by Amanda Leduc
The drawings she made for him are tacked up on the wall. There are more pencils and pens and sheets of blank paper and pictures torn from magazines, stock photos still in frames. Smiling children, smiling families. All dead now. All gone.
“Where did all this come from?” she asks them, in one of her lucid moments.
“Our father was a collector,” Aura says. “And after him—Estajfan.”
Heather looks around the space and tries to focus.
“This was for our mother,” Aura answers the question before Heather can ask. “In case she ever decided to come see us.”
Heather eases herself off the bed and moves slowly to the desk. She flips the laptop open. The battery is long dead, of course. “What use is all of this?”
“It’s of no use.” Estajfan looms dark in the doorway. “I just keep it to…remember.”
“But you’ve never used a computer,” Heather says. She crosses the cave and edges past him. The air outside is cold and starry.
“I haven’t,” he agrees. He comes to stand beside her. “There is no one, Heather. I’m sorry.”
“No one,” she echoes. Last night she dreamt of the girls again, and her father’s face as he fell. She woke up alone in the dark of the cave, a moonlit shadow—Aura? Estajfan? She couldn’t tell—outside the door.
When she fell back to sleep, she dreamed of her mother, who welcomed her into a room that was bare except for a butter churn toppled against the wall in the corner.
“Would you like some tea?” her mother asked. When Heather looked around, confused, her mother opened the window and plucked a mug off a tree branch. When she closed the window, leaves pressed against the glass.
“They want to come in,” her mother said.
“Where’s the baby?” Heather asked. “I left him with you.”
“Oh.” Her mother’s kind face creased with surprise. “He’s sleeping. Out there, like in the song. See?” Out the window, Heather saw him in the tree, embraced by the branches. When she reached for him, the tree would not give him up.
“He’s for the trees,” her mother said.
Heather turned to her mother. “Where are the girls?”
“They were for the trees too.” She stepped forward, tucked a strand of hair behind Heather’s ear. “Like you, Heather. Your life was always going to look a little different too.”
In the dream her stomach dropped in mingled terror and rage. “But they could have done so much,” she whispered. “Didn’t I manage to climb a mountain?”
“Yes. And look what happened when you did.”
Now, waking, she moves to the cave opening and steps out into the light. It’s overcast, but she’s been in the cave so long she needs to shield her eyes.
The mountain centaurs stand in a semicircle in front of the entrance, their faces stern.
“There is no room for humans anymore,” one of them says. A male, tall and dark, his black hair falling down his back in careless waves.
Heather, weary, says, “Do you have anything else to say to me?”
“You are here only because of Estajfan,” he says. “But he cannot protect you forever.”
Estajfan shifts so he’s partly in front of her. “Nothing will happen to her here,” he says. The other centaur, unimpressed, moves away.
“Take me somewhere else,” Heather says.
And he does. They climb another sloping path that ends in a flat space with three weeping willows. She moves slowly, weak from grief and pregnancy and trauma. She sits down with her back against a tree. Estajfan kneels beside her.
“Tell me a story,” he says.
There are no stories anymore, she wants to tell him. But the stories find her anyway.
* * *
Once there were two little girls who were born as the world became new again. Their hair was red like the fire that destroyed the old world. At night, they curled into one another for warmth, their fingers laced together.
They were restless babies. Why sleep when you could keep your eyes open and discover the world? To soothe them, their mother put them in a sling and walked them through the ravaged streets out to the edges of the city, through the fields, close to the mountain in whose shadow they sat every day. They wailed and wailed and wailed.
As their first months passed, the girls cried less and less, and instead began to listen as their mother told them stories—of princesses who beat dragons, of girls whose tears could feed the trees.
“You can do anything,” their mother said to them, over and over. “You can do anything, because you are so loved.”
Greta, a few minutes older, liked to roll balls across the floor with her thumbs. Music made her laugh until she screamed. Jilly, the younger, liked to curl into her father’s neck and whisper nonsense to herself. She loved birds. Greta was louder, but Jilly was the first to find words.
They grew, and were the best of friends. At school they sat together; at home they were never far from one another. Their parents joked that even for them it was impossible to tell the girls apart. They grew taller and slimmer and began to lose their baby faces, growing into their teenage skins. They had their father’s eyes and hair. They had their mother’s hands.
Since they had never known another world, they grew into this one the way tropical flowers grow from decaying trees. When their parents spoke of airplanes and music boxes that ran all the time, of lights that kept the city bright at night, it sounded like a dream. The girls knew only fires in the backyard and laundry done by hand. The water they bathed in was heated over the fire.
But the gardens were bountiful, and they always had enough to eat. They were loved. They were loved.
They remained restless, like their mother. It was not unusual for the girls to find themselves in the shadow of the mountain and not remember how they got there. They would stare at the mountain rising into the clouds and wonder what was up there. Was it magic, this mountain that haunted their days? Did it watch over them in ways they didn’t know? What about the trees, their city, the sky? Did these watch over them too?
