All Our Pretty Songs Part 9

"I look naked."

"Naked and beautiful. For me. You promised. Did you remember a mask?"

"No, but I remembered your present."

I pull the banner from my bag and offer it to her. She tears away the paper and the canvas unspools across her floor. When she sees the painting she gasps and covers her mouth with her hands.

"Oh my G.o.d," she says, "oh my G.o.d. This is me. You painted me."

"Someday I'll be able to afford a real present."

"You idiot." Her eyes are bright with tears. "How could I want anything other than this? It's the best thing anyone's ever given me."

"Do you remember when your dad's manager got you a pony?"

"Oh, G.o.d. That poor f.u.c.king thing. It's in a pasture somewhere. Who gets a six-year-old a pony?"

"You did say you wanted one."

"Everyone wants a pony when they're six. That's what's wrong with me, you know? I'm the girl who got the pony. Now go downstairs," she adds. "You're not supposed to see the dress before the wedding."

"n.o.body's getting married, Aurora."

"G.o.d, you are so literal."

I go and find one of the caterers while Aurora gets dressed, and get him to help me hang the banner. I'd thought to put grommets at the corners, and it only takes us a few minutes to secure it in place so that it hangs, waving gently, over the back porch. The sky is purpling. I lean against a pillar, careful not to dirty Aurora's dress, and watch the caterers light tiki torches and mill about, pretending to look busy until the guests arrive. I want to tell them that no one here cares, that they can sit on the gra.s.s and drink c.o.c.ktails if they want. But maybe that's weird. I feel soft hands on my shoulders, and I turn around.

Aurora is wearing a loose, transparent dress made of something cream and gauzy, sewn all over with hundreds of sequins that catch the light and shatter it into a halo around her. Her feet are bare, and her white hair hangs in a sleek curtain down her back. She's outlined her eyes so that they look even bigger, put on a mask of white feathers. She looks inhuman, like some half-bird, half-girl creature who's crossed over to linger, dazzling, in the mortal world.

Jack is with her, and I wonder when he got here. Dark clothes to her bright, black hair to her white. They are so glorious I can barely look at them. Oh, envy, I think, you belly full of serpents. "You look beautiful," I say. I don't know which of them I mean.

I am already drunk when Minos comes. Here in Aurora's house, I think, surely we are safe. I can't erase the image of Jack and Aurora together, Jack's hand at Aurora's waist. Jack leaving. Aurora knew. Who told her? Jack, or Minos? Who told her first? What are they keeping from me? I fill my cup until the edges of the world are fuzzy. Not Minos's eldritch drink; Aurora's perfectly normal vodka. Instead of erasing the world it makes everything worse. I lean on a wall, alone and maudlin in my magical dress. I know who wore it better. Putting pointe shoes on a hippopotamus won't make a f.u.c.king ballerina. Jack's avoiding me, and I think if I think about it too much I will crawl under a couch and cry myself into oblivion, so instead I refill my gla.s.s. Dance with some boy, masked and courteous, bowing over my hand like we are in a period piece. There are more and more people, people pouring in the front door, cl.u.s.tered around the garden. Some of them I haven't seen in years: old friends of Maia's, of Aurora's dad, their long hair grizzled and their eyes sad behind their masks. None of them recognize me, and I don't bother to say h.e.l.lo.

One minute the party is ordinary, noisy and exuberant, and the next Minos is there. I can feel it before I see him; it's like someone has raised the stage curtains, and now the audience is waiting. The air goes hot and expectant. There are people in masks and people whose masks are not masks, and I am trying again, as always, to tell myself that I am drunk, that I am crazy, but I'm not sure, anymore, that that's true. I lost sight of Aurora and Jack a while ago. Everywhere I go, Minos is there already, watching me, silent, until I want to scream. I run upstairs and into Aurora's room, thinking I will lock myself in, climb into her bed and pull the covers over my head, something, anything.

But he's there, too. Standing by the window, looking out. Aurora's sitting cross-legged in her bed, the feathered mask next to her, and I don't see at first what she is doing. A strip of silk is tied tight around her arm, a syringe in her other hand. "Aurora." She looks up, her eyes empty.

