Dirty Wings (15 page)

Maia gets under the covers and is about to turn out the light when there's a soft rap on her door. She freezes. “Maia? Can I come in?”

“
Shit,
” she hisses. There's no hiding Cass, or her own new hair. Even if her father didn't notice how long she was gone, or that she went out at all. “Okay,” she calls.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
He opens the door and looks down at Cass. “Oh,” he says. “Hello.”

“This is Cass,” Maia says.

“I didn't know you had a little friend over. Hello, Cass.”

“Hello,” Cass says. “Sir.”

“I just wanted to say goodnight,” her father says. “I haven't seen you all day.”

“Goodnight, Dad.” He crosses the room and Maia wants to pull the covers over her head. He bends over her, kisses her forehead. She can smell the whisky on his breath.

“Goodnight, sweetheart.” Pause. “Is there something different about your hair?”

“Um, a little.”

“Oh. It looks nice. Sleep tight.”

“Sleep tight, Dad.”

When the door is safely shut behind him Cass explodes into giggles. “Is there something different about your
hair,
” she gasps. “Fucking
unreal.
”

“Says my little friend.”

“Oh, princess. I would not trade my life for yours for anything.”

“I don't blame you,” Maia says. “Goodnight. Sir.”

“Goodnight. Dream about Todd.”

Maia throws a pillow at her and is rewarded by the satisfying sound of it thwacking into Cass's head.

NOW: BARRA DE NAVIDAD

Cass thinks sometimes about getting sober, but then she always thinks twice. She knows the story other people would tell about her: sad girl with a sad habit, sad vices to sidestep sad memories. If her life were a made-for-TV movie she'd repent at the end, yield up teary confessions on a couch in the office of a therapist who at last has made her see the error of her ways and cracked through her bitter shell to the caramel-soft girl beneath. Wrap with a softly-lit shot of her shining face, a weepy monologue detailing the arc of her redemption, maybe a final scene of her walking slowly, bravely toward an anonymous group meeting for other girls like her, laying aside their differences to heal as an ensemble.

But there's no room in that sob story for the truth of Cass's own life. There are some things you don't get better from, some harms too deep to heal. There's the man in the black coat, the legions of the dead that follow him, more than enough for any ordinary person to live with; but the ghosts that haunt Cass are some of them as real as daylight. First the stepfathers, and then the street, which is not a kind place for anyone, let alone a girl. And even if Cass did wake up one day with her past a tidy package, a boxed-off set of old memories banned from seeping over into her daily life, there's more to it than that. More to it than forgetting, or giving back to herself what was taken from her in the moments when she's high enough to reclaim her own skin. What Cass loves is the freedom of speed jackhammering through her, the fractured seconds when anything is possible. What Cass loves even more than letting go is saying yes. Yes to every bad idea, to every drug, to every possible thing; yes to wide horizons, yes to euphoria, yes to the wants of the animal body. Yes to running wild in the night, yes to being monster more than girl, bare teeth and nails like claws and muscles like a wolf's. Nothing has ever made her feel as good as drugs, as good as drunk, not the magic Raven taught her, not her dreams of the dead, not even the promise of the man in the black coat lurking at the edges of the world she lives in, beckoning her over to the other side. She could get sober but to get sober she'd have to give up what makes her live.

And now Cass is too high to think about anything except the vibration of the stars and the feel of the ocean breeze on her skin and the realization that she is never ever going to sleep again because there are too many things to do and it feels so good to be this alive and this awake and this young and they can go anywhere they want now and they can think anything they want and here they are in the world, little animals, little animals.

 

 

With every day that passes on the beach, Cass hates Jason more. He's fickle, tyrannical, prone to nightmares. He will only eat soft corn tortillas and cheese, turns his nose up at shrimp and shellfish pulled fresh out of the sea and sold in the village. He talks about himself incessantly. The more obnoxious he gets, the more Maia moons after him, asking anxiously if he is okay, what he needs, what she can get him, nursemaiding him through his days as if she's his nanny instead of his lover. Exasperated, Cass takes to swimming, or running on the beach, or going for long walks by herself; when she comes back, he's always drunk the lukewarm Coke she left in the car, looked through her and Maia's things in search of something to do or read or munch. If she leaves her alcohol anywhere he can find it, he drinks it; if she doesn't hide her drugs, he does them. It goes without saying that he doesn't have any money.

