Forests of the Heart (4 page)

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.

His gaze rested thoughtfully on her and for a long moment she couldn’t speak. Then he looked down at the water. She followed his gaze to see the salmon stirring, but before it could wake, before it could speak,
el lobo
pulled her away from the fountain and the priest, out of myth time into the cold night of her own world, her own time.

They stood beside Salvador’s carp pond, the water frozen. From nearby, the windows of the house cast squares of pale light across the lawn. Bettina shivered and drew the loose flaps of her borrowed parka closer about her, holding them shut with her folded arms.

“Who was that man?” she asked.

“I saw no man,”
el lobo
replied.

“There was a padre … standing across from us, on the other side of the pool…”

Her companion smiled. “There was no man,” he said. “Only you and I and the spirits of the otherwhere.”

“Bueno.
Then it was a spirit I saw, for he was nothing like you or your friends.”

His smile returned, mildly mocking. “And what are we like?”

Bettina merely shrugged.

“You think of us as wolves.”

“So now you read minds?” Bettina asked.

“I don’t need to. I can read eyes. You are wary of us, of our wild nature.”

“I’m wary of any stranger I meet in the woods at night.”

He ignored that. “Perhaps you are wise to be wary. We are not such simple creatures as your Spanish wolves.”

Bettina raised her eyebrows. “Then what are you?”

“In the old land, they called us
an felsos,
but it was out of fear. The same way they spoke of the fairies as their Good Neighbors.”

They were no longer in myth time, so there was no convenient translation for the term he’d used to describe himself. She still spoke Spanish, but he had switched to an accented English. She hadn’t noticed until this moment.

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

“I could be a friend.”

“And if I don’t want a wolf for a friend?”

Again that smile of his. “Did I say I was your friend?”

Before she could respond, he turned and stepped away. Not simply into the forest, but deeper and farther away, into
la época del mito.
Bettina had no intention of following him, though his sudden disappearance woke a whisper of disappointment in her.

She stood for a long moment, looking down at the frozen surface of the pond, then into the trees. Finally she shook her head and began to make her way back to the house. As she crossed the frozen lawn, she caught a flutter of movement in one of the second-floor windows, as though a curtain had been held open and had now fallen back into place. It took her a moment to remember whose window it was. Nuala’s.

She kept on walking, eager for the warmth inside. In the few brief moments since
el lobo
had brought her back into her own time, the bitter cold had already worked its way under her borrowed parka and was nibbling deep at her bones. But she was barely aware of her discomfort.

There was so much to think upon.

Qué extraño.
How strange the night had turned.

We live in a fallen world where good people suffer

because actions of others.

—
OVERHEARD AT A FUNERAL

T
WO NIGHTS LATER
; T
UESDAY
, J
ANUARY
13

The media couldn’t stop discussing
the see-sawing weather.

Not so long ago, it was all talk of the Christmas thaw, but then it snowed again last week and for the past two days the deep freeze that had gripped the city through most of December had descended once more. The thermometer registered a bitter minus-twenty Celsius yesterday as commuters began their exodus back into the ‘burbs. By midnight the mercury had dropped to almost minus-thirty, not taking into account the wind-chill factor. With the biting northern winds factored in, you could subtract at least another twenty degrees tonight.

It was the kind of cold that gave Ellie Jones nightmares. She’d dream she was one of the homeless people they were trying to help with the Angel Outreach program, that she was stumbling for block upon frozen block on numbed feet, looking for a warm grate, an alleyway, anyplace she could get out of the wind, away from the cold. When she finally woke, shivering and chilled, it was only to find that sometime during the night she’d kicked her comforter off the bed. All she had to do was pull it back up under her chin and she’d be warm again.

But it didn’t work that way for the people who had no home.

It was cold in the van, too, as she and Tommy Raven made their rounds. The ancient vehicle’s heater was set on high, but the lukewarm air it pumped barely made a dent against the cold. Of course in the summer you couldn’t get the stupid thing to shut off, but Ellie would gladly trade a sweltering summer’s night for this cold. The metal walls of the van kept out the wind, but she could still see her breath. Frost fogged the edges of the window, crawling across the glass with dogged persistence.

“Tell me again why we’re doing this,” she said as she scraped her side window, creating a miniature snowfall that fell across her legs and the seat.

Tommy smiled. “I don’t know about you, but I’m only in it to get rich and meet girls.”

She arched an eyebrow and Tommy’s smile widened.

“Or was that when I was thinking of starting up a rock band?” he said, returning his attention to the street ahead.

“I didn’t know you were a musician. What instrument do you play?”

