Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “I couldn’t just leave her out there,” Rye had told her. “Could I?” But he laid her down in the barn like an awkward package he didn’t know what to do with either and left her there. Only Eva and Chelya tended to her. She has been sleeping for twelve days now, without need of waking, without need of food or water. Impossible for a human being.

  The girl moans softly in her delirium and curls her body toward Fawn. Something in Fawn’s heart leans forward, as if in suspense. The girl reaches for Fawn like a hungry ghost, her eyelids still closed but fluttering, her fingertips brushing Fawn’s hip and breast while Fawn freezes in shock, then jumps backward in a movement completely alien to her. She sits still for a long time, keeping her distance, watching the girl sleep again with limbs piled in her direction, trying to slow her own breathing.

  A couple of brief hours in the afternoon are Fawn’s favorite time of the day, her time alone in the forest.

  Sometimes she goes to the river to bathe. Other days, like today, she gathers herbs for Eva, though there is nothing her mother especially needs right now. She picks up a few feathers she thinks Chelya might like to use in one of her necklaces. More than anything, this careful searching with her hands and mind over the forest floor is an excuse to caress the body of the mountain. With all her senses she touches that body, and breathes its breath, and learns about its health: what pains it, what is growing and what is dying. She knows all of the deer and rabbit paths, and how and when they change with the seasons. In the winter she always knows who has died in the night. In summer, she knows what trees have fallen in the storms, and sometimes she goes to them the next day to say goodbye. In her dreams she feels the earth ever in her hands, and she can feel the textures of the plants against her palms as she passes her hands over the shape of the mountain, and it seems as if the earth blooms and opens under her touch, and closes its wounds against her skin. When she wakes she is sorry that she is just one human woman after all, and cannot hold the earth to her breast, and cannot protect it from whatever is coming.

  Before returning to the house, she always goes to the river, for it comforts her. Whatever changes have happened that day or that year—whatever bird flock is missing from the sky in the spring migrations, whatever groves of trees have been destroyed by some new blight—the sound of the river makes it all rest a little easier inside Fawn, at least for the moments she sits by it.

  Yet even the river, whose voice she can usually understand, tells her of changes that have come and are coming. She thinks its rhythm and its pitch are somehow different now, perhaps heavier with the poison it carries, or interrupted by the vibrations of drilling near one of its tributaries up the mountain, where Jay’s wife’s childhood home was taken from her.

  Today when she returns, she finds that Rye has brought home a woodchuck for dinner, and she spends the evening skinning and cleaning its different parts, unraveling its life piece by piece and thanking it as she does so. Before he goes out to the eastern garden, Rye wraps an arm around her from behind, rubbing his chin against the top of her head and brushing her nipple with his thumb. She feels lonely for him suddenly, her earthen body turning inky and soft; it seems a long time since they have really looked at each other. They have been so caught up in the height of the planting season, and before that, the winter was so hard. She wants to turn around now and open her mouth to him, the man of her heart, the man who first discovered the fire in her shy body so many years ago. But her hands are bloody, and she is tired now. And something is making her anxious nearly all the time—not a terrible anxiety, but something disturbing her familiar peace. Maybe it’s that girl. That girl in the barn.

  She keeps working with the animal, pressing back against Rye a little, trying to let him know she hasn’t forgotten him, that she isn’t angry with him any more. He was only being good and kind when he brought the girl home, like he always is. She hears Chelya’s laughter outside, and finds herself wondering if the children will remember to go carefully around the wasp nest outside the door. Why do there seem to be fewer and fewer honey bees, those messengers of sweetness, and more and more angry, aggressive insects like those wasps? She thinks it must be a reflection of something changing in the human world, though she doesn’t know.

  By the time she comes back to herself, Rye has walked away.

  Then Chelya and Kite are breezing through, sweeping the main room and bringing in vegetables for dinner. Outside the rain is beginning to surround them, hushing them inside its husk of sound. They will eat indoors again, but this time with words pouring more freely, excited to be in contact with each other again and sharing the experiences of their day. Chelya will talk about the bees and the wasps and the antics of the goats, and Fawn will report with a few, soft words the progress of the garden, and Rye will listen, his big elbows on the table, tired and smiling. Eva’s voice will be rare but opinionated, and will often come with laughter. Unless he is excited by some new discovery he’s made, Kite’s face will brood as he devours his meal, and he will shift with an irritable restlessness in his seat, and ask his father if he can go with him on his trip to Jay’s farm tomorrow. Rye will say yes, as always, even though he knows Kite is more needed here, because he worries that the children don’t have enough connection with others, and he knows Kite hopes for some adventure along the way—any adventure at all. Every winter, Rye talks of a trip they will take in the summer: just him and Kite. It will be an adventure to see who else is still out there, he says, and find what other farms are still left. They’ll meet other people and hear their stories, and they’ll bring things to trade, and come back with all the things they have needed for so long: glass, dried fruits, seeds that have been lost here. But come summer, Kite no longer reminds his father of that promise, no longer asks when it will happen. He knows it never does. They don’t have time. It is an impossible dream, now that the City has swallowed up so many of their people, now that they live all alone out here and must work so hard to survive.

