6
The girls smile at two months—both of them at the same time, their mouths curling up as they watch one another. Their eyes follow her everywhere. On the rare days when sunshine filters through the front window, Heather spreads a blanket on the living room floor and lays them down. They stretch their arms to the ceiling. She whispers silly things into the soft cups of their ears.
On the rare evenings when the girls aren’t colicky and he is home from scavenging, B lies with her in the living room and makes funny faces at the babies. He calls them beautiful and gorgeous and Daddy’s favourite flowers. He picks them up and twirls them in the centre of the floor until their faces split with smiles, and then he goes into the kitchen and makes dinner for them all. His eyes say beautiful and gorgeous to Heather when he’s too tired—and they are both of them almost always too tired, now—to say the words.
He brings her wildflowers from the southern edge of town; tall daisies and tulips, irises and snapdragons. She throws the dried amaryllis into the backyard and this time B does not bring it back; the next day it is covered by Boston ivy.
B says he loves them in the food that he cooks, in the way that he dances with and sings to the girls. His voice soaring high and sweet, sounding so much younger than she feels.
At night he reaches for her again and again and weeps his hot tears into her hair. This, too, is a kind of love.
It’s a miracle that any of them survived. This family they have—a miracle.
The girls shine with a sticky magic that pulls her toward them, a force that feels older than love. Her children. The dark matter of her mind and heart is in constant, uneasy orbit around their flaming heads.
They are three months old, then four, then five.
She grows thinner. Everyone does.
Summer has given way to autumn. Daylight gives way to the dark. Heather and B go to bed earlier and wake up when the light comes, turning themselves toward the remnants of the sun. The sky is grey-tinged, with faint rust at the edges. There is no power in the city save for the generator that keeps Tasha’s clinic refrigerators going.
The girls have finally started to sleep for stretches at a time without wailing. Three hours here, five hours there. Still Heather walks them, and sometimes B comes too. He carries one twin, she carries another. Sometimes they even hold hands—the way they did before the girls came, when she was pregnant and life spooled in front of her, boring but safe. They walk up and down the streets and nod to the people they see. Everyone knows who B is, and they call out to him and smile.
One day, B finds a battery-powered radio in a heap of rubble and brings it back to the house. At night they put the girls down, then turn on the radio and search for news, all of which is ominous. One city has been hit with an unknown sickness—the doctors gone, the food almost nonexistent. Please, somebody help. We can’t do this much longer. A voice-over at another station complains of what they call the greening—the vines that crawl up to choke the buildings and the vegetation strangling the roads.
It’s a fucking referendum OF THE TREES, people! This from a man who identifies himself only as Nate. If you haven’t noticed the way the trees are taking the world back, you haven’t been paying attention! Hoard your matches! Don’t be burned—make sure you DO THE BURNING!
B doesn’t like Nate. B doesn’t really like the radio at all. Inevitably he is the one who goes to bed while Heather sits at the kitchen table with the volume low and searches for other voices.
Every night, B reaches for her when she finally comes to bed. His hand between her thighs and then his cock, his tears against her shoulder, his frustrated grunting in her ear. She looks out the window and up to the mountain. She does not make a sound.
“Where have you gone?” he whispers. “I feel like I’m fucking a ghost.”
Once, when she is feeding the girls dinner from jars of mushy peas and puréed carrots they’ve hoarded down in the basement, B comes across a station that is playing cello music. The notes burst into the kitchen, mournful and dark. The girls stop fussing, instantly. The only music they’ve ever heard is their mother singing to them in the forest. She watches, transfixed, as their eyes register the sound, as they twist their heads around to find where it is. B watches them too. As the music becomes more urgent, they break into open-mouthed smiles, and then they are laughing with joy in a way they’ve never done, and suddenly Heather is laughing too, then crying, and B comes to her, gathering her into his arms as she sobs into his dirt-encrusted shirt.
“It’s okay,” he whispers. “Heather, we’ll be okay.” After the cello trails away, the girls stare at her, and then at B, uncertain.
That night she is the one who reaches for his cock, his face, his lips. She straddles him in the darkness of their bedroom and rocks in utter silence, the only sound the creaking of the mattress, B’s laboured breaths.
He laughs as he comes inside of her, soft and incredulous.
In the days after this she often turns the radio on. She lets the girls roll around on the floor as she looks for the music again. She finds the cello once or twice, here and there a violin or trumpet. She never finds anyone singing.
She burns through one pair of batteries and then another, and then B takes the radio away.
“We have to make our supply of batteries last,” he says. Even B has given up hope of someone coming to the rescue.
The next day, Heather goes to the strip mall, to where Annie is taking inventory in the clinic, which is filled with tired mothers and sniffling children. Tasha is nowhere to be found.
“Batteries,” Heather says by way of hello. “I want more batteries, Annie.”
