Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

She was recovering from trauma, the doctors said. She’d just seen her father die. (On that, it seemed, everyone was agreed.) It wasn’t unusual for people recovering from trauma to say strange things.

“Her world does not make sense right now,” the doctors told her mother. Reactive psychosis, caused by grief and stress. It would pass. “Give her time to heal.”

Instead Heather shut her mouth and refused to say anything else. Through the search partway up the mountain, before the team had to turn back in defeat because of bad weather; as people put on bright-orange jackets and walked through the mountain trees for hours, calling her father’s name. Maybe he was lying crumpled on the ground somewhere and couldn’t get up. Maybe he had crawled until he couldn’t crawl anymore and was too weak to answer when they yelled for him.

They came back to her with more questions.

Did he really fall?

Nod.

Did you see it?

Nod.

Heather. Are you sure he didn’t jump?

Shake of the head.

What happened?

Silence. There was nothing she could say.

After the search teams gave up, the city council passed a law to ban people from the mountain. They let the fields leading to the mountain grow wild, allowed the forest to creep in.

Her mother held a funeral but Heather didn’t go. How could they bury her father when there was no body? It made no sense.

None of it made any sense.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” her mother said when Heather was home from the hospital, but Heather couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer.

Her mother packed his clothes away and carried them to the basement. When Heather found the boxes, she brought them to her room.

The house seemed so much larger without her father inside of it. The walls echoed with the absence of story.

People stared at Heather wherever she went. Rumours and whispers grew. He jumped. He was angry, and sad, and he jumped. The wolves on the mountain found his body. There wasn’t even a scrap of clothing left.

Eventually her mother started to tell stories too. He was charismatic and intoxicating, and she’d fallen so deeply in love, but he was also unstable and sad. He jumped. Of course he did. She should have known, she should have said something, but she wanted so badly to believe it wasn’t true. She’d loved him; she had hoped that would be enough. It wasn’t. It never had been.

“Heather is my worry now,” she would say to the friends who sat up with her when everyone thought that Heather had gone to sleep. “She’s so much like her father. I can’t lose them both.”

Was she like her father? Heather wondered. Probably. He hadn’t jumped. She wouldn’t jump, not even in the midst of all this hurt. But there had been magic in her life when her father was alive, and now it was all gone. No more walks under the stars, no more journeys up the mountain.

“I can’t believe he took you,” her mother said, over and over. “What if something had happened to you, too?”

Help us, he had said to the creature. I know you can heal her.

So she hadn’t been perfect, or strong. Not really. Not enough.

She had nightmares for months. She twisted so violently in bed she started sleeping without sheets. Her father, there and gone. His hand reaching and just missing the centaur’s fingers.

Just think what you’ll be able to do when your legs don’t hurt anymore. Because climbing halfway up a mountain hadn’t been good enough, hadn’t ever been good enough, no matter what he had said.

That long, tumbled run down the mountain—her face buried in the centaur’s neck, his arms firm around her, one hand cradling her head.

No one else walks like you, Heather-Feather. That’s something to be proud of.

Until it wasn’t. Until he’d wanted her to walk like everyone else.

The silence inside of her built like a wall. The doctors and counsellors couldn’t get past it. Her mother couldn’t get past it. At night, she crept out of the house and took long walks through the fields, keeping close to the tree-bordered edges so that no one could see her. Close to the mountain, then closer still. To her father’s greenhouse, now filled with weeds and dead things.

See, Heather-Feather. See how strong you are?

The anniversary of her father’s death dawned fresh and bright—the spring sun warm, the air still cool. She floated, silent, through the day. Three hundred and sixty-five days. How many more would they live without him?

In the evening, outside her window, the sudden smell of mountain flowers. She scrambled out of bed and pushed the window open. A shape, just there, hidden by the trees that lined the back of the yard. She shimmied awkwardly out the window, jumped to the ground. She wanted to weep, but couldn’t. Tall, dark shape against trees and sky. He came to her and dropped something at her feet—the knapsack. It still smelled of her father, even after all these months. The moonlight glinted on a golden cuff around his wrist. He was a tall mass against the shadowed trees, all wild hair and dark wiry arms. She hardly even noticed the flowers.

“You,” she said. “It’s you.”

Sometimes when the girls and B are asleep she slips out of the house and stands silent on the overgrown street. She smells the grass, the night air, the thick stench of the city. Everything smells now, even in fall. Everything tastes of despair.

She walks back to the house and goes inside. As she pads softly down the hall, the girls do not wake. She slips into the bedroom, slides in beside B.

She is almost asleep when he asks, “Where did you go?”

“Just outside, onto the street.”

A long pause. “You shouldn’t go out at night alone.”

“It really wasn’t far, B.”

“You were gone for a long time. Next time, wake me up so I can go with you.”

“I don’t need you to go with me.”

The anger in his voice is dark and surprising. “You’re always going, that’s the point.”

She doesn’t answer, just lies silent beside him and imagines one long running leap out the window, a flight up the street, into the forest, through the trees. Up the long slope of the mountain, the air thin in her lungs. She steps out of her skin and deep into its dirt, and then she is no more.

The girls grow bigger and more restless by the day. She walks to the strip mall to retrieve her ration of oatmeal, she cooks eggs given to them by Joseph over their backyard fire. Tasha sends people out to hunt. B joins with some of the other men—Kevin and Alan, and Annie goes too. They take hunting rifles into the forest, bring back what they can. A deer they butcher in the old town square, squirrels they skin and roast over backyard fires.

The Council, people have begun to call Tasha and the rest. The Council will know what to do.

Heather hardly pays attention. She changes the girls and throws the dirty diapers into the ravines that line some trails along her mountain walks. She sets buckets out to collect water whenever it rains and boils it in their backyard firepit to make sure it’s safe to drink. She walks the girls beneath the sky. She whispers his name until her throat hurts.

He does not come for her.

She is walking by the greenhouse when nausea creeps up and then explodes, a heavy crampish feeling that does not go away. Her breasts hurt. Her whole body feels swollen.

She is so tired. She stops and lets the girls down on the forest floor and smiles, with effort, as they reach for her.