  After dinner, while Rye helps Fawn clean up, Chelya—because it is raining too hard to go out tonight—will sit by the dying fire and make jewelry out of small bones or stones or feathers. This is a relief to Fawn, who never knows where Chelya goes at night or if it is safe. Eva will talk with Chelya about the old legends of the forest spirits and the tree people, answer her questions about whatever she dreamed last night, and laugh and whisper with her as easily as if the two of them were sisters.

  When the dishes are done, the compost turned, and the kitchen cleaned, and Fawn can finally rest, she will lean her head against the back of her rocking chair, close her eyes, and listen to Rye’s voice as he picks thoughtfully at his guitar. She will try not to worry about mold growing inside the house from the excessive rains, parts of it weakening and sagging, because she knows her family takes care of those things. She will remember she forgot to ask Kite if he was able to fix the window. The sound of the hard, insistent rain will make her restless, and she will find that her eyes are open now with sudden, nameless worry. But then she will close them again, and Rye’s voice will come deep and swinging, like black earth turning over in the hands of the seasons, and it will rock her into herself, keeping her safe.

  And the girl in the barn, Fawn hopes, for now, will still be sleeping.

  “You’re leaving,” says Delilah. She’s been sleeping fitfully for hours, in and out of dreams that she forgot repeatedly because of the discomfort they caused her. Now she realizes that Moon has gradually been pulling away from her. She sees him sitting in the entranceway to her cave, haloed in sunlight, his face tilted upward but with no joy upon it. He looks back at her and smiles with sad tenderness, and she wants to take that tenderness in, she wants not to be cruel, but she can’t seem to help herself.

  “Fuck you,” she says. “Coward. You weren’t even going to wake me.”

  She knows it’s hard for him, too. And it isn’t as if he had to pack any things; he could have stolen off in an inst
ant if he had wanted to, if he had wanted to sneak out without her knowing. But that doesn’t matter. She hates being the one left. In the City, she always fucked the boys in their rooms or apartments; they never came to her. How could they, anyway? But she’d liked it that way, because then she was always the one to leave, and she never had to see that look on their faces, which—whether it was contempt or fondness or even longing—might contain some trace of pity too. Every time Moon leaves her, she is reminded again that she is the one with a home now. Home is vulnerable. When you have a home, it means people can find you and people can leave you. They can learn what is precious to you and they can destroy it.

  He’s still not saying anything. She throws a pebble at him. “Just GO then.” She turns around, faces the wall.

  She feels his soft mind behind her, coming toward her hesitantly and turning back, coming toward her again, unsure. His heart struggling to stand.

  “Come on, Lil,” he says. “I always leave. Why does it have to be like this?” She doesn’t hear footsteps but she feels his hand, as unknown to itself as a child’s, on her shoulder, pulling her hair back from her face, and then his breath, the palest kiss on her cheek.

  “That’s not an excuse. ‘I always do it.’ How is that an excuse? How does that make it okay? You go on about how I have to face my fears, face death, kill the deer, save Mira, blah blah blah—and what do you do? What are you going back into the City to do? To lose yourself. To forget. You’re a fucking coward.”

  She feels him freeze, and she freezes too. She had to say those things, because this was love too, this need, but she didn’t mean for him to stop coming closer. Now that she’s said the words, she wants him back. Doesn’t he get that? Doesn’t he know what she wants, after all this time? Doesn’t he know she doesn’t mean to hurt him? Why does he have to be so fragile?

  But, “Maybe so,” he says. “Maybe I am a coward.”

  That’s all, and he is gone. And maybe she will always regret that she did not simply take his hand, and hold it against her heart, and beg him to stay.

  But she had no words for that, then. She has no room in the little survival kit of her heart for regret. Anyway, she will tell herself later, it wouldn’t have changed anything.

  Lonely’s eyes open to a dark roof, like a cave—like being underground, though she has never been underground—and for a moment she is sure she’s back in that terrible place beneath the island, where she will find out that all her brief passions, the waterfalls, waving fields, and birdsong of the world, were a dream. But light drifts in from somewhere. The ceiling arches protectively over her like an upside-down nest. She closes her eyes again. Then the girl’s voice calls a second time, soft but startling,

  “Hey!”

  Lonely turns toward the voice. The girl grins at her, her sunny face hung all around by ivy-like red hair, her round freckled shoulders rising magnificent and warm.

  “You’re awake,” she whispers, and giggles, as if she and Lonely are carrying out a mischievous, secret plan. Lonely can’t help but smile, too, though she doesn’t know what the secret is. She feels relieved somehow, as if she has finally arrived at a place she’s been avoiding, and it’s turned out to be sweet after all, sweet as this eager, heart-shaped face.

  The girl is studying her. “Your eyes are so dark,” she observes, “even darker than ours! I never saw anyone like you. I thought your eyes would be light, like the rest of you.”

  So did I, thinks Lonely, who is not yet sure that she can speak.

  “What’s your name?”

  Lonely looks away, back at the ceiling. Certainly it seems an important question in this world, the question everyone asks first. It seems she will not be able to come close to anyone without first having a name.

