Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  The dark moon is such a dangerous time: it makes everything shift, so subtly you don’t realize it until it has already happened. Suddenly Delilah feels as if, in all her years of fucking men, maybe there are ways one body can meet another that she has never known or even imagined.

  He stands as if waiting, and she can feel his gaze upon her, though she cannot see it. The moment stretches on indefinitely, with a dream’s irreverent sense of time. What was that “no” a moon ago, and who was the person who spoke it? Now the pride of it freezes her, and makes him more a stranger than ever. Dragon stands like a statue in the white mist, white like the disappearing tail of a unicorn over desert stone, and in spite of herself she thinks of the girl again and is confused. Desire is so familiar. The “no” was not. She feels vulnerable in her bleeding now, and the vulnerability feels so unnatural to her that she shrinks against the stone. She knows with a painful, conscious knowing that she wants Dragon. But in the clarity of that wanting, she knows this is not the time. This isn’t like the wanting she has felt in the past, in which nothing really mattered.

  She can hear the moist brush of her own quick breath as she draws it in; she is aware of the shapes of the stone not fitting her palms as she scrambles back down the way she came. She watches the motions of her own seemingly determined body with wonder, as if it belongs to somebody else. The way it jumps with confidence to the firm sand below, the way it runs. But the memory of Dragon’s gaze is all too real, and the emotion in that gaze is more familiar to her than it should be. She can feel his eyes on her back—she’s sure of it—on the back of her heart, all the way home.

  When she finally tires and slows to a walk, she tries not to think because her thoughts don’t feel like her own. She can’t stop thinking, not of Dragon, but of the girl. I’m on a journey, she had said. I’m looking for love. Who spoke like that? Who could be so ridiculously simple? Who goes looking for love? As far as Delilah is concerned, love is something you get or you don’t get, through no fault of your own, and whoever goes looking for it is certain not to find it, because when you reach for it, it disappears. But that girl had a different kind of certainty in her eyes. Maybe she was blessed somehow. Delilah realizes that, of all the things she spoke to Moon about, it was that girl she really wanted to speak of. That was the most important thing she needed to tell him: what that girl had said, about love. No, not what she’d said, which was simple and childish after all, but something else. What was it?

  Whatever it was, she couldn’t have told him. What that girl said, what she sought—it wasn’t something that would have made sense to either Delilah or Moon. Even in an unconditional friendship, the one that can always save you, there are limits. The more closely you understand each other, the greater stretch the expanses—beyond that intimate circle—where neither of you have ever been. There are whole worlds that neither of you knows. And even when one person glimpses them, there is no language with which to tell the other.

  In the mountains a wind is coming like a fall breath in the middle of summer, bringing weather that no one can yet predict. Lonely watches it through the window of the house: a watching that began with waiting for Rye, trying to conjure up his broad-shouldered figure on the horizon. She does not like to be so obvious, but sometimes she feels so useless that she doesn’t care. She’d rather turn invisible against the window, losing herself in her watching, and her watching losing itself in the wind. The women are cooking behind her, murmuring to one another, and no one has any need of her. No one speaks to her.

  The more she watches, the more Lonely can actually see the wind. She would tell them but they don’t know her; they don’t understand her. She couldn’t tell them how more and more, she can see the actual body of the wind—the whip of its muscle, the gape of its mouth, the metallic blue of its skin, the flecks of red around its hollow eyes.

  The sound of it, wordless now, is so lonely. Loneliness seems all that it is, moaning terribly against the earth and the walls, nagging hungrily at the trees. It calls like the way it called to her when she paced between her round tower walls, and she did not know what it was saying. Yet she remembers, also, when the wind has not been loneliness but freedom. She remembers when she rode through the meadow sea of it, when she lifted her face to it, and it seems to her now that in those moments she breathed the power of it, as if that power belonged to her.

