Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

“What are you, the birth control police?”

Isn’t that obvious? she wants to say. Instead she just looks at the girl. “You don’t want to get pregnant. Not now.”

The girl raises her chin. “I’m not stupid.”

What a gift—to be young and horny as the world ends. “Lock it after I leave,” she says as she heads for the door. She fights the urge to turn back and touch their faces.

She and B find a house two streets down from the wreckage of the hospital. There is a high chair in the kitchen, a baby carrier in the hallway, a car seat in the garage even though there is no car. There is an art station in the kitchen, with fingerpaints and pencil crayons. The pencil crayons are scattered over the floor, as though they were dropped in a hurry. Maybe these people got away. Maybe they all got into a car and drove away in those hours when she was sitting scared beneath the hospital.

Before they move in, Heather packs away all of the family pictures. A mother, a father, a daughter, and two sons. The pool out back is filled with rubble from the wreckage of the house behind them. Boston ivy flanks the backyard fence, tendrils of it already reaching out over the destruction. Within days of them moving in, the pool is crisscrossed in green.

The girls share a bedroom in this new house. B finds a bicycle abandoned on the street and scavenges odds and ends from the other empty houses—winter coats, a garden shovel, all of the canned food from the kitchen next door. There are some diapers in the house, but B takes his bicycle and brings back as many packages from the store as he can. One trip, another, another.

“We’ll replace everything if they come back,” he says. Heather tries to imagine a world where this mother and father and their three children make their way back to the mountains.

When she closes her eyes, she still sees fire in other cities. She sees burned vehicles and blackened bodies inert at the sides of the highway. She says nothing about this to B.

She feeds the babies and puts them down to nap and picks them up and rocks them when they keep crying. They are angry, red-haired monsters filled with colic and rage, and then they are sweet, impossible fairies—always one or the other, never anything in between. She walks beneath the maples and the oak trees, wearing thick socks and jeans tucked into rubber boots that are too big. They are the only shoes here that will fit over her twisted foot.

She ventures as close to the mountain as she dares. The sun is weak and feeble these days, filtered through a grey sky choked with cloud. But in the woods, the world looks the same. The green trees, the whispers of a grey-green mountain that stretches high above them.

He is not here, he is not here.

As she walks the girls, she tells them stories. Sometimes she yells the stories over their screams, the urge to throw them headfirst onto the ground and watch their tiny necks snap so strong she can taste it. Cinderella and her mice. Rumpelstiltskin and his fire. ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WERE A KING AND QUEEN WHO LONGED TO HAVE A CHILD.

The only thing she longs for now is quiet, and sleep.

The forest is calm, its greenness doubly rich against the backdrop of the destroyed city. Once upon a time there was a girl who lived in a village and looked after the geese for the queen. When they are also calm, the girls stare up at her and snuffle like little pigs. Their eyes are newborn blue, but flecked with greenish-brown. In a few months they’ll go hazel, just like B’s.

She is so tired. She walks them and walks them, and when the girls scream, she thinks about unwrapping them, pulling them away from her chest, and laying them on the marbled green forest floor so the wolves can take them, so the fox will come back and find her and show her the way up the mountain.

She doesn’t unwrap them. She doesn’t let them go.

The first earthquake comes—a small one, just enough to shake the pictures on the walls. The girls are finally, briefly, asleep, tucked between Heather and B on the bed. At the first rumble, they both reach for one of the girls, then stumble down to the kitchen and squeeze under the table. They stare at each other as the girls wail, as they wait for more disaster to rain down around them.

Nothing happens. After an uncomfortable hour, B gives Jilly to Heather and climbs out from under the table to look around outside. When he comes back, he’s relieved. “All clear,” he says. “But maybe I’ll go see how the others are. I won’t be gone for long.” His voice is thick with the determined cheerfulness that’s begun to characterize him, to characterize their city. We’ll get through this. Everything will be okay.

After he leaves, Heather crawls out from under the table and lays both girls out on its surface. They immediately start to wail. She puts her hands over her ears. Outside, the sky is grey and brown, the air heavy with rain that doesn’t come. B will come back soon—and then what? They’ll eat, maybe, or the girls will continue to cry and Heather will take them for another long walk beneath the trees. Maybe they’ll go together to the looted grocery store down the road and see what remains on the shelves. Tomorrow they will do it all again.

The girls are red-faced, screaming, furious. She pulls her hands away from her ears and then reaches for the dishtowel, thinking if she muffles their noise just a little maybe the pounding of her heart won’t be as bad. Then she balls the dishtowel in her fists. No. No. No.

She won’t do it.

She won’t.

The kitchen has a screen door and she bangs out through it into the backyard—stumbling as though there is no air left in the house.

The bouquet sits on the bottom step, blood red and lushly green. She registers the flowers just in time to jump over them, landing hard. She crouches frozen for a moment, then turns around and stares at the bouquet before reaching to pick it up. The stems soft and fresh against her palms. The deep-red burst of amaryllis, the dark-green grounding of satin leaves. Everything smells of the mountain.

She is weeping so hard she cannot see.

When B comes back, the babies are still crying on the table. Heather hasn’t moved from her place by the steps.

“Where did those come from?” he asks. He’s carrying shopping bags—he went to the store after all—and he must have walked right past the girls to find her. She clutches the flowers and lies instantly.

“I don’t know.”

He stares at her. “Yes, you do. I can see it all over your face.”

“They’re just flowers,” she says, weakly.

“If they’re just flowers, you can tell me.”

She looks away.

“Why is someone else bringing my wife flowers?” he says. There’s an edge to his voice she’s never heard before. “Heather, what the fuck is going on?”

“It’s nothing,” she says. She gets up and takes a step toward him. “B—really. They’re from an old friend. That’s all.”

He drops the shopping bags. “What old friend of yours has time to go and find tropical flowers in this goddamned mess?”

The wails from the kitchen intensify, and they both look to the house. When they turn back to one another, Heather nods. “My father used to bring me flowers like these on my birthday,” she says. “We had a tropical garden when I was growing up.” She doesn’t talk much about her father; maybe this will soften him. She isn’t sure.

He doesn’t move. “How come your old friend knows that and I don’t? I’m your husband. I should know these things!”