Dirty Wings (9 page)

Here you are at last,
he says. His voice is dry and so low that she can feel it inside her, somewhere in her chest.

“Who are you?”

We have a mutual acquaintance,
he says, smiling, a death's-head grin with no real joy behind it.
But it is your music that makes me wish to know you better. It has been a long time since the sound of a gift like yours found its way to us in the deep. Come with me, and I will show you a kingdom the likes of which you have never even dreamed.

There is something about him that is both sinister and lovely, and his voice is in her ears and her throat and her body, and he is reaching one hand out to her, his lips slightly parted as though he is readying for a kiss. She takes his hand; his cool fingers close around her wrist.
Are you the lover,
she thinks,
or are you the beloved,
and she remembers that the human refused the mermaid not only because he was fickle but because loving her would mean his death, and she pulls her hand from the man's grasp and takes a step backward, shaking her head.

“I can't,” she says, “I can't, you know that, I can't come here,” and he smiles then and his smile goes all the way through her like a knife splitting open her ribcage and laying bare the pulsing muscle of her heart.

We will see each other again,
he says.
I am a patient man.
Then the earth swallows him up and Maia comes awake with a jolt where she is slumped against the piano, her hands stiff and cramping. She knows without looking at the clock in the kitchen that it is late. She climbs the stairs to her room, her body aching as though she's run a mile underwater.
Jesus,
she thinks,
what a weird dream.
She washes her face in the bathroom, looks at herself in the mirror. The piano keys have left their imprint across her cheek, and she touches her face and then runs her fingers through her black hair. There are droplets of something silvery caught in the long strands. She touches her tongue to the tip of her finger. There, unmistakable, the salt taste of seawater.

NOW: SANTA CRUZ

Maia calls Oscar from a pay phone in Santa Cruz. It's a sun-basted college town, peopled with newly minted trustafarians flush with their parents' cash and relics left over from the era of free love and psychedelics, shuffling down the main strip in dirty corduroy bell-bottoms. “Someone should tell them Jimi died,” Cass says.

“Jimmy who?” Maia asks.

Cass rolls her eyes. “Never mind.”

It's a funny place, filled with white students a couple of years older than them, hair knotted into clumpy dreadlocks and stuffed into crocheted Rasta hats. The boys grow scruffy, pubic-looking beards that straggle up their acne-spotted faces. Cass holds hippies in the deepest contempt, grumbling about them as Maia drives past head shops and burrito places with big rainbow-painted signs.

“Let me know if you see a phone,” Maia says. Cass doesn't ask who she wants to call.

They find one in a grocery-store parking lot. Cass waits in the car, chewing her thumb and smoking, while Maia picks up the receiver with shaky hands. She makes a fist around the handful of change in one pocket, waits until the coins are sweaty and her hand is hot. What will she say if he answers? What will she do if he doesn't? She feeds nickels and dimes into the phone, dials, holds her breath. He answers on the second ring, as though he's been waiting next to the phone all this time.

“'Ello?”

“Hi, Oscar.”

“
Maia
,” he says, his tone equal parts relief and accusation. “Then you are alive.”

“I'm alive.”

“You are coming home.”

“Not for a while.”

“You are practicing, where you are?”

“Oscar. No.”

He makes an exasperated noise and she can picture him, pursing his lips and pushing out air. She has tried, herself, to replicate his hilariously French disgust, but it never looks the same on her.

“I needed a break,” she says.

“You needed a
break,
” he repeats. “What is this, your summer vacation? You think this is how the world works? When we are tired, we run off with our parents' little car and do not tell anyone where we are for weeks, hmm? This is what you think adults do?”

“I don't—no, I don't think that. Are my parents looking for me?”

“I would imagine. I have not spoken to them since they called me asking where you were and I was obliged to tell them I did not know.”

“Oh.”

“You have made me quite unhappy, Maia.”

“I know, Oscar. I'm sorry. Will you—will you tell my parents I'm okay?” His silence on the other end of the phone is deadly. “Just tell them—tell them you heard from me. Tell them I'm fine.” No answer. “Oscar?”

