Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

The darkness is so still, so quiet, like the bottom of a lake. Their aloneness surrounds them, wrapping them in the kiss of secrecy. She sees Kite shift from one foot to the other, twisting his shoulders as if irritated, as if trying to harness something that itches inside him. She wants to name that something, wants to tell him that what they feel is the same.

  “How old are you?” she asks him, imagining him crossing the desert by himself, sleeping under rocks—hungry, hot and then cold, haunted by the voices that haunted her.

  “I’ll be fifteen this winter,” he says. “How old —?”

  “I don’t know,” Lonely interrupts. She feels every age—eager and young when she’s with Chelya, passionate and innocent when she’s with Rye, old and pensive when she’s with Eva—but maybe she feels most like Fawn’s age, which is also unclear, for though Fawn is young, she is also old. Fawn is a woman, and yet she is also the earth around that woman, older than time. Lonely still feels some knowledge lying dormant between herself and Fawn, something that could rise like the moon between them and turn the whole world breathless and inside-out with its wild, dark-light glow.

  “You don’t know how old you are?” Kite looks at her suspiciously.

  “No,” says Lonely. Her chest burns. She is so tired of the questions she can’t answer. “What does it matter?” She leans on the table with one hand and rolls her shoulder toward him, shifting her hips. She’s so close to his body she can feel their sweat evaporating into a mingled cloud between them.

  “Lonely,” he says, trying out the word for the first time, and his voice drops soft and saggy like something with the bones taken out of it, and she can feel that he’s never noticed the feel of his own lips before the way he notices them now when he says her name.

  But then in an instant he is bouldering past her, angry or scared and striding fast toward the door, toward the light. The candle huffs out in the wake of his leaving, and Lonely is left in the darkness of the space she stole from him, holding her own body rigid with confusion and shame.

  By evening, the heat shows no sign of releasing them from its fists. Lonely takes a bucket of water from the river and carries it behind the house, dunks and rinses the faded sundress she was wearing, wipes her body down with a rag, then dumps the rest of the water over her hair. As she wrings out the dress and pulls it back on, still wet but drying fast, she shakes her hair and imagines that Kite is watching her. She can still feel his hungry eyes exploring her, as droplets of water travel from her hair down the easiest pathways of her body. She walks carefully into the house to help Fawn with dinner.

  It’s too hot to cook, so they cut salad vegetables and boil eggs. No one will feel like eating much. The quick fire they make to boil water for the eggs turns the cool water on Lonely’s neck to sweat, and even Fawn’s face is flushed and damp. The windows are still covered, so the women work in shadow. When Kite returns, he will remind them that if they had electricity, fans could be cooling them. But this idea is so foreign to both Fawn and Lonely that neither of them think of it; they only move slowly and try to breathe deeply, every now and then splashing cold water on their faces from the water tank by the stone counter.

  In silence, they wash and shake dry the lacy, violet-green leaves of the lettuce. Lonely snips the ends of the little pregnant boats of the peas with her fingernails, and slices them in half. The juicy stiffness of the peppers falls easily into strips under Fawn’s knife, and then she chops fennel to add its strange, leathery taste to the salad, too. Lonely scoops the sweet wet lumps of chopped tomato into her palms, lifts them dripping over the bowl, and drops their redness in. Then she dips her hands full of bean sprouts into the rinsing bowl, and accidentally sprays a few drops of water on Fawn’s face as she brings them up and shakes her fists to dry them. Fawn raises one eyebrow, something Lonely didn’t know she could do, and then, a moment later when Lonely has forgotten, comes around the other side of her and splashes her on purpose from the same bowl.

  They both laugh then, and their laughter is happy and grateful in the hot darkness. Lonely turns to Fawn and watches her face for a moment, a face she has earned the right to gaze at occasionally. Fawn’s teasing thrills her a little—the surprise of it bursting out of her shyness, yet without disturbing her placid grace. Her face is beautiful to watch, even when its expression doesn’t shift, like a mountain forever the same yet forever changing in each moment of the day’s light. Her slick brown hair, pulled tightly back, leaves her neck open and elegant in its simple strength. Her eyes, focused on the cucumber she is slicing, are restful; her lips fit perfectly together but are ever so slightly uneven.

