What do you want?
I don’t know what I want. She holds out the baby, whose dark eyes watch her, unafraid.
Estajfan raises a hand and for an instant she thinks he’s going to hit her. The ground wobbles beneath her feet and Estajfan is reaching for her. His fingertips brush hers. He pauses. It’s only a fraction of a second, but long enough. She falls, the baby’s scream loud in her ear.
She wakes up slick with sweat, curled over her belly. When she gets up, there is blood on the sheets.
B wants her to go see Tasha, right away. “The girls and I can come with you,” he says. “We’ll go together.”
“No,” Heather says. “I can go on my own. It’s all right.”
He’s hurt. He’s always hurt now, and she is trying not to think about it. She is trying not to think about anything. She cleans herself up as best she can and then sits with the girls while they eat wizened apples for breakfast. When B comes into the kitchen, he smiles at the twins. “You look so pretty,” he says. It’s true. They are beautiful and tiny, like little ruffled sparrows. Then he looks at her. “You’re beautiful too,” he says. “I don’t say that enough.”
Heather swallows the lump in her throat. “Thank you,” she says. She crosses to kiss him on the cheek. The baby kicks as she straightens, and she takes B’s hand and presses it hard against her abdomen. Another kick and a smile touches his face.
She blinks and it’s Estajfan standing before her instead. His hand on her belly, his hand against her face. In his eyes she sees the mountain.
“Heather, are you all right?” B is frowning at her now.
She steps back and cups her abdomen, trying to quell the shaking of her hands. She manages to kiss him on the cheek again, and then turns on her heel and leaves without saying goodbye to the girls.
At the clinic, Annie is harried. Tasha, as usual, is unflappable and calm. Heather sits in the makeshift waiting room and listens to Tasha speak gently with a father and his children. Annie, at the front counter, takes inventory. She is always taking inventory now, watching their supplies dwindle day after day
“How are you?” Heather asks, surprising herself.
“I’m all right,” Annie says, as though she’s never asked herself the question. “Tired. Hungry. But aren’t we all.”
“And Tasha?”
“Tasha is Tasha.” Annie shrugs. “One day she’ll drop dead from a heart attack and all of this will be over, but until then, who knows.”
After the family leaves, Heather follows Annie to where Tasha sits waiting on her chair. Annie pulls the curtain across and sits down beside her.
“Heather,” she says. “What can we do for you?”
She tells them about the bleeding. Tasha frowns and gets up to check her belly.
“The placenta seems lower than it should be,” she says, “though it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on without equipment. Did you bleed with the girls?”
“A little,” Heather tells her.
Worry settles into the lines around Tasha’s eyes. “We’ll just have to wait and see. But let me know if the bleeding continues,” she says.
Heather looks at them both, then clears her throat. “What if… what if I don’t want it to stop?”
Tasha blinks. “What?”
“What if I don’t have this baby?” Heather whispers. “What if I can’t have this baby? Can you help me with that?”
The women glance at each other. For a moment Heather sees strong emotion pass between them. Envy flickers in her heart. She’s never looked at B like that. She’s never even wanted to. She’s only ever looked like that at someone else—and that, an impossibility.
“It’s too dangerous,” Tasha says, finally. “Heather—you’re malnourished. I can’t take a chance that something might happen.”
She swallows, closes her eyes. “Isn’t it dangerous to keep going?”
“Your body knows what to do,” Tasha says, softly. “Trust your own body before anything else.”
Her body. Heather lets out a laugh, and wipes a tear from her eye. “My body has always betrayed me,” she says. Not strong enough, not normal enough. And yet still strong enough, somehow, to give her children, again and again.
“I would do it,” Tasha says. “If this was any other time and we were in any other place. I would do it.”
The sharp pull of the curtain. Heather turns.
B stands there, backlit by the light from the windows. She can hear the girls laughing in the waiting room.
“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he says. Something like terror in his face, something like hatred.
“Brendan—” Tasha begins, but he raises a hand.
“Don’t talk,” he says. “Please.” He looks back at Heather. “Would you have told me? Or would you have just gone and done it?”
She stares at the floor. The criss-cross of cracks over the tile. “I didn’t do it.”
“But you want to.”
“We’re starving,” she says. “You really want another child?”
B comes to her and grips her arm. She feels the other women shift, stand up. “I need you to have faith,” he says. Angry, desperate. “We’ll get through this. We will. The winter will end and we’ll plant the gardens again—”
“And if that doesn’t work? What happens then?”
“You’re always so negative!” he cries, dropping her arm. “I’ve tried so hard and nothing is ever enough for you. Even before all of this.” She looks up at him and then can’t look away.
“No one wanted to touch you,” he whispers. “No one wanted anything to do with you. I used to watch the way that people mimicked you at school. They called you crazy, you know that? No one wanted to be near you. But I did. I do.”
She thinks, hazily, of the smirks his friends had shot his way after B came over to her table at the pub. The whistles that had followed them out onto the street.
“So what?” she hisses. “Am I supposed to be grateful you’re paying attention to me now? Is that it?”
“Heather.” Annie comes to stand between them. “Brendan. Look—this is all terrible—everything is terrible.” She holds her arms out as if to push them away from one another. “But fighting helps nothing. Think about the girls.”
At the thought of them, Heather feels her heart crack open. “I’m sorry,” she says, and covers her face with her hands. “I just—I can’t do this. It’s too hard.”
“You’re not doing it alone,” B says. “That’s what I keep trying to tell you.”
Heather lets her hands fall, then nods. “Yes,” she whispers. “I know.”
They walk back to the house together, each of them carrying a twin, the gulf that yawns between them growing deeper as they go.
As the winter ends, the sky is blue—but never for very long, and not the blue that anyone remembers. The grass and trees are deep green, as though they’ve all kept on growing under the snow. The city is a daylight clock. The city is a shell. The mountains stand over them in shades of grey and green and blue.
There are no eggs from Joseph anymore. Heather no longer speaks to Joseph, apart from saying hello when they pass on the vine-ridden street. She doesn’t really speak to anyone apart from B and the girls, who are babbling now—mostly nonsense, sometimes a few words of something only they can understand. They are tiny but fierce. They pull themselves up by the legs of tables and wobble around the house from one piece of furniture to the next. Greta is always first in line. Jilly, more timid when it comes to new adventures, laughs the loudest. Neither of them goes anywhere without looking to see where the other twin is first. Their eyes follow her everywhere.