Forests of the Heart (3 page)

And she began to trade her fetishes and charms. First to some of those living in the house, then to customers the residents introduced her to. As her
abuela
had taught her, she set no fee, asked for no recompense, but they all gave her something anyway. Mostly money, but sometimes books they thought she would like, or small pieces of original art—sketches, drawings, color studies—which she preferred the most. Her walls were now decorated with her growing hoard of art while a stack of books rose thigh-high from the floor beside her chair.

The few months grew into a half year, and now the house felt like a home. She was no closer to discovering what had drawn her to this city, what it was that whispered in her bones from the hills to the north, but it didn’t seem as immediate a concern as it had when she’d first stepped off the plane, her small suitcase in one hand, her knapsack on her back with its herbs, tinctures, and the raw materials with which she made her fetishes. The need to know was no longer so important. Or perhaps she was growing more patient—a concept that would have greatly amused her
abuela.
She could wait for the mystery to come to her.

As she knew it would. Her visions of what was to come weren’t always clear, especially when they related to her, but of this she was sure. She had seen it. Not the details, not when or exactly where, or even what face the mystery would present to her. But she knew it would come. Until then, every day was merely another step in the journey she had undertaken when she first began to learn the ways of the spirit world at the knee of her
abuela,
only now the days took her down a road she no longer recognized, where the braid of her
Indio
and Mexican past became tangled with threads of cultures far less familiar.

But she was accepting of it all, for
la época del mito
had always been a confusing place for her. When she was in myth time, she was often too easily distracted by all the possibilities: that what had been might really be what was to come, that what was to come might be what already was. Mostly she had difficulty with the true face of a thing. She mixed up its spirit with its physical presence. Its true essence with the mask it might be wearing. Its history with its future. It didn’t help that Newford was like the desert, a place readily familiar with spirits and ghosts and strange shifts in what things seemed to be. Where many places only held a quiet whisper of the otherwhere, here thousands of voices murmured against one another and sometimes it was hard to make out one from the other.

The house at the top of Handfast Road where she now lived was a particularly potent locale. Kellygnow and its surrounding wild acres appeared to be a crossroads between time zones and spirit zones, something that had seemed charming and pleasantly mysterious until
los lobos
began to squat in its backyard, smoking their cigarettes and watching, watching. Now she couldn’t help but wonder if their arrival spelled the end of her welcome here.

“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 from 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.