Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

“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.”