Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  She’s overcome a lot of trials out here in the nothingness. The terror of hunger before she began to trust the dreams of animals. Climbing up and down the cliff to the pine forest, even when her body pained her, and dragging the bodies back home. Thirst, the years when the rains never came, and especially the year of her first drought, when she didn’t know enough yet to prepare, when she didn’t recognize the signs and later had to follow the empty path of the dead river up toward the mountains until she nearly collapsed. She got sick sometimes in the beginning, before she learned how to store the meat properly, but to her surprise she survived, though at the time she was too exhausted and dehydrated from vomiting to feel relieved. Also there had been loneliness. A little.

  But none of these triumphs—the obstacles she’s overcome—really matter. Because when she lets herself think about the past, she knows that it has never stopped hovering on the brink of her consciousness, surrounding her, just as clear as the day she walked away from it. The pain of her loneliness among people, and the pain of losing the people she lost, and the droning emptiness in the apartment where she grew up are all more real to her still than anything she’s suffered in the desert.

  The animals she’s killed and that have saved her. The rains and the floods, the river and the drought, the heat and the winter, the snake and the fox, Moon coming and going. All of these things flow together and have become part of her.

  But she remembers that silence in the apartment when she used to come home in the middle of the night: a silence that was not real silence, but a fake silence stretched taut over fear and fury that, when released, would be too loud for a home. Her mother hissed that Delilah must not bother her father, for he was struggling again and must have his space, and she didn’t care where Delilah had been. It didn’t matter how many days she’d been gone. It didn’t matter that her father was only drunk or high and completely delusional; it didn’t matter that their supposed respect for him was really fear. Mira must go to him, because she understood that magic he worked with. Delilah must make herself gone. She’d only come back for a change of clothes anyway, and maybe a little food, if the kitchen seemed safe.

  She remembers the sadness in Mira’s voice when she spoke to her for the first time in months—and for the last time ever, though Delilah didn’t know that then. Delilah had just seen Moon in the alley. She stumbled into their bedroom and found Mira, as usual, on the floor in a corner, curled up in a ball and gazing up at the dim light from the window. Delilah didn’t even know why she’d come home. Maybe she needed to see Mira. Maybe she believed then, somehow, desperately, that her sister was the one other person in this world who could potentially love her.

  Mira turned to her and said, “Go back to him.”

  Delilah put her hands on her hips. Mira was only nine years old, but somehow she knew things she shouldn’t be able to know. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Delilah said, more confused than angry.

  But Mira said, her voice calm and sane, “Lilah, go back. You need him.” And Delilah didn’t go.

  She remembers after their father’s death, how Mira started screaming. How Delilah thought she was possessed, even though she didn’t believe in such things. After that, Mira never spoke again.

  She remembers every girl she beat up at school, who called her sister names. But her sister wouldn’t look at her any more. She wouldn’t eat the food Delilah brought her from the dining hall. When Delilah shook her, sometimes, she was like an empty sack.

  Delilah remembers that. That feeling of hopeless flesh. She couldn’t bear it. She had to go out and fuck some boy. She had to feel someone’s life force inside her, driving inside her, to the point of pain.

  When they took Mira away, Mira was eleven years old. She didn’t fight at all. Delilah thought she seemed relieved. But Delilah fought. She fought until they had to restrain her, until they tied her arms behind her back so hard her shoulder came out of place and wouldn’t work quite right ever again.

  Delilah remembers all these things and more—each one in detail, each one with edges sharp and colors blinding. The color of the blonde girl’s hair, the color of her lipstick. The color of blood on Mira’s arms. The color of her father’s eyes, green on fire. The color of her mother’s flushed cheeks as she prepared dinner in a frenzy and tried to soothe him at the same time. The colors of the fire where Delilah burned all of Mira’s few things, once she decided she was done trying to find her; there was nowhere else to try, and she was going to walk away from this and never look back. The color of the brick building that was the school and that absence of color inside it; and the rainbow colors beneath her own black skin as she stared at her own hands to keep herself sane—to keep herself from scratching her eyes hungrily over the stiff shirts of the boys at the desks in front of her, wanting to tear off their clothing, wanting to make them scream, wanting to drown them in her own trapped fury.

  All of these memories still clear to her, their details sharper than her own knives. As if, when she left the City behind, she’d frozen them all in little packages along the hidden vertebrate of her spine, and they remained there—and because they were frozen, they were never able to decay. They were perfectly preserved. Possibly, they are even still alive.

  She lies on the stone floor of her cave, trying to be still inside. Remembering Dragon, and not understanding this longing she suddenly feels to be held, though not necessarily by him.

  She tries to understand why she feels so confused. Maybe it’s the absence of pain in this moment—pain that has, for so long, reminded her constantly of her body. Is it possible that she misses it? It doesn’t matter, for she knows it will come back. It must. She can remember that tension behind her shoulder blades like the tension of a bow before she releases the arrow. When Dragon made her come, the arrow had shot, and she’d killed something, but she doesn’t know what it was. She knows only that she understands desire now. It is not a need to be filled but a need to release something—a need to express something held inside.

