The Centaur's Wife

by Amanda Leduc

  One evening, while making her way through the mountain woods, the girl came across a boy—a young man, really, creeping quietly through the underbrush, tracking a deer. She was frightened—she remembered the stones—but the boy had a kind face, and he hadn’t seen her, so she followed him in silence, curious to see what he might do.

  When the boy lifted his knife some time later, the girl understood his intention and cried out. The boy, surprised, whipped around to face her and threw the knife before he could help it. The blade caught the girl’s long hair and pinned it to a tree, driving deep into the wood. Unable to free herself, the girl looked into the boy’s eyes and saw the villagers and their rocks, but also the trees the boy had climbed as a child, the rivers in which he’d washed his own hair and sung his own songs.

  She opened her mouth, but she had no words.

  “I’m sorry,” the boy said, and he reached for the knife. “I didn’t see you.”

  The girl did not understand this, but if she had, she would have told him that the people in the village hadn’t seen her either. She stayed still as he pulled the blade out of the tree. The deer was gone now, safe somewhere in the trees, and for that the girl was grateful.

  “Are you lost?” the boy said, but the girl didn’t understand this either. Instead she walked away from him, up the steep mountain path. The boy followed her because he could.

  The boy did not know what he was starving for, in truth. But neither did the girl.

  As he followed her, the girl became restless and worried. She began to run faster, but the boy kept up—they climbed higher and higher, each one of them afraid of and afraid for the other. The boy chased the girl right up to the peak, so high they could see clouds far below. At the edge, the girl turned back to face the boy.

  He held out his hand. “I won’t hurt you,” he said. “Please believe me. Please say you believe me.”

  But the girl had no words and could not speak. She took a step back and the ground crumbled beneath her feet. The boy reached for her but he was too late. She fell and her hair fanned about her like moonlight.

  Oh, the girl thought. I remember this feeling. She fell down and then up, into the bottomless expanse of the sky, her moonlight hair shining with a different kind of light now, a light fresh and made of stars.

  The boy did not see this. But then, he hadn’t seen the real girl anyway. He’d only ever seen his dream of her.

  3

  They are tiny, Heather’s babies, made of magic, like the stars. They are perfect. They are awful. They gurgle and whimper, feed from her, and cry. After that day under the hospital they show their true selves—they do not sleep, ever, unless they’re attached to her and she is moving. Up one street and down the next. Greta and Jilly, Jilly and Greta. Their tiny curled fists, the squished wrinkle of their faces. The unholy pitch of their screams.

  Heather straps them to her chest and goes for long, dizzied walks amongst the trees near the mountain. B does not come with her. He is helping the other survivors. He has become someone everyone recognizes—the people from the basement, who turned reluctantly to him at first and now follow his lead; the people from the ambulance and fire trucks, who know him as the first person who spoke when they arrived.

  No one’s in charge here, he said, but he was wrong.

  He doesn’t like that she’s taking such long walks with the babies, but he likes it less when she tries to help. The babies won’t stop screaming, and she finds it hard to pay attention to anything or anyone else. Finally B just tells her to take them away, and she goes.

  There are so many dead. Some remain only in pieces—an arm here, a buried bit of skull that could have belonged to a child. Three days after the meteors come, she is walking through the city’s central square—there used to be a park here, but it is now a field of rubble—when a man and a woman enter the square a few paces ahead of her, carrying tools and wood. They stop in the centre of the square and drop things on the ground, and she pauses to watch. First they pound a wooden post into the ground with a sledgehammer. Then they nail a sheet of plywood to the post. They loop lengths of string through a hole in the top left-hand corner of the plywood and tie the ends around several black markers.

  ANNALISE BOWEN, the woman writes on the plywood. FREYA BOWEN. KARLA BOWEN.

  DOMINIC HOLLINGSHEAD, writes the man. AMY GREEN.

  The woman holds out a marker to Heather, but she shakes her head. She hasn’t slept in twenty-six hours; she hasn’t bathed in four days.

  The man comes toward her. “Who are you missing?” he says. His tone is the kind you might use with someone talking loudly to themselves at the bus station.

  Heather steps back and shakes her head. “No one,” she says. “I’m missing no one.”

  The woman’s face spasms and she turns away. The man only nods. “Tell everyone you see about the board,” he says.

  She nods, avoiding eye contact with the woman, and walks away from them. Ahead of her, the forest beckons, calm and green.

  On her way back, she notices that B’s parents’ names are now on the board. When she sees him later that afternoon, he doesn’t mention it.

  * * *

  At first they sleep on couches and mattresses with the others from the hospital basement, refugees in their own city. As the days plod on, Heather and B steal time to go up and down the streets, jimmy locks, slide into bright kitchens. They pad across gleaming hardwood hallways and ash-covered kitchen floors, looking for something that could become a home. Their own apartment is gone.

  “Find houses near the city centre,” the doctor has told them. Tasha. “Everyone should stay close, at least for now.”

