Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (3 page)

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.

“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.

Her belly rumbles softly, and the girl who is beginning to suspect that her name has always been Anastasia, that she is only delusional and forgot somehow, is thinking about going back to the icebox. But then she notices the tall wooden cabinet standing alone in one corner of the studio. It has not been locked against her, and when she opens it and peers inside, she discovers the white-grey pelt of a large wolf, rolled up into a tight bundle. At first, she is too afraid to even touch it. Her hunger forgotten, she sits back down on the floor, though still within easy reach of the pelt, which has been stored on the cabinet’s lowest shelf.

Ton have allowed yourself to be bedded by a man,
the skinwalker told her in the dream, but now she understands that he is something more than a man, and something less, as well. And she also understands why he came to her on the rooftop, when all other men avoid her, and why it is he led her into his cave and took her as a mate. What the green-eyed woman began, this man has finished.

“Do they know what you are, any of them?” she asks aloud, and her own voice startles her. She glances back towards the entrance to the studio, the open door leading out into the hallway. But there is no one there, no one to have spoken except her, and so she turns again to the tall cabinet. A few minutes later, she finds the courage to reach inside and remove the stolen wolf pelt. She presses it gently to her face, to her nostrils and lips and the tears streaking her cheeks. When she sniffs at the thick fur, she is not surprised that it hardly smells like a wolf, anymore. On the street, there is the wail of an ambulance or fire engine, an awful, hurting wail not so unlike the noise swelling inside her. When the siren has passed, the girl unfolds the pelt and spreads it out across the floor, smoothing it flat. She lies down on it, weeping and wishing that she’d never noticed the cabinet, that she’d never opened it and looked inside. And she rubs herself furiously against the pelt and then pisses on it in a futile effort to drive away the bland, sweet stink of mankind. If she ever was a wolf, she is not one now, and she only succeeds in working the odor of humanity deeper into the hide. She opens her month and despair spills from her like vomit, and she howls as best as any woman may ever expect to howl.

I hope that you’ll still be hen because I
want
you to be here
, he said.
I hope that counts for something with you.

You have given yourself to him freely
, said the demon in the woods.

When there are no tears left, and her throat is too sore to make even the pathetic sound that is not a howl, she lies still and silent for a time. She listens to her heart and to the dry, hot air sighing from the holes in the floor. She listens to the muffled din drifting up from the street below, to the babble of men and women and their machines. And then she stands and drapes the wolf’s pelt about her shoulders, even though she knows this pelt is not her own. Remembering the demon, she loops the forelegs together around her throat so that the hide won’t slip off and fall in a heap to the floor.

Were she to stand before a mirror, she would see reflected there the perfect image of the skinwalker who took away her true form. In the placid, unrippling glass, she would encounter again those same moss- and spruce-green eyes staring out at her. Because the magic is complete now, the curse consummated and absolute, and she would gaze into that same inexorable determination that greeted her when she awoke to find herself flayed and gasping beneath the star-haunted mountain sky.