  She touches the glass. She can see the wind now, and she wants to go outside. Something is there for her, out in the mad universe of the wailing wind—some answer, some promised thing. Something that belongs to her. Silvery blue, blood red glitter, yellow leaves, and the wind slings its body apart, explodes open again, hurling itself faster now against the house, slamming into her ears, her eyes—

  “Lonely!”

  Lonely turns, breathless. It is Eva who spoke her name, and as the indoor sounds catch up with her, Lonely feels that she may, in fact, have spoken it several times. Eva has lain down the knife with which she was cutting the garlic. Her eyes are calm, but the eyes of Fawn, who stands just behind her, are not. Lonely looks anxiously back at the window. Did she do something? Did she call the wind to her? It seems to pale a little now, but not before she becomes suddenly aware of the rattling window. Trying to calm her own breathing, which she had not noticed rising, she presses her palm to the glass.

  “What is this?” she asks, trying to keep her voice steady. She looks at Chelya, knowing it is she who will answer.

  “It’s glass,” says Chelya, who is accustomed now to Lonely’s childish newness to all the ordinary things of the world. Eva is still staring at Lonely with a stare that Lonely cannot meet, and she doesn’t say why she called Lonely’s name.

  Lonely looks back at the window and thinks she can see hints of her own face inside it. Suddenly she remembers that face, which she has not seen for so long but which once she saw every day.

  Her own face. She remembers its stillness, and then the way it teared and flushed and opened, like summer, when she saw the mountain.

  “But what is glass made of?” she asks.

  She looks back at Chelya, but it is Fawn who says, her voice small and cold, “Sand.” When Lonely looks at her, Fawn is looking back down at her work. She is cleaning one of the three large fish that Rye caught today, while Chelya dusts the table and clears out the insects. They will eat inside again tonight, the night of the dark moon, by the light of little candles held in ornate, animal-shaped holders that Chelya made out of river clay. Eva is working with the herbs and vegetables; in her old age, she neither handles nor eats meat, saying that it brings too much heaviness into her body, which is worth little to her now, and muddies her conversations with the spirit realm.

  Lonely stares at Fawn, but Fawn still doesn’t look up. “It is made of sand,” she elaborates softly. “Sand shaped by fire.”

  “But how is sand made?”

  Fawn hesitates, and Lonely can hear her breath. “By water.”

  “That’s beautiful,” says Chelya, laying a cloth over the table and arranging the candles. “I wish we knew how to make glass, here in the mountains.”

  “So glass is melted by fire, too,” says Lonely. “Like ice.” She says it to the window, forgetting them again, but Eva’s voice calls her back.

  “Girl,” she says abruptly. “Where do you come from?”

  Lonely keeps staring at the glass, and cannot see her reflection now—only the wind. She cannot see the mountain or the tender face of her prince. She feels a terrible need to see her own face again, to know the comfort of its familiarity, the comfort of that high distant room where there was no longing, no fear—nothing other than herself, safe within herself.

  “Lonely,” says Eva sternly.

  Then the wind begins to circle into stillness, and at its center Lonely can see the coming of a great rain. She can see the inevitability of that rain in the stillness the wind draws for her in the sky.

 
“I come from a tower made of glass,” she says without feeling.

  “Oh!” cries Chelya behind her. “How beautiful! Where is it?”

  “In the middle of the sea. But now it’s gone.”

  After a long, long silence, a silence in which Lonely turns again to see joyful fascination in Chelya’s eyes and a sudden, icy tension in Fawn’s, Eva speaks again.

  “Lonely,” she says, gently this time, “come speak with me tonight. When dinner is over. Will you do that?”

  “Okay,” says Lonely, and she looks back at the window, hoping the wind, and only the wind, can see her tentative tears, and hoping the wind will know why the tears have come, because she does not.

  But the wind closes its eyes now, and the sky slackens, and the water comes down. And Lonely remembers Dragon and that day she stood in the river, full of hope.

  She doesn’t think once of Eva’s request during dinner, because she is seated next to Rye, and that hot, embracing scent of earth and skin and subtle, unconscious sweat overwhelms her.

