Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart Read online

  For a time, she is wandering the hospital ages again, those endless white caverns lit by tiny suns that blind her, yet shed no warmth. At last, she finds a hole in a wall of the cavern, and when she looks out upon a high and winter-bound meadow, she sees the corpses of all her pack strewn about there, a dozen lifeless bodies disemboweled and stripped clean of their hides, limp crimson smears stark against the fresh snow, become only carrion now left behind for starving ravens and coyotes. And she can also see the footprints of women and men, the tracks of the skinwalkers who have done this thing. Their laughter rises and falls, buoyed triumphant on swirling, icy gusts or drifting down from the hazy blue-grey sky, and they sing her a song that is all rattling bones and thunder.

  Older than the one who spins the World,

  We are free.

  Not enslaved by the likeness of Mother or Father,

  We are free.

  Unencumbered, unafraid, ever undying,

  We are free.

  And she turns away from the window, then, back to the nurses and their pills in paper cups. She is begging them to help her to forget that she was ever anything but a human girl. She is promising them that she can learn to use a fork and to shit where she’s told and to look at people when they speak to her. Only let me forget, she pleads. Only let me forget and never remember myself again. Rut they frown at her and say she clearly isn’t any better at all, because there was never anything to be forgotten.

  She opens her eyes, and it’s day again, and there is a young man squatting beside her on the roof, brushing the tangled strands of hair back from her face. The girl who is no longer a wolf bares her teeth and snarls at him before she remembers how short and dull her teeth have grown and how little threat is left in her voice. Still, it is enough that he immediately pulls his hand away, and enough, too, that the man’s expression changes, his curiosity and concern dabbed now around the edges by surprise and wariness.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says, then glances at his hand as though checking to be certain that all five fingers are still where they ought to be. “But you must be freezing,” and as if to prove the point, his breath fogs. “You’re going to get pneumonia or frostbite or—”

  “I’m not cold,” she says, though she is, in fact, very, very cold, and the girl sits up, scooting a little farther from the man. There’s a brick wall at her back now, and nowhere left to go.

  “Do you have a home?” he asks. “Someplace to get in out of the weather for a bit? Do you have someone to take care of you?”

  “I am awake,” she says, and he slowly nods his head. “Yes, you’re awake. But it’s very cold out here, and we need to get you inside, maybe get some coffee or soup in you. Maybe a strong cup of tea if you don’t like coffee.”

  She wrinkles her dry nose, remembering the bitter black water called coffee. Then she hugs herself and glances up at the January sky. There are no clouds, no sign of snow, and she cannot hear the skinwalkers singing. But she is sure they must still be watching her, and so she looks quickly down at the toes of the man’s boots.

  “Where are your clothes?” he asks, and she shrugs, not because she doesn’t understand him or does not know the answer, but because right now she’d rather be cold and naked than wrapped up in those tattered false pelts. This hairless skin is terrible enough, and when she sees the cuts and abrasions on her arms and breasts, her belly and thighs and long hind legs, she is only sorry that she has not done herself more serious damage.

  The man removes his own coat and cautiously takes a step towards her. “Here,” he says, “please, take this,” and he drapes it around her shoulders. It itches, and the suede leather smells faintly of some long-dead thing, but she doesn’t shake it off.

  “We really do need to get inside,” he tells her, “before someone else sees you and decides to call the police.” And when he offers his hand, she accepts it, rising slowly to her feet. The man leads her across the rooftop and in through an open window. He shuts and locks it behind them, and then she follows him down a long hallway and a flight of stairs to his apartment one floor below and on the other side of the building. He talks, and she listens. She understands most of what he says, enough to know that he was out all night the night before, and that he often comes up to the roof in the morning.

  “The view,” he says, though the girl has not asked him to explain. He closes the apartment door and turns the deadbolt, then smiles and adds, “Most days, you can see all the way to the mountains from up there. That’s one reason I rented this place.”

