Our Animal Hearts

by Dania Tomlinson

  When we finally came out of the trees, the land dropped out of sight and the lake shone in its place. Red pine needles were scattered all along the ground. Llewelyna stepped out of her slippers and had me unbutton her taffeta dress so she only wore her pale chemise, gauzy in the rising sun. She wasn’t one for corsets, and she was clearly naked beneath the thin slip, the most secret parts of her body made into shadows.

  “It is not known whether my body is flesh or fish,” she whispered, quoting some story. Then, without looking back, she took two paces forward, and jumped. I ran to the edge of the cliff and watched her hair blaze up behind her. She disappeared in a white splash. I held my breath until she resurfaced.

  “Come on, jump! It’s brilliant!” she yelled up to me.

  Her pale arms and legs flashed beneath the water. Her hair was flat against her head and made her almost unrecognizable. I put down our towels and slipped off my shoes. I stepped closer to the edge. When I looked down again I saw dark shadows swarm and spiral in the water beneath her.

  “Look out!” I pointed at the water around her. The shadows collected into a solid shape, and a long snake-like figure breached the surface. “The addanc!” I screamed. The monster had slithered somehow from Llewelyna’s story and into our world.

  She kicked her legs in an attempt to lift her shoulders out of the water to see beneath her.

  “Don’t be a fool,” she called up. She wrapped her arms around a boulder and lifted herself out of the lake.

  I trembled at the top of the cliff until she hiked all the way back up. She did not slow to comfort me, but threw her dress on over her head and walked past me and into the forest. I had to run to keep up with her, clutching her forgotten slippers to my chest. We walked home in silence. The back of her dress gaped open and her wet hair dripped down her back. That was the first time I saw Llewelyna’s monster, her addanc, in our own lake.

  * * *

  Azami took my fear of the lake and its monster as a challenge, something to defeat in me. She tugged me to the shore as if this were some kind of game. The water was so still and clear we could see the pebbles far below and fish flicker past our toes. Brown leaves from seasons past clumped along the shore and skimmed the surface beneath the birch trees. It was autumn now, and too cold to swim. Azami pulled her necklace out from the collar of her shirt and placed it over my head. I fingered the warm metal of the tag and the red glass bead. She said it would keep me safe from the lake kami. It had protected the Russian soldier from death. It had kept Azami safe on the boat from Japan.

  The sun was low and bulbous on the mountains. It was the golden hour, as Henry called it, when everything is more vivid because the sun plucks the colours out into the open. A family of mallards floated past and I could see the gold flecks in their blue and green feathers. Azami took my hand. A yellow-veined leaf floated along the water at our feet and left a shadow against the bottom of the lake. Beneath the shadow, the glittery green-blue skin of the lake monster flooded past. I knew Azami could see it too because she clenched my hand so tight it pinched. She dipped her toes into the water and splashed the surface so we couldn’t see the monster beneath us. Then she let go of my hand and lowered herself into the lake. Her skin was goose-pimpled; her feet treaded water in the space just above where the monster had been. She lowered herself deeper, up to her chest, and I had no choice but to follow. Our fingertips were white, still clinging to the edge of the dock. I could feel the cool currents the monster created against the pads of my feet. A chill shot through my arches, so sharp I thought for a moment I had been bitten. Azami grinned. Then she let go and dropped below the surface. I gasped for air and followed after her.

  Beneath the water her cotton shirt fluttered like fins as she swam. Her hair was as fine as ink. We swam into the darker water. Azami seemed set in a certain direction. The air in my lungs was hot and warmed my body. I realized Azami wasn’t swimming away from the monster but chasing after it. The tip of its tail undulated ahead, nearly out of sight. The red bead of Azami’s necklace thumped against my chest and calmed me. The deeper we swam, the larger and slower the fish around us and the cooler the water. Rainbow trout the size and girth of our calves glided past. The whiskered bottom-feeders, and carp so large they must be mammals, gave us little notice. And it was here, past the carp and into the coolest, darkest depths of the lake, that we found a sunken rowboat glittering with coins and broken china. Azami placed a chip of rose-patterned porcelain into my fist and held a triangle of blue glass in her own. Amongst the shadows on the other side of the rowboat we found the skeleton of a horse. Its teeth were clenched and furious against the sand. I went to gasp for breath and my throat burned with the choke of water. I thought I might drown but Azami’s hand was tight on my wrist. Her lips puckered and her eyes went wide. We surfaced in a splash. I was surprised how close we were to the shore. I expected to come out somewhere in the middle of the lake. The greasy rocks against my soles were a relief.

