Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  All of this, while Dany was unconscious in the burn ward?

  “When the work farm burned down, there was chaos,” she says slowly. “All those bodies. Norah said they didn’t identify me right away. That I was out of it for a couple of days, but then she came and identified me.”

  He stares out at the trees in silence.

  “But Aunt Norah came before I woke up,” she says, glancing at the back of her aunt’s head, up there in the cab. “So you made the deal – not knowing if I’d survived.”

  Antoine nods once, a nod so subtle she could have missed it.

  Dany turns and, for the first time, looks her father in the eye.

  She reaches out. Her hand hovers close to his face – but she doesn’t touch. But yes, she could. She could reach right out and touch that pear-shaped tear in wonder.

  Mac looks up from her book, a question on her little face.

  “Norah made a home for you girls,” Antoine says, giving Mac a reassuring pat.

  “I don’t understand,” Dany says. “How come they put Norah back inside?”

  Antoine shakes his head, a bitter expression on his face.

  “Parole violation,” he says. “The agreement they made her sign, it said she wouldn’t attend a violent protest.” Again, he shakes his head.

  “It was peaceful,” Dany says. “I was there. It was a memorial for murdered women on the Eastside,” she says. “But they arrested her anyway and put her in the hospice.”

  Antoine nods.

  She steals a look at her aunt, up front. She’s squeezed between Eva and Faraday, but the cab of the truck might as well be another world and her aunt’s face is turned away from her.

  For a long time, Dany says nothing. Still, she thinks she understands.

  When Dany looks at her father again, something in her has changed. Some tension, one that’s always felt like an essential part of her, eases. She looks at Antoine, measures this change, and then she turns away, her eyes once more on the line of trees.

  “Let me show you one more time,” Antoine says to Mac.

  “She gets it,” Dany tells him. “Little Bear’s tail is Polaris. A protractor, a ruler, a plumb line.”

  “And the angles?” he asks.

  But Dany just points at the kid’s head and looks away.

  “Well, maybe you can find your way around, at that,” Antoine says. A smile plays at the corner of his mouth. “Sometimes, it’s just good to just look up at the stars.”

  And then, looking ahead, he nods to it.

  In the distance, ahead, a water tower. The large structure proclaims the name of the town in red paint. Once they pass it, Dany turns back, watching the big old bulb of a thing recede into the distance.

  “C’est là,” Antoine tells her. “A few minutes, now, we should see your checkpoint.”

  Dany leans over the side rail, looking up ahead – but the truck, under Eva’s hands, is swerving from side to side. She glances at Faraday in the cab up front. Like her aunt, he’s green.

  Eva, behind the wheel, is doing her best impression of a zigzag.

  Dany can’t help it. For that one moment, she forgets all about the checkpoint and grins.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 44

  So far, Dany has seen nothing on the road. Not one sign of life.

  They haven’t passed another car or seen so much as a shadow behind a curtain. The only creature they’ve passed is a skinny dog, chained up outside an old farmhouse. The dog is too lazy or tired to raise its head and bark. Years from now, Dany worries, someone will find its bones chained in the grass.

  She sits back down in the cargo hold and turns to Antoine.

  “It’s weird,” Dany calls out. “I don’t see anybody. But I feel like we’re being watched.”

  Antoine looks at his daughter sharply and nods. “I feel it too,” he says.

  Ahead of them – somewhere on the far side of town – the sky is blossoming into a dark flower – all that smoke. Whole houses must be burning to produce so much smoke. On the wind, though only for a moment, there and then gone, she smells Darling-­Holmes. The place is there, in the toxic fumes given off by burning clothes, in the sickening stench of burnt meat.

  Dany’s heart races and all of a sudden, she’s tired and chilled to the bone.

  But it’s just like the dark, she tells herself. An illusion. A person’s fear is almost always focused on the wrong thing. She doesn’t need to be scared of the smoke, any more than she needs to fear the dark.

  She tightens her arms around her chest. The wind is cold, that’s all. It’s just that the wind has picked up and it’s blasting across the cargo hold. Her breathing slows, her heartbeat slows, and Dany catches sight of a billboard ahead.

  From here, she can see the picture on the billboard. A little family. Behind them, a strange sun is setting. Only the sun has been painted in a vaguely ovoid shape, like it’s one large burning eye. And that eye is staring at Dany with a look she knows all too well.

  Your fault, the burning eye says. Your fault.

  Trying to understand her own feelings has always been like staring at an impressionist painting, one that has been cut up into jagged bits, remade into a collage. In the back of the pickup, sitting next to her sister, is a man named Antoine. But who is he? An environmental activist? A criminal? Billy the goddamned Kid?

  A liar?

  A snitch?

  My Dad, the eco-terrorist.

  Maybe a little bit of all of them.

  When Dany was really small, her aunt told her all about Antoine. How he’d lived in the squats. Sometimes, when she was really little, she and her mom lived there too. Dany’s heard stories from her aunt, about the time Antoine and his friends blew up a pipeline construction site. Most of the stories are about the activism they’ve done. But even seeing through her aunt’s eyes, Dany is always confused on a certain point. Somehow, none of the stories reveal who Antoine is.

