Whisper (5 page)

He came down too easily and put his hand on my shoulder, pushing me back into the mud. I flipped my body around and dug my fingers into the sludge of the bottom. I grasped a handful and rose to the surface. I waited for his head to come back up. The dappled shadow of his form moved away from me, toward the bank where the otter's slide muddied the hill.

The ooze in my hand began to slip through my fingers and trickle down my arm. When Jeremia's head came to the surface, I threw the muck, but his hand came up, stopping the muddy assault. He smiled at me, a grin that darkened his eyes. He took a handful of muck from the otter slide and pelted me with it. I ducked below the surface, laughing as I went and choking on the water that flowed through the slits in my face and into my nose. He would come for me now, so I turned and swam to the opposite side of the hole, the side where the wild rose hung over the water. I surfaced beneath the branches, hoping they were thick enough to cover me, and waited.

I couldn't see him, didn't know where he would emerge. I held my breath. His head pushed the water up, a rising bubble, and he looked at me from only inches away. I could see the gold flecks in his brown eyes. Water dripped from his perfect nose and mouth. My feet dug into the ooze of the hole.

“This is the best life we'll ever have,” he said, “here, with just our tribe.”

I looked at the banks of the pool, trying to understand what he meant. This pool was good. We ate well, except for during the late winter when supplies ran low. But my mother was not returning and I now had a baby to care for. Life could be better.

“Out there, no one cares. We have to stay together.”

His hand gripped my arm, squeezed and tightened. His mouth was pulled straight and his eyes did not shift. Where had this Jeremia come from? What had happened to the playful Jeremia who swung me about and danced against the light of the fire, who carved such beautiful sculptures that I wanted to crawl inside them and let their cascading waterfalls forever slide over my body? The Jeremia gripping my arm knew about a world I'd never seen and didn't care to understand. My heart pounded beneath his fingers.

“Only us, Whisper.”

He pulled me to him, our chests meeting. I could feel his heart beating, speaking to my own, and his mouth against mine was like the first bite of a fresh mango. My lips parted, the slit opening and spreading against the solid skin of his own lips. He didn't seem to mind. My hands slid across the skin of his back and tightened, pressing him against me so the length of his body met my own. He lifted my feet out of the mud and his arm held me close, so close, but not close enough.

And then he let go. I sank back into the mud and we looked at each other. I held my hand against my chest, trying to still my heart, to cover its almost visible pounding.

Jeremia swam to the bank where the pine tree hung over the pool and pulled himself out. He reached for his shirt, glanced at me one last time and then walked back down the path.

I wanted him back. We weren't children anymore, couldn't roll in the grasses, wrestle in the mud, rest our backs against each other for warmth in the night when the chill seeped through our blankets. Something had changed, and even though I was almost sixteen, my birthday only days away, I was not a woman. I had not yet grown breasts, and I had not yet had my period. I knew I was late—Rosa had gotten hers when she was fourteen. But I did know that my feelings were true, and my blood pounded when Jeremia touched me. I wanted that feeling again, his body pressed against mine as snug as bones.

Four

Our job—Eva's and mine—was to dry blueberries, wild raspberries and blackberries for the winter months. We picked them in great quantities and laid them on the plastic sheet near the fire. Eva's job was to scoot away the bugs that liked the berries as much as we did. Eva always forgot and chased after a dragonfly or played her games of pretend. I went through the berries again later in the day and removed what bugs I could find.

When fruit was growing all around us in the summer, it was hard to imagine how little we'd have in the winter. The air was thick with the smell of sweet berries and oncoming fall. I used to love this time of year because it meant my mother was coming. The air itself breathed her presence, a delicious promise.

Rosa had hated my mother. I used to dance in anticipation of her coming, and Rosa would swat at my legs, smack me on the side of the head and huff. “Your mother doesn't deserve your love. She abandoned you. She deserves hate.”

I had thought about that. I had considered hating my mother, but she had saved me as best she could. When I was born and my father saw my disfigured face, he said, “Devil, witch, stealer of lives” and ran with me to the stream. He held me below the surface of the water, but my mother had chased after him. She pulled me from him, held me tightly against her chest and refused to let my father touch me. I was their first child. Then she gave me to Nathanael, who told me the story when he thought I was old enough to understand. He had wanted to make it clear that I belonged here and not with my family.

“I see my mother one day a year,” I had whispered to Rosa. “Why would I spend that day hating her?” Every time my mother came for a visit, I asked her, begged her, pleaded with her to take me with her, to take me back to the village. She'd tuck my hair behind my ears, smile a half smile, call me Lydia and shake her head. For many years, all I dreamed about, all I wanted, was to go home with my mother, but Rosa told me such dreams were stupid.

When my mother came, Rosa would stay only long enough to glare at her, snarl a few times and stomp around. Then she'd leave and return when my mother was gone.

Rosa was still young when she left our camp. Only fourteen. I thought about her sometimes and wondered what had happened to her. She had lashed out at life, and I often got in the way. But sometimes she'd comb my hair until it glowed black and glossy. She'd braid it for me, tenderly and carefully, and I would forget that she'd slapped me the hour before. When she left, I was lonely but also secretly happy.

I promised to be a better sister to Ranita than Rosa had been to me. I would never hit. I would never torment or ridicule. Rosa had made fun of my whispering all the time. She said it was stupid. “You have a voice—use it,” she'd shriek at me. I hadn't wanted to sound like her. Ever. My own voice was nasal, airy and distorted.

My mother never made fun of me. I had her for one day a year, one short day, from early afternoon, when she arrived, to the morning, when she had to leave, and I spent every moment touching her hair, holding her hand, resting the skin of my arm against hers. Did she miss me when she left? Did she miss me as much as I missed her?

