by Amanda Leduc
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.
5
Her first night in the city, Tasha sleeps on the floor beside Annie, in a house just down from the destroyed hospital. Strangers lie beside them—no one wants to be alone. The girl, Elyse, sleeps on the couch, her breathing laboured. When Tasha wakes up some hours later, in the early hours of the morning, Elyse turns to her, pale and worried in the dim light.
“Was it a dream?” she whispers.
Tasha sits up and draws her knees to her chest. “No dream.”
Her words wake Annie, who puts a hand on Tasha’s arm.
“Did you sleep okay?” Annie asks.
“Yes,” Tasha says, knowing what she means. If a night terror was going to visit her, surely it would come now, with the end of the world. “I slept fine.” More than fine. She slept like the dead.
Maybe they are dead, she thinks, even as the people around them begin to stretch and stir. Maybe this is a terror that finally makes sense.
“What happens now?” Elyse says.
Tasha takes Annie’s hand and kisses her palm and is rewarded with a tired smile. “Now we figure out what happens now,” she says.
When she stands up, everyone turns to her, waiting.
* * *
“We’ll be all right,” she tells everyone as she leads them out into the streets. “Everything will be all right. We’ll take it one step at a time.”
First, we must help the wounded. She and Annie stand for hours that day in front of the hospital wreckage, tending the injured, making sure everyone is bandaged, setting broken bones. There is morphine in the ambulance and they use as much of it as they need. She doesn’t think about saving it until later.
Next, food. She and Annie—trailed by Elyse, who won’t let them out of her sight—find a convenience store two streets over. No one else is here except for a young man who sits slumped at the till. When they walk in, he blinks as though he doesn’t quite believe they’re real.
“People will need food,” Tasha says. She uses her doctor voice—calm, certain, and unhurried. He nods. She wonders if he’s been here the whole time. She pulls her wallet from the pocket of her scrubs and empties all her cash onto the counter. Thirty-five dollars. “If people come in,” she says, “let them have whatever they want. I will pay you for the rest of it later.”
He is young, nervous. He doesn’t ask her how she’s going to pay for the rest of it; he just nods and takes the money. When she turns back to the door, one of the firemen who came with them from the coast—his name is Kevin, and his yellow jacket is smudged with soot—is standing in the doorway.
“There’s a grocery store nearby,” he says. “People are panicking.”
When they get to the store, people are crying and shouting, appealing to a man who stands in the front of the registers with his hands up to hold them back.
“The system is down,” he says. “I can’t ring anyone through.”
“The sky fucking fell apart!” someone shouts. “When do you think the system’s going back up?”
Tasha pushes her way to the front of the crowd. “Hello,” she says to the grocery store clerk. “What’s your name?”
The man looks at her as if she makes no sense, but says, “Alan.”
“Are you the manager?”
He looks around nervously. “One of them. I don’t know where the other ones are.”
“I’m sure they’ll be here eventually,” Tasha says.
Even though she hasn’t asked, he says, “The tills won’t even open when the system is down.”
“That’s okay, Alan. We all understand. But people need to eat.”
“There are restaurants,” he says, feebly. “They have generators. After the hurricane a few years ago the power went out and they were packed for like a week. I remember.” He looks at Annie, then behind her, then back at Tasha. “I can’t—I don’t have the authority to do anything. It’s not my fault.”
Another voice shouts. “This wasn’t a fucking hurricane! Half of the city is gone!”
Tasha ignores the other voice. “I know it’s not your fault.” She reaches out and puts a reassuring hand on Alan’s arm. “But we have to work with what we have right now, Alan, okay? Some of these people don’t have houses anymore. We don’t know what’s happening. When you add that to being hungry, it’s a lot. People just want food. We can pay for things later, when the system goes back up.”
When the system goes back up. This is another thing you learn in the ER—that hope is like a kind of lying.
“There’s no power,” he whispers. “How are
people going to cook?”
“We’ll find a way,” she says. His shoulders relax. She beckons to Kevin. “Help everyone get what they need,” she says, and then, leaning close to his ear, “Make sure no one takes too much.” She turns and heads for the door.