Sometimes, when they went out walking, they ran into their mother. She had been up the mountain long ago, the only one who had. When they asked her if she’d ever go up again, she shook her head.
“I like to be by the mountain,” she said. “But my dreams are enough now. I don’t really want to climb it.”
When she was sixteen, Greta heard stories from travellers about a school far away where you could learn to be a doctor. She applied, and was accepted. Her parents packed her bags; her sister wept, but shouldered a pack for her as the family set out for the school together. Jilly, like their mother, was already an artist, her sketchbook filled with flowers and trees.
The world had been reborn a shadow of itself. They had no car, not even bicycles, so they walked to the school. At night, they slept beneath the stars. It took them seven days to reach the school, whose letter of offer had come to Greta by way of a man riding a horse, like all the other letters that passed from place to place. As soon as they got there, Jilly said, “Don’t stay.” She couldn’t see a world without her sister. Would the mountain look the same without Greta there to see it? Would the flowers?
Greta shook her head. “I’m here for a while, and then I’m coming back.”
Jilly opened her mouth to plead, but just then a hummingbird flew by them. She held out her hand. The hummingbird came to sit in her palm. She and her twin bowed over it in silence. They had never seen a hummingbird by the mountain, though they’d read about them in books.
“You see?” Greta said, her voice soft.
The hummingbird started, and flew away.
That night, over dinner, Jilly told her parents that she was also going to stay.
Her mother said, “Greta has a dorm room. You can’t stay by yourself—you’re only sixteen.”
“Then stay with me,” Jilly said. She watched surprise flare in their faces.
“But we’ve always lived by the mountain,” their mother said.
Jilly had already drawn the hummingbird in her notebook. “Maybe it’s time for us to find out the differences in the world?”
Their parents looked at each other. The twins had always suspected that something other than love lay between their parents—something that came close to love but wasn’t quite the same.
“We’ll think about it,” their father said.
Their mother nodded, then reached forward and took their hands. “Magic will follow you wherever you go,” she told them. Her copper-headed girls. The bright-haired twins who’d come out of her just before the world burned. “Even if we don’t stay with you.”
In the morning their parents had decided. They found a small house by the river. Near enough to Greta’s school that they could visit, but far enough away to give her space. Jilly had her own room. Before long, the city began to clamour for her sketches. She drew flowers and hummingbirds until her sketchbook was full, and then went into their new city and bought another.
She drew the mountain less and less, and then stopped drawing it altogether. They did not return to their old city. None of them ever thought of the mountain again.
The mountain, magic though it might have been, did not care in the slightest.
* * *
“We should have left,” she whispers to Estajfan. The words feel like a betrayal. “Right when it happened. I should have taken the girls and gone with B the day we climbed out of the hospital.” The breath catches in her throat. “But I couldn’t leave. You were here. I couldn’t leave you.”
“Heather,” he says, miserable. “Heather, I told you you should go—”
“I know!” she cries. The words ricochet off the trees. “I made a choice. I made a choice, and I didn’t even realize it. And now look what happened.”
“You couldn’t have known—”
She puts a hand against his mouth. “It doesn’t matter. It still happened.”
She lays her head against his chest and listens to his hearts. He lifts the hand covering his mouth and lets it gently drop, then strokes her hair. She reaches up and traces the angles of his face, the slope of neck that reminds her, for a fleeting moment, of B.
He smells of earth and sky and still the stars, but also something else now. Uncertainty. Her fingers touch his lips. He is here with her. He is here, finally here.
And her family is gone. Jilly. Greta. B. She whispers their names into his neck, his ear, his lips, the long dreads of his dark hair. He whispers back the names of those he’s lost—his father, his mother, far away and long ago. The lives that weren’t. The lives that could have been.
She takes their names into her mouth. He does the same.
“I want out,” she whispers, and he freezes, unsure, but what she means is that she wants out of her body. One long seam from forehead to toes, split open, so she can march away from her old self like she was moulting.
Instead she presses against him. Her face is slick with tears as he breathes with her, as he whispers into her hair, as he lays her down into the dirt. She wants to dig her hands into the earth and bring up something new. She turns until she’s face down, the ghost of B all around her and yet so far away, because it isn’t B lifting her skirt this time, his fingers trembling but sure, his hands running around her hips and pulling her hard against the great bulk of him, lifting her off the ground and up against the trembling weight that could kill her. It isn’t B above her at all.
Estajfan beside her on the mountain, Estajfan beside her in the city, Estajfan before her, at night, with the flowers. Estajfan here now, with her, above all other things. He has always been with her. She has always been here. He is inside of her and over her and somewhere else besides; they are breathing, they are one now, they are everywhere, together.