  “Did you see that?” I gasped. Each breath bubbled painfully out of me.

  “Of course I saw.”

  We lay on the shore and shivered in the breeze. Our lungs pumped up and down desperately, like those of two beached fish. The golden hour had passed, and the world was ordinary again. I felt Azami turn to me. She held up her piece of blue glass and I showed her my bit of porcelain. We laughed at our tiny proof.

  “What happened to that horse?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Drown?”

  My ears filled with the horse’s frantic limbs thunderous against the water. “Horses are excellent swimmers,” I said.

  “Kami get very hungry,” Azami said. A chill crept across my legs like tiny bugs and made me itch. Azami put her hand out to collect the necklace. “Told you it’s lucky.”

  I didn’t want to give it back.

  We tied our bits of glass and porcelain to chimes. A few days later, when Azami wanted to gather more of the water-softened porcelain for our wind chimes, she swam from the same spot but could never find the capsized boat and the horse skeleton again.

  That winter Azami came to the tree fort with something stuffed up under her wool coat. She pulled the material up through the collar. The red silk had cherry blossoms and bumblebees embroidered onto it. Before Azami allowed me to touch it, she checked my hands and fingernails for dirt like my grandmother did before church and meals. Then she turned away from me and told me not to look. I peeked through my hands at her bare back as she slipped into the silk. Her skin where the sun hadn’t touched was the colour of buttermilk. She fiddled with a tin of something but I couldn’t see what she was doing. The kimono was far too long for her but she hiked it up and tied it in the back. She used a spoon to secure her hair in a bun. When she turned around her face was powdered white and her lips were dark red. She shivered.

  “Here,” she said and held the cube of beetroot towards me. I leaned in and let her paint my lips with the cool edge of the cut beet.

  * * *

  In return for the stories Azami shared with me, I told her the ones I knew. I told Azami about Coyote and how he and the animal people shot arrows at the sky and waged war against the sky people. I told her how Noah called all the animals onto the ark right before the floods came. She asked how he spoke to the animals and I showed her how to call the deer and the groundhog, and when she doubted even that, I told her Llewelyna spoke to birds, spoke to spirits, to kami, using tongues.

  Azami shook her head. “Not mix like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Kami or Coyote or Noah. Not all.”

  “Why not?”

  “You can’t,” she said, sitting up. “My family has your God now. Father says you must decide. That’s why he threw away the shrine.”

  “I believe in all of them,” I said. I wanted to impress her with my belief.

  Azami frowned at my insistence. “You can’t. You must decide.”

  That night, as we walked home through the cool, dark forest, Azami poin
ted to the North Star. “There’s the first kami,” she said. The North Star was bigger and brighter than any of the others. “Now there are as many kami as there are creatures, but the first kami came into being alone. That, right there, is my God. See? Where is your God, Iris?”

  Of course I had no answer for her.

  * * *

  As winter progressed, and it was too cold to visit in the tree fort, Azami and I were forced to hide away in our homes. I was restless, holed up like a rodent, and my father convinced me to accept Mrs. Bell’s invitation to take piano lessons from her.

  “If you don’t enjoy it then there’s no need to continue,” he said. “But it would be rude not to go at least once.” I agreed only because I wanted to see Angel, the dove.

  Mrs. Bell had opened the door and inhaled suddenly, as if she hadn’t been expecting me in the first place. She took me by the hand and pulled me to the parlour.

