Long years ago, on that second morning of labour, the doctor had reached into the mother and felt a leg where a baby’s head should be. A leg that was not human—a tiny leg, an impossible hoof. She’d felt it with her fingers. She’d known it with her heart. She had taken her hand out and reached for her scalpel knowing full well what was to come.
She’d felt it, that centaur-shaped hole in the universe, and recognized it instantly. She thought the world would recognize it too.
That was a mistake. The doctor knows this now. She should have tried harder. With the father, with the mother. With the world below the mountain.
You belong here, the doctor wants to say. You belong everywhere. You are not a monster.
The girl looks about to smile, but then the father speaks.
“These ones, Aura,” he says, then he looks up and follows his daughter’s eyes to where the doctor stands.
And he is up, he is coming toward her in a blur of fury.
It’s all right, she wants to call, and she puts her hand out, opens her mouth. Aura, she thinks. The sun comes over the edge of the mountain and sets the girl’s hair on fire. Aura. That’s beautiful.
Then his hands are around her and she knows in that instant that she was wrong about this, too. Sometimes there is no healing. His hands are stronger than the hands of any man she’s ever known. He lifts her into the air like the feather she’s always known herself to be.
She isn’t sorry, even as the split seconds fall around her and she feels him let go. She isn’t sorry. She saw magic all those years ago and there is magic here, too, at the end. She catches the eyes of the daughter in one last tilted moment and then she is flying, she is falling, and the mountain comes to meet her.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks above all to Anne Collins, who took a chance on a wild idea for a story that then became a wild mess of a book. Under your expert hand, it has gradually become far less messy while also retaining its wild bones, for which I am so grateful.
Thanks to my agent, Samantha Haywood, for your faith and encouragement, and for always being so staunchly in my corner.
Thanks to the Canada Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence Program, Hedgebrook, and the Banff Centre, for your gifts of financial support and space in which to nurture this unpredictable story.
To Heather Cromarty, who read the earliest draft of The Centaur’s Wife while I was still under the delusion that it was “almost finished” (LOL oops), and was so very kind.
To Sarah Taggart, dear friend and best reader, for your incisive and thorough comments. Thank you so much.
To Julie Gordon, bookseller extraordinaire and first cheerleader, who was there for me at countless bookish breakfasts at the Hamilton Farmers’ Market and patiently listened to me worry about how this book was Never Ever Ever Going to Get Done.
To Piyali Bhattacharya, Vero González, Mira Jacob, Ashley M. Jones, Lisa Nikolidakis, and Yaccaira Salvatierra. Hedgebrook coven love is the best kind of love.
To Gary Barwin, whose words brought encouragement and strength when the writing of this book seemed impossible.
To Jael Richardson, #workwife and friend, who is a gift that lights my days.
To Ron Read, physician and medical expert, for fact-checking the medical details of an entirely unfactual novel and for automatically assuming (correctly) that the centaurs all have six-packs. Also, for rescuing Estajfan from a terrible death due to sepsis. I am grateful, and so is he.
To Cara Liebowitz, for your careful and considered thoughts on this book.
To the friends who’ve stood by and cheered, silently and aloud, during the ups and downs of writing: Elissa Bergman, Trevor Cole, Pamela King, Jaime Krakowski, Jen Sookfong Lee, Sabrina L’Heureux, Lisa Pijuan-Nomura, Stacey Bundy, Adam Pottle, and Ria Voros.
To Catherine Hernandez, my doula in the world of loss.
To my family—Raymond and Debra Leduc, Allison, Adam, Areyana, and Adelyn DiFilippo, and Alex Leduc and Aimee Leduc, for always being there with love and support and unbridled enthusiasm for reshelving my books in prominent bookstore displays and other guerrilla marketing tactics.
To Sitka, the Dog of Doom, who escaped her crate one day at five tender months of age and proceeded to tear apart, and then pee on, a draft of this manuscript, thereby inuring me to any and all future criticisms of it. (You were right; there was still much more work to be done. Thank you for exercising editorial judgement when I needed it the most.)
And to Liz Harmer, who told me that one short story about centaurs wasn’t enough, that she needed to know more about them.
Grief is the hardest mountain I have ever climbed. I am grateful beyond words that I haven’t had to climb it alone. Thank you to Richard and Jo-Ellen De Santa, Meghen De Santa Brown and Ken Brown, and Tim De Santa and Genelle Diaz-Silveira, for your love, laughter, and memories, and for opening your homes and arms to me as we walk this land of loss together. I cherish your fierce and brilliant hearts.
Finally, to Jessica De Santa. Dearest best friend and sister of my heart, who recognized me instantly that day in our St. Andrews dorm residence all those years ago, who believed in me before I had the strength to believe in myself. It was the privilege of my life to have you as a friend, and the dark howl that is life without you is matched only by the impossible, extraordinary grace of having known you in the first place. You were—you are—the greatest gift. Miss you now, tomorrow, always.
I hope I’ve done you proud.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AMANDA LEDUC’s essays and stories have appeared in publications across Canada, the US and the UK. She is the author of the non-fiction book Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space (Coach House Books, 2020) and the novel The Miracles of Ordinary Men (2013, ECW Press). She has cerebral palsy and lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she works as the Communications Coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), Canada’s first festival for diverse authors and stories.
ALSO BY AMANDA LEDUC
Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
The Miracles of Ordinary Men
Copyright
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2021 Amanda Leduc
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2021 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: The centaur’s wife / Amanda Leduc.
Names: Leduc, Amanda, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020025586X | Canadiana (ebook) 20200255916 | ISBN 9780735272859 (softcover) | ISBN 9780735272866 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8623.E426 C46 2021 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Text design by Emma Dolan
Cover art and design by Emma Dolan
