by Amanda Leduc
Tasha thinks of Heather, and then of Joseph.
“We can’t abandon them now,” she says. “If we leave them to—to their stories, and the mountains—Annie, they’ll all be dead by the spring.”
“They aren’t children,” Annie snaps. “Jesus, Tasha—you make them all sound like they’re from some backwater hamlet in the middle of nowhere. God complex much?”
Tasha shuts her eyes. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Well, that’s how it sounded. And anyway”—there’s that dark note in Annie’s voice again—“you’re one to talk. I see your face when they whisper those stories. When you talk to Heather. You’re all We’ll get through and Let’s focus on what’s in front of us, but you want to believe those silly stories as much as anybody else.”
“Annie, I don’t—”
“Yes, you do!” Annie cries. “You focus on what’s right in front of you because everything else is too hard. You do this over and over again. Well, I’m right in front of you, and I’m saying that I want to go.”
There is a long silence. Tasha stares stonily at the ceiling, then finally clears her throat. “I don’t want to leave the mountain,” she says, finally.
Annie opens her mouth, closes it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. It comforts me. And now, with—with the food—”
“You really think someone is up there, bringing food down?” Annie frowns. “Then why didn’t we go closer when there was no snow?”
“I wasn’t thinking about it as much when there was no snow,” Tasha says. “I wanted us to think about the gardens and securing the food we had. And now—I think we’re here for a reason. Maybe the mountain—or the stories that everyone is telling—maybe that’s it.” She thinks a minute, swallows. “I should have told Candice and Seth to stay.”
“Tasha. That wasn’t your fault. That was nobody’s fault.”
She can’t speak; she only shrugs.
Another silence. “You’ve never even been here before,” Annie says.
“I know.”
“You didn’t even know how to get here.”
“I can’t explain it. But I felt like we ended up here because we were meant to.”
“For fuck’s sake, Tasha. You cannot be serious.”
“Why not?” Tasha tries to keep her voice calm. “It’s the first city we came to that was still standing. That makes as much sense as anything else.”
“It called to you,” Annie insists. There’s something else in her voice now. She sounds almost afraid.
“Yes? So what?”
“What did you do—tell yourself a story about it?”
“What? Of course not.”
Annie launches herself off the bed. “You always do this,” she says, again. “You tell yourself stories when you can’t handle real life.”
“I do not!”
But Annie doesn’t waver. She stares down at Tasha, shakes her head. “You do,” she says. “That’s why you went back to work. So you could be a doctor and save lives. So you could make life into a puzzle you could solve. Beginning, middle, end. You made work into the magic you needed so you didn’t have to be in your life. You think I didn’t see it? I was there every goddamned day.”
Tasha stares up at her, dumbfounded. “I didn’t—Annie, I didn’t mean—”
“And now you’re doing it all over again,” Annie says. She takes a step back from the mattress, swings her arm in a wild circle. “Maybe this was the first city we came to. Fine. But you’ve spent the past however many months telling everyone we’d survive. Telling them a story—one where you get to be the hero so you don’t have to be the person who can’t get out of bed.” Her hands shake; she clenches her fists, stares at the floor. “Well, what about me, Tasha? What if I don’t want to be the hero? What if I don’t want to pass you your equipment and help you gather food and walk around with this goddamned key around my waist all the time? What if I’m not okay not knowing where our mystery food comes from? What if I don’t want to wait here while we starve? What if I want someone who will help me get out of the goddamned bed? Don’t I deserve that too?”
Tasha stands and reaches for Annie’s hands. “Don’t leave,” she whispers, and she brings Annie close, pulls her in. “Annie, I’m sorry. Please don’t leave.”
“Can’t it just be us again?” Annie whispers into her shoulder. “I’m so tired. I don’t want to think about taking care of all of these people anymore.”
“There are no other doctors here,” Tasha says. “If we leave the city, we leave them with nothing.”
