Forests of the Heart

  “You might not know them,” Nuala said as though in response to her worries, “but you called them here all the same.”

  Bettina shook her head. “I doubt it,” she tried, willing it to be true. “They are spirits of this place and I am the stranger.”

  But Nuala, la brujería less hidden in her eyes than Bettina had ever seen it before, shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “They are as much strangers as you are. They have only been here longer.”

  Bettina nodded. The shallow rooting of their spirits said as much.

  “How do you know this?” she asked.

  Nuala hesitated for a long moment before she finally replied. “I recognize them from my childhood. They are spirits of my homeland, only these have been displaced and set to wandering after they made the mistake of following the emigrant ships to this new land. They watched me, too, when I first arrived in Kellygnow.”

  Bettina regarded her with interest. “What did they want?”

  “I never asked, but what do men ever want? For a woman to forsake all and go running with them, out into the wild. For us to lift our skirts and spread our legs for them.”

  Bettina tried to imagine Nuala in a skirt.

  “But they grew tired of waiting,” the older woman said. “They went their way and I remained, and I haven’t seen them now for many years.” She paused, then added, “Until you called to them.”

  “I didn’t call them.”

  “You didn’t have to. You’re young and pretty and enchantment runs in your veins as easily as blood. Is it so odd that they come like bees to your flower?”

  “I thought they were part of… the mystery,” Bettina said.

  “There’s no mystery as to what they want,” Nuala told her. “But perhaps I am being unfair. As I said, I’ve never spoken to them, never asked what they wanted from me. Perhaps they only wished for news of our homeland, of those they’d left behind.”

  Bettina nodded. Spirits were often hungry for gossip.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “what one mistakes for spirits are in fact men, traveling in spirit form.”

  “I’ve never met such,” Nuala told her.

  Nuala might not have, but when she was younger, Bettina had. Many of them had been related to her by blood. Her father and her uncles and their friends, Indios all, would gather together in the desert in a similar fashion as los lobos did in the yard outside the house here. Squatting in a circle, sharing a canteen, smoking their cigarettes, sometimes calling up the spirit of the mescal, swallowing the small buttons that they’d harvested from the dome-shaped cacti in New Mexico and Texas.

  Peyoteros, Abuela called them.

  At first, Bettina had thought it was a tribal designation—like Yaqui, Apache, Tohono O’odham—but then Abuela had explained how they followed another road into the mystery from the one she and her abuela followed, that the peyote buttons they ate, the mescal tea they drank, was how they stepped into la época del mito. Bettina decided they were still a tribe, only connected to each other by their visions rather than their genes.

  “Where I come from,” she told Nuala, “such men seek a deeper understanding of the world and its workings.”

  “But you are no longer where you come from,” Nuala said.

  This was true.

  “And understand,” Nuala went on. “Such beings answer only to themselves. No one holds you personally responsible for their presence. I’m simply making conversation. Offering an observation, nothing more.”

  “I understand.”

  “And perhaps a caution.” Nuala added. “They are like wolves, those spirits.”

  Bettina nodded. “Los lobos,” she said.

  “Indeed. And what you must remember about wolves is that they cannot be tamed. They might seem friendly, but in their hearts they remain wild creatures. Feral. Incorrigibly amoral. It’s not that they are evil. They simply see the world other than we do, see it in a way that we can never wholly understand.”

  She seemed to know a great deal about them, Bettina thought, for someone who had never spoken with them.

  “And they are angry,” Nuala said after a moment.

  “Angry?” Bettina asked. “With whom?”

  Nuala shrugged. “With me, certainly.”

  “But why?”

  Again there was that long moment of hesitation.

  “Because I have what they lack,” Nuala finally said. “I have a home. A place in this new world that I can call my own.”

  The housekeeper smiled then. Her gaze became mild, la brujería in her eyes diminishing into a distant smolder once more.

  “It’s late,” she said. “I should be in bed.” She moved to the door, pausing in the threshold. “Aren’t you sitting for Chantal in the morning? You should try to get some rest yourself.”

  “I will.”

  “Good. Sleep well.”

  Bettina nodded. “Gracias,” she said. “You, too.”

  But she was already speaking to Nuala’s back.

  What an odd conversation, she thought as she went over to the table and began to put the milagros back into the envelope she had taken them from earlier. Nuala, who so rarely offered an opinion, little say started a conversation, had been positively gregarious this evening.

  Bettina’s gaze strayed to the window. She couldn’t see beyond the dark pane, but she remembered. After a moment, she took down someone’s parka from the peg where it hung by the door and put it on. It was far too big for her, but style wasn’t the issue here. Warmth was. Giving the kitchen a last look, she slipped out the door.

  It was already colder than it had been earlier. Frosted grass crunched under her shoes as she walked to where the men had been watching the house. There was no sign now that they’d ever been. They’d even taken their cigarette butts with them when they’d withdrawn from the yard.

  She considered how they would have gone. First into the trees, then down the steep slope to where these few wild acres came up hard against the shoulders of the city. From there, on to the distant mountains. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they made their home here, in the city.

