Dirty Wings (7 page)

Cass sets the bag of dried nettles down, stands up slowly. “I have to go,” she says.

Raven sighs. “Oh, Cass. Who will you fight, when there is no one left around you? You are always welcome here.”

“I'll see you tomorrow,” Cass says, not looking at her. The light in the witch store is watery and grey.
Fuck this,
she thinks, but she cannot tell anymore whether she is furious with Raven or with herself.

“Well met, Cass,” Raven says softly. “I will see you again in this life.”

That night Cass dreams of the skeleton man. She is standing in front of the black palace, all its doors open to the dead world; he is next to her, his black coat flapping in the breezeless air. His bony hand is on her shoulder, his long fingers curled around her collarbone.
You are keeping something that is precious to me,
he says, his voice the dry flutter of moths' wings in her mind.
I will come for it soon, Cassandra.
He is frightening, but there is something magnetic about those flat black eyes, the thin cruel curve of his mouth. What could she possibly have that he wants? An amulet, a pile of crystals? “Take me with you,” she says as he lets go her shoulder, “take me with you,” but he does not answer her as he walks away.

She does not go to the witch store anymore, after that.

NOW: BODEGA BAY

Here is her body: long legs, long arms, long bony fingers. The ridge of her knuckles. The teeth of her spine. They got a motel room for twenty dollars, the kind of motel where the door doesn't really lock and the people in the rooms on either side of them live here. Women with faces made desperate by hunger and the grief of watching their own lives leave them. Not all at once but in pieces. Grey-faced children with dark shadows under their eyes. The parking lot full of breaking-down cars stuffed with possessions: blankets, boxes, toys, groceries. The sheets on the motel-room bed are white and stiff, cheap fabric reeking of bleach. A flickering neon sign advertised
FREE CA LE
but the television is broken, switches on to channel after channel of static.

This is the longest Maia has ever gone without playing the piano. When she sleeps she dreams of her hands on white keys. She dreams of mermaids drifting in the deep, their songs sweet and faint. She dreams of Rachmaninov's
Elégie in E Flat Minor
, the arpeggiated left hand, the smooth sad chords counterpointing in the right, the melody singing between them both; a piece that makes her think of moors, of wandering in some dreaming misty world smeared with rain and love lost and melancholy. Her hands ache, remembering. The weight of what's unsung threatening to drown her. All her life the only words she has spoken well are those spelled out in notes, black marks on the staves' black lines, the only language she knows as her native tongue. The words are someone else's but the song is hers, the longing, the rhythm of it moving in her body, her blood. For all the years and miles and lifetimes that separate her and those long-dead men, for all their whiteness and their polonaises, for all the ways in which they are nothing like her, what they have written lives in her, is made real in her hands, her heart, the muscles of her back and arms. Her own body, moving, her strong fingers poised above the keys. Sometimes when she plays she imagines them standing over her, a silent ghostly chorus, smiling.

She dreams of Ravel, wandering in the dark world where ghosts speak in human tongues and tell human stories, where demons are real and sirens call to human lovers with no love, only malice. In her dreams the white keys of the piano turn to pale trees in a night forest, their branches reaching overhead into the looming dark, the ground cool beneath her bare feet. Her hair long again, spilling down her back; she is wearing a white dress like a bride's that falls to her ankles and moves around her in drifts although there is no breeze. In front of her the ground splits open, revealing a stairway leading down into the dark, and she knows the man in the black coat is waiting for her at the bottom, patient as death.
I'm coming,
she tells him,
I'm coming. Wait for me. I'm coming.
The darkness knits through her, through and through, black thread on a silver needle flashing between her ribs, stitching silent her tongue, and when she reaches the bottom of the stairs his hands close around her like a cage. But when she wakes up she remembers only the piano, only the feel of her hands on the white keys, only the music in her ears.

