They are parents, Heather realizes again. She’s a mother.
The woman nods. Another woman, tall and blonde, has climbed down from the passenger side of the ambulance and comes to stand beside her. “Is the whole hospital gone? Are there salvageable supplies?” She raises her voice and Heather watches little shimmers of movement around them as people step toward her, hope flaring in their eyes. Maybe she knows. Maybe she understands what’s going on.
“How many survivors?” the dark-haired woman calls out.
“We don’t know,” B says. “We’ve only just come out of shelter.”
She looks at him with something like confusion in her face, which quickly softens into sadness. “We’ve been driving for hours,” she says. “The whole day. There are fires everywhere.”
Everywhere. They already know this, but still the shock rolls through them like a wave. Heather finds herself staring at the ground. What comes next? She has no idea. There are no flashes to tell her.
Then two scuffed greyish runners appear in front of her, peeking out from dark-blue scrubs. The small woman kneels and places a delicate brown hand—the nails blunt, the fingers slender—on Jilly’s head. The girls are both sleeping now, incredibly.
“Are they all right?” she asks.
Heather nods.
“My name is Tasha.” The woman peers into Heather’s face. “Are you all right?”
Heather laughs for real this time—sudden, hysterical. “Are you a doctor?”
“Yes.” The other woman sits back on her heels. Her hand feels warm and dry on Heather’s forehead, but at her touch, Heather sees a darkened room, hears weeping so loud it’s almost a scream. Her nostrils fill with smoke.
“What happened?” Heather whispers. “What happened in that other fire?”
Tasha pulls away as though burned. She stays crouched for a moment, opens her mouth to speak and then closes it. After another moment, she stands, wipes her hands against her scrubs, and moves on. She touches other faces, asks everyone’s name.
Heather sits on the curb until B takes the girls from her. He leads her back into the second house, where they find a spot on the living room floor, bedding down among strangers with blankets from somewhere far away.
She sleeps beside B, the girls snuggled between them, but she is not there. She is on the mountain. Only clouds and looming green ahead of her.
He isn’t there. She cannot see him no matter where she looks.
MOTHER FOX
Once there was a fox on the mountain, and she wanted babies more than anything else in the world. But she didn’t know how to get them, and so she asked the mountain.
The mountain told her, You must go down off the mountain and into the grasslands where the sun shines and casts no shadow. Once there, find a rock and pry it up from its resting place so that the earth beneath the rock sees the sun for the first time. Say to the rock: I am ready to bring you into the world now, and turn in two circles. If it thinks you deserve them, the rock will give you your babies.
The rock doesn’t know who I am, the fox said.
Everyone knows who you are, said the mountain. You’re the Fox. You have red hair and a long red tail. The trees recognize you. The ground knows the way your footsteps feel different than the Deer’s. The rock will know you too.
But how will the rock know I deserve babies? the fox asked. How will it know I am worthy?
To this, the mountain made no answer.
The fox went down the mountain anyway. She was quick and light and small, and knew how to hide when larger creatures—bears, a wolf, an orange-brown coyote that grinned at her through the trees—got in her way. She found the grasslands with no trouble. She even found a rock. After she lifted it, she turned herself in two careful circles, then sat and spoke the words.
I am ready to bring you into the world now.
But when the fox looked down at the earth beneath the rock, she saw only dirt and worms. The fox was confused. There was no mountain around to tell her what to do next. So she walked farther through the grasses and found another rock and lifted it. She turned herself in two more careful circles and spoke the words again.
I am ready to bring you into the world now.
Again, only dirt and worms.
The fox, puzzled, went back to the first rock. She reached out a paw and touched it. It was warm, which surprised her; she’d never touched warm rock before.
The sun warms me, the rock said. It didn’t actually speak, but the fox heard it anyway. The sun warms rocks differently on the mountain.
I am ready to bring you into the world now, the fox said again, thinking that perhaps the rock hadn’t heard her.
I know, the rock said. The babies were waiting for you when you turned me over.
But, the fox said, not understanding, I saw only dirt and worms.
Can’t worms also be babies? the rock said. Don’t they also deserve to be in the world?
I don’t know anything about worms, the fox said. I don’t know what they eat. I don’t know how to keep them safe.
No one knows at first, the rock said to her. But everyone can learn.
The fox, understanding, was ashamed. She sat back on her haunches and looked at the rock for a while.
I am ready to bring you into the world now, she said again.
The worms crawled out of the dirt to her, and she was very happy.
2
When the meteors come for them, Tasha is at work in the sickly green of the ER, dealing with the normal crises of an ordinary shift. Then there are bangs and screaming, and fire everywhere. She is standing by the charge desk one moment, and the next she’s crawling out from beneath a pile of chairs and pieces of ceiling and scattered patient charts, the fire alarm screaming through the space between her ears.
Where is Annie? She looks around and sees only bodies, some of them sprawled motionless, others struggling to stand. Blood like a slow red wave. The fire alarms go on and on.
Have they been bombed?
Tasha pushes herself up, shaky on her legs. She touches the side of her head and her hand comes away sticky—blood, something else. There are other fluids on the floor. Bags of saline, bottles of hand sanitizer cracked and leaking onto the tiles.
Someone appears in front of her, grabs her by both arms. Mouth open, no sound. Brown eyes. Blonde hair. Annie.
“Speak up,” Tasha says. “I can’t hear you.”
A frown, and Annie’s mouth moves again. “Tasha,” she hears, faintly. “Tasha, look at me.”
Tasha’s hands start to tremble. She balls her fists and closes her eyes, takes one deep breath. “I hit my head,” she says, looking at Annie again. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Annie says. “A bomb?”
Who would want to bomb them? That makes no sense. Then the ground shakes beneath them and Tasha feels the idea of a bomb move out of both their minds and become something else. It was like that with Annie, sometimes. They felt things at the same time, understood crossword puzzle clues at the same moment, even when they were on opposite sides of the house. They’d made a silly Sunday game out of it over morning coffee—finishing their respective puzzles in unison, the two of them flushed and triumphant.