“Everyone wants batteries,” Annie says, not looking up. She is borderline skeletal now, as they all are.
“I just want a couple,” Heather says. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Annie laughs. “A secret like all the other secrets you’re keeping?”
Heather blinks. “I’m not keeping any secrets.”
Annie snorts. “Sure. Sneaking off to that greenhouse by the mountain is what, exactly?”
Inside of her, a sudden bloom of irrational betrayal. “How do you know about the greenhouse?” She knows the greenhouse does not belong to her. Tasha can talk about it with anyone.
Annie rolls her eyes. “You’re not the only person sneaking away from work, it would seem.”
“I have children to take care of—”
“And I have an entire city to take care of!” Annie slams her palm down on the counter. “Do you care about that? Does Tasha?”
“Annie, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know you go to the greenhouse,” Annie hisses. “I know that Tasha goes there too.”
“Tasha?” Heather asks, now thoroughly confused. “Alone?”
“Everyone is working so hard,” Annie says. “Tasha most of all. She won’t sleep, I can barely get her to eat—but she disappears into the forest and goes to a fucking greenhouse? For what—so she can pick some fucking flowers that no one can eat?”
“Maybe she just needs some time alone,” Heather says.
“Well that’s too bad!”
Heather and all the people in the clinic stiffen in shock.
Annie flushes, shakes her head. “Come with me,” she mutters to Heather. She leads her into the back of the clinic, but then stops and uses the keys at her belt to let them into a small room, a tiny space with a window that faces west. When Heather follows her in, Annie closes the door behind them. The walls are stacked to the ceiling with shelves, which are full of boxes and bundles and who knows what else. Annie turns to face her.
“Why do you go to the greenhouse?” she says. “Why does Tasha?”
“I don’t know why Tasha goes,” Heather says. “But it reminds me of my dad—he’s the one who built it.”
“You know something,” Annie presses. “I see the way that Tasha looks at you.”
“Look, Annie—why don’t you ask her?”
“I do, but she doesn’t tell me.” Something in her flat tone reminds Heather of B. “She acts like we’re meant to be here when we could just as easily go anywhere else.” She reaches up, yanks a box down from a high shelf. “I was there for her,” she says. “The whole goddamned time after her parents died. She wouldn’t have gotten out of bed if it hadn’t been for me. I didn’t complain. I didn’t say anything. Because I love her.” She stares at the box in her hands. “I thought about leaving her. A hundred times. But that’s not what you do, is it—not when things get bad. And now the world actually falls apart and where is she? Playing the lone saviour and taking off whenever she can to a fucking greenhouse?” She swipes an angry fist across her forehead and fixes her gaze on Heather again. “Why do the people here talk about you?”
Heather clears her throat. “The batteries, Annie?”
“Is it the mountain? Everyone says that no one has been up there except for you. What’s the big fucking secret?”
“My father died on the mountain,” Heather says. “After he fell, the city made it a law that no one could climb the mountain.”
“You went up with him?” You, her face says. You, with your twisted feet?
Heather nods.
“Why?”
“I wanted him to believe that I was strong, that I could keep up with him. It was the only thing he wanted for me.”
“So what’s the big deal? What’s up there?”
“Nothing, Annie. Nothing is up there.”
“Then why do people keep talking about it? What did he do—jump?” As soon as the words are out of her mouth, Annie freezes, a look of horror on her face. She won’t meet Heather’s eyes, and begins to fumble through the box, then grabs a small package of batteries and holds it out to Heather.
“He fell,” Heather says, not taking her eyes from Annie’s face. “He didn’t jump.”
Annie nods. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. When Heather takes the batteries, Annie moves past her, head down, and goes out the door.
Alone in the closet, Heather stares around her at all the boxes. She shoves the batteries in her pocket and reaches for another box on the shelves.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” a voice says. When Heather spins around, she sees Elyse, pale and thin in the doorway, breathing hard.
“Annie let me in.”
Elyse shrugs. “You shouldn’t be here now,” she says. “All of this is private.”
“Private?”
“We don’t know what the winter will bring,” Elyse says. “We all need to go without so that everyone can have a little. Annie and Tasha know what they’re doing.”
“No one knows what they’re doing,” Heather says. She brushes past Elyse, doesn’t wait for an answer.
The next day, after B leaves in the morning, she finds where he stashed the radio and plays it once more for the girls. The cello music bursts forth from the speaker as if by magic. Their smiles are bright, their laughter uncontrolled.
The town that had the sickness does not broadcast anymore.
When the last pair of batteries dies, she walks the girls in the forest more. They are five months old now, and she works to carry both of them. Their eyes are now bright and curious, ready to take in everything around them. Ravenous monsters. They reach out for the trees and brush their tiny hands across the bark; they reach forward to the deep-orange flowers that twine through and hang down from some of the trunks. She’s never seen these orange flowers before. She guides their hands away.
