by Mindi Meltz
“No. It doesn’t have one direction like that, or one voice. It’s more like the wind or the sky.”
“Did you have to cross it to come here?”
“Yes.”
“Did you take a boat?”
“No.”
Chelya stares at her, eyes glowing in the dark. “Can you swim that far?”
“No. I can’t.”
“Did you use magic to get across?”
“I guess I did. But I didn’t mean to. Suddenly I was in the sea, traveling under there, at the bottom. I felt very far away from everything.”
“What did you see under there?”
Lonely rolls onto her back and looks at the stars. She imagines the sky is the surface of the sea, with the pins of light struggling to pierce through from far above. “I saw things,” she said, “without voices, things that were very close to me, touching me, and then suddenly gone. I saw things that were only half there, and then darkness. They were creatures, I guess, and plants like the trees, but they seemed to be from another time or place, where I could not reach them even though I was there.”
“Was it very beautiful?”
“Maybe,” says Lonely, feeling sad. “I was too lost to know. I did not know anything then. But Yora took my hand—”
“Yora?”
“Yes, she was a woman, and she pulled me up from the bottom of the sea, and brought me to the shore, and saved me. She gave me my horse.”
“Oh,” breathes Chelya, in a kind of ecstasy. “She is the goddess of the river you bathed in with my mother—the great river of the world, that connects us with the sea. I’ve never seen her! What does she look like?”
“I don’t know. Like you, only grayer and sadder, and like the river, with old, old eyes—older than Eva’s.”
In the morning, Lonely will not be able to believe she spoke of these things. Yet she will feel relieved, to realize that she could name them.
On other nights, when her longing is too much for her, and she must be alone with her own body and imagination, she sleeps in the fields far away from Chelya and Kite. The fields are big, with room for everyone’s solitude and everyone’s secrets.
One night, she sleeps again in the loft, wanting the embrace of home around her. She wakes at dawn to the sound of Fawn’s gentle footsteps down the ladder from the rooftop garden where she and Rye sleep, continuing downward to the ground floor. Then, to her hungry surprise, the hatch opens again, and Rye’s smiling face peers down in greeting.
“Sleep well?” he asks.
She nods, smelling her own sweat under the sheets, and stares at him, unaware that she has not answered. She watches his smile widen, watches the flex of his naked shoulders as he supports himself against the rim of the square hole above her. The hair on his chest comes almost to his neck.
“Have you ever been up here?” he asks her.
“N-no,” she says, finding her breath and her voice, and sitting up sharply with the sheet clutched to her breasts.
“Come on up, if you want, and take a look.” His face disappears. She rises bare from the bed and throws on a dress that Chelya dyed yellow with the heartwood of a mulberry tree. She splashes water on her face from the drinking cup by the bed. She climbs the ladder.
When she reaches the top, Rye’s body jerks a little toward her as if inclined to give her a hand, but she scrambles quickly over the edge and stands. She fears his touch as much as she wants it, though she doesn’t know why. Now they stand beside each other in the morning breeze. Lonely sees the fields in their entirety, the wheat and the gardens, the goats and the chickens, the stream going happily homeward into the forest, the soft mountains and the great, hard, impossible mountain in the distance. She sees Rye’s gentle, patient body out of the corner of her eye, aware of her and waiting for her to see. She sees the silent, tumbled blankets where he and Fawn slept together, the still-warm pockets of their careless folds as distant and unattainable to her as that mountain. She turns her head toward Rye a little more, but he does not look at her.
“You built this house?” she says.
He nods.
She looks out again. The land is still grey with the dawn, but the sun begins to creep across it, with tendrils of hot light that look new and unfiltered as if they will burn upon contact. The work of the day is laid out before them, beautiful but lonely. What does Fawn think, when she stands here beside him? Don’t go, thinks Lonely. Don’t leave yet.
“I’m going fishing,” says Rye. “You want to come with me?”
Lonely cannot get any sound to come. She nods, choking quietly on her breath.
“Only if you want to,” says Rye. “It’s quiet out there, peaceful. I just thought— I mean you might— Well, if you want to come, I’m leaving in a moment. I’ll be downstairs.”
He leaves her standing there like a leaf, shivering in the sun, smiling with tearful joy at his awkwardness and the reciprocal hunger it might imply.
After a series of breathless moments and a breakfast that Lonely cannot remember, they are walking into the forest.
Rye names the birds that are singing. “Song sparrows,” he says, after a song that bounces and twinkles in the high air. And “robin,” after a pretty lilt upward and downward, feminine and full-breasted. “Titmouse,” after a high piercing squeak.
Lonely thinks of music, of the songs that Rye sings—their patterns familiar the way the wind is familiar, the way her bed of earthen things was familiar in the tower though she’d never felt the earth. There are songs everyone knows, she thinks. There are ways we know each other, languages we recognize. For the birdsong does not make her lonely today.
Her hands brush the yellow dress as she walks, sometimes trotting behind Rye to keep up. He points out the mourning dove with her bobbing, owlish coos. He tells her of the nuthatch with his cynical rasp, who can walk vertically down trees and speak the language of chickadees, who are tiny, brave, and curious, and whose mating cries are a faint off-key echo of lazy summer. The cardinal, a sacred bird made of fire, sends up high explosive notes that afterward come peeling downward like shooting stars.