What was she thinking? That she could walk away? That speed and freedom would fill the emptiness of her heart, teach her how to love? In Cass she sees herself echoed. What's unmatched in their bodies is twinned in their hearts: that same ache, that sorrow, that vast want. Until she opened her eyes to it Maia had no idea of the immensity of her own hunger. But without the piano she is nothing, no one, not even a girl you would remember. Without the piano she has no way to spell out what she's asking for, no way to name a single thing, to give voice to the loss that follows her wherever she goes. She is her own worst curse. Cass was better off without Maia's dead weight throwing her off-course. Before, Maia was a blank slate, a girl with no sense of her own yearning. She channeled the dead in her hands and made their dreams hers, played like she was possessed with a genius no less great for not being her own. But now she is cut adrift, lost between worlds, following Cass from basement show to club to basement show as though she'll find the answer to herself in sweaty skin and the crash of noise, bodies wild against bodies in the dark. It's a release, but it's not the solution to any riddle. If she knew what she wanted, if she could put a name to it, would that set her free? Cass is so sure of herself, so clear, so relentless, but there's nothing about Cass that makes Maia think she is happy either. Both of them, lost in the loss of each other.

They take turns in the shower. Cass first. Maia can't remember the last time she was clean. Things like that used to matter to her. They'd met some people in Arcata, stayed for a while. Sleeping on floors. Or in beds. Not alone. A couple of nights in a hotel room down the coast some drummer from some band had rented for her and Cass and him and some other people whose names she can't remember. Fat white lines of cocaine on a mirror and Cass's big eyes looking straight at her; later, Cass had said she was sorry, and Maia said, “For what,” and Cass said, “I didn't think I was this contagious.” A life can change so fast. Where is her mother now, and is she worried? Has she called the cops? Are they swarming the coast, even now, searching out a girl gone astray, or are runaways cheap currency on the I-5 corridor, not even worth the effort of a search until they turn up fish-eyed and clammy in some ditch, their underwear missing and their futures gone? Has Maia's father even noticed she's left? They'd swapped out the license plate on the Mercedes in a grocery-store parking lot in Vancouver, traded it for the plate off a truck festooned with American flag bumper stickers. Both of them had liked the almost-joke, though the extra step meant nothing if no one's looking.

But in between there are patches of joy. One night wild with speed and Cass's hand in hers and this show was great, this show was brilliant, this show was better than all the other shows. This show was a woman with long black hair and a great throaty purr of a voice too big and too gorgeous for the dirty room, her hands sure on the guitar, each note true.
I've been waiting for my life to start,
she sang, and Cass and Maia's eyes went wide, because here they were, waiting too, and sometimes all it takes is another voice to call out the words living unspoken in your chest. The kids around them felt it the same way they did, surging up against the battered stage with their arms outstretched, singing along to the chorus as soon as they recognized it well enough to repeat it.
I've been waiting for my life to start,
Maia and Cass howled with one voice. After the show Maia pulled her through a knotted throng to where the woman and her band were packing up instruments and amps. “Hi,” Maia said, her voice tiny, but the woman heard her. She was older than they thought, up close. Late twenties, maybe. Lines at the corners of her sad eyes where hard days had marked her, but her face was kind. “Hi,” she said.

“That was really good,” Maia said, a little louder, and then she said, “How do you play like that? How can I play like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like how you play,” Cass said.

The woman laughed. “It's here, little bird,” she said, tapping Maia's chest gently, the knot of bone covering her heart. “It's all here. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You play?”

“Piano,” Maia said. “But I can't sing.”

“People always told me I couldn't sing, too.”

“But you're a great singer,” Cass said.

She grinned. “That's because I told them to fuck off.” She rested her palm on Maia's forehead, a benediction, and then hoisted her guitar and gave them a little wave as she rejoined her band, and the warmth of her touch had lingered long after she'd gone.

