Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  No sound comes back to her, not even a whisper. Just a waiting silence.

  Then, from somewhere deep in the house, comes a muffled bang. It’s as if someone has left a running shoe in the dryer. But Dany knows this isn’t it. Can’t be it. Because this is a fleshier sound. And, judging from the dead spiderweb of wiring over the living room, the power is still out. The hydro has been on and off since morning and Dany tries not to understand, tries not to put the muffled bang together with what she saw earlier today, tries not to think of poor Liz.

  Dany reaches for a light switch, flicks it on and off, but there is no effect. Or, there is an effect, but it’s only this – when she flicks the light switch, and it doesn’t offer control over light and darkness, Dany feels like she’s been plunged into a lucid dream.

  “I’m dreaming,” Dany tells herself, but her voice drops to a whisper.

  “Interesting thesis,” Eva says, coming up behind. “And if you die in a dream, then, like, do you die in real life?”

  Dany takes a deep breath and looks at her friend.

  Under those enormous bangs, Eva wears a silly grin on her face. She doesn’t look the least bit worried.

  Dany stares at Eva, but what she sees are all of the sheltering layers that, over long years, have been carefully built up around her friend. ­Bianca, who keeps the Wahls’ house. Esteban, who keeps the grounds of the Wahl estate. The driver, who stands outside their car, modelling conservative suits. Lawyers. Private doctors. Nutritional consultants. So many people in Eva’s life, all hired by Len Wahl, to keep her apart from the world.

  And Eva, crazy Eva, doing her best to outflank the lot of them.

  It’s Eva who insisted on an Eastside micro-school.

  It’s Eva who parachuted herself into Dany’s world.

  It’s Eva who followed her into this house.

  She supposes, really, that’s what being rich means. Being rich means you have to fight your parents to be able to spend a sliver of time in Dany’s world. Being poor means it’s all but impossible to scratch your way out of it.

  “What’d you do with Mac?” Dany asks.

  “I gave her my glasses,” Eva says. “Don’t worry. I opened the internet browser for her and everything. There’s a lot on there that’s, like … artistic.”

  “You left her alone on the internet?” Dany asks, incredulous.

  “Yikes,” Eva says. “User error? Sorry.”

  Dany looks at Eva for a beat.

  “But there are some really good pictures,” Eva says.

  Dany shakes her head and moves into the dim interior. “You should wait outside,” Dany tells her. Her eyes trace the muddy prints, but these peter out partway into the house. By the time the living room carpet becomes linoleum, the footprints are smears.

  “Bianca tells this story,” Eva says quietly, “about the house on Negros Island where she grew up. It was an old place, like, say, the guest house of a plantation, but falling apart. I always sort of pictured it like this.”

  Narrowing her eyes, Dany traces the last of the muddy streaks. Soon, though, she’s lost all sign. But whoever it is, they were moving towards the kitchen.

  “When she was six,” Eva goes on, “Bianca saw an ­amomongo – it’s like, the Negros Island version of a Sasquatch. The thing disembowelled a goat right in front of her and then draped itself in the entrails.”

  Dany stops and looks at her friend. “Helping?”

  Eva shakes her head. “No, it’s not helping me either.”

  Dany stares at her friend, exasperated.

  But Eva has stopped moving, and she is looking at Dany with a serious expression. “Look,” Eva says, “just in case we do both die, there’s something I want you to know. I, well, I want to be a cryptozoologist. For a non-profit. You know, something humanitarian, er, well, sasquatcharian. But yes. I want to like work with cryptos. For, like, minimum wage.” Her eyes light up at the thought. “Like, I don’t know, I thought maybe you and me can like found an organization, you know, like the SPCA. But for sasquatches. Err, I mean, sasquai? Sésq’ac?”

  Dany nods – but already, she can smell the danger. “Gas,” she says.

  The two of them head for the old stove.

  Two of the gas burners are on, the pilot lights out. After switching off the burners, Dany tries to open a window, but over the years, the seams have all been painted along with the frames, sealing them shut. In the distance, above them, she hears scuffling. Now and again, another strange and muffled bang.

  Dany looks at Eva and her friend shakes her head. “We turned off the gas, and now we should go,” Eva says.

