Forests of the Heart (67 page)

He indicated the colorful carved dogs her sister had sent. They still stood ranged around the feet of the Virgin. She nodded and he stowed them away in her suitcase.

Finally they went down to the kitchen. Nuala was sitting there, alone, staring out at the miserable night.
El lobo
set Bettina’s suitcase and backpack down by the back door. Bettina stood in the doorway through which they’d entered, waiting for the housekeeper to acknowledge their presence, but
el lobo
approached Nuala first. When he was a few steps away, Nuala looked up and
el lobo
went down on one knee in front of her.

“Lady,” he said. “I hope you won’t think ill of the one who brings you the bad news.”

“What bad news?”

“An felsos
… they didn’t survive.”

Nuala’s lip twitched. “What makes you think I care?” she asked

“Lady, I know they were your sons.”

“And you?” she said. “I suppose you now expect to take their place.”

“I would not presume.” He hesitated a moment, then added. “And I was never like them.”

Her steady gaze lay on him. “No, you are all the parts they discarded— isn’t that the tale you tell?”

He shook his head. “I do not tell tales.”

Bettina hated seeing her wolf be like this. With all she’d learned recently, she felt Nuala deserved no one’s respect, least of all his. She walked to his side, laid a hand carefully on his shoulder.

“They were your
children”
she told the housekeeper.

“I didn’t ask for them,” Nuala replied. “And look how they turned out— the spitting image of their sire.”

“Because you abandoned them.”

“Do you really think so? You know nothing of the true nature of these wolves.”

“I know that everyone, human or spirit, can become the being you expect them to be. If they had been mine, I would never have abandoned them.”

“I would do it again,” Nuala said.

“I’m sorry for you.”

Nuala shook her head. “Come speak to me of this again when you’ve experienced rape and exile from all you hold dear.”

Bettina turned away. Her wolf joined her and gathered up her belongings.

“Did your grandmother never teach you about the dangers of consorting with wolves?” Nuala called after her.

“Yes,” Bettina told her. She looked back and met the housekeeper’s gaze. “She also taught me about forgiveness.”

She stepped outside with her wolf and he closed the door behind them before the housekeeper could respond.

“I would have liked to have said goodbye to some of the others,” Bettina said as they crossed the lawn, walking back towards the woods.

“You’ll be back,” her wolf said. When she made no comment, he added, “Won’t you?”

Bettina nodded.
“Mas pronto o más tarde.”
Sooner or later.

She glanced at her companion, but his features were expressionless. She wanted to explain that she couldn’t stay here, it wasn’t her home. That if she’d come here to heal herself, then the process was only begun. It could only be completed at home. In the desert. But the words were locked in her throat. He had to stay; she had to go. It left them little room to get to know each other any better, less still to make a life together.

“What will happen to the house now?” she said instead.

El lobo
shrugged. “Nuala will remain in it, of that we can be sure. A spirit such as she is difficult to exorcise. It won’t matter who inherits the property now that the woman you called the Recluse is dead.”

“The Recluse,” Bettina repeated. “We left her by the pool.”

“Yes …”
el lobo
said, drawing the word out.

“We can’t just leave her there. She needs to be buried.”

“If we’re lucky,” her wolf muttered, “the carrion birds will have done our work for us.”

But he got a shovel from one of the sheds behind the house and led her back into
la época del mito
all the same.

Nothing had changed by the pool where
an bradán
slept. The hazel trees still leaned over the water. The low stone wall, haphazardly built of fieldstone and found rocks, still held its clutter of offerings. Antlers, posies of flowers, beaded bracelets and necklaces. The little bone and wood carvings that reminded her of her
milagros.
It was peaceful, a place that bespoke quiet wisdom and eased the spirit.

Or at least it would without the addition of the corpse.

Bettina sat by the pool, frustrated that she couldn’t help her wolf with the task of burying the Recluse. He dug only a shallow grave some distance away and carried the body over to it, quickly filling in the grave once more. When he was done, all that remained was a long mound of dirt that made Bettina unhappy to look upon. She was unhappy the woman was dead, unhappy with all the Recluse had done, the lives she had ruined. And for what? To end up dead and buried unceremoniously, all her dreams turned to smoke and ash.

They walked back to the pool and sat on a clear space on the low stone wall. She gave him a small smile, then looked back into the pool, her gaze drawn to the salmon floating there, sleeping. It was all she could do to not reach in and stroke the shimmering scales. She couldn’t have said why she felt the urge to touch it.