  The family is talking quietly about the rain, and how it has come too soon since the last rains. Many of Fawn’s new plants are dying in waterlogged soil, and mold creeps into their wooden house and rots the supports under the sheds. The front room is raised high enough to give room for the river to rise, but only so much. Outside now the rains shroud the house in sound, and every now and then the wind thrusts through it again—the wind, who doesn’t take sides, only accentuates what is.

  Then Rye says to Fawn, “Is something wrong?”

  She is sitting next to her mother across the table. She shakes her head. The older women, Lonely notices, seem unusually silent. And she knows it has something to do with her, and the wind.

  “Dad,” says Chelya, “you can take a couple of the goat kids when you go to Jay’s next. They’re old enough now.”

  Rye nods, glancing again at Fawn.

  “I was thinking,” continues Chelya, her voice overeager, and Lonely can tell how the silence unnerves her too, “if we ever find any other families, I was thinking I could trade my jewelry someday.”

  Then Lonely looks at Kite, for no reason she knows. Maybe it’s the scent and presence of Rye beside her that causes her, more than usual, to notice the mysterious quiet of the men. Suddenly it seems clear to her that the silence isn’t coming from Fawn or Eva. It is coming from Kite. That’s where the silence of the whole family lies—inside his mind, where no one can see. Something there is making everyone uneasy. Or maybe it’s only Fawn who is uneasy. But that uneasiness spreads. Lonely tries to trace it, the way she tried to trace the wind. Kite to Fawn. Fawn to Rye. Then to Chelya, when she sees the tension between Fawn and Rye.

  “Start thinking about what we need,” says Rye now, smiling at Chelya, “when I do go. Maybe I’ll make a trip before the harvest, when the planting’s done. Maybe further south. I think that’s where the other farms will be, if any are left.” He looks at Fawn again and Lonely remembers a conversation when she first arrived, the morning after Rye and Kite returned. About how the farm he’d visited to the north was gone. Just gone. Nothing but bare, torn earth, and the house empty, the people gone. Even the crows had seemed solemn as they pecked their way through the emptiness, said Rye. Lonely, caught up in the newness of her own experience then, mesmerized by the movement of Rye’s mouth as he spoke, had not understood Fawn’s bowed head or Chelya’s soundless tears.

  Now Fawn says simply, without lifting her face, “Wool. And flour of course.”

  Chelya puts her fork down. “Maybe someone is growing fruit?”

  Rye shakes his head. “I don’t know. Fruit trees aren’t doing well. The weather has been so strange. The late freeze we had this spring—all the trees are confused.”

  “I don’t know why you’re talking about this,“ says Kite, reaching over Chelya’s plate for the little bowl of dill and lavender. “You won’t go anyway. You never do.”

  Rye looks at him, his jaw tense, but Kite won’t look back.

  There is silence, and now it seems to stretch from Kite to his mother. Lonely has stopped eating, and is unabashedly watching, following the pathway of glances and unspoken feelings from one person to another.

  “Fawn,” Rye says across the table. “Why won’t you look at me.” Lonely catches herself staring at him, and looks away.

  Reluctantly, Fawn looks, but only for a moment. “I don’t want to talk about this again.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “The two of you going to the City. I know you’re thinking about it. There’s no need for you to go there.”

  “Nobody said—”

  “But it’s here. That idea is here at the table. I can feel it. Kite.” She turns to her son. “I know you want to visit the City. I know you think about it all the time—”

  “Ma,” Kite raises his voice a little. The unexpected power in it makes Lonely shiver. She pictures him walking in from the fields this afternoon, an image she didn’t know she had stored. “They have things we can use there. We could fix what we have, make things run better. They know how to—”

  “Come on, you just want to meet girls,” Chelya teases.

  “That’s not true!”

  “If you go there, Kite, you could bring some of my jewelry to give away, and the girls would like you.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Stop,” says Fawn, not raising her voice, but they stop, and Chelya remembers herself and looks sorry. “We have everything we need. The way we live is fine. We have so much. When I was growing up, I didn’t even have a house.”

