Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

“I see it now,” she said. She turned away from the paintings and smiled. “But we all carry that light inside ourselves. I’m not special.”

“Perhaps,” Lisette said. “Perhaps not. But in you it seems more intense. More tightly focused.”

Bettina almost laughed, thinking what her abuela would have thought to hear this. The most-used phrase in her grandmother’s vocabulary had been, “¡Presta attention!” It was always, “pay attention.”

“¡Presta atencion, chica!” Because Bettina’s mind had always been wandering, her attention captured by everything and anything and not always the task at hand. There was no place in the mysteries for a sonadora, a daydreamer. Only for true dreamers. “Remember this one small piece of advice,” Abuela would say. “You must always be focused. You must see everything at once, as it is, or you will lose yourself in all the possibilities of what might be, and for you and I, who can so easily slip into la epoca del mito, that could take us a very great distance indeed. It could take us so far we might never return.”

“You’re amused,” Lisette said, bringing Bettina back to the studio from that place where her memories had taken her.

Bettina nodded. “I was thinking of my grandmother. When I was young, her one complaint to me was always that I wasn’t focused enough.”

“Something you’ve outgrown, I assume.”

“So it would seem,” Bettina agreed, though she wasn’t entirely sure. Sometimes she felt she was still too much the sonadora, not the true dreamer. Not serious enough. Though, she remembered, Abuela could be anything but serious, too. If the fancy happened to take her, she could readily play la tonta loca, the crazy fool.

Lisette walked back behind her easel and picked up a brush.

“Do you have time for one more twenty-minute session?” she asked.

“Sí,” Bettina said.

But she paused as she passed the window, her gaze caught by a stranger she saw standing on the lawn by the tree line. Something in his stance reminded Bettina of that part of la epoca del mito where el lobo had taken her last weekend, of the priest she’d seen by the salmon pool whose existence el lobo had denied. The figure wore a dark overcoat with an old-fashioned cut and stood with his back to them, facing the forest.

Even from this distance Bettina could see how la brujena clung to him, like shadows to the branches of the trees beyond him. It was not a healer’s magic, not quite witchcraft either, but something new to her. Potent and strange.

“Ah,” Lisette said, joining her by the window. “The Recluse is back,”

“The who?”

Lisette shrugged. “I don’t know her name, but she winters every year in the old cottage—you know, the original one that Hanson’s supposed to have built and lived in. She usually moves in again around the end of November, the beginning of December,”

Bettina remembered seeing smoke rising from its chimney the other night, but that hadn’t struck her as odd. She’d thought that one of the writers was living in it.

“This is the first time I’ve seen her this year,” Lisette went on. “I wonder where she spends her summers?”

Bettina turned to look at her. “You keep saying ‘her’ and ‘she,’ but…?”

Lisette smiled. “Oh, I know she looks butch, but she’s a woman, the same as you or me.” Her smile broadened a little. “Well, probably more like me than you, if you know what I mean.”

Bettina returned her gaze to the stranger who was walking along the tree line now, her face in profile. She still didn’t look like a woman to Bettina. Not with her short-cropped hair and strong jaw, the man’s gait and the masculine set to her features. Bettina thought of Kellygnow’s housekeeper Nuala. She might dress as a man, but for her it seemed more a choice of style and a man’s clothing could do nothing to disguise Nuala’s womanly shape. This woman Lisette had referred to as the Recluse appeared to be deliberately confusing the issue.

And she still reminded Bettina of the priest by the salmon pool, though she wore no priest’s collar today. La brujena had been strong then, too, but she had put that down as their being in myth time.

“Is she a writer or an artist?” Bettina asked.

Lisette shrugged. “I don’t really know. She doesn’t mix with the rest of us. Someone told me a couple of years ago that she’s an old friend of the family—the Hansons, that is.”

“I thought they were all dead and gone—that some foundation looked after all the business now.”

“It does,” Lisette said. “But that doesn’t preclude special dispensation for certain individuals. Consider yourself. I don’t think there’s ever been a model in residence for as long as you’ve been—not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

“And speaking of modeling,” Bettina said.

Lisette nodded. “Yes. We should get back to it. I’m sure someone else has you booked for the afternoon.”

Bettina shook her head. “Not today. I’m going to work with Salvador after lunch.”

Lisette had been squeezing some paint onto her palette, but paused now.

“Really?” she said.

“Mmhmm.”

“Lord, you even have the look of one who relishes the idea.”

“Oh, I do. I love physical labor. It helps center me.”

Lisette smiled. “I’ll take paint on my hands over dirt under my nails any day.”

With that she went back to considering her palette. Bettina returned to the chair where she’d been posing. She lined up the chalk marks on the floor for her feet, on the arms of her chair for her hands, found the sightlines to get her head back in the right position once more.

“Move your head a little more to the left,” Lisette said. “And bring your chin up just a touch. A little more. There. That’s it.”

Bettina and Salvador had most of the wood split when Nuala came out to join them. Normally they would have had it all split and stacked by the end of summer, before the first snow fell, but Nuala’s intuition had told her that it was going to be a long winter so she had Salvador order in a couple of extra cords of seasoned wood just to be on the safe side.

Bettina was always comfortable in Salvador’s company. He reminded her of the men on her mother’s side of the family: strong and tall, darkly handsome, good-humored and generous of spirit. Now in his sixties, he was still straight-backed and strong, his hair and moustache a grizzled gray. And like her uncles, he was forever teasing her.

“Ah, chica,” he said today, his breath frosting in the cold air. He leaned on the hardwood handle of his splitting maul and gave her a very serious look. “If only I had the courage, I’d leave my wife and run away with you.”

Having been to dinner at his apartment on the East Side and seen firsthand how much he loved his wife Maria Elena, Bettina knew he wasn’t being in the least bit serious. She might not have accepted his flirting so lightly if he’d been an Anglo, but he was too much like family for her to even consider taking offense. Instead she paused in her own work.

“Where would we go?” she asked.

“Mexico City.”

“But you have relatives there. They would never accept me. They’d call me ‘la adúltera’ or worse.”

“Did I say Mexico City? I mean New Mexico. Santa Fe.”

“Doesn’t Maria Elena’s cousin Dolores live there?”

“¿Y bien? We would not have to visit with her.”

“But still she would gossip about us. We couldn’t go anywhere without People talking.”

“Then California.”

“Too many earthquakes.”