“It’s still asleep,” she said.

“What were you expecting?”

“Remember the first night we met?” she said. “You told me that if it woke, I would be changed forever.”

“I remember.”

“So that’s why I thought it would be awake,” Bettina told him.

Her wolf smiled. “Are you so different now?”

Bettina nodded.

Her wolf rolled a cigarette and offered it to her. When she shook her head, he lit it and leaned back, blowing a stream of smoke up into the boughs of the hazels. When he was finished, he ground the butt out in the dirt and put it in his pocket. Bettina asked him to bring over her backpack, to take out the small pouch in which she kept her
milagros
and asked him to look through them. He spread them on his hand, moving them about with a finger.

“That one,” she said, pointing to a heart. “
El
corazón.
There should be more than one.”

“I can only find two.”

“We only need two.”

She had him put the rest away, then take out a spool wound round with a thin leather thong. Under her direction, he cut two lengths and threaded a heart-shaped
milagro
onto each one. When he was done she had him tie one around her neck. The
milagro
threaded onto it rested in the hollow of her throat. He held the other in his hand and looked at her.

“Do you want me to wear this?” he asked.

She studied him, trying to read what he was thinking, what he was feeling in that wolf’s heart of his.

“Only if you want to,” she said. “Consider it a promise. If you can wait for me, if you have the patience …”

“So you
will
return.”

“We will be together,” she promised him. “It’s just… I need to understand these wings that flutter in my chest. I need to find Papa, to speak to him of our blood … of hawks. And then
los cadejos
…”

Her wolf nodded. “You are indebted to them now. I won’t say that was ill-done, but…”

“You will think it.”

He shrugged.

“So you will go now,” he said.

“Soon. But first, I…”

Shyness overcame her courage for a moment. He gave her a quizzical look.

“That blanket you packed in my suitcase,” she said. “Do you think you could take it out and lay it here on the grass? My … my hands are still tender, but perhaps you will let me hold you in other ways …”

A great stillness fell between them. Then her wolf smiled and lifted the thong to his neck, tying it in place so that his
milagro
hung just in the hollow of his own throat. He shook out the blanket and stood there on it, waiting until she rose from the stones by the pool to join him.

“Mi lobo,”
she murmured as he lowered her to the blanket.

Then his lips were on hers and there was no more need for words.

Endings are beginnings in disguise.

—M
EXICAN SAYING

A
WEEK LATER,
W
EDNESDAY EVENING,
J
ANUARY
28

The ice storm lasted until
the end of the week, driving the city completelyto its knees. By the middle of the following week, basic services had been restored throughout most of the city, but there were still hundreds of homes in outlying regions without power and the cleanup of downed branches and utility poles, while progressing, seemed to operate at a snail’s pace. There was simply so much damage and the onslaught of a new cold front didn’t make anyone’s job easier. The temperature dropped steadily through the weekend and by Monday they were gripped in a deep freeze as vicious as the one that had plagued the city in December.

Ellie immersed herself in the Angel Outreach program as soon as the Creek sisters let her off at her apartment. She went upstairs only long enough to have a shower and change before heading over to Angel’s Grasso Street office to see if she could be of any use. She found the place in chaos and was soon working long days and nights, catching up on sleep when she could, which, as often as not, was on a cot in the back of the office.

The deep cold made her sojourn in some otherworldly desert all the easier to put on a backburner. The truth was she needed something like this—the cold and the hard work—to ground her after all she’d been through. She didn’twant time to think. Not about Donal or monsters, mysterious otherworldly deserts, or this magic she was supposed to have inside her that had gotten her mixed up in all that craziness in the first place. Thinking could come later. Right now she only wanted to be busy, to fill every waking moment with work so that when she did catch some sleep, it was deep and dreamless.

With Tommy recuperating up on the rez and so much work for the volunteers to do, she usually found herself taking the van out on her own. Angel didn’t like it; she always wanted her people paired and she especially didn’t want women out alone in the vans, but everyone was overworked and there was simply too much that needed to get done for them to be able to follow protocol.

For her part, Ellie wasn’t nervous being out on her own, but she couldn’t explain why to Angel without sounding like an idiot. “You see,” she would have had to say, “after facing down some huge tree monster in Nevernever-land, it’s kind of hard to get worked up about anything the streets could throw at me right now.”