"Snakebite," she says dreamily. If I knew how, I would kill him.

"Get out of here," I say, and when he does not move, I say it again. He turns to look at me. His face is somewhere between curious and amused. He lifts one elegant shoulder in a shrug. "Aurora." I shake her. "You know better. Aurora. You idiot."

"Come with me. You promised me we'd be happy." She takes my hand, rests her forehead on my chest. Oh, Aurora. Aurora calling me in the middle of the night, begging me to come get her. Aurora pa.s.sed out in the garden in her underwear. Aurora with her hands wrapped in my b.l.o.o.d.y s.h.i.+rt. Aurora at the party, glittering on the precipice. My whole life has been saving Aurora from herself, and there is nowhere she can go where I will not follow. Nothing I will not do to keep her safe. Even this.

"You know you want to," she says. And that's the trick of it, Aurora with her straight shot to my secret heart. For all my protests, all my designated driving, all the nights I've kept on the straight and narrow while she ranged far, I've always wondered what it was like. What was so sweet about that oblivion that it could call our own flesh and blood away from us, send Ca.s.s running away from this house and putting Maia on the permanent twilight express. G.o.dd.a.m.n you, Minos, how did you know, I think, how did you know? How badly I want to save her and how badly I want to be her, beautiful and doomed in a pretty dress. How badly I want someone else to do the saving for once. How the fastest way to unravel us was to lay bare our own wants and let them undo us. "Like sisters," Aurora says.

There wouldn't be so many songs about it if it wasn't at least a little bit sweet. "Like always," I say, and kiss her. Minos moves toward me, takes the hand she isn't holding. His touch is as gentle as a lover's. Unbending my arm, bony fingers at the crook of my elbow. The needle the faintest pinch. I close my eyes and wait for what comes next.

I can feel the drug right away, sleek and languid in my veins. Minos's face is as inscrutable as ever, but there is something in those dead eyes that I think is pity. Or maybe it's just contempt. Aurora's room is blurring into darkness, her poster-covered walls fading to black. "Aurora," I whisper, but there's no answer. I have fallen out of the world I know and into something else. There's no sound but the distant murmur of water. I can feel dirt under my bare feet. A chill moves through me. The trees around me are bone-white and bare. I know this place.

In the distance I hear a hectic cacophony, as if a hundred throats are open wide, loosing terrible cries to the unseen sky. The call of horns and the tramp of feet. The noise is growing closer. There's only one path, and I'm standing on it. I look around, frantic, look for somewhere to hide, but there's only the bare trees, the thorns, the blood-colored sap. An unearthly howl rises above the clamor, full of pain and menace, and is joined by another, and another, and then they are upon me.

They are like some nightmare version of a festival parade: a procession of bone-thin riders on horses so dark I can only see them as empty cutouts of night against the white trees. The riders are maggot-white, the white of fungus and old bone. They're still in their party masks: fur and feathers, velvet and lace, rotting silk and dirty satin. Their long ragged hair is braided with tattered dark ribbons that flutter madly although there is no wind. They radiate a greenish light that does nothing to push away the impermeable night. They stream past me, slow and stately. I cower against a white trunk, taking care not to catch myself on the huge thorns, but the riders take no notice of me. I am in Aurora's room. I am on Aurora's bed. But I can feel the cold smooth trunk under my hands, can smell the faint tang of rust and rot that comes from the riders. My bare feet are cold and gooseb.u.mps are rising on my skin. I pinch myself and nothing happens. Pinch harder. Bite down on my lip until my mouth floods with the bitter taste of blood, and still the riders keep coming. That trio of howls again, so close now they make me jump, and in that jerky unguarded movement my shoulder hits one of the th.o.r.n.y vines and I cry out as the spikes pierce my skin. Hissing in pain, I look up and see Minos.

