The Centaur's Wife

by Amanda Leduc

  “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 a
nd 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.