“Jesus,” Cass yells, one afternoon, when she catches him paging through her journal. He drops it like it's a scorpion. Maia's a ways down the beach, dozing.

“I'm sorry,” he says quietly. His usual bravado is gone; he's almost sheepish.

“You are a
shit,
” Cass says. “A fucking shit. And just because my best friend has lost her mind don't think I have, too. I see right the fuck through you. Don't ever touch my shit again or I'll cut your dick off and feed it to you.” His eyes widen in real fear, and Cass has to make a terrible face to keep from laughing.

“I know I'm a shit,” he says unexpectedly. “I know. I'm sorry. I try—I try to be something else. You know, like a decent person. I get mixed up. I don't know how. I—” He falters.

Cass pushes her hands through her dirty hair. He's like a stray dog, bristled big to hide the staring ribs and mangy pelt and life of too many kicks. Jason might think he's special, but she's met a hundred boys like him.

“You're lucky Maia likes a project,” she says curtly. “And I meant what I said about your dick.”

Later that night he plays for them, as if in apology. They sit at the tideline under an upended bowl of stars, the night warm and luminous around them. Jason plays Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen, the Kinks, a song Cass doesn't recognize. “Who is this?” she says.

“The Vaselines,” he says, looking out at the ocean. He cracks his knuckles, and then he plays them songs of his own. They are both like and unlike the songs his band played, each of them a little world that the three of them step into together. The loneliness, the ache, in Jason's voice is so raw that Cass cannot watch him play; it's like walking in on someone naked. Alone, he is even more compelling than he is with the band. The night beach around them drops away. Cass thinks of meadows and bumblebees, the sound of rain falling in the forest, the sun warm on her back, swimming naked in an alpine lake. The warm smell of pine and earth in the high passes of the mountains out on the peninsula. They built a fire earlier but the flames have died down to coals, and the night is close around them. Against her will Cass admits it: She can see this thing in Jason that Maia sees, this spark. She does not want to feed him or coddle him or ensure his safety or comfort, but even she is moved a little by his music. At the edge of the circle of Jason's voice she sees something shift in the darkness, lifts her head.

The man in the black coat is watching them, his pale face expressionless, his dead eyes flat and full of hunger. The red glitter of rubies at his throat, his white fingers curled into fists. “No,” Cass says aloud, sitting up, “no, that's not right,” and Jason, startled, falters on a chord, the jangling noise harsh and sudden.

“What's wrong?” he says.

Cass scrubs at her eyes with the heel of her palm, searches the darkness. Whatever it was that she saw, it's gone. “Nothing,” she says. “I thought I saw something.”

 

 

After their confrontation Jason is more gracious most days, offering to go into the village to buy more water or food, bringing back candy for her, or fruit, or woven bags from a roadside vendor. Cheap things—and who does he think he's kidding, he's bought them with Maia's money—but the sentiment is worth more than the gift itself. He's like a toddler, aggravating but without malice. No matter how much she resigns herself to him, though, she can't forgive him the worst offense of all: stealing Maia from her and transforming her into a near-zombie version of her former self. She takes on his opinions, his affectations, even his vocal tics. His drawling, sarcastic “
Yeaaaaah,
” his chortle, his peninsula hick's disdain for people who care about clothes or good food or money. Which is, of course, an easy spite to carry if it's someone else's money you're living on. But Maia won't hear a word against him, and Cass is on unstable ground, since she herself has been living off Maia's savings since they skipped town. He's divided and conquered them as efficiently as someone bringing a cleaver down on the ties that have bound them together in the last month. Wherever he goes, Maia's eyes follow him, adoring, her face turning after him like a leaf following the sun, until Cass has to look away. They will have to leave here, soon, drive north with what little they have left and figure out what comes next, and she has the sinking feeling the rest of the story will have Jason's name scribbled all over its pages.

