Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

Tasha thinks of Heather, and then of Joseph.

“We can’t abandon them now,” she says. “If we leave them to—to their stories, and the mountains—Annie, they’ll all be dead by the spring.”

“They aren’t children,” Annie snaps. “Jesus, Tasha—you make them all sound like they’re from some backwater hamlet in the middle of nowhere. God complex much?”

Tasha shuts her eyes. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Well, that’s how it sounded. And anyway”—there’s that dark note in Annie’s voice again—“you’re one to talk. I see your face when they whisper those stories. When you talk to Heather. You’re all We’ll get through and Let’s focus on what’s in front of us, but you want to believe those silly stories as much as anybody else.”

“Annie, I don’t—”

“Yes, you do!” Annie cries. “You focus on what’s right in front of you because everything else is too hard. You do this over and over again. Well, I’m right in front of you, and I’m saying that I want to go.”

There is a long silence. Tasha stares stonily at the ceiling, then finally clears her throat. “I don’t want to leave the mountain,” she says, finally.

Annie opens her mouth, closes it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know. It comforts me. And now, with—with the food—”

“You really think someone is up there, bringing food down?” Annie frowns. “Then why didn’t we go closer when there was no snow?”

“I wasn’t thinking about it as much when there was no snow,” Tasha says. “I wanted us to think about the gardens and securing the food we had. And now—I think we’re here for a reason. Maybe the mountain—or the stories that everyone is telling—maybe that’s it.” She thinks a minute, swallows. “I should have told Candice and Seth to stay.”

“Tasha. That wasn’t your fault. That was nobody’s fault.”

She can’t speak; she only shrugs.

Another silence. “You’ve never even been here before,” Annie says.

“I know.”

“You didn’t even know how to get here.”

“I can’t explain it. But I felt like we ended up here because we were meant to.”

“For fuck’s sake, Tasha. You cannot be serious.”

“Why not?” Tasha tries to keep her voice calm. “It’s the first city we came to that was still standing. That makes as much sense as anything else.”

“It called to you,” Annie insists. There’s something else in her voice now. She sounds almost afraid.

“Yes? So what?”

“What did you do—tell yourself a story about it?”

“What? Of course not.”

Annie launches herself off the bed. “You always do this,” she says, again. “You tell yourself stories when you can’t handle real life.”

“I do not!”

But Annie doesn’t waver. She stares down at Tasha, shakes her head. “You do,” she says. “That’s why you went back to work. So you could be a doctor and save lives. So you could make life into a puzzle you could solve. Beginning, middle, end. You made work into the magic you needed so you didn’t have to be in your life. You think I didn’t see it? I was there every goddamned day.”

Tasha stares up at her, dumbfounded. “I didn’t—Annie, I didn’t mean—”

“And now you’re doing it all over again,” Annie says. She takes a step back from the mattress, swings her arm in a wild circle. “Maybe this was the first city we came to. Fine. But you’ve spent the past however many months telling everyone we’d survive. Telling them a story—one where you get to be the hero so you don’t have to be the person who can’t get out of bed.” Her hands shake; she clenches her fists, stares at the floor. “Well, what about me, Tasha? What if I don’t want to be the hero? What if I don’t want to pass you your equipment and help you gather food and walk around with this goddamned key around my waist all the time? What if I’m not okay not knowing where our mystery food comes from? What if I don’t want to wait here while we starve? What if I want someone who will help me get out of the goddamned bed? Don’t I deserve that too?”

Tasha stands and reaches for Annie’s hands. “Don’t leave,” she whispers, and she brings Annie close, pulls her in. “Annie, I’m sorry. Please don’t leave.”

“Can’t it just be us again?” Annie whispers into her shoulder. “I’m so tired. I don’t want to think about taking care of all of these people anymore.”

“There are no other doctors here,” Tasha says. “If we leave the city, we leave them with nothing.”

Annie straightens. “ I’m not a doctor,” she says. “I could leave tomorrow.”

Panicked, Tasha reaches for Annie’s hand again. “You’ll get stuck in the snow even if you walk out. We have food here, we have shelter. I can’t do this without you. Please, please, please don’t go.”

Annie’s hands cup her face now, and she brings her lips to Tasha’s, resting her forehead against Tasha’s. She breathes slowly, in and out, until Tasha feels her own heart settle down.

After another long moment, Annie moves back to the mattress and pulls Tasha down with her, plants a trail of kisses that ends at Tasha’s collarbone. “I’m sorry, Tasha, but I can’t do this forever.”

“We’ll do more hunting,” Tasha says. “We’ll hunt, we’ll dry the meat. Send groups out to scavenge as best as we can.” She grabs a handful of Annie’s hair and kisses her hard. “We won’t do this forever. I promise.”

Her promises are no longer enough. She can see that in Annie’s face already.

Still, it is not all bad. With the snow hemming them in, there is not much to do during the day, so Tasha converts a storefront a few doors down from the clinic—an old bank, the ATMs silent and useless and the floors heavy with thick carpet—into a community centre equipped with two propane heaters. People bring board games and play them for hours, sprawled on the floor. They boil water over the firepit in the back alley, stir in cocoa and powdered milk, then ladle the thin, rich liquid into mugs and pass them around. They tell stories, they sing songs. Everyone shares.

Sometimes Heather and Brendan bring the girls to the centre and Heather gets out her pencil crayons and teaches the children how to draw. Annie has salvaged colouring books and crayons from the grocery stores. Tasha can’t draw but tries anyway. The children squeal with laughter at her attempts.

The children like to draw Tasha as a small stick figure with a black stethoscope around her neck, putting bandages on bleeding knees and stitching cuts together. In one picture by a little boy named Tom, she is sewing a severed arm back onto a body. When he gives it to her, she laughs and hangs the picture up in the clinic.

Heather draws on the community centre walls like a woman possessed—her movements quick and sure, a whole world tumbling from her hand in a matter of minutes. She sketches the children at various points on the wall—her babies, Tom and his older sister. Nina and Frederic. Other little faces in between. The children love her pictures. Brendan has told Tasha that Heather still goes for walks, though Tasha hasn’t come across her in the forest again. (Tasha has seen her footsteps. She always sees her footsteps.) It is more difficult, walking through the forest in the snow. But not impossible.

One night during a blizzard, they cram as many people into the community centre as they can to share the warmth. Heather and Brendan arrive with dark bags under their eyes, the twins restless and feverish. Tasha takes one baby and Elyse takes another. They sing—Tasha sings as badly as she draws, but she tries anyway—until the girls are smiling, then they walk them until each twin is asleep. The strain in Heather’s face eases a bit and she goes to where the other children are drawing, then slides down onto the floor beside them. Beneath the loose hang of her clothes, the soft curve of her belly is unmistakable.