  “Lonely,” says Fawn, for she says that name more easily now, without looking up. “My mother says you are searching for something, someone.”

  Surprised, Lonely nods, and looks back to her work.

  “Where are you going when you leave here?” Fawn asks, pronouncing the words carefully as if they are foreign to her. Lonely is surprised to be asked a question.

  “I have to go to the high mountain, the one that’s white at the top,” she answers, wondering now if what she says is true. Does she have to go there?

  Then it is Fawn’s turn to nod and say nothing. She begins moving again, shelling the eggs in a bowl of cold water that will quickly turn warm. Lonely can’t tell what she is thinking.

  “Fawn,” she says on impulse. “Did you long for someone, before you found Rye? Did you search for someone? Did you feel alone?”

  The slightest quaver interrupts the seamless grace of Fawn’s motions. She shakes her head. “I did not search for love. I didn’t know I needed it. My mother and I were trying to survive. I just lived, here in the mountains with the earth, and I loved things, I always loved but—I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain.”

  Lonely turns to her. “You weren’t waiting for him,” she says.

  “I was, I think. But I didn’t know it. Something inside me was making a web of my own life, a web that included all the beings of my world, and included him, before he ever arrived. I didn’t know it, but he knew it. It was like he recognized me and said: ‘Here you are, you are Fawn.’ He made me see myself for the first time.”

  “Didn’t you long for touch?” asks Lonely. Fawn blushes.

  “I didn’t know what it could be like,” she fumbles, pausing as if surprised at the memory. “I lived in touch already. The touch of the water when I bathed, the touch of the leaves and grass as I walked through them, the feel of food in my mouth.”

  She has stopped her work, her body frozen. Lonely nods. She knows those touches, and how they feed her body’s glory in itself, but with the glory comes desire. Always. Just as Yora predicted, she realizes, she constantly wants more.

  Something else haunts her tonight, too: Kite’s fantasies of the City, and her sense that someday she, too, will find herself there. She feels certain that some part of herself—some dark part she doesn’t want to know—comes from there and is alive there. Perhaps neither her past nor her longing will ever make sense to her until she sees that place with her own eyes.

  When they sit down outside, an icy breeze flies almost imperceptibly through the fat layers of heat, and the sky begins to cloud.

  “Storm coming,” cries Chelya. “Finally!”

  Kite arrives last minute and falls on his knees in front of the blanket, helping himself to the salad without looking up. When he avoids Lonely’s gaze, she can tell he is nervous, and then she feels sorry.

  “You got more tomatoes than me,” he accuses Chelya, grabbing one with his fingers from her plate.

  “I deserve more tomatoes than you,” Chelya teases, mouth full.

  “Mmff,” says Kite, chewing with what seems to Lonely an exaggerated passion.

  “Lonely,” says Chelya, “are you coming out with me again tonight? It’s the full moon. It’s going to rain, so it could be wild.” She winks at Lonely, lowering her voice
a little, and Fawn looks sharply over.

  Lonely smiles at Chelya, not trusting her voice.

  “Can I come?” says Kite.

  Chelya looks at him, surprised.

  “You never take me to meet your friends,” he adds.

  “I didn’t think you were interested. Anyway, you wouldn’t like it.”

  “How do you know?” says Kite, flaring up.

  “Neither of you should go out tonight,” Fawn interrupts, and Lonely starts at the tension in her voice. “It’s not safe, going out in the storm. It’s going to storm.”

  “Oh, Ma,” Kite says. Eva looks from one to the other, her expression curious but uninvolved.

  “You’re not coming, Kite,” Chelya says. “Girls only.” She shoots a furtive glance at her mother. Lonely watches Kite scowl and feels sorry for him, but she doesn’t want him to go either. She doesn’t want him to see the way she will surrender to those animal embraces. Or will she? Will she go again, after dreaming that dream?

