Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  Dany follows Mac’s gaze, takes one last look.

  She gets it, she does. Her little sister wants their aunt to face them, to acknowledge them one last time. To hold up a single hand. To wave. To let them know she’ll be okay. But the guard shifts his hand, takes hold of his baton.

  “Move,” Dany hisses. She tugs on that little arm and the kid stumbles forward a step. And then Mac just stands there, again, staring up at Dany out of bottomless eyes.

  “Aunt Norah will be okay,” Dany tells her. “She can handle herself.”

  The guard steps forward, eyes on Dany.

  “We’re going,” Dany says and pulls. But the kid is a square wheel, so Dany has no choice. She drags her sister away. Time and again, the kid squirms from her grip and, turning back, fixes big eyes on the yard. Another need as insistent as hunger has taken hold.

  “She’ll be okay, I swear.”

  The kid looks up, searches Dany’s face.

  “I swear,” Dany whispers. “I’ve got a plan. I promise. I will get Norah out.”

  Back at home, Mac goes for the Scrabble box. The kid gives the box a shake and stares up at her sister.

  But Dany looks from the game to their ancient answering machine. The dusty black box is analogue. Inside, there is a tiny compartment to hold a little tape cassette. The thing belonged to Antoine – who is seriously paranoid about digital technology. On the black box, a little light blinks red.

  Dany knows it will be bad news – because it’s always bad news – but she hits the button anyway. On the inside of her chest, there’s this tiny whisper of hope that refuses to die. The little whisper is telling her that maybe Eva called. Maybe Eva is on her way over.

  But the first message is from the phone company. Not only are landlines being permanently phased out, but their bill is past due. Dany hits the button again, and the tape skips forward. The machine blips and there, from that dusty plastic box, comes the voice of a tired old man.

  “Danielle, mon chou, it’s me, it’s papa,” the voice on the machine says. The kid sets down the Scrabble box and stares, head cocked.

  Dany frowns.

  “You’re mad. I understand.” Antoine sighs, and for a beat, there is the sound of his tired breaths. “Can you tell Mac there’s going to be chicks?” he tries. “Four, five days more, I think. Maybe she wants to come see the baby chickens hatch. Maybe you both want to come and see. I’ve fixed up rooms for both of you. You know that I –”

  Dany hits the button and the machine shuts off. But too late. The kid is looking up at her, eyes bright. She’s heard it all. With a sigh, Dany reaches for the phone. “I’ll call, I’ll call,” she tells Mac. “Stupid chickens.”

  But the kid is grinning.

  Dany picks up the phone and frowns. Taps on the little button. But when she holds the receiver to her ear, there’s no dial tone. No nothing. Just a dead hunk of plastic. Because they’ve finally done it. Cut the landline off.

  She holds the telephone out to her little sister and shrugs.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 2

  She doesn’t know if it’s the failed visit, Antoine’s call or the dead telephone. Maybe it’s the long session of failed Scrabble, in which the kid breaks all of Dany’s simple words into random bits of sound. What is mo and cu and ga supposed to mean, anyway? She doesn’t know what does it – but that night, sleep takes a long, long time to come.

  For what feels like a hundred years, Dany lays there, staring at the popcorn ceiling over their bed. She thinks about their file, sitting on a desk at the ministry. At some point, somebody will figure out that they’re on their own. And then there’s the rent she can’t pay. She pictures the chickens at the prison-hospice, the ones who woke one day in a cage inside of a jail. She thinks of the rats at the lab, the half-empty shelves at the food bank and the prisoner who went down, thrashing. Her arm half out of its socket. As Dany stares at the little spikes of stucco, her mind is an unhappy Ping-Pong ball, and the little stucco spikes are like needles in her eyes.

  A second later, an hour later, a million years gone – Dany doesn’t know – but she’s up with a start, clawing at the twisted comforter. Her heart skitters and skips, and her breaths come in tiny gasps. Dawn is bleeding through the threadbare sheet they use as a curtain.

  But she is here, Dany tells herself. She is here, and here is home.

