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.
Instead, the tears dripped from my nose and pooled in the slits above my lip.
When the wolf ’s breathing stopped, I felt like mine started. I sucked air in deeply, listening to the shuddering of Eva’s breath as she tried to calm herself. I sat down on the log again and looked at the sick wolf. Jeremia’s wolf, its coat silver and tan next to the other wolf’s dark pelt, lay down by the dead one and put its muzzle on its paws.
We went to our huts then. I curled around Ranita, her light breath a promise of life after the death we had seen. And even though Ranita slept that night, her stomach full, her body warm against mine, I listened to the low barks of the living wolf by the fire as it said goodbye to its friend.
In the morning Jeremia’s wolf was gone, and the dead wolf was stiff. Jeremia dug a hole in our graveyard, where the babies had been buried, and the two of us wrapped the body in a sheet of plastic and hefted the wolf up, bringing it to the grave. In the daylight we could see the damage to the black wolf, and we marveled that it had lived as long as it had. Great red sores covered its body, not only its mouth, and it smelled as though it had been dying for a very long time. It was best dead—even Eva understood that.
The night before my birthday, I sat by the fire pit and played the violin. I could play about five songs, none of them screechy or high-pitched. Nathanael pulled on my fingers sometimes, correcting my movements. He wouldn’t tell me how he had learned the violin; he wouldn’t tell me why he refused to play anymore or why he watched me now with eyes so narrow and dark, I wondered what I was doing wrong. I had lived with Nathanael all of my life, but I knew more about the village he came from, the one I’d never seen, than I knew about him.
Jeremia sat beside me, carving a piece of wood, his hand never still, his short arm holding the wood in place. I slid farther down the log, closer and closer, so I could smell his nearness, breathe in the darkness of his scent. He reminded me of a hummingbird, fluttering here, hovering there, and then gone. We balanced each other—solid, dependable, quiet me and fast, whirling, dancing Jeremia. Sometimes he would leap about the fire, crazed, intense and full of monkey antics. I would watch him then, quietly and carefully, because his beauty—his supple, lithe beauty—burned with the intensity of a firefly, so wonderful to watch but dangerous to arrest. If I could have, I would have captured him, held him close, but that would have killed him.
The new object Jeremia carved was for my birthday, although he hadn’t said so and hadn’t given it to me yet. It was a miniature violin, no longer than my middle finger but with details as curved and precise as the larger version. I knew what I would do with it: I’d wear it around my neck, close to my voice box, where it would represent the promise of what my voice could be.
Jeremia put down his tools and looked up into the night. It was too dark to carve—bats flitted against the sky and owls swooped to catch them. I played my mother’s lullaby once more and felt the sting in my nose and the glassing over of my eyes. Jeremia grunted.
I set the violin in my lap and brushed the sleeve of my shirt against my eyes. Ranita snored softly. Jeremia looked down into the fire. His shoulders hunched, and I felt his arm tense as it brushed against mine.
“You had fifteen years, fifteen times that she came to visit you.” His voice was low, gravelly. “My parents haven’t visited me once.”
He turned his head to look at me. His face, shadowed and blurred, carried a glint from the fire. “You shouldn’t cry.”
He stood up, brushed against my knees with his legs and picked up Eva, who had fallen asleep on a mat in front of the fire. I placed my hand on Ranita and felt her warm breath seeping into my shirt. I rocked her back and forth.
He was right. I knew he was right, but I still missed my mother. Is it better to never have known your parents, like Rosa or Eva, or better to have had one brief day a year in which to place all of your hopes?
I woke up and looked out the window. Clouds billowed across the sky. Ranita slept on my chest, her favorite spot. Since we had discovered the rice milk, she awoke only occasionally during the night.
It was my birthday. I wasn’t sure I’d get out of bed.
And then I heard the warning—three short whistles and a long one. Someone was coming. My mother. Before I thought that it couldn’t possibly be true, I reacted to the pounding of my heart, the shaking of my hands, the rush of my blood.
I jumped up, holding Ranita to me, and ran out the door of my hut. I was so happy, even my fingertips tingled.
It was not my mother who stood in the center of our camp. It was a man and two boys. When I emerged from my hut, the man stepped back, narrowed his eyes and put his left hand on his belt where a knife glinted.
My heart began to slow, and my shoulders started to droop. Now I felt twitchy, like lightning was about to flicker from the sky and set my hair on end.
Both of the boys stepped back and the smaller one crouched, his hands clenched into fists. All three of them made the sign of the cross over their chests. Nathanael stood in front of the man. His arms were crossed and his chin jutted forward. He was standing tall, and his clothes seemed to fit him better than before. He had strength that belied his sixty-nine years. I waited at the door of my hut and tried not to let my fluttering heart and hands wake Ranita.
