Dirty Wings (20 page)

They are standing in the apartment from her dreams. Beyond the wall of glass, a dark sea heaves against a darker sky. The candles in the chandeliers burn with an eerie greenish light that does little to dissipate the gloom. The room is deathly cold and Cass shivers in her tattered shorts and T-shirt. “What is this place?”

You know where you are, Cassandra. You know what I am.

“No,” she says, looking around her. There's a wall behind her she hadn't noticed before, windowless and lined with oil paintings. Cass thinks at first they are landscapes, but when she gets closer she sees they are populated with figures. She walks down the line. In one, a man rolls a boulder up a hill, his face contorted in agony. In another, a woman stands on a parapet, her face grief-stricken, her skin an ashen grey that makes her look as though she is made of stone. There are dozens of paintings, and Cass looks at every one, as the man in the black coat waits behind her.

When she gets to the last, she pauses. It looks newer than the others, somehow; the style is more modern. It's a study of a man on a grassy lawn, a big house behind him, all angles and windows. He's looking at something outside the frame of the painting, his face sad. Behind him, half-obscured, the figure of a woman in a white dress, her features hidden. “This is Jason,” Cass says slowly. “This painting is of Jason.”

You know what I am,
he says again.
You know what I want.
She chews the edge of her thumb. Does the man who's haunted her dreams since she was a little girl really want
Jason
? Whiner and narcissist, inept cook and hapless navigator, a boy who could not take care of himself if he were given ten thousand dollars and a roadmap to the adult world? His music is good, but despite the other night on the beach, it's nothing special. Cass cocks her head, considering. Maybe there's some secret side to Jason that she's too spiteful to see. Maybe Maia's right about him; maybe he really is worthy of her love. She's having a hard time believing it, but if this skeleton in a fancy suit is bent on collecting Maia's boyfriend for his nocturnal freak show, Cass isn't going to argue. The gods always want boys for their special projects; girls only ever go crazy or die. Or betray.

“You want me to, like, get him for you?” she asks. “Doesn't he have to make his own deal with the devil?”

The man in the black coat shrugs, one shoulder rising to his ear and dropping again, his eyes never leaving her face. In every fairy tale Cass has ever been told the witch is a trickster, the gods turn traitor. Fickle as toddlers and as cruel. If he is from the dark palace that haunts her dreams, if he has crossed that black and undulating river, he is not on her side, whatever story he tells. But she thinks, then, of her life restored, her Maia brought back to her, unhitched from the stringy-haired monster that has insinuated himself into their friendship like a cancer. She knows all those old stories too, musicians selling their souls at the crossroads, signing away on the dotted line. Jason wants to be famous, and the man in her dreams wants Jason, and if he really is what she dreams of, there is nothing he cannot do. She looks down at the floor. “You can have him,” she says. “But he doesn't like me. You'll have to talk to him yourself.”

It is you I have come to, Cassandra. You whom I have followed here. You who led me to what it is I seek. And you are, after all this time, what I expected to find.

“What the fuck is
that
supposed to mean,” she says. His eyes are so dark she cannot tell where the pupil ends and the iris begins, and behind them there is nothingness. A dead white plain, a black palace with a thousand doors.

You are not a fool, child,
he says. He reaches into his black coat and pulls out something round and red and tosses it to her, and she raises her hand instinctively to catch it, her eyes following its rosy arc, and when she looks again he is gone. She blinks, once, twice, and she is on the beach again, the hot sun on her face, shaking her head to clear away the cobwebs of the dreaming world. There is nothing to suggest she was talking to anyone other than herself, save what she holds in her hands: a pomegranate, sweet-scented and heavy, cool against her palms. “No fucking way,” Cass says, and starts to laugh. “No
way.
” Whatever he is, he has a sense of humor.

Her bottle is empty and the joint is dust. The sunlight glitters on the water. Cass takes her shirt off and puts it over her head, stretches out on the sand, and falls backward into sleep.

 

 

When she wakes up, the sun has tracked most of the way across the sky and is sinking into a gold-purple blaze at the edge of the world. She has to think about where she is for a while before she gets up. The pomegranate is still real, next to her on the beach. Her belly is tender, the beginning of what will most likely be a nasty burn. She picks up the fruit and it's cool in her hands, despite having sat out on the beach while she slept.

