The doctor is invited to the mother’s second wedding. She toasts the beautiful blonde bride, the humble, happy farmer with his homely face and capable hands who is her new love. There is wine and good food, and the villagers are happy to see the doctor again, though there’s no denying that they’re also uneasy—they need her, but she reminds them of monsters. But there is nothing to worry about this time around. The new husband has lived here all his life—he went to the village school, spent his summers tending fields with his father. Great swathes of corn and acres of strawberries, row upon row of giant orange carrots and great purple beets. This was the kind of magic the villagers relied on. This was magic they understood.
The mother and her new husband invite the doctor to stay with them. She sleeps in the old back room, the one with the fireplace, which they’ve converted into a bedroom with a view of the gardens. The table is gone. The floors are new, pale wood, smooth under her feet, scrubbed and sanded clean.
The mother seems quieter now, her blonde hair slightly dulled. The doctor isn’t sure why she didn’t give the house to someone else, or even burn it down, but she doesn’t say this. Instead she toasts them at the wedding and wishes them nothing but the brightest kinds of happiness. She dances with the village boys. They laugh at the clomp of her boots, but she’s a good dancer, better than most. When the night ends, she stumbles back to the house alone and falls into bed, leaving the mother and her new husband in the wedding tent.
In the middle of the night, the doctor wakes and hears footfalls outside her door. At first she thinks it’s the newlyweds—they’ve forgotten something, or maybe they need another blanket for the tent. But the steps pause and then someone softly turns the handle. The doctor leaps out of bed and grabs her satchel, searching for her favourite scalpel, polished and sharp. She finds it and holds it in front of her as the door swings open. She says a wordless prayer. She doesn’t believe in the gods, but the night is cold and she is alone and the gods, in this moment, are better than nothing.
Solid darkness enters the room. The scalpel slips from her hands and clatters to the floor. “You,” she says.
The husband—the first husband—cocks his head at her. His face is the same: the anguish hasn’t left him; the shadows are still there. He is quiet in the same way that the mother is—a silence that came in the wake of the children. This is not the first time that he’s been there—the doctor can see that right away. She’s also sure that the mother doesn’t know he comes at all.
He is so much bigger. She wants to stare at the rest of him—the great black legs, the gleaming flanks—but that would be impolite. The doctor has been many things in her life, but she’s never been rude. She keeps her eyes on his face.
“Me,” he says.
How much pain fits in a word? She wants to cup her hands and catch it, throw it away from him the same way she’s disappeared so many other hurts. But there is no way to fix this. She can’t help it—she looks at the rest of him, at the body she doesn’t know.
“I took them back,” he says. “To my home. I tried to save them.”
How terrible, she thinks. The babies all dead.
He sees this in her face and shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I asked the mountain to make them human so I could bring them back. Instead,” and he indicates the new body she’s trying so hard to ignore, “it matched me to them.”
The doctor doesn’t know what this means, the mountain, and she doesn’t want to ask. She takes a step closer to him. “So the babies survived?”
He smiles. “Yes,” he says. “They are alive, and they are beautiful.”
The rush of happiness almost makes her dizzy. She steps forward again and takes his hands—at first she isn’t sure that he’ll let her, but he does. She is a tall woman in a nightshirt, sleeping in an almost-stranger’s house. The events of a year ago feel like a dream.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she says. “They’ll come back soon.”
“I saw her. In the wedding tent. With her new husband, and the villagers. I saw them all.”
The doctor doesn’t let go of his hands. “You’ve built a new life for yourself. She has to do the same.”
“The mountain is very beautiful,” he whispers. “I think—I know that she would love it.”
The doctor shakes her head. “That doesn’t matter now. This is no longer your life.” She looks up to meet his eyes. “Your children need you. You can’t leave them alone.”
“They’re so much like her,” he says. “So impulsive, so angry.”
“And you’ve never done an impulsive thing in your life? You’ve never been angry or sad enough to tear the world apart?”
