Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “Stop following me,” he’d said softly, emerging from the pines.

  And whatever Rye had said in the long night after that, sitting across a fire in the black forest with his only son, had not mattered. Kite had gone on anyway, and Rye had returned with his arms limp at his sides, immobile as Fawn shook him with her small hands.

  “He’s almost as skilled a hunter as I am,” Rye told Fawn. “He’ll survive.”

  “You don’t care,” Fawn growled. “You don’t care what happens to him. He’s only fifteen.”

  “Fawn,” Rye said. “I’m only trying to comfort you.”

  “I don’t need to be comforted!” she cried. “I need my son.” Then her body seemed to break, as if all her bones, all this time, had been made only of this one love. “I need him,” she sobbed, her face in her hands, doubled over at the waist, rocking forward and back. “I need him.”

  Eva came to her and took her in her arms, guided her like a child to the fire, and sat her down. Fawn buried her head in her mother’s thin chest and Rye stood there, looking more alone than Lonely had ever seen him.

  There is loneliness in this family, too, she thought, and she saw that it had been there even before Kite left.

  “You could have gone with him,” Fawn whimpered.

  “And leave you?” Rye said.

  She didn’t answer, and after a moment Rye shouted, the pain in his voice shocking Lonely. “Do you want me to, then? Do you want me to leave you here alone for the winter? Shall I go now, and find him again, though he doesn’t want me, and follow him? Should I?” Silence. “Should I, Fawn?” He was yelling, but Fawn only cried harder, shaking her head, her body bouncing heavily with her sighs, as if a brutal horse rode heavy and hard beneath her, without caring for the safety of its rider.

  These conversations continued, indoors and outdoors, for days. Fawn saying, “Why couldn’t you make him come home? You’re his father!” And Rye yelling. Rye saying, “If you didn’t make it so forbidden, he wouldn’t be so desperate for it, Fawn. If you didn’t try to rule him with your fear, if you didn’t tell him he could never go—” And Fawn yelling again. Even Fawn.

  Then there was silence all over the house, in which love floundered and struggled, alone and afraid, and anger paced restlessly, and pain was the only thing that anybody heard.

  On that first day, Eva explained winter to Lonely. How life hides in darkness. How the surface parts of life die, and the deep inner heart of life becomes still. How night rules. How the body sleeps, and the mind wanders curious and alone in the darkness in search of the soul.

  Lonely wants only to rest. She knows she should help out more and earn her keep. Part of her wants to help. And sometimes Chelya gives her tasks. But most things she could think of to do in the house would place her in the way of Fawn. Whatever is happening inside Fawn in Kite’s absence is terrifying to Lonely. Whenever she looks at Fawn’s face, she feels like she can’t breathe. Fawn does not speak to her. It’s like in the beginning, when Lonely first came here from the tower.

  The place that once rescued Lonely—her only home in the world—does not feel like a home now. Fawn acts as if she doesn’t exist. Rye is out all the time, staying away from Fawn. Eva speaks to Lonely sometimes at night, after the others have gone to bed, but often she falls asleep early, cranky with the pain in her bones. She’s different in winter from how Lonely knew her in summer. Suddenly being old seems to Lonely not like wisdom and power after all, but like a constant, defeated falling.

  And Chelya is often away from home, with her new love.

  “Who is he?” Lonely asks her one afternoon, when Chelya is cooking dinner to make up to her mother for being gone so much. “Why doesn’t he come here?” She is desperately curious in spite of the pain it brings her, or perhaps because of it, as if the pain knows something she doesn’t, and yearns to bring her deeper into itself. How much can she bear to hear of Chelya’s love and its happiness—a love that began in the flesh before her own did, and continues long after?

  “He’s a tree spirit,” says Chelya. “An oak.” Her voice sounds older now, less jubilant, more even. Why is it, thinks Lonely, that being older means expanding to contain more sorrow? Why is that wiser? Why is that better?