“Your father is a very important man in the village,” she told me while combing my hair, preparing it for a braid. “He sits on the council with many other important men like Jeremia's father, Jun. They make the decisions for our village.”

Her hands, so gentle in my hair, so different from Rosa's, almost lulled me to sleep. My head rocked in motion with her fingers.

“Someday you will meet a man, Whisper. A man you can love because only you know how to reach him. Your father is such a man for me.”

How could anyone love a man who had tried to drown their first child? My mother's hands soothed, combed and brushed my tangled hair, making it shine like a raven's wing. But I knew now what she meant. Jeremia, whose dancing anger whirled and burned, was such a man for me. I understood him. Better than anyone else.

“He needs me, and sometimes need and love become tangled,” she said.

At the time, I didn't know what she meant, but I remembered every word. I remembered her stories about my brothers, Mateo and David, who looked like my father but were as different from each other as the vulture is from the hummingbird. I remembered her descriptions of life in the village where the council decided everything—what work each person did, what rules the town would follow, what food the town would eat. My father was on this council—my father, who had decided that I could not live with them in the village.

I couldn't hate my mother, who visited every year and whose gentle hands reminded me that someone cared about me, but I could hate my father.

Three days before my birthday, as I sat by the fire and coaxed songs out of the violin, and Ranita breathed against my chest, Jeremia's wolf visited us.

Jeremia sat beside me, carving a long twisted branch of maple in which I could see raccoons, otters, me with my broken lips, Eva with her webbed feet and Jeremia with his half arm. Jeremia heard the soft snuffling, the coughing bark, and put his knife down on the log beside me. Our legs had been touching just at the knee, but he pulled away and walked beyond the circle of firelight.

The breathy bark came again, and Jeremia followed the wolf into the woods. Their padding feet left no marks and no sounds. Nathanael sat up in the chair. I put down the violin, and Eva, with Emerald on her shoulder, walked to where Jeremia had disappeared into the trees. None of us spoke. We jumped every time the fire popped. We waited. I fed Ranita more rice milk, which she pushed about with her tongue, half of the mixture coming out again through her nose. Eating the food was enough to tire her, and she soon slept.

I rocked back and forth on the log and listened so hard, every noise became the wolf. Eva shuffled her feet in the dirt by the trees. The quiet must have been too much for Nathanael, because he stood suddenly, walked into his hut and returned with the radio. When he turned it on, the loud static crackle made Ranita's eyelids flutter, but she soon went back to sleep. Nathanael adjusted the dial. An eerie shriek came from the machine, and then he found the usual station with the news.

A woman spoke of things I knew nothing about. Hearing another voice, though, using clean, clear words without the nasal quality that I was so used to in my own voice, was enough to make me listen. I tried to remember the names, but they meant nothing to me and moved through me like air. And then Nathanael turned it up.

“…and we will now join the opera,
El Fuego del Mano
, already in progress. Mezzo-soprano Alicia Fabila is singing the part of Barbara…”

We listened to the opera for a few minutes, the music jarring in the silence of the night, and then Nathanael flicked the switch and the voice stopped. Instead, we heard loud panting and the trudging of feet, as though someone with a heavy load was lumbering through the trees. The goat scurried around the campfire and disappeared into Nathanael's hut. I stood up from the log and held Ranita against me. I tensed my muscles and readied myself to run, but when Jeremia emerged from the forest, I relaxed again.

The wolf padded along behind Jeremia. I had never seen it so close and marveled at the beauty of its silver fur. Eva backed away from it and stood by the fire next to Nathanael and me, the silent macaw on her shoulder watching warily. The wolf's long tongue hung from its mouth, and its yellow eyes glinted in the fire.

Jeremia carried another wolf slung over his shoulders and laid it down beside the fire. It was a much older wolf, with tufted black fur that had become tinged with gray. A smell rose from the wolf, a smell so strong that I pushed my hand against my nose, trying to stop the odor from drifting into my mouth. The wolf 's muzzle was completely white except where sores had formed around its mouth. Always be wary around hurt animals, I had been told, but this creature's eyes rolled about in its head, and it panted loud foamy breaths flecked with blood. I couldn't imagine it harming anyone.

I took a bowl to the creek and filled it with water. I placed the bowl by the hurt wolf's head. Jeremia's wolf looked at me, licked its lips once and then panted, its tongue again hanging from its mouth. Nathanael knelt beside the hurt wolf and spoke in a low voice. He hummed, murmured and laid a wrinkled hand on the wolf's abdomen. The creature whimpered and panted, more froth spilling from its sore-infested mouth.

“Something it ate or drank,” Nathanael said. He turned his head to the side, away from the stench of the wolf. Jeremia held the bowl up to the wolf 's mouth, pouring a bit of the water onto the sore lips. The wolf lapped at it eagerly, its tongue searching for more, but its eyes rolled again, and the whimper was so painful to hear, I held Ranita tighter. Eva pushed her hands against her eyes and cried, her voice one continuous wail. Emerald fluttered to the ground on her stunted wings and ran to Eva and Jeremia's hut, where she slid behind the door flap.

Now even the healthy creatures in our woods were becoming sick and maimed like us. How were we to escape whatever it was that had caused all this disease?

Nathanael hummed to the sick wolf and stroked its head and back. The animal's side heaved up and down with each breath, the panting beginning to slow, to lose its panicked quality. As Nathanael rubbed the wolf's back, clumps of hair slid from its body and fell in patches. I put my arm around Eva's shoulders and pressed her against my hip even though I wanted to wail with her and cry through my fingers.