Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  She knew about how, in some languages, the word for hello is the same as the one for goodbye.

  When Dany wakes again, it’s morning.

  Someone has been into Faraday’s room, to prop open the window with a wooden dowel. She hears a strange chirping sound, like crickets in a glass jar. It takes a minute for her to figure out what the sound is – but yes, Antoine’s in April means peepers, those tiny frogs that call out when the sun warms the skin of the land.

  It’s a weirdly hopeful sound.

  In the bed, Faraday has propped up the pillow and is sitting up.

  Her history teacher, who yesterday looked to be at death’s door, is sitting up, his nose buried in a book on trauma and the human brain. Her book. Jasper’s book. Dany grins at him. “You’re okay,” she says.

  He snaps the book to a close, looks at her and smiles. “Good morning,” he says.

  Someone, she sees, has already been in to change his bandage. The cloth is fresh and white and, but for a tiny red line on the fabric, you wouldn’t even guess the extent of it.

  Here, in the hush of dawn, Dany can hear all of it, the singing of the peepers, the sound of blood running through her veins, and quieter still, that weird and eerie static, the math in her own neurons – the quiet and constant stream of numbers that runs through her brain. And, for a second, she remembers the dream and remembers Zeke.

  What is it the little boy said?

  Something about hello. Or goodbye. But the dream is gone, and all she can hold onto is the overwhelming feeling of the dream, that Zeke is okay and it’s time to step off.

  But step off what?

  “Take another Oxy,” her aunt says, stepping into the doorway. “You’re going to feel like you’ve been hit by a sledgehammer when Antoine’s happy pills wear off.”

  “I’d like a clear head,” Faraday says. “I missed most of yesterday and I think I have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “Take half a tab then,” Norah says. “Think, with a bit of help, you can make it to the kitchen?”

  Faraday nods, but before her aunt can get in the way, Dany is there, by his side. She runs her fingers over the seal of her mask, and steps up to help Faraday out of bed.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 42

  The rough walls of the kitchen still wear the original paint. Though it’s been forever, they’re just like she remembers, milky green, the paint worn and blistered with age. In the kitchen doorway, Eva’s waiting for them, her hair tousled with sleep.

  Seeing Faraday on his feet, Eva grins and steps aside. Dany helps their teacher into a seat at the kitchen table. And as soon as she steps in, the smell hits her, hits her hard. Dany isn’t hungry. She’s ravenous.

  Antoine is stirring a ridiculously large pot over a pair of burners on a Coleman stove. Mac is at his side, wide-eyed and alert, a big wooden spoon in hand. Dany takes her seat at the old pinewood table.

  The kitchen table is heaped with vegetable scrapings.

  With a single stroke of his broad arm, Antoine sweeps the leavings into a bin for the chickens, and Mac sets down half a dozen bowls. This, this is no breakfast. This is a fully fledged dinner. Eva sits there, a grin on her face and a spoon in each hand. She looks at Dany, raises her eyebrows. Dany has caught the mood, too. She grins right back. She’s going to demolish some rabbit stew.

  Norah joins them a minute later. Seeing her in the full kitchen light, Dany notices the difference. The goose egg is now half its previous size, and the loose flap of skin? Neatly stitched. The prison chain, she sees, has chafed the skin around Aunt Norah’s wrist, leaving it red and raw.

  “Your stitches,” Dany asks. “Did you do them with a mirror?”

  “Oh God, no,” Norah says and smiles proudly at Mac. “Mac’s good with her hands. A quick study. She really just has to see a thing once to get it.”

  Antoine smiles down at Mac, the pride on his face clear.

  “What’s that thing,” Eva wants to know, “about hair dryers.”

  But Dany shakes her head once, sharply. Luckily, Mac doesn’t seem to be paying any mind.

  Eva raises her shoulders. “Okay,” she says. “Again, alarming.”

  But by then, Antoine is ladling out huge servings of the stew. The stew is thick, rich with meat. She’s dipped her spoon into the bowl and gotten it halfway to her face when she remembers her mask. Glancing at Eva, she sees that her friend has just ripped her mask off. The mask dangles from Eva’s neck, and she is shovelling the thick stew in.

