by Amanda Leduc
Sometimes Heather finds apples or other fruits in their backyard. B is too beaten down to ask about such gifts now; he just accepts them, and eats his share.
He still goes to the strip mall to help Tasha and Annie when he can. But sometimes he sleeps away the day. Sometimes they all sleep, as the vines grow over Joseph’s old house, choke it into memory.
On the days that B leaves, Heather musters the strength to take the girls to the greenhouse. One foot in front of the other.
Then, at last, one day Estajfan comes out from the trees when she grows close.
“Heather, please don’t come to the greenhouse anymore,” he says. “Save your strength.”
“I can do it,” she says. It is still possible—even with her belly, even with the girls. Delirium keeps her going now. These terrible, hysterical gifts.
“Heather.” Estajfan comes to her and puts his hands on her shoulders. “Heather, stop coming here. Please rest.”
“I rest here or I rest at home.” She shrugs. “I’d rather be here with you.”
He watches her face. “And your…B?”
She looks away. “All you have to share now is what grows on the mountain, right?”
“We still look,” he whispers. “We go farther and farther, but things are harder and harder to find.”
She closes her eyes. It is not hard to see. This abandoned city, that abandoned town. Large humps of green that used to be houses, smaller humps that might have been cars on the roads.
There are smaller humps even than those, almost imperceptible in the green. This one big enough, perhaps, to have once been a person. A child. The flowers that bend around them are bright and terrible—orange and purple and a brighter yellow than she’s ever seen, giant half-moon traps that hang off the vines on other houses. Bushes with dark, juicy berries, soft white oleander plants that choke the hydro poles that stand still and useless, lining the streets.
She takes a breath, then opens her eyes. “You need to take us up the mountain.”
He looks at her. “You should have left a year ago.”
She laughs at this. “Well, I didn’t. You really think I could leave?” Then she says it again. “Estajfan. You need to bring us up the mountain. Me. The girls. And B.”
He shakes his head.
“Estajfan. Please.”
Silence. She watches him clench and unclench his fists. Then he says, “I can bring you.”
“Yes,” she says. “And the girls. And B.”
“Just you. The mountain is the centaurs’ home.”
She steps back from him, one arm around each of the girls, a hand half covering their ears as though they understand. She opens her mouth. “N—”
“Heather.”
She turns as Estajfan jumps back into the trees and disappears. The ground rumbles beneath her feet.
Elyse is coming toward her, from the field. She stops in front of Heather, breathing hard. “Heather?”
Heather digs her fingernails into her palms. The girls whimper, weak, against her collarbone. “What, the horse?” she says.
“That wasn’t a hor—”
“You’re tired, Elyse.” Heather starts to walk back in the direction of the city.
“That—that thing—it was more than a horse!” Elyse lunges forward, grabs Heather’s arm. When she tries to shake her off, Elyse holds on even tighter.
For a moment, everything around them stops. There is no birdsong, there is no rustle of the leaves. There is no wind.
“In the beginning,” Elyse says, and she lets Heather’s arm fall, “a horse fell in love with a woman.”
“That’s just a story.” Heather resumes walking, her heart beating loud in her ears. She fights to keep from screaming. Estajfan. Estajfan.
“It’s up there, isn’t it?” Elyse says, stumbling after Heather. “On the mountain. My grandmother—she used to tell us stories. It’s up there, and—” she coughs, ugly and painful, but keeps coming— “oh my God, Heather. Did he say—I heard ‘centaurs.’ Are there more of them?”
She doesn’t turn around. One foot in front of the other. Forward. Forward. Never back.
“What’s on the mountain, Heather? Do they…” Elyse falls silent for a moment, and Heather can almost hear the gears working in her mind, pieces falling into place with terrifying precision. “Was it them who brought the food? Is there food up there?”
Heather keeps walking, willing herself not to cry. Elyse struggles relentlessly behind her. “No one has been up the mountain in years,” she says. “There is no food. We all know that, Elyse. We’ve told stories about the mountain forever.”
“You were there! You—” And then Elyse stops. “You knew,” she says. “You’ve known this whole time.”
“You’re making no sense, Elyse.”
“I’m making perfect sense!” Elyse cries. “You kept this from all of us while the whole city was starving?”
“Is starving,” Heather mutters. She feels Elyse watching her. “We are starving, Elyse. We will continue to starve until it ends.” The footsteps stop, and finally Heather turns to see Elyse half hunched over in the middle of the overgrown road. She and the girls are almost home; she has to shut this girl down. “You didn’t see anything,” Heather says. “I walk the forest all the time, Elyse—I know how the shadows and the light can trick you. Stop grasping for hope that isn’t there.”
“I know what I saw,” Elyse insists. “And it wasn’t a horse.”
“What did you see?” It’s B, on their doorstep, coming out to meet them.
Heather shrugs. She lifts Greta out of the sling and passes her over so that B’s attention shifts to the baby. “Nothing,” she says. “A trick of the light in the forest. That’s all.”
Elyse laughs. “The only one with tricks around here is you.” She looks at B. “Did you see it too? Do you know about the creature in the forest?”