  There is fish tonight, and kale. The grains are all gone. So many crops were ruined last summer by the heavy rains. Lonely doesn’t understand the significance of the world’s changes in weather. She doesn’t have any sense of the pattern that came before, for however many thousands or millions of years. To her the weather is the moods of the earth, like her own. Unpredictable.

  Chelya opens a mixture of onions and fruit that they canned in the summer. “He can’t come,” she adds. “He can’t leave the grove where he lives, though he can move within it.

  “But—” Lonely begins, confused. “What will you do, then?”

  Chelya smiles at her. “I can visit him there. We’re happy there together, and it’s better because we can be there in secret without my mother knowing. It’s the most magical place in the world. We dance in the moonlight. We pray in the morning. We talk about the world, and we dream together. You know.”

  “What do you talk about?” asks Lonely. She wonders if they can kiss, if they can make love. She remembers the spirits of the trees who danced with her at the great fire last summer, how she could feel their breath and the brush of their leafy arms—how that touch tickled and tantalized her, how gentle it felt. She supposes this spirit of Chelya’s can love her with a purer love than a human being can ever know. She imagines his devotion, his eager awaiting for Chelya’s arrival. Rooted to his one sacred place in the earth, never to leave it, never to yearn for anywhere else, never to fly away, he will always be there waiting for Chelya—and she will never have to wonder where he is.

  “We talk about—I don’t know, everything. The earth, and how it’s changing. The other creatures and plants of the forest, and all the stories he knows and learns from the wind and the water that runs through him. He’s very wise. We talk about my mother and father. And the things Grandmother says. And Kite—”

  “Do you think he’s going to be okay?” Lonely interrupts. She’s been wanting to ask. She thinks of Kite often, if only because it is impossible not to, in this house. The agonized question of his absence hangs inside every interaction, lurks in every familiar place and behind each person’s eyes. Yet Lonely has felt that she could never mention him, or something or someone will explode.

  “Yes,” says Chelya without hesitating. “I think he’ll be okay.”

  “Why?”

  Chelya shrugs. “Because he knows what he’s doing. He’s smart and he doesn’t get carried away by things like me or my mother. He thinks everything out. I know he’s been thinking this out for a long time.”

  “He told you?”

  “No. He wouldn’t have told me because he wouldn’t want me to get in trouble, after he was gone. He thinks of everything and he wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt more than they have to. My brother has a really good, big heart. He just doesn’t always say what he’s feeling. Anyway, he talks to me in my dreams sometimes. I know he’s okay. And I think when he gets to the desert….”

  “What?”

  Chelya shrugs again. “I don’t know. I think someone will help him. That’s the feeling I get.”

  Lonely had never thought about the love between a brother and a sister. She had only seen Chelya tease Kite, and Kite scowl and bite back. But now Chelya talks of love. She talks of her brother’s heart—a heart Lonely never dared imagine, he kept it so secret—as if knowing it is as easy for Chelya as knowing the timbers that frame the house’s walls. How sweet, thinks Lonely, to have a brother. To love a boy so easily and to be so easily loved, to belong always to each other even without words, even when you are far away, because you are family. Not knowing what else to say, she stands up to help Chelya. She places the biggest pot o
n the fire and begins to fill it with water from the basin to boil for washing dishes. She feels Chelya’s easy, human movement near her, and remembers the kitchen again as the space of Fawn’s movements, Fawn’s quiet, careful expression. Then the longing for that modest, self-contained peace beside her, for the dark silhouette of that head bent attentively near her own, for that flicker of curious hunger that linked them through a mystery of untraversed wilderness between their bodies—Lonely feels that longing suddenly with such force it turns her stomach over. That was friendship. It came once, and never again. More innocent than romantic love, and easier, it slept beside her loyally every night while she dreamed and dreamed of a love who was already leaving her, completely taking that comfort for granted.

  “What happened to you?” asks Chelya, her voice uneasy with its own knowing, like the way she looked at Lonely the night Lonely wouldn’t tell her where she was going but left as if she would leave forever. “You came back.”

