Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Yora’s face, a faceless face, like the contours of a waterfall. Fawn falls and falls through herself, down beneath the basement, beneath the earth itself, down into the deep liquid of the earth, down to the center of the world. In a sea of tears she rises up, feels the surface of the earth like her own skin, feels it boil under the hard floors of the City, feels it tingle with the growth of trees. Like the Earth feeling the footsteps of her children, she feels her own son’s footsteps walking his long, faraway path over the land, over the pavement, over the land again—each footstep burning her, wounding her, cutting her as the actions of people cut the earth, and yet she cannot bear to live without this pain: this pain brings her joy. Simply to feel the light, innocent manliness of those perfect young footsteps. Simply to feel his path over her body wherever he goes, even knowing that he does not think of her, knowing that he travels beyond her and forgets her, knowing that he does not—has never—belonged to her.

  When she comes upstairs in the morning—the sun beginning to rise earlier again—she makes the fire without thinking and milks the goats before Chelya gets up. When her daughter finds her in the kitchen, she touches Fawn’s hand, tentatively, as if that hand might burn. “Ma?” It almost makes Fawn start crying again. She draws her daughter into her, and silently holds her. She feels her daughter’s proud, strong breasts against her own, feels her sturdy frame, taller than her own, and feels the knowing womanness inside her. What a miracle, that she, Fawn—knowing nothing, still afraid of thunder—could have nurtured the growth of such a beautiful, capable, wise young woman! She kisses her daughter’s face.

  “I love you, Ma,” says Chelya nervously.

  “I love you, too,” are the first words that Fawn speaks on this morning. The reality of the morning strikes at her with its cords of light through the windows, and she is unsure now how real her determination is. “Chelya,” she says with all the firmness she can muster, “Willow asked me to visit her old farm with her. She has asked me more than once now. I should go. I feel it is time now, today. Come with me?”

  Chelya nods. She doesn’t ask why Willow wants to go, or why she asked Fawn to go with her, and not Jay.

  Before they leave, Fawn goes to her mother and asks her to tell Rye, asks her to be with him today, to keep him company, and to help him understand why they had to go without him.

  They take both horses. As they ride, Fawn tries not to think. She tries to focus on the new red buds, the new spring angle of the morning sun—its newborn joy, as if this year were the first year ever made. But she can’t keep out the memories of the last time she stood in the place where they are going. Blue, only five and a half years old, came riding on a galloping horse all the way to Fawn’s home, his dark face tense and frightened. “My mother says to come. They’re taking our home.” Then, realizing it, he began to cry. But when they arrived, Fawn did nothing. What could she do? She stood rooted to the earth, holding Blue’s tight hand, Willow’s mother crying on her shoulder, while Rye and Jay, Willow and Willow’s father spoke first gently and respectfully, then angrily, with the men there. While Jay threw his first punch, while the strange men took out their guns, while Willow wept, while the strange men turned from her, and while Willow and Rye carried Blue’s wounded father away, Fawn stood there rooted, as if she could be rooted, as if her roots were strong enough to hold that land to her body—but they were not strong enough. Not even the roots of the trees were strong enough. And there is a road cutting through now, all the way up the mountainside. The big machines are still coming.

  To calm herself, she remembers Chelya, riding in respectful, wondering silence in front of her on the thin deer path. She tries to concentrate; between the blinding drowning of all the losses, she tries to concentrate on remembering her own daughter, and who she is. What is happening in Chelya’s life? Does she miss her brother? Fawn thinks of all the evenings that Chelya has sat whispering with Eva, or stayed hidden away with Eva in the loft, while Rye finished doing the dishes and Fawn sat alone, staring into nothing. She thinks how, behind her grief, she envied her own mother for the closeness she shared with Chelya, a closeness Fawn had lost.

  “How are you, Chelya?” she says now.

  “I’m okay, Ma.”

  “Are you?”

  Her daughter’s profile before her does not change, but Fawn sees something: a little shake of her head, a tightening between her shoulders.

