Dirty Wings (3 page)

Cass did not like the shelter, which smelled bad a lot of the time. The bathrooms were always dirty, no matter how many times they got cleaned. The mattresses had plastic covers on them that rustled when you moved, and at night the sonorous breath of too many people in too small a room kept Cass awake. The other kids went through her clothes. Sometimes the moms got in fights. Her own mom had gotten a job at a gas station half a mile away and was so worn thin with worry and weariness that Cass thought she might disappear altogether. After they had been at the shelter for a week, the orchid girl came out of the office one evening and asked Cass's mother if she could talk to Cass for a little while. Cass had been in the office that first morning, when one of the women had asked her mother a lot of questions about her life and what had happened before they came here, so many questions that Cass had eventually fallen asleep, but not since then.

“Cassandra,” the orchid girl said. She sat down on the floor, her back against the bed in the office, and stretched. After a moment Cass sat down next to her. She stretched, too.

“Do you like it here so far?” asked the orchid girl. Cass considered lying; she did not want to get her mom in trouble. One of the other kids had told her that his mom had gotten kicked out of the last shelter and they had had to spend the night in an alley before his mom found a man who would pay for a hotel room. But something about the orchid girl's face was so honest, so friendly, that Cass trusted her immediately.

“No,” Cass said.

“That's pretty normal,” the orchid girl agreed. “Not the most fun, right? Where would you go if you could go anywhere?”

“I'd live on the beach,” Cass said, surprising herself. “I'd live in a little cabin on the beach. And I'd eat tofu and avocado every day. I would have a boat.”

“A warm beach?”

“Maybe. Well, no. I mean, the beach where I'm from. My mom took me there when I was really little. We went to the rainforest and then the ocean. It would be that beach, but warmer. So I wouldn't need a coat.”

The orchid girl nodded thoughtfully. “I like that. Would your mom live with you?”

“If she wanted,” Cass said. “My mom's okay. She's just tired. If we lived on the beach she wouldn't have to work. She could eat tofu and avocado, too.”

“You must really like tofu and avocado,” the orchid girl said solemnly. Cass shot her a sidelong glance and saw she was making a joke. Cass grinned a little.

“We could eat spaghetti, sometimes,” she said.

The orchid girl asked her more questions: What she liked to do for fun, what was best about school, what had happened in their last house. Sometimes she wrote Cass's answers down on a piece of paper. Had the stepdad ever done anything bad to her? What was Cass afraid of? Cass wasn't afraid of anything, but she told the orchid girl about her dreams. She'd always had dreams that were more than dreams. She'd dream of glass breaking, and the next day her mother would drop a bowl in the kitchen, curse as it shattered. She'd dream of a raft of dying animals, floating in a dark sea, and in the morning she'd find a newly-dead kitten moldering next to the sidewalk, eyeless, its matted fur crawling with maggots. Sometimes she dreamed things that she knew would not come to pass for a long time to come: herself in a bright kitchen, its shelves lined with mason jars, tendrilly plants hanging from baskets. Herself on a beach, a white-sand beach, not the one she knew. Sun warm on her bare arms, the ocean flat and glassy before her. Herself in a vast apartment, chandeliers filled with candles hanging from the high ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows showing a view of a dark sea under a darker sky. A dark-skinned man with long dreadlocks, sailing a little wooden boat across a whitecapped grey sea. A girl whose blue eyes were startling in her brown skin, looking up at a night sky glowing white with stars.

 

 

When Cass was a small child, she'd been out one afternoon in the woods, playing alone in a stand of evergreens. A cloud moved across the sun and a hush fell through the forest. She lifted her head and saw a man standing between two trees a little ways away. Tall and thin, in a long black coat. Death-pale face. The glitter of rubies at his throat. “Hello,” she said.

Hello, Cassandra,
he replied, in a voice like stone. His mouth did not move when he spoke.

“Are you a ghost?” she asked.

The people of your time do not have a word for what I am.

“You look like a ghost. Are you sad?”

