Our Animal Hearts

by Dania Tomlinson

  * * *

  The following summer, Viktor and Yuri swam carelessly through the waters I feared. I would sit on the wharf and count their laps, timing them with my father’s old pocket watch. Between swims they lifted themselves up onto the dock and panted next to me. Water slipped down Viktor’s chest. The skin there was smooth and firm as a seal’s. I wondered how it might feel to the touch. How it might taste. In the water Yuri’s blond hair became translucent; his eyebrows and eyelashes disappeared completely. His body was in no way formed like his brother’s. Despite the long hours he worked, Yuri’s stomach remained pudgy. His large pink nipples were visible through his wet undershirt.

  “How long?” Yuri asked, pushing his hair off his face and rubbing the water out of his eyes with his middle fingers

  “You each did fifteen laps. Eighteen minutes for you, Yuri, twenty and a half for Viktor.”

  “That’s worse than yesterday!” Viktor said. “I don’t believe you.”

  “I never miscount.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  Viktor crawled on top of me. “Never?” He shook his hair and body like a dog, spraying water all over me. I covered my face and squirmed beneath him, laughing.

  “Viktor, get off her,” Yuri said.

  Viktor ignored him. He dropped his chest onto mine. The wet cloth of his shorts soaked my dress. I went still, removed my hands from my face and looked up at him. Viktor’s face changed. I didn’t push him away like he expected. Yuri pulled at Viktor’s shoulder until he got off me, awkwardly. He left me soaked and still catching my breath.

  “Why don’t you ever swim with us, Your Highness?” Viktor asked. The nickname had stuck and I hated it. His eyes wandered over my body and I knew he was imagining me naked. I crossed my arms to hide my unimpressive breasts.

  “I don’t like to swim.”

  “You don’t know how, do you?” Viktor teased.

  “Of course I know how to swim.”

  “Well, what are you afraid of?”

  “Leave her alone,” Yuri said.

  Viktor wrapped his arms around me. “What if I just picked you up and threw you in.” He stood so I was dangling from his arms. I looked down into the water below. My stomach rose to my throat.

  “I said leave her alone.” Yuri ripped at Viktor’s arms, red-faced.

  “Damnit, hen.” Viktor put me back down so he could inspect his arm. “You scratched me, you little woman. I was only fooling around.” Viktor gathered his clothes and stomped down the wharf, back towards the orchard, their midday swim finished.

  Later that evening, I couldn’t find Viktor as I walked along the edge of the orchard while the pickers were just finishing the workday, putting away ladders and carting the last few bins into the storehouse. In the dead of summer, the men worked early mornings and late evenings and spent the unbearably hot middle hours of the day at the lake. Pink blossoms filled the trees and the entire world smelled of their nectar. It would be an hour until Mary called me in for dinner and so I hiked up into the forest and climbed the ladder to the tree fort.

  For the most part, my days were taken up with tending to Llewelyna and helping Mary around the house, and so I hadn’t been up to the fort for a while. When I pulled myself up through the hole in the floor I found myself staring into the wide eyes of a beautiful woman, a grown face I vaguely recognized. She was lying beneath a sheet, her shoulders bare. Sweat glistened her forehead.

  “Azami?” I asked. She patted her hand on top of the sheet where another shape moved. The blanket was pushed back and Viktor’s dishevelled dark head emerged.

  “Your Highness?” he said with a crooked smile. He pulled the sheet up to his chest and lay next to Azami. Long black eyelashes rimmed her dark eyes. Her face had grown dimensions, cheekbones, a delicate chin. It had only been months since I had seen her, and yet she looked so much older than me. The peaks of her breasts rose up from beneath the sheet. I was humiliated by my shapeless child’s frock, much too short for me now, but I refused to wear the suffocating gowns my grandmother sent. Azami reached for her clothes and pulled them on beneath the sheets.

  “Could you pass me my trousers, Iris?” Viktor said.

  I found his brown work pants and threw them to him. He scrambled around beneath the sheets as he put them on. Azami twirled her long black hair around and around. She knotted it somehow on top of her head, stood, and slipped a flat cap over her hair. She was wearing a button-up shirt and trousers. A button was missing from the shirt. I found it on the floor and passed it to her. Wordlessly, she squeezed past me and down the ladder. I heard her jump to the ground.

