Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

In the morning the doctor wakes up early; the sun has barely risen, the sky is still tinged with pink. When she exhales, her breath mists in the air. She shakes out the blanket that kept her warm through the night and then bundles it up and tucks it in her bag. For breakfast, a handful of berries and some dried meat. Not fancy, but she’s survived on much less.

When she has eaten, she squares her shoulders and readies herself for the climb back up the mountain. Sleeping outside is not as nice for her bones as it once was, no matter how much mountain air she breathes.

As she climbs, she thinks about the babies. They had cried like all babies do, but in those dark moments when the wife was asleep and the husband stood in the corner of the room not knowing what to do, the babies’ eyes had followed her. They might not have known who she was but they knew she was somebody. By the time she’d finished stitching up the mother and had turned her attention again to the babies, they no longer seemed unusual. Like they’d been born into a spot that had already been waiting. Like the world, whatever the villagers might have said, had been ready for their arrival.

She picked each baby up in turn and sang to it—old lullabies and holiday carols and songs about sunshine and love—then she wrapped each of them into a blanket and laid them on the table beside their mother. Then she turned to the husband and told him he had to go, and take the babies with him.

As she climbs the mountain these years later, the doctor wonders if that was a mistake. Should she have stayed there, in the village, and protected the babies? Had she acted too quickly in sending the children and their father away? The mother might have come around. The children were beautiful. It wasn’t hard to see that.

They aren’t monsters , the doctor might have said to her. They’re only different. And perhaps the mother and her husband might have forged a way together. They might have had to move out of the village, but they could have done it, they could have survived.

Instead, this.

Higher, and higher still. The doctor pushes away the flowers that bob in front of her along the path. She thinks about the golden cuffs she brought him yesterday. An extravagant gift, but what was the harm—what was she going to do with golden bracelets anyway? When was the last time she’d had reason to adorn herself?

She’s not entirely sure that the centaur will find a use for them either. What’s the point of wearing golden cuffs if you live on the mountain and there’s no one to impress? But he did what she thought he would do—he saw the gold and how it shone. He had been impressed—the human part of him, the part that measured worth in things like gold. Sometimes he was so human she almost couldn’t stand it.

You are the best and most beautiful of creatures, she wants to tell him. The nobility of a horse and the sharp mind of a human, the strength of the mountain beating in each of his hearts. Be worthy of that. It isn’t hard.

She reaches the last bend in the path before it stops. Beyond that there’s a little hill; she’s never climbed it because the centaur was always here to greet her.

It’s so steep it’s a struggle, but then she is over the rise, and there they are. Two of them. The father, dark and tall, and the girl, golden in the sunlight. Her long blonde hair shines almost white; her arms are tanned and muscled, and her shoulders slope in the happy way that children’s do.

The girl turns and sees the doctor first. Her eyes are blue-green, like her mother’s.

Far away, the doctor imagines that the mother stands up and listens.

She looks like her mother, the girl—the same face, the same scattered golden freckles. The same tilt of neck and chin. The resemblance is so strong the doctor almost cries.

I have a secret, the doctor wants to say. I’ve been waiting all these years to tell you.

Long years ago, on that second morning of labour, the doctor had reached into the mother and felt a leg where a baby’s head should be. A leg that was not human—a tiny leg, an impossible hoof. She’d felt it with her fingers. She’d known it with her heart. She had taken her hand out and reached for her scalpel knowing full well what was to come.

She’d felt it, that centaur-shaped hole in the universe, and recognized it instantly. She thought the world would recognize it too.

That was a mistake. The doctor knows this now. She should have tried harder. With the father, with the mother. With the world below the mountain.

You belong here, the doctor wants to say. You belong everywhere. You are not a monster.

The girl looks about to smile, but then the father speaks.

“These ones, Aura,” he says, then he looks up and follows his daughter’s eyes to where the doctor stands.

And he is up, he is coming toward her in a blur of fury.

It’s all right, she wants to call, and she puts her hand out, opens her mouth. Aura, she thinks. The sun comes over the edge of the mountain and sets the girl’s hair on fire. Aura. That’s beautiful.

Then his hands are around her and she knows in that instant that she was wrong about this, too. Sometimes there is no healing. His hands are stronger than the hands of any man she’s ever known. He lifts her into the air like the feather she’s always known herself to be.

She isn’t sorry, even as the split seconds fall around her and she feels him let go. She isn’t sorry. She saw magic all those years ago and there is magic here, too, at the end. She catches the eyes of the daughter in one last tilted moment and then she is flying, she is falling, and the mountain comes to meet her.

Thanks above all to Anne Collins, who took a chance on a wild idea for a story that then became a wild mess of a book. Under your expert hand, it has gradually become far less messy while also retaining its wild bones, for which I am so grateful.

Thanks to my agent, Samantha Haywood, for your faith and encouragement, and for always being so staunchly in my corner.

Thanks to the Canada Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence Program, Hedgebrook, and the Banff Centre, for your gifts of financial support and space in which to nurture this unpredictable story.

To Heather Cromarty, who read the earliest draft of The Centaur’s Wife while I was still under the delusion that it was “almost finished” (LOL oops), and was so very kind.

To Sarah Taggart, dear friend and best reader, for your incisive and thorough comments. Thank you so much.

To Julie Gordon, bookseller extraordinaire and first cheerleader, who was there for me at countless bookish breakfasts at the Hamilton Farmers’ Market and patiently listened to me worry about how this book was Never Ever Ever Going to Get Done.

To Piyali Bhattacharya, Vero González, Mira Jacob, Ashley M. Jones, Lisa Nikolidakis, and Yaccaira Salvatierra. Hedgebrook coven love is the best kind of love.

To Gary Barwin, whose words brought encouragement and strength when the writing of this book seemed impossible.

To Jael Richardson, #workwife and friend, who is a gift that lights my days.

To Ron Read, physician and medical expert, for fact-checking the medical details of an entirely unfactual novel and for automatically assuming (correctly) that the centaurs all have six-packs. Also, for rescuing Estajfan from a terrible death due to sepsis. I am grateful, and so is he.

To Cara Liebowitz, for your careful and considered thoughts on this book.

To the friends who’ve stood by and cheered, silently and aloud, during the ups and downs of writing: Elissa Bergman, Trevor Cole, Pamela King, Jaime Krakowski, Jen Sookfong Lee, Sabrina L’Heureux, Lisa Pijuan-Nomura, Stacey Bundy, Adam Pottle, and Ria Voros.