by Amanda Leduc
At last, they find themselves in an old stone foundation. The air is damp and musty here, but also hot with panic. People jabber and weep, shout into their cell phones. I can’t hear you. I don’t know what’s going on.
Heather collapses softly against a wall and tries to breathe. B huddles beside her.
“Are you all right?” he says, pitching his voice low so it can find her in the din.
She can’t speak; she only nods.
More people keep coming from the stairs. They are screaming and sobbing, some of them bloody. Another crash above them and everyone shrieks; the lights flicker, go out, come back on again. She thinks about the people hooked up to machines, the people they left behind. Soon there is hardly room to sit, bodies pressed so close around her she fights the urge to panic.
Breathe in, she thinks. Breathe out. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine the mountain air, but all she can picture is fire on the mountain too.
The mountain. The ones on the mountain, and fire.
Is he there? she wonders. Is he all right?
When she opens her eyes, B is crouched in front of her, Greta silent in his arms, her eyes wide and searching. “Look at me,” he says. “Heather—it’s all right.”
“It’s not all right.” She wants to scream out loud, but whispers. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He reaches his free hand out and once more grasps her elbow. “But we’re here. We’re okay. Everything will be okay.”
She wants to scream again at this; she only looks at him, then nods. Breathe in, breathe out. She holds Jilly close and breathes in her crumpled newness—the soft velvet of her bright-red head, the folds of skin at her neck.
Mine, she thinks. Mine.
Another crash above them, and the lights begin to flicker. The room fills with screaming.
“Calm down,” B calls out. “Everyone—calm down.”
She feels a hinge of disbelief in the air. She feels people turn their faces to his voice.
“Calm down?” a voice calls. “What do you mean, calm down?”
“There’s nothing we can do right now,” B says. “We just have to wait.”
“Wait for what?” Another voice, this time from what sounds like the opposite side of the room.
Beside her B stands up and clears his throat. “I don’t know,” he says. “But I don’t think it’s safe to go outside.”
There is a moment of silence in the room—she feels them all look up to the darkness above. Crashes—fainter now, but still there.
“Is it an earthquake?” someone says.
“Maybe,” B says.
But Heather shakes her head. “Not an earthquake.” She thinks of the fire raining down from the sky.
“Well,” he says, then he speaks so everyone can hear. “Whatever it is—we can’t go outside. We just have to wait.”
“What if we’re trapped?” someone else says. “How do we get out?”
“We’ll get out,” B says. “We just have to be patient.”
There is another crash, louder than all the ones before it. The lights go out, and do not come back on.
This time there are no screams—only a whimper that reverberates around the room. Nothing else crashes above them. People check their phones again, lose calls. Hello? Hello?
The girls fall asleep, eventually. The sobs of those around Heather gradually soften and go quiet. Above them the wind wails cold and lonely. A tornado, maybe. Or some other kind of madness.
B tries to stretch his legs out in front of him, but there’s no room. “I hate closed spaces,” he mutters. Gone is the man who was so steadfast only a short time before. There’s a vulnerability in his voice that reminds her of the night they met—drunk ramblings at the bar, the sweetness of his palm in hers as they stumbled down the street. They’d gone to the same high school. She hardly remembered him. She hardly remembered anybody. Everyone in the city was a stranger to her, even the people she’d known all her life.
The sweetness of his palm. That sudden rush of animal power as they fell together in the park, the dirt on her knees, the faraway-ness of the stars. She looked up and saw the mountain’s deeper shadow in the dark sky—she felt its power pour down around her as she came, in a rush of rage and longing, and then it was gone and she was only sweaty on the grass, B once more sweet above her, mildly surprised.
He held her hand as he walked her home, and after he kissed her at her door she went inside, sure she’d never see him again. A nice boy, but what was there to talk about? They’d shared one thing, and that was enough.
He sent her texts—she didn’t remember his name, had him listed only as B. She ignored the messages until the day, weeks later, when she found herself staring at a pregnancy test in the dim light of her bathroom.
She would get an abortion, obviously. She was thirty-seven, single—it was the only thing to do. Except that she didn’t and one day passed and then another, and she stopped drinking and made an appointment with her doctor and bought herself the vitamins that she recommended. Then she went to her mother’s house.
Everyone has to grow up sometime, Heather, was what her mother said.
She knew that they were two before the doctors did. Twin girls. She wanted them; she was afraid of them too. She worried about premature births, about a delivery like her mother’s—prolonged and difficult, brain damage from oxygen deprivation in the birth canal. She dreamed about two girls who came into the world with a gait just like hers—rollicking, uneven, one side of each tiny body unable to function quite like the rest. Muscles that didn’t stretch quite the way they should, feet twisted from a brain that gave weak signals. Their twinned futures slices of bullied days on the schoolyard. Cerebral palsy. Cerebral loser. Stupid fucking spaz.