“I’m not. I don’t. That’s why the band never got off the ground and I’m driving this van tonight.”

She punched him in the arm, but she laughed. In this kind of work you’d take the smallest sliver of humor and play it out. You needed it to help balance the way your heart broke a dozen times a night.

Tommy slowed down near the mouth of an alley, tires crunching on the hard snow that edged the pavement. Ellie almost didn’t see the man, huddled up between stacks of newspaper that were waiting to be recycled. By the time Tommy stopped the van, the man had gotten to his feet and shuffled off, deeper into the alley. Ellie pulled her hat down so that the flannel side flaps covered her ears and got out. The blast of cold wind that hit her when she stepped onto the pavement almost made her lose her balance—the streets were like wind tunnels because of the tall office buildings rearing up on either side. She peered down the alley and saw that the man had already disappeared from view. Shrugging, she left a sandwich in a brown bag, a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and a blanket where he’d been sitting.

She knew the man would be back as soon as they drove off. The only reason he’d fled was because he was afraid they’d try to take him to a shelter. It was no use telling some of them that they’d only take them if they wanted to go. At this point they didn’t trust anyone.

The van felt almost toasty when she was back inside.

“What do you think?” Tommy said. “You want to swing back to Bennett Street and see if that kid’s changed her mind?”

Her name was Chrissy. Fifteen, shapeless in the old parka they’d given her a couple of nights ago, not even close to pretty or some pimp would have already turned her out. Ellie had talked to her a half-dozen times already, trying to get her into one of the programs that Angel administered from her Grasso Street storefront office, but with no luck.

“She won’t have,” Ellie said. “But I’m willing to give it another shot.”

Tommy sighed. “She’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

Ellie nodded. If the weather didn’t get her, some predator would. You didn’t have to be pretty to be a victim.

They stopped on Palm Street where a covey of prostitutes, shivering as much from their need for a fix as from the cold, flagged them down for coffee and sandwiches. Then it was on to the Oxford Theater where they’d seen Chrissy panhandling earlier in the evening. When they rolled to a stop in front of the building they saw that the girl was no longer hanging around. That made sense. The theater crowd had gone home by now, taking with them the possibility of their handing out a bit of spare change. Ellie hoped Chrissy had found a place to spend the night, preferably someplace warm and safe, but what were the chances? More likely she was huddled on a hot air grate, too scared to close her eyes and sleep.

“Hang on,” Ellie said as Tommy was about to pull away from the curb. “What’s that?”

At first glance she’d thought it was only garbage, piled up in the snow outside the theater, but now she saw that there was a body lying alongside the green garbage bags. She couldn’t tell the sex or age. All she knew was that it was too still.

“Maybe you better let me check it out,” Tommy said, but she didn’t pay any attention to him.

Before he could stop her, she had her door open and was out on the sidewalk, running to where the body lay. A man. Obviously a street veteran, so it was impossible to judge his age. He could have been anywhere from his early thirties to his late fifties.

She went down on one knee and put a hand to his throat. No pulse. That was when she saw the yellowish liquid dribbling from the side of his mouth. Oh, shit. He’d choked on his own vomit.

“Call 911!” she cried to Tommy.

Pulling off her gloves, she worked his mouth open and scooped the vomit out with her fingers. Her own stomach gave a lurch. The liquid was thick and slimy and clung to her fingers, but after three or four tries, she got most of it out. He still wasn’t breathing. Wiping her hand clean, she reached in again, finger hooked this time, feeling for whatever was blocking his air passage. She couldn’t find it.

A quick glance to the van told her Tommy was still on the phone.

She returned her attention to the man, opened his coat. Kneeling astride his legs, she placed the heel of one hand just above his navel, the other hand on top of it, and gave a half-dozen quick upward thrusts. This time when she swept his mouth with her finger, she found a wedge of some undefined spongy matter and managed to hook it out. When he still didn’t begin breathing again, she started CPR.

First the chest compressions. After fifteen of them, she ventilated his lungs, gagging on the taste of his vomit. It was all she could do to not throw up herself. After two ventilations she went back to the chest compressions. Four cycles of this and she paused long enough to check for a pulse. Still nothing, so she continued with the CPR.

All she could taste, all she could smell, was his puke.

Don’t even think about it, she told herself. Like it was possible not to.

The fourth time she ventilated his lungs, there was a gurgle deep in his throat, a faint rasp of breath. She paused, put two fingers against his carotid artery and checked his pulse again. Her hand was so cold, it was hard to tell. She put her cheek close to his mouth. Held her breath. Tried to ignore the sour taste in her own mouth. She felt a faint warmth on her cheek.

