The XY

by Virginia Bergin

“Come home now,” Kate says.

  The room…it’s empty. I don’t know how it got to be empty.

  Only Plat and Kate and Mason remain.

  “Come on,” Plat echoes, helping me to my feet.

  My legs are numb. I can hardly walk. I walk.

  In the lane, stumbling home through fast-falling snow, I say again, “But I did it.”

  “He’s taking the rap,” Kate says, breathing so deep on the night air a fear about her lungs manages to burst into my stunned brain. “D’you understand?”

  “They talked to him,” Plat is saying. “He Agreed.”

  “He Agreed,” Kate echoes.

  “Code of Honor,” Mason whispers to the sky, astonished by the falling of snow.

  Chapter 24

  Right and Wrong

  “It’s not right.”

  That’s all I keep saying. To myself—and to Kate, and to Plat, and to Mason. And what gets said in between chills me colder than I have ever been.

  “You’re worth ten of him,” Kate says, sitting me down at the kitchen table. “Sorry, Mason, but that’s how it is.”

  It’s shocking—so shocking—to hear these shocking things coming out of Kate’s mouth, but what is apparent to me is that this isn’t some kind of hate or anger speaking; it’s logic drenched in sorrow. Muffled by snow.

  “Guess so,” says Mason.

  “But…he’s a boy,” I say. I’m not even sure what I mean by that—not anymore. I was brought up to believe they were precious. Dangerous but precious?

  “And he’ll still be a boy, wherever he ends up,” Kate says. “D’you understand? It’s his job to produce sperm, and it always will be. Maybe in another sixty years, it’ll be different. Maybe it’ll take another hundred years. It’s harsh, but that’s how it is. You though… River, I don’t know what restoration would get decided on if you took the blame for this, but I’m pretty sure it’d be bad news—for your future. For our future.”

  “Took the blame? I DID it. The whole village knows I did it! This is not right.”

  “You’re the only one thinks that,” says Mason. “I mean, ain’t that how it works around here? If the most people think it’s right, it is right.”

  “We’d just say that it had been Agreed,” Plat says quietly. “But Kate is right: you’ve got to think about your future.”

  “What about his future?”

  “What about it?” Mason snorts.

  “His future is set,” says Kate, grimly.

  “The way you’re talking…you’re making it sound like he’s a different species or something.”

  “Ain’t me that’s different,” he mumbles.

  “He might as well be a different species,” says Kate. “Didn’t what that man did to you prove that?”

  I feel sick at the memory of it, sick and angry. And I wonder what it’s going to take, and how long it’s going to take, to find a place to put that memory—far, far away from everything that is good in my world.

  “That wasn’t Mason.”

  “No. But Mason wasn’t raised like you.”

  “He’s still a person though, isn’t he?”

  “Technically, yes.”

  “I’ve read about this,” Plat says, “about the way some men used to talk about women—now listen to how you’re talking about him.”

  I’ve never seen this, Plat challenging Kate. Makes my numbed brain—heating with anger—wonder again why Plat abstained.

  “It’s not the same.”

  “How is it not the same?”

  “Because in between then and now, we nearly got wiped out. Them and us. All of us. The whole of the human race. This isn’t prejudice. This isn’t sexism. This isn’t anything other than practicality. Wake up, girl! It is not the same!”

  “Then how come it sounds the same?” says Plat.

  Kate sighs, gets up, and shoves the kettle on the stove.

  “You weren’t there. You don’t know how it was,” she says. “You, River, the mummas, all of you: you’re clueless.”

  Kate says that to me a lot. Usually it’s about whatever I’m wearing. She says it wasn’t just men who died; it was fashion.

  “No voting, no education, no legal rights, no decent jobs, no decent pay, no control over fertility. Wasn’t that how it was?” says Plat.

  “Not in my time. You’re muddled on your facts. Things had changed.”

  “Not for all women.”