B pauses only for an instant, but it’s enough. “What creature?” he says.
“Half man, half horse,” Elyse gasps. “It was—Brendan, it was like something from a dream. Like the stories we used to hear when we were kids! But it was real. I swear.”
“If there are magical creatures in the mountains,” Heather says, trying to sound weary, not panicked, “don’t you think someone would have talked about them before?”
“You did,” B says. Low and unmistakable.
She glances at him. “What? I did not.”
“Right after you came down, when your father died. You told the doctors there were creatures on the mountain. And no one believed you, so you stopped talking.”
Heather swallows. “How would you know?”
“I went to school with you, remember? People talked. Everyone knew about your time in the hospital. Everyone said you were crazy. I said it too, once.”
She looks away from him. The sting is so old it doesn’t even hurt, but the panic building in her chest is something altogether different. “I barely remember you from school.”
“Why would you?” he says, still in that strange voice. “You didn’t talk to anybody.”
She laughs. “And everyone remembered me anyway—because they said I was crazy? Because I walked funny?”
He doesn’t deny it.
“They’re up on the mountain,” Elyse interjects. She has B now—soon she’ll have the whole city. “Brendan—they have food up on the mountain. We have to go up.”
He hasn’t stopped looking at Heather. “Is that where the fruit came from? And the flowers?”
She doesn’t meet his eyes. “There is nothing on the mountain,” she says, again. “If we go up there, people will die.”
“People have already died!” Elyse shouts. She takes one more step closer to Heather. “If you aren’t going to do what needs to be done, then I will.” She turns and starts to walk to the to
wn.
Heather lunges after Elyse, all her careful resolve disintegrating in panic. B’s hand on her arm is the only thing that stops her. He has Greta on his hip; Jilly, still in the sling, looks up at her, confused.
“You need to tell me everything,” he says.
“You’re hurting me,” she says. She watches Elyse hurry away from them, then glances at his hand on her arm. He doesn’t let go.
The ground rumbles beneath her feet.
“We can’t go up the mountain,” she whispers to B. “It isn’t safe.”
“Why isn’t it safe, Heather?”
“It just isn’t.”
She finally wrenches her arm away, and he laughs—a short, sharp bark at the sky. “You can’t really be serious. Half man, half horse? What kind of joke is this?”
“It isn’t a joke,” she says, dully. “But it doesn’t matter. We can’t go up there.”
“Tell me,” he says, and she knows what he means. “Tell me all of it.”
And so she does—standing there in front of their house as the sky begins to darken and the breeze rustles through the trees. The day her father took her up the mountain. The songs he sang. The beasts in the trees and her father’s explosive joy. The way he touched the palomino. His sudden stumble and fall.
“How could he do that?” B interrupts.
“How could he fall?”
“No—how could he take you up the mountain? On a path he didn’t know was safe? A child like you who couldn’t even walk straight on normal ground?”
“He helped me.”
“What if you’d fallen? What if you’d gotten hurt? Would he have left you there with God knows what while he went down for help? Didn’t he think about that?”
“He believed in me,” she retorts. A reflex, her loyalty so deep it splits her in two. “I wanted to believe in myself too. To know that I could do it.”
Help us, she remembers him saying. Help my daughter.
B shakes his head. “So—what—your father fell and this—creature—carried you back down the mountain? And then what?”
She thinks of it—night after night of hushed escape from the house. Estajfan, smiling as she drew him on the paper. Estajfan, telling her a thousand stories.
“I had no one else to talk to,” she says, eventually.
“You had people to talk to!” he cries. “You didn’t want to talk to anybody else.”
“People wouldn’t have understood,” she says. “You don’t know because you weren’t there.”
“I’m here now,” he says. “I’ve been here for almost two years. And you’ve never told me any of this.” B looks away, for a moment. He doesn’t believe her entirely, she can tell. But who can blame him? They are all malnourished, weakened, beaten down by this disaster. What’s easier to believe in—magic or despair?
“I’ve tried so hard to be good to you,” B says. “But you never let me in. You’d rather believe in the stories you tell yourself instead.”
“This isn’t a story,” she says, softly. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“Not just this,” he says, surprising her. “Everything you believe about yourself is a story.”
She blinks. “What?”
He sighs. “Everything. The mountain. These—centaurs. The way that everyone treated you at school.” She opens her mouth to protest; he just shakes his head. “I know we weren’t perfect. I know I haven’t been perfect. But—people change, Heather. I’ve tried. Tasha has tried, and tried, and tried. And all you show us is a wall.”
She swallows. She’d expected anger, not this.
“You might as well be up on that mountain already,” he says. “You’d rather be in a fantasy world than here.”
“Can you blame me?”
His face hardens. “I can, a little. It’s like you believe that the only person who can change is you. You went into the forest while everyone else tried to keep the city alive.”
“I had the girls,” she protests. “I kept the girls alive.”
“You did,” he admits. “That’s true.” They stare at each other, and then he sighs again, and says, “So. These—centaurs—on the mountain. Is there food? Like Elyse said? Can we go up there and get it?”