Everything in the forest now feels poisonous to her, even the plants that she knows. Still, she walks. She tamps down the tangled grass and roots and holds her hands out to brush the branches away. They reach the field with the sunflowers—husks now, disrobing for winter. They walk across the field and into the forest on the other side and eventually reach the greenhouse.
She opens the door and the smells spill out. The orchids, the lilies, the jacaranda tall and blue in the middle of it all. The air in the greenhouse still feels hot and heavy, waiting for what, she doesn’t know.
The amaryllis bob at her, fiery red and sweet. The girls reach out their hands.
She is twelve years old and she and her father are going up the mountain to celebrate her birthday. It is a secret—no one knows, not even her mother. Her mother thinks they are going into town to see the flowers Heather’s father has planted in the square, and then to a movie and dinner. A father-daughter date.
“Have fun!” her mother calls, and waves to them both from the door. They walk to the end of the street and turn left as though they are heading downtown. Then they double back along the street parallel to theirs and make their way to the base of the mountain.
Everyone has heard the stories, but Heather’s father isn’t afraid.
“Who died?” he has often said to his wife and daughter. “No one knows anyone who has actually been up here. I’m the only one who’s even been close to the mountain in years.”
“People have disappeared,” her mother always says. “You know they have.”
“But who?” The last time he asks that, they are in the kitchen after dinner, washing dishes. Heather is supposed to be taking a bath, but she has crept back along the hallway and stands listening by the kitchen door. Her father reaches for her mother’s hand and strokes it. “We’ll be fine. I found a path—it’s man-made, you can tell. I’ve been smoothing it out these past few months, making it ready for Heather. The incline isn’t that steep. It’ll be just like walking the hills in the park.”
“You can’t seriously be thinking of taking her up with you.”
“Of course I’m serious,” her father says. He catches sight of Heather, peeking around the kitchen door, and smiles. “Heather is stronger than you know. The climb will be good for her—it’s good for her to touch the world. You don’t want her to grow? To overcome her fears?”
“I want her to be who she is!” Her mother’s voice rings out in the small room and Heather flinches, shocked. More quietly, her mother says, “I don’t want her to climb the mountain just to prove something to you.” She notices where her husband is looking, and turns to see Heather now standing in the doorway.
Her father says, “Heather, do you want to go up?”
Of course she wants to go up. She nods. She expects her mother to object again, but she only sighs and goes back to her dishes.
The next day, she forbids them to go.
The day after that is Heather’s birthday.
On their way to the mountain, they stop at the greenhouse and check the plants. They cross the field and plunge into the trees again.
“The trees are coming closer!” her father says. She gets the feeling that he says this every time to himself—a private joke, a long-held wish. She knows how badly he misses being among the mountain trees.
At the foot of the mountain, they find the path. It is just as he described—old and somehow new, ready for her. The slope seems to go on forever, a long stretch of green eventually lost in the clouds.
“Why don’t we live on the mountain if you love it so much?” she asks.
“Your mother wouldn’t like it.” He smiles as he says it so she knows he isn’t mad at his wife. “She thinks it’s better for us to be in the city. She doesn’t like the stories. She used to, but she doesn’t like them anymore.”
“She can probably climb better than I can.”
“You climb just fine, Heather-Feather,” he says.
“But what if I fall?” she whispers.
“You won’t fall,” he says.
She wants to believe him; she wants to show him that she can. But the climb is difficult. As they go higher, the drop at the edge of the path calls her like a song. She fights to concentrate: one foot down, and then another. Her legs shake, but on she goes. She is surprised to see tropical flowers blooming off the mountainside, but her father just behaves as though he’d known all along they would be here.
He sings as they climb higher—little ditties to make her giggle. More flowers appear; she breathes in the scent of them, feels her lungs expand with mountain air. She lets go of her fear, just a little.
“That’s it, Heather-Feather,” he says. His smile is so lovely it makes her want to cry. “I knew you could do it. I knew it.”
Her legs hurt, but it’s a good kind of pain. She wants to drink from the mountain streams. Or cut her palm and mark the stones with her blood. Here, her father isn’t eccentric, and she is no longer strange—instead they are magic, instead they belong.
This is what he meant, she thinks. The magic of things that are possible. Her chest expands with sunlight, with hope. I’m climbing, she thinks. And still they go higher. I’m above the clouds.
They stop for lunch, perched on rocks that line the path, red amaryllis around them. Her father pops a cherry tomato whole into his mouth and she laughs; the sound echoes.
He grins. “How’s your leg, Heather-Feather? I told you you could do it. See how strong you are?”
As she opens her mouth to reply, she sees a sudden flash of blonde in the trees behind him.
