Forests of the Heart (54 page)

The humor returned to his eyes. “I am hardly an old spirit. To tell you the truth, I’m not entirely certain what I am.”

“But still I will ask him,” Bettina said. “He may be an old spirit, but he is still my
papá.”

“This is true.”

“¿Y bien?
And as for love—do any of us trust or understand it?”

“I don’t understand it,” her wolf told her. “I can only feel it.”

“Do you trust it?”

“If you mean, do I trust the feeling? Then certainly. Do I feel it will be returned …” He shook his head. “I have no idea. Do you seek it?”

“Everyone looks for love,” she said. “But I have learned not to make my happiness depend upon it. My
abuela
would say that even in a relationship, one must be happy with oneself as an individual, or what do you have to offer the other?”

“I would have liked to have met your grandmother. You still miss her, don’t you?”

“Si,”
Bettina said. “I think of her every day.”

She gave him a wan smile and they walked on in silence for a time. The forest remained unchanged, the tall trees rearing skyward to their impossible heights, the footing even, mostly moss and a carpet of autumn leaves with little undergrowth to impede their way. It was not a forest they could have found in the world they’d left behind.

“I thought we would have come across some sign of the creature by now,”
el lobo
said finally. “Or at least heard about its passage. But the trees are silent to my ears and the gossips are most noticeable by their absence.”

Bettina nodded. This aspect of
la época del mito
was completely unfamiliar to her, so she had been following her wolf’s lead. Now she glanced at him.

“You were going to show me how to call up
los cadejos,”
she said.

The thought of their return filled her with mixed emotions. She’d realized ever since her dream and Adelita’s gift the other morning just how much she missed them. She was anxious as well. How would they react to her contact after such a long silence?

“I was,”
el lobo
said. “I will. But I was hoping to find the creature’s trail before we needed to do so.”

So he was nervous, too. That didn’t bode well. What wasn’t he telling her now?

“Why was that?” she asked, striving to sound calmer than she felt.

He shrugged. “Because there is always a danger in coming to the attention of old powerful spirits.”

He left so much unsaid, Bettina thought, but she understood exactly what he meant, his reservations obviously mirroring her own. She stopped and turned to him.

“Even if we didn’t need their help,” she said, “this is something I must do. I have not treated them fairly. I must make amends for my broken promise.”

El lobo
nodded.

“Y así,”
Bettina said. “So how do we do this?”

El lobo
shook his head. “Not we, but you. You must welcome them back to you. But we must do it in some place that is familiar and dear to you both or else they might choose not to hear you.”

“The desert is too far from here,” Bettina said. “We don’t have the time to make such a trip.”

El lobo
gave her that maddening smile of his. “Surely your grandmother taught you that the spiritworld can be whatever you need it to be?”

“No,” she replied. “We ran out of time before she could tell me so many things.”

“Most clothe it in a landscape with which they’re familiar, or one that they expect to find, as we did when we crossed over. We were in the eastern woodlands when we left your world, so that is how we see the spiritworld now, or at least an idealized version of those forests. But it doesn’t have to be so. The spiritworld can be anywhere we need it to be.”

“I see … I think. But that doesn’t explain how we can change where we are now into the desert.”

“That’s somewhat more complicated,”
el lobo
admitted. “It would be easier if your
croí baile
was in the desert.”

As had happened the first time she and her wolf had met in
la época del mito,
not all the Gaelic words he used were automatically translated by the spiritworld’s enchantment.

“My what?” she asked.

“The home of your heart. That one place where you feel truly and completely at home. Each of us has one, though not everyone cherishes it as they should. We carry an echo of it with us. Here.” He laid a hand on his chest. “It comes with us wherever we go—no matter how far we travel from the physical location.”

Bettina nodded. “I have heard of that. Abuela called it
el bosque del corazón.
The forest we carry with us in our heart.”

“When you are here, in the spiritworld, you are always but one step away from that place. The actual location, I mean.”

Bettina’s eyes lit up. “So that’s why she called it
el bosque del corazón.”

“What do you mean?”

“Abuela would often make these pronouncements, but before you could ask her what she meant, she had already gone on to something else. It never made sense to me that she would call it a forest, but now with what you’ve told me, I understand.”

“I still don’t follow you,” her wolf said.

“You know the story of the First Forest—how all forests are an echo of it and reach back to it?”

“Of course.”

“Then don’t you see? This is our own version of it—
we
connect to our heart home just as all forests echo back to the First Forest.”

El lobo
smiled. “Good. So you understand. And does the forest in your heart echo back to the desert?”

“I have never considered it. But it must. That’s the only place I am ever truly happy.”

“Then that is where you must bring us,” he said.

For a long moment Bettina could only look at him. Everything he said made perfect sense, but it still left her feeling dizzy. She had never looked inside herself for her own
bosque del corazón,
so how could she bring them to the place it echoed? And never having attempted such a task before, who was to say where they might end up? She was not exactly the most focused individual when it came to journeying through
la época del mito.
As easily distracted as she could be in myth time, anything could happen to them.

“I can’t,” she said. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Look inside yourself,”
el lobo
told her. “Call that place up in your mind, clearly and truly.”

“And then?” Bettina asked, unable to keep the doubt from her voice.

“Hold it in your mind like a waking dream and will us to be there. Your father’s blood will ensure that we will journey true.”

“My father’s blood.”

El lobo
smiled. “Have you studied your grandmother’s teachings so diligently that you’ve forgotten your father’s lineage? You have the blood of shapeshifters and shaman running in your veins—the oldest and truest
geasan.
”

“I…” She hesitated, then knew she had to admit it to him. “I’m not the most assured of travelers in
la época del mito.”