He's astride the biggest horse I've ever seen. He is wearing a dark robe of some kind of fur and a crown of twisted metal set with cracked and dirty red stones. Aurora is behind him, arms tight around him, head resting on his back, eyes closed, her hair a beacon in all that dark. At the horse's feet trots a huge black dog with three heads. One of the heads turns toward me, and the dog stops, its three muzzles thrust into the air and sniffing, like some horrible parody of a house pet searching out treats. Three sets of teeth, ridged fangs each as long as my thumb; three red tongues dripping with slaver; three growls rising in three hot throats. Minos halts the ma.s.sive horse. The riders split around him as seamlessly as water, flow back together once they've pa.s.sed him and stream away down the path. I see Jack, sitting tall on a horse of his own, surrounded by ghouls. His head is held high and his back rigid. His guitar is slung across his chest. His face is a mask, his mouth a straight line. "Jack!" I shriek. "Jack!" But he doesn't turn, doesn't look toward me. The horse moves relentlessly away until he's lost in a sea of black.

The dog howls, the same trio of howls I heard in the distance. Minos holds out a bony hand and the dog stops, looks up at him with a tripled gaze that is equal parts adoration and fear. It wags its whip-thin tail and moves away from me. Minos is as still as stone, watching me, the endless riders moving around him, the dog sitting now, expectant, waiting for a command. "You can't have her," I say. "You can't have either of them." Aurora opens her eyes, sees me, her face aglow.

"You came," she says. "I knew you'd come. We're going to see my dad now." The pain in my shoulder is spreading. I take a shaky step toward Minos, but my body is burning up. He bares his teeth as if he's going to take a bite out of me, and I realize he is smiling. Aurora's gaze goes unfocused, her mouth slack. "Oh," she whispers. "It's so beautiful down here." Her lids flutter closed.

"You f.u.c.ker," I snarl. "Give her back." The world around me is dimming, a red haze moving across my vision. I take another step forward and fall to my knees. Minos puts his heels to the horse and beckons to the dog. I stagger to my feet. The last of the riders thunder past me. I can hear the echo of hooves far ahead. There's no way out but forward. Each step is more painful than the last.

When I get to the river I sink to my knees again, touch my forehead to the colorless earth in despair. There is no sign of them. I hear the dog's howl, m.u.f.fled as though it comes now from somewhere deep in the earth. Faint but unmistakable, the first chords as Jack begins to play. Go home, child, someone says, and darkness comes down around me like a curtain.

I open my eyes to green. The smell of wet earth fills my nose. I'm freezing and my body is one giant ache. Somewhere above me a bird scolds me with a vigorous, descending trill. I push myself up on my elbows, wincing at the stab of pain in my shoulder. I'm in the trampled, empty wreckage of Aurora's yard, sopping wet, tangled in the shredded ruins of her dress and covered in fresh-cut gra.s.s. The sky is the white-gold of dawn. I climb shakily to my feet and check for damage. Ten fingers, ten toes, b.u.m shoulder, wobbly legs. Otherwise in full working order.

The inside of the house is a disaster. Streamers hang crazily from the huge chandelier, and the front hall is caked with mud and feathers, bits of fur, the broken pieces of a jeweled necklace with its gems cracked and smeared with filth. Paintings hang at odd angles, the gla.s.s in their frames splintered into jagged starbursts. My heart catches when I see the banner I painted for Aurora, torn down and trampled. I pick it up out of the dirt, brush off the worst of the grime, but it's ruined. I leave it on the back porch and go inside again. "Maia?" I call, climbing the sweeping staircase to the second floor, but there's no answer.

I peek in Aurora's room, hoping against hope that she's here, lounging in her bed, chugging Dr Pepper and eating Slim Jims and watching eighties movies. Painting her toenails and rolling her eyes at me, demanding to know where I've been. Her room's empty, the bed unmade and strewn with eyeliner pencils and lipsticks. The syringe winks at me from the covers where we must have left it. I rub the crook of my elbow and s.h.i.+ver. There's not even a mark there.

