On their way to the mountain, they stop at the greenhouse and check the plants. They cross the field and plunge into the trees again.
“The trees are coming closer!” her father says. She gets the feeling that he says this every time to himself—a private joke, a long-held wish. She knows how badly he misses being among the mountain trees.
At the foot of the mountain, they find the path. It is just as he described—old and somehow new, ready for her. The slope seems to go on forever, a long stretch of green eventually lost in the clouds.
“Why don’t we live on the mountain if you love it so much?” she asks.
“Your mother wouldn’t like it.” He smiles as he says it so she knows he isn’t mad at his wife. “She thinks it’s better for us to be in the city. She doesn’t like the stories. She used to, but she doesn’t like them anymore.”
“She can probably climb better than I can.”
“You climb just fine, Heather-Feather,” he says.
“But what if I fall?” she whispers.
“You won’t fall,” he says.
She wants to believe him; she wants to show him that she can. But the climb is difficult. As they go higher, the drop at the edge of the path calls her like a song. She fights to concentrate: one foot down, and then another. Her legs shake, but on she goes. She is surprised to see tropical flowers blooming off the mountainside, but her father just behaves as though he’d known all along they would be here.
He sings as they climb higher—little ditties to make her giggle. More flowers appear; she breathes in the scent of them, feels her lungs expand with mountain air. She lets go of her fear, just a little.
“That’s it, Heather-Feather,” he says. His smile is so lovely it makes her want to cry. “I knew you could do it. I knew it.”
Her legs hurt, but it’s a good kind of pain. She wants to drink from the mountain streams. Or cut her palm and mark the stones with her blood. Here, her father isn’t eccentric, and she is no longer strange—instead they are magic, instead they belong.
This is what he meant, she thinks. The magic of things that are possible. Her chest expands with sunlight, with hope. I’m climbing, she thinks. And still they go higher. I’m above the clouds.
They stop for lunch, perched on rocks that line the path, red amaryllis around them. Her father pops a cherry tomato whole into his mouth and she laughs; the sound echoes.
He grins. “How’s your leg, Heather-Feather? I told you you could do it. See how strong you are?”
As she opens her mouth to reply, she sees a sudden flash of blonde in the trees behind him.
They stay at the greenhouse until the girls begin to fuss. These days it doesn’t take long—they want to move, her girls, they want to see and feel and taste the world. To put it in their mouths.
She opens the door and, just before they leave, she turns back. She stands in the doorway with a hand on each of their bright heads and closes her eyes. She feels her legs rooted firmly, feels the vines whisper around her ankles, feels the way the ground slopes ever so slightly upward here, reaching for the sky. The air smells of flowers, but it is fevered by the city’s grief and despair. She lets herself think of it—that long moment when her father lost his footing on the path, that even longer instant when he was falling backward, his eyes and face alive with terror. The chasm of grief that cracked open inside her.
She waits for the air to change—to smell of starlight, to carry to her the deep, wild musk of the mountain. It doesn’t come. He never comes. She walks in the forest every day, and every day the answer is the same.
The girls whimper, which saves her. She opens her eyes and stumbles; she was leaning into the greenhouse, into that old despair. She clears her throat and wraps her arms around the girls, then turns to make her way back to the city. To find the blonde girl, Elyse, standing there.
“Jesus,” Heather says. “You couldn’t say hello?”
“Sorry,” Elyse says. She doesn’t sound it.
Heather clears her throat. “What are you doing here?”
Elyse shrugs. “I heard there was a trail.”
“Did you follow me?”
Elyse doesn’t meet her eyes.
“It’s a greenhouse,” Heather says, pausing on each word for emphasis. “What’s the big fucking deal?”
“Nothing,” Elyse says, quickly. “There’s no big deal.”
Heather rolls her eyes. She moves forward past Elyse; after a moment, the blonde girl comes after her. “Aren’t you afraid, out here all alone?”
Heather can’t help but laugh. “I’ve spent my whole life alone,” she says. “It feels normal to me.”
Keeping pace with them, in the trees, is an orange-grey blur of fur and tail. Elyse does not notice. The fox follows them all the way back to the city; Heather concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other and pretends the fox isn’t there.
Her father is singing when the creature steps out from the trees. A palomino, though Heather won’t know that word until much later. Golden hair and blue-green eyes and sleek and muscled arms, a golden cuff that shines softly on her wrist. The body of a woman, the strong chest and legs of a horse. The creature takes another step, and then another, until she stands in front of them. She looks young but also old, as though she’s been on the mountain forever. Her small breasts are bare.
Heather’s own breasts are larger, even at twelve, and her arms instinctively go up to hide their roundness.
“Hello,” her father breathes. The tone of his voice makes Heather think of church.
“Hello,” the creature breathes back. She sounds excited but also afraid. Her voice is sweet and clear and strange. Heather feels frightened but also electric—The stories, she thinks. The stories are true. She glances at her father and she can tell he’s thinking the same thing. He gets up from the rock and takes several small careful steps forward, then reaches out and puts a hand around the creature’s wrist.
“What are you?” her father asks.
The creature blinks. “I am… a centaur,” she says.
“Centaur,” he repeats. Then he nods. “Help us,” he says. “Help my daughter.”
The shock of his words is like slimy ice in her veins. Her father turns to her and smiles reassuringly, reaches for her with his other hand. “You made it all this way, Heather-Feather,” he says. “Now just think what you’ll be able to do when your legs don’t hurt anymore.”
The creature tries to pull her hand away, but her father won’t let go. The ground around them rumbles, shakes.
It breathes, Heather realizes. The mountain is breathing.
“Please,” he whispers to the creature. “I know you can heal her. We’ve come all this way.”
The creature jerks her hand away so fiercely her father stumbles backward, his foot catching on a rock. Everything happens so quickly.
The other creature, the dark-haired one, reaches out for her father from the trees, but he misses, and her father falls.
It is cold now in the city, late autumn, and still the wild things grow. The city sinks in green. In the mornings the survivors line up at the strip mall for rations. One packet of oatmeal per person, one capsule of vitamin C. A handful of shrivelled, mushy beets, of tiny green tomatoes. The people in front of and behind Heather in line grumble but she doesn’t complain. Joseph might bring them eggs today. He likes the babies.