The Centaur's Wife

by Amanda Leduc

  “The flour and rice were in front of the clinic,” Elyse says. “I found them when I got here.”

  The apples are small and hard and green. They look wild. Tasha takes one and bites into it. The fruit is so sour her whole face puckers. It is indescribably delightful.

  “You didn’t wash that,” Nina says.

  Her brother, who is maybe twelve, thirteen, elbows her in the ribs. Frederic. “There’s hardly any water for washing, dummy. Remember what Dad said.”

  Tasha laughs, then reaches into the bag and gives a fruit to each. “Your dad is right,” she says. “But I think these apples are okay. See how they’re not shiny? That means they haven’t been sprayed with pesticides.” Pesticides. She hasn’t used that word in months.

  They watch her, then each of them bites gingerly into an apple as though afraid someone will take it away.

  “Can I have another?” the girl says with her mouth full.

  Her brother elbows her again. “We need to share,” he says.

  Tasha nods, then reaches into the bag again and gives the girl one more. “Your brother is right,” she says. “Take that to your dad, and tell him thank you.” The children nod as one, then leave, the girl clutching the apple tightly in her small hand.

  Tasha delves into the bag again and hands an apple to Elyse, and one to Annie. “What should we do with the rest of them?” she asks. “Go door to door?”

  Annie shakes her head. “There aren’t enough. Let’s just keep them here,” she says. “We’ll add them to the stores we already have.”

  “Where did the food come from, though,” Elyse says. “Why would someone just drop food here without saying anything to anybody?”

  “Maybe it’s from Joseph,” Annie says.

  But Joseph, when they ask him later in the day, has no idea. They’ve gone door to door after all, asking about these gifts. No one seems to know anything.

  “Apples?” Joseph says. “Where would I get apples from?” He shakes his head. “Did you check to make sure they aren’t poisonous?”

  Tasha forces a laugh and tries to ignore the sudden drop in her stomach. “I don’t think we’re living in a fairy tale,” she says. “I doubt anyone here has the strength or the malice to poison the food.”

  Joseph shrugs. “Probably not,” he says. “Still—apples and flour appearing out of nowhere might as well be magic. I don’t think poison is that far a stretch.” There’s a commotion at his feet and then a chicken pokes its head around the edge of his front door.

  Tasha blinks, sure for a moment that she’s hallucinating. “Hello,” she says.

  The chicken looks up at her, then retreats.

  “You keep chickens in the house?” Annie says. “Do you know how dangerous that is?”

  “They don’t stay in the house,” Joseph says. “They have the run of the backyard. I bring them in for company. Also—it’s cold, Annie.”

  Elyse looks skeptical. She opens her mouth and is about to speak but Tasha rushes in, nods to where the chicken has disappeared.

  “You have eggs?” she says.

  Joseph’s face goes dark. “They aren’t laying anymore,” he says. “And they certainly couldn’t lay enough to feed the whole city.”

  “Well,” Tasha says. “Keep an eye out. Let me know if you see anything…unusual.”

  He snorts. “Like a wicked stepmother? Okay.” Then he looks at her. “If you find out who it is, what are you going to do to them?”

  “I’m not going to do anything. No one’s getting in trouble. I just want to know where it’s coming from. And if we can get more. Don’t you? Aren’t we all in this together?”

  Joseph rolls his eyes. “If someone is dropping food in front of the clinic, they’ve been hoarding all this time. So no—I wouldn’t say that this person, whoever they are, is in with us at all.” He looks at her, at Annie. “But then, you know all about hoarding.” He shuts the door in their faces.

  They drop in on Brendan next.

  “Someone left food at the clinic,” Annie tells him.

  “Food?” he says. “From where?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Tasha says. “Do you have any idea where it might have come from?”

  He blinks at her. “Sounds like someone’s been hoarding food and feels guilty about it.”

  “That’s what Joseph said,” Annie says, slightly suspicious.