I open Aurora's drawers as if she's hiding inside them. Just a welter of crocheted bikinis and silk slips, fishnets, a rhinestone necklace. A pair of ancient ballet shoes left over from our brief stint as ballerinas when we were still in the single digits. A paper covered in Ca.s.s's handwriting: Aurora's horoscope, undated. Mars is less happy in Taurus. Great, Ca.s.s, very helpful. Exactly what Aurora needs. I walk down the hall to Maia's room.

I think, for a second, that this time Maia really is dead. She's out cold on her bed, her eyes closed, her skin ashen. A few stragglers from the party are pa.s.sed out in various states of disarray. There's a long-haired dude next to her, one arm hanging off the bed, as comatose as she is. "s.h.i.+t," I whisper, but then I see the faint rise and fall of her bony chest. "Maia," I say, but she's zombied. I say it again, louder. I don't want to touch her, but I swallow hard and shake her. Her eyelids flutter.

"Aurora?" she murmurs.

"No such luck. Maia, do you need a doctor?" At last she opens her eyes and gives me an unfocused stare.

"You're not Aurora."

"We covered that. We're moving past 101 now. Are you okay, Maia? Do you need to go to the hospital?" She looks bad but not dying. She looks the same way she's looked for most of the last decade, minus a bit of zest. I sit on the bed, take her hand. "Maia? How you doing, lady? When did you eat last? How much smack did you do last night?"

"Where's Aurora?"

"She either went to Los Angeles or she went to h.e.l.l."

"What?" But Maia's barely conscious. She's more pitiable than anything. Her complete failure to rise to the occasion comes as no surprise. I think of all the times she told us how she was going to get sober, how this time it would be for real. This time she was going to go to a spa in the hills of California, drink lemon juice and hot water for ten straight days, return pure and clear. This time she was going to backpack into the desert, eat peyote and let the spirits take the drugs out of her. This time she was going to stay with some friends on a sailboat, head north to the islands along the coast, learn how to fish. This time she was going to buy a cabin on the beach in Mexico, spend the winters there until the sun bleached all the junk out of her veins. This time, this time, this time. But it always turned into next time, or the time after. Always something came up, something happened. Some old friend came to visit. Some hard day. Some reminder. "This is the day I met your father," she'd tell Aurora, and then she'd disappear into her room and we wouldn't see her for days. This day was the day Aurora's father died. This day was the day Aurora's father's ba.s.sist told Maia he never wanted to see her again, that she'd been the one who ruined everything. That if it hadn't been for her the band would still be together and no one would be dead. Every day contained some moment that made this time the time that didn't count. Next time, next time she'd get clean for real. Oh, Maia. I smooth her greasy hair away from her forehead. Music is playing, so faint it's only now registering. It's the remastered alb.u.m the record label put out, a decade after Aurora's dad died. All of us hate this alb.u.m. "f.u.c.king producers," Aurora said, the first time we listened to it. I never heard her play it again.

"I guess Aurora went away for a while," I say to Maia now, my voice catching. "I wanted to make sure you were okay. Do you think you should take a shower or something?"

"Did you have fun at the party?" Her head lolls back on her neck.

"Not really." The man in her bed mutters, rolls over. Score another point for the living.

"I saw him," she says. "I saw him here. Why was he here?"

"Who did you see, Maia?"

"The skeleton man." My whole body goes cold.

"Do you mean Minos? How do you know Minos?"

"That a.s.shole. He was always around." She lifts her head with an effort. "Always around," she repeats, her voice slurry. "Always making promises. Everyone was going to be so G.o.dd.a.m.n rich. Everything we ever wanted. I could have had him forever. He used to write me songs; did Ca.s.s ever tell you that? Before that stupid alb.u.m. We were so f.u.c.king happy and we couldn't even see it. Look at me now. Listen to this s.h.i.+t." She points in the general direction of the stereo. "Don't let Aurora-" She falters. "Don't let him take her away. He has the best drugs. I can never say no when he's here. He told me-last night he told me..." She trails off.

"Who else did he take away? Maia? Who else?"

"Who do you think?" She struggles to sit up and I reach forward to help her, but she bats my hands away. "f.u.c.king Ca.s.s," she mutters. "Ca.s.s let him in. Ca.s.s tried to take my baby, too. You tell Ca.s.s I said she can go to h.e.l.l."