  “So what,” says Kite under his breath.

  Rye sighs. “We do have enough,” he says, directing his words at Fawn. “But to just turn our backs on the whole rest of the world, to say it’s purely evil—”

  “They have turned their backs on us.”

  “Because they don’t know. They don’t understand. They don’t remember where their food comes from. We understand these things. We could teach them.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,“ he answers, but then he continues, and this momentary pause of not knowing—this willingness to admit not knowing, but continuing on anyway—makes Lonely love him. “I know you’re afraid, Fawn. I’m afraid, too. I’m afraid that our world is dying around us while we sit here and do nothing. I’m afraid that one of us will get sick beyond Eva’s ability to help—or Eva herself, who is growing older, will grow sick one day—and we don’t know any other healers. I worry about our children, who are restless, who have no social connections, who are growing up isolated.”

  “I’m not restless,” Chelya interrupts hopefully, looking back and forth between her parents’ faces. Lonely sees the warmth reddening Fawn’s face, knows she wishes she had not spoken of all this in front of everyone—or, really, in front of Lonely. Then Fawn looks up into Rye’s eyes, and her voice is small but even. “They’re afraid of us there, Rye. They think anything that comes from wild places is evil.”

  Rye sighs, his voice weakening, as if he knows his words will not reach her. “It doesn’t matter, Fawn. They need us.”

  After another moment of silence, in which nobody takes a bite, Chelya turns tenderly to her mother and offers, “Just think, Ma. Not everyone there is bad. There are children growing up in that world who have never tasted real food. There are so many animals living in the streets. Aren’t there?” She turns to Eva.

  Eva says nothing, but Lonely notices her sad smile.

  “I don’t understand what you want to do,” Fawn says to Rye, her voice tight.

  “I don’t know exactly either,” Rye says again. “I just wish you’d think about this with me.”

  With me. Lonely imagines the two of them, lying together in bed or walking in the woods, sharing a space together that no one else can ever enter. How can Fawn refuse such an invitation? How can she not
come to him right now, and think about anything—feel anything, do anything—with this beautiful man, so earnest, who loves her?

  Fawn looks right at him. “Something bad is going to happen there, Rye,” she says quietly. “I know somehow. Something is going to happen there soon. I can feel it all around me, in the world, in this wind even. I can feel it. Things are changing somehow.”

  Eva looks at her daughter, and Lonely thinks she wants to say something, but she doesn’t. Instead she looks down at her plate and sighs.

  Then they are all silent again, this time for so long that Lonely loses herself in the taste of food in her mouth and the faint brush of Rye’s leg against hers. She notices that Chelya is looking down at her plate, not eating, her normally lively features drawn together and dulled.

  After a long time, Rye says in a new tone, “How was your day, Lonely?” using her name as if it were common and easy, as if it made sense and were nothing to be feared.

  “Oh,” says Lonely, surprised, pressing her fingers to her mouth as she chews, drinking in his gaze through her skin but afraid to look at him. “It was windy,” she murmurs.

  He laughs, and his laugh is like music through a deep wind instrument, that at once soothes and makes her tremble. “Yes,” he says. “It was. Do you like the wind?”

  Lonely presses her leg against his, and he doesn’t pull away. But out of the corner of her eye she sees his smile fade, and he doesn’t press back. Still, his muscle, both huge and humble, against her, stirs her with such heat that she begins to panic, trying to remember what he asked her. She wonders suddenly if the animal between his legs that makes him a man would rise for her the way Dragon’s always rose whenever she was near him. The thought makes her face hot. She tries to remember what he asked her. The wind, the wind….

  “Yes,” she breathes. “I like it.” She wants to feel his hand there, where the wetness comes from. She would let him do anything to her. Anything. She needs him to find that secret well within her—that well from which she draws her life, and yet which she herself cannot see. She looks sideways at Fawn, terrified that her own longing might be visible on her face. But Fawn is looking out the window at the wind.