He had taken a step forward, looking down at her.
I am very old.
And before she could tell him that that wasn't what she had asked, that wasn't an answer at all, he stepped back into the shadow of a tree and vanished. There was a bright fuzz around the edges of her vision and the air tasted of smoke and ashes. She went home and told her mother she'd seen a ghost. Her mother was watching television with all the drapes drawn, her face slack, lit greenish in the flicker of the screen. “I told you not to talk to strangers,” her mother said, changing channels. “Go outside and play.”

Even then, Cass understood that the world was not quite the same for her as it was for other people, that the lines between the real and the not-real, the present and the past, were sometimes blurred inside her. She tried talking to animals, but they did not understand her any better than they understood other girls. She tried telling the weather to change its patterns, but the sun shone or didn't no matter what kind of morning she'd asked for. But sometimes out of the corner of her eye she saw a group of tall, stern, pale people, battling one another with swords, or sailing ships across a wine-dark sea. She saw an island of one-eyed monsters dotted with sheep. She saw a woman with the face of a goddess and serpents winding out of her skull. She saw these things when she slept, and saw them again in waking, and sometimes if she called after them, if she cried out, “Wait, wait,” one of them would half-turn as if listening. “Take me with you,” she begged. “Take me with you.” But they never did.

 

 

The orchid girl was quiet for a long time, and Cass wondered if she'd said too much. If they were going to take her away now, make her sleep in an alley. Call the police. Whatever happened to freaky monster-seeing girls who didn't fit the right way in the world.

“I have dreams like that, too,” the orchid girl said instead.

“Does everybody?” Cass asked.

“No,” she said.

“Is there something wrong with me?”

“Do you think there's something wrong with me?”

Cass looked up at the orchid girl. “You seem fine,” she said.

“Well then,” said the orchid girl. “There you go.”

 

 

After a month, Cass's mom saved up enough from the gas station for them to take the bus back to Seattle and get a room in an apartment they shared with another mom and her son, who went into their bedroom and shut the door whenever Cass was in the apartment. Cass went back to school. For a while, things seemed like they might be good. But then came the second stepdad, and another apartment with just him, and Cass having to lock her door at night. She knew better than to tell her mom. It was the stepdad or the shelter again, and anything was better than the shelter. After the second stepdad came the third. The third was a yeller, not a hitter or a toucher. “You little whore,” he liked to yell, at either Cass or her mother. Or sometimes “You goddamned whores,” at both of them: two birds with one stone. By the third stepfather, Cass's mother's eyes were dead and her shoulders had a permanent slump to them, and though she'd been pretty and chatty and alive when Cass was younger, the stepfathers had wiped anything like beauty from her face. By the third stepfather, Cass's mom had stopped saying anything at all. It was easiest for Cass just to leave, and so she did. Became her own bad news. Cass, catlike, landing feet-first, teaching herself young to fight her own battles with fists or with wits. Whichever got her clear of trouble she didn't go out seeking herself. She took to drugs like she was born with an addict's sneaky wit, rifling her mom's prescriptions and then, when her mom caught on to that racket, finding the first of a long stretch of mean-eyed boys way too old for her.

 

 

Half the girls Cass knows, all the girls Cass lives with, are living the same after-school special, with minor variations. She loves them, to be sure. They've kept her safe and fed and watched her back. The squat is like a family, riddled with squabbles and bad blood and old grievances, but at the end of the day they take care of each other. They share what they have, split their food stamps, aren't stingy with their drugs or their booze. Cass fell into them, and they caught her. Brought her back to their derelict manor and welcomed her in.