She didn’t want them to grow up without a dad. And so she looked up B’s last text and sent him a message, and then there was coffee, and then dinner, and sometime after that there was a shy proposal and she said yes because there was nothing else to say, and then there was a wedding. She looked surprised in the photos, not quite sure how she got there, her belly big under its covering of grey lace.
His name is Brendan, but to her he is only B. She reaches over, takes his hand, takes her turn at being reassuring. “Everything will be okay,” she says. Her eyes have adjusted to the darkness and she sees him smile a little.
Then Jilly starts to cry. Greta, in B’s arms, lets out a wail. Heather feels the fear in the room spike again, mouths around them open and ready to scream.
In front of her, low to the ground, a fox materializes out of nowhere. Its blue eyes open and blink at her.
Blue eyes, like the sky. Two tiny bodies suckling against her orange-grey fur.
Heather catches her breath, looks around—no one else seems to notice the fox. She watches it stand up as its babies gently fall, then carry them one by one over to the wall, stepping lightly around the people huddled on the floor. No one moves. No one notices.
In front of the foxes, the wall shimmers and then disappears. Beyond it, the green reaches of the mountain, a flash of bright blue sky. No fires. The fox turns to look at her.
She wants to gather up her own babies and run to the wall, through stone and onto mountain grass. She can hardly breathe.
B’s hand on her elbow, again. “Heather.” His voice is urgent. “Heather, please.”
The babies are now wailing at the top of their lungs. She looks at the portal again, at the foxes who wait, and then back at B.
“There was a fox,” she says, and the babies—and the wails of the people around them—quiet. Like magic. The silence that comes after this is puzzled, unsure. The foxes at the wall cock their heads and look at her; the mountain beyond them shimmers grey-green and blue.
“What fox?” It is a child who asks. Heather shifts so that B can put Greta in her lap. Sh
e gathers both babies close, takes a breath. The entire room is silent now, waiting.
They are listening only because they are tired and frightened and there is nothing else to do. She glances at the wall again, but the foxes are gone, and so is the portal. And so she begins.
“There once was a fox on the mountain,” she says. An old story, one that her father had told her when she was small. “She wanted babies of her own more than anything else in the world. But she didn’t know how to get them, and so she asked the mountain how.”
* * *
When they were born, her daughters tumbled from her like firecrackers—their hair bright red, their voices loud enough to fill the room. She was too tired to cry, too tired to think, too tired to be anything other than relieved. The nurses cleaned the babies up and handed her one girl and then the other, and she held them against her, skin to skin. They were perfect. Their mouths opened like tiny birds. They rooted against her collarbone, her breasts, and the nurses helped to turn them, one mouth against one nipple, one mouth against the other. It hurt when they latched on, and Heather hissed, fought the urge to fling them both across the room, see their tiny skulls crack against the wall. Did it show?
“It will get better.” Had the nurse seen the storm in her face? Maybe she said this to all the mothers. The nurse nodded to B, weeping with joy by the bed. “You have help. You’ll be just fine.”
“They’re so beautiful,” B said, and he reached over Heather’s shoulder, cupped one tiny head in his palm. “They’re so beautiful.”
Already, she was so tired of him. It felt hormonal but she knew it went much deeper—beyond the emergence of these tiny bodies, beyond the relief and the sudden flush of power: I did it, I did it, now I can do anything. She wanted to run screaming through the hospital, climb the walls, jump off a mountain. She was almost certain she could fly. And she hated the way he wept, the way he seemed so happy. Ten months ago she had had hardly any idea who he was, and now she was married to this man in a way that went even deeper than the ring she’d let him put on her finger.
Greta and Jilly. Jilly and Greta. They were perfect. She loved them, and it was an iron cage that settled over her heart and clanged shut in a way that reverberated right down to her toes. She had been free before, and now she was chained to them forever.
The next day, meteors rained down from the sky.
* * *
When they climb out of the basement long hours later, the hospital is gone. They clutch the girls—B has Jilly now, while Greta sniffles in the crook of Heather’s arm—and climb the stairwell until they step out into a tired orange light that reveals a city turned to rubble, littered with dust. It could be late afternoon, it could be evening. The air is hot and dry and smells of burning. The sky is thick with cloud and smoke. Their fellow basement dwellers emerge the way they do—squinting, shielding their eyes from the light or the wreckage, maybe both. There are no human sounds, not even sirens.
“Were we attacked?” someone quavers. No one knows what to say.
There is a toppled building to their left, half of an office tower shaved off in front of them across the street, the ground littered with downed trees and fallen branches, shards of broken glass, power lines dancing in the wind. On the far side of the office tower, smoke rises in a steady plume. She wants to go and see what’s burning, and the answering vision comes to her in a flash, like so many others have through the years. A crater, a hunk of molten rock, the area around it so hot it’s hard to breathe.
People are moaning in disbelief. “What happened?” someone says. “What’s going on?”
Heather glances around—so many people spilling out into the dim light, all of them looking around with the terrified eyes of children. She has no stories left to calm anyone.
“Your phone,” she says to B. “See if it works now.”