  Perhaps because of her night with Dragon in a place surrounded by water, Delilah’s dreams that day are filled with desert fish, the kind that live in the river and stay alive during the mud of the dry season when only tiny pools remain. In the dream, Mira is one of them, her eyes shining cold. At the same time those eyes are the eyes of the oldest woman in the world.

  Mira talks to her more in this one dream than she spoke in the entire last few years that Delilah spent with her. “The desert fish are the keepers of time,” she says, her voice coming without sound into Delilah’s mind. “They keep the water until someday the desert becomes ocean again. Someday everything will be ocean again.”

  “I’ll be dead by then,” says Delilah, as if Mira will not also die, as if Mira is no longer part of this category of the living.

  “You don’t know anything about age,” replies Mira. “You don’t know why you came to the desert. You came because you were seeking your elders. We have no elders where we come from. We have no wisdom. But I was taken where the wise are taken. I was taken to where they keep them, under the sea.”

  Then—because it’s a dream, you understand—Mira becomes me, the Unicorn.

  Foaming in the waves, my white hair is the white hair of age, of death, of the truth you forbid yourselves because you know you are not ready.

  And Delilah wakes, her sister’s name a silent word forever caught in her mouth, and her own life feels meaningless.

  Her sister would be eighteen years old now.

  And the desert wasn’t the answer after all.

  Fawn and Lonely still speak very little, and Lonely never speaks of her past. But in the quiet work of each day, in the peace of Fawn’s nearness, Lonely holds conversations with herself. She understands things she didn’t understand before. Like about Dragon. How his body moved so fast and hard, reaching for her most secret places from the moment they first touched, and ho
w she simply wasn’t ready for that. How she had to tell him to stop. How she had to leave. How she did not love him, after all. He wasn’t the one. It seems very simple now.

  The stories Eva has given her, however, are not simple, nor is the meaning of Lonely’s dreams or her longing for the mountain. Even the story of the Dream People only confuses her further. For even if they are real, even if she could find them, it was her own father who destroyed them. What if it is this terrible secret that keeps her separated, forever, from true love?

  In the mornings, Chelya’s laughter as they feed the animals is a relief from such questions. Lonely’s hands in the earth of the gardens are real to her, and meals in the grass and at the heavy oak table are real, and the warm closeness at dinnertime is real. The family seems easier and easier in her presence. She could almost pretend she is one of them. It is less often now that she goes to her horse in the fields, but when she glimpses him sometimes, he seems happy. And though she tries not to think of it, she begins to catch Rye watching her again, turning her body every time to wet gold fire.

  One evening it’s still hot by the time Fawn starts to make dinner, and Lonely is alone in the fields, finishing the weeding of two last rows of vegetables. It hasn’t rained in some time, and the saucy sun-dry scent of new tomato plants fills her pores. She takes off the shirt she was wearing and ties it around her waist, leaving her breasts bare, because no one is around and the sun is making her dizzy. She’s wearing an old pair of Kite’s shorts. Kite and Chelya have gone into the woods to gather some herbs that Eva requested, and Rye is either not back from the woods yet or he is helping Fawn with the fire or the water or the cleaning of the meat for dinner.

  For once she isn’t thinking. The heavy sunlight flattens out her thoughts. The focus of discerning the weeds from the new sprouts and working the tougher ones up from the soil with a shovel, and the tenderness she feels for them as she tosses them into the sun to shrivel and die, takes all her concentration. It feels good to her, this knowing exactly what to do, not having to wonder, knowing that what she’s doing is necessary and useful. This is what it must be like for a family, moon after moon, year after year, living inside this rhythm. Lonely is too restless for such an endless routine, but in this moment she doesn’t know it. Only the ideal of it sits happily in her mind, as she fantasizes about staying forever.

  When she stands up to stretch her knees, Rye is standing beside her, holding out a jug of water. Her surprise makes her laugh, but he doesn’t laugh back.

  “You have to remember to drink water,” he tells her, still holding out the jug until she takes it. She remembers her bare breasts when she sees the reflection of her nakedness in his eyes, though he does not look down.

  “You’re always rescuing me,” she says softly, to cover the embarrassment of her own excitement.

  This time he smiles back, and she feels a little easier. She tilts the jug to her mouth and drinks, aware of his unwavering gaze and the openness of her own moving throat. Carefully, she places the jug on the ground and brings her hands to her mouth, wiping her lips with her thumbs.

  “Can I help?” he asks.

  “Don’t you have to help Fawn?”

  “I will. But you have a lot left here.” He steps over the row and begins weeding opposite her, and so she kneels again and keeps working—their heads bent toward each other close. She wonders if she should put her shirt back on, but that would only draw attention to her nakedness, and also she’s too hot. And also—

  “I haven’t talked with you for a long time,” he says. “I wanted to ask you, why were you so quiet when my brother’s family was here?”

  He doesn’t say, Why were you crying? and she can’t decide if she is grateful for that or not.

  “I’ve never been around so many people.”

  “Yeah,” he says, and there is a dense pause between his words. “We aren’t either, any more. Hardly ever, I mean.”

