About a Girl (8 page)

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.

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.