All Our Pretty Songs

“You—I think you—I think you might need to go to the hospital.” He points. I look down. The skin on my knees and elbows is gone.

“Seriously,” I wheeze. “This happens all the time. Thanks.”

“I can—”

“I’m fucking fine.” He backs away.

“I was only trying to help,” he says, curt now.

“I don’t need your fucking help! I need my fucking friends!” I don’t care how I look, and I don’t care what’s coming out of my mouth. Nothing has ever felt as good as screaming at this total stranger. “I need my best friend! I need my best friend’s mom to quit doing drugs! I need parents and I need my boyfriend back and I need Aurora’s dad to not be a dead fuckup rock star and I need that creepy asshole to leave me and the people I love alone and I need—” Gasping, I run out of steam. The businessman is gaping at me. “Shit,” I mutter. “Sorry. Bad day.” I turn around and limp away. My mouth is so dry it’s burning. I would kill someone for a glass of water. A businessman. I would kill a businessman for a glass of water. Ha ha.

I walk for a long time without thinking. When I look around I’m standing in front of the big old cathedral at the edge of downtown. Why not? My feet whisper across the red carpet. I’m so thirsty I dip one hand into the marble basin of holy water, make a cup out of my palm, and bring the droplets to my mouth. A lady clutching a rosary next to me hisses in disapproval. The water doesn’t taste like anything. Overhead the cathedral’s arching ribs meet in a dizzying peak, and the light fractures through the stained-glass windows. People file past me, genuflecting at their pews and sliding into their seats, kneeling in prayer.

I stand in the nave, watching as the priest in his rich white robe edged in gold raises his hands over the congregation, and people begin to sing in Latin. The dead language swirls around me and the sun blazes behind, casting my shadow in a long strip across the red carpet. A few people turn around to look at me, and then keep staring. Someone who looks official—what do you call people who work at a church? They can’t all be the ones who don’t have sex, some of them must be secretaries or something—turns to the man next to him and mimes making a phone call. That’s for sure my cue to split. I stumble back out into the innocuous afternoon, and then there is nothing left to do but go home.

Cass is sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea, the light streaming in around her in buttery slabs. When she sees me she starts.

“What happened to you? You’re a holy mess.” She grabs a clean dishtowel, runs it under the tap, sits me down at the kitchen table. I wince as the skin stretches over my abraded knees. She dabs at me with the towel. I push her away.

“Sweetheart, you look awful. Let me clean you up, okay?”

“They went without me.” She sets the towel aside and puts her arms around me.

“Who went without you?”

“Jack and Aurora.”

“Where did they go?”

“Wherever he took them.” I start to cry. She doesn’t ask me who I mean. She holds me while I sob into her shirt, rocking me gently like she used to do when I was small enough to fit on her lap. She doesn’t try to hush me, or tell me everything will be okay. She lets me cry until I have no tears left, and then she gets up and pours me a cup of tea and pushes the mug toward me. I stare at my reflection in the sweet-smelling liquid.

“What do I do now? How do I find them?”

“I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.”

All the days after that pass in an indistinct blur. I catch Cass filling bowls with crystals and salt water and leaving them on the windowsills. She unearths the dog-eared paperback with her spell recipes and mutters incantations over colored candles, pours drops of oil in the corners of every room, burns so many herbs she sets off the smoke alarm. I lay out my tarot cards over and over, but I don’t even know what question to ask. I find one of Aurora’s white hairs across my pillow, and a guitar pick in a bowl of apples. After that, nothing. I listen to Nick Cave over and over because it feels true. I let love in. I let love in. So much there that’s not love, so much there that’s anger. Love and hate are twins. I listen to songs about following your wife into the dark beneath the earth, the music that leads you there. Oh mama. I was such a fool. Such a fool to think I could have either one of them, to think that Jack loved me, to think that there was anything real but the two of them together and me on the outside, looking in.