  But Dany leaves her place at the table, bowl in hand, and sits on the floor in a corner of the kitchen. Only then, sitting on a different plane, does she remove her mask. It’s taken all of her will not to just tear the thing from her face and dig right in. She’s lifting the spoon to her mouth when she feels it. His eyes on her. Antoine has stopped what he’s doing and is watching Dany, taking in how she’s sitting on the floor, a little bit apart from everyone.

  Dany shrugs off his gaze and digs in.

  There’s a gamey taste to the stew, but that doesn’t bother her one bit. She eats three full bowls. When she’s finished, she stares down at her empty bowl, suddenly at a loss. She can’t put it in the sink with the others. Can’t take that risk. In the end, she just gives the bowl and spoon a rinse, slips them in a plastic bag and puts the bundle in her backpack.

  But Antoine – with his preternatural attention – has eyes on her again.

  She puts her mask back in place, reforms the seal and takes a seat at the table again. Antoine isn’t eating like the rest of them. No, her father’s just sitting there, in a chair, his bad leg jutting straight out, eyes on Dany. He looks deep in thought.

  But Mac is on him in an instant. She works her way between Antoine’s legs, her tiny hands on his knees, eyes wide, a smile on her face.

  Dany can’t help it. She grins too. Not at Antoine, but at her kid sister. The kid’s okay. Here, in a halfway normal environment, she’s coming out of her shell again. Resilient, that’s what the child workers always said about kids. It’s what they said on the burn ward too, though she doubted the coroner agreed.

  Kids are resilient.

  Dany figured that was their excuse. That little word pretty much let you do to kids whatever you wanted.

  “All right,” Antoine says, beckoning to Mac with a finger. “There’s time for one story before you go get dressed and brush your teeth. Allons-y. You’ll like this one. There’s a bear in it. A big fat grizzly like me.”

  Norah spears a homemade pickle and, holding it up at the end of her fork, smiles. “This, I want to hear,” she says.

  Eva nods, her eyes big and happy. “Me too,” she chimes.

  Dany doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t leave either.

  Antoine has plucked her little sister up into the air. Turning her in mid-air, he settles the kid on his lap. Antoine spins out his fairy tale, as Faraday and Aunt Norah sip a thin black liquid meant to approximate coffee. Antoine makes the stuff from roasted chicory roots, the pretty blue flowers that litter the edges of the property here. As Antoine unfolds the tale, Dany recognizes the shape of the story, but it’s as if it was a new skin hung on much older bones.

  Mac loves it. And when Antoine is done, he plucks Mac up once more and sets her down on her feet. “Be a good one and go get ready,” he tells her.

  But Mac doesn’t move, not an inch. She holds her doll tightly in her arms, and looks up at Antoine with wide eyes.

  Dany can’t help it. Half of her wants to be like Mac, so at ease with Antoine, feeling all of that affection shine on her, and part of her can’t let go of the past, of the places she’s been because he wasn’t there to prevent it.

  “C’mon,” Norah says. “You heard him. Brush your teeth and get dressed.”

  But the kid ignores her too.

  “Miracle Grace Munday,” Norah says to the kid.
r />   “I’m not Miracle,” Mac says clearly.

  Dany stares at her sister.

  These are the first words she’s heard her sister speak since the ministry entered their lives, since a continental divide came down in their lives, neatly slicing them into pictures of before and after.

  Her voice is strange, a little. Like she’s got an accent.

  Hearing her voice, so small, so sweet, it nearly breaks something open inside of her. She can’t explain it. Just the feeling that there, inside of her chest, some little thing is going to burst. Still, Dany doesn’t cry.

  Because Dany doesn’t cry.

  Under the table, Eva’s hand finds Dany’s and she is squeezing so tight that it hurts. Eva hasn’t yet pulled up her mask, and there is such a big stupid grin on Eva’s face that Dany can’t help it. She breaks out a stupid grin, too.

  She feels it then, that little pill that has broken open inside of her? That little burst skin? It’s filled with pure sunshine. Still, she doesn’t want to freak the kid out. So, Dany sets the tone. She lets them know, by her example, how to handle it.