  Something bigger than a god growls in the distance, from the direction of the high mountain. Lonely looks up, her eyes wide.

  Chelya laughs at her expression. “Thunder,” Fawn explains.

  Lonely doesn’t know what thunder is. It sounds like an avalanche. “From the mountain?” she asks, confused.

  “No,” answers Fawn, smiling a little. “From the sky.”

  It happens again and Lonely doesn’t understand how the sky could make such hard sounds, or what form it could take and what surface it could grate against to create such chaos in her belly. The sound swells like anger, growing louder. She remembers the voice of the wind, suddenly, telling her the clouds were the dreams of her lover. She remembers his face in the dream, and the face of Coyote, and fear.

  She sees Fawn’s smile fade, her brow darkening like the sky.

  “Lonely,” she says softly. “Will you stay here tonight, with me?”

  Lonely hears the helplessness in her voice and understands, for the first time, Chelya’s true power. There is nothing Fawn can do to stop her daughter from going. For whatever reason, it makes Fawn afraid, and she will have to live in that fear all night long.

  But Lonely doesn’t know what she wants. She looks away from Fawn’s questioning gaze. She doesn’t answer. She sits still, looking down, as Fawn stands abruptly, perhaps embarrassed by her own request, and begins to bring the dishes inside. Chelya, hurried and eager, and Kite, restless and already finished with two helpings, jump up and follow her.

  In the silence and distant birdsong that remain, Lonely looks up into Eva’s eyes, without meaning to, and finds them waiting for her. She starts in sudden fear, like prey that realizes it’s been discovered—that it’s been watched for a long time, in fact, so that by the time it becomes aware, it is too late.

  “What are you waiting for, Lonely, in staying here?” says Eva quietly. And Lonely knows she doesn’t mean staying at the table.

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  “I think you do,” says Eva sternly. “It’s time for you to begin owning your own desires, taking responsibility for them, and deciding what to do with them. It’s time for you to take control, instead of letting them control you. It’s time for you to make choices consciously, because whether you are conscious of them or not, you are making choices anyway. And they’re affecting other people.”

  Lonely just stares, horrified. How much does Eva know? How does she know?

  “It’s not that I want you to leave,” Eva continues. “You’re becoming part of our family. And I believe that you help Fawn, even if you shake the structure of her life a little and shift things around. I think maybe that’s good for her. Though don’t tell her I said so.” She smiles, but Lonely can’t smile back. Then Eva says, without changing her tone, “But I also think you’re dangerous, Lonely. Because you’re not paying attention.”

  Lonely is so shocked that she can’t speak until after Eva has closed her eyes, rested a moment longer, listened to the birds, and then stood up and turned to go. Then she calls, “Eva,” but her voice sounds cramped and scared.

  Eva turns, and her eyes are tender, and Lonely wants that tenderness so badly that she’s overcome with all the things she could say, and can think of nothing to say. But how she longs to tell someone who would understand, who would be able to explain to her the confusion of her longing, how it reaches out its tentacles to anyone near, how it grasps and pulls. She needs to know if that is some evil in her, some evil that comes from her father. If she could only find her true love, it would all go away. Eva’s story would melt away behind her, forgotten…

  “I don’t want to be like my father,” she blurts. “I mean, I don’t—I don’t want to go to the City.”

  “Then don’t go,” says Eva.

  “But I feel like I have to. Like I belong to it, or it belongs to me. We’re connected somehow, aren’t we? I know I’m supposed to do something about what my father has done.”

  But Eva doesn’t answer, and Lonely knows why. Eva doesn’t have all the answers, no matter how much Lonely wishes that she did. The thunder roars again, like judgment that will come down upon her. But right now the air is fresh and cool and young, and this little valley is raised up to the heavens on the hand of a single moment.

  “I want to know what’s real,” she says helplessly. “If the things I feel are real. If the things I want are real. My father lived in illusion. Everything, everything was an illusion.”