  Viktor was sitting against the wall watching me, his chest still irresistibly bare and glistening. He patted the floor next to him and I sat. His rough fingertips tickled my arm. “You’ll keep this between you and me—what you saw. Azami and me.” He looked directly into my eyes as he traced figure eights on my skin. “You can’t tell anyone. Not your brother, not Yuri. Not anyone. I can trust you, can’t I?”

  I nodded.

  “I knew I could.” He ruffled my hair as though I were a child. I wriggled away from him. “Hey, don’t be like that,” he said. I gave him a final glare before stomping down the ladder and running home.

  The vision of Azami and Viktor opened me up to the world of flesh and bodies and sex. That night I lay in bed and imagined Viktor on top of me, his body pressed up to mine, his lips hard against my neck, my shoulder, my breasts.

  Some days Viktor and Yuri would pick up huge rocks, hold them against their chests, and wobble along the mossy rocks into the water. I’d watch their backs slip below the surface and timed how long they could stay underwater, walking along the lake bottom. Reminded of Jacob, I was always anxious for them to rise. Just when I would be about to scream for help, one of them would burst through the surface. It would usually be Yuri, who was a better swimmer than Viktor but couldn’t hold his breath as long. After they dried off, Viktor would light a cigarette, pass it to Yuri and me, and we’d watch the sun go down.

  “I want to work on the orchard,” I said one day.

  Viktor scoffed. “A woman? Father would never allow it.”

  I turned to Yuri. “You told me once about the girl you knew that could pick better than some of the men.” I didn’t want to bring up Azami. I didn’t want her name to enter our triangle. Yuri coughed smoke and passed the cigarette across me and back to Viktor.

  “Cleo Winston!” Viktor said, taking the cigarette. “You were in love with that little half-breed, weren’t you, hen?” he teased.

  “She was my friend,” Yuri said.

  “She wasn’t that good a picker.”

  “What about Azami?” Yuri said. “Wouldn’t you agree she’s quite efficient?” Yuri’s face was serious, challenging.

  The moment of tension between them exposed a glimpse of the sibling rivalry I could never understand. Viktor broke the moment with a hearty laugh the joke didn’t warrant and that enraged Yuri further.

  “And with my father and Jacob gone, and the trees full,” I went on, “I’m sure you could use some help.”

  Viktor took a final puff and flicked the cigarette into the lake. He placed a hand on my head and ruffled my hair. “You’d like that, would you, Your Highness? Working on the orchard with the lowly peasant men?”

  “I’d earn a wage, of course,” I said.

  Viktor smiled. “And who would teach you to pick fruit? It’s no easy thing you just wake up doing. It takes exceptional talent.” Viktor rubbed his fingernails against his chest, playing the dandy.

  “It’s not that hard,” Yuri said.

  “You could teach me, couldn’t you?” I asked Viktor.

  “I’ve no time to teach little girls how to pick peaches.”

  “I’m fifteen,” I said. My irritation was unwarranted, he was only kidding, but I was fed up with him treating me like a child. “And I learn quickly. I’ve been watching the men, I know how to do it.”

&nbs
p; “I could teach you, Iris,” Yuri said.

  “All right,” I agreed, looking at Viktor but speaking to Yuri.

  For a week Yuri and I met in a hidden corner of the orchard during his lunch break. He showed me the best way to pluck peaches, by slightly twisting my wrist, not so hard that the delicate skin peeled or wrinkled but enough that the stem broke from the branch and didn’t separate from the core. It was messy work. The peaches were sticky with nectar and bugs. The pick sack was heavy and made my back throb and shoulders burn, but it felt wonderful to be outside in the fresh air, up in the trees with the birds. Once I was fast enough, and Yuri inspected the peaches I had picked and found no badly damaged ones, I performed my act for Taras.

  Taras laughed when he first saw me put the pick sack over my shoulders and climb the ladder. I quickly filled my sack. After he inspected the peaches in my batch, he shrugged and gave me a job. “What harm?” he said.