Outside, Annie looks at her. “You’ll need to eat too,” she says.
“I’m fine,” Tasha says. Above them, the sky is grey and brown.
Next, we need places for everyone to sleep. When the cell towers are still down late into the afternoon, she gathers the paramedics and the other firemen who came with them, all pale with fatigue but alert—and sends them to survey the houses still standing near the hospital. Asking for shelter when people answer the door. Forcing open doors when no one answers.
She also asks everyone to put their phones away and stop checking for reception. For now. Just for now.
Help will come. Help will come. Until then, we’ll help each other.
Help will come.
Help will come.
She says the words over and over until they mean absolutely nothing.
* * *
Later still on that long day in the city, Annie says to Tasha, “You need to sleep. And not on a floor.”
Annie is also tired, Tasha wants to point out. Elyse, who has followed them everywhere today, says, “Should we go back to the house we were in last night and snag the bedrooms?”
Tasha and Annie glance at each other. “There are a lot of houses,” Tasha says. “Let’s find another one for the three of us.”
Elyse’s shoulders slump in relief. They both see it, and say nothing.
Annie is the one who finds them a townhouse one street over from the wreckage of the hospital. The front door isn’t even locked.
“Hello?” Annie calls as they step inside, but no one answers.
Everything is peaceful and quiet. Their footsteps echo on the floor. The windows are dusted with a layer of fine brown dirt, and Tasha makes a mental note to clean them as soon as she can.
The bedrooms upstairs are neat. No children live here, at least none who are small. Both the master bedroom and the smaller one overlook the destroyed backyard. A fence is blown in on the right-hand side. A maple in the garden is split in half, its carcass bent and leaning against the small bedroom’s window.
There’s a couch in the master bedroom. “I can sleep on that,” Elyse says.
Annie shakes her head. “You take the other room.” She slides an arm around Elyse’s shoulders. “It’ll be more comfortable. We’ll be right next door, Elyse.”
Elyse looks away, her lip trembling. “I’m not—I know I shouldn’t be scared—”
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” Tasha says. She smiles at Elyse, at them both. “You and Annie take the bed until you’re comfortable, Elyse. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Elyse looks down at the floor. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s fine,” Tasha says. “None of this is going to be forever.”
She waits for Annie to protest, but she doesn’t say a word.
* * *
Over the following weeks, they mobilize their resources. They go to all the restaurants, most of them in ruins, and move the working generators to a spot behind the strip mall. They clear the wreckage of the hospital, searching for supplies. Some of the eastern wing is still standing, along with the front stairwell where people had climbed out from the basement that first afternoon.
Elyse goes everywhere they do. She can’t exert herself too much, so they ask her to sit in a chair in front of the rubble and count and pack what they salvage into boxes. Cotton balls and tongue depressors, scalpels wrapped in plastic. Water from burst pipes has crept over what’s left of the floor, and their shoes squelch as they crouch down in doorways to peer further into the wreckage. Tasha’s sneakers are soaked through. She can tell by the wrinkle in Annie’s nose that hers are too.
They find other things—a baby’s bonnet, a suit jacket smeared with dirt and blood. A watch lying face up in a puddle, the digital face blank. A silver earring shaped like a goose. After a while Elyse gets restless packing boxes and moves around the wreckage, popping random things into a yellow bucket Annie found.
“Look,” she calls. When they turn, she holds up a Get Well card, the lilac ink now smudged. “For Sharon. Get better soon—love, Edgar.” She stares at the card before dropping it in the bucket. “I hope Sharon and Edgar survived.”
Other things they discover: a torn cerulean purse; a zip-lock bag filled with salted peanuts; a day planner with soaked pages that have softened into one misshapen hunk of paper. A loop of child’s teething beads. A soggy romance novel. Twenty empty pill bottles. Six more solo earrings, and one diamond ring.
“We should have a lost and found,” Elyse says. “We could keep it somewhere central. Maybe by the sign in the square?”
She heads deeper into the darker hallways, where Tasha and Annie have already been, and Tasha calls out, “Don’t go any further.”
Elyse stops, turns to them. “But—there might be more stuff in those rooms. And what if there are…people? Shouldn’t we be looking?”