  “Your hair, darling.” She ran a hand through my tangled locks. She pulled me into her room, in front of her vanity, and sat me down. There were tinted bottles of perfumes, tins of powder, rouge, pins, and combs neatly arranged on the tabletop. In the reflection of the mirror I could see Mrs. Bell’s bed neatly made with crisp pillows and embroidered blankets. Like most of the women in Winteridge, Mrs. Bell wore her hair in a round pompadour that nearly doubled the size of her head. She arranged my hair in the same way so that when she finished I resembled her in miniature.

  I was a miserable student, not the slightest bit musical. But Mrs. Bell was patient and encouraging. After an hour or so of chords, she turned to me.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  I nodded, made curious by the serious adult tone of her question.

  “Does your father know your mother goes off alone with that Indian?”

  “Henry?”

  “That enormous Indian.” She said this as though Henry’s height made the situation exceedingly worse.

  “They’re friends.”

  “Friends,” she said simply, seemingly satisfied with my response, and went on to teach me scales.

  It was only later, while she fetched biscuits from the kitchen to take with our tea, that I heard her say, as if to herself: “Not proper for a married woman to go off like that. Poor Noah. How shameful.”

  Before Mrs. Bell’s comment, I wouldn’t have imagined Llewelyna and Henry’s relationship as anything but innocent. From then on, I became more aware of the appearance of things, no matter their truths. Mrs. Bell opened a world wherein my mother was a harlot and my father a cuckold, and I hated her for that.

  One day after I watched Mr. and Mrs. Bell leave on the lakeboat, Azami and I slipped into their house through their kitchen window. It was my idea. Azami was terrified. Although she happily rebelled against her father, she was nothing but respectful of strangers.

  Inside the Bells’ home Azami clutched her arms around her stomach, afraid to rub against any of their expensive belongings. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “I want to show you something.” I took Azami to Angel’s cage.

  She shrugged. “A bird?”

  I took the silver chain out of the drawer and opened the door to the cage. I cooed to Angel as I had seen Mrs. Bell do and carefully clipped the chain to the band on the bird’s foot.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Watch,” I said. Angel launched up towards the ceiling. I looked to Azami and was satisfied by the surprise on her face. She held a hand to her mouth. Then her expression changed from shock to horror. Her eyes turned glassy.

  “Please stop,” she said. “That hurts her.”

  “It doesn’t. She likes it,” I said. “Mrs. Bell does this all the time.” I gathered the chain to bring the bird closer.

  “Birds belong in the sky,” Azami said. “Let her free,” she said. Her eyes turned cold. “Undo the chain.”

  I held the dove in my hands. Her body trembled under my palm. Her heart ticked faster than a pocket watch.

  “Do it!” Azami said.

  I undid the clasp from the dove’s foot. Angel soared up, frantic, expecting a limit that wasn’t there. She bumped against the ceiling and then soared towards us. Azami and I had to duck to avoid her flight. Then plonk. The dove slammed into the closed window in the sitting room and bounced onto the velvet loveseat. Azami and I approached the bird carefully. She was on her side, yellow twiggy feet extended and twitching.

  “She’s just stunned,” I said. But it was clear the dove was dead. Azami picked up the bird in her cupped palms and whispered into her feathers. She closed her eyes and gave the dove’s head a little kiss. She carefully placed the bird back in the cage and closed the door.

  As we crawled mournfully out the window of the Bells’ house, we heard the dove coo. “Listen,” I said. The dove cooed again. We scrambled back inside and ran to Angel’s cage. The dove was perched on her pole. She eyed us sideways. I thought of the words Azami had whispered as she nuzzled the bird.

  “Did you do that?” I asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Bring it back to life.”

  Azami smiled. “Of course not.” She picked a white feather from the ground. “For the shrine,” she said.

  * * *

  That spring Azami filled the tree fort with the items her parents had banned from her home and thrown away. I see now it was her re-creation of Japan, but back then I saw it only as a trove of treasure I was permitted limited access to. She found me unworthy, it seemed, to handle her precious things.

  I was desperate to find something sacred, something beautiful to place in the shrine. I opened the bottom drawer of my wardrobe and pulled out one of Saint Francis’s feathers and considered it. It wasn’t enough. I placed the feather back. Then I found the perfect item.