At the river, Lonely sits on a mossy stone and watches the reflection of Rye’s bare torso in the sun. She imagines touching the solid vessel of his chest, smelling the scent caught in the web of brown animal hair over his heart—hair in places where Dragon was smooth and shiny. His muscle rolls beneath his clay-earth skin as he leans back and winds his arm, and the line soars over the water and falls. He’s wearing loose pants rolled up to his thighs. His dark hair is curly and damp, his beard heavy, his face a magical animal. Lonely sees his shoulders drop back and relax, sees his hips settle, as the bait falls into the water.
She has been watching him for so long. She has learned to watch him even without looking at him. She watches him at the dinner table without turning her head. She pauses where she can just see him through the cracks in his workshop behind the house, pretending to listen to Chelya’s talk, as carefully and roughly, forcefully and exactly, he hammers pieces of trees into shapes. She watches him in the fields, the twisting sling of his body with the scythe through the grass. She watches him kiss Fawn goodbye and hello.
“Kite used to come with me,” Rye says thoughtfully. “Fishing,” he clarifies, clearing his throat. “But he doesn’t often, any more.”
Lonely tears through her mind in search of some answer to continue the conversation. There is sadness and a sense of importance in Rye’s voice. But she doesn’t know what to do with that. “I don’t think Kite likes me,” she blurts, because it is the only thought that comes.
She cannot see Rye’s face, but she can hear the smile in his answer. “He’s only a little shy,” he says with a gentleness that makes Lonely ashamed of her rude words. “He’s never had a pretty girl come live with us before. He’s hardly ever met anyone outside our family.”
These w
ords take all of Lonely’s voice away for several moments. But while she struggles, Rye continues, his words quicker now. “My daughter feels a connection with you, though. And Fawn, too—and that is something.”
Again, Lonely tries to think of what to say. She bows her head and succumbs in frustration to her own wordlessness.
“You traveled a long way to come here, didn’t you?” says Rye, casting the line again.
Lonely nods, though he cannot see her. “It felt like a long way.”
“Did you meet any other people in the mountains?”
“No,” says Lonely. “Not in the mountains.”
“What is the land like, between the mountains and the sea?”
“There is desert where nothing grows, and then desert with giant stones in different shapes, and caves, and then desert with a river, full of green. Then there are fields.” But that doesn’t describe it at all. Lonely wants to talk about the people she met, and her loneliness and her longing, and the painful beauty, but she doesn’t see a way in.
“What animals did you see out there?”
“Vultures and a dog. A lizard and a snake. Butterflies, hawks. Birds like here, that talked to each other all day long. I wish I knew what they were saying, but I couldn’t understand them like other animals. I guess they were calling to each other, not to me,” she says helplessly.
Rye thinks a moment. “Sometimes they are calling to each other,” he says. “But sometimes more than that. I think when they sing—just sit in a tree and sing so beautifully!—they’re talking about themselves. They’re describing themselves to the world, you know? Saying this place is mine, and this is me, beautiful and strong, powerful enough to have all that I want and to defend what is mine! That’s how they attract those they want to them and keep the ones they don’t want away. Listen, and you’ll hear it. You can’t translate it into our kind of words, or it wouldn’t say the same thing.”
He sounds so certain about this, even proud. Lonely has never heard this boyish joy in his voice before. Unconsciously she leans forward, her whole body smiling, wanting to taste it. She imagines that her own being could be so definite, so easily expressed as the birds—that just by saying with clarity who she was, she could have all that she desired.
But there is Rye, standing still in the water, and here is she, folded small around a stone, and he does not look at her.
Then there are no more words for a long time. Lonely listens to Rye’s silence, and the way the birdsong fits inside it. She listens to the wind, and it seems to her now that the wind knows the water where Rye casts his line more intimately than it knows her, and that it winds around Rye with tenderness, protecting him from Lonely’s desire.
“What bird is that?” she asks once, listening to a few watery trills from some deep shadows far off, haunting, like riffs out of the flute music Moon played from beneath the waterfall.
“Thrush,” says Rye in a soft voice that does not interrupt it, and the word is sensual; Lonely can hear his tongue slipping between his teeth as he says it. “That’s one of my favorite calls. I hear them in the dark forest at dusk or when the sky clouds over before a rain. They’re like calls to another world, don’t you think?”
Lonely nods, though he cannot see her, and clutches the moss in her fists.
Rye laughs a little. “I almost forgot you were there. Being out here, my mind gets to be like the fish, swimming around down there in a dream.” Then he turns to her, and she remembers his face all over again.
“You can go,” he says, “whenever you like. I mean, you don’t have to stay. I’ll be here a long time.”
Lonely shrugs, trembling. “I don’t know the way,” she says in a small voice, hoping this is reason enough.
Rye, who was preparing to fling out his line again, puts it down on the shore and comes toward her. So easily he comes and stands beside her, then crouches beside her, then—before she can even take it in, before she can even steady herself to survive it—leans his face very close to hers and points, looking into the forest.
