The Centaur's Wife

by Amanda Leduc

  Her hand trembles; he doesn’t notice. “I don’t know.” She sounds so much calmer than she feels. “Maybe they just—maybe it’s just a way for me to know that they’re okay. There are—” she swallows, thinking anew of B’s missing parents—“there are so many missing. Maybe they thought I’d be worried.”

  When she looks back at him, he’s staring down at the babies in his lap. “You can have friends, you know,” he says. “Even friends who were old boyfriends. I’m not a monster.”

  “I know that,” she says. “It really doesn’t matter. They’re not in my life anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  He is so wary with her, and yet so hopeful too. “Because you are.”

  The girls wake a short time later and immediately start screaming; she takes them from him and carries them outside, heading into the forest, one foot in front of the other.

  When she returns, B is gone and the flowers sit in a jug in the front window.

  * * *

  The next day, before Heather leaves for the first long walk of the morning, Tasha comes to visit them. Annie and Elyse are with her, and so is B, holding a shovel, his pants smeared with dirt. Elyse has a blue surgical mask over her face. Heather blinks and thinks back to their moments together after climbing out of the basement. Lung transplant, the girl had said. Her friend had just received one; Elyse had still been waiting.

  She hasn’t slept again, and for a moment as she stands in the doorway, she isn’t sure what’s going on.

  “What do you want?” she blurts.

  Tasha steps forward and takes her hand. Heather lets her. “We came to ask if you wanted to help,” she says. “With the cleanup, and the consolidation of supplies.”

  “I tried to help,” Heather says. “B didn’t want me.”

  B flushes. “There are things you can do now,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  What for? Heather thinks. What’s the point? Above them, the sky is reddish-brown, the air warm and stretched and waiting. “You’ve already been consolidating,” she says. She pulls her hand away. “The stores are practically empty. Did you think we wouldn’t see?”

  “People have been looting,” Tasha says. “We needed to get there quickly so we could stockpile things for us all.”

  “The food’s going to run out anyway,” Heather says. “It’s not going to last forever.”

  “Maybe not.” Tasha is calm. “But we can make it last longer if we’re careful about it, and smart. We don’t know how long it will be before help arrives.”

  Help. Heather blinks at this notion. When she looks at B, she sees again the determined cheerful slant of him. Her face hardens. “What if help isn’t coming, Tasha—did you ever think of that?”

  “We can help ourselves,” Tasha says. “There’s so much we can do. We need to make sure everyone has a safe place to sleep. I need people to help me build a clinic as best we can, and we need people to help catalogue and organize supplies and figure out a rationing plan. We need to build greenhouses. We need people to grow food.” Her voice softens. “Brendan says you used to have a garden. Maybe you could help us with that.”

  “My father was a gardener. I can’t do jack shit.” The words are out before she can stop them.

  “You could plant flowers,” B says, and she realizes that this is his idea. “It’s a small thing, Heather, but it will help.”

  “What am I supposed to do with them?” and she motions to the twins bundled across her chest. “They don’t sleep. You know they don’t sleep. That’s why you sent me away the first time!”

  “You can walk them around the town,” he says. A pause. “And then you wouldn’t have to walk so far into the forest.” He flushes, but just a little. “I don’t want you to fall out there with no one else around.”

  She’s so angry for a moment she almost can’t see—she stares away from them all, into the overgrown front yard of the house next door. “I’m fine,” she grits out, eventually. “I’m careful with the girls. I’m their fucking mother.”

  “No one is saying that you aren’t careful,” Tasha says. Even though that is exactly what B is saying. Not careful with the girls, not careful with his heart. Why is someone else bringing my wife flowers? “All we’re saying is that it’s safer for everyone to stay together.”

  Heather takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she looks straight at B. “I’m fine,” she says again. Maybe a little too loudly. “I won’t go as far into the forest, if that makes you happy. But until you can find another way to make them sleep, I’m going to keep walking.”

  “Do you want someone else to walk them from time to time?” Tasha asks. She takes a step closer to Heather, puts a hand on Greta’s tiny head. “Aren’t you tired? Are you getting enough sleep?”

  “Is anybody?” Heather takes a step back and Tasha’s hand falls. She can see that Annie is irritated, but Tasha doesn’t blink.

  “Let me know if you want me to do anything for you,” Tasha says. “I know none of this is easy.” Behind her B looks defeated.

  “Where are those flowers from?” Annie says. She’s stepped back onto the front path—she must see the flowers in the window.

  “They were a gift,” Heather says. “For my birthday.”

  Annie looks back at her, then at Brendan. “Where did you find tropical flowers?”

  As if on cue, Jilly wakes up and starts to cry; Heather backs away from the door and reaches for her boots. “I will help when I can,” she says, finally, because they’re not going to go until she does. “Now can you leave me alone?”

  * * *

  After this, she walks in the forest a little less and in the city a little more, just enough to ease B’s suspicions. She watches the townspeople as she walks—first they clear the debris from the centre of town, take what they can from the wreckage and pack away anything useful they can find. The strip mall near the central square is relatively undamaged—she watches person after person carry box after box inside.

