Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “So you are a traveler?” asks Willow, and Lonely can feel the real questions, unasked, and they hurt. She glances up at Willow and looks away. She can tell, from the way others look at her, that eye contact is expected, and yet it overwhelms her. When she looks into someone’s eyes, she sees the whole world at once, and cannot remember anything specific enough to say. Only Fawn avoids her eyes too, which makes it easier for Lonely to know her.

  “Yes,” she answers Willow shortly. Then she adds, “They took me in. They are letting me stay—I don’t know how long.” She glances at Fawn. “I am very grateful.” But she feels she will cry, especially when she sees something like pity—though distant and pensive—in Fawn’s eyes looking back at her. She feels how desperately she needs them, how in every way they have rescued and filled her, at least in every way but that one.

  “There are so few of us left in these mountains,” Willow says, nodding. “So much has been taken from us that it can be difficult, sometimes, to let others in.” It seems to Lonely that she says this more for Fawn’s benefit than for hers. “But Fawn is very generous. And long ago, we took her in.” At this Willow takes Fawn’s hand, and Fawn looks right back at her and smiles.

  “What do you mean?” asks Lonely, feeling thin and empty, looking at the comfortable abundance that is Fawn and trying to imagine her, one day long ago, feeling the same as she does now.

  At this moment, Blue comes wandering in through the greenhouse and comes to sit beside his mother. He is silent, but once he leans his head against his mother’s body, he has the courage to look up into Lonely’s eyes, and after that he keeps staring. His eyes are simple and pale like crystal, neither kind nor unkind, interested nor distant. They settle down on Lonely and rest there, watching her, and do not leave her. They remind Lonely of his mother’s eyes, and it is those connections —between mother and child, father and mother—that both fascinate and pain her to see.

  “When my mother and I came into the mountains,” Fawn explains to Lonely, “they took us in.”

  “We all grew up together,” Willow adds, shifting her weight. She seems to relax a little, as if sensing the ease that Fawn and Blue feel with Lonely. “I lived with my family on a farm very close to Jay and Rye’s farm, and I was over there playing with them all the time. Neither of our families gave up their farms or surrendered to the City life, when so many others did. And Jay, Fawn, and I were all the same age. We spent our whole childhood together.”

  “But what about Rye?” Lonely asks.

  “He’s older,” says Willow. “When we were children, he was already a young man, and even as a teenager he had this wanderlust. He’d disappear for months at a time, traveling to other parts of the mountains to see what farms were left, trying to convince the other farmers to stay, even venturing near the City though I don’t think he ever went in.”

  “But I didn’t want to go anywhere, ever again, once I got here,” says Fawn quietly. “I felt like I was finally safe.”

  “When he was twenty-one years old,” continues Willow, “he came back to us after having been gone for a couple of years.” She turns and strokes Blue’s head thoughtfully, and Lonely learns something else about children: their presence is pure love, and can comfort an adult in moments of sadness. “His family had thought he might be gone forever,” she says slowly, still looking down at Blue’s head, “and his mother had died never knowing that he was still alive.”

  Then they are all silent, and Blue looks up anxiously at his mother’s face, which is a little damp around the eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says to Fawn. “I’m so emotional lately. It’s the pregnancy.” Fawn shakes her head forgivingly and takes Blue’s hand, as if he is an extension of Willow. Willow continues. “He came back to tell us that he was going to the City, to try to make some change there, to try to bring the farmers back to their true lives. But when he found his mother had died, he fell into such grief.”

  “He understood, finally,” says Fawn firmly. “He couldn’t keep leaving.” Lonely listens. They seem to be telling a story they have not told themselves for a long time, and they are telling it more for themselves than for her. They are telling their own explanation of how the world is, what is right and what is wrong.

  “But actually,” says Willow, “what made him stay this time after all, and change his plan to go off to the City, was that he fell in love with Fawn. She was fifteen then, and he saw that beauty she’d tried to keep hidden for so long, finally blooming.”

  Fawn blushes; Willow smiles.

  “So then he courted her for a few years. He didn’t rush her, because she was so young. But when she was eighteen, she got pregnant with Chelya, and Rye said he would make a home for her and Eva and their child. Then they started this place here.” She looks back at Lonely. “So you see. We took Fawn and Eva in once, and both Rye and Fawn can feel, I think, how much it means to take someone in when they have nowhere else to go. How you can save a life that way.”

  But Lonely is thinking of Rye, and the romance of this story. There is no way she can come in between them—ever. This story is as firm as earth. What is it within her that wants to break it all apart? What evil would make her long for this?

  “I worry that Kite is like Rye in this way,” Fawn says. “He has this longing to wander, to see new worlds. To see the City. Even Rye still has this longing, though he keeps it hidden for my sake, for our family’s sake. You cannot be a farmer and also a traveler. But Kite—he’s at that age now. I worry,” she sighs. “I worry so much, Willow.”

  “You always worry,” says Willow, stroking her back. “Have you told him the story of what happened when Rye left?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t matter to him. He is young. He thinks none of that has to do with him. Young people think the actions of their parents and their ancestors have nothing to do with them.”

