I said. “A ride would be great.”

  “Hekate,” she said, sticking out her hand, “but most people call me Kate, these days.”

  “Your parents, too?” I asked her, and unexpectedly she threw back her head and laughed out loud.

  “You could say that,” she said, still chuckling. I had no idea what was so funny.

  “Tally,” I said. “Short for Atalanta. But nobody calls me that.” I eyeballed her outstretched hand and took it gingerly, but whatever had happened the first time she’d touched me didn’t happen again, and I told myself I must’ve imagined it—You most certainly did not imagine it—and the sleepless night had gone to my head. The rest of the crossing was uneventful; when the boat docked, the passengers filed off it and down a wooden walkway that led to a tiny terminal. I followed Kate out to the parking lot, where an enormous dust-covered pickup awaited us. She opened the door for me, and I clambered inside, moving a tattered Tom Robbins paperback and piles of wilting herbs off the front seat. “Sorry,” she said, without helping me. “Meant to hang those up to dry before I left town, but the day got away from me.”