  “Are you lonely?” Fawn tries again. Because she remembers now that Chelya has broken with her love, the one she used to go to in the forest. Though at first Fawn was relieved, she has seen the sadness this brought, though Chelya never spoke of it. She wants her daughter to talk to her about it, but she doesn’t even know how to ask. What does she know of that kind of romance? Rye was her first and only love, and he continues to stand by her to this day.

  “Sometimes,” says Chelya.

  Fawn tries to think what to say. “I miss you. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”’

  Fawn bites her lip. Sometime soon, when they are home, both facing each other before the fire, she will ask the right questions somehow. She will say, Please tell me this story. I want to hear your story. I want to hear all the parts I’ve missed. Please. Will Chelya refuse her? Is it too late?

  “Chelya,” she says.

  “Yes.” Not angry, not cold.

  “Do you long for it, too? Do you long for what Kite longed for, to see the City, to see the world?”

  She sees Chelya shake her head. “No. Not like that. Don’t worry, Ma. I won’t leave.”

  “No,” says Fawn, embarrassed at the implication of her own fear. “I only want to know, do you long for it?”

  “Well, I’m curious, I guess. I will like to hear Kite’s story when he comes home. But I want to be here. Everyone, everything I love is here.”

  But at the mention of Kite coming home—upon hearing this amazing statement of simple faith—Fawn begins to cry, hard enough that it takes all her effort to keep silent. This goes on for a long time, and she keeps it silent, though she feels that Chelya knows, because she can see the stiffness in Chelya’s shoulders, and the girl says nothing. Finally, when she can speak again, Fawn says, “But what do you long for, Chelya?”

  Chelya has to think about this. “I don’t know. For us all to be happy and together again, I guess.”

  “But don’t you long for, I don’t know, something more? Your own husband maybe, your own family?”

  “But that will come,” Chelya says. “It will come when I’m ready.”

  “How do you have such faith? Where did you learn such faith?” Fawn thinks of the world through Chelya’s eyes: the butterflies in summer, the otters laughing over the banks, the goats galloping up to her, fruit falling into her hands in ecstasy. It’s a kind of beauty she used to be able to imagine, in flashes, particularly when Chelya was a little girl.

  But Chelya says, “I learned it from you.”

  And while Fawn is still reeling from this information, Chelya continues: “You were always calm, always sure. When I hurt myself, when I feared the spring would never come, when I couldn’t bear to live another day hungry and the winters lasted so long, or when the rains came flooding and we missed the sun so much, still you were always peaceful—you made me feel like everything would be okay. You never panicked. You never grabbed at the future.”

  Fawn shakes her head. Chelya seems already a grown woman, able to articulate all this about her past, able to look back on her childhood and make sense of it, as if she can take care of herself now and doesn’t need Fawn to do it any more. How strong she is! Like Eva. “But now it’s you,” Fawn says, sighing, “who has been there for me. I have not been there for you in this way since Kite left. It is you who have been there for me,” she emphasizes.

  Ahead of her, Chelya shrugs. “We’re family,” she says. “It’s the same thing.”

  When they ar
rive, Willow is turning the spring earth with Jay, hilling up the half-frozen garden beds with sharp shovels. When Fawn tells Willow why she has come, Willow stares at her for a long time, and then, finally, almost smiles.

  “I’ll go and get Thea’s pouch.”

  “But is it safe to bring her?” asks Fawn.

  “I don’t know.” Willow shrugs. “But I can’t leave her that long without nursing.” Then, in response to Fawn’s frightened eyes, “You and Chelya can go ahead of us and make sure no one is around.”

  They tie the horses at the house and walk.

  Chelya walks on the other side of Willow, making faces at Thea, whose mouth hangs open—a tiny sweet darkness—and who talks occasionally and loudly without words. Blue and Morgan love to watch over her and tease her; they didn’t want Willow to take her away. “Ma, leave her here! We’ll take care of her.” Fawn couldn’t bear to look at them. She saw their eager faces and thought of nothing but Malachite.