He smiles again, a little. “Perhaps.”
“I would love to see them again.”
He shakes his head, pulls his hands away. “They are on the mountain now,” he says. “They will stay on the mountain. It is safer for them there.”
“I won’t hurt them,” she says.
“You are of the human world, and that world will hurt them if it gets too close. I can’t let that happen.”
The doctor lets it go, and backs away. As she does, she steps on the scalpel and bends down to retrieve it.
“Were you going to attack me with that?” he asks, amused. “It looks sharp.”
It is. The doctor’s father made a set of these for her after she’d finished her schooling. It is its own work of art—polished steel, the handle traced with tiny stems and flowers. Her hands are steadier when she works with this knife. It is her favourite tool.
This is the one she used to cut the mother open a year ago, here in this very room. She watches the first husband remember this and look away from her.
“I’ll go now,” he says. “You’re right—I shouldn’t be here.”
“Wait,” the doctor says, almost without thinking. She reaches into her satchel, finds the drawstring bag where she stows her knives for safekeeping. She slips her favourite tool into the bag and removes the others. “Take this,” she says. “This knife brought you your children. Look at it and remember—from pain, also life. From death, another life.”
He hesitates, then takes the bag. “Thank you,” he says. He ducks back through the door.
She runs after him. “Wait. Please.”
He stops and turns to her, the old pain back on his face. Something else is in the air now too—a heaviness, a dislike that radiates from the walls. She swallows. “Promise me you won’t come back,” she says. “If they catch you here, no one will understand.” Half man, half horse? They’ll shoot him before he can speak.
But he only smiles. “I never mean to come here,” he says. “It just happens. The house draws me in, the way the mountain drew me back.”
The house draws me in. The thought makes her shiver.
“What do I call you now?” she says.
He shrugs. “I am the centaur.”
When he’s gone, she bolts the front door again—How did he get past it? Does she even want to know?—and crawls back into bed. There, she lies silent and thinks about this, over and over. Outside she can hear that a few of the young ones are still up and drinking. They laugh, they sing raunchy songs. She would smile if she didn’t also feel that the house was watching, that it has been watching her this whole time.
When the sun finally rises, her relief is so great she almost weeps.
The new bride and her husband come back later that morning. They are happy to see her and ask her to stay another night. She politely refuses.
“Were you uncomfortable?” the bride asks, concerned.
“No—it’s just that I must be going.” She shoulders her satchel. “I have patients to attend to in other places.”
“I’m glad you could come to the wedding.” The mother is as beautiful as all newly married brides, but not as beautiful as she’d been at that other wedding, nor as happy.
This is all right, the doctor thinks—her new griefs will also be smaller. (Surely the mother’s new griefs will be smaller.) She shakes the husband’s hand. She hugs the bride.
“Thank you for letting me stay in your home,” the doctor says. “I hope you’ll be very happy here.”
It isn’t a lie, not exactly. But as the doctor walks away from the village and into the hills, she thinks about this, hard. She does wish them happiness. But she suspects that the room where she slept will always feel hollow—along with some aspect of this new marriage. You can’t plaster over that kind of grief.
As she moves along the path that winds through the trees and will take her back out onto the road and from there down to the sea, the doctor thinks that maybe she’ll give this village to someone else to tend. She knows others who’d be happy to add this cluster of homes to their rounds. They’ll visit the new bride and her husband and bring their children into the world and never recognize the sadness in her face for what it is. The villagers will keep the secret. The village takes care of its own.
Or maybe she’ll keep coming back. Maybe the stories won’t let her go.
The doctor travels for days, ministering to all along her way. She sleeps when she’s tired and eats when she wants to—there are many little villages along this stretch of road, and she’s never short of company. Sometimes she pays for lodging, but more often she stays for free. People like to have a doctor in their debt.
It is a gift, she tells herself over and over. It is a gift to be able to do this.
She believes it. She means it. But at night, she dreams of that empty room in the house she left behind.