Jason and Maia are asleep in their cabana. The lowering sun falls across Jason's stubbled cheeks in strips. His mouth is slack, his face as innocent as a child's. One hand is tucked beneath his chin, the other outflung, as though he's reaching for something far away. Maia's curled up against him, her head on his bony chest, the tangle of her bleached hair spilling across his faded shirt. Cass stands looking at them, the two of them a locked door she cannot pass through, a barred gate with
DO NOT ENTER
writ large across its iron bars. She is overcome by the childish impulse to throw a handful of sand at Jason's head, curls her fingers tighter around the fruit instead. Maia murmurs, her eyelids flickering open. “Hey, you,” she says, her voice raspy with sleep.

“Hey,” Cass says. “I got us something.” She holds up the fruit and Maia's eyes widen.

“Far
out,
” she says, sitting up. “Where on earth did you find that? I didn't even know they grew around here.”

“Got it from some guy,” Cass says, and sits next to Maia, stretching out her legs. The cabana is cool and dim and tilting slightly. “I'm sort of drunk,” Cass adds.

Jason opens his eyes, shading out the sun with one hand. “What is that?” he asks. Maia takes his hand and brings it to her mouth, bites his knuckle gently.

“Pomegranate,” Cass says.

“I don't know what that is.”

“It's good. Try some.” She takes out her knife, cuts through the thin red skin to reveal the nest of ruby seeds.

“How do you eat it?”

“Like this.” She mimes dropping the gemlike fruit into her mouth, pretends to chew. He laps what she's given him up from his hand. Red juice stains his palm. He swallows and she hears a chord on the wind, faint and far away. She waits for gods, demons, a celestial host. Nothing happens. The waves crash against the beach, the sunlight falls in slats, Jason looks at her with his ice-blue eyes.
He's all yours,
she thinks.
Take him quick and don't let him come back.

“That's good,” he says.

“Here,” Maia says, “you have to try this,” and takes a red seed between her fingers. “Open your mouth.” Jason parts his lips. Maia puts her fingers in his mouth and pinches the seed between them and the tangy juice fills his mouth as the seed bursts and he laughs.

“Do it again.”

She does, and opens her own mouth. “My turn.” They have gone to some world of their own, their eyes on each other, their lips bright with pomegranate. Cass cannot look away from them. The air has gone still, the ocean soundless, the sun dim. Time stops. Cass can feel the deep slow pulse of the earth, the blood moving in her veins, the breath stopped in her lungs. Maia swallows. Cass closes her eyes. A sound, then, like a great bell tolling, somewhere in the deep. Her skin goes cold.

And then the moment passes and the sky undims itself and the breeze flutters in off the ocean, and the waves murmur against the beach, and Maia and Jason are looking at each other, dreamy-eyed as lovers in a tragedy, just before the knives and poison bring down the curtain. “You want some, Cass?” Maia asks, holding out a blood-colored handful of seeds.

“What the hell,” Cass says, and opens her mouth wide.

 

 

When she tells the story years from now she will tell it untrue. “That week was the best week of my life,” she'll say. Sun on the beach, sand, blue water. At night, more stars than she's ever seen in her short life. Maia: tanned dark and laughing, legs long in her cutoff shorts. Cass will tell it how she wishes it had happened, the three of them kin, Jason a sweet-natured Puck to her and Maia's Castor and Pollux. As if with her lying mouth she can remake the truth of what she did.

They go home. It's time. Nothing seems to have changed. Cass watches closely for traces of demons, signs Jason is spending sleepless nights wandering the paths of Hell. He looks tired, but not in any new sort of way.
I imagined that whole weird-ass thing,
Cass thinks. Cass's own dreams are blurry, aimless; sometimes when she wakes her muscles ache unreasonably, as if she's walked a long way, but if the man in the black coat comes to her again she does not remember when she wakes. Whatever is keeping him from her, she's grateful. She ran out of Raven's herbs a long time ago.