  Dany tears the coverlet off her arms, freeing herself. But for a long time, she looks at that sun-faded sheet. Traces each stain and tear. Wrapping her arms around her chest, she breathes, and the fingers of her nightmare slowly loosen their grip.

  Still, the feeling of the dream is slow to die.

  Dany takes in her small room, in all its solid reality.

  She makes herself look at her dresser, take in each chip in the paint. Two, three, five. She makes herself look at the wall beside her bed, smudged with dozens of tiny Mac-size handprints. Seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three. And all the while, she runs her primes. Forty-seven, fifty-three, fifty-nine. But best of all, for grounding, are those tiny feet, ice-cold and insistent, the ones digging into her side.

  Best of all, always and forever, is Mac.

  Dany cups her sister’s little feet in her hands. She huffs, warming Mac’s frozen toes. A moment later, the kid twitches awake. She sits straight up, clutching at her doll, and blinks at Dany out of sleep-drunk eyes.

  “School day,” Dany tells her, and Mac shuts her eyes. Falling back against the pillow, the kid pulls the comforter over her head.

  “No way, not today,” Dany says. “I’ve got lab.” She tugs at the thick blanket, but her sister grips the thing in her little fists. “Look, get up now and I’ll taxi you in to breakfast.”

  The cover slides down and Mac’s wide-awake eyes blink out at her.

  Dany’s been played.

  Without her aunt to help, mornings are a bit much for Dany. There’s the hassle of getting the kid into clothes, there’s the worry of breakfast. This morning, Dany shakes the last of the powdered milk into a glass of water, stirs and pours the translucent liquid into a bowl of sugar puffs. When the kid looks at the milk, eyebrows raised, Dany shrugs and tells her it’s skim.

  Finally, they’re both ready to go.

  Mac has her sneakers on, the ragged laces tied off in knots, and all Dany needs to do is get the nose plug on the kid. But it’s the same every day. A monumental struggle. Some mornings, the kid hides her face in her hands. Some mornings, she stares at Dany’s nose, a look of utter betrayal on her face. Today, as soon as Dany’s back is turned, the kid vanishes into the closet – and when Dany opens the door, Mac is buried under the pile of old coats.

  Dany shakes her head. You’d think, with the fuss Mac made, that Dany was trying to shove the plug up her nose.

  “Look, I know it bugs you,” Dany tells the squirming coat pile. “And I know it pinches, but it has to, if it’s going to work.” Dany gets it. She knows why Mac is upset. Mac’s the only kid who goes to kindergarten with a nose plug on. Some of the kids wear N95 masks and some show up in old dust masks. A few have homemade cotton jobs. And at least a quarter of the kids wear nothing at all. Dany’s seen it all, but she knows science and what’s more, she knows kids. The plug will work better on a five-year-old than any oversize mask.

  “You know why it’s important,” she tells the kid. “I told you how the virus works.” Dany pauses, and looks at the plug. “Besides, this isn’t an ordinary nose plug. It’s magic.”

  The coat pile shifts.

  “Did I ever tell you about the girl who could breathe underwater? She gave me this plug, so I could breathe underwater, like her.” Dany rests her hand on an old coat, tells it the whole story. How, a long time ago, there were things called swimming pools. How pools were pretty much like bath tubs, abandoned by giants. How a single swimming pool could hold all of the kids at Mac’s school and more. How sometimes,
if you were very lucky, in the deep end, you might find a little mermaid, who’d slipped in among the human children.

  The coat pile shifts again and this time Dany can see a dark pair of eyes peering out at her.

  “Back then,” Dany tells her, “everyone wanted one of these.” Dany holds the plug up, examining it like a pearl. “This one was hers,” Dany says softly. “And it’s special. Really special. You know what, I bet it still works.”

  Dany starts to put it on her own nose. From the coat pile, a tiny hand reaches out and takes the plug from her.

  But the hassles don’t end with the nose plug.

  Because across the hall, outside of ­Kuzmenko’s unit, she sees the same garbage bag as she saw the day before. The air in the hall stinks. Dany shakes her head and grabs the bag. And worse, when they head into the stairwell, the only light bulb has been smashed to bits. Frowning, Dany abandons the garbage bag on the landing.