  “I told you. Go wait in the yard,” Dany tells her. “But I’m going up.”

  “But, like, you’re my sidekick.”

  Dany rolls her eyes, but Eva puts a hand on her shoulder.

  “I am not losing you. No way. No how.”

  As they move deeper into the house, up the steps and onto the second floor, Dany catches the scent of something unsettling. More unsettling, even, than the smell of gas. There is, as always, the faint smell of whisky and lilacs – Bea’s scent – but under it, there is something else, something subtle, the kind of scent that comes and goes, there and then not, here and then gone. The smell reminds her of the burn ward… . In the air, a strange copper tang, one she associates with the inside of the body and that makes her afraid.

  “Where would I be if I were Bea?” Eva asks.

  Dany glances at her.

  “You sure she’s even home?”

  Dany nods. “Somebody’s definitely here.”

  “I know where I’d be,” Eva whispers dramatically. “I’d bloody well hide under the bed from monsters.”

  “You should wait outside,” Dany says. “Watch Mac.”

  “No,” Eva says. “I have to protect you.”

  Dany can’t help it. She laughs.

  “Not from them,” Eva says, seriously. “From you.”

  Dany narrows her eyes and looks at her friend, but Eva is staring straight ahead, and the expression on her face makes Dany’s heart skip a beat. She turns, follows Eva’s gaze, and that’s when she sees Bea.

  Bea, who has always been like a grandma to the girls. A slightly terrifying grandma, but a grandma nonetheless. Bea, who brings over dishes of pasta, plates of cookies, casseroles and soups. Bea, whose tongue is sharp but whose eyes are soft.

  She is wearing a flowery apron, and yes, on the surface, as always, she is Bea, their Bea. Mac’s Bea. But one look, and Dany knows – the Bea they both know is gone. This old woman’s face is wild with fright, and her hands are curled like claws around a pair of knitting needles.

  “I’m on fire,” Bea is saying, in that strange and broken way. “On fire.”

  Like Liz. She’s muttering just like Liz.

  But it is her eye that stops Dany cold. Something is wrong with her left eye. A strange liquid is leaking from the broken orb. One glance at the dark-tipped knitting needle confirms it. The eye has been perforated.

  Bea’s other eye bulges from her socket, looking wrong – so wrong. The swollen orb doesn’t belong in a human face. Her brain is swelling. Her swollen brain is actually putting pressure on her eyes, pushing them out.

  Eva is right.

  There are monsters.

  Little planets that consume us from within.

  And they aren’t creatures, just clusters of molecules… .

  And then Bea – who Dany loves, who Dany trusts with her little sister – raises the knitting needles in her hands, but they aren’t pointed outwards, they aren’t pointed at Dany. And that makes it worse.

  Infinitely worse.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 17

  ­Dany doesn’t know this girl, the one who fights Bea for the knitting needles. The one who doesn’t think about viruses or vectors – only about the so
ft orbs of an old woman’s eyes, the sharp needles in her hands. ­Dany roughly tears the knitting needles from Bea and then knocks the old woman back into her bedroom.

  She and ­Eva get the door closed, and ­Dany tosses the needles down the hall.

  All at once, ­Dany is more tired than she’s ever been in her life. She wipes her hands on her pants and slides down to the floor.

  ­Eva sits heavily down next to her. With a chagrined shrug, she passes ­Dany a small bottle of alcohol gel.

  ­Dany pours a glob on her hands and rubs them together. Her whole body is shaking. ­Dany hates the virus. Hates it. But most of all, she hates what the virus does to every last one of them – infected or not. “We need a chair,” she tells ­Eva. “Something to hold the door.”

  ­Dany squats on the ground, her shoulder lodged against the door. The tongue is in its groove and the old woman has gone quiet on the other side.

  ­Dany turns the handle and opens the door a crack – just a tiny bit – just enough for a whisper. “Bea? Hey, you in there, Bea?”

  The old woman shoves forward.

  She doesn’t mean to hurt ­Dany. She just wants to get out of the room she’s locked in. But when Bea shoves the door, the edge hits the side of ­Dany’s face, and there is an explosion of pain.