  Tasha sighs. “All right. Well—if more comes, we’ll add the extra food to the rest of the stores. If you see anything, Brendan, or hear of anything, let us know?”

  He nods. “Why do you think more food is going to come? Isn’t it better to assume it’s a one-off?”

  Tasha looks at him, surprised. “I don’t know,” she admits. “I guess I just thought—I don’t know what I thought, actually.”

  Annie snorts. “You thought it was magic. You were ready to believe, like you always are.”

  “I was n—”

  “Tasha.” There is a long-suffering note in Annie’s voice that shuts her up. “Don’t even get me started.”

  Tasha smarts from this the entire walk back to the clinic. Magic. Don’t be ridiculous.

  But the next morning, there are more bags outside the door—cans of vegetables, rice and dried beans. Someone else comes running to tell them about a food drop at the edge of the city—this one out where Heather and Tasha both take their walks.

  They gather the food and store it, put it all under lock and key.

  The next day, there is still more food left outside—a random assortment of scuffed and dented cans that they store with everything else.

  Not a lot, Tasha tells herself. It’s not a lot. Hardly magical. But she cannot help it; she wakes every morning like a child, eager to see if more gifts have come.

  * * *

  In December, the first snow. They have prepared as best they can—indoor propane heaters looted from the hardware stores, propane doled out as carefully as gold. People congregate in the houses that have wood-burning stoves, the wood that they’ve all split for the winter stacked in the abandoned space next to Tasha’s clinic, piled six feet deep.

  They advise people to move closer to the strip mall, so that no one needs to travel very far through the snow. Once again, people bunk down in strange beds, on couches, on the floor. No one is a stranger to anyone else anymore. They shovel when they can, but the snow is heavy and wet; the paths around the strip mall are all that stay cleared.

  As the days go by, the temperature drops. Some people stop coming by the strip mall for wood. Tasha leads a scouting party to Randall’s house. He’s an older man who lives on the outskirts of the city with his wife, and had refused to move. “We’ll be okay,” he had told her. “We’ve lived in this house our whole life. Don’t want to say goodbye to it just yet.”

  When they get there, the place is dark and silent, freezing cold. They find Randall and Stella in their bed by the living room fireplace. The window is open and snow has dusted onto the floor. Tasha steps close to them, checks their pulses, and then looks away.

  “Dead,” she says.

  Annie is too tired to be horrified; she looks around the room, then nods. “We should take the wood,” she says.

  When they return to the clinic, staggering under the weight of firewood, Tasha tells the townspeople. “Please everyone, stay close. We’ll get through this together.”

  They are hesitant to believe her, she can tell. But no one disagrees with her, either.

  * * *

  One night when Tasha is asleep on the clinic mattress, someone bangs loudly on the door.

  “Tasha!” a voice yells, muffled by snow. “Tasha, please!”

  The voice pulls her from sleep and dreams of fire. The man on her doorstep is Robin, one of the original residents who had helped her with the gardens. He’s staying with a grou
p of people a few houses down from Tasha’s townhouse. Candice, one of the women in the group, is six months pregnant.

  “The baby’s coming,” Robin says. Tasha’s already pulling on her boots.

  Snow is thick and deep on the sidewalks; it takes forever to get there.

  “Go get Annie,” she tells Robin, and he sets back off into the snow.

  Candice lies labouring on the couch in the living room. The wood stove blazes fierce and orange, the room almost unbearably hot.

  The baby is already crowning; when she guides it out, the child is blue, the cord around its neck a whitish-purple noose. She untangles the cord and stimulates the chest. Tiny hands and feet, tiny purple lips. A boy. The mother and the father—his name is Seth, she remembers—are both sobbing. The room stinks of blood and fear.

  Noises at the front door, a gust of cold wind. She doesn’t look up. She clears the baby’s mouth with her finger, then gently turns him over and rubs his back, his arms and legs hanging limp. One, two, three rubs. A little movement. Not enough. When the child finally gasps in air, his arms and legs do not move. She turns the child over—he is so tiny, a crumpled fairy frog—then lays him down across her thigh, flicks a finger against his feet. Nothing.