They stay at the greenhouse until the girls begin to fuss. These days it doesn’t take long—they want to move, her girls, they want to see and feel and taste the world. To put it in their mouths.
She opens the door and, just before they leave, she turns back. She stands in the doorway with a hand on each of their bright heads and closes her eyes. She feels her legs rooted firmly, feels the vines whisper around her ankles, feels the way the ground slopes ever so slightly upward here, reaching for the sky. The air smells of flowers, but it is fevered by the city’s grief and despair. She lets herself think of it—that long moment when her father lost his footing on the path, that even longer instant when he was falling backward, his eyes and face alive with terror. The chasm of grief that cracked open inside her.
She waits for the air to change—to smell of starlight, to carry to her the deep, wild musk of the mountain. It doesn’t come. He never comes. She walks in the forest every day, and every day the answer is the same.
The girls whimper, which saves her. She opens her eyes and stumbles; she was leaning into the greenhouse, into that old despair. She clears her throat and wraps her arms around the girls, then turns to make her way back to the city. To find the blonde girl, Elyse, standing there.
“Jesus,” Heather says. “You couldn’t say hello?”
“Sorry,” Elyse says. She doesn’t sound it.
Heather clears her throat. “What are you doing here?”
Elyse shrugs. “I heard there was a trail.”
“Did you follow me?”
Elyse doesn’t meet her eyes.
“It’s a greenhouse,” Heather says, pausing on each word for emphasis. “What’s the big fucking deal?”
“Nothing,” Elyse says, quickly. “There’s no big deal.”
Heather rolls her eyes. She moves forward past Elyse; after a moment, the blonde girl comes after her. “Aren’t you afraid, out here all alone?”
Heather can’t help but laugh. “I’ve spent my whole life alone,” she says. “It feels normal to me.”
Keeping pace with them, in the trees, is an orange-grey blur of fur and tail. Elyse does not notice. The fox follows them all the way back to the city; Heather concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other and pretends the fox isn’t there.
Her father is singing when the creature steps out from the trees. A palomino, though Heather won’t know that word until much later. Golden hair and blue-green eyes and sleek and muscled arms, a golden cuff that shines softly on her wrist. The body of a woman, the strong chest and legs of a horse. The creature takes another step, and then another, until she stands in front of them. She looks young but also old, as though she’s been on the mountain forever. Her small breasts are bare.
Heather’s own breasts are larger, even at twelve, and her arms instinctively go up to hide their roundness.
“Hello,” her father breathes. The tone of his voice makes Heather think of church.
“Hello,” the creature breathes back. She sounds excited but also afraid. Her voice is sweet and clear and strange. Heather feels frightened but also electric—The stories, she thinks. The stories are true. She glances at her father and she can tell he’s thinking the same thing. He gets up from the rock and takes several small careful steps forward, then reaches out and puts a hand around the creature’s wrist.
“What are you?” her father asks.
The creature blinks. “I am…a centaur,” she says.
“Centaur,” he repeats. Then he nods. “Help us,” he says. “Help my daughter.”
The shock of his words is like slimy ice in her veins. Her father turns to her and smiles reassuringly, reaches for her with his other hand. “You made it all this way, Heather-Feather,” he says. “Now just think what you’ll be able to do when your legs don’t hurt anymore.”
The creature tries to pull her hand away, but her father won’t let go. The ground around them rumbles, shakes.
It breathes, Heather realizes. The mountain is breathing.
“Please,” he whispers to the creature. “I know you can heal her. We’ve come all this way.”
The creature jerks her hand away so fiercely her father stumbles backward, his foot catching on a rock. Everything happens so quickly.
The other creature, the dark-haired one, reaches out for her father from the trees, but he misses, and her father falls.
It is cold now in the city, late autumn, and still the wild things grow. The city sinks in green. In the mornings the survivors line up at the strip mall for rations. One packet of oatmeal per person, one capsule of vitamin C. A handful of shrivelled, mushy beets, of tiny green tomatoes. The people in front of and behind Heather in line grumble but she doesn’t complain. Joseph might bring them eggs today. He likes the babies.
She drops the groceries at home and walks the girls to the forest edge and back, over and over. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair. She lays them on the forest floor and rests with her back against a tree while she continues the story—the prince who scales Rapunzel’s tower and makes love to her, secretly, in the dead of night. Rapunzel’s own twins, growing in her belly, giving her away.
“The witch discovered them and took Rapunzel away to a desolate land,” she says. “In despair, the prince threw himself from the tower. He landed among thorns, which blinded him, and he wandered the land, lost, for years.”
They laugh at the way she tells this story, stretching her arms above her head to show the tower.
Despair hits her, and she imagines their faces as she leaves them for the fox, for the wolves. For other creatures that might come and take them away.