  Eva nods. “It’s hard to avoid the mistakes our parents made,” she says. “But at least if you know what they are, you can try.” Her eyes face Lonely’s but she isn’t looking at her. She is looking inward, as if talking with herself, about some other story that Lonely doesn’t know. “It helps,” she adds, “if you’re not guided by fear. Fear will draw you right back to the same mistakes, over and over. Focus on your choices instead.”

  But it isn’t fear, thinks Lonely. It’s need. It’s desperate, raw need. How can you understand that? “What am I afraid of?” she asks, feeling tired.

  Eva raises her eyebrows, as if surprised that Lonely doesn’t know. “Of your name,” she says. “Of loneliness.”

  By the time Lonely comes back inside, Chelya is ready in her magical flower dress, and Kite has disappeared somewhere. Lonely tells Chelya she isn’t going. She is going to stay here with Fawn. Because Fawn said her name. Because of what Chelya once told her: that you have a name so that someone can call you when they need you. And because she doesn’t know the answer to the question Eva asked her, and she needs to know.

  Fawn meets her in the kitchen after bringing the food scraps to the chickens and locking them up for the night. She’s opened the shades to catch the last of the light as the storm encloses them. She lights a candle on the table and another on a shelf above the counter.

  “This dinner won’t take long to clean up,” Fawn says. “I can do it. Sit there, by the fire, if you want.”

  Lonely can hear the unusual energy in Fawn’s voice that comes from gratitude and relief. She sits on a hay-stuffed cushion in front of the fire, feeling dazed, while Fawn boils water again for washing the dishes. There is something serious about her now. Her soft lines seem harder, her fluid motions caged by some inner fear that Lonely can see behind her eyes.

  “Rye might be very late,” she tells Lonely, suddenly talkative. “He’ll probably stop somewhere to keep out of the storm, unless he is very close to home already.”

  Lonely doesn’t answer. She wonders what it would be like, to know that love is coming home to you, to know that it’s on its way to your door and all you have to do is wait.

  “Rye and I were arguing this morning,” Fawn adds, and Lonely looks at her, startled.

  “Why?” she asks.

  “He wanted to take you with him, to Jay and Willow’s.”

  “What—me? He wanted to take m
e?” Lonely stammers, unable to control her voice. Fawn doesn’t seem surprised and doesn’t look at her. Could it be she already knows how Lonely feels? “But—” Lonely begins, and stops. But why didn’t you let him? her desperation wants to ask, imagining a whole day alone with Rye, perhaps riding behind him on the horse, her legs around him. Instead she only asks, “But why?”

  Fawn shrugs. “Company, I guess. I never go with him any more. I don’t like to travel.”

  “But why not?”

  Fawn looks at her now. She doesn’t seem angry. There’s something pained and confused in her face, something lost beneath its surface as if trapped beneath ice—looking for a way out, and drowning. Lonely can’t understand why Fawn is telling her this. It’s so strange for Fawn to start a conversation about something personal. But her voice is steady. “You would have gone,” she says, ignoring Lonely’s question. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Lonely doesn’t know how to answer. Is it wrong to say yes? But Fawn will know anyway. Like Eva, in her own way she seems to know everything.

  The sky explodes above them, shaking the house with the impact of pure sound. Lonely jumps up, too surprised to notice Fawn’s reaction. Then she looks back at Fawn, and Fawn smiles with shame, her shoulders shaking a little. She turns back to the dishes, and Lonely sits down again.

  “I’m so worried,” Fawn murmurs.

  “About Rye?”

  “Yes, and Chelya and Malachite.”

  “Where is Ki—Malachite?”

  “He said he was going for a walk. He has this place he goes, up high. I’ve seen him there before. But I wish he wouldn’t go there in the storm.”

  Lonely looks out the window and sees the wind slinging a single hemlock side to side against the chicken shed. She wonders what will happen in the forest tonight, in the storm. Will there be a bonfire? Will everyone make love in the rain? Her body is so full with desire, like an overfull bucket of water that will brim over at a single touch. She holds herself uncomfortably, her hands in her lap. The wind thrashes against the house, reminding her of the tower, reminding her of the primal, wordless place inside her where longing first began.