  She hungers after the hint of dissatisfaction in his voice. Though only a moment ago she fantasized about being a part of this family, living on this land forever, now she must stop herself from imagining that Rye will leave everything behind, and travel with her into—

  “Where are you headed, Lonely?” he asks, as if he can read her thoughts.

  “To that high mountain,” she says, choked, unable now to say the reason. “Because I have to.”

  “And what would you do if you didn’t have to? What would you do if you had no obligations to anyone, if you could do anything?”

  Lonely looks up, surprised. She had thought he would ask more about where she was going and why, and she would have to explain. Instead he just jumped right over all of that, into a place she’s never been, never even looked at, never even known was there.

  “I—I don’t know,” she stammers. She sits still in order to think. Rye doesn’t say anything. She watches his dark, bent head, his dutiful attention to the earth and his invisible attention to her voice, and loves him. “I never thought about it before. Maybe I’d wander around the world, and see every place there is to see, all the different landscapes, all the different animals, and hear all their stories.”

  He smiles, not looking up.

  “Where have you—” she begins.

  “Can you talk to animals?” he interrupts. “Can you understand what they’re saying?”

  “Yes. Can’t you?”

  “Not the way you can, I imagine.”

  Lonely likes his words: I imagine. It excites her to imagine his imagination. She senses that originally he asked her a question that he was really asking himself, and she wants to know his own answer. At the same time it moves her that someone should ask questions just about her, not about where she came from.

  “Are you happy here?” Rye asks.

  “Are you?” answers Lonely.

  Rye smiles a different smile now, one that makes Lonely ache. Still he does not look up, nor does he answer. The look on his face makes her sad, as if there are things he will never tell her, no matter how long he knows her. That look is the separation between family and not family, that can never be crossed. Then out of nowhere, as if explaining something that everyone’s been wondering about, he says, “Fawn used to be different, you know. She was more free when we first fell in love. She wasn’t so afraid of things. But the City’s been creeping up on us, little by little, and it’s too much for her. It’s like pure evil to her, like the end of all things. Her fear is so big that even when she doesn’t speak it, the whole family feels it. When you first came here, we all felt her fear of you. She’s afraid of anything otherworldly, strangers, the unknown, or anything magical—because it was magic that created the City. She didn’t used to be like this. Part of her has been, I don’t know, shutting down inside. Putting itself away somewhere, where it’s safe. Somewhere even I can’t go.”

  “But she loves you,” says Lonely, who tastes tears in her mouth, and wants to wrap Rye in her arms. She feels afraid of her own heartbeat and the way even her skin seems to listen, when bare.

  “Of course,” he says. “I’m not saying we don’t love each other as much as ever. But I remember she used to be more open to me. In her whole being, not just her heart but her thoughts, her spirit, her body. You know?” He looks up at Lonely, and Lonely’s mouth waters, and she swallows but it doesn’t help. She nods, her body frozen like the day she stood in the river and waited and waited for him to look at her. Now he is looking. And she looks away.

  “Am I embarrassing you?” he asks.

  “No.” She can feel his desire like an avalanche he’s holding back, so much heavier than she is, making him sad, making him angry. Like Dragon’s desire, like her father’s sorrow—these feelings men have, so heavy, too much for them to bear. Maybe he holds it back because he knows that, after all, it will be too much for her—to have what she thought she longed for. Because she feels afraid now, and she changes
the subject.

  “Why does Jay look at Fawn like that?” she asks.

  “Like what?”

  “You know.”

  He breathes out, a little laugh, or something like it, and goes back to his weeding. “Jay was in love with Fawn once,” he says casually. “Maybe he still is.”

  Lonely stares.

  “Funny, isn’t it,” Rye says, “the way love criss-crosses around like that, never respecting the boundaries we’ve drawn, the decisions we’ve made?”

  “But—”

  “I didn’t steal her away from him. I just came back one year, and she had become a woman, and we fell in love. All that time Jay lived right there with her. He could have told her how he felt. But he never did. And he regretted that for a long time. He regretted it for years, before he and Willow finally became lovers. He didn’t want anyone else. He didn’t tell me for a long time either, so I didn’t know why he hardly ever visited, why he turned cold. I thought he was angry with me for not being there when our mother died, for leaving him alone with the farm and our father, who was also dying. When he finally told me, we had a good long talk about it. I think that’s what finally freed him, to move on.”

  In his words Lonely hears his younger self, someone headstrong and more powerful, more confident than his brother, someone who did what he wanted and took what he wanted, and didn’t feel sorry. Because that confidence is tempered by his tenderness, it doesn’t seem cruel to her. Instead it excites her. Instead it makes her lean back and stare, wishing he would look at her again, until finally he does.

  “What?” he says.

  “Nothing.”

  He smiles. She thinks he’s breathing a little harder, though the sun is sinking now and it isn’t that hot any more. “So how was it—how was Jay looking at Fawn? I didn’t notice, actually.”

  “Like this,” Lonely answers, knowing her words won’t surprise him. “Like the way you’re looking at me.”

  This time she can’t look away. Rye is leaning forward over the plants, on his hands and knees. He takes her jaw in his hand and kisses her.