Their tiny bodies in the air as she flings them off the mountainside. As she flings herself off the mountainside.
She holds them close and breathes them in. “But she found him,” she whispers. She buries her face in their sweet skin. “She found him, years later, and her tears made him see.”
After her father fell, she told the doctors and her mother about the mountain—the way they climbed, the way they stopped, the way the mountain breathed, the way she’d understood almost instantly that the mountain didn’t want them there.
I felt it, she said. I felt the mountain come alive. No one believed her. They thought her father had jumped.
She was recovering from trauma, the doctors said. She’d just seen her father die. (On that, it seemed, everyone was agreed.) It wasn’t unusual for people recovering from trauma to say strange things.
“Her world does not make sense right now,” the doctors told her mother. Reactive psychosis, caused by grief and stress. It would pass. “Give her time to heal.”
Instead Heather shut her mouth and refused to say anything else. Through the search partway up the mountain, before the team had to turn back in defeat because of bad weather; as people put on bright-orange jackets and walked through the mountain trees for hours, calling her father’s name. Maybe he was lying crumpled on the ground somewhere and couldn’t get up. Maybe he had crawled until he couldn’t crawl anymore and was too weak to answer when they yelled for him.
They came back to her with more questions.
Did he really fall?
Nod.
Did you see it?
Nod.
Heather. Are you sure he didn’t jump?
Shake of the head.
What happened?
Silence. There was nothing she could say.
After the search teams gave up, the city council passed a law to ban people from the mountain. They let the fields leading to the mountain grow wild, allowed the forest to creep in.
Her mother held a funeral but Heather didn’t go. How could they bury her father when there was no body? It made no sense.
None of it made any sense.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” her mother said when Heather was home from the hospital, but Heather couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer.
Her mother packed his clothes away and carried them to the basement. When Heather found the boxes, she brought them to her room.
The house seemed so much larger without her father inside of it. The walls echoed with the absence of story.
People stared at Heather wherever she went. Rumours and whispers grew. He jumped. He was angry, and sad, and he jumped. The wolves on the mountain found his body. There wasn’t even a scrap of clothing left.
Eventually her mother started to tell stories too. He was charismatic and intoxicating, and she’d fallen so deeply in love, but he was also unstable and sad. He jumped. Of course he did. She should have known, she should have said something, but she wanted so badly to believe it wasn’t true. She’d loved him; she had hoped that would be enough. It wasn’t. It never had been.
“Heather is my worry now,” she would say to the friends who sat up with her when everyone thought that Heather had gone to sleep. “She’s so much like her father. I can’t lose them both.”
Was she like her father? Heather wondered. Probably. He hadn’t jumped. She wouldn’t jump, not even in the midst of all this hurt. But there had been magic in her life when her father was alive, and now it was all gone. No more walks under the stars, no more journeys up the mountain.
“I can’t believe he took you,” her mother said, over and over. “What if something had happened to you, too?”
Help us, he had said to the creature. I know you can heal her.
So she hadn’t been perfect, or strong. Not really. Not enough.
She had nightmares for months. She twisted so violently in bed she started sleeping without sheets. Her father, there and gone. His hand reaching and just missing the centaur’s fingers.
Just think what you’ll be able to do when your legs don’t hurt anymore. Because climbing halfway up a mountain hadn’t been good enough, hadn’t ever been good enough, no matter what he had said.
That long, tumbled run down the mountain—her face buried in the centaur’s neck, his arms firm around her, one hand cradling her head.
No one else walks like you, Heather-Feather. That’s something to be proud of.
Until it wasn’t. Until he’d wanted her to walk like everyone else.
The silence inside of her built like a wall. The doctors and counsellors couldn’t get past it. Her mother couldn’t get past it. At night, she crept out of the house and took long walks through the fields, keeping close to the tree-bordered edges so that no one could see her. Close to the mountain, then closer still. To her father’s greenhouse, now filled with weeds and dead things.
See, Heather-Feather. See how strong you are?
The anniversary of her father’s death dawned fresh and bright—the spring sun warm, the air still cool. She floated, silent, through the day. Three hundred and sixty-five days. How many more would they live without him?
In the evening, outside her window, the sudden smell of mountain flowers. She scrambled out of bed and pushed the window open. A shape, just there, hidden by the trees that lined the back of the yard. She shimmied awkwardly out the window, jumped to the ground. She wanted to weep, but couldn’t. Tall, dark shape against trees and sky. He came to her and dropped something at her feet—the knapsack. It still smelled of her father, even after all these months. The moonlight glinted on a golden cuff around his wrist. He was a tall mass against the shadowed trees, all wild hair and dark wiry arms. She hardly even noticed the flowers.
“You,” she said. “It’s you.”
Sometimes when the girls and B are asleep she slips out of the house and stands silent on the overgrown street. She smells the grass, the night air, the thick stench of the city. Everything smells now, even in fall. Everything tastes of despair.