  She has to pee, and so he shows her where the bathroom is, then goes to make them each a cup of tea, leaving her alone. And when she’s finished, and her bladder no longer aches, the girl who was born a wolf stands before the mirror mounted above the sink with its shiny silver faucet and its knob marked H and its knob marked C. The girl watching her from the glass was also born a wolf, and she also wears nothing but the young man’s suede jacket. Her body has all the same inconsequential wounds. But the girl has long since come to comprehend the nature of mirrors—that she is only seeing herself reflected there and not another. It isn’t so different from sunlight off a pond or a slow-running stream, only made so much clearer, so much stiller, the image never marred by a ripple or the movements of a curious fish or turtle rising to the surface. She puts a finger to her chapped lips, as though warning herself not to speak, and the girl in the glass does likewise, and their eyes are the greenest things that she’s ever seen. She flushes the toilet, turns off the bathroom light, and then goes out to drink the steaming cup of tea the man has made for her. She dislikes the taste, though not so much as she dislikes the taste of coffee, and at least it makes her warm inside.

  “No,” the man tells her, answering a question she hasn’t asked. “As it happens, I wasn’t born here. I came to the city a few years back:, looking for work and wanting to be near the mountains, wanting to photograph—” He pauses, staring back at the odd, soft-spoken girl sitting across the counter from him, shamelessly naked except for his jacket, holding her empty cup and watching him intently.

  “It’s easier, I think, if you see for yourself,” he says, and so he shows her to the room that he calls his studio. There are a great many odd things there the girl cannot understand, though he tries to explain them to her. But mostly, there are images pinned upon the walls with thumbtacks or held inside black aluminum frames or kept safe between plastic archival sleeves in thick photo albums. She has seen this trick before, too, and knows that it’s something like a mirror. Unlike the objects seen through a mirror, however, these images do not move, but appear inscrutably suspended in time. He show’s her alpine meadows strewn with the bright blooms of columbine, lupin, and butterweed, and deep glacial lakes stained the color of polished turquoise by the constant influx of rock flour. There are photographs of jagged, snow-dusted peaks stark against the palest blue skies, and photographs of the ghostly white trunks of aspen groves, their leaves gone gold with autumn. There are elk and black bears, otters and mink and a badger, moose and mule deer, and one shot of a lynx crouched in the limbs of a ponderosa pine. And finally, he produces an album filled only with photos of wolves. She does not say a word, but only stares down at the familiar amber eyes and the lolling tongues as the man turns the pages and explains that he is especially proud of this one shot of a pack moving in a line across the snow, alpha wolf at the lead and the scraggly omega trailing out behind the rest.

  She closes her eyes, so that she will no longer have to see the photographs. And he wants to know if something’s wrong, if it’s anything he’s said or done, and she can only shake her head and mutter entirely unconvincing assurances that she is fine. Then she asks to be excused and returns alone to the bathroom, where she sits on the edge of the tub, weeping and shaking and digging her nails into her palms until they leave behind red crescents and draw the tiniest bit of blood.

  And later, after he makes her French toast with powdered sugar and pours her a glass of milk, th
e man asks her to stay with him, if she has nowhere else to go. And because she hasn’t anywhere else to go, excepting the streets, and alleyways, and the homeless shelters when she’s feeling very brave, she says yes. But the girl knows that isn’t the only reason that she’s agreed. Now that she has seen and held the album filled with his photographs of wolves, she cannot bear the thought of never being able to hold it again. She is lying on his sofa, warm beneath a woolen blanket, wondering if he would try to stop her if she simply decided to take the album and leave, when she falls asleep. She dreams, but this time there are no hospital nightmares or singing skinwalkers waiting for her.

  When she awakens, the sun is already setting, and the threadbare clothes she left scattered all about the roof the night before have been washed and dried and are lying folded neatly on the floor beside the sofa. The man is sitting at the kitchen table, tinkering with the innards of one of his big cameras, and he doesn’t stop and turn to watch as she dresses. “Thank you,” she says and buttons her grey corduroys, then pulls the raveling yellow sweater on over her head.

  “No bother at all,” he says. “It was laundry day, anyhow. But you’re welcome, regardless. You know, I was just thinking, I don’t even know your name.”

  She sits back down on the sofa, and almost replies that wolves don’t have names, that wolves do not need names. But she’s not a wolf, anymore, and girls do have names. In the hospital, one of the doctors had called her Anastasia, though she’d never understood why.