  “No.” Kate turns around. “For sure. And for the rest of us, in the countries where everything was supposed to be just peachy…it wasn’t at all. It was a different kind of bad. It was a sneaky, poisonous kind of bad. So sneaky I hardly even knew it at the time. Equal but not equal. Different standards. And it was normal.”

  The kettle screams, so quick to boil in our superheated house. Kate shoves it off the heat.

  “It was so normal we never really questioned half the things that went on,” she says. “I never questioned it. I never even thought about it until River came along.”

  She sits back down at the table. She grabs my dread-frozen hands, clutches them within her age-frozen hands—her hands that are tool-cut scarred from years of hard work.

  “You have freedom,” she says to me. “I didn’t even know what it meant until I saw you. Sweetie pop, if my mother could see you, she’d be so amazed and so proud and”—Kate wells up; she doesn’t really do positive expressed emotion—“she’d also tell you to shave your legs and use mascara.”

  Kate’s mumma sold cosmetics to her neighbors. That’s how she made money Kate’s daddy couldn’t touch. Her money.

  Kate shrieks with crazy laughter. Emotion overload.

  “Ah! I’m just kidding! Well, I’m not, because you really would look a whole lot better if you’d—oh, don’t listen to me. My mother, she would have been blown away by you,” Kate says, wiping away those rare tears before they can fall.

  Mason, he shifts back his chair slowly—a quiet grumble.

  “And I think your mother would be proud of you,” Kate tells him.

  “I don’t know what she-wolf dropped me,” Mason says.

  It’s a savage comment. If one of the littler ones said anything like it, we’d…just ignore it. You’ve got to circle back around to such obvious expressions of anger. Kate performs a handbrake turn:

  “And your father would be proud too,” Kate says.

  “I doubt it,” Mason says. “And he ain’t here to ask, is he? She just killed him.”

  “For which I do most sincerely thank you,” Mason says into the silence that follows.

  The silence continues.

  “Your father…?” Kate says.

  “I tried to tell you last night, but you up and left,” Mason says to me.

  “He was your father?”

  “Unit father! I don’t know who my father is any more than anyone does—any more than you know who your she-wolf mother is!”

  “My mumma…she’s my mother.”

  Mason, he stares at me. “She’s your real mother?”

  “Yes.”

  All this time, it never occurred to me that he would think otherwise. The resemblance alone, surely? My heart fills with pity for him.

  “What will happen to Mason?” I ask Plat.

  “Whatever the National Council decides,” she says.

  “He’ll probably end up in goddamn China,” says Kate. “I am sorry, you know,” she says to Mason, “but we can’t challenge this whole trade thing right now…even if we wanted to. There’s just too much at stake.” She looks at me.

  My head is full of thoughts. Thoughts I don’t want to be there. Thoughts that feel as alien in my head as Mason being here in the first place. I am used to thinking hard, but it’s math I know. Correct and incorrect. Things you can work out, even if it takes a long time. See
ms to me people have been puzzling over this whole girl-boy thing for hundreds—maybe even thousands—of years, so how would someone like me, who never really listened in community studies and only met a boy for the first time in her life a few weeks ago and pretty much hates any kind of slippery debate—how would someone like me know what’s right and wrong here?

  “If Mason were a girl,” I say to Plat, “what would the restoration be?”

  “The Agreement is clear,” she says. “Usually the victim’s family would have the first say on what the restoration would be. Although there isn’t really any ‘usually,’ there are so few cases.”

  “What if the victim had no family?”

  “I don’t think that has ever happened.”

  “But what if?”

  “The communities involved would be asked. They’d be consulted anyway, as part of the process. As would the perpetrator’s family.”

  “What if the perpetrator had no family?”

  Plat shrugs.

  “But he has,” says Kate. “He has! Mason has a mumma! Everyone has a mumma!”