She walks back to the house and goes inside. As she pads softly down the hall, the girls do not wake. She slips into the bedroom, slides in beside B.
She is almost asleep when he asks, “Where did you go?”
“Just outside, onto the street.”
A long pause. “You shouldn’t go out at night alone.”
“It really wasn’t far, B.”
“You were gone for a long time. Next time, wake me up so I can go with you.”
“I don’t need you to go with me.”
The anger in his voice is dark and surprising. “You’re always going, that’s the point.”
She doesn’t answer, just lies silent beside him and imagines one long running leap out the window, a flight up the street, into the forest, through the trees. Up the long slope of the mountain, the air thin in her lungs. She steps out of her skin and deep into its dirt, and then she is no more.
The girls grow bigger and more restless by the day. She walks to the strip mall to retrieve her ration of oatmeal, she cooks eggs given to them by Joseph over their backyard fire. Tasha sends people out to hunt. B joins with some of the other men—Kevin and Alan, and Annie goes too. They take hunting rifles into the forest, bring back what they can. A deer they butcher in the old town square, squirrels they skin and roast over backyard fires.
The Council, people have begun to call Tasha and the rest. The Council will know what to do.
Heather hardly pays attention. She changes the girls and throws the dirty diapers into the ravines that line some trails along her mountain walks. She sets buckets out to collect water whenever it rains and boils it in their backyard firepit to make sure it’s safe to drink. She walks the girls beneath the sky. She whispers his name until her throat hurts.
He does not come for her.
She is walking by the greenhouse when nausea creeps up and then explodes, a heavy crampish feeling that does not go away. Her breasts hurt. Her whole body feels swollen.
She is so tired. She stops and lets the girls down on the forest floor and smiles, with effort, as they reach for her.
She’s known for a while what’s been happening to her—the subtle but unmistakable changes in her body, the unrelenting fatigue. You’re starving, she told herself. That’s all it is. You’re starving, you’re unwell. You should go see Tasha, and see if she can give you something for despair.
But what kind of medication is there for this level of sadness? So one day passed and then another, and she did not go to Tasha, she did not go to Annie, and now she is here, in front of the greenhouse, the girls laid out on the ground in front of her as another life blooms inside her.
She sobs aloud, then catches her breath. Colours swim—bright-red flowers that cover the greenhouse, dark, husky berries that sway up from the ground. She leans her forehead against the cool glass of the greenhouse and closes her eyes, reminded of her father. Soon the snow will come in earnest and bury them all.
She doesn’t want to bring another child into this mess. She doesn’t want to die, frozen and starving.
She picks some berries and brings them to her mouth. Belladonna. Belladonna, oleander, poison oak in the shade beyond the greenhouse. Her father had loved poisonous plants the best.
The babies coo; she barely hears them. The berries won’t kill her, just make her sick, and maybe that will do the rest. Her father was right, all those years ago. She isn’t strong enough. She never was. The world smells of amaryllis and lilies and orchids and the jacaranda tree and the sweetness of the berries in her hand and then something else. A sudden dark shadow comes toward her, rippling the leaves. A shape that smells of mountain and snow and crystalline air but also of sunlight and flowers, of animal and darkness.
“You,” she says, as he comes out from the trees. “It’s you.”
After he brought the knapsack, the centaur returned to her night after night. She snuck out after her mother was asleep. Out the back door and into the trees. If her mother suspected anything, she didn’t ask. Or she didn’t want to know.
Instead of flowers, Estajfan brought her stories. They walked through the silent fields and the cicadas stopped to listen. The crickets went still, like they knew him.
He told her about the time that he and his brother—Petrolio, the name like a flower on the tongue—ran down the mountain so fast they almost fell. The rage that their father had been in when they’d returned—how he’d yelled at them, how he’d wept. How he’d been so sure they’d been killed.
Don’t go down the mountain, his father had said, and they raced each other anyway.
Estajfan told her about the other centaurs—how they’d grown from his father’s bones, how they’d pulled themselves out of the earth. They had no names, he said, because they didn’t need any. He told her fairy tales she hadn’t heard before—stories about octopuses who guard treasure in the deeps, mountain deer who kidnap and raise a human child. Fairies who lived in the salt mines beneath the mountains, long ago, who coated themselves in salt crystals before mating. That one sounded familiar—an old wives’ tale her father once told her, about elders who threw salt across a doorway to ask good things into a woman’s life.
“Stories are never just stories,” her father had said. “There’s always a kernel of truth hidden deep within the words.”
In turn, she told Estajfan about walking late at night. About the twelve dancing princesses, the goose girl, the queen. She talked through the silence that surrounded her, her words like a knife, cutting a web that had grown thick and hard.