  A moment later, swearing, ­Eva is beside her. Together, they shoulder the door to a close. The metal tongue, once more, snicks into its groove.

  ­Dany slides to the ground, her back against the door, holding it in place. Already, she can feel her eye swelling. Feel her mouth filling with something warm and wet. She wants to spit the blood from her mouth, but can’t risk spattering blood near ­Eva. Instead, ­Dany swallows. The blood is lukewarm and salty, sickening. She tongues a tooth experimentally. It gives a little in its bed. God. But it was an accident. Bea would never hurt her. Not on purpose. Never.

  On the other side of the door, ­Dany can hear the old woman muttering. Only it isn’t Bea in there. It’s the virus. The virus is moving Bea’s puppet strings now. That’s not Bea, but a life-size viral host. She hears herself think it – hates herself for thinking it – but somehow, she can’t stop the word from coming. Viral. Bea is a viral.

  Finally, ­Eva drags the wooden captain’s chair over and together they angle it under the door handle.

  “Can we call someone?” ­Dany asks.

  “Outside,” ­Eva says. “We should get out of here first.”

  ­Dany sits there a moment, more sad than afraid. Here she is, turning on Bea like the old woman is nothing to her. ­Dany doesn’t want to be a bad person. But everywhere she goes, and everyone she loves, turns bad.

  “Everybody, everybody around me, they all die,” ­Dany says, her voice small.

  “No, no, no,” ­Eva says, pulling at her arm. “I need you to listen to me. This is not your fault. This is not on you.”

  ­Dany looks up at ­Eva.

  But then ­Eva is looking at her strangely, as if some new thought is only now occurring to her.

  ­Dany fingers her mask, checking the seal. Only after she is sure that her mask is in place does ­Dany get to her feet, get herself moving. Step follows step – exactly as they always do – and ­Dany, once again, finds herself walking out of the ruins of another life.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 18

  Outside of Bea’s house, Dany looks up at the sun. The fiery ball is set inside of a big blue sky and shines down on her bruised and battered face. Shines down on the three of them. Her arms are shaking and the kid, now, is in front of Dany – tugging on her hand – an urgent question in her eyes. But Dany can’t tell her, can’t find the words to explain to Mac about Bea. Shame burns inside of her. She’s let Bea down.

  Bea has been like a grandmother to Mac – and now, Dany’s let her down.

  Mac stares at her solemnly. But her eyes keep flicking from Eva to Dany to the house. She wants to know about Bea.

  Eva is the one to tell her.

  “Aw, Little Rabbit, Bea’s not up for a visit just now,” Eva says. “But she’s got a couple of new friends. Mister Sharps and Mister Pointy.”

  Mac, running tiny fingers over her nose plug, looks from Eva to Dany. Dany sees it – the worried expression in her eyes. Dany kneels down in front of her kid sister. Because she doesn’t want to lie to the kid about anything. Not anymore. Not ever.

  Not even about Santa Claus.

  Dany lifts a single finger towards Mac’s nose. Stops herself just in time. Slides that finger instead along the ridge of the kid’s ear, tucking away a strand of loose hair. She feels a kind of grief for the gesture, that moment her finger would gently arc into air before tapping down on the button of her little sister’s nose. A familiar gesture between them. Full of meaning, thick with repetition, a gesture they’ve come to and made and remade over her years on this planet. Gone.

  One day, she doesn’t know when, but one day, the kid would have been done with the gesture. But now, the virus has done away with it for them.

  “Bea’s sick,” Dany tells her. “I’m sorry, but we can’t help her. We don’t want you to get sick, too. Bea wouldn’t want that. ’Kay?”

  Mac looks up at Dany and, standing on her tippy toes, reaches up, touches a tiny finger to the outer ridge of Dany’s ear. A gift, that one tiny fingertip. And Dany, feeling that little tap, knows it will all be okay. Even if Jasper and Liz and Bea are gone. Because as long as Mac is okay, the world has a centre. As long as Mac is okay, gravity holds.

  Because Mac, she is all of it, she is the beating heart of Dany’s world.

  For a few minutes, they stand there, in silence – the sun beating down on them, the world reassembling itself into something like sense.