I sleep for what feels like days. Years. The entire rest of my life. I sleep so much that when I’m awake I don’t feel right and the edges of my vision go furry. I dream about her, always, all the time. Aurora in the ocean, her white hair floating behind her. Aurora in a house like a palace, white walls, white-hot sky. Aurora, huge dark eyes looking back at me out of a pool in the earth ringed with flowers. Aurora with Minos’s long bony fingers around her throat. One night I can see her again with the syringe, the strip of silk. She’s in a bathtub the size of a fish pond. Marble-floored bathroom, candles everywhere. Floor-to-ceiling windows and beyond them black sea, black sky. I can see the steam rising off the bathwater, smell lavender and salt breeze and the rich vanilla of Aurora’s skin. She’s skinnier than ever, barely any flesh on her long bones, the line of her cheek knife-sharp. Her white hair like a beacon in the dark. Her lips part and her eyes roll back in her head. She’s sliding underwater, down, down, down. No! I cry, and reach for her, but she’s too far away for me to touch. You left me, she whispers. You let me go. And then she’s gone and I jerk awake, dripping with sweat, in my own dirty sheets, my own bed, my own shabby apartment. Our kingdom glimmers on the far wall, the country that we made together. “Aurora,” I say aloud into the dark, but there’s no one there to hear. “Aurora. I’m sorry. Come back.”

Cass tiptoes around me, takes to leaving my meals outside the door of my room. I don’t want to eat, but the smell lures me out like a bear to bait. Betrayed again by my animal body and its stupid animal wants: food, friendship, sex, love. Cass and I don’t talk. I’m a chalkboard that’s been erased over and over again until there’s nothing left but a haze of white dust. Before this I never understood how long an hour could take, how many ticks of the second hand are in a minute, how endless the space between seconds can be.

I can never put together a whole picture of Jack in my head. Shoulders, hips, the line of his belly, the muscles of his back. The soft place behind his knee. Long tendons in his forearms, long fingers, long narrow toes. Sunlight throwing bone into relief: the sharp place at the inside of his elbow, the bird-fine bones of his wrist, the muscles of his thigh moving under his skin like water. The tangle of his hair. I draw pieces of him and tape them together, take them apart again. I draw a single line and already it’s wrong. I draw the angle of his cheek. I draw his palms the way I remember them, but on paper they are nothing I recognize. My desk is piled with crumpled sheets of newsprint, my fingers covered in charcoal dust. Jack cutting fruit in his kitchen, frozen with his knife parting the apple’s green skin. Jack playing me Leonard Cohen songs on his porch, the birds in his garden creeping forward to listen better. Jack in my room, laughing, shirt unbuttoned. Jack watching me draw. Jack’s voice in my ear, low and rough. I don’t know if it’s worse to have a thing like that and then have it taken away from you or to never have a thing like that at all.

My brain’s not shy about coming up with other images that, for all I know, are just as real: Jack and Aurora hand in hand on the California beach, Jack and Aurora in a convertible with the top down, drinking margaritas by the ocean and watching the sun set. Did they go away for Minos, or did they go away for each other? Did they go to get away from me? Does Jack know by now that Aurora loves anchovies and olives on her pizza but would die before touching pineapple, that she drinks her coffee with so much sugar it’s a wonder she has any teeth left? Does he know that The Lost Boys reminds her of her dad for no rational reason? Does he know she learned French so she could read Rimbaud in the original? Has she told him we used to take turns reading The Dark Is Rising aloud to each other every Christmas? Does he have his motorcycle wherever he is now and are they together, her arms around his waist, her hair whipping back from her helmet, are they driving down Highway 1 to Mexico like Jack and I said we were going to do, are they sleeping on the beach and watching the sun rise over the Pacific and learning all the constellations? Is he cutting her slices of peach with his knife, feeding them to her one by one? Does he touch her the same way he touched me? Are they lost, or lonely, and do they think of me, and if he has kissed her does he wish it is me he is kissing, or has her perfect face already wiped mine from his memory? Does he touch her the way he touched me? Every night I go over to my window and look out, at the spot in the shadows where I thought I’d seen Minos before, but the street is empty and dark and even the shadows have no weight. I’m not who he was waiting for.