  Annie is beside her now, her hands ready. She passes the child to Annie and gets up to check the mother over. Candice tore, but only a little; she’ll be okay.

  She can hear people trying to be quiet in the kitchen. When she turns back to Annie, it’s been five minutes since the birth; they tap the baby’s tiny feet again and still he doesn’t react, though his chest heaves up and down. They don’t need to say anything to one another—instead Annie swaddles the baby and hands him to his parents.

  They stay the rest of the night, keeping the wood stove alive, catching bits of sleep in turns in the armchairs. They try to feed the baby—first at his mother’s breast, and then with some formula from the clinic. In the morning the baby is still breathing but is otherwise unresponsive. The parents are vibrating with terror.

  “What can we do?” Seth whispers.

  “He lost oxygen to the brain,” Tasha says. “Because of the cord.”

  “He’ll be able to move eventually—won’t he?” Candice asks.

  Tasha doesn’t answer. She sees the mother swallow.

  “He won’t latch,” Candice says. “I’m holding his head right up to my breast and he won’t latch.”

  “He’s three months premature,” Tasha says, as gently as she can. “There is likely significant brain damage. He’s not moving his arms and legs because he can’t. He won’t latch because he can’t. We can try to give him more formula, but you should know that this is going to be difficult.”

  “Difficult how?” Seth asks.

  “He’s not going to have the life you wanted him to have,” she says, slowly. “You can take a car and try to reach another city, somewhere with a hospital that might be better equipped. If you find one, they might be able to do more for him than we can. Take a car—we can give you some of the gas we have left.”

  “But what about the snow?” Candice’s voice rises in panic. “What happens if we take a car and leave and don’t find anything and he doesn’t latch?”

  By now, they all know the stories Joseph has brought them. Haphazard militia who prowl what’s left of the highways, thieves who ambush families and steal their cars, leaving them to die on the road.

  “We can give you more formula,” Annie says.

  “And what if that runs out?” Candice looks at them both, her eyes wild. “What if we run out of gas? What happens if there’s no clean water or snow to mix the formula with when we’re on the road?”

  Annie, eventually, says, “You’ll have anywhere from three days to three weeks.”

  The mother closes her eyes. When she opens them again, they are bottomless in a way that reminds Tasha of Heather. “It’s so cold outside,” Candice says. “I could take him to the mountain, like other mothers have. It would be just like falling asleep.”

  “What other mothers?” Tasha asks, her voice sharp.

  Candice opens her eyes and stares at her as if from far away. “Mothers who leave their children in the snow,” she says. “Mothers who leave their children on the mountain. Everyone knows the stories.”

  Tasha looks at Seth, at the people now huddled listening near the door to the kitchen. “Is this true?” she asks. How many mothers have taken their children away? She sees the bodies piled in frozen lumps at the base of the mountain, pilgrims on a climb to nowhere.

  An older woman steps forward—thin like the rest of them, unbowed and tall. “It’s an old story,” she says. “Just something parents used to say to keep their children in line. Wolves who lured children up the mountain. Foxes who stole mothers away. My parents told me the same stories years ago.”

  “Stories,” Tasha echoes. “Like the stories the others talked about in the fall? Only stories? You’re sure?”

  The woman laughs. “You’ve been here long enough, Tasha—the whole city is filled with stories like this. Mountain superstition—that’s all it is. We can hardly get down the sidewalks. You think anyone is going to go near the mountain in the snow?”

  “We’re not going up the mountain,” Seth snaps. “We have to try.”

  Candice blinks, comes back to herself. “Yes,” she says, and nods.

  Annie packs the car herself, loading it with as much food as they can spare, and all the formula they have. The other people from the house busy themselves clearing a path out of town as best as they can. Tasha gives the couple one of the flashlights from the clinic and a map—not that maps mean all that much anymore. She’s marked the closest city anyway.