  Despite my attempts to engage the Japanese pickers, they avoided me. Most could not speak English anyway, but they also knew that to speak to a white woman, and the daughter of the landowner besides, was unacceptable. It wasn’t anything anyone had to say. I tried to tell myself their unease had nothing to do with the fire.

  That summer the trees were heavy with peaches. I would wake in the mornings to the groaning branches. Taras hired more and more pickers to keep up with the work. There was a constant flurry of new faces. Men slept on floors in the workhouse or in hammocks hung between the pine trees bordering the orchard.

  I kept the money I earned in a coffee tin under my bed, next to the blue fish. I had no idea what I would use the money for, but I felt better having it. If I wanted, if I needed to, I could jump onto the Rosamond and disappear. I thought of Llewelyna’s faery money that she claimed would turn to fungus if Jacob and I didn’t go spend it quickly at the store, and sometimes I checked the tin just to make sure my coins were still there. Each time I put my wages away, I would take out the blue fish and remember the words of the woman who crawled out of the lake: A gift. A girl. I didn’t understand what this gift might mean, and why she had brought it to me, but I hoped one day I would understand. I dropped a dead fly into the jar, a ribbon of lettuce, a bread crumb; the fish didn’t seem to eat anything and eventually I had to transfer it into a fresh jar of water.

  At the end of a hot summer workday I was in the top of one of the taller trees, my pick sack nearly full, the straps rubbing my shoulders raw, and I was about to head down the ladder when I saw one last peach, reddened by the sun, just out of reach. My mouth watered for it. As I stretched my arm out for the peach I had an intense feeling of déjà vu. The green filtered light, the tickle of sweat down my arms, and the men laughing while they carried a bin of peaches—it was all eerily familiar, as though I had already lived through this precise moment. Then my vision became splotched, full of burning holes, like the jaguar’s fur. I realized the peach I reached for was much too far away. A metallic taste filled my mouth, like the smell of lightning, then lemon. The world began to shake. A branch whipped my face. I was in the air. Then darkness.

  I was on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff face. The jaguar was swimming through the lake towards me. I pulled my knees to my chest. Before me, the lake was swollen, swarming with blue fish. I scooped one from the water and dropped it down my throat.

  A cold splash on my face made me open my eyes. Viktor, Yuri, and Taras looked down at me. Taras held an empty bucket, his face recoiled in disgust. My pick sack dangled from Viktor’s hand. Peaches were scattered everywhere. One was sticky beneath my back; the pit pricked my skin. Some Japanese pickers kept a polite distance and craned their necks from where they stood amongst the trees. Yuri had me propped up on his knees. His face was upside down and his hands cradled my head.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I moved my fingers, my toes. “I think so.”

  He tried to pick me up.

  “Let me,” Viktor said as he put down my pick sack. “I won’t have you dropping her.” He took me from Yuri’s arms. I let myself lean in against Viktor’s chest and breathed in the smell of his skin, peach nectar and tobacco and salt. I thought of my father when he carried Llewelyna out of the church. I had never loved my father more than at that moment.

  When I woke hours later I was in my bed. I had been stripped down to my drawers. Yuri sat on the edge of the bed, staring at his feet. He tapped his work boots against the floor. There was someone else in the room but I was too tired to turn my head to see who it was. I shifted, and Yuri looked at me.

  “You’re awake,” he said. “How do you feel?”

  “Tired.” It was hard to speak, exhausting to move my jaw.

  “Mother is preparing you a bath.”

  I tried to sit up but my torso was iron. I fell back into the pillow. “Who else is here?”

  Yuri looked left and right as if he may have missed someone. “It’s just me.”

  I tried to sit up again, not believing him. “There’s someone else,” I said.

  “Relax, Iris. Rest.” His face was terribly serious. “There’s no one else.” He kept his eyes trained on me as if I might disappear.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Do you remember what happened?”

  “I fell.”

  “You don’t remember anything else?”

  I thought for a moment and remembered the dream I had before I woke up in the orchard, the jaguar and the fish, but this couldn’t be what Yuri meant.

