“Yeah? That’s cool. I can’t even draw stick figures. All I’m good at is drumming and washing dishes.”
“People were really into you.”
“There’s a million bands in this city, and at least ten of them are good. Not enough to go around. I might still be washing dishes when I’m thirty.”
“At least you tried.”
“Not many other options.” I nod. We’re quiet again. She takes out another cigarette, smokes it, taps. I wonder if she twitches in her sleep. She’s waiting for me. We are entering the realm of adult transactions. But I don’t want to sleep here, and so I don’t say anything. I bring my shoulders up to my ears and make the silence hard and without invitation. I hear Aurora’s laugh again, and the noise of more people coming into the loft. Someone puts on an old punk record, something loud and fast that I don’t recognize. A shot of nervousness runs through me and I chew on my lip, curl my toes in my boots. The drummer leaves me at the window. I don’t want to turn around, deal with strangers. I want to grab Aurora and get out of here. I turn enough to see what she’s up to. Kissing the bass player on the couch while people sit on the other end, ignoring them, drinking beer and handing around records. Oh, Aurora. For a young dog, her tricks are pretty old.
I wait until Aurora comes up for air and then I sidle over. “I’m out.” The bassist’s a skeeze, but he’s pretty tame compared to some of the dudes Aurora ends up with. These people seem nice. They’ll take care of her if anything goes wrong. Hold her hair out of her face while she throws up their shitty whisky. I’m far from home, but not too far to walk. She looks up at me.
“Take my car.”
“No, it’s fine. I’ll walk.”
“I don’t want you to walk.”
“I like walking.”
“Serious.” She rummages through her purse, looking for her keys. I dig them out of my pocket and try to give them to her, but she closes my fingers around them. “Serious,” she says again. “I’ll get a ride home with—” She stops, turns to the bass player. “What’s your name again?” For a second, he looks hurt, and then his face is cool again. She’ll eat him for breakfast, I think, and I can’t help grinning. She knows why I’m smiling, and she throws her head back and laughs. “I’ll be fine, Mom.”
“Okay.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
To my surprise, Cass is waiting up for me. She takes a bowl of stir-fry out of the refrigerator. “I can heat it up,” she offers. I shake my head, sit at the table, and shove forkfuls of vegetables and tofu into my mouth. Cass has been a health freak for about as long as I’ve been sentient. She quit doing drugs when I was a kid. Unfortunately for me, she also quit sugar, television, and fun. She insists the human body is meant to live on raw food, but I told her I’d run away from home if she got rid of the stove, so we compromise. She makes me stir-fry and herbal tea, and I don’t tell her when I go to Chinatown with Aurora and eat sixteen different kinds of meat swimming in grease. That way, everybody’s happy. Mostly. I would give anything to have a secret stash of, say, pork rinds, but Cass can sniff out Yellow #5 the way some moms suss pot and dirty thoughts. She was nineteen when she had me, and most of the time she feels like an annoying friend you can’t shake and not like a mom at all. But when it comes to restricting my toxin intake, she’s a holy terror.
“You out with Aurora?”
“Yeah.”
“Good show?”
“Yeah, they were awesome. We hung out with them for a while. She’s still there. Not really my scene, though.” Cass snags a red pepper out of my bowl.
“You worried about her?”
“Like, all the time. But not tonight.”
“Okay.” Her face goes distant and I know she’s thinking of Maia. Aurora would be better off in the custody of a potato. At least she could eat it if things got dire. “You let me know, though, if—” She trails off.
“It’s cool. She’s cool. I keep an eye on her.”
“That’s my girl.” Cass reaches over to ruffle my hair, and I duck. I hate it when she tries to be a parent. It doesn’t suit her.
Lately I have been dreaming about a river and a dark forest. In the dream I am standing on a path that winds through trees that are white as bone and without leaves. I am barefoot, and my feet are covered in blood. The only light comes from the trees themselves, an opaline glow like that of a luminescent fungus. The path stops at a river that is too broad for me to see the far bank, and the water moves swift and smooth and has an oily sheen to it. I know there is someone waiting for me on the other side, someone I must find, but I do not know who it is. In the distance I can hear howling. Wolves, I think, or dogs. The bare branches of the trees clatter against each other although there is no wind. I take a step forward, but before my foot breaks the surface of the water I wake up. It is always a long time before I remember where I am.
After Aurora’s father died, when I was still very small, Cass and I lived with Aurora and Maia for a while. The house was always full of people and music then. Maia was a silent shadow, worn wraithlike with grief. She moved further and further away from us, into her own twilit limbo outside space and time. Sometimes a skeleton- thin man in a long black coat would come to the house and sit in her room with her for hours. Cass told us he was her doctor, but we didn’t know then the kind of medicine he was working with his suitcase full of needles and glassine bags. Aurora and I weren’t allowed in Maia’s part of the house, but we stole into it once. I remember candles everywhere, and dark walls without decoration, and a great canopied bed draped with silk and satin and scattered with velvet pillows. Maia slept tangled in the sheets, her arms akimbo, her mouth slack, her nut-brown skin ashen. “Is she dead?” I whispered.
“She’s fine,” Aurora said. “She sleeps a lot.”
Slowly Aurora’s father’s bandmates and their friends drifted away, escaping their orbit around the black hole Maia had become. There were no more parties, where Aurora and I darted in between the legs of grownups, stole bites off plates and sips out of glasses and fell asleep, giddy and a little drunk, on Aurora’s lawn. No more circles of musicians playing guitars together in the garden until the sky glowed white with dawn. No more lanky-limbed, long-haired men and women twirling us around while we squealed with glee, lifting us to their shoulders and parading us up and down the sweeping marble staircase, or teaching us to slide down the banisters when Cass wasn’t paying attention. The house went still and dead as a tomb.
After that, Cass took me away from Aurora’s palace in the hills. Aurora and I stayed twin-blooded, wearing each other’s clothes and finishing each other’s sentences, but Cass and Maia never talked again. I don’t know what happened in that vast house, or if anything happened at all. Maybe Cass gave up trying to pull Maia out of darkness and settled for bringing me to a brighter world instead. Sometimes I wish Cass had fought harder, had taken Aurora and Maia with us. I know it was hard for Cass to get clean, and maybe that’s why she left Maia there; she wasn’t strong enough for them both. I’m not like that. I will never let go of anything I love.
Aurora and I have lived in this city all our lives. If you came here you would know that it is a young city, out on the edge of the world, just a few hours away from where the earth drops off into the grey ocean that reaches all the way to the far edge of the sky. It is a city of hills and water, ringed in mountains that are capped with white even in the dead of July. The summers are sweet and golden, bookended with long rainy seasons where the sky brushes the earth with a blanket of cloud.
Aurora and I used to spend our days roaming, picking out books at the huge old bookstore downtown with its creaking wooden floors and innumerable rooms, trying on Doc Martens and buying Manic Panic at the punk store under the viaduct, stuffing ourselves with fish and chips on the pier and drinking coffee until our speedy hands shook. We haunted the curio store down on the waterfront, visiting Sylvia and Sylvester, its glass-cased mummies (Aurora insists they are real; I say no way). Even now we still love putting quarters in the fortune-telling