"Ca.s.s wasn't here last night," I say.

"Not last night. A long time ago."

"Ca.s.s let Aurora's dad in?"

"You aren't listening to me."

"Maia. I don't understand what you're telling me. Where did Aurora go? Do you know? Did she go to California?"

"It's too late," Maia says, and starts to cry. "If she went with him, it's too late. Now I have to go looking for her, too."

"Tell me how to find her. Tell me where they went. Tell me what Ca.s.s did." But she's leaning back into the pillows, coughing, her eyes closing.

"I have to sleep. I can see him sometimes when I sleep."

"Maia. Maia." Her face is still. I wait for her to say something else, but she is gone again, to wherever it is that she goes. I shut the door behind me and go to find some clothes. I am not looking forward to the bike ride home.

My apartment is empty, the breakfast dishes washed and drying in the drainer. I have no idea what to do with myself, stand stupidly in the middle of my room staring out the window. I don't have to work today. If it were any other day, a normal day, I'd be at the beach with Aurora. Post-morteming her party, talking s.h.i.+t about the guests. Who wore what and who paired off, locking themselves in her bathroom for way too long. Aurora nursing her hangover with a bag of Doritos and a raw egg in tomato juice, me making horrified faces while she insists it's the healthiest cure imaginable. Later, I'd call Jack, and we'd have a picnic in the park or stay up all night in his little house, kissing with the windows open to let the night in. But none of that, now.

I can't remember the last time I went running. I unb.u.t.ton the s.h.i.+rt I stole from Aurora's closet, wincing at the sharp twinge in my shoulder. I check out my back in my mirror and there it is: an ugly constellation of red punctures, the flesh around them puffy and discolored. I wonder what happens if they get infected, if there's some kind of first aid manual for the cuts you get in h.e.l.l. I put on my sports bra and a T-s.h.i.+rt, doing my best not to touch the wounds.

Outside, I lace up my sneakers and start to run. Head down, legs moving, harder and faster than I've ever run before. Running away from last night, the pain in my shoulder, the memory of that river of ghouls carrying Jack and Aurora away from me. I don't pay attention to where I'm going, don't look up even when I crash into a couple pus.h.i.+ng a toddler in a stroller. Their startled squawks follow me as I keep going. I run until I think my knees will split apart, until my mouth is open and working and the air is hot on my dried-out tongue. I run until I trip over a rough patch of sidewalk and go flying, the breath coming out of me in a sharp whoosh as I hit the ground full-on. I lie there for a minute, stunned, so winded I wonder if I'm going to throw up, and then I roll over on my side. "Jesus," someone says. "Are you okay?" A middle-aged man in a suit is standing over me, his expression anxious. "Do you need me to call someone?" Laboriously, I get to my feet.

"I'm fine," I whisper, when I can catch my breath enough to get the words out. "Thanks."

"You-I think you-I think you might need to go to the hospital." He points. I look down. The skin on my knees and elbows is gone.

"Seriously," I wheeze. "This happens all the time. Thanks."

"I can-"

"I'm f.u.c.king fine." He backs away.

"I was only trying to help," he says, curt now.

"I don't need your f.u.c.king help! I need my f.u.c.king friends!" I don't care how I look, and I don't care what's coming out of my mouth. Nothing has ever felt as good as screaming at this total stranger. "I need my best friend! I need my best friend's mom to quit doing drugs! I need parents and I need my boyfriend back and I need Aurora's dad to not be a dead f.u.c.kup rock star and I need that creepy a.s.shole to leave me and the people I love alone and I need-" Gasping, I run out of steam. The businessman is gaping at me. "s.h.i.+t," I mutter. "Sorry. Bad day." I turn around and limp away. My mouth is so dry it's burning. I would kill someone for a gla.s.s of water. A businessman. I would kill a businessman for a gla.s.s of water. Ha ha.

