She drops the groceries at home and walks the girls to the forest edge and back, over and over. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair. She lays them on the forest floor and rests with her back against a tree while she continues the story—the prince who scales Rapunzel’s tower and makes love to her, secretly, in the dead of night. Rapunzel’s own twins, growing in her belly, giving her away.
“The witch discovered them and took Rapunzel away to a desolate land,” she says. “In despair, the prince threw himself from the tower. He landed among thorns, which blinded him, and he wandered the land, lost, for years.”
They laugh at the way she tells this story, stretching her arms above her head to show the tower.
Despair hits her, and she imagines their faces as she leaves them for the fox, for the wolves. For other creatures that might come and take them away.
Their tiny bodies in the air as she flings them off the mountainside. As she flings herself off the mountainside.
She holds them close and breathes them in. “But she found him,” she whispers. She buries her face in their sweet skin. “She found him, years later, and her tears made him see.”
After her father fell, she told the doctors and her mother about the mountain—the way they climbed, the way they stopped, the way the mountain breathed, the way she’d understood almost instantly that the mountain didn’t want them there.
I felt it, she said. I felt the mountain come alive. No one believed her. They thought her father had jumped.
She was recovering from trauma, the doctors said. She’d just seen her father die. (On that, it seemed, everyone was agreed.) It wasn’t unusual for people recovering from trauma to say strange things.
“Her world does not make sense right now,” the doctors told her mother. Reactive psychosis, caused by grief and stress. It would pass. “Give her time to heal.”
Instead Heather shut her mouth and refused to say anything else. Through the search partway up the mountain, before the team had to turn back in defeat because of bad weather; as people put on bright-orange jackets and walked through the mountain trees for hours, calling her father’s name. Maybe he was lying crumpled on the ground somewhere and couldn’t get up. Maybe he had crawled until he couldn’t crawl anymore and was too weak to answer when they yelled for him.
They came back to her with more questions.
Did he really fall?
Nod.
Did you see it?
Nod.
Heather. Are you sure he didn’t jump?
Shake of the head.
What happened?
Silence. There was nothing she could say.
After the search teams gave up, the city council passed a law to ban people from the mountain. They let the fields leading to the mountain grow wild, allowed the forest to creep in.
Her mother held a funeral but Heather didn’t go. How could they bury her father when there was no body? It made no sense.
None of it made any sense.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” her mother said when Heather was home from the hospital, but Heather couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer.
Her mother packed his clothes away and carried them to the basement. When Heather found the boxes, she brought them to her room.
The house seemed so much larger without her father inside of it. The walls echoed with the absence of story.
People stared at Heather wherever she went. Rumours and whispers grew. He jumped. He was angry, and sad, and he jumped. The wolves on the mountain found his body. There wasn’t even a scrap of clothing left.
Eventually her mother started to tell stories too. He was charismatic and intoxicating, and she’d fallen so deeply in love, but he was also unstable and sad. He jumped. Of course he did. She should have known, she should have said something, but she wanted so badly to believe it wasn’t true. She’d loved him; she had hoped that would be enough. It wasn’t. It never had been.
“Heather is my worry now,” she would say to the friends who sat up with her when everyone thought that Heather had gone to sleep. “She’s so much like her father. I can’t lose them both.”
Was she like her father? Heather wondered. Probably. He hadn’t jumped. She wouldn’t jump, not even in the midst of all this hurt. But there had been magic in her life when her father was alive, and now it was all gone. No more walks under the stars, no more journeys up the mountain.
“I can’t believe he took you,” her mother said, over and over. “What if something had happened to you, too?”
Help us, he had said to the creature. I know you can heal her.
So she hadn’t been perfect, or strong. Not really. Not enough.
She had nightmares for months. She twisted so violently in bed she started sleeping without sheets. Her father, there and gone. His hand reaching and just missing the centaur’s fingers.
Just think what you’ll be able to do when your legs don’t hurt anymore. Because climbing halfway up a mountain hadn’t been good enough, hadn’t ever been good enough, no matter what he had said.
That long, tumbled run down the mountain—her face buried in the centaur’s neck, his arms firm around her, one hand cradling her head.
No one else walks like you, Heather-Feather. That’s something to be proud of.
Until it wasn’t. Until he’d wanted her to walk like everyone else.
The silence inside of her built like a wall. The doctors and counsellors couldn’t get past it. Her mother couldn’t get past it. At night, she crept out of the house and took long walks through the fields, keeping close to the tree-bordered edges so that no one could see her. Close to the mountain, then closer still. To her father’s greenhouse, now filled with weeds and dead things.
See, Heather-Feather. See how strong you are?
The anniversary of her father’s death dawned fresh and bright—the spring sun warm, the air still cool. She floated, silent, through the day. Three hundred and sixty-five days. How many more would they live without him?
In the evening, outside her window, the sudden smell of mountain flowers. She scrambled out of bed and pushed the window open. A shape, just there, hidden by the trees that lined the back of the yard. She shimmied awkwardly out the window, jumped to the ground. She wanted to weep, but couldn’t. Tall, dark shape against trees and sky. He came to her and dropped something at her feet—the knapsack. It still smelled of her father, even after all these months. The moonlight glinted on a golden cuff around his wrist. He was a tall mass against the shadowed trees, all wild hair and dark wiry arms. She hardly even noticed the flowers.
“You,” she said. “It’s you.”
Sometimes when the girls and B are asleep she slips out of the house and stands silent on the overgrown street. She smells the grass, the night air, the thick stench of the city. Everything smells now, even in fall. Everything tastes of despair.
She walks back to the house and goes inside. As she pads softly down the hall, the girls do not wake. She slips into the bedroom, slides in beside B.
She is almost asleep when he asks, “Where did you go?”
“Just outside, onto the street.”
A long pause. “You shouldn’t go out at night alone.”
“It really wasn’t far, B.”
“You were gone for a long time. Next time, wake me up so I can go with you.”
“I don’t need you to go with me.”