“I do not understand why you could not tell me.”

“Tell you?”

“That you are so miserable with me.”

“Oh, Oscar. It wasn't you. It was—there's something wrong with me. I can't—I have to figure out—” She falters.

“I was like you once,” he says abruptly.

“What?”

“When I was young. You know, it is difficult, this life. I am not unaware of this. I have led it also. Sometimes a child has certain ideas. He has grown up certain one set of things is true, yes? He is talented, he practices, he works hard, everything falls into place. It is a simple path if he can follow the rules. But then something comes along to change this. He sees something about himself that he did not see before, and perhaps it frightens him.”

“Something like that,” Maia says.

“I ruined my own life,” he says. “I did this, Maia. Me and no one else. I had a good career ahead of me, and I destroyed it because I looked inside myself and I could not manage what I found there. I do not wish this for you. I have spent every day of my life with this thing. It is not pleasant. Do you know why you are my best student, Maia?”

“No,” she whispers.

“It is because you are afraid also. It is this fear that pushes you to work, like an engine in your heart, do you see? But this fear, it will also take you apart. If you can conquer this, you will be a better pianist than I ever could have been. I teach you because you are on the edge of being magnificent. I cannot tell you what you are afraid of; only you can know this. It is not my business. But I see the mistakes I have made when I was not much older than you, and I do not wish you to make them.”

“I have to find out,” she says, “what it is.”

“Maia, I do not believe you,” he says. “I think you have already got the answer inside you, and you are running away.”

She thinks of her mother's stern, pale face, her father's sad eyes hazy with whisky. She thinks of Cass, waiting for her in the car. She thinks of the last weeks, of how it feels to have no one watching her, nowhere to be, no rules for the first time in her entire life. Free of everything except the trap of her own heart.

“I don't,” she says. “I don't know. I'm sorry, Oscar. I can't come back right now.”

There's a rustling noise. She can picture Oscar running his hand across his moustache in exasperation as clearly as if she's standing next to him. “Fine,” he says. “I will tell your parents I have spoken to you and you are not dead. Although I imagine they might wish to hear this from you directly.”

“Don't be mad at me. Please.”

“When you are ready to return to me,” he says coolly, “my door will be open to you.”

“Thank you,” she says. “Oscar, I love you.” But the unmistakable click of his hanging up is followed by a dial tone that swallows her words whole.

She replaces the phone in its cradle, leans her head against the glass of the pay phone booth. She stands like that for a long time before she walks back to the car.

Cass is dozing in the passenger seat, but she opens her eyes as soon as Maia gets in. “You don't look so good.”

“Probably not,” Maia says, wiping her eyes.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

Cass hands her the tobacco and Maia tries rolling herself a cigarette, but she can barely manage this new skill when her hands aren't trembling. Cass takes the tobacco back without comment, rolls two cigarettes, passes her one. Maia lights it and blows a column of smoke out the open window.

“Let's find some weed,” Cass says. “And some surfers. And a nice beach.” To her delight, Maia smiles.

“You know what?” she says. “I think that is an excellent plan.”

THEN

“Take me to your house,” Cass says one afternoon. They're sitting on the sidewalk, talking about nothing. Cass rolls a cigarette and hands it to Maia, who takes it and then looks at it, uncertain. “I'll get cancer,” she says.

“Eventually,” Cass agrees. She lights the cigarette. Maia takes a single, cautious puff and doubles over, hacking into her knees and flinging the cigarette away from her into the street.

“Oh my god!” she wheezes. “That's disgusting!”

“It grows on you,” Cass says. “Come on, let's go to your house. What are you afraid of?” Maia can't answer with the truth.
You.

“Nothing,” she says, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and wishing she had something to wash out the cigarette's taste. She has a few hours before her mother will be home. It's safe, she thinks, it has to be safe. It's a bad idea, but if no one finds out no one will know any better. She stands up and tugs Cass to her feet. “Come on.”