He was breathing.

She got off his legs and then Tommy was there to help her roll him into the recovery position—on his side, one leg pulled up.

“Here,” Tommy said. “I’ve got some blankets.”

She wanted to help cover the man up, but her own nausea was too much. Stumbling away, she threw up against the side of the building. Now the taste of vomit went all the way down her throat. She knew it was her own, but it still made her retch again. Nothing but a dry heave this time.

She leaned her head against the brick wall of the theater, weak, stomach still lurching.

“Try some of this,” Tommy said.

He appeared at her side, put an arm around her shoulders to support her and offered her a cup of coffee. It was the only liquid they had in the van. All they carried was the few necessities to help the street people get through another night of bitter winter cold. Coffee and sandwiches. Blankets. Parkas, winter boots, mittens, scarves.

She took a sip of the coffee, gargled with it. Spit it out. Rinsed her mouth again. Tommy had cooled it down with a lot of milk, but because of the taste in her mouth, the milk seemed to have gone off. Her stomach gave another lurch. Tommy regarded her with concern.

“I…” She cleared her throat, spat. “I’m okay. How’s he doing?”

Tommy returned to the homeless man, bundled up with blankets now.

“Still breathing,” he said after checking the man’s pulse. “How’re
you
doing?”

Ellie tried to smile. “Well, they never tell you about this kind of thing when you take that CPR course, do they?”

They could hear an approaching siren now. Ellie pushed herself to her feet and went to reclaim her gloves. Setting the coffee down on the pavement, she thrust her hands into a snowbank, dried them on her jeans. She put on her gloves. Tossing the remainder of the coffee away, she stuffed the empty cup into the mouth of one of the garbage bags.

“Got any mouthwash?” she asked.

“ ‘Fraid not,” Tommy said. “I must’ve left it at home with that love letter I got from Cindy Crawford this morning.” He dug about in the pocket of his parka. “How about a mint?”

“You’re a lifesaver.”

“No, these are,” he said and handed her a roll of peppermint Life Savers.

Ellie smiled.

The ambulance arrived before the mint had a chance to completely dissolve in her mouth. Retreating to the van, they let the paramedics take over. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, leaning against the side of the vehicle to watch as the medics lifted the man onto a stretcher, fitted him with an oxygen mask and IV, carried him back into the ambulance.

“My old man died like that,” Tommy said. “So drunk he passed out on the pavement. Choked to death on his own puke.”

“I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

Ellie shot him a surprised look.

Tommy sighed. “I know how that sounds. It’s just…” He looked away, but not before she saw the pain in his eyes.

Sometimes Ellie thought she was the only person in the world who’d had a normal childhood. Loving parents. A good home. They hadn’t been rich, but they hadn’t wanted for anything either. There’d been no drinking in the house. No fights. No one had tried to abuse her, either at home or anywhere else. She could only imagine what it would be like to grow up otherwise.

She knew that Tommy had gone through one of Angel’s programs, but she’d never really considered what had driven him to the streets, what nightmare he’d had to endure before Angel could find and help him. Most of the people who volunteered for Angel Outreach and the other programs had come from abusive environments. The ones who stuck it out, who got past the pain and learned how to trust and care again, almost invariably wanted to give something back. To offer a helping hand the way it had been offered to them when it didn’t seem like anybody could possibly care.

But they’d still had to go through some kind of hell in the first place.

“Ten years ago,” Tommy said, “if that had been my old man, I’d have let him lie there and just walked away. But not now. I wouldn’t have liked him any better, but I’d have done what you did.”

Ellie didn’t know what to say.

Tommy turned to look at her. “I guess we’ve all got our war stories.”

Except she didn’t. She’d hadn’t thought of it before, but most of the people she volunteered with must think that she, too, carried some awful truth around inside her. That, just as they had, she’d been through the nightmare and managed to come through the other side well enough to be able—to
want
—to help others. But the only war stories she knew were from the people she tried to help. She had none of her own.

Before she could think of a way to try to explain this, a police cruiser pulled up. Tommy pushed away from the van.

“I’ll deal with them,” he said.

Ellie let him go. She watched him talk to the two uniformed officers when they got out of their cruiser. The ambulance pulled away, siren off, cherry lights still flashing. When it rounded a corner, she turned back to the van, but paused before getting in. Even in this severe cold, the incident had managed to gather a half-dozen onlookers. A couple of obviously homeless men stood near where she’d thrown up. The others probably lived in one of the buildings nearby, cheap apartment complexes that had long since seen better days.