“That her?” the man asked.
Nathanael said nothing.
“You Whisper?” the man shouted. “Lydia?”
I looked at Nathanael.
“We have come for you. We came to get you,” the man said. He had a prominent forehead and heavy eyebrows that made him look angry. “It was your mother’s dying wish.”
I had to take that in for a minute, weigh what his comment meant. My mother’s dying wish. She was dead.
I felt the air rush out of my mouth and nose. My stomach clenched. I took a step back and leaned against the door frame of my hut. I closed my eyes and tried not to breathe so hard and fast. I’d thought I’d given up hope, but it had been there all along, and now it burst, shooting shards of glass through my body. I slid down the wall of my hut and sat hard on the ground.
When I opened my eyes, the scene in front of me had not changed. I felt old, trodden upon, worn, and yet no time had passed.
“Does she understand what I’m saying?” The man spoke to Nathanael but looked at me.
“Yes. But I’m not sure I do,” Nathanael said. “What do you want with her?”
“She’ll come home with us, help in the house, take her mother’s place.” The man peered at me, the corners of his mouth turned up in a slight smile. I thought he was cunning, although he spoke to me as if I were stupid.
“You have shown no interest in her for sixteen years, Belen, and now suddenly when it suits you, you want her back. She’s not going.” Nathanael’s mouth was pulled straight, tight, and his eyes squinted. The man heard Nathanael’s words and turned to look at him.
“I have every right to claim her, which you do not. I want her now, that’s what matters, and she’ll come home with us.”
The two boys stepped forward and flanked their father. The three of them had the same hair—thin and limp. They had hunched shoulders and rounded limbs. I thought all men were like Nathanael, Jeremia and the messenger, with muscles rippling beneath the skin and flat bellies. These three looked weak in body, but there was a strength to them that resided somewhere other than in their muscles.
I didn’t want to go.
“Come, girl. Get your things,” the man said.
Panic started to rise in me and forced me to my feet. My breath came fast, and the beat of my heart matched Ranita’s. My father walked toward me. His head was lowered and his upper lip twitched into a snarl. He reminded me of the coyote who snooped around our camp, always wanting, always hungry. I held Ranita tight against my chest.
“You will come with me,” he said. He was two feet in front of me. He looked up and down my body. “Even though I don’t want to claim you as blood, you are mine, and you’ve had sixteen years of freedom, living wild like the animals. Now you will come with me and do your duty.”
Ranita stirred. The man’s nose wrinkled.
“That your child?” His mouth turned up in a sneer. “You’re sixteen and already a mother. I can see what living here in the wild has done for you. Who’s the father? The old man?”
Nathanael coughed, and then he spoke low and slow, as if he were speaking to Eva when she was having a temper tantrum.
“The messenger told me this is Clemente and Maximo’s child, although I thought they were too old to have children.”
Belen looked hard at Ranita, raised his upper lip into a snarl and then reached out, grabbing my arm. I wondered why I had ever thought him weak. His grip cut into my upper arm and I tried to yank it from his grasp, but he had become a rock, unyielding and impenetrable. The older boy grabbed the arm of the younger and pointed at Ranita. The younger boy, Mateo, gasped, his hand over his mouth.
“I said get your things. I don’t want this other child, this monster and murderer. You come alone. Now.”
I heard rustlings at the side of my hut. Oh no, please don’t. I felt Jeremia’s anger, like low-lying fog slithering along the ground and wrapping itself around us. Jeremia had not yet felt the power of this man. An encounter between the two wouldn’t end well. I closed my eyes and prepared for the impact. Belen was taken by surprise when Jeremia flew through the air and landed with his foot against the man’s chest. Jeremia was on top of him, pinning him to the ground, snarling into his face.
When Belen screamed, we heard twigs snapping, leaves rustling, and another man emerged from the woods. He held a knife and crouched low. He ran at Jeremia, grabbed him by the back of his hair and yanked his head up while holding a knife to his throat. He pulled Jeremia’s good arm behind his back and forced him to his feet. Jeremia’s eyes were red, wild. He growled.
Belen sat up, steadied himself with his hand against the ground and stood. His face was red and puffy. He panted. The two young boys didn’t know what to do—they ran to their father, then back to the woods, then crept forward again.
“Kill him,” Belen said, his voice rough and jumpy. He nodded to the man with the knife against Jeremia’s throat. Pounding fear pumped through my veins. The very air itself seemed to throb.