  There’s nothing weird, after all, about a five-year-old girl speaking. And though Dany can’t help but grin, she takes a deep breath and shrugs. “Okay,” Dany says, “you don’t like Miracle. What should we call you?”

  The girl holds up her doll, looks into its glassy eyes and considers the question.

  “Mon chou,” says Antoine.

  “Little rabbit,” offers Eva.

  “My love,” says Aunt Norah.

  “Love,” Mac says, clutching her doll. “You can call us both that.”

  A moment later, Mac skips from the kitchen. They hear the door to the bathroom close behind her, and a second later, the water is on.

  Eva beams at her, wide eyes brimmed with tears. Grinning at Dany, Eva reaches towards her, but Dany folds her hands into her lap. “I told you, I told you,” Eva says. “I told you.”

  Dany can’t help it, she’s grinning too. Norah is smiling too. Or she was smiling. But the instant that she turns to Antoine and Faraday that smile slips from its place. “How’s the wound?” Norah asks.

  The light goes out of Faraday’s eyes. He stretches his arm and winces. “Not bad,” he says.

  “We’re going to need antibiotics,” Antoine says to the room. “Soon.”

  “I feel fine,” Faraday says.

  “Infection’s a risk with any puncture wound,” Norah tells her teacher. “Bullets aren’t usually the worst. They’re white hot – self-sterilizing – but given the old blanket we used to staunch the bleeding, well, I think Antoine’s right. We should get you on something strong, soon.”

  Antoine shifts in his seat. “This town,” he says. “It’s no good. I don’t know how it is elsewhere. But here, this place, it’s basically a prison town,” Antoine shakes his head. “The local gun club has organized. They’ve shut down the hospice,” he says, and again, he skips a glance at Dany. “What that means can’t be good.”

  Dany juts out her chin. “I’ll go into town,” she says.

  Antoine’s face darkens, but Eva is nodding. “You’ll need a driver,” she says.

  “I think we all have to go,” Antoine tells them.

  Aunt Norah reaches across the table and grabs the man’s hand. “You can’t,” she says. “Six months, less. And you’re done. We can’t take that from you.”

  But Antoine just shakes his head. “We all go.”

  Dany feels Mister Faraday’s eyes flick over her way, feels him ask a silent question.

  Dany shrugs and nods at Antoine’s ankle.

  “Show Faraday what’s keeping you here,” Dany tells Antoine. Her voice has a harder edge than she intends. “Show him your ankle.”

  Reaching down, his eyes on his daughter, Antoine pulls up the cuff of his pant leg. Now even her history teacher can see it: the monitoring device the old man has to wear.

  “Wait,” Eva says. “Does that work in a power outage.”

  Antoine gives Eva a half-smile. “I am afraid so,” he tells her. “If I cut it, take it off, they will come. But maybe I have an idea or two about it, a way to get us through this.” Antoine looks around at each face. “So, do we head for Dany’s island?” he asks. “On la grosse barge of Eva’s?”

  Eva is the first to nod.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Faraday says. “You can just give me a couple Oxy and throw me in the back like the luggage. It’s pretty much how I’ve ridden this whole way.”

  Even Aunt Norah has to admit, finally, that they have nowhere else to go, and that, in any event, an isolated island can’t be a bad thing. When it’s done, when it’s all agreed, Mac comes barrelling back in, wearing a pair of oversize rubber boots.

  Eva grins at her. “When Mac puts on her big girl boots,” Eva says, her eyes on Dany, “you can be pretty sure that adventure’s on its way!”

  Dany smiles at her friend. For a moment, she feels lucky. Really, truly lucky.

  And a beat later, that hand is around Dany’s heart again, squeezing it tight, and she hears it. The ticking of a clock.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 43

  Eva’s in the driver’s seat, and Aunt Norah and Faraday are up front, next to her, in the cab of Antoine’s old truck.

  Dany is sitting on one side of the cargo bed, the road vibrating into her spine. Still, it’s safer – for her to ride back here in the open air. Mac, across from her, is tucked up under Antoine’s arm.