  “That’s not true,” cries Lonely, too suddenly. “I mean sometimes they feel those actions but they—they just don’t know what to do with that. It’s so much pressure, so much responsibility. Maybe he needs a little freedom to work things out for himself.”

  “How do I not give him freedom?” Fawn turns to her sharply, and though she never expresses anger openly, Lonely feels sorry. “He can be whoever he wants to be.”

  Lonely turns awkwardly away from Fawn’s stare, and is rescued by the loud, bumpy entrance of the men and boys.

  “Isn’t anyone around here hungry?” asks Rye.

  There are times, living here, when Lonely thinks the end of all loneliness is somewhere in the circle a family makes around food in the evening. Would she have ever begun to feel lonely, if she and her father had known what it was to hunger, and had come together each night to join themselves with the bodies of other beings in this way? She had not even known day and night. She had not been a part of anything. Earth and sky had not joined in her. There was only her father and his sorrow.

  Around the blanket on the grass where the food is laid out today, Lonely tries to understand all the different kinds of love. She sees the way the little boys, more than anyone else at the table, love their food. She sees the way Eva teases the boys, and the almost clumsy, happy way that youth stumbles out of her in their presence. She is telling them about invisible colors that surround them; Morgan easily believes, and Blue doesn’t want to but looks tempted. Morgan is continually boasting about his baby brother who isn’t born yet, certain that it’s a boy, because that’s what he wants, and Lonely also sees this kind of love: the love of a child that arises from desire, that decides what it loves before it even meets the object of that love. Though Lonely has never met a child before, that kind of love feels familiar. It makes her twist a little inside. Anxious, she wants to tell Morgan that the baby might be a girl.

  She sees the love of the boys for Kite, who loves them because they admire him—because they make him feel like a man whenever he can lift something they can’t lift or exp
lain something to them like how he and Rye placed the traps for the rabbits they’re eating tonight. She sees the tenderness of Willow for Kite as she watches him talk to her sons, and the laughter that relaxes Fawn when Morgan takes down her hair while she eats because it is prettier that way, and the way Blue always wants to sit next to Chelya, and the way Chelya and Willow whisper together, and all the serious, interested questions Jay asks Kite about the projects he’s working on. She also sees hints of loves not expressed at all—like the way Jay looks at Fawn, every now and then, with a glance so brief that no one but Lonely, who is quieter than the rest, would notice. She sees Rye’s hunger to be near his brother, the subtle surrender of his gratitude in being among their larger family again, and the hint of a loneliness, or a restlessness, that Lonely never noticed in him before but which makes her want him all the more. She thinks of him wandering all those years, before he fell in love with Fawn. She wonders what he was searching for, and if he knew he needed love. She wonders if his body and heart hungered the way hers do now, or if he searched for something else—something she will never know.

  She assesses Jay, this new example of manhood, for she can stare openly at both him and Rye now in a way she cannot do normally, so distracted are they by their conversation, so oblivious to her. Jay is shorter than Rye, and shorter than Willow, but the muscles in his arms are bigger than Lonely could reach around with the fingers of both her hands. His palms are black, his face is darker and more rugged than Rye’s, and he hardly smiles at all. But when he finally does, that smile is so innocent, so boyish, so incongruous with his heavy face, that she realizes it is only shyness that keeps him serious. He was more animated before when he showed Rye the tools than in the midst of conversation and discussion, not like he’s unhappy now, but like he doesn’t have that many words inside of him. Once, when he glances toward Lonely, as if feeling her gaze, he gives her a simple, polite nod and turns back to his food.

  The children are the center of life at the table. Lonely smiles in wonder as she watches them. She hopes they will not turn their dazzling, knowing eyes her way, and at the same time she wishes they would. She sees the most primal hues of each emotion in their bodies and faces: joy and fascination, hurt and anger, hope and wariness, played out in quick succession as fluidly as their soft limbs turn. Morgan, five years old, makes exaggerated faces for each feeling—one moment tightening all his features together in mock rage when Kite pretends to steal his bowl of strawberries, and the next moment beaming up at Fawn in love-struck joy as he throws himself down on his back in her lap. Lonely thinks that perhaps he is trying out each emotion for size, and she watches the experiment with wonder. In that tiny body his spirit seems so big, so much to contain. In Blue it is his wisdom that seems bigger than his body—or something like wisdom that Lonely imagines in his silent attention to everything, his skepticism, his curious staring every time she speaks, as if, like Willow, he knows she is hiding.

  At first she listens with interest to everything they have to say. She learns about an animal Jay’s family raises called sheep, which provide wool, from which Willow makes much of the clothing for the whole family. She learns that fire also shapes metal, and that Jay works with that fire to make cooking pots and knives and Rye’s tools out of those hardest of substances, copper and iron; this skill, Lonely thinks, explains the hard, quiet intensity in his eyes. She learns, as they plan for the birth and talk of Eva’s healing skills, that they worry what will happen when Eva is gone and they know no other healers. Willow had an older brother and a younger sister, who both died when she was a child. Lonely learns, through the family’s discussion of the river, that they suspect those children died from a sickness that was carried in the water—a sickness from the rains, which held the poison of the City. She learns the fear that they live with, that this could happen again.

