THE DOCTOR AND THE TWINS
The next time the doctor visits the mother’s village, there are two new babies to see. Twins—like the doctor and her sister long ago, like the nieces who love her stories whenever she returns. The twins are healthy and big. There is nothing wrong with their lungs.
“And the birth?” the doctor asks, cuddling one of the babies—a boy, with large, dark eyes and a nose that already looks like his father’s.
The mother has been smiling, but now her face clouds over. “It was fine,” she says. “There was no trouble at all.”
This is true; the villagers confirm it. No labour that stretched from one day into the next. No need for a surgeon’s slender tools. The boy came first, and then his sister—the mother was up and moving around the house within hours. The entire village has been visiting the babies, playing the songs of welcome for days.
They are happy babies, which is just as well. Two babies at once is more than enough for anyone, the doctor thinks, remembering what life was like for her sister when her own two girls came into the world. An unending avalanche of crying and pissing and shitting and never enough sleep. The second husband holds the children like they are made of glass; when they cry, the doctor takes pity on him and reaches for them. He soon escapes outside.
“Surely he should learn,” the mother says. She and the doctor are at the window, watching the husband retreat into the fields.
“Parenting is different for everyone,” the doctor says. She’s seen enough parents to know. “He’ll get used to being a father, eventually. And you’ll be fine.”
“I thought I’d feel whole,” the mother says. “But instead I feel…unfinished.” She turns and grips the doctor’s arm. “How are they?” she whispers. “How are my babies?”
“Your children are right here,” the mother’s mother calls from the front door. She shuts the door behind her and comes to stand with them. “See?” she says. “Look how beautiful she is. Look how beautiful they both are, and how perfect!”
“Yes,” the mother whispers. She looks up at the doctor. “They’re perfect.”
The doctor stays for two weeks. She sleeps in her old room. The other husband, haunted and grief-stricken, does not come this time. There are no footsteps in the hallway. There is no dark presence on the other side of the door.
When the doctor is ready to move on, the mother insists on walking with her to the edge of the village, her twins in a sling. As the doctor says a final goodbye, the mother stops her with a hand on her arm, the same hunger in her eyes.
“Are they all right?” she whispers. “My babies. You never tell me how they are.”
“I haven’t seen them,” the doctor says. “But I think they’re all right.”
“You think?”
“I hope,” the doctor says.
“And—him?” she says. “Is he all right?”
“He is as all right as he can be.”
The mother nods. “I knew he was different. I wanted my life to be different too. But at the time I didn’t know what that meant. What that could be.”
The doctor nods, and gently pulls her arm away. “We never do,” she says.
The mother thinks about this for a moment. Then she turns back to the village without saying goodbye.
The doctor makes her way back to the city of her birth, where her sister still lives. At their house, her nieces run out to greet her.
“We’ve been waiting for days!” one of them exclaims, hanging on the doctor’s arm. “Where have you been?”
The doctor laughs. “I could move as fast as the wind and it wouldn’t be fast enough for you.”
“Yes,” her sister agrees, coming down the front walk to kiss her. “Nothing moves fast enough for these two.”
Inside, the girls hang her coat up in the closet. The doctor carries her bag and her satchel to the guest room. She is barely unpacked before they’re at her door and tugging on her hands, pulling her into the living room.
“Tell us about the centaur,” they say. “Have you seen him? Have you seen the babies? It’s been so long!”
The doctor lets the girls lead her to a seat before the fire. Her sister brings her a mug of tea, then sits in a nearby chair. She asks, “So have you seen him? Did you give him my thanks for taking those heavy, godforsaken books from my shelves?”
As promised, the doctor had been bringing gifts up the mountain every time she passed by. Last time, she had given the centaur some of her old textbooks.
The centaur had loved them. He loved all her gifts.
“I’ve seen the centaur,” she tells them. “He is as tall and proud as ever.”
They delight in how intractable he is, how stubborn and rude. He is a puzzle that they’ve yet to unlock.
“Have you met the children yet?” her other niece asks. The quieter one, the one who reminds the doctor of herself. “Are they happy? Are they loved?”
“I haven’t met the children.” The girls and their mother sigh in disappointment. “Next time, maybe. Perhaps I should bring him a different kind of gift.”
“Seems to me you bring the centaur everything. And the centaur brings nothing to you,” her sister says.
The doctor looks down at her mug of tea. “He’s lost a great deal.”
“So have you.” Her sister’s voice is sharp. “So have we all.”
“Perhaps. But how is he supposed to know that?”
“He would know if he asked you about yourself. If he spared one moment to think about you.”
The doctor shrugs. “He has no obligations to me.”
Her sister cocks her head at her. She has never been surprised—not when the doctor first told her the story of the centaurs, not later, not now. She is also the child of an almost-witch. She, too, lost her mother in the fire. She has survived all these years by turning her anger into love for her twins, her husband, and the sister she sees only a few times a year. Everything is magical and nothing makes sense. Everything could fall away at any moment.
“He has an obligation to you like everyone else does,” her sister says. “If the centaur doesn’t see that, then he’s not worth your time.”
That night, after the girls have gone to bed, the doctor and her sister sit outside. Together, they breathe the night air.
“You’ve lost weight,” her sister says. “Are you eating enough?”
“What kind of doctor would I be if I wasn’t taking care of my own body?”
Her sister snorts. “You. That’s what kind.”
The doctor chuckles. She always feels very young when she’s with her sister, and tonight is no exception. “Do you miss them?” she says, after a while.
“Always,” her sister says. “And I still see them everywhere.”
The doctor nods. They often talk about this: how their dead mother sometimes seems to appear in a crowd; the way their father, who died last year in his sleep, still sometimes seems to come to them in the face of a stranger on the other side of the street.
“I keep running into the same stories,” the doctor says. “Babies with no faces, extra limbs. Monster children that nobody wants.” She leans forward and rests her elbows on her thighs. “The way that Mama kept running into people who wanted love. What lessons lie in that?”
“The centaur loves his children,” her sister reminds her. “If what you say is true.”
“Yes,” she says. “But he doesn’t want to show them to anybody. He keeps them hidden away on that mountain. And maybe that’s my fault.”
“Mama was not responsible for the choices that other people make, and neither are you,” her sister says, sharply. “If he wanted an uncomplicated life, he should have stayed a horse.”
The doctor laughs, and then sobers. “But what about his children? What kind of life will they have up there, alone?”
“Still not your responsibility. Didn’t you say their mother has new twins? Human ones?”
“Yes,” the doctor says. She can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Perfect babies. A boy and a girl.”
“She’s chosen her life,” the doctor’s sister reminds her. “And so has the centaur. You can’t expect either of them to choose a different one. Perhaps that is the lesson you need to keep on learning.”
The doctor looks away. “That doesn’t seem a worthwhile lesson,” she says.
Her sister sighs. “There are different kinds of magic. And there are different kinds of grief. One person can only carry so many kinds. You of all people should know that.”
“And what if his children want to be in the world? What if they don’t want to be hidden away?”
Her sister has no answer for this; they sit on the step in silence until a call from the house takes them back inside.
It’s the second niece, awake. The doctor goes in to see her.
“Tell me the story again,” she says. “Tell me what happened when the centaurs were born.”
The doctor sits beside her on the bed and brushes the hair out of her eyes. She’s told this story so many times they know it by heart. It is not, perhaps, the best kind of story for children. But it’s the one they always want.
“Three doors for three babies,” she says. “Three doors into the world.”