They gather her up, weeping, and hold her close between them.
15
He doesn’t mean to go far. He doesn’t. But he finds he needs to run, only stopping for a moment at the mountain cave to tell his sister where Heather is. “She’s up with the willows. Go to her, Aura. I—can’t.”
And then he’s past her, through the meadow, then on the downward path, his hooves hitting the shale and sliding, going down.
Heather. As a child standing before him on the mountain. As a teenager in the garden, her eyes lost and huge. Heather at the greenhouse. Heather on the mountain.
Heather, before him at the willow trees.
Heather, telling him to leave.
He’d been a monster that day when her father had fallen from the cliff. He hadn’t meant to be.
She doesn’t need help! he had wanted to scream. The child there in front of them, so sweet and open. The struggle of their climb had been written all over her face. She’d looked tired, and also guilty to be tired, as though her fatigue had somehow betrayed her father’s dreams. He’d seen it all at once, had understood it instantly.
What monsters are these?
Get them away, get them away.
Help her, the father had said. The way their own father had asked for the mountain’s help so long ago. Make them like me.
She doesn’t need help! he’d wanted to yell at her father. She doesn’t need to be fixed!
And so he had hesitated. Not for long, but long enough.
He runs. To the base of the mountain, past the city, through the foothills. The stars shine far overhead and the ground tells him nothing. There are no people. Not even animals bar his way.
When he stops, a long while later, he can smell the faint tang of the sea. He walks for a while until he reaches an abandoned beach village—old clapboard houses falling down, the centre street overgrown with grass and weeds. Two rabbits leap across what used to be the road and then disappear.
At the edge of the sea, he pauses for a moment, then he wades into the water until it’s up past his knees, above his belly, until the ocean covers his back and he’s just a torso in the waves. If someone saw him now, they would think he was a man. Only a man.
The waves push hard against him. Other things still live here, beneath the surface. He can feel them swimming far away. The ocean keeps on going. The mountain endures in a different way.
The green of growing things—that endures too, in a way he is only beginning to understand.
He stands for a while in the sea, feeling the waves, soothed by their roar. He isn’t cold. The sky above him is shot with stars.
When daylight is still some time away, he turns around and heads for land. He stands dripping on the beach for one long moment and then begins the long run back home. He’ll bring Heather here, he decides. He’ll stay with her, he’ll find them food. Whatever it takes.
He runs on a tangled road that leads him through one empty town after another. The buildings on either side are like dark hills with hidden eyes. They watch, but let him pass.
Then, suddenly, the start-up rumble of an engine. He freezes, alive with fear.
The headlights come from nowhere, and everywhere. The hard blast of a car horn burrows deep into his ribs. Lights come at him from everywhere.
A hot, sharp flash of something against his side—he cries out, stumbles, hits the ground.
He can’t see.
He can’t see. He can’t see. He can’t see.
THE DOCTOR AND THE TWINS
The next time the doctor visits the mother’s village, there are two new babies to see. Twins—like the doctor and her sister long ago, like the nieces who love her stories whenever she returns. The twins are healthy and big. There is nothing wrong with their lungs.
“And the birth?” the doctor asks, cuddling one of the babies—a boy, with large, dark eyes and a nose that already looks like his father’s.
The mother has been smiling, but now her face clouds over. “It was fine,” she says. “There was no trouble at all.”
This is true; the villagers confirm it. No labour that stretched from one day into the next. No need for a surgeon’s slender tools. The boy came first, and then his sister—the mother was up and moving around the house within hours. The entire village has been visiting the babies, playing the songs of welcome for days.
They are happy babies, which is just as well. Two babies at once is more than enough for anyone, the doctor thinks, remembering what life was like for her sister when her own two girls came into the world. An unending avalanche of crying and pissing and shitting and never enough sleep. The second husband holds the children like they are made of glass; when they cry, the doctor takes pity on him and reaches for them. He soon escapes outside.
“Surely he should learn,” the mother says. She and the doctor are at the window, watching the husband retreat into the fields.
“Parenting is different for everyone,” the doctor says. She’s seen enough parents to know. “He’ll get used to being a father, eventually. And you’ll be fine.”
“I thought I’d feel whole,” the mother says. “But instead I feel… unfinished.” She turns and grips the doctor’s arm. “How are they?” she whispers. “How are my babies?”
“Your children are right here,” the mother’s mother calls from the front door. She shuts the door behind her and comes to stand with them. “See?” she says. “Look how beautiful she is. Look how beautiful they both are, and how perfect!”
“Yes,” the mother whispers. She looks up at the doctor. “They’re perfect.”
The doctor stays for two weeks. She sleeps in her old room. The other husband, haunted and grief-stricken, does not come this time. There are no footsteps in the hallway. There is no dark presence on the other side of the door.
When the doctor is ready to move on, the mother insists on walking with her to the edge of the village, her twins in a sling. As the doctor says a final goodbye, the mother stops her with a hand on her arm, the same hunger in her eyes.
“Are they all right?” she whispers. “My babies. You never tell me how they are.”
“I haven’t seen them,” the doctor says. “But I think they’re all right.”
“You think?”
“I hope,” the doctor says.
“And—him?” she says. “Is he all right?”
“He is as all right as he can be.”
The mother nods. “I knew he was different. I wanted my life to be different too. But at the time I didn’t know what that meant. What that could be.”
The doctor nods, and gently pulls her arm away. “We never do,” she says.
The mother thinks about this for a moment. Then she turns back to the village without saying goodbye.
The doctor makes her way back to the city of her birth, where her sister still lives. At their house, her nieces run out to greet her.
“We’ve been waiting for days!” one of them exclaims, hanging on the doctor’s arm. “Where have you been?”
The doctor laughs. “I could move as fast as the wind and it wouldn’t be fast enough for you.”
“Yes,” her sister agrees, coming down the front walk to kiss her. “Nothing moves fast enough for these two.”
Inside, the girls hang her coat up in the closet. The doctor carries her bag and her satchel to the guest room. She is barely unpacked before they’re at her door and tugging on her hands, pulling her into the living room.