  Lonely shakes her head. She wants to tell Chelya everything, but she doesn’t know how to explain her return. The thought of it only emphasizes her failure.

  “You didn’t find your love?”

  “No,” Lonely says, her voice tight. “I did. I did find him.” Her words feel too big for her throat. She shuts her eyes for a moment.

  “Then what happened?”

  “I don’t know if I can explain.” But that’s not it. She feels that Chelya is the only one who might understand. Maybe she doesn’t want to know what Chelya will say. Maybe she’s too proud to find out that this young girl knows more about love than she does. Because Chelya is loved. Because she has always been loved. Because she breathes love every day, without ever having to think about it.

  Chelya is silent for a moment, and Lonely is afraid she has angered her. She never wants to be in Chelya’s disfavor. It would be the last thing she could bear—like losing the love of the sun, which should belong to everyone, and which no one has to earn.

  “What happened to the dress?” Chelya asks more gently.

  Lonely looks down. “I can’t wear it any more.”

  “Why not? Aren’t you still you?”

  Lonely wants to laugh at the innocence of the question. She wants to throw her arms around Chelya. She wants Chelya to grab her hand and gallop off with her into summer fields, but those fields are frozen over now, and Chelya’s free spirit is linked now to another. Instead she says, “Chelya, why is your mother angry with me? What do I have to do with Kite’s leaving?”

  She expects Chelya to tell her it isn’t that—that Fawn acts crazy lately, crazed by grief, unpredictable. She expects her to dismiss the question. She wants her to. But Chelya shakes her head and says, “I don’t know. You know more than I do, I think. Something happened between you the night you left. I could tell by her mood the next morning. She never spoke your name again.”

  Lonely shivers. For a long time, the contemplative grumble and crackle of the fire is the only sound. She feels the canyon of Fawn’s loss for the first time, as if a trap door opened beneath her feet. It seems only another expression of the same loneliness: the absence of Sky, the absence of Fawn all part of the same, their sorrow like water that flows through her the same way over and over, carving a channel that began with her father’s death, and is carved ever deeper by every successive loss.

  When Yora calls to Delilah in a dream, she wakes immediately, slings her backpack over one shoulder, and walks across the glowing sand in her broken sneakers toward the sound of water. It’s already dark.

  She hasn’t seen the sun for more days than she can count. But there is no one to tell her that her face looks gaunt and pale.

  I wanted to say goodbye, says Yora, who is nothing but the river now.

  Delilah nods. She feels calm inside. She takes a handful of water and splashes her face, even though she is shivering with the cold. A little sunshine wouldn’t hurt, perhaps. She’s wearing most of the clothing she has, layered on top of each other, and sometimes, in moments of weakness, she wants to call out to Dragon to come make her a fire she doesn’t have to work for. But she doesn’t know where he is these days, and she doesn’t want to think about him. The thought of him fills her with something like shame.

  “Back to the ocean?” she asks Yora.

  I have to.

  “It was so painful for you there.”

  No. No pain—I just let go.

  Delilah says nothing. But she knows. She, too, has lost much of the pain she used to carry. Her neck doesn’t hurt. Her spine is like a waterfall, sometimes, when she wakes up. It almost frightens her, how easily she moves. There is something empty about that movement.

  I cannot be a ghost any more, hovering outside myself, Yora continues. This is my story. I go to the Sea. I come out of the Sea and I return home. It is better than being homeless, being no one. It is better than being lost from myself. If I do not remember the story of the water, no one ever will.

  Delilah traces the patterns of the moving water with her fingers, feeling them break and change with her touch.

  The Unicorn came to me, adds Yora. She helped me. I am stronger now.

  Delilah lifts her head and looks around. “The Unicorn was here?”

  She is returning, too. But I do not think she realizes it.

  “I’m coming with you,” says Delilah, dreamily, as if she is only commenting on some small, sweet wonder, a desert flower she’s noticed in passing.