“There,” he says, and she can feel his breath. “You see that? It isn’t a cleared path, but if you rest your eyes on it for a bit, you’ll see how there’s a path there, that we made. You’ll see how the leaves are all turned where we passed, and how the light concentrates, and there’s a broken branch—see? It’s not far that way, if you follow the path we came by.”
But Lonely’s eyes are closed. She is holding her breath and doesn’t care if he knows it. She can smell the hearts of trees, the sweat-hunger, and her father, and smoke and skin and sun all at once. “But—” she says.
He starts to look at her, seems to notice the closeness of her face as if for the first time, and stands abruptly.
“Can I stay?” she says, looking up at him, scared. “Is it all right? Do you mind?”
Rye smiles and ducks his head, and he starts to walk away, but in his face she sees something sweet that she will not be able to forget. “Nah,” he says, and there is irony in his voice. “I don’t mind.”
Then he walks back out, throws his line, and becomes silent and far away.
Lonely cannot sit still. It is all she can do not to cry out. She moves toward the water. “Can I go in?” she asks, thinking it might disturb the fish.
“I don’t mind,” says Rye again.
She wades into the soft river. Every motion feels heavy. She knows that Rye is watching her, and knowing that burns her secretly from the inside out. She thinks of Yora and closes her eyes. I want to be beautiful, like the river. I want him to search inside of me, the way he searches in the river for his food. The water is so cool, and the day so hot, that she keeps walking in, the yellow dress shining around her and then swallowed whole into the darkness. She dips herself in with a splash and turns around, rising a little with laughter, the cloth clutching her breasts.
Rye does not laugh and does not look at her, but she knows that he sees her. She is right here, in front of him, not far from the rippled path of the line.
I want you, she could say, and rise up with the wetness all over her. She could lift the dress away from her body, and she would be the river, and she would sweep him in. She sees the clenched determination in his face, the weak kindness in his stance. She feels the hard tower in her own spirit, the ice of it and the silver song of it, and her father’s power running cold and greedy in her blood. She feels her own beauty. She could do anything.
“Thank you for taking me home with you, Rye” she says, feeling the courage to speak his name for the first time. “Thank you for saving me.”
Rye looks at her then, his eyes just turning, without moving his head, and she is shocked by the sadness she sees there. She feels instant remorse, though she doesn’t know why.
“I’m sorry,” she says, rushing her words. “I was so lonely. I was going to die if you hadn’t found me.” Tears bubble out from beneath her eyes, unplanned, and all her power is gone. She wants to drop into the water, cover her head beneath it, but she is ashamed to move. She feels her body freeze beneath the wet dress. His eyes remain focused on hers. But they are heavy with some sorrow she does not understand, and they want to fall upon her, and she would do anything to lie down under the weight of that gaze and let it press her into the water and the deep earth beneath…
“Why do you call yourself Lonely?” he asks her very quietly, not moving a muscle in his face. “Why do you call yourself that?”
Lonely doesn’t answer, only stands still and lets the tears spill over. They are the only part of her that moves, and the water moves around her, deep and slow, and she sees the forbidden tenderness in his eyes as he watches her, and she drinks it and drinks it as if she could never be filled.
“Would you believe that I am a goddess?” she murmurs finally.
He nods. “I would believe it.”
“Did you know, when you saw me?”
> “When I saw you, I saw—” He looks away, shakes his head. “I could not stop myself,” he says so softly that she almost doesn’t hear.
“You thought I was beautiful,” she says. For the first time, she feels this beauty, not as Dragon saw it, nor as her father saw it, nor as the world, perhaps, saw it. She feels it living in someone’s heart, growing there, something given.
“Yes,” he says.
She thinks the look on his face will break her, and yet she, too, cannot stop herself. “Are you ever lonely?” she says.
He looks back at her for one more moment, his eyes sharpening. “Yes, sometimes.”
“Isn’t it…hard to be lonely?”
She waits for his answer. She waits a long, long time, hovering in nothingness over the abyss between their voices, terrified but unable to turn back. Don’t you want me? she is asking over and over in her mind, and she knows that he hears her. She knows.
“Some things in life are hard,” he answers finally, but his voice is hard now, too, and rough, and he has turned his face away. “It’s hard when we don’t have enough rains, or too many rains, and we go hungry. It’s hard when we don’t get to see the family we love in far places. It’s hard when our children grow away from us. It’s hard to see other human beings tear apart the land all around us, tear up the mountains. Some things are hard. But because something is hard, or painful, doesn’t mean it needs to be fixed. Sometimes it can’t be changed, and doesn’t need to be. It just makes us what we are.”
She stares at him.
“No, I am not lonely,” he says now, shaking his head again, as if speaking to himself. “I love my family more than my life. I have everything.”
“But I am,” says Lonely. “And I—” But she cannot say it. She knows it is wrong to say it. “I am lonely,” she finishes quietly again, hanging her head.
Rye nods, pulling in his line. “There is a time for that, too,” is all he says. Then he begins to wind the line and put the bait away, and she knows there will be no more of this conversation.