Annie straightens. “I’m not a doctor,” she says. “I could leave tomorrow.”
Panicked, Tasha reaches for Annie’s hand again. “You’ll get stuck in the snow even if you walk out. We have food here, we have shelter. I can’t do this without you. Please, please, please don’t go.”
Annie’s hands cup her face now, and she brings her lips to Tasha’s, resting her forehead against Tasha’s. She breathes slowly, in and out, until Tasha feels her own heart settle down.
After another long moment, Annie moves back to the mattress and pulls Tasha down with her, plants a trail of kisses that ends at Tasha’s collarbone. “I’m sorry, Tasha, but I can’t do this forever.”
“We’ll do more hunting,” Tasha says. “We’ll hunt, we’ll dry the meat. Send groups out to scavenge as best as we can.” She grabs a handful of Annie’s hair and kisses her hard. “We won’t do this forever. I promise.”
Her promises are no longer enough. She can see that in Annie’s face already.
* * *
Still, it is not all bad. With the snow hemming them in, there is not much to do during the day, so Tasha converts a storefront a few doors down from the clinic—an old bank, the ATMs silent and useless and the floors heavy with thick carpet—into a community centre equipped with two propane heaters. People bring board games and play them for hours, sprawled on the floor. They boil water over the firepit in the back alley, stir in cocoa and powdered milk, then ladle the thin, rich liquid into mugs and pass them around. They tell stories, they sing songs. Everyone shares.
Sometimes Heather and Brendan bring the girls to the centre and Heather gets out her pencil crayons and teaches the children how to draw. Annie has salvaged colouring books and crayons from the grocery stores. Tasha can’t draw but tries anyway. The children squeal with laughter at her attempts.
The children like to draw Tasha as a small stick figure with a black stethoscope around her neck, putting bandages on bleeding knees and stitching cuts together. In one picture by a little boy named Tom, she is sewing a severed arm back onto a body. When he gives it to her, she laughs and hangs the picture up in the clinic.
Heather draws on the community centre walls like a woman possessed—her movements quick and sure, a whole world tumbling from her hand in a matter of minutes. She sketches the children at various points on the wall—her babies, Tom and his older sister. Nina and Frederic. Other little faces in between. The children love her pictures. Brendan has told Tasha that Heather still goes for walks, though Tasha hasn’t come across her in the forest again. (Tasha has seen her footsteps. She always sees her footsteps.) It is more difficult, walking through the forest in the snow. But not impossible.
One night during a blizzard, they cram as many people into the community centre as they can to share the warmth. Heather and Brendan arrive with dark bags under their eyes, the twins restless and feverish. Tasha takes one baby and Elyse takes another. They sing—Tasha sings as badly as she draws, but she tries anyway—until the girls are smiling, then they walk them until each twin is asleep. The strain in Heather’s face eases a bit and she goes to where the other children are drawing, then slides down onto the floor beside them. Beneath the loose hang of her clothes, the soft curve of her belly is unmistakable.
She dra
ws a mountain on the wall, and winged things that fly close to its summit. Fairies, Tasha sees, as she comes closer. Unicorns run down the side of the mountain, and still other beasts lie shadowed in the trees.
“What kind of mountain is that?” a child asks.
“This is a wishing mountain.” Heather’s hand doesn’t stop. “It’s filled with magic.” She glances up and sees that Tasha’s watching. She looks back at the mountain. “Magic that will make our world better.”
“Is it like our mountain?” Another child—brown-haired, dark-eyed Sasha. She reaches up and touches a fairy’s wing.
Heather smiles. “It can be like ours,” she says. “It can also be different. It can be whatever we want it to be.”
Tasha’s breath catches in her throat. The twin on her shoulder coos softly in her sleep. Despite how delicate they are, the twins’ heartbeats are strong. They don’t know any different. This is their only world.
It might not be so bad, she thinks. Next spring they will plant again. In the meantime, they have the community centre, they have each other. Others might have much less.
