“Where’s Petrolio?” he says, following Aura to where Heather lies on the bed.
Aura breaks off little chunks and feeds them to Heather, piece by piece. “Up in your spot at the top of the mountain,” she says. “Hoping Da will give him wisdom.”
He snorts. “How much wisdom has Da given us lately?”
“Not much,” Aura admits. “But Petrolio is ever hopeful.”
“What are the desks for?” Heather asks, as if she’s just noticed them. She points to a corner of the cave, where three children’s school desks sit covered in a layer of dust.
“Our father brought them to us when we were young,” Aura says. “He liked us to stand in front of them when he was teaching lessons.”
“I thought maybe they were for young centaurs,” Heather says. “Though that doesn’t really make sense, does it?”
“There are no children here. The centaurs have no young.” Aura stands up and brushes the dirt from her legs. “Do you think you have the strength to come outside for a little while?”
Heather blinks at both of them, then glances at the desks. “None of this makes sense,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” Aura whispers. “I wish everything was different.”
He watches Heather sit up, slowly, and brace herself against the bed.
“So they’re really gone,” she says. “It wasn’t just a dream.”
He’s gone past her house, down in the city. He hasn’t looked inside.
“Yes,” he says. “But you’re here.”
She only looks at him, and her eyes are very far away. “Was it worth it? The mountain has the world now?”
To this, he has no answer.
She turns away from both of them and looks back to the wall.
13
Heather sees, and yet she cannot see. Long stretches of sleep peppered with even longer periods of lying awake, unable to get off the bed, unable to move at all.
Where are they, her girls? Far below her, hanging in the kitchen. When she closes her eyes, the image is imprinted on the back of her eyelids. Their tiny faces going black and green.
Come back.
Come back.
Come back to me.
They do not answer. They are gone.
She sleeps.
She eats what Aura feeds her, but cannot taste.
Estajfan brings her a plump avocado that Aura opens with a small knife she keeps tucked in her shoulder bag, her hands at once alien and also so human. The desks in the cave, the picture frames that gather dust. Everything is familiar and strange.
Sometimes Aura hums wordlessly and sometimes Estajfan hums along with her. Sometimes he sings the words. Heather hadn’t known he could sing.
The walls of the cave are dotted with shelves and lined with cupboards and cabinets filled with surprises. Dishes and cutlery. A child’s wagon, a butter churn. Lanterns, empty and dry.
A laptop computer sits on one of the desks, a small handheld video game atop it. On another are the paints and pencil crayons she gave to Estajfan those years ago.
The drawings she made for him are tacked up on the wall. There are more pencils and pens and sheets of blank paper and pictures torn from magazines, stock photos still in frames. Smiling children, smiling families. All dead now. All gone.
“Where did all this come from?” she asks them, in one of her lucid moments.
“Our father was a collector,” Aura says. “And after him—Estajfan.”
Heather looks around the space and tries to focus.
“This was for our mother,” Aura answers the question before Heather can ask. “In case she ever decided to come see us.”
Heather eases herself off the bed and moves slowly to the desk. She flips the laptop open. The battery is long dead, of course. “What use is all of this?”
“It’s of no use.” Estajfan looms dark in the doorway. “I just keep it to… remember.”
“But you’ve never used a computer,” Heather says. She crosses the cave and edges past him. The air outside is cold and starry.
“I haven’t,” he agrees. He comes to stand beside her. “There is no one, Heather. I’m sorry.”
“No one,” she echoes. Last night she dreamt of the girls again, and her father’s face as he fell. She woke up alone in the dark of the cave, a moonlit shadow—Aura? Estajfan? She couldn’t tell—outside the door.
When she fell back to sleep, she dreamed of her mother, who welcomed her into a room that was bare except for a butter churn toppled against the wall in the corner.
“Would you like some tea?” her mother asked. When Heather looked around, confused, her mother opened the window and plucked a mug off a tree branch. When she closed the window, leaves pressed against the glass.
“They want to come in,” her mother said.
“Where’s the baby?” Heather asked. “I left him with you.”
“Oh.” Her mother’s kind face creased with surprise. “He’s sleeping. Out there, like in the song. See?” Out the window, Heather saw him in the tree, embraced by the branches. When she reached for him, the tree would not give him up.
“He’s for the trees,” her mother said.
Heather turned to her mother. “Where are the girls?”
“They were for the trees too.” She stepped forward, tucked a strand of hair behind Heather’s ear. “Like you, Heather. Your life was always going to look a little different too.”
In the dream her stomach dropped in mingled terror and rage. “But they could have done so much,” she whispered. “Didn’t I manage to climb a mountain?”
“Yes. And look what happened when you did.”
Now, waking, she moves to the cave opening and steps out into the light. It’s overcast, but she’s been in the cave so long she needs to shield her eyes.
The mountain centaurs stand in a semicircle in front of the entrance, their faces stern.
“There is no room for humans anymore,” one of them says. A male, tall and dark, his black hair falling down his back in careless waves.
Heather, weary, says, “Do you have anything else to say to me?”
“You are here only because of Estajfan,” he says. “But he cannot protect you forever.”
Estajfan shifts so he’s partly in front of her. “Nothing will happen to her here,” he says. The other centaur, unimpressed, moves away.
“Take me somewhere else,” Heather says.
And he does. They climb another sloping path that ends in a flat space with three weeping willows. She moves slowly, weak from grief and pregnancy and trauma. She sits down with her back against a tree. Estajfan kneels beside her.
“Tell me a story,” he says.
There are no stories anymore, she wants to tell him. But the stories find her anyway.
Once there were two little girls who were born as the world became new again. Their hair was red like the fire that destroyed the old world. At night, they curled into one another for warmth, their fingers laced together.
They were restless babies. Why sleep when you could keep your eyes open and discover the world? To soothe them, their mother put them in a sling and walked them through the ravaged streets out to the edges of the city, through the fields, close to the mountain in whose shadow they sat every day. They wailed and wailed and wailed.
As their first months passed, the girls cried less and less, and instead began to listen as their mother told them stories—of princesses who beat dragons, of girls whose tears could feed the trees.
“You can do anything,” their mother said to them, over and over. “You can do anything, because you are so loved.”