  Kate places the ring on the table in front of me. It is her engagement ring. Silver, with a diamond. A once-was ring, a gift from her boyfriend. It’s not that people don’t wear such things anymore. They do; people exchange and wear all kinds of rings. Mumma wears one for the National Council and another she won’t talk about. I grew up thinking it was for me until the day I told Kate I thought that, and Kate laughed, so I asked Mumma, and Mumma said it was also for me. But this ring? It is so precious to Kate, yet never ever worn. I have only been allowed to see it a few times in my life. I have never been allowed to touch it, and now she is giving it to me.

  “We should never have asked the National Council to decide restoration,” Kate says. “Plat is right: his mumma must decide.”

  Mason, Plat, and I are silent—as we have been for the past ten minutes as Kate shouted on the phone to Akesa, to the granmummas, to persons unknown, as she rummaged in her bedroom.

  “We can find out who she is. All those tests Akesa did? Let’s just say his DNA info is not secure. It could be hacked—very easily. It could be matched—very easily. Uh! Do I have to spell it out for you?” she says as we all stare blankly at her.

  “Clueless,” she mutters. “You’re going to go to some people who can locate his mumma. Now you take this,” Kate says to me, sliding the ring across the table with one work-scarred finger, “and you go to this address.”

  I see her finger hesitate for a second before it leaves that ring. The first time it has been out of her possession in sixty years. She lays a crumpled scrap of paper on the table: BABYLAND, BULLRING, it says, block capitals in her atrocious handwriting.

  I look up at her, still not quite understanding—or perhaps not quite willing to understand.

  “You’re saying this isn’t right, aren’t you? You’re saying it’s not right Mason should take the blame,” she says to me.

  I nod, uneasy.

  “If you’ve seen a problem, you have to come up with a solution, don’t you? Well, lucky you, I’ve thought of it for you. You take this ring to this place and you trade it for his mother’s identity.”

  “And then what?” Mason jumps in.

  “And then you’ll be safe,” says Kate. “Trust me: she’ll keep you safe.”

  “I don’t trust no—”

  “Oh, put a sock in it, would you? You’ll be fine. And if you’re not fine, you can come right on back here and have a good old whine at me.”

  “No, I—”

  “What? You’d rather be shipped to China? How gutless are you? This is a chance, and you need to take it.”

  Mason falls silent again.

  I pick up the piece of paper as though holding it would make any of this—or her handwriting—any clearer. “I don’t even know where this is,” I tell her.

  “The Bullring—it’s in Birmingham?” Plat says.

  “Correct,” says Kate. “There’s a train at 5:00 a.m., gets into Birmingham at seven. If you leave at four, you should be okay.”

  “The snow?” says Plat.

  “Three then,” says Kate. “Two thirty just to be on the safe side.”

  “By horse?” says Plat.

  Kate frowns—so do I. But I’m thinking, This is crazy and scary and typical Kate, but this is a thing I can do.

  “My bike can handle snow,” I say, meaning I can handle snow. And then I remember: my bike is dumped in the woods, miles away, tank empty. There is the Bonneville in the workshop, but even if it could handle off road—and it can’t—it is almost as precious to Kate as her ring; the only use it ever gets is a once-a-month trip up and down the lane—So I know it’s still alive, Kate says.

  “Can I take your bike?” I ask Plat.

  “You can’t take a bike. It won’t matter if you even manage to wheel it a mile away before you start it up: everyone will hear.”

  “I’ll wheel it two miles!”

  “Better to take the little pony,” Kate nods, in agreement with Plat.

  I glance at the kitchen clock; just gone midnight now, though it could be somewhat wrong. I grab the phone Kate’s been ranting on: 12:10 a.m. I recalculate based on ONE horsepower: Milpy plodding in snow, in a bad mood—she’s bound to be. She won’t like this.

  “I should go now.”

  “I’ll get you some warmer clothes,” she says to Mason. “Well, obviously you’re going to have to take him with you,” she says to the look of horror on my face.

  “No. I don’t want to.”

  “You have to take him.”