  She pulls out her stainless steel water bottle, grips it by the neck. The bottle is full and the weight of it feels good in her hand. If someone bothers them, a full water bottle will crack a skull. Theoretically.

  “Keep close,” she tells her kid sister, and Mac does.

  The kid doesn’t like the dark, but Dany knows better. You don’t have to worry about the dark. Worry about the people who use the dark. Her whole life is a dark stairwell. One misstep, a bit of bad luck, and it’s all over for them.

  She isn’t worried about the sixteen-year-old boy on the third floor, the one who probably smashed the light bulb in the first place. He lives with his cousin, a parole officer with two pit bulls, and she worries less about him than the clothes he steals from the laundry room. Some days he steals underwear, some days he smashes light bulbs and some days he scatters thumbtacks in the hall. That boy is the Eastside weather, her aunt used to say, but that was a long time ago. And then there are the street kids he runs with, a pack of hairless wolves. Eyes as cold as stones. Dany wonders if her own eyes look like dead rocks, too, after the places she’s been.

  But the worst of all is the Ministry of Child Services and all the places they can put you in. Because to get in trouble is to risk being sent back. And no matter what happens, she can never go back there again.

  When the two reach the bottom landing, Dany cracks open the door and peers out.

  There, in the blinding light of the alleyway, she sees her.

  A kid. A little kid who’s somehow fallen down next to the dumpster.

  Dany takes a couple of steps towards the girl before she realizes how perfectly still she is. Too still. And then she sees it. The girl is made of plastic. The doll’s matted hair, like Mac’s, sticks up at all angles.

  Only the doll’s not a doll. She’s a message. A message aimed directly at Dany. Someone wants to tell her something. Needs to tell her something. So, no, she doesn’t even notice that Mac isn’t holding her hand anymore. All she sees is the doll and then the woman, the one wheeling her shopping cart around the dumpster. And before she knows what’s happening, the kid has bolted.

  Her little sister runs fast, but Dany – seeing the woman’s face – is, for a long beat, held in place by those eyes. Then Dany, too, breaks away, long loping strides. She scoops the kid up into her arms just before Mac hits the street. A car horn blares, her heart pounds and the kid reels.

  Her kid sister is trembling, her little arms shaking.

  Still, Dany can’t help it. She turns back.

  Behind them, the woman has wheeled her shopping cart up to the dumpster. In the cart, there are picture frames, bits of bric-a-brac. The debris of a broken life. The woman plucks up the doll from the trash and settles it in the front seat of her cart, stiff legs poking through the bars like a taxidermied child. Dany takes in the cart – sees the doll, surrounded by half-familiar odds and ends. She’s seen the woman around before. Too many times to be by chance. But today, for the first time, she notices the picture. The framed photograph in the woman’s cart. But it hurts to look at it, and she wants to turn away.

  Is the woman infected? Dany can’t say. But there aren’t any obvious signs. If this woman is infected, over time, the virus will colonize her brain. And day by day, the light in her will dim, consciousness will dim, until the day comes that someone glances at her in passing and sees that there is no pilot light left. No one on the inside of those eyes. They’ll call her in to the medicos.

  She won’t have much of a life.

  There are outbreaks of typhus on the streets, and lately, Dany’s been hearing about a new strain of cholera. Most people give no thought to the street people they see. But Dany does. Every time she sees this woman, she asks herself who she is, if she has family. And even if she hadn’t seen the photograph in her cart, Dany would know the answer. This woman had a family. This woman had kids. Has kids. Two of them. Girls.

  In her arms, Mac is trembling.

  Dany holds her sister tight. Slowly, she raises her eyes to take in the woman’s face.

  The woman’s staring back at her and, for an instant, Dany could swear it was there. A flicker of recognition. There, in the woman’s eyes.

  But when Dany looks again, two empty dark pools stare back at her.

  Maybe the woman is slipping away. Maybe she is losing the last of herself. Maybe it’s the virus. Maybe it’s a more ordinary kind of loss. In a way, it doesn’t much matter. All Dany knows is that looking into the woman’s eyes is like looking into a black hole, where the future is void. Looking at her, Dany too is sliding into a dark nothing. Not even the terminal cases, out at the hospice, scare Dany. Not like this. The woman is a glass with a crack, slowly draining down.