  Time inches slowly forward. The days seem twice as long as she remembers days to be.

  On one of her morning walks she sees that someone has grouped the generators from restaurants and other businesses together behind the mall. By the time she returns from the forest there is a chicken-wire fence around them, complete with a makeshift padlocked door. All day long, the generators hum intermittently. The key to the enclosure hangs at Annie’s waist.

  More days go by, and there is no news. Tasha sends volunteers on scouting missions but none of them come back. Other people pack their bags and leave late in the night—some in cars but more of them on foot or on bicycles. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. Whole families. They don’t come back either.

  The vines grow thicker over their backyard pool. Soon they cover it completely.

  When they’ve been in the house for a little over a month, a man comes back to the house next to theirs. He knocks on the door one morning right before B is leaving to go to the strip mall. Heather, bleary-eyed and grumpy, gets the door.

  “Hello,” the man on the doorstep says. He looks faintly surprised. “You’re not Denise.”

  “No,” Heather says. She fights down a rush of guilt. “They haven’t come back.”

  He nods. “Probably better for them, in the long run.”

  No one says anything for a moment. B emerges from the kitchen and comes to stand behind her.

  “I live next door,” the man says, and waves his hand in the direction of the house to their left. His voice sounds hollow, almost robotic. “I’m Joseph.”

  “Brendan,” B says. He steps forward and reaches across Heather, takes the other man’s hand. “This is Heather. And this is Greta,” he points, “and Jilly.” He looks over to the house. “Everything all right?”

  “We were away,” Joseph says. “I just got back.”

 
“We?” Brendan asks, and Heather wants to kick him. “Your family?”

  “I came back alone,” Joseph says. That hollowness again. He jerks a thumb at the house. “I have chickens in the backyard. Surprised to find them still alive, to be honest.” Then he laughs. It is not a nice sound. “I guess the natural world outlives us all, anyway.”

  Chickens? Heather thinks. And now she can smell it, the faint scent of acrid chickenshit under the thickness of ash and dirt that still falls through the air. She hadn’t noticed any chickens. But she hasn’t noticed much. The babies. The walking. The boxes carried into the strip mall.

  The pink bicycle in Joseph’s driveway, lopsided against the garage.

  “Anyway,” Joseph says, “I’ll have eggs for a while. Don’t know how long—until the feed runs out and they all die, I guess. I’ll bring over my extras, if you want them.”

  “Thank you,” Heather says, finally. “We’d be grateful.”

  Joseph looks at her again. This time he seems to see the babies—really see them. “It’s fine,” he says, abruptly. Then he jerks his head in the direction of the city centre. “Who put them in charge? Tasha—right? Annie? Where’s the City Council?”

  “Dead or gone,” B says.

  “So—what—we just let them hoard the food? Is that what’s going on?”

  “They’re rationing the food,” B says. “We don’t know how long everything will have to last.”

  “And gas?” Joseph says.

  “People were taking gas,” B says. “But we’re saving it now for the generators. I’m sure you could get some if you asked for it.”

  Joseph laughs. “No need for that,” he says. “My van was destroyed when the meteors came. Surprised I made it back alive, to be honest.”

  “Do you want to help with the rebuild?” B says. “I’m just about to head in now.”

  Joseph blinks.

  “B,” Heather says. She fights to keep an edge from her voice. “He only just got back.”

  “We need all the hands we can get,” B says, not meeting her eyes.

  “Maybe,” Joseph says. “Not now.” Heather can almost see the words in his head. What’s left to rebuild? He steps back down the path. “I need to sort out my house first.”

  Later that night, lying exhausted on the bed, B says, “Maybe we should think about chickens.” He’s only half joking. “Maybe we should start a farm.”

  “We don’t know anything about farming,” she says. “We’d starve.”

  He shrugs. “Maybe we’ll starve anyway.” He reaches for Jilly. They both do this now, she’s noticed—reach for the babies when they should be reaching for each other.

  “It’s not a bad idea,” Heather says, relenting. “But I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d be useless.”

  “You could learn. So could I.”

  “Do you really think we’ll starve?” She stares at him over Greta’s coppery head.

  B pauses and then shakes his head. “We won’t. We can’t. Tasha won’t let that happen.”

  “Tasha can’t feed everybody.”

  “So what do you want me to say?”

  She flushes. “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll ration the food until help arrives. They must be mobilizing the army. I don’t know.” Jilly starts to whimper and he sits up, rocks her softly. “Maybe they’ll send in a train.”

  “Send a train where?”

  “I don’t know! Jesus, Heather—it’s like you want them to fail. Like you want us to fail.”

  “I don’t,” she says. “I don’t want that.”

  “How can I be sure?” he says. “You don’t tell me things and you disappear for most of the day. It’s like—” he looks straight at her—“it’s like I don’t even know you.”

  What to say? They don’t know each other, not really. They’ve been thrown together the same way they were thrown into this house. But he will be hurt if she says this.

  “I’m so tired,” she whispers. “I want the girls to be quiet. That’s all I want. And that only happens when I walk them. I don’t have space for anything else.”