She entered ninth grade with no friends except the one she met late at night. She read fairy tales at lunch and drew dragons in her notebook. Dragons, Estajfan told her, had lived on the mountain long ago. They’d disappeared before the horses were there.
“Were they dinosaurs?” she asked him.
“I’m not sure,” he said. He knew many things and yet often seemed like a child—fascinated with mundane human objects like combination locks, a cafeteria tray heaped with food, the money humans passed to one another.
She brought him things for his collection—picture frames, a baseball glove. Her first job was at a bookstore and instead of saving her wages for college she bought paint and pencil crayons and thick sheets of creamy paper and passed them to him in the dark. “So you can draw, if you want to.”
“Draw?” he said.
She showed him what she meant—spreading the paper on the ground, the moon just strong enough to show the pencil lines. Four legs, two arms, a tangle of hair in dreads. He smiled when she finished.
“Is that me?” he said.
She was suddenly too shy to say yes, so she just shrugged. “I’m guessing you all look the same,” she said, and he laughed.
“Mostly we do.” He took the pencils, the paper, and the drawing with him up the mountain.
The years went by. She graduated high school and decided not to go to college after all, telling herself that she didn’t want to leave her mother alone. It was mostly true. She got a full-time job at the bookstore, and started to send out her illustrations. Bears with long teeth. Unicorns and strange birds. Dark forests with shadowed beasts among the trees. Her illustrations began to be published. She illustrated a picture book, and then a volume of fables. She stopped working at the bookstore, and moved into her own apartment. She walked the trails up to the mountain in the dusk to meet Estajfan. Every birthday he brought her flowers, which bloomed in her windows for months. Fifteen years went by like that.
She drew centaurs, over and over. She drew her father falling, his face rigid with terror. Estajfan’s fingers just missing his. Her father’s broken, mangled body somewhere down far below. No one saw those.
She drew herself, a wide-eyed twelve-year-old, one leg shorter than the other, her feet twisted and bent. Her mouth open in a silent scream.
She drew herself now. Her father’s eyes, her father’s smile. The uneven legs and lopsided shoulders that were entirely her own.
Once upon a time there was a father and daughter who went up a mountain together, and only one person came down.
One night she showed Estjafan these pictures. He was gentle with them. When he looked at her afterwards, there was something in his face that made her ribcage tighten.
“Could I keep these, too?” he asked. She wanted to say no, but she nodded.
“Did you ever find him?” she asked.
“I didn’t look,” he said. “Heather, I’m sorry.”
Everything went hot and blurry. “You didn’t try to find him? You just left him to rot?”
“I didn’t want to see it,” he admitted. “I didn’t want to remember what I’d done to you.”
“It was an accident.”
In the dark, she saw him swallow. “When I reached for him, I—I hesitated.”
The world skittered in and out of focus. “For how long?” she said, finally.
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “He was already falling.”
She closed her eyes. “Why did you hesitate?”
“You weren’t supposed to be there,” he said. “Neither of you. He touched Aura like he had a right to do it. Like we were…property.” A long pause. “And what he said—I saw your face. I saw what that did to you.”
She swallowed. “He deserved to die for that?”
His eyes were dark, bottomless pools. “I’ll spend the rest of my life being sorry.”
She tried not to imagine it, but the thoughts came anyway. The animals that had nibbled on his flesh. The maggots that ate his eyes. Had he died right away? Or had death come later, in the dark?
“He deserved somewhere to rest,” she said. “He deserved at least that much.”
Estajfan took her wrist and she jumped. It was the first time he had touched her since he carried her down the mountain. “I don’t think I should come to see you anymore.”
“Why did you come in the first place?”
A long pause. “I didn’t know why,” he admitted. “And then I did.”
What was it that he’d said years before? Humans are like the brightness of comets in the sky. She was thirty-seven years old—older than her father had been when he died. Time was going so quickly. Time was not going at all.
She held fast to his hand. “Don’t go,” she said.
“Heather,” he said.
He so rarely said her name.
It’s the first time she’s seen him in the daylight in years. She’s forgotten how big he is, how magical. A story made flesh.
“Heather,” Estajfan says. They stand together in the forest, near the greenhouse. The weak sunlight glints on the golden cuff on his arm. The girls lie gurgling on the forest floor between them. It is warmer than any November she remembers. “I won’t let you starve.”
He’s brought her a small sack of things—cherries, nuts, and apples.
She closes her eyes and lets the nightshade berries drop onto the ground. “And what about another baby?” she asks. “You’re going to feed us all? See us through the winter, when snow buries everyone in the city?”
“I’ll find a way,” he says. “I promise.”
I promise. He had promised to stay on the mountain. He had promised to leave her alone.
“I don’t think we should do this anymore,” she had said just over a year ago. Two pink lines on a pregnancy test, dinner with B in the immediate future. “I need to live my real life.”