  She closed her eyes, imagining them loping through the city’s streets. Had they even kept to human form, or was there now a wolf pack running through the city? Perhaps a scatter of wild dogs since dogs would be less likely to attract unwanted attention. Or had they taken to the air as hawks, or crows?

  Knowing as little as she did about them, it was impossible to say.

  She walked on, past the gazebo, into the trees where, in places, snow lay in thick drifts. The cottages were all dark, their occupants asleep. A thin trail of smoke rose from the chimney of Virgil Hanson’s, the only one of the six to have a working fireplace. She regarded it curiously for a moment, wondering who was inside. In all the months that she had been living here, that cottage had stood empty.

  Past the buildings, the trees grew more closely together. She followed a narrow trail through the undergrowth, snow constantly underfoot now, but it had a hard crust under a few inches of the more recent fall, and held her weight.

  There was no indication that anyone had been this way before her. At least not since the last snowfall.

  There was a spot at the back of the property, an enormous jut of granite that pushed out of the wooded slope and offered a stunning view of the city spread out for miles, all the way north to the foothills of the mountains. Bettina was careful as she climbed up the back of it. Though there was no snow, she remembered large patches of ice from when she’d been here a week or so ago. In the summer, they would sometimes sit out near the edge, but she was feeling nowhere near so brave today. She went only so far as she needed to get a view of the mountains, then straightened up and looked north.

  At first she couldn’t tell what was wrong. When it came to her, her legs began to tremble and she shivered in her borrowed parka with its long dangling sleeves.

  “Dios mío,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper.

  There were no lights f
rom the city to be seen below. None at all.

  She felt dizzy and backed slowly away until she could clutch the trunk of one of the tamaracks that grew up around the rock. For a long moment, it was all that kept her upright. She looked back, past the edge of the stone where normally the glow of the city would rise up above the tops of the trees, but the sky was the dark of a countryside that had never known light pollution. The stars felt as though they were closer to her than she’d ever seen them in the city. They were desert stars, displaced to this land, as feral as los lobos.

  Myth time, she thought. She’d drifted into la época del mito without knowing it, walked into a piece of the past where the city didn’t exist yet, or perhaps into the days to come when it was long gone.

  “It is easier to stray into another’s past than it is to find one’s way out again,” someone said.

  The voice came from the trees, the speaker invisible in the undergrowth and shadows, but she didn’t have to see him to know that he was one of los lobos. “We are wise women,” Abuela liked to say. “Not because we are wise, but because we seek wisdom.” And then she’d smile, adding, “Which in the end, is what makes us seem so wise to others.” But Bettina didn’t feel particularly wise tonight, for she knew what he’d said was true. It was not so uncommon to step unawares into myth time and never emerge again into the present.

  “Who’s to say I strayed?” she said, putting on a much braver face than she felt.

  With a being such as this, it was always better to at least pretend you knew what you were doing. Still, she wished now that she’d taken the time to invoke the protection of Saint Herve before going out into the night. He would know how to deal with wolves—those who walked on two legs, as well as those who ran on four.

  El lobo stepped from out of the shadows, a tall, lean form, smelling of cigarette smoke and musk. There was enough light for her to catch the look of mild amusement in his features and to see that he was indeed, oh so handsome. After all those nights of watching him from the window, his proximity, the smell and too-alive presence of him, was like an enchantment. She had to stop herself from stepping close, into his embrace. But she had enough brujería of her own to know that there was no enchantment involved. It was simply the man he was. Dangerous, perhaps, and far too handsome.

  “Ah,” he said. “I see. And so it was simple delight at your success and not surprise that made you dizzy.”

  Bettina shrugged.

  “And now?” he asked.

  “Now, nothing. I’m going home to bed.”

  “Indeed.”

  He leaned back against a tree, arms crossed, smiling.

  Bettina sighed, knowing that el lobo was now waiting for her to step back into her own world, confident she wouldn’t be able to. And then what? When he decided she was helpless, what would he do? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps he would bargain with her, his help in exchange for something that would seem like poquito, nada, yet it would prove to cost her dearly once he collected. Or perhaps his kind had other, less pleasant uses for las curanderas tontas who were so foolish as to stumble into such a situation in the first place. She remembered what Nuala had said about the wolves who’d come to watch her, how they were waiting for her to lift her skirts, to spread her legs. Handsome or not, she would not let it happen, no matter how attracted to him she might be.

  She stifled another sigh as the quiet lengthened between them.

  He could wait forever, she knew, amused and patient. ¿Pero, qué tienef She could be patient, too. And she could find her own way home. All she needed was a moment to compose herself, enough quiet for her to be able to concentrate on the threads of her spirit that still connected her to the world she’d inadvertently left behind. She needed only the time to find them, to gather them up and follow them back home again.

  Behind el lobo there was movement in the forest, a small shape that darted in between the trees too quickly for her to see clearly. There was only a flash of small, pale limbs. Of large, luminous eyes. Here, then gone. A child, she thought at first, then shook her head. No, not in this place. More likely it had been some espíritu. Un deunde—an imp, an elf. Some creature of the otherwhere.

  Eh, bueno. She would not let it bother her.