He’s one step ahead of her, thumbing at his phone with one hand and holding Jilly with the other. “No signal.”
A woman beside her—her scrubs splattered with blood, dirt smeared across her face—pulls her own phone out of her pocket and taps it. “I can’t get a signal either.”
One by one, people tap their screens and hold them up to the sky. Nothing happens.
“The cell towers,” someone says, finally. “They must be down.”
Heather bundles Greta tight in the folds of her hospital gown and moves farther out into the road. She’s in bare feet. It’s taken her this long to notice.
“Heather,” B says. “Be careful.”
“I’m always careful,” she says. “I just need to see what’s going on.”
He holds out an arm. “Give me Greta.”
Heather shakes her head. “She’s fine.”
“You’re not wearing any shoes,” he says, carefully. “I don’t want you to fall.”
“I’m not going to drop her.” She’s angry at the way his words have brought her own fears to the surface. “I’m fine.”
Behind B, the crowd is starting to disperse—shell-shocked and terrified, some people wailing again. Others still wave their phones in the air. She turns away from B and steps forward, picking a path through the rubble. She feels his eyes on her uneven gait.
I can keep her safe, she thinks. Fuck you.
When she gets to the end of the street, everything is exactly as she envisioned it. The crater has demolished an apartment building and spans almost a block. Small fires burn all around. The others from the hospital join her—B beside her once more, his hand shielding Jilly’s face.
He nods to Greta. “Cover her. She shouldn’t be breathing this in.” By this he means the tiny flecks of ash and dust that dance around them. They float almost lazily, as though they have all the time in the world.
“She is covered.” She draws Greta deeper into her gown nonetheless.
“Heather.” B’s voice is sharp now. “Heather, come away from here. Please.”
She turns and walks away from the crater, stopping at first by a small house that is seemingly untouched except for the roof, which is smoking. Greta snuffles in her arms, a tiny pig gone to sleep again. For a moment she imagines the story she’ll tell the girls years from now. You both could sleep through anything. Even the end of the world.
She opens its door and steps into the house and hears B calling her name in a voice that belongs to someone else—to the person that told everyone to calm down in the basement. He’s trying to take charge. He’s worried for her.
She moves down the entry hall and into the kitchen, where mugs of tea are abandoned on the counter, flecks of ash and soot floating on the surface. The patio doors have blown open—ash is everywhere in the house and, as she steps outside, onto the patio, spread thickly over backyard grass. She cradles Greta and watches the smoke rise out of a hole in the backyard, a much smaller crater than the one she’s just seen. Smoke drifts over the half-buried bodies by the wreckage of the pool. An arm attached to nothing, just lying curled on the blackened grass. The air here smells like a barbecue that’s gone on too long.
Beyond the fence at the end of the backyard and the squat brown house on the other side, beyond the street that lies in rubble on the far side of that—Deadwood Street, she thinks dizzily, how fitting—over still more roads and paths that lead out toward the forest (Miller Road, Longwood Avenue, Larkspur Crescent), beyond the smoke and the glittering fires that burn all around, the mountain rises, cool and green. Untouched. There are no fires burning there, as far as she can see.
The relief makes her dizzy; her knees buckle and she almost falls.
“Give me Greta,” B snaps, from behind her. “Give her to me now.”
When she hands him the baby, his face softens right away. “There’s a TV in the living room,” he says. “No signal there either.” She can hear the faint scratch of static and is surprised there’s power at all. Others are filtering out into the backyard and come
to stand beside them.
What happens now? she sees everyone thinking. What happens now?
The ones on the mountain—she knows they’re there—see them too. They stand untouched, their marble arms and glossy flanks just as she remembered from that day on the mountain when she was a child, while Heather and B stand with the girls, their lives flecked with ruin.
No one goes up on the mountain now. She’s the reason why.
* * *
She’d been a strange child. Dark-haired and quiet, her limp sometimes imperceptible and other times visible from halfway down the street. She had a crutch when she was tiny but then, when she was a little older, only her own unsteady feet. Her mother worried about shoes and braces; her father said it didn’t matter.
“No one else walks like you, Heather-Feather,” he would say to her. “That’s something to be proud of.”
When she was a baby, her family had moved from their house under the mountain’s shadow to a house in the city proper—at the end of the last street before the mountain fields. A house that backed onto thick forest.
“We’ve moved for her. We need to be close to good schools,” her mother always said, though Heather knew it was for her mother too.
The mountain made her mother nervous in a way she couldn’t explain. So instead she focused on the things that she could know: how far away the schools were, how long it would take Heather to walk there.
“I don’t want her to have to walk too far,” her mother said. “I don’t want her to get tired.”
“Heather’s a trooper,” her father had said. She’d been born two months early; they hadn’t been sure she’d survive. “The more she walks, the stronger she’ll get.”
“I know that,” her mother said. “But what will the children at school think?”
The children at school thought she walked funny, and told her so. They imitated her when they thought she wasn’t looking—the uneven circle of her hips, the slow swing of her leg. They laughed.