  “Oh. Wait, what?” says Mason. “No. I can’t do that. No way. Did you see the way them she-wolves was around me back there?! All staring at me like I’m some kind of freak!”

  “That’s because you are a freak,” says Kate. “To them, I mean. Because they know what you are. I mean—look: most of them have never seen a boy, or ever expected to—”

  “They. Stared. It was…not courteous.”

  “Ha.” Kate smiles. “So you’re speaking the language now, are you? Your mumma’s going to love that. Trust me, if we put the right sort of clothes on you, no one’s going to bat an eyelid.”

  Mason tugs at his fuzzy beard.

  “Facial hair is hardly unusual,” says Plat.

  “I never saw no one in that room with this much.”

  “That’s because Hope’s mumma wasn’t there,” mutters Kate.

  “She abstained too?” I ask.

  “No,” says Plat. “She Agreed by proxy. She was too…upset to attend. The point is, Mason, facial hair is not an issue. Especially not in Birmingham.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he says. “All I know is how a female is supposed to look.”

  Plat and I shrug helplessly at Kate, who rolls her eyes. “All right. I’ll shave your face if it’s going to make you feel better,” she says.

  “It will not make me feel better,” he says.

  “Oh, get over yourself,” says Kate.

  “Fuck you,” Mason mutters, then glances up at us. Only Kate seems to be not remotely shocked by his words. He lowers his gaze.

  Oh, but in that glance, I see it: his fear and his helplessness.

  “River, I don’t think you should go,” Plat says. “Look, I wasn’t thinking straight just now. I’m not disagreeing with the principle. I see the argument that Mason should be treated fairly, and I understand why Kate—and the rest of the granmummas—would want this.”

  “You understand nothing,” says Kate.

  “But I don’t think you should go—with him—because we cannot be certain that he won’t attack you, as that other XY did.”

  The memory, loose in me, chills my blood. Even Kate is quiet for a moment.

  “Code of Honor,” Mason says.

 
“What is that?” says Plat. “That means nothing. That’s just words.”

  “That’s all I’ve got,” Mason says. “I wouldn’t do that thing you’re saying. I wouldn’t hurt River. I owe her my life.”

  I don’t feel relieved at hearing this. I feel again a burden I do not want to carry: his gratitude for having been treated like a human being. I want to be free of it. I want him gone. The kaleidoscope is back, being twisted this way and that. I did a thing I could never have imagined doing. I didn’t mean to do it, but I did do it. And he is prepared to take the blame for it. Any which way it all twists, I see Mason—and I do not want to see him. I wish I had never seen him, but…

  “I trust him,” I tell them. And it astonishes me that this is so. “We need to hurry.”

  Kate nods, but still she turns to Mason.

  “You listen to me,” she says to him, pointing her scarred, shaking finger in his face, “if anything happens to my great-granddaughter, you will die. Slowly and painfully. We will hunt you down.”

  This is not so very far away from the kind of casual threat Kate would make to me in jest. She was particularly fierce with me when Plat and I pulled off the raft trip to Gloucester. But I have been hunted down; I know what it feels like to be running for your life—and so does Mason.

  “I know it,” he says.

  “That’s it?” says Kate. “That’s all you’ve got to say?”

  “What else am I supposed to say? You’re issuing a threat. I’m telling you I’ve heard it.”

  “You could reassure me that nothing will happen to my granddaughter.”

  “I already did. Sayin’ a thing twice ain’t gonna make it any truer.”

  Kate scowls at him.

  “Please, shut up now,” I tell her, and we go to my poky room, Plat and I.

  I am so grateful that she stays, hunched on my creaky cot, as I shove items into my backpack—no more than I’d take to my cousins’ for a weekend stay, which seems too much. I won’t be gone for more than a day, will I?

  “How long do you think this’ll take?” I ask her.

  “It doesn’t have to take any time at all,” Plat says.

  “Plat.”

  “River,” she says, standing and putting her loving arms around me, “don’t go.”