“Be careful,” she says.
“I will.”
“You don’t know him.”
“It feels like I do.” Is that true? I don’t know. Something in me recognizes something in him. His body brings my body home. If that’s not a kind of knowing, I don’t need to know what knowing is.
She sighs and runs her hands through her hair. There is grey in it now, which still surprises me. Cass has always seemed barely older than I am. She refuses to dye her hair dark again, which I think is funny, considering how many unnatural colors it was when she was younger. “That’s a different kind of vanity,” she’d said when I pointed that out. “I’m not afraid of growing up.”
Now she scowls at me. “That’s always how it feels.”
“This is different.”
“You’re seventeen. You think everything is different when you’re seventeen. How old is he? What does he do?”
“He’s a musician.” I ignore the first question.
“Stay away from musicians.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Of course I worry. I let you do whatever you want, I let you grow up without––” She stops. She had been about to say without a father. “I let you run around with Aurora,” she says instead. “Be careful.” Her face is impossible to read.
“I promise.”
“Is someone baking bread?” Aurora asks from the doorway. She’s sleepy-eyed and tousled, her shirt slipping off one shoulder, her white hair disordered.
“It should be about done,” Cass says, and gets up to check the oven. Aurora takes a mug out of a cabinet, pours the last of the coffee. She has never commented on the fact that my house has four rooms and hers has forty, or that you can see the floorboards through our fraying rugs, or that nearly all the beautiful things we own are things Aurora bought for us. She gave me a Kiki Smith print for my birthday last year that’s worth more than everything else in our house put together.
“God, I had the weirdest dream,” she says, sitting down.
“What did you dream?” Cass asks.
“I was being chased by this man, and his eyes were made out of fire, and he wanted something from me but I didn’t know what it was. I was running through this weird apartment with all these windows and on the walls were these terrible paintings of people being tortured, and everywhere there was this music and it was getting louder and louder. And all I wanted was to stop and go to sleep there and forget everything, but I knew if I stopped the man would never let me leave again.” As she talks a cloud moves across the sun and the light in the kitchen dulls. Cass closes her eyes, reaches forward, touches Aurora’s forehead with two fingers. She whispers something, opens her eyes, takes her hand away.
“I’ll make you some tea.” She takes away Aurora’s coffee mug. Aurora makes a noise of protest as Cass pours the coffee down the drain and sets the kettle on the stove.
“Humor her,” I say.
Cass takes jars down from her shelves, measures out herbs. “Will you tell me if you have that dream again?” Like me, she’s trying to keep her words light, but I know she is as unnerved as I am.
“Sure,” Aurora says, yawning. “Can I have a little coffee?”
“Later,” Cass says.
“It was like I wanted the man to catch me, though,” Aurora says. “In the dream. Like I knew he could give me something in return, for whatever it was he was going to take, and I wanted to know what it was. There was something beautiful about him, too. The whole thing felt so real.”
“It’s a mask,” Cass says quietly with her back to us. “Beauty like that is always a mask.”
“It was a dream,” Aurora says. “Can I have some bread, at least?”
Later, after Aurora goes home, and Cass takes her cards and her crystals and her charts and goes to meet a client, I try to draw Jack. I rifle through my records and put on the Gits, smooth the blank sheet of paper with my palms, get out my pencils, arrange and rearrange them, pick them up and put them down again. Whenever I close my eyes all I see is him. I draw a line and it’s wrong, another line and it’s worse, turn the paper over, try again. I can see him in my mind but not with my hands. Everyone at the party had moved toward him when he played, unseeing, their mouths open, their eyes blank. My work does not have that kind of power, or anything close. There is no magic in anything I ever draw; only labor, and love, and sometimes a grace that becomes larger than the paper or the canvas, so that you can see for a moment the person inside as though they are about to speak to you or come alive. But that does not happen very often, and most of the time my pictures are only pictures, and a lot of the time they are not very good at all. I put the pencil down. I don’t want to draw him. I want him here, in my room, his hands across my skin again, his mouth. I want him to play me songs. I want tangle my fingers in his hair. I want things that make me blush. It is unseemly, I think, to want someone this much. I can’t draw what I’m seeing. I would have an easier time trying to draw the shape of a cloud moving across the sky.
I draw a line instead, a line of trees that becomes a dark wood with eyes peering out of it, shadows moving through the trees, dark shapes flitting from one branch to another. The afternoon shades into evening, and my room dims. The figures in the trees seem to move without my drawing them, as though they have taken on a life of their own, reaching out to me, whispering my name. I can see into a world without sunlight, a darkness so dense I can shape it with my hands. My bare feet are on a rough dirt path through the trees and the air has gone cold. Thick vines bristling with thorns wrap around the trunks, a viscous sap dark as blood running down the bark where the thorns have pierced it. The darkness around me is alive, creaking and rustling. The branches of the trees are bare and dry as bones. I hug myself, shivering. I am at the river again, the river in my dream. It gleams with a dull sheen as though it were made out of oil. I am looking for someone. Someone I must find, before it is too late. I can hear the dog howling. A figure steps onto the path between me and the river, a darkness blacker even than the darkness around it, and it speaks my name aloud in the dark and reaches its arms toward me. I scream and jerk backward, and my room floods with light from the hallway, and I hear my name again, over and over, Cass running through the open door. The darkness is an ordinary darkness again, my own small room with the lights off, my unmade bed, my stereo, my windowsill lined with candles and dried flowers, the disintegrating rag rug underneath my feet. “I didn’t hear you come home.”
“I thought you were asleep, and then I heard you scream.”
“I was drawing.” I turn to my desk to show her the forest but the paper is blank.
She lets go of me and walks into the kitchen. I wonder how long I was in that forest. Where that forest was. Cass brings me a steaming mug of something bitter and sharp-smelling. I climb into my bed without taking off my clothes and she sits with me while I drink the tea, stroking my forehead, and when I fall asleep at last I do not dream again.
“You have got it bad,” Raoul says. I’m so dopey with lust I’ve been tripping over fruit crates all day. We’re sitting in the street behind the stand now, on a smoke break, watching the fish-stall boys chuck salmon. They look good and they know it. They’re like a tribe of Norsemen, all bulging muscles and piercing blue eyes. Tourist ladies are always trying to get their pictures taken with the handsomest ones. Not so much my speed, but I like to watch Raoul flirt with them. Across the street, the pierogi girls are reading each other’s palms. Occasionally the summer breeze brings me a whiff of their patchouli.