One night she showed Estjafan these pictures. He was gentle with them. When he looked at her afterwards, there was something in his face that made her ribcage tighten.
“Could I keep these, too?” he asked. She wanted to say no, but she nodded.
“Did you ever find him?” she asked.
“I didn’t look,” he said. “Heather, I’m sorry.”
Everything went hot and blurry. “You didn’t try to find him? You just left him to rot?”
“I didn’t want to see it,” he admitted. “I didn’t want to remember what I’d done to you.”
“It was an accident.”
In the dark, she saw him swallow. “When I reached for him, I—I hesitated.”
The world skittered in and out of focus. “For how long?” she said, finally.
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “He was already falling.”
She closed her eyes. “Why did you hesitate?”
“You weren’t supposed to be there,” he said. “Neither of you. He touched Aura like he had a right to do it. Like we were… property.” A long pause. “And what he said—I saw your face. I saw what that did to you.”
She swallowed. “He deserved to die for that?”
His eyes were dark, bottomless pools. “I’ll spend the rest of my life being sorry.”
She tried not to imagine it, but the thoughts came anyway. The animals that had nibbled on his flesh. The maggots that ate his eyes. Had he died right away? Or had death come later, in the dark?
“He deserved somewhere to rest,” she said. “He deserved at least that much.”
Estajfan took her wrist and she jumped. It was the first time he had touched her since he carried her down the mountain. “I don’t think I should come to see you anymore.”
“Why did you come in the first place?”
A long pause. “I didn’t know why,” he admitted. “And then I did.”
What was it that he’d said years before? Humans are like the brightness of comets in the sky. She was thirty-seven years old—older than her father had been when he died. Time was going so quickly. Time was not going at all.
She held fast to his hand. “Don’t go,” she said.
“Heather,” he said.
He so rarely said her name.
It’s the first time she’s seen him in the daylight in years. She’s forgotten how big he is, how magical. A story made flesh.
“Heather,” Estajfan says. They stand together in the forest, near the greenhouse. The weak sunlight glints on the golden cuff on his arm. The girls lie gurgling on the forest floor between them. It is warmer than any November she remembers. “I won’t let you starve.”
He’s brought her a small sack of things—cherries, nuts, and apples.
She closes her eyes and lets the nightshade berries drop onto the ground. “And what about another baby?” she asks. “You’re going to feed us all? See us through the winter, when snow buries everyone in the city?”
“I’ll find a way,” he says. “I promise.”
I promise. He had promised to stay on the mountain. He had promised to leave her alone.
“I don’t think we should do this anymore,” she had said just over a year ago. Two pink lines on a pregnancy test, dinner with B in the immediate future. “I need to live my real life.”
He had nodded, had accepted it all without question.
Now he is here again, in front of her.
Everything has changed.
“What am I supposed to do?” she says. Half to him, half to somebody—anybody—else. The girls start to fuss. “How am I supposed to have a baby? I’m barely eating enough as it is to feed myself and the girls.”
“I’ll bring you more food. Things are still growing on the mountain.”
She stares at him. “Why are things still growing on the mountain if they aren’t growing in the gardens? Or the greenhouses?”
He looks at her, but doesn’t speak.
“Estajfan.”
“I don’t know,” he says, carefully. “I can guess, but I’m not sure.”
“Well—guess, please.”
“Haven’t you already guessed for yourself?”
You are not meant for the mountain. Perhaps humans are not meant for the world now either. She takes a deep breath. “So—what—the world is starving us now? There’s nothing we can do?”
“There are always things we can do,” he says. “I will not let you starve.”
“Stop saying that!”
He is taken aback, hurt. “What else do you want me to say?”
“I asked you to go and you went. I walked these forests for months after the meteors came, waiting for you to come back, and you never did. Not once.”
“I came.” His voice is almost a whisper. “I came every day. I watched you through the trees. But you had your husband. Your girls. Your real life.”
“Well. The world got in the way of that, too, I guess.” She bends and picks up Greta, puts her in her sling, and then does the same for Jilly. “You won’t be able to feed us forever. Even I know that.”
“Maybe not forever,” he says. “But maybe for now is enough.”
She would laugh, but she’s too tired. “Humans don’t live in the now, Estajfan.”
He bends and snips a lily from the greenhouse, then reaches forward and tucks it behind her ear. “Then maybe,” he says carefully, “I’m glad I’m not human.”
It isn’t easy, carrying the girls and the sack of fruit back from the forest, but she manages. The fox follows her and she pays it no attention. No one sees her slip into the house and put the food away. But B discovers it all later that evening, as she plays with the girls in the dark living room.
“What’s this?” When she looks up at him, she sees that he’s holding an apple in each hand. “Where the fuck did this come from?”
“I found it in the forest,” she says.
She doesn’t expect him to believe her. She is not wrong. “Oh sure. Apples and cherries. Just lying on the ground?”
“I found the sack,” she says. “Maybe someone left it there?”
He looks at her, scoffs. “Do you think I’m a moron? A fucking idiot?”
She flinches, thinking of the children who mocked her at school. Moron. Idiot. Fucking spaz.
B stops and looks at her—really looks at her. He is gone with Tasha and Annie every day now, preparing for the winter. He is so thin. “If I find out that you’ve been fucking someone else off in the forest—”
She throws the first thing she grabs—a paperweight they keep on the living room table. It catches him on the side of the head with an audible thump, then shatters on the floor. He stares at her with horrified surprise, a hand to his head.
The silence around them is thick for a moment, and then the girls burst into tears.
“I am doing the best that I can,” she says over their cries. “Would you rather I went and threw myself off the mountain?”
Something flickers over his face—shame, maybe, but warring with anger and pain. Blood trickles from his temple. “I don’t know what to say to you,” he says. “I feel like I don’t know you at all.”
“I don’t know myself anymore,” she admits. They stand like this—frozen, not reaching out—until B looks down and notices the broken glass.
“I’ll clean that up,” he mumbles, and turns toward the kitchen.
“I’m pregnant,” she says. As he slowly pivots to face her, she thinks back to when she told him about the girls—that awkward dinner, the fear and joy that leapt into his face. Another universe long, long ago.