  “Jay says they dug up the earth and put in walls of concrete, plastic tubing, cleared a bunch more trees,” Willow tells Fawn and Chelya. “They put in the foundation. He’d always see some big machine there—one of the yellow ones, resting its claws against the ground. But then something changed. They stopped building. In fact they tore down part of what they’d started. And then something else began that I think is much worse, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Aaah yaaahaaa!” cries Thea, her eyes focused vaguely ahead through Willow’s blowing hair, her arms and legs waving from her pouch. “La la la,” says Chelya back, softly but distractedly, her eyes on Willow’s face.

  “They’re drilling into the earth,” says Willow. “I mean with a drill bigger than that tree, and deeper—much, much deeper than a foundation or a water ‘system’ would ever go. And I don’t know why. I guess they’re looking for something, the same thing they were looking for inside all those other mountains that they tore apart. They thought it wasn’t here in these mountains, but now they think it is, or they’re desperate. Jay says it’s far more valuable to them than a home, whatever it is.”

  “What’s more valuable than home?” asks Fawn, but she says it to her feet, to herself, knowing that Willow has no answer. “Something so strange is happening in the world.”

  “I know,” Willow surprises her by responding. “My parents say their grandparents told them about a time like this one a long time ago, when all the weather got strange, and the seasons came early and late, and the river had a funny sound in it. They said there were great storms then, in the heart of the world. But they didn’t hurt anyone then, because the City wasn’t there. It was only those other people, the first people who lived there then. They knew what to do to survive it.”

  Fawn is thinking hard. She can hear the dry leaves rattling, harsh and insistent. “I have felt something.” She nods quietly. “I have felt it. I knew that something was coming.”

  “But,” Chelya breaks in, “what are you saying? That these storms are coming again? What kind of storms? And why in the heart of the world?”

  Willow shakes her head. “Why was the City built in the world’s heart?” she asks back. “I don’t know, Chelya. But I think your mother is right. Some big changes are coming soon. Doesn’t Eva speak of it, too? A time when their structures will begin to fall, and there will be so much destruction and chaos—” She sighs.

  “But why are you so calm about this?” Chelya interrupts again. “Kite might be there!”

  At the mention of his name, Fawn looks sharply at her daughter. It seems like the first time that someone in the family besides herself has truly broached a fear for him. She takes Chelya’s hand.

  “He’s going to be okay,” she shocks herself by saying, giving Chelya’s hand a squeeze. And she is even more surprised when Chelya allows her hand to be squeezed and does not pull away. Chelya bows her head without saying more, as if Fawn’s simple, meaningless words are comfort enough.

  They walk for another hour in silence. Fawn is afraid now. Willow, too, is bracing herself; Fawn can see it in her body. Chelya’s eyes can hold more sorrow than Fawn ever knew. Thea, sensing their feelings, says nothing more, only chews on Willow’s hair and looks around, her face burning against the cold. Old, hardened snow still clutches everything. The hardiest maples try out their new buds, but everything else continues to hold still. The ravens are the only animals awake who have anything to say, and they speak only to each other.

  “I haven’t gone for so long,” says Willow finally. “I was afraid to see it alone.”

  When they arrive, it’s nearly sunset. Fawn and Chelya forget to go first.

  Where Willow’s family home used to stand, where the apple orchard grew, where the horses and sheep used to graze, the earth is turned inside out. It is like a desert, not even recognizable. Fawn looks around in a dim panic, unable to understand where the land she knew has gone. The tree where Willow’s older brother Morgan, who died when Willow was ten, built his treehouse—and where Willow used to spend days and nights when she missed him so much she couldn’t bear it—is gone. In its place, there is not even a stump, though the powdery, turned earth is still sticky with sap. The far hillside has been blown away, tunnels pouring open from its side.

  The silence tenses, unsure of itself. All Fawn can hear is her own gasping breath. She turns to Willow in astonishment at what she must be feeling, wanting to take her hand but feeling a distance she has never felt before between them, as if the horrid transformation of this place has made them unrecognizable even to each other and themselves.