  “I know some things,” murmurs Fawn, “that my mother has taught me, but I do not know much.” She bows her head, and Eva lays a hand upon hers.

  “You know very much, Fawn.”

  Fawn shakes her head. “There is no need to reassure me.” She looks up suddenly at the others. “I have not lived here as long as the rest of you. I wish sometimes that I had something to give, the way Rye works with wood, and Jay with metal, and Willow with wool.”

  Willow laughs. “Fawn,” she says, not looking at her, “you give so much. It’s funny what you say, like asking what the mountain gives.”

  There is a pocket of silence then, in which Lonely hears the wind turning over thoughtfully.

  Rye nods. “It feels sometimes as you’ve been here longer than the rest of us, Fawn. When you came here, the mountains took you right into them, as if they knew you.”

  Jay nods, too, staring at Fawn, and his jaw tightens a little. Fawn refuses to look up. “Please,” she says.

  Chelya laughs. “Let’s talk about something else,” she says. “Ma’s embarrassed.”

  At first Lonely is grateful to find how little attention they all pay to her. The food is so important. Their joy with each other is important. They see each other so rarely that the excitement of being together outweighs the interest of a new person, or so she supposes.

  But she also feels that, despite Willow’s warm conversation in the house, which never was for Lonely anyway, but more a story she enjoyed with Fawn, they’re afraid of her, like Fawn was in the beginning. And Lonely is thinking about other things too, things that make her sad. She listens to them update each other on which crops got ruined, and discuss how hard it will be to stay fed all winter. She hears in those quiet, determined calculations that she, Lonely, must go. She, who is not even human. She, who never knew what it was to eat before she came here.

  She discovers jealousy for the first time. Until she came to this place, she’d never in her life been with another person without being the sole object of that person’s attention. Now she watches Fawn and sees how little she means to her in comparison with her family. She sees how Rye never glances at her now, with curiosity or kindness or hidden desire, like he did before. She sits open-mouthed with this new feeling—a crude, painful feeling that makes her throat sore, a feeling that, unlike hunger, cannot be soothed—and forgets her food for moments at a time. She tries to distract herself by looking around at the sunset hills, watching her horse graze peacefully in the distance, as if he doesn’t need anyone.

  “They’ve started building on Willow’s land,” Jay is saying now.

  Fawn puts her fork down and stares. “Oh, Willow. You didn’t say—”

  “What are they building?” asks Rye.

  “Homes,” says Willow, looking down as she eats, the shine gone out of her face. “The kind where people live in boxes and never see each other, and they have to clear all the trees, not for growing crops but so they can see places far away and feel like kings. Like lonely kings.”

  “That’s why they wanted that land,” growls Jay. “Because it was up high. They probably don’t care about the springs that start there. The whole river will be polluted with their waste.”

  “Or maybe it will be one of those enormous homes, just for one family. These people have to live indoors, you know? They’re forever expanding their houses, trying to build enough rooms to hold the whole world without ever having to go outside. Why don’t they come outside? The whole world is right here.” Willow’s attempted smile is broken by an old, rueful anger.

  The children are silent now, Morgan frowning and Blue sitting very still. Chelya leans across the table to Lonely and tells her in a low voice, “Willow and Jay used to live with Willow’s parents on the farm Willow grew up on. But a few years ago the people from the City made them leave, took it over, and destroyed it. Now they all live where Dad and Jay grew up—they fixed up the old place where Dad’s parents used to live.”

  Lonely nods. She tries to understand what Chelya is describing, but she’s still stuck on this idea of family, stuck on the wor
d “parents,” trying to imagine another family connected with this one, and another, and webs of connected people expanding ever outward.

  “We can hear it from our house,” says Willow, her voice flat. “The machines.”

  “Oh, Willow,” says Fawn again.

  Willow looks up as if surprised, and smiles. Then she puts her hands in her lap, then lifts them up again, touches the corners of her eyes, and glances away.

  “Oh, well,” she says. “It’s not like I had to move far. I’m still home in the mountains that love me. I’m with my family. I’m more at home than those people in their big boxes will probably ever feel.”

  “Do you ever go back there to see?” says Chelya.

  Willow nods. “But I haven’t been for a while,” she says.

  “I go,” grumbles Jay. “They won’t keep me off.” Lonely sees Blue imitate his expression, jabbing his greens with his fork, and turn inward to mysterious child thoughts. His silence reminds her of Kite now.

  “What if we go try to talk to them?” asks Rye.

  “Rye—” Fawn begins.

  “Why not?”

  Jay looks up, eyes darkened, and waits for Rye to continue.

  “I think we need to make connections. Remember we’re all human. We all need homes, we all have families we need to protect. Why can’t we understand each other?”

  “Good question,” grumbles Jay.

  Morgan, restless, has crawled around the blanket to sit next to Lonely. Folding his limbs in a little pile in front of him, he pushes himself softly up against her, falling halfway into her lap and leaning his head against her breasts. Lonely begins to cry.