He had nodded, had accepted it all without question.
Now he is here again, in front of her.
Everything has changed.
“What am I supposed to do?” she says. Half to him, half to somebody—anybody—else. The girls start to fuss. “How am I supposed to have a baby? I’m barely eating enough as it is to feed myself and the girls.”
“I’ll bring you more food. Things are still growing on the mountain.”
She stares at him. “Why are things still growing on the mountain if they aren’t growing in the gardens? Or the greenhouses?”
He looks at her, but doesn’t speak.
“Estajfan.”
“I don’t know,” he says, carefully. “I can guess, but I’m not sure.”
“Well—guess, please.”
“Haven’t you already guessed for yourself?”
You are not meant for the mountain. Perhaps humans are not meant for the world now either. She takes a deep breath. “So—what—the world is starving us now? There’s nothing we can do?”
“There are always things we can do,” he says. “I will not let you starve.”
“Stop saying that!”
He is taken aback, hurt. “What else do you want me to say?”
“I asked you to go and you went. I walked these forests for months after the meteors came, waiting for you to come back, and you never did. Not once.”
“I came.” His voice is almost a whisper. “I came every day. I watched you through the trees. But you had your husband. Your girls. Your real life.”
“Well. The world got in the way of that, too, I guess.” She bends and picks up Greta, puts her in her sling, and then does the same for Jilly. “You won’t be able to feed us forever. Even I know that.”
“Maybe not forever,” he says. “But maybe for now is enough.”
She would laugh, but she’s too tired. “Humans don’t live in the now, Estajfan.”
He bends and snips a lily from the greenhouse, then reaches forward and tucks it behind her ear. “Then maybe,” he says carefully, “I’m glad I’m not human.”
It isn’t easy, carrying the girls and the sack of fruit back from the forest, but she manages. The fox follows her and she pays it no attention. No one sees her slip into the house and put the food away. But B discovers it all later that evening, as she plays with the girls in the dark living room.
“What’s this?” When she looks up at him, she sees that he’s holding an apple in each hand. “Where the fuck did this come from?”
“I found it in the forest,” she says.
She doesn’t expect him to believe her. She is not wrong. “Oh sure. Apples and cherries. Just lying on the ground?”
“I found the sack,” she says. “Maybe someone left it there?”
He looks at her, scoffs. “Do you think I’m a moron? A fucking idiot?”
She flinches, thinking of the children who mocked her at school. Moron. Idiot. Fucking spaz.
B stops and looks at her—really looks at her. He is gone with Tasha and Annie every day now, preparing for the winter. He is so thin. “If I find out that you’ve been fucking someone else off in the forest—”
She throws the first thing she grabs—a paperweight they keep on the living room table. It catches him on the side of the head with an audible thump, then shatters on the floor. He stares at her with horrified surprise, a hand to his head.
The silence around them is thick for a moment, and then the girls burst into tears.
“I am doing the best that I can,” she says over their cries. “Would you rather I went and threw myself off the mountain?”
Something flickers over his face—shame, maybe, but warring with anger and pain. Blood trickles from his temple. “I don’t know what to say to you,” he says. “I feel like I don’t know you at all.”
“I don’t know myself anymore,” she admits. They stand like this—frozen, not reaching out—until B looks down and notices the broken glass.
“I’ll clean that up,” he mumbles, and turns toward the kitchen.
“I’m pregnant,” she says. As he slowly pivots to face her, she thinks back to when she told him about the girls—that awkward dinner, the fear and joy that leapt into his face. Another universe long, long ago.
There is no joy this time. B closes his eyes, then nods.
She says, “I don’t know where that sack came from. But I don’t care—I’ll take it. We don’t have enough food.”
He opens his eyes and looks, for the smallest of instants, like the man that she married. “We’ll find a way,” he says. Then he turns for the kitchen.
She soothes the girls while he sweeps up the glass. By the time he comes back from dumping the shards outside, they are already tucked in their crib. He climbs onto the bed behind Heather and puts an arm around her.
“If none of this had happened,” he says, “where do you think we’d be now?” A peace offering.
Where, indeed. Their old apartment, their old jobs, taking the girls to daycare, maybe the park. He’d worked with computers; his office had been a twenty-minute walk from their apartment. Before the girls were born, they had walked to his office in the mornings and stopped by a coffee shop on the way—latte for B, iced raspberry tea for her. In the latter stages of her pregnancy she’d been obsessed with the iced teas from that store.
“Please don’t go up the mountain, or away,” he whispers. “We can’t survive without you.”
She squeezes his arm, and says nothing.
The next morning, someone finds a sack of apples on the other side of the city, and two bags of flour and rice appear as if by magic on the doorsteps of the strip mall.
B does not ask her any more questions.