Aurora shook her head. She still wore her hair past her shoulders and straight as a needle; no longer blond, it fell in streaked gray and black lines across her face. “She won’t,” she said, and took a long sip at her mug. “He’s got her now and he won’t want to give her back.” Her voice trembled and tears blurred the kohl around her eyelids.
Haley bit her lip. She was used to this. Sometimes when Aurora was drunk, she and Linette carried her to bed, covering her with the worn flannel comforter and making sure her cigarettes and matches were out of sight. Linette acted embarrassed, but Haley didn’t mind, just as she didn’t mind doing the dishes sometimes or making grilled cheese sandwiches or French toast for them all, or riding her bike down to Schelling’s Market to get more ice when they ran out. She reached across to the counter and dipped another golden thread of honey into her tea.
“Haley. I want to show you something.”
The girl waited as Aurora weaved down the narrow passage into her bedroom. She could hear drawers being thrown open and shut, and finally the heavy thud of the trunk by the bed being opened. In a few minutes Aurora returned, carrying an oversized book.
“Did I ever show you this?”
She padded into the umber darkness of the living room, with its frayed kilims and cracked sitar like some huge shattered gourd leaning against the stuccoed wall. Haley followed, settling beside her. By the door the frogs hung with splayed feet in their sullen globe, their pale bellies turned to amber by the setting sun. On the floor in front of Haley glowed a rhomboid of yellow light. Aurora set the book within that space and turned to Haley. “Have I shown you this?” she asked again, a little anxiously.
“No,” Haley lied. She had in fact seen the scrapbook about a dozen times over the years—the pink plastic cover with its peeling Day-Glo flowers hiding newspaper clippings and magazine pages soft as fur beneath her fingers as Aurora pushed it towards her.
“He’s in there,” Aurora said thickly. Haley glanced up and saw that the woman’s eyes were bright red behind their smeared rings of kohl. Tangled in her thin fine hair were hoop earrings that reached nearly to her shoulder, and on one side of her neck, where a love bite might be, a tattoo no bigger than a thumbprint showed an Egyptian Eye of Horus. “Lie Vagal—him and all the rest of them—”
Aurora started flipping through the stiff plastic pages, too fast for Haley to catch more than a glimpse of the photos and articles spilling out. Once she paused, fumbling in the pocket of her tunic until she found her cigarettes.
Youthquaker! the caption read. Beside it was a black-and-white picture of a girl with long white-blond hair and enormous, heavily kohled eyes. She was standing with her back arched, wearing a sort of bikini made of playing cards. Model Aurora Dawn, Brightest New Light in Pop Artist’s Superstar Heaven.
“Wow,” Haley breathed. She never got tired of the scrapbooks: it was like watching a silent movie, with Aurora’s husky voice intoning the perils that befell the feckless heroine.
“That’s not it,” Aurora said, almost to herself, and began skipping pages again. More photos of herself, and then others—men with hair long and lush as Aurora’s; heavy women smoking cigars; twin girls no older than Haley and Linette, leaning on a naked man’s back while another man in a doctor’s white coat jabbed them with an absurdly long hypodermic needle. Aurora at an art gallery. Aurora on the cover of Interview magazine. Aurora and a radiant woman with shuttered eyes and long, long fishnet-clad legs—the woman was really a man, a transvestite Aurora said; but there was no way you could tell by looking at him. As she flashed through the pictures Aurora began to name them, bursts of cigarette smoke hovering above the pages.
“Fairy Pagan. She’s dead.
“Joey Face. He’s dead.
“Marletta. She’s dead.
“Precious Bane. She’s dead.
“The Wanton Hussy. She’s dead.”
And so on, for pages and pages, dozens of fading images, boys in leather and ostrich plumes, girls in miniskirts prancing across the backs of stuffed elephants at F.A.O. Schwartz or screaming deliriously as fountains of champagne spewed from tables in the back rooms of bars.
“Miss Clancy de Wolff. She’s dead.
“Dianthus Queen. She’s dead.
“Markey French. He’s dead.”
Until finally the clippings grew smaller and narrower, the pictures smudged and