  She honestly can’t say.

  Dany looks ahead, watches as that baleful sun – the burning eye on the billboard – grows huge. Slowly, the words below that burning eye come into focus. In a heartbeat, she knows, they will be past it and the eye will wink out and disappear.

  But before the billboard disappears, she sees the full picture. There, darkly outlined against the eye of the sun, there is a family: a dad, a mom and a little girl.

  The billboard is a government ad for vaccines.

  “Protect the ones you love,” the ad proclaims, “from an invisible threat.”

  She sits all alone in the cargo bed, looking from Antoine to Mac, and she knows, she knows, there isn’t any room for her in this picture.

  The thing about Dany’s brain is this.

  Dany is quick to see patterns.

  Dany hears patterns in the rush of water, sees mathematical figures in a sky filled with clouds. Dany senses patterns in the arrangement of skin pigmentation on a human hand and she hears words in the broken language of the virus.

  She sees a pattern in the way the virus leaps, from one person to the next, always in a concentric circle, always moving outwards, and in its centre – the rock that displaces all of that water in rounding waves – a single variable, a constant, an X.

  There is only one way to see her sister have a life.

  Only one way to solve this equation.

  With subtraction.

  Dany knows that if she gets taken at the checkpoint, her family will be safe. But Dany isn’t ready to be taken, and, as the checkpoint comes into sight, all at once Dany knows two things. First, Dany doesn’t really want to save her sister’s life. Not if it means she will lose her. Because as they pull up to the checkpoint, Dany knows that she doesn’t want their truck to get stopped. She doesn’t want to get taken away. That she isn’t ready to let go.

  Second, Dany knows she has
already infected her sister. Not with the virus. Not that. But in a way, she has infected her with something worse.

  Fear.

  Because, over the last two months, Dany has turned her sister’s world inside out. She’s let her past overtake Mac’s present. And this is almost worse than the virus. Darling-­Holmes is the worst place Dany has ever been, and the place has gotten to Mac through her.

  In her blood, there is a virus. But it isn’t even the virus that has ruined everything. In a way, it isn’t even Darling-­Holmes.

  It’s Dany.

  She is the vessel by which the past has overtaken the present. That’s on her. Her. If fear is the disease then Dany is the vector, and through her, the horrors of the past return.

  She sees her sister’s smiling face, and the smile is new to Dany, and she knows, she knows, that is all on her.

  As they draw up to the checkpoint trucks, Dany sees that there is no one there, no one to cull her from their little herd, and she takes a deep breath. In an instant, there’s a flood of relief, and a beat later, because of the relief, there is shame.

  And then Dany is sad.

  Impossibly goddamned sad.

  Because she knows, she’ll never have the strength to do what she needs to in order to protect her sister. Their truck slows, drives onto the rough shoulder of the road – passes the two pickup trucks – and they’re on their way.

  Staring out at the line of trees, Dany knows what she should do. Dany should do the math herself. Subtract the X. Save her sister. But she can’t. It isn’t in her; it’s just not in her to do.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 45

  A few minutes later, Antoine calls out for Eva to pull over. Here, on the stretch of road that fronts the rural hospice, where the stench of burning flesh is at its worst, Eva drives onto the shoulder and, as Dany watches, Antoine lowers the back gate and eases himself down. “Here,” he tells them. “I’ll leave the monitor here, where the bodies are, they’ll assume I’m …” But his sentence falls away, and he flicks a self-conscious glance at Dany’s arms.

  “Burned to a crisp,” Dany finishes.

  The old man digs into his tool box, looking for a pair of wire cutters.

  The kid is looking up at her sister with big questioning eyes. “I’m okay,” she tells Mac, though she’s still shivering. “I’m just cold.”

  Dany closes her eyes and then she feels it. A sudden snuggling warmth. The kid is cozying into her, that warm little face nuzzling against her, so that the seal of Dany’s mask peels away from her cheek.

  Dany reacts without thinking.

  She shoves the kid – hard.

  The kid is so slight, so small, that Dany’s shove sends her flying. The back of the kid’s head hits the metal cab of the truck. Already, Dany can see it. Fat tears are welling up in those big eyes. The kid rubs the back of her head and, through narrowed eyes, stares at her big sister, eyes full of betrayal. Dany reaches out for her, but the kid scoots away, retreating to her corner of the cargo hold.

  “I’m sorry,” Dany whispers. “I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”

  But the kid has backed up as far as she can go and, from her little corner, looks at her sister warily. Antoine is holding the wire cutters in his hand, staring at Dany. It’s a long look, cold and penetrating. As if he sees right through her.

  “You and I will talk,” he says to Dany.

  Antoine shakes his head, turns his back on the girls and limps off into the smoke.

  Antoine’s gone for what feels like a long time. Dany and her kid sister have time to stake out opposing corners of the cargo hold. “You want me to read?” Dany finally asks.

  But it’s like she’s dead to the kid.