I walk for a long time without thinking. When I look around I'm standing in front of the big old cathedral at the edge of downtown. Why not? My feet whisper across the red carpet. I'm so thirsty I dip one hand into the marble basin of holy water, make a cup out of my palm, and bring the droplets to my mouth. A lady clutching a rosary next to me hisses in disapproval. The water doesn't taste like anything. Overhead the cathedral's arching ribs meet in a dizzying peak, and the light fractures through the stained-gla.s.s windows. People file past me, genuflecting at their pews and sliding into their seats, kneeling in prayer.

I stand in the nave, watching as the priest in his rich white robe edged in gold raises his hands over the congregation, and people begin to sing in Latin. The dead language swirls around me and the sun blazes behind, casting my shadow in a long strip across the red carpet. A few people turn around to look at me, and then keep staring. Someone who looks official-what do you call people who work at a church? They can't all be the ones who don't have s.e.x, some of them must be secretaries or something-turns to the man next to him and mimes making a phone call. That's for sure my cue to split. I stumble back out into the innocuous afternoon, and then there is nothing left to do but go home.

Ca.s.s is sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea, the light streaming in around her in b.u.t.tery slabs. When she sees me she starts.

"What happened to you? You're a holy mess." She grabs a clean dishtowel, runs it under the tap, sits me down at the kitchen table. I wince as the skin stretches over my abraded knees. She dabs at me with the towel. I push her away.

"Sweetheart, you look awful. Let me clean you up, okay?"

"They went without me." She sets the towel aside and puts her arms around me.

"Who went without you?"

"Jack and Aurora."

"Where did they go?"

"Wherever he took them." I start to cry. She doesn't ask me who I mean. She holds me while I sob into her s.h.i.+rt, rocking me gently like she used to do when I was small enough to fit on her lap. She doesn't try to hush me, or tell me everything will be okay. She lets me cry until I have no tears left, and then she gets up and pours me a cup of tea and pushes the mug toward me. I stare at my reflection in the sweet-smelling liquid.

"What do I do now? How do I find them?"

"I don't know, baby. I don't know."

All the days after that pa.s.s in an indistinct blur. I catch Ca.s.s filling bowls with crystals and salt water and leaving them on the windowsills. She unearths the dog-eared paperback with her spell recipes and mutters incantations over colored candles, pours drops of oil in the corners of every room, burns so many herbs she sets off the smoke alarm. I lay out my tarot cards over and over, but I don't even know what question to ask. I find one of Aurora's white hairs across my pillow, and a guitar pick in a bowl of apples. After that, nothing. I listen to Nick Cave over and over because it feels true. I let love in. I let love in. So much there that's not love, so much there that's anger. Love and hate are twins. I listen to songs about following your wife into the dark beneath the earth, the music that leads you there. Oh mama. I was such a fool. Such a fool to think I could have either one of them, to think that Jack loved me, to think that there was anything real but the two of them together and me on the outside, looking in.

I sleep for what feels like days. Years. The entire rest of my life. I sleep so much that when I'm awake I don't feel right and the edges of my vision go furry. I dream about her, always, all the time. Aurora in the ocean, her white hair floating behind her. Aurora in a house like a palace, white walls, white-hot sky. Aurora, huge dark eyes looking back at me out of a pool in the earth ringed with flowers. Aurora with Minos's long bony fingers around her throat. One night I can see her again with the syringe, the strip of silk. She's in a bathtub the size of a fish pond. Marble-floored bathroom, candles everywhere. Floor-to-ceiling windows and beyond them black sea, black sky. I can see the steam rising off the bathwater, smell lavender and salt breeze and the rich vanilla of Aurora's skin. She's skinnier than ever, barely any flesh on her long bones, the line of her cheek knife-sharp. Her white hair like a beacon in the dark. Her lips part and her eyes roll back in her head. She's sliding underwater, down, down, down. No! I cry, and reach for her, but she's too far away for me to touch. You left me, she whispers. You let me go. And then she's gone and I jerk awake, dripping with sweat, in my own dirty sheets, my own bed, my own shabby apartment. Our kingdom glimmers on the far wall, the country that we made together. "Aurora," I say aloud into the dark, but there's no one there to hear. "Aurora. I'm sorry. Come back."