He follows her into town one afternoon, scuffing his feet and whining, though she tries her best to dodge him. He's hungry but doesn't want shrimp, doesn't trust the roadside vendors—this though they've been eating from carts all week—thinks they probably have the kind of cheese he doesn't like, or flour tortillas instead of corn. “There's only one kind of cheese,” Cass says, but he doesn't hear her. What does he expect, Monterey Jack to appear out of the ether like somebody abracadabraed it? Cass might be a witch, but she's no
I Dream of Jeannie.
The sun pounds down on their burnt shoulders. Jason's unpleasable, sulky, intolerable. They're standing in the middle of the dusty street, which is thankfully deserted; Jason makes her embarrassed to be white. “I don't want to go back to the beach without something to eat,” he says.

“It's your own goddamn problem,” Cass says, “if you won't eat anything that's here.”

“I don't like anything that's here.”

Cass forgets her resolve, what little forgiveness she's mustered, loses her temper with him altogether. “We should just fucking leave you behind,” Cass snaps.

To her astonishment, his face goes as slack-jawed as if she's punched him.

“You can't,” he says in a tiny voice. “You can't leave me behind.” His eyes are full of despair.
You and I are more alike than I care for, little man,
she thinks. “You can't leave me,” he says again. “You can't.”

“Lucky you,” she says, “it's not up to me.” She turns her back on him, unable to look at the pathetic slouch of his shoulders any longer, and trudges back toward the beach. He waits for a moment and then runs after her.

“Promise me you won't,” he says.

“Won't what,” she says.

“Won't leave me.”

She stops and faces him. “I'd leave you in a second,” she says. “I can't stand you. But like I said, it's not up to me.” She steels her face against the misery that crosses his.

“I told you I don't know how,” he says. “To change.”

“It would be nice if you learned.”

“I never really had a mom.”

Cass snorts. “You seem to have found the equivalent.”

“I want you to like me,” he says. “I love Maia. I do. I love her. I've never met a girl like her. I'm going to marry her.”

“You're
what
?”

“That's what people do,” he says, “when they love each other.”

“Jesus, Jason, you sound like a kindergartener.”

“Why are you like this?”

Cass shakes her head. “Give it a rest.”

“She loves you. But I don't know how to even make you like me.”

“You can't make me like you. That's not how it works. I have to want to like you.”

“I'm trying really hard.”

“You could've fooled me.”

He shrinks back from her, wounded. “You're kind of a bitch, Cass.”

She laughs. “Bingo, Jason,” she says.

There's nothing she can do about him. He's like a canker. And now Maia's leaving her, the way Cass knew she would all along. The hurt of it is not her going. Cass is used to letting go of anything good. The hell of it's that Maia didn't quit Cass for her well-paved road to a good and meaningful life; she quit for this snivelly loser, this dirty-haired trainwreck of a boy-man. It's worse, infinitely worse. It's like he put something in her water. He has a kind of charisma, Cass will admit; the people here, improbably, love him, find his stumbling hacked-up Spanish adorable, his ineptness endearing. They, like Maia, will frequently attempt to feed him, clearly certain he is unable to do so on his own. It happened the whole drive down, too. Cashiers at gas stations, truck-stop waitresses, random mothers in parking lots. A forty-something woman in a business suit had come up to him in San Diego and handed him twenty dollars, apropos of nothing. Cass has seen it happen before with street punks like her, always white boys who were just the right mix of good-looking and vulnerable, dirt smudged along their pretty cheekbones so artfully it looked intentional. A legion of girls forever trying to nurse them back to health, fix them up, buy them food, give them one more chance. Jason's power to charm makes Cass want to cut his throat in his sleep. She has never let anyone take care of her. She has pride and her own wits, gets herself out of the trouble she gets into. She doesn't understand how boys like Jason can stand themselves. Easy for him to be the edgy artist with a diva's temper; Maia's just one of a long line of girls who'll fatten him up and cover his bills when he blows all his rent money on a new amp. Cass knows all about it. If Maia had ever been out in the world, she'd be able to see it, too.