  “What do we do?” Eva finally asks.

  “Warn people,” Dany says, her shrug an open question.

  They stand in the sun in the alley, Eva instructing the little voice in her glasses to text every last person she knows.

  Finally, Eva calls Bianca. The right arm of her glasses ­separates into two limbs, and she slides one of these down towards her mouth, positioning the tiny microphone to pick up her voice. A moment later, Bianca is on speaker and Dany’s listening to the call.

  In the background, she hears a Tagalog soap opera on the shortwave. Dany can’t help it. The sounds of the kitchen, they put her in mind of Antoine. And then he has to figure in the equation too. As little as she likes it, as little as she wants to do with him, as little as he deserves to be part of her math, because he hasn’t earned it, there it is. She has to rescue her stupid father, too. On their way out of the city, she has to somehow break Norah out of jail, and then stop to pick up Antoine, too.

  In the background, the soap opera falls silent.

  She hears the receiver hit the hard stone tile of the kitchen floor – handcrafted, Italian – and realizes that Bianca has taken Eva literally. She’s simply dropped the phone to get Eva’s mother and go.

  Eva clicks some invisible button on her glasses and nods.

  “I’ll get my driver,” she says.

  But it’s too late. When Eva calls her driver, instructing him to pick her up, Dany hears his voice for the first time. “To hell with that,” the driver tells Eva. “I’ll mail the keys when I hit Alaska.” The call clicks off, and Eva makes a face. “Maybe I should have called my driver before I sent that mass text.”

  Dany looks up at the sky. Ten digits write themselves into the blue of forever. Like wisps of cloud, there and then slowly blurring at the edges. The answer. A way out. The number is there, after all, in her head. And she’s seen Faraday around, seen him putting groceries into his car at the local store. His old VW Bug might be a shit box, but it’s a shit box with four wheels. A shit box that rolls on the ground, presumably.

  “We’ll go to Faraday’s,” Dany says.

  “Uh, and stalking our history teacher, it helps
how?” Eva asks.

  “He has a car,” Dany says. “Besides, I owe him. If he hadn’t kept his mouth shut – back there – I’d be … I’d be … Me and Mac, we’d have been …” Dany shrugs. “Just, like, give me your glasses.”

  “What,” Eva says in mock seriousness. “Dany is utilizing the new technology. This is an emergency!” Still, she hands the glasses over. Dany addresses herself to the object in her hand – one lens irises into an opaque screen – and a moment later, she can see a reverse-lookup website in small, right before her eyes. A beat more and she is blinking at their history teacher’s home address.

  “Someone really should teach Mister Faraday about how personal privacy works in a digital age,” Eva says. She shakes her head sadly.

  Dany’s last call is about Bea. Isobel Lau takes down Bea’s address – but it isn’t Bea that Isobel wants to talk about.

  “The MDC sent people to your house,” Isobel says. “But somehow, we had the wrong address on file.” Her voice is dry with irony.

  “Why would they go there?” Dany asks.

  But she knows.

  The blood and tissue samples, the ones they took at the lab, they must have told Isobel what Dany is only now beginning to suspect. Dany takes the eGlasses off speaker and turns her back on Mac and Eva.

  Quietly, clinically, in the cold language of a scientist, Isobel draws a line from the new, mutated virus – the one that got Jasper – to Liz and Bea. The line runs right through her. Dany has infected them. It’s obvious. Dany all but knew it already.

  All but for one problematic fact.

  “I’m not sick,” she tells Isobel.

  “You’re asymptomatic,” Isobel says. “Your samples tested positive for antigens to both variants of the virus. So even if you aren’t feeling sick, we need to assume you’re infectious. We need you to come in.”

  The world spins, and all the while, Isobel offers up theories. What prior exposure to the mild strain of the virus might mean. Critical differences in T cells and immune response in the young. A recent study out of Oxford. “They’re only now documenting the existence of cases like this. Children, Dany, children and early adolescents who present with such mild symptoms they’re almost subclinical. Of course, that’s with the earlier strain,” she adds, and Dany’s head spins. “We’ll need to watch you, carefully, and we should run a cerebrospinal fluid analysis stat,” Isobel begins, but Dany is done.