Heather draws a bright thing, falling from the mountain. Then another, then another.
“What are those?” Tasha asks.
“These are fire-birds,” Heather says. “They fall from the sky.”
Tasha’s heart thuds hard in her chest. “What did you say?”
Heather doesn’t look at her. “Fire-birds,” she repeats. She draws another one hitting the ground, a great gaping hole opening beneath it. “They burn holes in the ground, the way the meteors did.”
Tasha tries to swallow. “Once there was a bird who was jealous of the sun,” she says.
Heather looks at her, sharply. “What?”
“Once there was a bird who was jealous of the sun,” she repeats. “No matter how high the bird flew, the sun was always higher.”
Heather watches her for a moment, and then whispers, “Why should the sun fly higher than we do?” She holds her pencil crayon in mid-air.
“We work so hard to stay in the air but the sun sits up there and does nothing. It’s not fair.”
Tasha swallows. “How do you know that story?”
“My father made it up for me.”
“My mother made it up for me,” Tasha says. “When I was a kid, I had dreams about birds that burned holes in the ground. She made that story up so I wouldn’t be afraid. How—how did your father know it?”
Heather puts her pencil crayon down, then shrugs. “My father once said that stories don’t belong to anybody,” she says. “He said they belong to the world.”
“Yes,” Tasha says, a little louder now. People turn to look at them. “But that exact story? Don’t you think that’s a little strange? Did our parents know each other?”
“I don’t think so,” Heather says. “My father never left these mountains. Did your parents travel here?”
Tasha shakes her head. “They wanted to. They always talked about coming. But they never did.” She looks at the children, who have stopped listening to them and are back on the floor drawing their own pictures. “Why did your father tell you a story about birds who fly higher than the sun?” she says. “What were you afraid of?”
“I wasn’t afraid of anything.” There’s a strange smile on Heather’s face now. “My father, on the other hand…” She shrugs again. “He was afraid of a lot, as it turns out. I should have clued in when the birds in the story flew higher and kept burning.”
Tasha frowns. “But that’s not how the story ends.”
“Isn’t it?” Heather stands and reaches for Jilly. Again there’s that flash when they touch—clouds and air, the high-pitched sound of screaming. Heather blinks and Tasha wonders what she sees—The smoke again? The fire?—but then Brendan appears by their side and takes Greta from Elyse.
“You can stay here if you don’t want to walk home,” Tasha says. Stay. Stay and finish the story. “You can have the mattress in the clinic, if you want. Or stay here with the others—lots of people will be sleeping here tonight.”
“We’re fine,” Heather says.
Stay, Tasha wants to beg. Rest. Let me help you. Please tell me what all of this means. Instead she only nods. “All right,” she says. “Just—hold on a minute.” She moves to the doorway, then steps outside into the snow and makes her way to the clinic. She lets herself in and rummages through the shelves that Annie has organized so neatly in the back. She finds the bottle she is looking for and closes her hand around it, then walks back to the community centre. After Tasha stamps the snow off her boots, she holds the bottle of prenatal vitamins out to Heather. “For you.”
Heather looks at the vitamins in Tasha’s outstretched hand. “What good do you think those will do?”
“Who knows, at this point,” Tasha says. When Heather takes the bottle, Tasha feels a small thrill at being able to help her, even a little, and watches as she and the girls and Brendan head out into the swirling white.
“You spend more time worrying about Heather than you do about Annie,” Elyse says, beside her.
“What?” Tasha says, confused.
“Annie would do anything for you. And you keep pushing her away. Don’t you know how lucky you are?”
“Elyse, I’m not pushing—”
“Yes, you are. You don’t deserve her.”
Tasha sighs. “Elyse, we’re all tired. We’re all working too hard.”
“Heather doesn’t even look at you. She doesn’t care!”
“I just want her to survive,” Tasha says, backing away from Elyse’s anger. “I want everyone to survive.”