  She unzipped the front of her parka and let it hang open.

  “It’s warmer here,” she said.

  El lobo nodded. His nostrils flared, testing the air. “The air tastes of autumn.”

  But what autumn? Bettina wanted to ask. Though perhaps the true question should be, whose autumn? And how far away did it lie from her own time? But then a more immediate riddle rose up to puzzle her.

  “You’re not speaking English,” she said.

  “Neither are you.”

  It was true. She was speaking Spanish while he spoke whatever language it was that he spoke. It held no familiarity, yet she could understand him perfectly.

  “¿Pero, como … ?”

  He smiled. “Enchantment,” he said.

  “Ah…”

  She smiled back, feeling more confident. Of course. This was myth time. But while he might appear mysterious and strong, in this place her own brujería was potent as well. She wasn’t some hapless tourist who had wandered too far into uncertain territory. The landscape might be unfamiliar, but she was no stranger to la época del mito. She might find it confusing at times, but she refused to let it frighten her.

  El lobo pushed away from the tree. “Come,” he said. “Let me show you something.”

  She shrugged and followed him into the forest, retracing the way she’d come earlier, only here there was no snow. There were no outlying cottages, either. No gazebo, no house with its tower nestled in between the tall trees. But there was a hut made of woven branches and cedar boughs where Virgil Hanson’s original cottage stood in her world, and further on, a break in the undergrowth where the main house should have been—a clearing of sorts, rough and uncultivated, but recognizably the dimensions of the house’s gardens and lawn.

  Bettina paused for a moment at the edge of the trees, both enchanted and mildly disoriented at how the familiar had been made strange. She could hear rustlings in the undergrowth—los mitos chicos y los espíritus scurrying about their secret business—but caught no more glimpses of any of them.

  El lobo took her to where, in her time, Salvador kept his carp pond. Here the neat masonry of its low walls had been replaced by a tumble of stones, piled haphazardly around the small pool water, but the hazel trees still leaned over the pool on one side. Lying on the grass along the edges of the pond was a clutter of curious objects. Shed antlers and posies of dried and fresh flowers. Shells and colored beads braided into leather bracelets and necklaces. Baskets woven from willow, grass, and reeds, filled with nuts and berries. On the stones themselves small carvings had been left, like bone and wood m ilagros. Votive offerings, but to whom? Or perhaps, rather, to what?

  When they reached the edge of the pool, her companion pointed to something in the water. Bettina couldn’t make out what it was at first. Then she realized it was an enormous fish of some sort. Not one of Salvador’s carp, though she’d heard they could grow to this size.

  The fish floated in the water, motionless. She had the urge to poke at it with one of the antlers, to see if it would move.

  “Is … is it dead?” she asked.

  “Sleeping.”

  Bettina blinked. Did fish sleep? she wondered, then put the question aside. This was la época del mito. Here the world operated under a different set of natural laws.

  “What sort of a fish is it?” she asked.

  “A salmon.”

  She glanced at him, hearing something expectant in his voice, as though its being a salmon should mean something to her.

  “And so?” she said.

  El lobo smiled. “This is a part of the mystery you seek.”

  “What do you know of me or what I might be looking for?”

  “Of you, little enough. Of the other…” He shrugged. “Only that
the older mysteries play at being salmon and such in order to keep their wisdoms hidden and safe.”

  Bettina waited, but nothing more was forthcoming. Fine, she thought. Speak in riddles, but you’ll only be speaking to yourself. Ignoring him, she leaned closer to look at the sleeping fish. There seemed to be nothing remarkable about it, except for the size of it in such a small pool.

  “If it were to wake,” el lobo went on. “If it were to speak, and you were to understand its words, it would change everything. You would be changed forever.”

  “Changed how?”

  “In what you were, what you are, what you will be. The mystery that you follow could well swallow you whole, then. Swallow you up and spit you out again as something unrecognizable because you would no longer be protected by your identity.”

  Bettina lifted her gaze from the pool and its motionless occupant to look at him.

  “Is this true?” she asked.

  As if he would tell her the truth. But he surprised her and gave what seemed to be an honest answer.

  “Not now, perhaps. Not at this very moment. But it could be, if you bide here too long. We should go—before an bradán wakes.”

  An bradán. She understood it to mean the salmon, but whatever enchantment had been translating their conversation passed over those two words. Perhaps because they named the fish as well as described it?

  “Would that be so terrible?” she was about to ask.

  For she found herself wanting to be here to see the salmon wake. To call it by name. An bradán. To watch its slow lazy movements through the water and hear it speak. To be changed.

  But the question died stillborn as she turned back to the pool. On the far side of the water, a stranger was standing—a tall, older man, as dark-haired and dark-skinned as el lobo, but she knew immediately that he wasn’t one of her companion’s compadres. Los lobos were very male and there was something almost androgynous about the angular features of the stranger. He seemed to be a priest, in his black cassock and white collar, and what might be a rosary dangling from the fingers of one hand. There was an old-fashioned cut to his cassock, his hair, the style of his dusty boots. It was as though he’d stepped here directly from one of the old missions back home. Stepped here, not only from the desert, but from the past as well.