Besides, a general air of community seemed to have taken over the city, with everybody lending a hand to their neighbors, and even to strangers. There were stories about generators going missing, of lowlifes stealing from people they were pretending to help, but the numbers were far fewer than one might have expected in the chaos left behind the storm.

Most of the street people still weren’t interested in the shelters, never mind the severe turn the weather had taken, but even they appeared to have acquired more of a Good Samaritan spirit. She found them actively keeping tabs on each other, steering her to people who needed help, and a couple of times she’d had a half-dozen of them pushing the van back onto the streets when she’d gotten stuck.

Not having to see her friends helped a lot. And even when she did, it was easy to put the haunted look in her eyes down to simple weariness.

“You okay?” Jilly asked her one afternoon when they were working side by side, washing up dishes in the makeshift soup kitchen that had been set up in the basement of St. Paul’s. “You’ve got a look …”

If anyone could listen to her story with an open ear, it would be Jilly, and at some point Ellie knew she would talk to her about what she’d experienced, but she wasn’t ready to do it yet.

“I’m just tired,” she said.

Jilly nodded. “Tell me about it. I usually make do on four or five hours of sleep a night myself, but I’m not even getting that these days.”

Ellie only smiled in response.

In the end, she’d done such a good job of putting aside the weird turn her life had taken prior to the ice storm that she was startled to get a call from Hunter that Wednesday afternoon when she was in the office on Grasso Street, putting together a new load of supplies for the evening’s run in the van. Startled, but pleased, especially when she found out he was calling to ask if he could lend a hand after he’d closed the store that day.

“I could use some company in the van tonight,” she told him.

“Okay. Sounds like a plan. Where should I meet you?”

“I’ll pick you up at the store. What time do you close?”

“Six.”

“I’ll see you then.”

“Great.” She could almost feel his smile through the phone line as he added, “So is this, like, another one of our dates?”

She laughed. “Dress warm,” she told him. “The van’s heater is pretty much a rumor.”

She was surprised at how happy she was to see him waiting for her when she pulled up in front of Gypsy Records at a little after six that evening, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his parka, hood up against the wind. The temperature had dropped even more this evening. Coupled with a fierce wind that had already rocked the van a few times on the drive over, it was serious frostbite weather out there tonight.

“Hey,” Hunter said as he got in on the passenger’s side and fastened his seat belt. “It’s great to see you.”

“You, too.”

“I tried calling you a bunch of times, but there was never any answer at your place.”

“I’ve been working kind of non-stop with Angel since we got back.”

Hunter nodded. “That’s what I finally figured out. So I looked up Angel’s office number.”

“I’m glad you did.”

And she was. She didn’t know how committed he was to the work that she was doing for Angel—it was pretty obvious that he’d offered to help out with the Outreach program as an excuse to see her—but she was flattered by the attention and couldn’t really blame him. She hadn’t exactly made herself available to anybody since she’d gotten back.

Hunter dug in his pocket and pulled out a cassette.

“Here,” he said, handing it to her. “I made this for you.”

Ellie smiled. “Jilly’s told me about this—it’s like a record store guy thing, right?”

“I guess. Though Fiona makes them, too.”

She looked at the label he’d made up for the cassette and started reading some of the names of the artists. “Ani DiFranco. Sonny Rollins. Solas. The Walkabouts. John Coltrane.” She glanced at him. “This is … eclectic.”

“Actually,” Hunter said, “it’s kind of a Miki tape. I got the feeling that you knew Donal a lot better than you did her and I thought maybe you’d understand her better if you could listen to some of the stuff she loves.”

“More record store guy stuff.”

“Well, you can tell a lot from the music a person listens to.”

She smiled and put the cassette into the player. They listened to the first song, DiFranco singing against the minimal accompaniment of drums and a bass guitar. The song started and ended with:

i’m a pixie

i’m a paper doll

i’m a cartoon

i’m a chipper cheerful for all

and i light up a room

i’m the color me happy girl

miss live and let live

and when they’re out for blood

i always give

When the song segued into Sonny Rollins blowing his horn, Ellie turned to Hunter.

“Everybody sees Miki like that, too,” she said.

Hunter nodded. “She used to hide it well. She just compartmentalized all the crap and really did wake up to each day like it was, well, the first day of the rest of her life. But now …”

“Is she still going away?”

On the walk out of the otherworld, Miki had told them that as soon as she could, she was leaving town.