“So does Annie,” Elyse says. “But she wants you—the both of you—to survive most of all.”
Tasha turns from her and goes back to draw with the children.
* * *
Improbably, the old greenhouse thrives in the winter. As the snows blow, the amaryllis flush a deeper red. One day in early January, Tasha snowshoes to the greenhouse and discovers that the vines have made their way out the door and are reaching to the dusty clouded sun.
She wrenches the door open and goes inside, and it is like stepping through a portal into the tropics. She has to peel off all her layers, sliding out of her coat and boots and shirt and pants until she’s standing in her underwear, so awash in scents and vivid greenery, she’s overcome.
It shouldn’t be hot in here, but it is.
The greenhouse shouldn’t be here at all, but it is.
Each time she stands in front of the flowers, her vision blurs and her mind is overwhelmed with despair—her mother in the fire, her father trying so hard to get her out, her father in the fire too. The people they left behind by the sea. Climbing the mountain that rises above them even though she’s never climbed a mountain before. Climbing the mountain in the midst of a fire that burns down all the trees, the ambulance rumbling hard behind her. Water rushing over them, swallowing her air. Children that she’s helped to birth and then, inadvertently, to kill. The people in the city who continue to starve. Poison plants that grow thick by the side of the road. She was not enough to stand between her parents and the fire. Her parents saved her, again and again, when she was a child, and in return she let them burn, she let them explode into nothing.
Her screams go on forever.
When she comes back to herself, she’s curled on the ground, her forehead pressed to the dirt. There’s a draft of cold air behind her—she turns, blinking slowly, and sees Heather outlined in the doorway. The twins watch Tasha with eager, interested eyes.
She stares at Heather, then clears her throat. “Did you hear me scream?” Her voice is hoarse and scratchy.
Heather cocks her head. “You weren’t screaming,” she says. “But I could hear you weeping as I got closer.”
Tasha nods, wipes a hand across her face. “I’m so tired,” she say
s.
Heather steps all the way into the greenhouse and pushes the door shut behind her. The cold air vanishes. She leans back against the greenhouse door and watches Tasha, not saying anything.
“Candice,” Tasha says, finally. “And Seth.”
Heather nods. “What about them?”
“I think they killed their little boy.”
Heather doesn’t blink. “Do you know that? For sure?”
Tasha wipes angrily at another tear. “No. But before they left, Candice talked about mothers leaving their children on the mountain.”
Heather nods as though it’s the most normal thing in the world. “Yes. I remember that story.”
“I told them to go as far as they could. To try as hard as they could. I should have told them to stay here.”
Heather hasn’t moved from the door. “Sometimes people have to make hard choices, Tasha.”
“What if that had been you?” Tasha cries. Then she stops, horrified. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I meant—”
“You meant, what if my parents had decided to leave me on the mountain when I was born,” Heather says. Her voice is so gentle. “But they didn’t, and now I’m here. I understand.”
“I didn’t—”
“My parents had a hospital that functioned. They had help.”
“I know, but I could have helped them—and Annie—for as long as we needed to—”
“My father used to tell me a story,” Heather continues—looking at Tasha, but also not looking at her—“about a fox that wants children more than anything else in the world. The mountain tells her to go to the flatlands and turn over a rock and the rock will grant her children. But when she does this, the fox sees only worms, and she doesn’t understand at first that the worms are meant to be her children. So she goes to another rock and turns that one over too, and the same thing happens, and it’s only when she returns to the first rock that she realizes what’s supposed to happen. So she welcomes the worms, and they go home with her at the end of the story. And she is very happy.” She shifts her weight from one hip to the other, wincing a little. “I thought it was a beautiful story when I was small. I knew that my father was trying to tell me what it felt like to be the fox, surprised to find herself the mother of children who weren’t what she thought they’d be. She was happy to have them, in the end. And the worms were happy to have her. They built a life together.”