  “Be safe,” she tells them through the window of the car. They are terrified, almost babies themselves. The car creeps away down the road and disappears around a corner.

  Three days later they come back, and they no longer have the child.

  * * *

  Cans of stewed tomatoes, cans of corned beef and Spam. Bags of beans and lentils. The food that is dropped off at various parts of the town is just enough to keep their stores from dwindling into nothing. And yet as the winter begins to rage in earnest, even these gifts are not enough. It snows constantly. Soon the food drops are only on the outskirts of town. Deliveries go unnoticed, buried under the snow.

  Sometimes there are footprints. Someone on a horse.

  Brendan suggests putting a guard at the front of the clinic, to try to catch the “Food Angel,” as some of the people have begun to say. Tasha vetoes this idea.

  “Don’t you want to know?” Annie asks her, incredulous, one night as they lie together in the clinic. Elyse is back at the townhouse, huddled in blankets, sleeping alone. They told her she could stay, but she refused.

  “You’ve done so much for me,” she said. “You deserve some time alone.”

  But this is what alone time with Annie means now—it’s like lying on a mattress beside a stranger, the gulf between them growing wider by the day.

  “Someone’s been hiding food from us all this time,” Annie presses. “Doesn’t that make you angry?”

  “Maybe it’s not someone in the town,” Tasha says.

  “Who else could it be?”

  Tasha shrugs. “Look—it’s helping us get through the winter. Let’s just stop asking questions for right now, and be thankful someone is helping at all.”

  “You’re making no sense,” Annie says. “You’re the one who always wants answers to everything! Why are you letting go of this so easily?”

  Tasha thinks about this. What else could it be? Some strange visitor, creeping through their city streets at night. Magic? She feels a whisper of something black and dark against her soul and tries not to shiver. If that’s real, what else is real? What other stories might come to life?

  “What are we going to do if we
find them out?” she says, slowly. “Raid their stores? If it’s someone from outside the city, are we going to keep them here, make them give us everything they have? Whoever they are, they want to stay hidden. And I don’t think we can spare the energy to find out who it is. Things for the townspeople are already”—broken, she wants to say, but still she refuses—“bad.”

  Annie stares at the ceiling, silent for a moment, then says, “We could go, you know.”

  “What?”

  “You and me. And Elyse. We could take a car and whatever gas is left and go find somewhere else.”

  “How far do you think we would get in the snow?”

  “We walk out, then. We wear warm clothes. We keep moving.”

  “You want to take Elyse out in the snow? For days on end?”

  “Randall and Stella’s deaths weren’t accidents!” Annie says, and Tasha goes silent. “They chose to freeze to death. I know that. So do you. I also know that not everyone is going to make it through the winter, no matter what we keep saying.” She sits up, stares down at Tasha. “We need to go,” she whispers. “We should have gone months ago.”

  “Things can be different here,” Tasha says. “We just need time. We’ve prepared as much as we can for the winter. We’ll be okay.”

  “What if we don’t have that time? What if the propane runs out, what if we haven’t cut enough wood, what if your magical Food Angel stops bringing supplies to top us up? I don’t want to freeze to death, Tasha. We aren’t even from here. Why stay? We got people away from the water. We don’t owe anyone anything else.”

  So much in Annie’s face seems different—frightened and small, not the Annie she remembers.

  “We don’t owe anyone anything?” Tasha says. “What about Elyse? You know she can’t leave, Annie. Not in the snow. You don’t even sound like yourself.”

  A short burst of silence, and then Annie jerks her hand away and laughs. “You can’t be serious. I don’t sound like myself? I haven’t changed! I’ve been right here this whole time. Who was there when your parents died and you couldn’t get out of bed and go to work? Who was there when you couldn’t get up for the funeral? It sure as hell wasn’t anyone from here.”