“She’s already gone. She left this morning for Chicago in Donal’s old VW minibus. Some booking agent she contacted had a band cancel out of this Irish club and she was in. She got a couple of her cohorts from Fall Down Dancing to go up with her and she’s dead-serious about starting up a touring band.”

“It seems so sudden,” Ellie said.

“Well, she’s leaving friends behind, but what else was left for her here? Everything she owns was trashed by the Gentry, Donal’s … gone, and all’s that left are a lot of weird memories.”

“I don’t know that running away’s ever the best answer.”

Hunter shook his head. “I think she’s more running to something. She should have done this a long time ago. The difference now is she’s traveling with a borrowed accordion and the handful of personal belongings she was able to buy with the money I fronted her, instead of also having to keep up a place back here.”

“You really care about her, don’t you?”

“Like a brother,” Hunter said. “No, scratch that. Like a normal brother.”

Ellie sighed. She hadn’t even begun to deal with what all of this meant to her memories of her own relationship with Donal. She missed him terribly, but whenever she thought of him, all the horrors came flooding back into her head.

“Something like what happened to us all changes you big-time,” Hunter said.

Ellie nodded. “I’m just trying not to think of it. For now.”

“I can’t do anything but. That’s what I’m doing here with you tonight.”

“How so?”

It was hard to tell with only the light from streetlamps coming into the van, but when she glanced at him, she’d swear he was blushing.

“I guess it taught me that life is short,” he said, “so you’d better do something with it. I want to take chances. Do more with my life.
Get
out of the record store more often. Do things like this, where it makes a difference to other people.”

So it wasn’t just to see her, Ellie thought, unaccountably pleased. But then he added:

“And I want to be with you.”

And that pleased her even more.

“No pressure,” he said. “I mean, I don’t even know how you feel about, you know, us. Or even the possibility of there being an ‘us.’ But I want to get to know you better and that’s not going to happen sitting in my apartment reading magazines and listening to music. I…” He shrugged and smiled. “I’m talking too much.”

“It’s okay,” Ellie said. “I’m enjoying it.”

She pulled over to the curb where a few homeless men were sitting on a hot air grate, hunching their shoulders against the wind that came down the alley behind them. Hunter got out and went around to the side of the van, getting coffees and sandwiches to bring over to them. For awhile Ellie stood by the van, watching the easy way he had in talking to the men, treating them like individuals, like people, instead of looking down on them, before she walked over as well, offering them blankets, warmer clothes, a ride to a shelter.

“What about you?” Hunter asked when they were back in the van and driving once more.

“What about me what?”

“How did what happened to us affect you?”

“Like I said,” she told him. “I’m trying not to think of it right now. I’m not trying to think of anything, really.”

“Oh.”

She smiled. “But so far I like this getting-to-know-each-other-better part a lot.”

T
UBAC,
W
EDNESDAY,
J
ANUARY
28

Two weeks had passed in the World As It Is when Bettina and her wolf came out of
laépoca del mito
into the western bajada of the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson. The sun was just rising behind them, flooding their view with its dawn light. A wide plain stretched westward, grasslands dotted with mesquite, cholla, prickly pear, and tall, spindly ocatillos. With the early sun upon it, the plain appeared to be a vast luminescent field, glowing with its own inner light. In the distance they could see a band of lusher vegetation that followed the meandering banks of the Santa Cruz River. The temperature was in the high fifties, not warm, but not unpleasant. Bettina knew it would warm up before long.

“This is hardly a desert,”
el lobo
said.

Bettnia nodded. “My friend Ban says that life zones converge in Pima County. A hike from Tucson to the top of the Santa Catalina Mountains is like traveling from Mexico to Canada.”

Her wolf smiled.

“De verdad.
Someday I’ll take you up Mount Lemmon—you’ll think you’re back home, walking under the oaks and pines.”

“I would make
this
my home, wherever you are …”

His voice went soft and trailed off. His gaze remained on the distant view.

“But you can’t,” Bettina said after a moment. “I understand. I would not have you break your word.”

They both had debts. At least her wolf knew the limits of his. She had no idea what
los cadejos
would ask of her.

“We can still make this work,” she added.

She shifted the straps of her backpack so that it hung more comfortably, then took his free hand and led him off across the grasslands, the tall yellowed blades whispering against their light cotton pants. She could have carried her suitcase, but her wolf wouldn’t let her.