  Sometimes, while she’s walking the babies, Heather searches for a house alone. She slips into houses with unlocked doors and stands in silent hallways, trying to imagine herself in the space. Herself, her husband, her girls. They are a happy family. Look—this house even has a white picket fence.

  She’s making her way through one of these houses when a sound behind one of the doors catches her ear—scratching and thumps, a tiny groan. She pictures a raccoon locked in a closet and grasps the handle, opens the door.

  A teenage girl and boy fall out onto the dull hardwood floor, all tangled arms and breasts and rapidly shrinking penis. Scrabbling for clothes.

  “Sorry,” Heather says, faintly surprised. The door leads to a tiny bathroom. There’s barely enough room for one person to stand up in there, never mind two.

  “Do you mind?” the girl snaps.

  “Is this your house?” Heather says.

  The boy mumbles, “I don’t think it belongs to anybody. At least, no one that’s come back.”

  Heather glances again at the bathroom, and then at the rest of the house. From the front hallway you can see through to the glass wall in the kitchen. The backyard grass is already high enough to reach the door. “Why the bathroom when you can have the whole house?”

  “Dunno,” the boy says.

  A long moment stretches between them.

  “Condoms,” she says finally. She feels a thousand years old. “Make sure you use condoms.”

  “What are you, the birth control police?”

  Isn’t that obvious? she wants to say. Instead she just looks at the girl. “You don’t want to get pregnant. Not now.”

  The girl raises her chin. “I’m not stupid.”

  What a gift—to be young and horny as the world ends. “Lock it after I leave,” she says as she heads for the door. She fights the urge to turn back and touch their faces.

  * * *

  She and B find a house two streets down from the wreckage of the hospital. There is a high chair in the kitchen, a baby carrier in the hallway, a car seat in the garage even though there is no car. There is an art station in the kitchen, with fingerpaints and pencil crayons. The pencil crayons are scattered over the floor, as though
they were dropped in a hurry. Maybe these people got away. Maybe they all got into a car and drove away in those hours when she was sitting scared beneath the hospital.

  Before they move in, Heather packs away all of the family pictures. A mother, a father, a daughter, and two sons. The pool out back is filled with rubble from the wreckage of the house behind them. Boston ivy flanks the backyard fence, tendrils of it already reaching out over the destruction. Within days of them moving in, the pool is crisscrossed in green.

  The girls share a bedroom in this new house. B finds a bicycle abandoned on the street and scavenges odds and ends from the other empty houses—winter coats, a garden shovel, all of the canned food from the kitchen next door. There are some diapers in the house, but B takes his bicycle and brings back as many packages from the store as he can. One trip, another, another.

  “We’ll replace everything if they come back,” he says. Heather tries to imagine a world where this mother and father and their three children make their way back to the mountains.

  When she closes her eyes, she still sees fire in other cities. She sees burned vehicles and blackened bodies inert at the sides of the highway. She says nothing about this to B.

  She feeds the babies and puts them down to nap and picks them up and rocks them when they keep crying. They are angry, red-haired monsters filled with colic and rage, and then they are sweet, impossible fairies—always one or the other, never anything in between. She walks beneath the maples and the oak trees, wearing thick socks and jeans tucked into rubber boots that are too big. They are the only shoes here that will fit over her twisted foot.

  She ventures as close to the mountain as she dares. The sun is weak and feeble these days, filtered through a grey sky choked with cloud. But in the woods, the world looks the same. The green trees, the whispers of a grey-green mountain that stretches high above them.

  He is not here, he is not here.

  As she walks the girls, she tells them stories. Sometimes she yells the stories over their screams, the urge to throw them headfirst onto the ground and watch their tiny necks snap so strong she can taste it. Cinderella and her mice. Rumpelstiltskin and his fire. ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WERE A KING AND QUEEN WHO LONGED TO HAVE A CHILD.

  The only thing she longs for now is quiet, and sleep.

  The forest is calm, its greenness doubly rich against the backdrop of the destroyed city. Once upon a time there was a girl who lived in a village and looked after the geese for the queen. When they are also calm, the girls stare up at her and snuffle like little pigs. Their eyes are newborn blue, but flecked with greenish-brown. In a few months they’ll go hazel, just like B’s.

  She is so tired. She walks them and walks them, and when the girls scream, she thinks about unwrapping them, pulling them away from her chest, and laying them on the marbled green forest floor so the wolves can take them, so the fox will come back and find her and show her the way up the mountain.

  She doesn’t unwrap them. She doesn’t let them go.

  * * *

  The first earthquake comes—a small one, just enough to shake the pictures on the walls. The girls are finally, briefly, asleep, tucked between Heather and B on the bed. At the first rumble, they both reach for one of the girls, then stumble down to the kitchen and squeeze under the table. They stare at each other as the girls wail, as they wait for more disaster to rain down around them.

  Nothing happens. After an uncomfortable hour, B gives Jilly to Heather and climbs out from under the table to look around outside. When he comes back, he’s relieved. “All clear,” he says. “But maybe I’ll go see how the others are. I won’t be gone for long.” His voice is thick with the determined cheerfulness that’s begun to characterize him, to characterize their city. We’ll get through this. Everything will be okay.