Squat
is the wrong word, technically. It's somebody's aunt's brother-in-law's cousin's house, more or less condemned, its front yard overgrown with chest-high weeds and pieces of its roof missing. No rent exchanges hands, but there is, somewhere, an actual owner; the only thing, Cass is sure, that keeps the neighbors from being able to get them out. There's no power, though somehow they still have running water. They carry their garbage to a Dumpster outside a minimarket down the block, rather less often than they should. They keep a low profile, in exchange for the neighbors' unwilling silence, and this tenuous equilibrium lurches forward toward an indefinite future. Cass has only lived here a year. Their elder statesman, Mayhem, has been here for four. It's better than her mom's house, though that's not a particularly strong recommendation. Cass even has her own room, with windows she edges in duct tape in winter to keep out the cold and throws open in spring to let in the warm new-scented air. The room was carpeted in a filthy shag when she laid claim to it, but she's since torn it out, sanded the floor, and painted it a rich dark brown. (That crisp fall afternoon, Cass and Felony pushing a full-to-the-brim shopping cart of paint and sandpaper and brushes and paint trays out the front door of the hardware store, cool as you please. Felony'd stolen a virulent magenta, with which to color her own room's walls, but the color was, not surprisingly, an eyesore. “Goddammit,” she'd sighed, gazing at the fluorescent horror she'd created, “now I'm going to have to go
back.
”) Cass papered her walls with a collage of show flyers and pictures of faraway cities cut out of magazines pilfered from strangers' garbage, made herself a desk out of milk crates and a board. Mason jars in the windowsills, filled with dried flowers. Candles to keep away the dark. Cass doesn't like to sleep, because sleeping means dreams.

Lately, in her dreams, she's begun to talk to dead people. This, she tells no one at all, but that makes it no less real. Shades slip in, uninvited, to the twilit world she wanders somewhere between waking and sleep. Her father, his eyes pleading, reaches out to her, but when she moves to touch him her hands strike an invisible wall, as though she's trying to push through a window. She sees a man with bloody holes where his eyes should be, tears of blood trickling from the sockets. She sees people she has never met, but knows from newspapers or television: overdosed rock stars, politicians killed by snipers, voiceless legions who died in genocide or war. She sees the tall man in the black coat again, looking down at her as she sleeps, but when she opens her mouth to say hello she finds her lips are sewn together with thread. She dreams about a black river in a dark forest, a palace dotted with a hundred open doors on a dead white plain, a three-headed dog. Sometimes the thought of sleep is so terrifying she stays up for days, doing speed until her eyes feel as though they will come out of her head and the walls crawl with things that aren't there and it's as bad being awake as it is being asleep. Mayhem gets her hands on some Dilaudid and that, for a little while, sends Cass into an intense, dreamless sleep like a coma. She's so grateful for the respite she cries when she wakes up, her body fighting her way out of the abyss of oblivion against her will.

“Do you ever see things?” she asks Felony, the evening of the day she shoplifts beer with the weird preppy girl she met on the street. They're rooting through a grocery-store Dumpster. Felony trains the flashlight on Cass, so that her face disappears behind a blaze of white light. Cass squints.

“See what?”

“Like, things that aren't real.”

Felony turns the light back to the Dumpster. “You're doing too many drugs, Cass.”

“Not like that. I know the difference.”

Felony holds up a plastic package of strawberries. “Look at these, only a couple moldy ones.” She tucks it into her backpack. “I don't know, girl, just lay off the speed.” Cass knows better, really, than to ask, but she thinks that maybe if she's going crazy someone else will have noticed. Someone will tell her, at least, and then she can go about putting a stop to it. However you put a stop to those sorts of things. Exorcism? Ritalin? She pictures herself in a group-therapy situation. “Do you think I'm going crazy?” she asks Felony, on their walk back to the squat.

Felony shrugs, digs the strawberries back out of her bag and puts three in her mouth at once. “Crazy is relative,” she says through a mouthful of fruit. “Why you going on about this shit, anyway?” Which Cass finds inexplicably comforting.

“I met this girl today,” Cass says.

“Huh.” Felony is going through the strawberries so briskly there'll be none left by the time they get back to the house.

“Hey, give me one of those. I met her in the street. I got her to steal beer with me.”

“Huh,” Felony says, handing Cass the strawberries with visible reluctance.

“I don't think she ever drank beer before.”

“Weird,” Felony says. “What is she, straight edge?”

“No,” Cass says. “I think she's just lost.” She eats a strawberry thoughtfully and looks up at the sky. “New moon,” she says.