The high-pitched whine of the pipes ends and Cass comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a shabby towel thin as paper and worn through in places. “Classy,” Cass says, poking her thumb through a hole. Her thick dyed hair is standing on end. The road suits her: sun's pinked her cheeks and gilded her shoulders, and her eyes are bright in her tan face. They don't discuss the lives they've slipped as easily as the clothes they shuck at the edge of the ocean. Mermaids. Cass swims like a shark, sure and fearless. Maia's learning in her wake. Cass is the first person she's ever let see her naked.
Was,
she thinks. Cass curls up next to her on the bed, slides one damp arm around her shoulders. “Bony thing,” Cass says gently in her ear. “We gotta fatten you up.” From Cass, this is almost silly; despite her broad shoulders and solid build, speed's slicked her down to skin and bone, same as Maia. Girls across the country would die for this diet, the wild thrill of their vampire nights. Their new life is like a
Lost Boys
remake.

“I'm homesick,” Maia says. Cass chins the top of her skull and she buries her face in the curve of Cass's neck like a kitten.

“We can take you home.”

“Not for that home. I don't ever want to go back to that home.”

“For Vietnam?”

“I don't remember Vietnam. I miss the piano.”

“I imagine.”

“And Oscar. My teacher.”

“It must be hard, not being able to play.”

“It's like part of me is gone. But I don't know—I don't know what I am without the piano. Without music. I wanted to know that. I wanted to know if it was really something that I loved, or if it's just the only thing I know how to do and I've done it for so long I don't know any better. Oscar wants me to be a musician and my parents want me to be a musician but I don't know what
I
want, I've never even asked myself what I want. I didn't know I could want things until I met you. I thought coming with you would show me what I was without it. But maybe all I am without it is nothing.”

Cass strokes Maia's hair, gentling her, murmuring nothings into the whorl of her ear. “I know,” she says, over and over. “I know.”

“I thought running away would fix it,” Maia whispers.

“Running away doesn't fix anything,” Cass says. “But it makes you harder to find.”

 

 

Maia wants to buy bread for sandwiches again. It seems like a good idea. Every idea seems like a good idea with drugs like this twitching through you. Cass jitters and grins. Yes, yes, we'll cook dinner—
With what? Never mind
—we'll clean the car we'll make a plan we'll write everything down for this week and the next week and the next. Girl, we have so many plans we can plan out last week, too. Cass waits for Maia on the sidewalk outside the grocery store, tapping her fingers on the cement curb, watching ordinary shoppers in their ordinary clothes: a mom toting sticky-faced toddlers, a droopy old man with glasses, a teenage girl a few years younger than she is holding the hand of a little boy who is maybe hers or maybe just her brother, a woman in a business suit clop-clopping in heels she has trouble walking in. All these humans. Cass is human too, look at this, look at her human hands, if she holds her hands to the sun the flesh goes almost translucent, doesn't it, not really translucent but lucid, light shining pinkly through the web of flesh between forefinger and thumb. A woman with thick glasses and a mean squint looks at her, scowling, and then Cass puts her hands on the curb again. Maybe they should eat something besides bread. What do people eat? Cass thinks about it, can't remember. Carrots, people eat carrots. Spaghetti. Bananas. Tofu and avocado. A coffee cup. You don't eat a coffee cup. You put coffee in it. Cass puts her chin on her knees, hugs her legs to her chest. It isn't cold. There's a woman by the door to the grocery store handing out Bibles. She has on a long purple dress—
Ugly,
Cass thinks,
what an ugly dress
—and her face is not young but at the same time strangely ageless; she could be forty, or sixty, or any age in between. She's wearing a scarf over her bushy horse-colored hair. No one wants her Bibles; she's been holding the same one since Cass sat here, offering it with insistent jerks of her outstretched hand, but everyone who passes ignores her, tugs a shopping cart out of its corral, pushes it through the sliding doors. There's a lull in customers, the sidewalk deserted, the glass doors snugged shut and unyielding, and the woman offers Cass the Bible with the same enraged ferocity.

“No, thank you,” Cass says.

“Do you know,” the woman says. It's the first she's talked. Her voice is surprisingly low and raspy. “Do you know where you will spend eternity?”

“In hell,” Cass says. “With all the rest of my friends.” By which she means Maia. She doesn't mean to be sarcastic; it's not until the woman snorts in contempt that Cass realizes what she's said.