* * *
The light fades slowly from the top of the mountain, throwing everything into deepening shadow. Her face is wet with tears.
Estajfan clears his throat. “Are you all right?”
She nods. She still can’t speak.
“Heather—”
“I’m all right, Estajfan.” Above them, the weeping willow rustles in the breeze.
What did she expect? What does happiness feel like when her girls are gone?
“How do you survive?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he tells her. “It just happens.”
They are silent for a time as the wind whistles lonely through the trees. “I saw a fox,” she tells him, and he stiffens. “Foxes. A vixen and two babies. They came to me when we were under the hospital. They followed me for months as I walked through the forest.”
His hand stills against her hair. “What did they do?”
“Nothing.” She closes her eyes to remember. “One time I unwrapped the girls and put them on the ground. I was so tired.” A long pause as she remembers. “I saw…a hole in the air, behind the foxes. It crept toward the girls and I knew it would take them away. I wanted it to take them away. But I snapped out of it. I got them back just in time.” She opens her eyes and looks at him. “My father told me other stories. Mothers leaving their children. Things like that.”
Estajfan swallows. “The mountain tells lots of stories.”
“But the girls are gone now,” she whispers. “I did that. I wanted it, just for that moment. And now it’s happened. That was no story.”
“Heather, I’m sorry—”
“Stop saying that!” She lurches unsteadily to her feet. “What are you sorry for? What can you do? Nothing. You could barely do anything for us when we were starving.” She gulps a breath, tries to calm down. “You couldn’t—or wouldn’t—bring the girls up here. You said that. Fine. You were right—I should have left when the meteors came. And I didn’t. It’s my fault. You have nothing to do with it, with them.”
He stands, and in the gathering dark he seems twice his size—magical and lonely, dangerous and beautiful. “I kept all of you alive,” he says, hurt.
She laughs at this and spins around in a circle. “For what? For what, Estajfan? So that the trees could claim everyone anyway? So that I could stand alone on a mountain with a monster from the stories my father used to tell and know that the ordinary world is gone and magic is the only thing that’s left? I don’t want magic. I want my girls back!”
She screams those last words into the sky and they hang in the air like mist, clouding everything she sees. Greta, ducking behind one weeping willow. Jilly toddling after her, her small hands eager and outstretched.
Even B is hiding in the mist. His soft laugh, his smile. The way he’d turned hard, so defeated, in the end.
Her fault. All of it.
“Go,” she whispers.
“What?”
“Go,” she says, again. Even now, the fact that he’s so near her feels like a gift. All these years and it’s that same first night all over again, beautiful and wild. He is the only thing she’s ever wanted. “Estajfan, please leave me alone. Just for now.”
“But—”
“I can’t bear it,” she says. Greta. Jilly. B. She squeezes her hands into fists. She sees the worry in his face and shakes her head. “I’ll be okay. I just—I need to be alone.”
His face shutters, and he nods. Monster. She’s hurt him. “All right,” he says. “I won’t—I won’t be far.”
When she opens her eyes again, a long time later, she is alone beneath the sky.
* * *
The stars hang heavy and bright overhead, brighter than they’ve been in a year. Three billion, one hundred and twenty-six million, four hundred and twenty-five thousand and one.
Who could possibly count the stars? Her father had been wrong to count them with her—wrong to take her up the mountai
n, wrong to fill her head with stories. But he had done it, and now here she is. The ground presses, rough, against her knees.
I want to be something else, she thinks.
No more sloping shoulders, no more awkward gait. No more dead girls or dead husband or dead parents. A new life here on the mountain. Four legs instead of two, family that will mirror her when she looks at them. She drops to her knees and digs her fingers into the soil, and it gives way beneath her hands, inviting her in.
“I want to be something else.” This time she says it out loud. She pushes her hands deeper into the earth and now she can feel it—the electric something that Estajfan called ground magic, thrumming and joyous, ancient, alive.
She digs and breathes and digs and breathes. The deeper she goes, the more the longing overtakes her, until it’s a constant hum in her throat, in her chest, in her heart. Estajfan, Estajfan. She won’t live in two worlds anymore. She won’t do it.
She can’t.
When the hole she has dug is deep enough, she scrambles into it and thinks of the horse that did the same all those years ago—what he wanted, what the mountain eventually made him be. Does she need a whole night? She looks up at the stars and pulls the dirt in close. She buries her feet and her legs—her human legs, the last time she’ll see them—then the rest of the dirt falls in on top of her. She can’t move. She can’t move.
The ground whispers in her ear, incantatory and triumphant. She will become other, she will become more.
She cries out as the earth tumbles over her face and blocks the sky. When she screams, she gags on dirt.
14
Tasha doesn’t know how long she’s been locked inside. It feels like hours.
The mother’s wild wave of grief, her plunge into laughter, the twisting of her hands, her boy’s neck snapped. Annie’s crazed voice.