  “When I found you on the ground you were shaking terribly. Thrashing.”

  I stared up at the ceiling. There was a yellow stain in the plaster. “Thrashing,” I echoed. The room spun around me. I rolled away from Yuri and there was the jaguar, her enormous head resting serenely atop the bed covers.

  “I’ll give you some privacy,” Yuri said, and shuffled out of the room.

  The jaguar yawned. Her teeth were as long as cigarettes.

  * * *

  I woke the next morning to hushed laughter and the clatter of tin plates. The jaguar purred steadily on the bed next to me. I moved to the window, careful not to wake her. The sun wasn’t up yet but the sky was violet from its hidden glow. Blue mist collected in the peach trees and undulated as if underwater. A lantern was on the picnic table in the orchard. Faces moved in and out of the dim light. A steaming pot was passed around. The workers took turns sitting at the table to eat while others warmed themselves by the cook fire or bathed in the dark by the well. Some men, their backs to the orchard, relieved themselves into the surrounding forest, whistling into the darkness to scare off bears.

  Yuri must have been down at the lake still. He said that swimming in the dark was like disappearing. I never asked him why he would want to disappear because I understood that thrill. But for me the lake wasn’t where things disappeared but where they came alive.

  I had spent much of my childhood invisible. If I was bothering Llewelyna she would simply close her eyes and make me disappear in the darkness of her mind. I knew then to walk away and leave her be. As a girl I would slink around the house on tiptoe and watch her from behind furniture and around corners while she went on not seeing me. The spell would break unexpectedly—little minx, you are—her hand reaching for me, her eyes finally meeting mine.

  Yuri walked out of the dark lake more real than when he stepped into it. I watched and waited for him to return to camp wet and shivering. When I finally saw him with a quilt over his shoulders, I let the disembodied babble of the workers and the purr of the jaguar lull me back to sleep.

  Later, it was silence that woke me. Outside the sun swelled against the hills across the lake. The mist had burned off the trees. The men were no longer at the table. There was nothing left of their meal, no plates or scraps. The scene had been wiped clean as if it were a dream. The orchard looked empty, but on the far side of the property, the trees rustled.

  I pulled the blankets up to my chin. The hush of the house emphasized the silence. The
screen door moaned on its hinge. A breeze yawned through cracks in the walls. I could even hear the clock in the kitchen ticking. I was sore and exhausted. Each joint was stiff and swollen and my body ached from the fall. I touched the bump on the back of my head and winced. In that quiet, the rustle of her blankets in the room above mine and the creak of the floor as Llewelyna shifted her body were thunderous. My eyes snapped open. I jolted out of bed. For a moment I had seen a cross-section of the house, our rooms stacked atop one another and our bedrooms identical, our positions in bed the same, her with her peacock and me with my jaguar. I imagined books piling up around my headboard as my hair grew wild and red around my face.

  In the mirror my eyes were bloodshot and there was a long streak of crusted blood all the way from the corner of my eye to my chin. Red and blue bruises mottled my arms. The jaguar paced behind me. I poured out some water from the basin and splashed it on my face. I undressed and checked the cut on my back, where the pit of the peach had pricked me. The jaguar’s hot tongue lapped at the blood. I recoiled.

  “Get away,” I stomped. She didn’t even blink. I tried clapping and snapping to scare the jaguar away but she did little more than glance up and lick a paw. I found Jacob’s matches and held one out towards the jaguar. The small flame flickered in her eyes before she turned from it and sauntered down the stairs and out of the house.

  I found my brother’s trousers, peeled a peach skin from the pant leg, and slipped on my boots. The orchard was busy with birds and thick with the sweet-sour smell of ripe and rotting fruit. I reached up, plucked a peach from a branch, and let its nectar revive me. On the far side of the orchard I found the familiar hustle of workers and disappeared into its rhythms.

  Yuri was helping a picker bring down a tree that had gone to rot. As soon as I set my eyes on him he looked around, sensing it. Once he and the worker had set the tree down, he came towards me.

  “Iris,” he whispered, glancing behind as if followed. “You can’t be here.”

  I looked down at him from the second rung of the ladder. “Why not?”