  “Go home,” she whispers. Only, when her mouth forms the words, Dany feels a crack open up inside of her, too. The kind of crack all kinds of things can leak out of.

  Mac slips from her arms, turns to clutch at her, shaking her. The kid wants Dany to move.

  And all at once, Dany breaks away.

  She turns from the woman and takes her kid sister in. Feels the warmth of the kid’s hands on her arm, sees her panic. Lets Mac fill all of her mind.

  “You and me, we’re okay,” she tells her. “We’re okay.”

  Taking her little sister by the hand, Dany turns her back on the woman. And together, they walk away.

  At the elementary school, security is just finishing up. Dany watches the guards hustle the last few addicts and homeless from the school doorway and waits, as janitorial sprays the steps down with disinfectant.

  If Dany’s mentor at the lab is right, among the street people, impossible to detect at the early stages, are infected. How many, no one can say. But if Jasper’s right, the virus is responsible for more than the upswing in viral encephalitis cases. The virus is responsible for the huge increase in psychiatric cases and homeless, too.

  Some people watch birds, ticking off exotic names in little red books.

  Dany watches the virus. Looking for patterns in the noise.

  Only now, because of what Jasper’s taught her, Dany watches everyone.

  There are maybe a dozen kids in Mac’s kindergarten class. Most people home-school little kids – because nobody wants to send small children to a public school, not now. They’re too small to take basic precautions. Mac’s classmates are the kids with no other option.

  Miss Papadopoulos spots them in the doorway, raises an eyebrow, and Dany sees it too: the tangle of Mac’s hair, the kid’s dirty fingernails. The teacher nods at the sink.

  Dany takes the kid over and carefully washes Mac’s hands up to the elbow. She runs her fingers through Mac’s wild hair, but the kid shrugs her off and heads to the cubbies. Together, they settle Mac’s glass-eyed doll in the little wooden box.

  Dany bends down, putting herself level with her sister’s eyes. “I’ll be here for you at three,” she says and swipes again at Mac’s frizzy locks.<
br />
  Mac dodges her. When her little sister straightens up again, her gaze is focused on some distant universe, a speck of a place, thousands of light years past Dany’s shoulder.

  “I love you times a million,” Dany says. “Times a googolplex.” She kisses one finger and touches the tip of the kid’s nose. Smiles. But that look, that thousand-mile stare, it just makes Dany sad, impossibly sad.

  Then she sees it: the worst of her morning is yet to come. Because there, at the door to the classroom, Mac’s teacher is waiting to have a word.

  On her way out, Dany stops by the door and frowns at the scuffed tile floor.

  “Your sister took the motor to pieces last week,” Miss P is saying, “the one that ran the filter of our fish tank.” And Dany can’t help it, she grins. “Killing half the salmon fry,” Miss P finishes, and Dany’s smile dies.

  When she glances up, the teacher’s lips are pressed in a thin line of disapproval. Dany tries to find an answer to that tight frown, but all she’s got is a shrug. “Did you look it up?” she finally asks. “The thing I told you about.”

  “Einstein syndrome,” the teacher says and sighs. “Just tell your aunt to call me.”

  Dany scuff-walks the tiled hallway, eyes cast down.

  But the worry follows after her. Trails her through two bus transfers, stalks her on the long walk across campus. By the time she lets herself into the university lab, she can feel the whole of child services half a breath behind. She feels the beginning of it, too – a truly awful headache. All of the forces in the world have lined up like dominoes, poised to come crashing down on their heads.

  She knows what causes the headaches. Stress.

  Dany tells herself not to worry. Because she doesn’t need to worry.

  Eva says that they both have it made.

  At the beginning of the year, Dany placed first on the district tests for math and the biological sciences. Eva came in second. That’s how they got their places at the BioGENEius project – at the university lab. Two days each week Dany’s at the lab and the rest of the time she’s in special classes at the micro-school.