Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

“I know,” she says, her voice low. She puts a hand against his chest, tries to soothe him. “We just—we haven’t had time. Everything happened so fast.” The girls are still crying. “B—I have to go to the babies. I’ll throw the flowers out. They don’t mean anything. Really.”

He sighs, then bends and picks up the bags. “I would have gotten you flowers. But there weren’t any.” He pulls out a container of cupcakes—the icing thick and white, the expiration date one week ago—and hands them to her. “They’re stale, obviously. But they’re also full of preservatives, so at least we don’t have to worry about mould. Happy birthday.”

She chokes on a bit of laughter. His eyes relax.

“You don’t have to throw the flowers away,” he says, softly. “But who gave them to you? That’s all I want to know.”

She can see it in his face: I know all of the survivors here. Which one is bringing my wife flowers?

“Does it matter?” she says. “They aren’t in my life anymore.”

“It matters to me,” he says. “How do they know that you’re here? If they aren’t in your life anymore, why bring you flowers at all?”

She looks at him, then nods. She grasps the bouquet in one hand and throws it back into the yard—the amaryllis bounce on the surface of the Boston ivy and then half sink into the green. “You’re right,” she says, and she walks past him into the house.

They go into the kitchen and B puts down his grocery bags and scoops up the girls. Heather takes the shopping bags and unpacks—the cupcakes, some cans of tuna, a few cartons of batteries.

He looks at her, shrugs. “We’ll need them,” he says. “Who knows if the power’s going to come back on.”

Heather nods, then moves into the front room. B follows with the girls, their faces splotched with red. Their eyes follow the dusty sunlight that filters through the window.

He stands and rocks the babies. They don’t usually fall asleep for him the way they do with Heather, but they are beyond tired. When they go quiet, Heather takes out the pencil crayons and draws the mountain on the living room wall. The mountain, the flowers, the clouds.

B sits gingerly on the couch, still holding the girls. They don’t wake up. A miracle. “I didn’t know you could draw,” he says.

She doesn’t look back at him. A dark-red whorl of amaryllis appears at the base of the mountain.

“Right,” he says, softly. “I remember now. You carried a sketchbook around with you at school.”

She pauses. “That was twenty years ago. You remember that?”

“I remember you,” he says, simply.

She thinks about this for a moment, and then sketches them in, lightly—four small figures at the base of the mountain. Two tiny bundles, three heads of flaming red hair. One dark.

“If this old friend isn’t in your life anymore,” he says, again, “how come they know how to find you? We’ve only just moved in.”

Her hand trembles; he doesn’t notice. “I don’t know.” She sounds so much calmer than she feels. “Maybe they just—maybe it’s just a way for me to know that they’re okay. There are—” she swallows, thinking anew of B’s missing parents—“there are so many missing. Maybe they thought I’d be worried.”

When she looks back at him, he’s staring down at the babies in his lap. “You can have friends, you know,” he says. “Even friends who were old boyfriends. I’m not a monster.”

“I know that,” she says. “It really doesn’t matter. They’re not in my life anymore.”

“Why not?”

He is so wary with her, and yet so hopeful too. “Because you are.”

The girls wake a short time later and immediately start screaming; she takes them from him and carries them outside, heading into the forest, one foot in front of the other.

When she returns, B is gone and the flowers sit in a jug in the front window.

The next day, before Heather leaves for the first long walk of the morning, Tasha comes to visit them. Annie and Elyse are with her, and so is B, holding a shovel, his pants smeared with dirt. Elyse has a blue surgical mask over her face. Heather blinks and thinks back to their moments together after climbing out of the basement. Lung transplant, the girl had said. Her friend had just received one; Elyse had still been waiting.

She hasn’t slept again, and for a moment as she stands in the doorway, she isn’t sure what’s going on.

“What do you want?” she blurts.

Tasha steps forward and takes her hand. Heather lets her. “We came to ask if you wanted to help,” she says. “With the cleanup, and the consolidation of supplies.”

“I tried to help,” Heather says. “B didn’t want me.”

B flushes. “There are things you can do now,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

What for? Heather thinks. What’s the point? Above them, the sky is reddish-brown, the air warm and stretched and waiting. “You’ve already been consolidating,” she says. She pulls her hand away. “The stores are practically empty. Did you think we wouldn’t see?”

“People have been looting,” Tasha says. “We needed to get there quickly so we could stockpile things for us all.”

“The food’s going to run out anyway,” Heather says. “It’s not going to last forever.”

“Maybe not.” Tasha is calm. “But we can make it last longer if we’re careful about it, and smart. We don’t know how long it will be before help arrives.”

Help. Heather blinks at this notion. When she looks at B, she sees again the determined cheerful slant of him. Her face hardens. “What if help isn’t coming, Tasha—did you ever think of that?”

“We can help ourselves,” Tasha says. “There’s so much we can do. We need to make sure everyone has a safe place to sleep. I need people to help me build a clinic as best we can, and we need people to help catalogue and organize supplies and figure out a rationing plan. We need to build greenhouses. We need people to grow food.” Her voice softens. “Brendan says you used to have a garden. Maybe you could help us with that.”

“My father was a gardener. I can’t do jack shit.” The words are out before she can stop them.

“You could plant flowers,” B says, and she realizes that this is his idea. “It’s a small thing, Heather, but it will help.”

“What am I supposed to do with them?” and she motions to the twins bundled across her chest. “They don’t sleep. You know they don’t sleep. That’s why you sent me away the first time!”

“You can walk them around the town,” he says. A pause. “And then you wouldn’t have to walk so far into the forest.” He flushes, but just a little. “I don’t want you to fall out there with no one else around.”

She’s so angry for a moment she almost can’t see—she stares away from them all, into the overgrown front yard of the house next door. “I’m fine,” she grits out, eventually. “I’m careful with the girls. I’m their fucking mother.”

“No one is saying that you aren’t careful,” Tasha says. Even though that is exactly what B is saying. Not careful with the girls, not careful with his heart. Why is someone else bringing my wife flowers? “All we’re saying is that it’s safer for everyone to stay together.”

Heather takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she looks straight at B. “I’m fine,” she says again. Maybe a little too loudly. “I won’t go as far into the forest, if that makes you happy. But until you can find another way to make them sleep, I’m going to keep walking.”