Greta, a few minutes older, liked to roll balls across the floor with her thumbs. Music made her laugh until she screamed. Jilly, the younger, liked to curl into her father’s neck and whisper nonsense to herself. She loved birds. Greta was louder, but Jilly was the first to find words.
They grew, and were the best of friends. At school they sat together; at home they were never far from one another. Their parents joked that even for them it was impossible to tell the girls apart. They grew taller and slimmer and began to lose their baby faces, growing into their teenage skins. They had their father’s eyes and hair. They had their mother’s hands.
Since they had never known another world, they grew into this one the way tropical flowers grow from decaying trees. When their parents spoke of airplanes and music boxes that ran all the time, of lights that kept the city bright at night, it sounded like a dream. The girls knew only fires in the backyard and laundry done by hand. The water they bathed in was heated over the fire.
But the gardens were bountiful, and they always had enough to eat. They were loved. They were loved.
They remained restless, like their mother. It was not unusual for the girls to find themselves in the shadow of the mountain and not remember how they got there. They would stare at the mountain rising into the clouds and wonder what was up there. Was it magic, this mountain that haunted their days? Did it watch over them in ways they didn’t know? What about the trees, their city, the sky? Did these watch over them too?
Sometimes, when they went out walking, they ran into their mother. She had been up the mountain long ago, the only one who had. When they asked her if she’d ever go up again, she shook her head.
“I like to be by the mountain,” she said. “But my dreams are enough now. I don’t really want to climb it.”
When she was sixteen, Greta heard stories from travellers about a school far away where you could learn to be a doctor. She applied, and was accepted. Her parents packed her bags; her sister wept, but shouldered a pack for her as the family set out for the school together. Jilly, like their mother, was already an artist, her sketchbook filled with flowers and trees.
The world had been reborn a shadow of itself. They had no car, not even bicycles, so they walked to the school. At night, they slept beneath the stars. It took them seven days to reach the school, whose letter of offer had come to Greta by way of a man riding a horse, like all the other letters that passed from place to place. As soon as they got there, Jilly said, “Don’t stay.” She couldn’t see a world without her sister. Would the mountain look the same without Greta there to see it? Would the flowers?
Greta shook her head. “I’m here for a while, and then I’m coming back.”
Jilly opened her mouth to plead, but just then a hummingbird flew by them. She held out her hand. The hummingbird came to sit in her palm. She and her twin bowed over it in silence. They had never seen a hummingbird by the mountain, though they’d read about them in books.
“You see?” Greta said, her voice soft.
The hummingbird started, and flew away.
That night, over dinner, Jilly told her parents that she was also going to stay.
Her mother said, “Greta has a dorm room. You can’t stay by yourself—you’re only sixteen.”
“Then stay with me,” Jilly said. She watched surprise flare in their faces.
“But we’ve always lived by the mountain,” their mother said.
Jilly had already drawn the hummingbird in her notebook. “Maybe it’s time for us to find out the differences in the world?”
Their parents looked at each other. The twins had always suspected that something other than love lay between their parents—something that came close to love but wasn’t quite the same.
“We’ll think about it,” their father said.
Their mother nodded, then reached forward and took their hands. “Magic will follow you wherever you go,” she told them. Her copper-headed girls. The bright-haired twins who’d come out of her just before the world burned. “Even if we don’t stay with you.”
In the morning their parents had decided. They found a small house by the river. Near enough to Greta’s school that they could visit, but far enough away to give her space. Jilly had her own room. Before long, the city began to clamour for her sketches. She drew flowers and hummingbirds until her sketchbook was full, and then went into their new city and bought another.
She drew the mountain less and less, and then stopped drawing it altogether. They did not return to their old city. None of them ever thought of the mountain again.
The mountain, magic though it might have been, did not care in the slightest.
“We should have left,” she whispers to Estajfan. The words feel like a betrayal. “Right when it happened. I should have taken the girls and gone with B the day we climbed out of the hospital.” The breath catches in her throat. “But I couldn’t leave. You were here. I couldn’t leave you.”
“Heather,” he says, miserable. “Heather, I told you you should go—”
“I know!” she cries. The words ricochet off the trees. “I made a choice. I made a choice, and I didn’t even realize it. And now look what happened.”
“You couldn’t have known—”
She puts a hand against his mouth. “It doesn’t matter. It still happened.”
She lays her head against his chest and listens to his hearts. He lifts the hand covering his mouth and lets it gently drop, then strokes her hair. She reaches up and traces the angles of his face, the slope of neck that reminds her, for a fleeting moment, of B.
He smells of earth and sky and still the stars, but also something else now. Uncertainty. Her fingers touch his lips. He is here with her. He is here, finally here.
And her family is gone. Jilly. Greta. B. She whispers their names into his neck, his ear, his lips, the long dreads of his dark hair. He whispers back the names of those he’s lost—his father, his mother, far away and long ago. The lives that weren’t. The lives that could have been.
She takes their names into her mouth. He does the same.
“I want out,” she whispers, and he freezes, unsure, but what she means is that she wants out of her body. One long seam from forehead to toes, split open, so she can march away from her old self like she was moulting.
Instead she presses against him. Her face is slick with tears as he breathes with her, as he whispers into her hair, as he lays her down into the dirt. She wants to dig her hands into the earth and bring up something new. She turns until she’s face down, the ghost of B all around her and yet so far away, because it isn’t B lifting her skirt this time, his fingers trembling but sure, his hands running around her hips and pulling her hard against the great bulk of him, lifting her off the ground and up against the trembling weight that could kill her. It isn’t B above her at all.
Estajfan beside her on the mountain, Estajfan beside her in the city, Estajfan before her, at night, with the flowers. Estajfan here now, with her, above all other things. He has always been with her. She has always been here. He is inside of her and over her and somewhere else besides; they are breathing, they are one now, they are everywhere, together.
The light fades slowly from the top of the mountain, throwing everything into deepening shadow. Her face is wet with tears.
Estajfan clears his throat. “Are you all right?”
She nods. She still can’t speak.
“Heather—”
“I’m all right, Estajfan.” Above them, the weeping willow rustles in the breeze.
What did she expect? What does happiness feel like when her girls are gone?