Ca.s.s tiptoes around me, takes to leaving my meals outside the door of my room. I don't want to eat, but the smell lures me out like a bear to bait. Betrayed again by my animal body and its stupid animal wants: food, friends.h.i.+p, s.e.x, love. Ca.s.s and I don't talk. I'm a chalkboard that's been erased over and over again until there's nothing left but a haze of white dust. Before this I never understood how long an hour could take, how many ticks of the second hand are in a minute, how endless the s.p.a.ce between seconds can be.

I can never put together a whole picture of Jack in my head. Shoulders, hips, the line of his belly, the muscles of his back. The soft place behind his knee. Long tendons in his forearms, long fingers, long narrow toes. Sunlight throwing bone into relief: the sharp place at the inside of his elbow, the bird-fine bones of his wrist, the muscles of his thigh moving under his skin like water. The tangle of his hair. I draw pieces of him and tape them together, take them apart again. I draw a single line and already it's wrong. I draw the angle of his cheek. I draw his palms the way I remember them, but on paper they are nothing I recognize. My desk is piled with crumpled sheets of newsprint, my fingers covered in charcoal dust. Jack cutting fruit in his kitchen, frozen with his knife parting the apple's green skin. Jack playing me Leonard Cohen songs on his porch, the birds in his garden creeping forward to listen better. Jack in my room, laughing, s.h.i.+rt unb.u.t.toned. Jack watching me draw. Jack's voice in my ear, low and rough. I don't know if it's worse to have a thing like that and then have it taken away from you or to never have a thing like that at all.

My brain's not shy about coming up with other images that, for all I know, are just as real: Jack and Aurora hand in hand on the California beach, Jack and Aurora in a convertible with the top down, drinking margaritas by the ocean and watching the sun set. Did they go away for Minos, or did they go away for each other? Did they go to get away from me? Does Jack know by now that Aurora loves anchovies and olives on her pizza but would die before touching pineapple, that she drinks her coffee with so much sugar it's a wonder she has any teeth left? Does he know that The Lost Boys reminds her of her dad for no rational reason? Does he know she learned French so she could read Rimbaud in the original? Has she told him we used to take turns reading The Dark Is Rising aloud to each other every Christmas? Does he have his motorcycle wherever he is now and are they together, her arms around his waist, her hair whipping back from her helmet, are they driving down Highway 1 to Mexico like Jack and I said we were going to do, are they sleeping on the beach and watching the sun rise over the Pacific and learning all the constellations? Is he cutting her slices of peach with his knife, feeding them to her one by one? Does he touch her the same way he touched me? Are they lost, or lonely, and do they think of me, and if he has kissed her does he wish it is me he is kissing, or has her perfect face already wiped mine from his memory? Does he touch her the way he touched me? Every night I go over to my window and look out, at the spot in the shadows where I thought I'd seen Minos before, but the street is empty and dark and even the shadows have no weight. I'm not who he was waiting for.

Does he touch her the way he touched me.

At work, Raoul knocks gently on my skull. Anyone home? No. He covers for me while I sit on a crate, staring out over purple mounds of plums. He mothers me back to his apartment, feeds me soup, puts Oscar Wilde on my head to make me laugh. It's the only thing that works. We smoke pot and watch television and when he brings me more and more snacks I realize he's getting me stoned so I'll eat. I tell him I don't deserve him, and he hushes me.

"Everyone needs to be loved through their first broken heart," he says, and I love him so much I can hardly stand to look at him. I tell him what Jack said to me before he left.

"I bet they're there together. I bet they wanted to be together this whole time. I bet she-"

"Why would you say a thing like that?" Raoul interrupts.

"Because everyone falls in love with her. She can't even help it. It's not her fault. She wanted him and she got him and now they're probably in Los Angeles laughing at me."

"Did you ever think that maybe Aurora loves Jack because he's the only person in her life who doesn't want anything from her?"

"I don't want anything from her," I say, stung.

"Are you sure?"

"I tried to protect her."