The three of them pile in the car, doing the best they can to brush sand from its seats, from themselves. They are tan and salt-skinned, beachy-haired as mermaids. Cass drives. Jason sleeps in the backseat. The miles flash by in a sunny blur. Maia calls Oscar from a gas station in San Diego while Cass pockets beef jerky, peanut butter crackers, packages of gum. Snacks that will litter the car, unopened, for the rest of the drive home. When Maia gets back in the car her face is still.

“How'd it go,” Cass says.

“I got in,” Maia says.

“Got in?”

“To that school I auditioned for.”

“You gonna go?”

Maia starts to laugh, her shoulders shaking, laughs so hard she has to rest her head on the steering wheel, and then the laughter turns to harsh, choking sobs, and she's crying, crying her sweet heart out while Jason snores away. Cass touches her shoulder, rubs gentle circles.

“Hey,” she says. “Hey. Princess. Hey.” But the knotted muscles in Maia's back don't loosen, and it's a long time before raises her head and wipes her nose with the back of one wrist.

“No,” she says, as if nothing has happened. “I don't think I will.”

Maia and Jason get married in a twenty-four-hour roadside chapel in LA, with Cass their only witness and a hungover Elvis impersonator officiating. They'd splurged on a hotel room to celebrate; that afternoon, Maia and Cass had left Jason there, gone to find Maia a dress. They'd found a Salvation Army on Ventura Boulevard and flipped through racks of ridiculous, puffy dresses—“I'm not going to the
prom
,” Maia said, laughing. Finally she found a white silk slip, edged in lace. She tried it on for Cass, came out of the dressing room twirling and barefoot. The slip was luminous against her clear skin, burnished deep brown by weeks of sun. Her eyes were bright, long legs bare, long beautiful hands poised like a dancer's. She was so beautiful Cass turned her face away, feeling her own heart splinter in her chest. “How do I look?” Maia asked, grinning. Fury pulsed through Cass's heart, wild and sudden as a flash flood.

“Don't do this,” Cass said. Maia's smile flickered and died.

“I want to be happy,” she said softly.

“You think marrying the first dirty rocker to bowl you over is going to do that?”

“Cass. Don't.”

Cass shook her head. “It's your goddamn funeral, princess.” The hurt on Maia's face was worse than anything Cass had ever seen. Cass left Maia there, in the white slip, her brown eyes filling with tears, walked straight out of the Salvation Army into the blinding afternoon sun, walked into a liquor store and back out again with a stolen bottle of bourbon thumping gently against her thigh. She drank it all in an alley and threw most of it up again when she was finished, and then she slid down against the stucco wall and buried her head in her arms and cried until there was nothing left in her. When she was done she walked back to the Salvation Army. They were just flipping the Open sign to Closed. Cass pounded on the door until an exasperated-looking woman let her in. “It's an emergency,” she said. “My friend's getting married.” The woman studied Cass, scowling, but whatever desperate thing she saw in Cass's face made her relent.

“Hurry up,” she said.

“Thank you.” Cass bought a bouquet of fake roses and a hat covered in silk ribbons. She sat outside on the sidewalk, pulled the ribbons off the hat and the roses off their plastic stems, knotted the ribbon around the roses, piecing them together into a crown. She walked back to the shabby hotel, knocked softly. Maia flung the door open. Jason was asleep on the bed, oblivious to the tiny drama playing out around him.

“I'm sorry,” Cass said, and gave her the flower crown.

Maia said nothing, the headdress clutched in one hand, her brown eyes wide and pleading, and Cass took her free hand, curled it into a fist, brought it to her heart. “I'm not much of a flower girl,” she said.

“You can be my best man,” Maia said, and she finally smiled. She held Cass and Jason's hands both, on the drive to the chapel.

The Elvis impersonator looks like Cass feels, and she's surprised he makes it through the brief ceremony without vomiting or passing out; but then, she's surprised she does, too. She wears her dirty cutoffs, her spiked dog collar, and a Misfits shirt she's stolen from Jason. Afterward they order Chinese takeout in their hotel room. They have to call six places before they find one that's still open and willing to deliver. Cass pulls the covers over her head and falls asleep before she has to listen to Maia and Jason having sex in the next bed.