  “You don’t have to tell me, if you’d rather not,” the man says. “Or maybe you could tell me some other time, if you wish It’s entirely up to you.”

  “Anastasia,” she answers. “My name is Anastasia,” and that makes him smile.

  “Then I am glad to know you, Anastasia,” he says. “And I’m very glad you didn’t freeze to death on the roof.” Then he goes back to working on his camera, and she sits staring out the window, watching as twilight turns to dusk and dusk turns to night.

  The night is filled with the ugly, clamorous sounds of the city, which, more often than not, and even after so many years, she still finds inexplicable and alarming. Footsteps falling hard on cement and asphalt; the angry, argumentative shouts and the cries of pain; the laughter and taunting catcalls; the hot screech of automobile tires and the blat of automobile horns. The long hiss of a bus’ airbrakes, a barking dog, and the rattling cacophony of an upturned garbage can. All of it to keep her on edge, to keep her startled and constantly looking over her shoulder, even here, in the relative safety and comfort of his apartment. The man does not object when she takes the clean sheets and blankets and pillows he has laid out for her on the sofa and makes an untidy nest of them beneath a table in one corner of the room. And he also does not object when, shortly before dawn, she wakes from another nightmare and leaves her nest to join him in his bed. That is the first time they have sex, and there is only a moment’s awkwardness when she whimpers softly and then bares her throat to him, before rising on hands and knees and offering him her ass. These might be peculiar overtures to a man who was never a wolf and never will be, but he’s a quick study and catches on soon enough.

  Afterwards, when they are finished, he whispers, “I have questions.” She lies next to him, feeling at once satiated and ill at ease, watching the sunrise leaking through the slats of the white Levolor blinds that cover his bedroom window. “But I don’t have to ask them, not now or ever, if you’d prefer that I didn’t.”

  “I am lost,” she says, hoping she’ll not have to say anything more, and not taking her eyes off the window as the world outside and inside grows brighter by scant degrees.

  “That much I’d pretty well figured out on my own. I’ve never met anyone who seemed so entirely lost as you. But, there’s something else, Anastasia.”

  “And I am not a sane woman,” she says, remembering all the things the doctors and nurses told her before they finally sent her out to live on the streets. “You should know that. I’m delusional, and likely schizophrenic.” There is enough sunlight now that she has to squint to keep from looking away from the window.

  “Are you on any sort of medication?” he asks, and she shakes her head. He doesn’t ask why not.

  “I am a wolf,” she tells him, then gives up and closes her eyes, because the sun has started making them smart and water, and she doesn’t want him to think she’s crying. “I was a wolf when I was born. I was not born a girl.”

  For awhile, he says nothing else, and she lies there watching the orange-white afterimages dancing about behind her eyelids. This is when he will make nu leave, she thinks. This is when he will lead me back up to the rooftop and lock the window so I can never come back inside. The thought only makes her a little sad, because she’s known it was coming all along.

  “Is that why you believe you’re crazy?” he asks, instead.

  “You have been very kind,” she says without opening her eyes. “If you want me to leave now, I wouldn’t blame you. I promise I won’t be offended.”

  “You never even asked my name.”

  “Names are new to me,” she replies.

  “And yours isn’t really Anastasia?” he asks.

  “It’s the only name anyone has ever given me,” she replies, then adds, “Wolves do not need names.”

  “I have to go to work,” he says. “I have a wedding to shoot today, and it’s not the sort of thing I can afford to cancel. Will you still be here when I come home?”

  She does not immediately recognize the tingling sensation in her chest and belly as relief, and it’s possible she has never felt human relief. But the girl who was not always a girl nods her head, and she says yes, I will be here, because you haven’t told me to leave, and I have nowhere else to go.

  “I hope,” he says, “that you’ll still be here because I want you to be here. I hope that counts for something with you.”

  “Possibly,” she says, answering him as honestly as she can, and then he kisses her lightly on the left cheek and gets out of bed. She lies there, listening to the noises he makes showering and having breakfast and getting dressed, and before he has gone, she has drifted back to sleep. In her dreams, she is in the mountains again, chasing rabbits and chipmunks and voles through the litter of a forest floor. It isn’t winter, but maybe early spring, and she isn’t a wolf, either. She brings down one of the rabbits just before it reaches its tunnel in a jumble of rocks and fallen spruce boughs. Even without her wolf’s teeth, she kills it quickly with a single crushing bite to the back of its skull, then lies down to eat amid the dead leaves and moss, the fern and harebells.