  “Can’t you tell me?”

  Lonely looks at her. “Yora,” she says, but it comes out like a question.

  “No, that’s not your name.”

  “How do you know?”

  The girl grins again, as if enjoying the game. “Because I heard you call that name in your sleep. And I don’t think you’d call your own name. Anyway, Yora is the name of the river.”

  “But—” says Lonely, and she wants to explain that Yora is not a river but a woman who can disappear into the ocean at will, but that feels too difficult, so she only asks in return, “What is your name?”

  “Chelya.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. It just means me. It’s something my mother made up.”

  “Oh,” says Lonely, wondering what a mother is, and wishing she’d had one to name her, instead of the wind. “Do I have to have a name?”

  “I think so,” says Chelya. “Or else no one could call you, if they need you.”

  If they need me, thinks Lonely. Does anyone need her? It’s something she has never thought about before. No one could call her if they needed her. Is that why she was lost? Is that why her prince could never find her?

  “You think a lot,” observes Chelya.

  Lonely turns, and tears blur her image of the girl, making her look like a reflection or a loving spirit rising from underwater. She struggles up onto her elbows, then her hands, wondering if she will be able to stand. “My name is Lonely,” she says.

  “Oh!” says Chelya, her brow furrowing urgently. “That’s so sad. How can that be your name?”

  “I don’t like it. I don’t like my name.”

  Chelya hesitates, her eyebrows still drawn together in a stormy sort of way, but even the storm looks gentle and sweet. “It’s okay,” she decides finally. “Maybe someday you can change it.”

  Lonely looks at her, her own life pounding over her in waves.

  Then animal faces are leaning in behind Chelya’s, long like the face of Lonely’s horse, but more sculptured, more face-like, with square eyes that make Lonely shiver. One of the animals cries out, and she recognizes the cry from her dreams: half-animal, half-human.

  “The goats live here,” explains Chelya. “You’re in their bedroom.”

  “Goats,” says Lonely, trying out that name. Everything has a name. She sits up, which seems to cause Chelya even more excitement. She throws out her hand, and Lonely reaches for it.

  “Come on!”

  But standing up makes Lonely dizzy. Her feet feel heavy, as if filled with sand. Her hips and waist start to buckle, and she reaches out and grabs hold of splintered wood. Chelya’s arm wraps around her like earth.

  Outside Chelya tells her, “Your horse sleeps in there,” and points to another shed. All the goats bound out with their kids, the older goats trotting with uplifted, questioning faces and the younger ones bucking and kicking with each bound, a sassy challenge in their eyes. Their eyes look right at Lonely, smart and present, and seem to demand honesty. One of the big ones sniffs at her hand as she holds it out to him.

  who are you, girl? the goat says. don’t you know how to laugh?

  “That’s their man,” says Chelya. “One man to all these women, isn’t he lucky?”

  And Lonely remembers, suddenly, the hot male body that secured her, carrying her away from her loneliness. It smelled faintly animal like these goats, only quieter, like the earth under the leaves in the forest.

  “Chelya,” she says, while the girl moves quickly among them, her body bent, her deft hands at once caressing and herding them, gathering the ones she needs. “Who was the man who rescued me?”

  “Oh, that was my father!”

  Father. The word echoes in Lonely’s body, and her own father’s sad eyes flash inside her mind, then turn away. “Where is he now?” she asks.

  “He and my brother went to my uncle’s,” says Chelya, innocent of Lonely’s longing. “They’ll be back tomorrow night, I guess.”

  Lonely aches to see him, to see that face more clearly, and to breathe his scent again, even from a distance.
She feels dizzy again. She follows Chelya back into the shed and sees her squatting close to a goat’s body, pulling thick white liquid down from its belly. The dim room is heady with the smell of bodies, the smell of Chelya and the goats, the hay and the damp wood. The shadows hold them close. Lonely sinks down in a pile of hay, her body weak with so many hungers she cannot identify where they come from.

  “Here,” says Chelya, “I know what you need.” She hands Lonely a cup. “Drink.” Lonely slips the edge of the cup between her lips, her tongue burning with the bitter taste of the metal. The milk flows into her body, comforting and musky and smooth, almost perversely physical, like the hot blood of the moon. It quenches her thirst and fills her hunger at the same time, and her stomach opens, full of glory and desire.

  “What is this?” she mumbles.

  “It’s life,” says Chelya. “When you’re born, your mother can feed you from her own body. Isn’t that amazing? That’s what mother tastes like. That’s what love tastes like.”

  Mother, repeats Lonely again in her mind, and it’s a word she has never known. But when she hears it, she begins to cry. It’s like the word home. She knows this girl Chelya has something she doesn’t have, as she comes over now to lay her arms around Lonely—something that softens her body, that creases her mouth with ease and smiling, that cushions her. Something that the angry woman Delilah did not have either, looking down hard on Lonely from her cave, her body like a tough, dry net she’d patched together over and over so as not to let the knives of her own hunger pierce her. Delilah had no mother, and neither did Dragon. Lonely knows this suddenly, the way she knows it about herself.