  He looks away. “I’m sorry. Forget I said anything.”

  Heather sighs and sits up. “I walk them and I tell them stories,” she says. “The stories calm them down. The trees calm me down. That’s all.”

  He relaxes, but only a little. “Do you meet your old friend on your walks?”

  “I told you they’re not in my life anymore,” she says. “If you want to know me, start by believing that.”

  He doesn’t believe her. She reaches for his hand, twines her fingers through his own.

  “I’m trying,” she says. Her voice shakes. “I know none of this is what you imagined, what you wanted. But I’m trying. I promise.”

  He looks at her, then squeezes her hand a little and tries to laugh. “I don’t think any of us imagined this,” he says. “I’ll try to remember that too.”

  * * *

  As the days pass, she again ventures closer to the mountain on her walks. She tells the girls about Cinderella and Snow White, the twelve dancing princesses, Hansel and Gretel. Mermaids who grant wishes, people who sleep for five hundred years. Sometimes as she sings to them she feels the trees listening; more often than not they walk in silence or to the rise and fall of wailing.

  She sees her foxes twice in those early weeks. The first time they are a sudden flash of white and orange against the emerald green of the forest, blue eyes that blink at her through the leaves. The babies cluster around the mother; bigger now, their eyes alight with curiosity.

  The vixen turns, and Heather follows, moving as fast as she can through the trees and the underbrush, pushing spiderwebs away with her hands. The foxes stop at the foot of the mountain and turn back to stare at her. Three pairs of blue eyes in a line.

  She cups a hand around each baby’s copper head. She doesn’t move. The foxes blink. She draws a breath and turns back toward the city. They do not follow.

  The second time, she’s walking down the middle of a city street. The girls have been screaming with colic for hours. It’s late afternoon, the weak sun readying itself to disappear behind the mountain. The girls’ screams rise up around her. Each step that she takes pushes them deeper into sweaty, red-faced rage.

  She is heading for the forest, but the wilderness meets her sooner than expected. Vines crawl up the sides of the houses that sit on the last street before the mountain. Grasses have overtaken the sidewalks here. She crosses the field that leads from the town to the trees and it feels narrower than she remembers. She’s not imagining it. It’s as though the trees have picked themselves up in the dead of night and crept closer to the city.

  The foxes are waiting for her at the edge of the field, where the trees start. She can’t tell the mother from the babies—they’re all the same size now. They don’t move, even when she marches up to them and unwraps each shrieking baby from her sling and lays them on the ground. They stop crying. They blink up at her and then reach out to touch the foxes’ whiskers. One of the foxes steps over the babies and Greta grabs for its tail.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Heather whispers.

  Beyond the foxes, the portal yawns open. It is a shifting mass with blurred black edges, a doorway that will take her to the summit. The mountain and its clear grey stone and bright blue sky. The scent of mountain air. The scent of something else.

  Of someone else.

  The portal creeps over the foxes until only their eyes are left, a shimmered black nothing that spreads over the ground and reaches out toward the girls’ soft hair.

  She snatches them up, breathing hard, then turns and walks back across the field and down the street toward the city. She’s so intent on the ground in front of her, she doesn’t notice the vehicle until someone calls her name.

  “Heather.”


  She looks up and sees Tasha beside her, in the ambulance. She stops; the ambulance stops too. It feels like Tasha’s been calling her name for a while.

  “Heather,” Tasha says again. “Are you all right?”

  The babies stretch toward Tasha and coo.

  “I’m fine,” Heather says. She glances back over her shoulder. The foxes are still there, watching her, but the portal is gone.

  Tasha follows her gaze and then looks back at her. She does not see the foxes, that much is clear. “Do you want a ride back?” she asks.

  “I’m fine,” Heather says again, louder this time. She starts walking, and after another moment Tasha drives slowly past her.

  When she looks back over her shoulder a second time, the foxes are gone.

  A story always starts, her father told her long ago, from the end of something else.

  * * *

  The weeks go by, and help does not come. Instead they build greenhouses from materials taken from the abandoned hardware stores. Heather walks the babies through the square and to the outskirts of town, past people who plant seeds into garden plots, past others who sometimes gather outside and pray for rain. There is no rain. Yet somehow the grass grows high and the vines begin to climb the walls of the houses.

  There is no army, there is no train.

  During the day, B is determined and cheerful, shouting orders in the square, helping people push abandoned cars off the streets. Sometimes, as she walks by, she sees him hunched with Tasha, Annie, and the others. They have impromptu meetings everywhere—at bus shelters, on picnic tables out in front of abandoned restaurants. He tells her that they’re planning for the winter.

  “We have to be prepared,” he says. He’s lost weight. So has she.

  When the girls are a few months old, he starts to come for her at night, in the pockets of time when the babies aren’t wailing. He traces his hands over her face as though he’s convinced himself that he knows Heather in ways that even she doesn’t fathom. (Maybe that’s true. She knows her body and yet she doesn’t know it like this—as a thing that someone could want, a thing that someone might treasure.)