  “If they catch you here, you must know they’ll surely kill yon,” says the green-eyed demon who stole her skin, and when the girl looks up, the thief is standing on a boulder not very far away. She wears the wolf pelt, forelegs tied tightly about her throat and shoulders and the hind legs cinched around her waist, the bushy tail hanging between her thighs. To most eyes, whether wolf or human, she would seem no more or less than any wolf.

  The girl sits up, her dead rabbit and all its delicious smells forgotten, and she stares directly at the demon wrapped in her fur. “I was born here,” she says. “Even after what you have done to me, this is still my home.”

  “Do you think so?” the skinwalker laughs, flashing a glimpse of its stolen teeth, and that’s when the girl notices the wolves standing not far behind the green-eyed woman. “Do you think they will ever have you back, bitch, looking like that?” and the demon motions towards the girl.

  “They know me,” the girl says. “I am of them, and I will always be of them.”

  “They do not even recall the smell of you,” the demon tells her, and then she sits down on the boulder as the wolves come nearer. They are all painfully thin, ribsy and half-starved as though this is the longest night of winter and the world is locked in snow and ice. A large male steps forward and stands next to the demon, it’s ears held erect and it’s lips curled back in a warning snarl.

&
nbsp; “You have allowed yourself to be bedded by a man,” the skin-walker says. “You have given yourself to him freely. The magic is complete,” and her voice swells, become the wind through tall trees, and the dry slither of a venomous snake along the forest floor, and the roar of an avalanche rushing forward to bury everything caught in its path.

  “Can you not see me?” the girl who is no longer a wolf asks the wolf who has never been anything else. “Can you not smell me? Has she truly taken everything I ever was?”

  “Were I you, child, I’d start running,” says the demon, and, at that, the wolf standing with the woman growls and bounds towards the girl, and the rest of the pack follows close behind him. She hears herself scream and turns to run, but finds that the forest has vanished, if it were ever there, and now she can see nothing but the gaudy, slurp-edged sprawl of the city, waiting to take her back. Knowing that the wolves will not follow, and knowing, too, the imperative of their empty stomachs, she lets it have her. And when she opens her eyes, there are only the white walls of the man’s bedroom, the slightly musky smell of the sheets where they fucked, and the late morning sun shining in through the blinds. She lies still, listening to her heart beating and staring up at the ceiling, pretending that she cannot still hear the hungry,pursuing wolves or the green-eyed woman’s hard, victorious laughter.

  Desiring no more of sleep or nightmares, she passes the afternoon exploring the man’s apartment. She does not bother with her clothing, as the dry, hot air blowing from gaps in the floor is sufficient to keep her warm. Like most human contrivances, the rooms and all their various contents strike her equal parts delightful, mystifying, and an nerving. She spends half an hour trying to discern the whys and hows of the telephone, before giving up and eating an assortment of things from the refrigerator. It is late afternoon before she finds her way back to the man’s studio, and still he has not returned home. She is beginning to wonder if he ever will, or if perhaps he has found some other cave somewhere, and now this one will belong to her. She sits on the floor and stares at the photographs on the wall, but doesn’t go near the cameras. They must be very dangerous things, if they can capture these moments, these slivers of the world, and freeze them forever. It must not be so very different from what the skinwalkers do, and she wonders at all the holes the man has left where the trees and animals and mountains in his photographs once were. And does he kill the things that he captures, or does he merely imprison them? She resolves that she will ask him, if the man ever does return, but then the girl decides maybe it will be better if she doesn’t. It might be better, she thinks, not to know. She looks through all his photo albums again, spending the most time on the book that is filled entirely with images of wolves. Staring at the pictures behind their plastic sleeves, she realizes that all wolves have come to look the same to her, aside from obvious variations in their coats and size, and she remembers what the demon said to her about the magic being complete now. Most times, she cannot even tell the males from the females.