  The next day at the tree fort I poured my marbles from their velvet pouch into my palm for Azami to admire.

  “Rocks?” she said, unimpressed.

  “Marbles. Look.” I held out the blue galaxy marble for her to see. “Isn’t it pretty?”

  Azami shrugged. Hurt by her indifference, I reached to set the marble in the shrine. Azami caught my arm and shook her head.

  “You said I could bring something.”

  “Something sacred.”

  “This is sacred.”

  “Why? Because it’s pretty?”

  I looked down at Azami’s objects and realized my mistake. I needed a story. “It’s a marble from Germany. Handmade.” Azami’s disdain infuriated me. “My father gave it to me. It was his great-great-great grandfather’s. Who is dead. He found it—in a northern forest.”

  “You lie.”

  “I do not.” I reached again to place the marble in the shrine.

  “No.” Azami slapped my arm away hard. “No silly things.”

  I stood up and towered over her, hands on my hips. “Get out!” I said. Azami opened her mouth to say something. “I said get out!” She glanced at her shrine. I slammed my foot on the ground and the entire fort shook terribly. “Leave!”

  Azami stood, her face close to mine. “You are stupid girl,” she said before she disappeared through the hole in the floor. I stood over it, watching her descend. When she got to the ground she glared up at me. I snatched her porcelain elephant from the shrine and threw it down at her. It ricocheted off the lower branches. I leaned against the wall and cried into my sleeve as I listened to her rummage through the leaves and pine needles for the elephant. Then I placed my blue marble in the shrine.

  The next day on my way to the tree fort, I could hear someone following me. I turned, expecting to find Azami, but it was only the silver coyote peeking at me from behind the trees. Llewelyna’s she-wolf. Then something struck my back, hard. I turned to see Azami with a slingshot poised, the lake-blue marble glinting.

  “It broke,” she said. There was a tear in the corner of her eye. “Was my grandmother’s. You understand?” Her hand that held back the elastic piece trembled. Then she let go.

  I woke to th
e taste of iron. There were stones in my mouth. I spat them out in my palm and was horrified to see a tooth covered in blood. I felt around in my mouth with my tongue and found the gap on the bottom, near the back. The marble had struck me in the cheek. It was bruised and tender. Next to me was my pouch of glass marbles, two missing. I groped through the leaves and found the yellow marble but not the blue one.

  When I got to my house, Llewelyna was reading on the front porch. My father was away, overseas. While he was gone Llewelyna often disappeared into the forest or into her books. Her constant reading gave me the sense she was never quite there, but split in two. She lived out multiple lives, one visible, the others hidden, secret. When I was very small, before I could read, I would snatch one of her books and sit next to her, gazing into it, hoping the world inside might absorb me also. We were never to interrupt Llewelyna’s reading. So I wasn’t surprised that as I stood there, blood seeping from the corner of my mouth, she didn’t even look up to acknowledge me.

  7

  It rained for weeks in Winteridge and I was kept shuttered in our house with nothing but the handful of children’s books Henry lent me and endless games of cribbage. One afternoon the rain fell against the roof and porch like stones and Llewelyna and Jacob and I were all sitting on the chesterfield in front of the fireplace in the sitting room, bundled with blankets. Jacob had a fever and so Llewelyna was inclined to be tender. She stroked wet locks from his forehead.

  “I remember it like this,” she began and closed her eyes. “Once there was a maiden, the fairest of the world, I think her name was Creirwy. She lived by the lake Tegid with her family. She was helping her mother gather herbs in the forest to make a stew that would make her ill-favoured brother who was born an idiot, and ugly beyond all means, a wise and intelligent man, for this brother was to inherit her father’s throne.” I expected Jacob to interrupt and protest, but he didn’t. Llewelyna continued. “One day she was walking through the forest, far from her house, when she came upon a rogue magician named Gwion Bach. He had long been exiled from the town and now haunted the black mountains. The maiden hadn’t realized she had wandered into his realm.”