Cass inside her house is a revelation. Cass stands in the front hallway, silent, looking at the polished floors and the beige carpets and the white walls, and Maia sees the house as if for the first time through Cass's eyes, smells its too-clean chemical tang. Maia's house looks like no one lives in it.

“Well,” Cass says. “No wonder.” Maia takes her shoes off and wills Cass to notice, to unlace her dirty boots without being asked, but Cass is oblivious or ignoring her and Maia, cringing, says nothing as Cass's big black boots cross the hardwood, the forbidden carpet. She follows Cass from the front hall to the kitchen. Through the kitchen. She watches Cass eye her reflection in the mirror-clean surface of the oven. In the hallway between the kitchen and the living room Cass pauses to take in the wall's sole decoration, a blurry framed photo of Maia as a toddler, bookended by her parents. Her father is holding her hand; her mother is staring at the camera with the haughty, bored expression she always has in pictures.

“Your parents are white,” Cass says.

“I'm adopted,” Maia says. “From Vietnam.” Cass nods and says nothing else, and for that Maia is so inexplicably grateful she wants to hug Cass, take her back to the kitchen and feed her snacks, make sandwiches with the expensive paté her mother buys and leaves untouched in the refrigerator. Maia's mother is not a big eater, but she likes the appearance of fine things.

Cass stops again in the living room, takes in the overstuffed matching furniture, the matching end tables, the matching crystal-based lamps with their matching shades. Matching throw pillows for matching couches. Matching paintings of abstract taupe expanses on the matching walls. The glossy piano dominating the room like an altar. “Who plays this?” she asks.

“I do,” Maia says.

“Far
out,
” Cass says. She crosses the room to the piano, depresses one ivory key so gently it doesn't make a noise. “I can't play a thing. Used to want guitar lessons so bad when I was little, but I think that was just too much MTV. Will you play me something?”

Maia, who's played for Oscar, for rooms filled with faceless adults, for judges, for her vicious peers, for hundreds and hundreds of people, is suddenly frozen with terror. “I'm not any good,” she mumbles. Cass shrugs.

“You have to be better than me,” she says. “Come on.”

Maia takes her seat at the piano, bewildered by her sudden stage fright. Cass is chewing on a piece of dirty hair, watching her with those solemn grey eyes.
Chaque flot est un ondin qui nage dans le courant.
For this girl, Maia will play the way to the kingdoms of the deep.

She's never played the Ravel so well, and she wishes that Oscar could see her now, her hands moving like light on water, like waves against the shore, like a shipwreck, like drowning. And then she isn't wishing anything at all; she is the water, the deep green roar, the mermaid singing her lover down to darkness, the lover falling.
Come drown with me and be my love.
She stumbles a little in the right hand but keeps going. She plays like the night is moving through her body, plays like a tidal wave. Plays for all the journeys down into the dark she's ever taken, all the lonely nights spent underwater, plays her regrets as salt-stinging as ocean spray, plays to a still deep place where the sunlight cannot filter down. There, in the dark, he is waiting for her, the man who is not the mermaid, not the lover, but something older and wiser and hers alone. The man with the bone-white face and the black coat, the man she saw in her dream, his mouth making the shape of her name:
Maia, Maia, I see you. I see you.
Through the dark water, the white gleam of his hands.
Wait for me,
she thinks,
make me change my mind,
and he smiles.

Cass is silent for a long time after Maia finishes, and then she lets all her breath out in one giant sigh that means she's been holding it in. “Holy shit,” she says softly. She touches Maia's shoulder and Maia covers Cass's hand with hers, and they have been standing like that for ten seconds or ten thousand years when Maia hears the front door close and knows the worst has happened, the worst was bound to happen. Her mother is home early. She whips her hand away from Cass's and Cass, startled, takes her hand away from Maia's shoulder, and Maia pushes the bench away from the piano, standing up as fast as she can, wondering if she can get Cass out a window, under the couch, in some closet upstairs where she can be secreted away until it's safe to come out, and then her mother strides into the living room and it's all over.