Heather sighs and sits up. “I walk them and I tell them stories,” she says. “The stories calm them down. The trees calm me down. That’s all.”
He relaxes, but only a little. “Do you meet your old friend on your walks?”
“I told you they’re not in my life anymore,” she says. “If you want to know me, start by believing that.”
He doesn’t believe her. She reaches for his hand, twines her fingers through his own.
“I’m trying,” she says. Her voice shakes. “I know none of this is what you imagined, what you wanted. But I’m trying. I promise.”
He looks at her, then squeezes her hand a little and tries to laugh. “I don’t think any of us imagined this,” he says. “I’ll try to remember that too.”
As the days pass, she again ventures closer to the mountain on her walks. She tells the girls about Cinderella and Snow White, the twelve dancing princesses, Hansel and Gretel. Mermaids who grant wishes, people who sleep for five hundred years. Sometimes as she sings to them she feels the trees listening; more often than not they walk in silence or to the rise and fall of wailing.
She sees her foxes twice in those early weeks. The first time they are a sudden flash of white and orange against the emerald green of the forest, blue eyes that blink at her through the leaves. The babies cluster around the mother; bigger now, their eyes alight with curiosity.
The vixen turns, and Heather follows, moving as fast as she can through the trees and the underbrush, pushing spiderwebs away with her hands. The foxes stop at the foot of the mountain and turn back to stare at her. Three pairs of blue eyes in a line.
She cups a hand around each baby’s copper head. She doesn’t move. The foxes blink. She draws a breath and turns back toward the city. They do not follow.
The second time, she’s walking down the middle of a city street. The girls have been screaming with colic for hours. It’s late afternoon, the weak sun readying itself to disappear behind the mountain. The girls’ screams rise up around her. Each step that she takes pushes them deeper into sweaty, red-faced rage.
She is heading for the forest, but the wilderness meets her sooner than expected. Vines crawl up the sides of the houses that sit on the last street before the mountain. Grasses have overtaken the sidewalks here. She crosses the field that leads from the town to the trees and it feels narrower than she remembers. She’s not imagining it. It’s as though the trees have picked themselves up in the dead of night and crept closer to the city.
The foxes are waiting for her at the edge of the field, where the trees start. She can’t tell the mother from the babies—they’re all the same size now. They don’t move, even when she marches up to them and unwraps each shrieking baby from her sling and lays them on the ground. They stop crying. They blink up at her and then reach out to touch the foxes’ whiskers. One of the foxes steps over the babies and Greta grabs for its tail.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Heather whispers.
Beyond the foxes, the portal yawns open. It is a shifting mass with blurred black edges, a doorway that will take her to the summit. The mountain and its clear grey stone and bright blue sky. The scent of mountain air. The scent of something else.
Of someone else.
The portal creeps over the foxes until only their eyes are left, a shimmered black nothing that spreads over the ground and reaches out toward the girls’ soft hair.
She snatches them up, breathing hard, then turns and walks back across the field and down the street toward the city. She’s so intent on the ground in front of her, she doesn’t notice the vehicle until someone calls her name.
“Heather.”
She looks up and sees Tasha beside her, in the ambulance. She stops; the ambulance stops too. It feels like Tasha’s been calling her name for a while.
“Heather,” Tasha says again. “Are you all right?”
The babies stretch toward Tasha and coo.
“I’m fine,” Heather says. She glances back over her shoulder. The foxes are still there, watching her, but the portal is gone.
Tasha follows her gaze and then looks back at her. She does not see the foxes, that much is clear. “Do you want a ride back?” she asks.
“I’m fine,” Heather says again, louder this time. She starts walking, and after another moment Tasha drives slowly past her.
When she looks back over her shoulder a second time, the foxes are gone.
A story always starts, her father told her long ago, from the end of something else.
The weeks go by, and help does not come. Instead they build greenhouses from materials taken from the abandoned hardware stores. Heather walks the babies through the square and to the outskirts of town, past people who plant seeds into garden plots, past others who sometimes gather outside and pray for rain. There is no rain. Yet somehow the grass grows high and the vines begin to climb the walls of the houses.
There is no army, there is no train.
During the day, B is determined and cheerful, shouting orders in the square, helping people push abandoned cars off the streets. Sometimes, as she walks by, she sees him hunched with Tasha, Annie, and the others. They have impromptu meetings everywhere—at bus shelters, on picnic tables out in front of abandoned restaurants. He tells her that they’re planning for the winter.
“We have to be prepared,” he says. He’s lost weight. So has she.
When the girls are a few months old, he starts to come for her at night, in the pockets of time when the babies aren’t wailing. He traces his hands over her face as though he’s convinced himself that he knows Heather in ways that even she doesn’t fathom. (Maybe that’s true. She knows her body and yet she doesn’t know it like this—as a thing that someone could want, a thing that someone might treasure.)
He is gentle with her, at first, and then not. He is a man reaching up from a well. His hands in her hair, between her legs. His cock inside of her like its own story, searching for some kind of happy ending. She holds his face between her hands and lets him take whatever he wants.
When they finish, they lie together until the girls start to scream again—sometimes minutes, sometimes a little longer.
One night, in those scant seconds of time before the babies start up again, he asks, “Where did you go?” He is stretched out behind her on the bed, his arm over her stomach. “Just now.”
She pretends to not understand. “I’m right here.”
“No, you’re not,” he says. He isn’t angry, or accusing. He is just tired. “You never are.”
She says nothing. He is silent for so long she thinks he’s gone to sleep.
“I love you,” he says, finally.
Yes, she thinks, he does. She reaches for his hand and squeezes it. “I love you too.”
Then the babies start up again; she pushes his arm away and slides out of the bed.
THE GOOSE GIRL
Once there was a girl who looked after the geese for the queen. In the mornings she brought the geese out of their enclosure and let them run around the yard; in the afternoons she would herd them down to the royal pond and let them paddle in the water and eat the water plants. Before dinner, the queen would come to the pond and visit the geese, bringing them lettuce from the royal kitchens, which she fed to them, piece by piece, her royal gown dipping into the scummy pond water each time she bent forward with a morsel in her fingers.
The geese loved the queen. They loved her more than they loved the goose girl, the tender of their home and protector of their eggs. Each time the queen got up to leave, they would follow her back to the castle, a line of waddling white bodies that made the castle staff—and the townspeople, when they saw them—chuckle. The queen would let the geese trail her until she reached the castle door. Then she would turn and smile at them and tell them they could go no further.