  Antoine prefers it back here, he says, where his bad leg has a bit of room. He’s got his leg jutting out in a straight line before him. In his hands, he’s holding a book of stars. Pitching his voice over the engine, he’s talking to Mac, explaining how to make a sextant, using a protractor, a ruler and say, for a plumb line, that hex key hanging from a bit of string on her big sister’s neck. Mac is looking at a spray of stars, pictured there. She touches a little point of light with one tiny finger.

  Together like this, Mac and Antoine almost look like a real family.

  All you’d have to do is X her out.

  As Antoine talks about the stars in his picture, the little bear and its tail, Polaris, Dany’s eyes are tracing the distant smudge of smoke blossoming into the sky, there, ahead of the truck. Dany turns to her father, then, and nods to the monitoring device on his leg. “Why haven’t you taken it off?” she asks.

  “Soon,” he says. “I want to leave a trail to the hospice. Maybe then they’ll forget me.”

  Dany shrugs, but she has her doubts. They’ve crossed a line. Already, in some distant office, an alarm is sounding and time has begun to tick down. The same way that in her, too, time is ticking down like a bomb.

  She fingers the mask on her face, testing the seal.

  There is a map to the stars on Antoine’s lap, and her sister’s finger, tracing the tiny points of light. The kid’s finger stops on Polaris again, the little bear’s tail, and she looks a question up at Antoine.

  Antoine leans towards her ear. “When you do it, you need to hold the thing like this. You need to be comme ça,” he says, demonstrating with his hands. “Let the ruler find the star, and your plumb line, hanging down – that will find the angle. It’s ­simple.”

  “I don’t do simple,” Dany calls out.

  “Ouais,” Antoine says, laughing. “I see that.”

  Dany lets go of the side rail and inches a little closer.

  “Why?” she asks, and that word, it holds everything. She glances down at Mac, still tracing stars. “Why’d you become a pacifist?”

  Antoine looks at her, his expression soft, contemplative. But he doesn’t answer for a long time. Finally, he shakes his head and, meeting her eyes, shrugs. “Perhaps, for a man like me, the only truly revolutionary act,” he says slowly, “is to relinquish violence. Ça va, mon chou? Answer enough?”

  But childr
en aren’t cabbage seeds, Dany knows that.

  You can’t just leave a kid in the dirt and expect her to grow herself up out of it.

  Antoine reaches out, touches her arm. “Because I do. I aspire. For better. For my kids, no?”

  “While you were so busy aspiring,” Dany reminds him, “I got put at the work farm.” She hears the sarcasm in her voice, the raw hurt beneath it, too, but there is nothing she can do about that. “You weren’t there,” she says, spelling it out for the old man. “Norah was.”

  Mac looks up at her, eyes huge, and Antoine shakes his head, eyes on the distance.

  “Ouais, non, pas vraiment,” he says and stares at the trees for so long she doesn’t think he will answer. “How do you think Norah got released, that first time?” he finally asks.

  Dany’s eyebrows narrow and she studies, hard, the lines in the road behind them.

  He tells her then, all of it. How he agreed to renounce his former comrades.

  Dany saw the video – someone uploaded the thing to YouTube. Sometimes it feels like everyone in the world has seen what Antoine did, because the video is on the internet, but of course, nobody much cares. Except for those involved. Just the people he’s betrayed. And that, she guesses, was the point of it.

  “I don’t get it,” she says. “What does betraying your activist friends have to do with me?”

  “We made a deal. I make the video, and you get a parent.”

  Dany chewed on that.

  So, long before they granted him house arrest, the government took away his power. But what did Antoine get in return? What did Dany get? “I didn’t get a parent,” she reminds him. As if he needs reminding, but maybe he does.

  Antoine nods at her aunt, in the cab. “You got Norah,” he says.

  Dany looks at her father.

  In exchange for the video, Antoine explains, they released Norah – they granted her early parole. “There was no way they were going to let me go,” he said. “Not then. Now? I don’t know, maybe. Maybe they would, in six months.”

  The pieces are simple, a child’s puzzle, and though there are only a few fat pieces to negotiate, still, it’s hard for her to put together the picture in this new way. To reshape her understanding of the past. So, okay, Antoine made a deal. He betrayed all of his friends. He betrayed them for Dany. For Norah. All of this, around the time Darling-­Holmes burned to the ground.