  Still, Dany digs into her backpack, coming up with her copy of The Wizard of Oz. Dany flips through the book, finding the page with its corner folded down – the place the two had left off the night before. Dany doesn’t know if it’s the smell of the smoke or if somehow the virus is beginning to affect her, but her hands are shaking, badly. It’s hard to hold the book. A few sentences in, the kid scooches over, reaches out for the book, but Dany shrugs away from her. “I’ve got it,” she says gently.

  Dany forces the feeling down, the impulse she’s got. To push her sister away again. Instead, she trusts the seal of her mask and trains her eyes on the book. How much risk is too much? How close can her sister get to her and still be safe?

  Dany is reading the words aloud, but she has a weird feeling – like she’s fallen out of time. The passage is weirdly familiar, and she knows she’s seen these sentences before. But her memory of the page is dim, a ghostly wisp. It’s just a feeling. And all around them, there is swirling smoke and the smell of burnt skin and meat. All around them is Darling-­Holmes.

  “Did I read this part already?” she asks the kid.

  Her kid sister gives her a wary look, as if she’s ready to dart away. After a moment she nods. One skinny finger points at the page.

  “Read some more,” the finger says.

  Dany’s voice falls to a whisper as she reads. Yes, she’s sure of it. She was reading this part out loud to her sister the night before – the part where the group gets separated, and they lose the Scarecrow. But when she tries to call up her memory of the page, the picture is distant and fuzzy. Dreamlike, strange. But yes, she remembers this much: Dorothy and the Scarecrow are rafting down a river. The night before, she read this when Mac was all but asleep. Still, though she read it – read it aloud – somehow, she just doesn’t remember very well.

  So she doesn’t see what is coming.

  “‘We must certainly get to the Emerald City if we can,’ the Scarecrow continued.”

  The night before, Mac looked a question up at her big sister, and Dany, she said, “Yeah. That’s where we’re going. Only it’s an Emerald Island.”

  Dany has forgotten how hard they can be, the stories grown-ups weave for children. Dorothy and the Lion and the Tin Woodman, they simply accept the Scarecrow’s loss and go on. It’s seriously screwed up.

  “We must certainly get to the Emerald City if we can,” Dany reads, and Mac closes her eyes to better picture it. Dany pictures Scarecrow, too, pushing “so hard on his long pole that it stuck fast in the mud at the bottom of the river.”

  “Then,” Dany reads, “before he could pull it out again – or let go – the raft was swept away, and the poor Scarecrow left clinging to the pole in the middle of the river.”

  That’s what Dany dreamed the night before.

  In her dream, she was left clinging to a pole.

  And for a moment, Dany has to close the book. She looks out to the smoke-filled ruins of the village hospice. Because she wants the book to turn out different for the Scarecrow. She wants to make the book come out different. She wants there to be some other answer than minus X.

  When Antoine gets into the back of the pickup, Mac abandons Dany and scrambles to his side. Norah pushes open the window between the cab and the cargo bed, looking a question Antoine’s way.

  “It’s done,” Antoine tells her with a shrug. “There were a lot of bodies. More than a hundred. Hopefully, when they find my monitor here, that’s that. Take them weeks to work through the dead. If they do.”

  So, yes, she hears Antoine telling Eva she should go – and she feels the shudder of the truck as they drive on, past the burning remains of the rural hospice, and glancing up, her eyes take in the charred remains of the infected they’ve burned, ashen, stiff in death, like the blackened bodies of Pompeii, and she wraps her arms around herself and turns inwards, shutting her eyes against something even worse.

  One single burning image.

  A body, burned black, trying to drag itself away from the burning human pyre.

  All around them now, closing in on all of her family, those that she loves most in this world, there is the smell of sm
oke and burning flesh. The past made present.

  Darling-­Holmes.

  Dany closes her eyes and tries to remember a different past.

  It’s the night before and there is the sound of Dany’s voice, and she’s reading to her little sister, Mac. She’ll have this, at least. For as long as she lives.

  Along with all of the bad, there are little bits of good, as well. She’ll always have the feeling of it, as long as there is a Dany to remember: the nights, reading to Mac, the spray of stars overhead, the night song of crickets, the memory of Phil’s throaty laughter and this last gift, given only today – the sound of her little sister’s voice.

  As she looks out of the truck at a meadow, greening with spring, she sees a girl, about her own age. As the truck rolls up to where she stands, the girl, by the side of the road, drops the small bundle she’s carrying in her arms and runs. The thing, whatever it is, is wrapped in a soft fleece blanket. But the little bundle is still. So terribly still.

  The girl tears across the field, barefoot. Dany sees the girl’s pinkish soles, flashing as she runs.

  “It’s just a doll,” Antoine tells Mac.

  But when Dany meets his gaze, she sees the dark cast of his eyes. He gives a subtle shake of his head, silencing her question. As their truck bumps over the road, she comes back to that image again and again, pictures that tiny bundle and both does and doesn’t want to know.

  When the Scarecrow is lost in the river, what is it Baum says?

  “And they were very sorry to leave him.”

  Dany’s eyes blur and though these aren’t tears, because Dany doesn’t cry, she brushes roughly at her eyes with her sleeve.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 46