  She doesn’t hear anything from the river, so she adds, “You don’t have to take care of me. I’ve been planning this for a while.”

  I cannot carry you. I am still sick.

  “No. I’m going to carry you. I already carry you, Yora. I carry you in my blood, in my body, like I carry every creature I’ve ever taken into me, and every man who’s ever entered me. That’s the power of being human, remember? We carry the river inside us. We carry all of life inside us. You taught me that.”

  Yes, but I will not speak to you any more, like this, Yora warns. I am only the river.

  “I know. But I still hear you. I listen to you day and night. I listen to my own body. I listen to you inside my own body, Yora. Do you hear me?” She’s never spoken such things before. She would never say such things to anyone else.

  The river just roars and whispers, continuing.

  Delilah begins walking beside it, not looking back.

  “Lonely,” says Eva from the doorway, over the dry winter sound of the stream. Lonely doesn’t turn her head. The greenhouse has a chill in it, and is already dark in the late afternoon, but she hasn’t moved for hours. She is watching the sky. She could watch it forever. Every mood, every way it changes—the shifting kingdoms of its clouds, the fur and feathers of them, the ridged golden edges—reminds her of her lover.

  Chelya said it might snow. Lonely keeps wondering about that, watching the grey hardening of the clouds now and their intimate, untouchable joining. She is hungry for snow, remembering that cold joy on her skin that told her she lived in his world, and that he might be near—somewhere—and every animal, every tree, knew him. But she hasn’t gone outside since she arrived. She can’t bear to look at that white peak that takes up the whole eastern distance—that was once her whole future, her whole hope. She can hardly believe it’s still there, just as distant as it used to be, as if her whole journey meant nothing.

  She feels lost, even while contained inside the tiny house. She misses her horse—the Unicorn—that, outside in the fields every day, once anchored her to the reality of her life. The Unicorn knew where they were headed, and why, even when Lonely forgot.

  “Enough feeling sorry for yourself,” says Eva to her now. “Enough waiting to be rescued. We need your help around here.”

  Lonely feels a vague fury rising in her throat, a sure rebellion—you don’t understand!—but it gets tired by the time it reaches her lips. Weary with herself
, she stands somehow and turns, walks obediently toward Eva and past her into the house. She knows Eva is right. Somewhere inside herself that she can’t fully feel, she is aware of the burden she adds to the household. Fawn is so emptied by despair that she spends almost all her time somewhere out in the forest, and even when she’s in the house, she is not really present. She sits in her chair and rocks, staring out the window, or she lies in her bed. Lonely feels guilty when she sees this, as if it’s her own fault. She feels guilty for being here, for being useless, and the heaviness of her own sense of failure makes it even more difficult for her to be useful.

  But as she brings in an armful of wood and begins placing the logs, with a natural intuition for air and space, on the fire, Eva’s voice softens.

  “All right, child, tell me. I know you came here seeking wisdom. What is it you want to know? Or do you have a story you need to tell first?”

  Lonely, struck dumb, sits back and considers the flames.

  “But only if you help,” says Eva. “Pour the water from that pot into the basin. If you wash the sheets, I can start dinner.” Chelya is out cutting ivy branches to bring to the goats, and repairing a hole in their fencing. Rye is out listening to the trees, asking for a message—for news of his son’s safe passage. When Lonely first arrived, there was a tightness to the family in the wake of Kite’s loss: everyone keeping close to the kitchen fire, Chelya nervously looking for ways to help her mother. Now it seems like everyone disperses in the morning as quickly as they can. The house is too small for five people anyway, Lonely feels, and with the added presence of such pain and anxiety, there is barely any room for the people at all. Still, the house smells of them even in their absence. In winter, they bathe more rarely. It takes hours to boil enough water to heat a tub, and they take turns in the same water. Sometimes Lonely can even smell herself. It frightens her almost, this smell, like something calling to her that she’d rather not remember.