“We can’t go up,” she says. “B—it isn’t safe. People will die.”
“People are already dying,” he says, echoing Elyse. “If there is food up there, we have to try.”
“B,” she whispers, “no one can go.”
“So that’s it, then? They’re going to let all of us starve?”
She doesn’t say anything—her face says it for her. She watches the realization slide over his face with something like horror.
“Not all of us,” he says, eventually. “Not you.”
Heather swallows, puts a hand against his arm. “He said he could take me up. I said—”
He leans over and plucks Jilly out of the sling. “Go, then,” he says. “Get the fuck up the mountain and leave us alone.”
She is too shocked to protest. She watches him turn away from her as if in a dream. He walks up the steps to their house, carrying the girls, then stands for a moment, his hand on the doorknob.
It’s a dream, she thinks. It’s only another dream.
“Go,” he says, and he doesn’t turn to her. “That’s what you really want, isn’t it?”
“I have to warn him,” she whispers. “I’ll come back. I promise.”
Beneath her feet, a steady rumble, rumble, in the ground.
* * *
Estajfan is not at the greenhouse. She heads past it, toward the forest, pushing her way through the underbrush. Sweat pools in her collarbone and trickles down between her breasts. When she reaches out to push the vines out of the way, her hands sting where they touch the green. She stops to examine them—small welts rise and fade as she watches. A trick of the light, she thinks, and pushes ahead, ignoring the pain. She’s good at that.
Another rumble hits—so hard and so loud she almost falls. When she rights herself, she’s barely past the greenhouse. She retreats back against it, looks up into the trees.
“Estajfan,” she calls. “Estajfan.”
“Heather.” Suddenly he’s beside her, before her, everywhere. Mountain air and light and sky.
She wants to collapse, to cry, but she gets a hold of herself. “Estajfan, listen to me. They’re coming up the mountain. You have to go—you, Aura, Petrolio. Please. I don’t know what they’ll do. They’re—everyone is so hungry, and so desperate.”
Estajfan shakes his head. “They can’t come up the mountain.”
“I know that—”
“No.” He grips her shoulders again. “Heather—something deeper is wrong. I’ve been trying to figure out what the ground magic is saying—”
“Ground magic?” She stares at him.
An unleashed banshee wail shoots at them from all directions. Heather covers her ears and bends low. Low enough to see the lilies around the greenhouse open their petals like mouths and scream. The glass shatters. Vines crawl through the shards and loop around her arms. She yanks free but the vines wind tighter, pull her down to the forest floor. Tiny green tendrils burrow into her arms. A thousand tiny pinpricks, a thousand pictures in her head.
A father tucks his son into bed, lifts up the pillow, and smothers the child. Then he jumps headfirst from a third-storey window and his neck snaps like a twig.
A mother bursts into tears at a dinner table and stabs her daughter through the eye with a fork, then takes her own life.
Children face down in a filthy tub. The mother and father slumped against the sink, a gun on the floor, blood and brain matter splashed over the wall.
In their city. In cities far away.
Then her girls and B, dangling from a beam in the kitchen.
The screaming. T
he screaming. She’s screaming with it.
The ground surges around her, green things thrumming in triumph. The air smells like the world has a fever.
Estajfan rips the vines away and picks her up. She turns into his shoulder and feels them start to climb.
Mama, says Greta’s little voice inside her ear.
Da, says Jilly.
They are gone—her girls.
There are no stories that will protect her from this.
They are gone from her, forever.
10
Tasha is in the clinic, her stethoscope against a little boy’s chest. She tries to concentrate on the heartbeat in her ears, but all she can see is Annie, pale and withdrawn in the corner of the room. When they woke up this morning, arms and legs tangled around one another, Annie had jumped away from her as though she couldn’t stand her touch. She’s been distant all day—even more distant than she’s been recently.
Tasha tried to distract herself by seeing patients. Those who managed to drag themselves into the clinic today all showed the same signs—they were restless and weary, jumpy and odd, their eyes feverish.
Candice had come, complaining of a fever. Tasha brought her into the examination room and pulled the curtain across.
“Sleep,” she said. “Sleep, and try to drink as much water as you can.”
“There’s no water left,” Candice said, dreamily.
“Annie will give you some.” Tasha glanced at the curtain. “Candice,” she whispered. “What happened to your little boy?”
Candice blinked at her, the words seeming to come from far away. “He died,” she whispered.
Tasha swallowed. “Did you—did you take him to the mountain?”
“I couldn’t,” Candice said. “I couldn’t do it. We got stuck in the snow—I tried to keep him warm, but nothing helped.”
Relief made Tasha dizzy; she reached out and held the other woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“I would like to sleep,” Candice continued. “I want to sleep and forget that any of this ever happened. But I just have nightmares. I never get any rest.”
Tasha doled a few precious antibiotics out into Candice’s waiting palm. “These will help,” she said. She felt renewed and also weary beyond belief; when Candice stood up to go, Tasha hugged her, then let her move beyond the curtain.