  After he leaves, Heather crawls out from under the table and lays both girls out on its surface. They immediately start to wail. She puts her hands over her ears. Outside, the sky is grey and brown, the air heavy with rain that doesn’t come. B will come back soon—and then what? They’ll eat, maybe, or the girls will continue to cry and Heather will take them for another long walk beneath the trees. Maybe they’ll go together to the looted grocery store down the road and see what remains on the shelves. Tomorrow they will do it all again.

  The girls are red-faced, screaming, furious. She pulls her hands away from her ears and then reaches for the dishtowel, thinking if she muffles their noise just a little maybe the pounding of her heart won’t be as bad. Then she balls the dishtowel in her fists. No. No. No.

  She won’t do it.

  She won’t.

  The kitchen has a screen door and she bangs out through it into the backyard—stumbling as though there is no air left in the house.

  The bouquet sits on the bottom step, blood red and lushly green. She registers the flowers just in time to jump over them, landing hard. She crouches frozen for a moment, then turns around and stares at the bouquet before reaching to pick it up. The stems soft and fresh against her palms. The deep-red burst of amaryllis, the dark-green grounding of satin leaves. Everything smells of the mountain.

  She is weeping so hard she cannot see.

  When B comes back, the babies are still crying on the table. Heather hasn’t moved from her place by the steps.

  “Where did those come from?” he asks. He’s carrying shopping bags—he went to the store after all—and he must have walked right past the girls to find her. She clutches the flowers and lies instantly.

  “I don’t know.”

  He stares at her. “Yes, you do. I can see it all over your face.”

  “They’re just flowers,” she says, weakly.

  “If they’re just flowers, you can tell me.”

  She looks away.

  “Why is someone else bringing my wife flowers?” he says. There’s an edge to his voice she’s never heard before. “Heather, what the fuck is going on?”

  “It’s nothing,” she says. She gets up and takes a step toward him. “B—really. They’re from an old friend. That’s all.”

  He drops the shopping bags. “What old friend of yours has time to go and find tropical flowers in this goddamned mess?”

  The wails from the kitchen intensify, and they both look to the house. When they turn back to one another, Heather nods. “My father used to bring me flowers like these on my birthday,” she says. “We had a tropical garden when I was growing up.” She doesn’t talk much about her father; maybe this will soften him. She isn’t sure.

  He doesn’t move. “How come your old friend knows that and I don’t? I’m your husband. I should know these things!”

  “I know,” she says, her voice low. She puts a hand against his chest, tries to soothe him. “We just—we haven’t had time. Everything happened so fast.” The girls are still crying. “B—I have to go to the babies. I’ll throw the flowers out. They don’t mean anything. Really.”

  He sighs, then bends and picks up the bags. “I would have gotten you flowers. But there weren’t any.” He pulls out a container of cupcakes—the icing thick and white, the expiration date one week ago—and hands them to her. “They’re stale, obviously. But they’re also full of preservatives, so at least we don’t have to worry about mould. Happy birthday.”

  She chokes on a bit of laughter. His eyes relax.

  “You don’t have to throw the flowers away,” he says, softly. “But who gave them to you? That’s all I want to know.”

  She can see it in his face: I know all of the survivors here. Which one is bringing my wife flowers?

  “Does it matter?” she says. “They aren’t in my life anymore.”

  “It matters to me,” he says. “How do they know that you’re here? If they aren’t in your life anymore, why bring you flowers at all?”

  She looks at him, then nods. She grasps the bouquet in one hand and throws
it back into the yard—the amaryllis bounce on the surface of the Boston ivy and then half sink into the green. “You’re right,” she says, and she walks past him into the house.

  * * *

  They go into the kitchen and B puts down his grocery bags and scoops up the girls. Heather takes the shopping bags and unpacks—the cupcakes, some cans of tuna, a few cartons of batteries.

  He looks at her, shrugs. “We’ll need them,” he says. “Who knows if the power’s going to come back on.”

  Heather nods, then moves into the front room. B follows with the girls, their faces splotched with red. Their eyes follow the dusty sunlight that filters through the window.

  He stands and rocks the babies. They don’t usually fall asleep for him the way they do with Heather, but they are beyond tired. When they go quiet, Heather takes out the pencil crayons and draws the mountain on the living room wall. The mountain, the flowers, the clouds.

  B sits gingerly on the couch, still holding the girls. They don’t wake up. A miracle. “I didn’t know you could draw,” he says.

  She doesn’t look back at him. A dark-red whorl of amaryllis appears at the base of the mountain.

  “Right,” he says, softly. “I remember now. You carried a sketchbook around with you at school.”

  She pauses. “That was twenty years ago. You remember that?”

  “I remember you,” he says, simply.

  She thinks about this for a moment, and then sketches them in, lightly—four small figures at the base of the mountain. Two tiny bundles, three heads of flaming red hair. One dark.

  “If this old friend isn’t in your life anymore,” he says, again, “how come they know how to find you? We’ve only just moved in.”