  Willow stands still, absent-mindedly curling a finger into the hand that Thea holds out to touch her cheek. She shifts the pack on her back and leans forward, her face like ice.

  “I’ll take her,” says Fawn impulsively.

  Without speaking, Willow swings Thea off her back and around to her front, kneels down, and works her little legs out of the pouch. Fawn knows intuitively that Willow doesn’t trust her own voice at this moment, but Thea cries out again: a general cry, neither angry nor afraid. Fawn holds out her arms and Willow hands Thea to her. Fawn bounces Thea and strokes her back, as if Thea is the frightened child inside her, though Thea herself wiggles restlessly and turns her head with lively curiosity from one face to the other. Finally she rests her eyes on Chelya, her tiny brows tensing. She reaches a hand toward Chelya, but Chelya is not looking at her.

  “Someone’s here,” says Chelya. “I heard something.”

  A gunshot rings out—a sudden, incomprehensible sound, like when a tree hits the earth.

  Without thinking, Fawn begins to run, not away from the sound but toward it. She runs over the embankment with the baby suddenly crying in her arms—and the first thing she thinks, absurdly, is It’s Kite. They’ve shot Kite. He is dead. Her breath stabs her as she stumbles over the hillside, and then she sees the men who must have killed him, struggling together in a chaos of muscle and dirt, and then hurtling away from each other.

  In the noise of their scuffle, they must not have heard her, and they do not seem to see her now. They stand bruised and tensed in the twilight, their heads shrunken into their shoulders.

  Fawn stops behind the big machine and catches her breath. At the same time that she remembers the weight of Thea in her arms, and becomes aware of the whimpers that warn of renewed crying, she sees where she is, and knows that Kite is not here. Now Willow is beside her, and Fawn hands Thea back to her quickly, hoping the comfort of her mother will stop the cry. This is no time for a baby to cry.

  Five men Fawn does not know stand apart now, their bodies bent forward and their fists hanging useless but dangerous below their hips. The sixth man, who faces them, holds a gun.

  “Go on,” the sixth man growls. “Try again. I’ll kill ya this time. I will.”

  “Put it down,” grumbles one of the other men.

&nbs
p; Silence.

  “We’ve got rights to this place,” growls another, more loudly. “We’ve been diggin’ here weeks now. Who’s your boss?”

  “Don’t have a boss. Don’t have lights in our house—no heat, no stove, nothing. Don’t have a job. Government says what’s under this land will get us our dinner.”

  “Who cares. You think it’s any different for us?”

  “You got others with you?” says another.

  “No, but I got a gun,” says the sixth man.

  Fawn steps out from behind the machine.

  “Ma!” comes Chelya’s terrified whisper behind her.

  Fawn walks toward the men, but she is behind them still, and only the man with the gun sees her. Startled, he nearly drops it. He gapes at her.

  “What are you men doing here?” Fawn asks quietly. Her hands go numb, and then her knees, and then her face. Her body wants to run, and then it wants to crouch down on the ground and fling her arms over her head. “What are you fighting for?” she asks.

  “Who’re you?” barks the man with the gun, looking strangely terrified. The others turn around, and some of them begin to glance quickly back and forth between her and the sixth man, as if trying to keep track of both.

  Fawn puts her hands on her hips, to steady herself. She grips the cloth of her dress.

  “Ma’am,” says one of the other men politely. “I don’t know who you are, but this is no place for a woman.”

  “There are three women here,” Fawn hears Willow say, coming up behind her. “And a baby.” She watches the men’s faces, which, despite her terror, break her heart. They look so helpless. They don’t know what to do with this land, she thinks with ridiculous compassion. They’ve got it, and they don’t even know what it’s for.

  “We live here,” says Fawn, “in the mountains. Please—what are you doing here?”

  Some of the men look down now and shuffle their feet. They seem to have forgotten all about the man with the gun, and he, too, seems to have momentarily forgotten himself. He’s letting it hang in front of him, and his jaw hangs down too.