“We’ve looked. You don’t need to go in there.” Annie’s voice is firm.
Elyse’s face trembles. She closes her eyes. Annie goes to her, puts an arm around her shoulder. “If anyone was still alive under the rubble, we would have heard them by now,” she says. “They would be trying to make noise. Have you heard anything?”
What’s left of the hospital is silent and dead.
* * *
On another day, they search a school. It was empty when the meteors hit and sustained little damage—but the pipes have burst here, too, and books bob softly in the hallways. They squelch through the corridors and take what they can.
“Won’t the kids need these things when they come back?” Elyse asks, after they’ve trudged outside yet again with their arms full of books and dropped them on the grass.
Tasha and Annie glance at one another.
“I think,” Tasha says, carefully, “we can assume that won’t be for a while.”
Elyse stares at her. “But—you said help will come.”
Tasha nods. “And I think it will. It just might take longer than anyone expects.”
Elyse nods at this, slowly. “There must be places that weren’t hit as bad.”
“Of course,” Tasha says. “But they might be on the other side of the world. We need to take care of ourselves, and prepare for the future as best we can. If for nothing other than to keep people busy. I don’t want anyone to worry any more than they have to, and the best thing for that is to give people something to do.”
“Okay,” Elyse says. She goes back to organizing the books.
It is helpful, the repetition—bottles in boxes and boxes in boxes and this food goes here and let’s gather blankets and keep them all in one central place so that no one stops to think about the fact that there is no one in the pharmacy, there is no one at the bank, there is no power, there is no news from elsewhere.
She and Annie have help, for which Tasha is more grateful than she can say. Kevin from the fire trucks, other paramedics from their old seaside city. Brendan, with the red hair and the girls and the dark-haired wife, Heather. Alan from the grocery store. Other people who open up their homes to strangers and share their food. Still others who defuse confrontations that break out in the streets. There is so much fear in the air, so much fighting. But slowly, slowly, the survivors come together.
On the nights that she can’t sleep, Tasha sends Annie and Elyse home and walks the city with other insomniacs—foraging, she calls it. Never looting. It isn’t just her own survival she’s thinking about. She’s thinking about everyone else. That’s how they’re all going to survive—by thinking about everyone else. She goes up and down the night streets with others that she trusts—Kevin, a
nd Alan, and Zeljko, the youth from the convenience store—and together they search for anything that might help them survive.
She hardly sleeps. But then, she’s used to that.
One night when she comes home in the early hours of the morning, Annie is waiting for her, just inside the front door. “Hi,” she whispers, and Tasha closes the door behind her and then Annie pushes her up against the door and Annie’s hands are in her hair, Annie’s tongue is in her mouth, Annie’s hands are pulling hard at the zipper of her jeans. Her skin feels grimy and dry but so does Tasha’s—they slide against one another like paper dolls, crumpling together, falling to the floor.
Tasha makes a sound deep in her throat, then lifts her head and bites Annie’s ear. Annie puts a hand over her mouth. “Shhh,” she says. “You’ll wake Elyse.”
Tasha laughs into Annie’s palm. She slides a finger deep inside of Annie and watches her wife shudder in the dark. Then she pulls her hand away.
“More,” Annie whispers.
Tasha only shakes her head. “What about Elyse?” she says, but her mouth is on Annie’s shoulder now, her fingers slick and hovering over Annie’s face. She sticks a finger in Annie’s mouth and Annie sucks it.
And then it is gone, the desire, the shock of its absence rushing cold into the room. Tasha pushes herself up, sits back against the closed front door. Annie blinks at her, surprised.
“I wasn’t serious,” Annie says. “Not really. I mean—it’s not like we haven’t had to be quiet before.”
Before. Once upon a time in a seaside city long, long ago. They’d had silent sex in the guest room in Annie’s parents’ house a hundred times. The laughter building in them, ready to burst.
Before. It hasn’t been that long, but it feels like it. Tasha pulls her knees up and sighs a little. Then she takes Annie’s palm and kisses it, folds Annie’s fingers over the kiss. “It’s late,” she says. “And it’ll be another long day tomorrow. We should go to bed.”
