Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

“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.”

Two weeks had passed in the World As It Is when Bettina and her wolf came out of la epoca 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.

Bettina 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.

“Let me be useful,” he’d told her when she brought it up earlier.

“You are much more than useful,” she’d replied and stood on her toes to kiss the corner of his mouth.

Two weeks in la epoca del mito had been time enough for her brujería to heal her hands. While her palms and the flats of her fingers remained scarred, the skin tight and still reddened, the pain was gone and she had regained most of her flexibility. But the look of them left her feeling terribly self-conscious. Her wolf’s response was to hold them and kiss her palms, even when they weren’t making love.

It took them the rest of the morning to reach the banks of the Santa Cruz. It was cool under the shade of the cottonwoods and willows and the water was chilly when they waded across.

“Your sister lives here?” el lobo asked as they came out from under the trees and walked up Bridge Road to the tiny central core of Tubac.

Bettina shook her head. “But she doesn’t live far away. Her gallery is here.”

The village was only three blocks long and three blocks wide and they soon reached Adelita’s gallery, their pant legs still damp from their wade across the river. La Gata Verde was on Tubac Road, across from Tortuga Books and nestled in amongst a collection of shops and galleries selling pottery, clothing, jewelry, paintings, and Mexican folk art. The street was crowded with tourists, most of them snowbirds, migrating down to Arizona to take in the warmer weather that their own northern climes couldn’t provide at this time of year.