“I say again, your father’s blood will see us through. Tell me, have you ever been harmed in the spiritworld?”

She shook her head.

“I would wager that your father’s blood keeps you safe. Any you meet here would recognize that old blood of his that you carry. I wouldn’t doubt it’s what first called
los cadejos
to you.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“It is simple. Especially here, in the spiritworld. We are the ones who make such things complicated.”

“Now you sound like Abuela.”

“Just try,” he said, his voice gentle.

Bettina truly didn’t know where to begin. The desert was the forest she carried in her heart, a seeming contradiction in terms unless one knew the Sonoran. But what part of it? She understood from what her wolf was saying that she must focus on a particular aspect of it, but she’d walked so much of it, alone or in the company of her
abuela
and Adelita, with Ban and his mother and her own father. What one place could her
bosque del orazón
echo? The desert was large and she loved it all. And complicating matters was how she’d always wandered in and out of
la época del mito
when she did go out hiking.

But then she remembered another gift that had arrived the morning she’d been reminded so strongly of
los cadejos.
She reached into the pocket of her vest and drew out the rosary that her mama had sent along in Adelita’s package. Though undoubtedly Mama hadn’t meant it to be used for such a purpose, it was exactly what Bettina knew she could use to focus.

Her wolf regarded the rosary with interest.

“Where did you get that?” he asked.

“My
mama
sent it to me.”

He reached out with a hesitant finger to touch it.

“This is a potent
geasan,”
he said as he let his hand fall back to his side. “Your mother has
Indio
blood, too?”

Bettina nodded.

“I didn’t think the
geasan
of old spirits and the church could join in such a fashion,” he said. “She must be a remarkable woman.”

Bettina hadn’t even considered that her mother might have made this herself. How could she have known how to do it, to combine the mysteries of church and desert like this? Who would have guided her hand? No one in the church, that was certain, but when had her mother even believed in the spirits of the desert, little say let one of them instruct her in anything?

But, “She is,” was all she told her wolf.

She held the rosary in both hands.

“Virgen bendita”
she said, closing her eyes.
“Espíritus de los lugares ocultos salvajes.
Help me find this place I seek.
Lo imploro.”

When the image came slipping into her mind it was like greeting an old, long-lost friend. Of course, she thought. How could she not have remembered this place on her own? It was the crest of low-backed rise that stood in a part of
la época del mito
a few miles from her mother’s house, a secret place guarded by saguaro aunts and uncles that looked down into a dry wash. In the human world, one could see the Baboquivari Mountains in the distance, rising tall and rugged on the western horizon. In
la época del mito,
those same mountains shone with an inner light, the mystery of I’itoi Ki rising up from Rock Drawn at the Middle in a spiraling column of multicolored hues, reaching for the heavens. It was as though the most amazing desert sunset had been captured in
cadejos
…

How often had she and Abuela walked there, camped there, talked long into the night and through the day in that place? She had been there with her father, too, on more than one occasion.

There, she thought, gathering her will and focusing it on that image in her mind. That is where we must go.

There was no sensation of transition. She only heard her wolf say something softly in Gaelic that roughly translated to “Oh my,” and then the cool autumn glade was gone and she had bright sunlight bathing her face. She could smell the desert, felt the shifting dirt underfoot, heard the quail and doves in the mesquite that grew down in the wash.

She opened her eyes, the rosary still held fast in her hands, her face turned to the sky. The first thing she saw was a red-tailed hawk, coasting on its broad wings as it rode the air currents high overhead.

“Papa,” she said.

But it was only a bird, not an old spirit in the shape of a hawk, his human form lying forgotten under his feathers. She knew a moment’s sadness, then put the old ache aside. It was too hard to hold onto it at this moment. She drew a deep breath, tasting again the familiar air. It was enough to lift her spirits once more. She turned to her wolf, astonishment and delight dancing in her eyes.

“Well done,” he said. “If this is the forest of your heart, then you are well-favored, indeed. Only … where are the trees? Or did your grandmother only mean this to be a forest in a figurative sense?”

Bettina laughed and pointed to the tall saguaro.

“What do you think those are?” she asked.

“Very tall cacti.”

She nodded. “A forest of aunts and uncles.”

El lobo
smiled at her infectious pleasure.

“You see?” he said. “Your father’s blood runs true.”

Bettina turned slowly around, drinking in the sounds and smells and sights. Not until this very moment did she realize just how much she had missed it. Truly, the desert was in her blood and she would not be whole living anywhere else.

That thought made her look at her wolf and recall what he’d said earlier, how perhaps it had been to heal herself that she’d sensed this mysterious call drawing her to Kellygnow. Sometimes one needed distance to appreciate what one had, lying close at hand. So perhaps it was true. Because she had long forgotten how it was to be so grounded as she felt at this moment. This is how it had been for her before everything had changed. Before
la Muerte
had sent the clown dog for Abuela. Before Papa had forgotten his human form. Before she had turned her back on the promise she had made to
los cadejos.

Those old sadnesses rose up to nibble at her joy. She could do nothing for Abuela and if her father slept in a hawk’s thoughts, it would do no harm for him to sleep so a little longer. But the broken promise …

“To call
los cadejos
to me,” she asked her wolf. “Is it the same as how I brought us here? I must hold the thought of them in my heart and mind and will them to return?”

He nodded. “All but the willing part. It might be better if you simply asked.”

“For supuesto,”
she said. Of course.

And if they would not come?

She shook her head and told herself not to think like that. She looked down at the rosary she still held and put it back in the pocket of her vest, unsure of how
los cadejos
would react to it. Besides, she didn’t need it to help her focus. The memory of their happy voices and rainbow colors was too immediate for her to need any sort of talisman.