I saw the man with the knife to Jeremia’s neck look at Belen. I saw him tighten his grip on the knife; I saw the knife press against the skin of Jeremia’s throat. Nathanael slid behind the man holding the knife, gripped the man’s arm and pulled the knife away from Jeremia’s exposed neck. Jeremia whirled around, facing the man with the knife.
Jeremia had no weapon and only one arm. That would not stop him. When Nathanael released the man’s wrist and jumped back to avoid the downward slash of the knife, I saw Jeremia tense his muscles and prepare to leap.
I screamed. I hadn’t used my voice in so long, it sounded as though it came from the trees, from the sky, squeezed from the sun. Everyone looked at me.
“I’ll go with them,” I said.
Jeremia rocked back and forth, his eyes still red, the tendons in his neck standing out like the strings on the violin. When he heard my words, he shook his head.
“You can’t leave.”
“Please,” I said, “take care of Eva and Ranita for me.”
In Jeremia’s eyes I saw something I had not seen before. It was dark, twisting and filled with yellow swirls. Fear.
“Don’t,” he said.
“No one will be hurt because of me.”
Nathanael and the man with the knife swayed opposite each other, their arms out, their legs wide apart. The man with the knife swung it forward, slicing at Nathanael. Nathanael backed up against one of the sitting logs. I saw what would happen, how this would all end, with old Nathanael cut open. With icy hands I touched Belen’s arm, and he jerked away from me, rubbing at the spot as though I’d burned him.
“Stop,” I said.
Belen pointed a finger at me and muttered, “Don’t you ever touch me, girl.” He glared and then yelled, “Celso, enough.”
Celso twitched his head, but his eyes never left Nathanael, and with a powerful lunge he lurched toward him, pushing him hard with both hands and slicing the top of his arm with the knife. Nathanael sat heavily on the log and held his hand over the cut. Blood seeped between his fingers, and I ran to him, pulling his hand away, examining the wound. It didn’t appear deep, but it would leave a scar, no doubt. Jeremia stood beside me, his hand out to the side, his jaw set with an anger that went into his neck. We were not used to such blatant cheating. We were not used to people who didn’t stop fighting when we’d already surrendered.
Nathanael accepted Ranita in his bloody hands when I handed her to him. My fingers, as they laid Ranita in his lap, shook and fluttered. Nathanael gripped my wrist, pulled me down and spoke into my ear.
“Come back, Whisper. As soon as you can. You, of all the rejects, were never meant for the life out there.” While he spoke, he slipped something around my neck. I looked down and saw the violin that Jeremia had carved for me—the miniature instrument. Nathanael had fitted it with a string through a tiny hole at the end of the long neck—a little piece of warmth and wood with smears of Nathanael’s blood on the edge. I slipped it under my shirt, where it soothed my skin.
I stood, held my head high once more and bit down on my tongue. I would not cry in front of these men. I would not let them have that power over me. I reached into myself and pulled on a small thread of anger. I held on to it, squeezed it, felt how delicate it was.
My belongings were quickly collected; I had very little. Everything my mother had given me fit into a scarf she had worn around her neck. I held the scarf up to my nose and breathed deeply. It still smelled of baking bread and molasses. I wrapped my cloth doll, a silver spoon and three ribbons for my hair inside the material. The violin fit against my back. I left the blankets, pillows, Jeremia’s life-size carving that reminded me of waterfalls, and my books—the three encyclopedia volumes I’d read from cover to cover, learning about the world. I pulled on my sweater, flipped aside the deerskin door and walked out of the hut. I wished I could pack Jeremia, Eva, Ranita and Nathanael into the violin case.
When I emerged, Jeremia stood by the fire pit, holding Eva. The two of them watched me with big, glassy eyes. I wanted to run to them, feel Eva’s arms around my neck, feel the tingling that started when Jeremia’s body was pressed against mine. Instead, I jerked my head away and tried to hold on to my thread of anger.
Celso and Belen stood by the path into the woods, and my brothers peered out at me from behind Belen. I turned to look at our camp—the log huts, the fire pit, the sitting logs surrounded by huge trees that stretched and strained toward the sun—and I thought of how small my world had been for sixteen years. How small and yet how huge.
When we walked into the woods, I did not look back, but as we moved away I heard nothing from the world behind me as the two men and two boys in my company lumbered through the trees, drowning out any sign of beauty that might have been there.
My mother was dead. And with that thought, my thread of anger disintegrated and I felt my lower lip begin to shake. I bit down on it until I couldn’t tell if the tears in my eyes were from my mother’s death or the pain in my lip.