The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  Blisters of heat swell inside me. “I can’t let you do that to yourself.”

  “You can’t stop me,” she snaps before locking eyes with me and melting a bit. “And it’s not being done to me. It’s being done for them. For all of us.” She clutches my hand. “Listen: Morency survived. I will, too. And you’ll be by my side the whole time, in Dom. If you’re afraid of the aftereffects, you need to remember you’re safe, don’t you see?” Her eyes glow with manic desperation. “You’re safe, as long as you stay inside him.”

  As if this is a fucking game of musical chairs. “That’s not what I’m worried about,” I say, throwing her hand away from me and standing. I pace her dime-size room on my unwieldy legs as if it’ll distract from the burning I feel. It doesn’t help. I feel like a goddamn rat trapped on a narrow ledge, scurrying above vats of boiling soup. It’s ending, soon. I’m going to fall inside and cook down to the bone. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. Not for sure.”

  “Even so. When do we ever know anything for sure?” She blows the air from her mouth slowly, calmly. “I need to try to end this for the girls.”

  For the girls. It’s her unrelenting, unapologetic earnestness, her kindness, and her selflessness: Everything to love about her tips me over the damn brink into the fiery abyss below.

  “Fuck the girls!” I shout, and she jolts back. “They’re not real! Can’t you feel it? They’ve never been as real as you. How could they be? A real person is a prism, not a paper doll with a cartoon backstory. You—you’re as real as Mama to me. You’re as real as Rob, and I hate myself for saying that, but it’s true, I feel it—” I shudder, stopping, the scorching heat consuming me down to the marrow. But they’re both gone, I want to add, so fucking selfishly. So you’re all I have now, Mavi. I think of the file Domenico paged through months ago: Tendency to form inappropriate and intense attachments. Maybe we are one and the same.

  “You’re speaking out of turn now,” she whispers sharply. “This is much greater than the two of us. You know that.” She shakes her head, her voice losing its edge. “Think about it, Angel. How much longer would we even have had together?”

  In her marbled brown eyes, there’s hurt and love intermingled, and it swallows my heart whole. She’ll never meet the real you. She’ll never know the real you. It was inevitable: this pain. This implosion.

  “I don’t—That’s not…” I’m swaying on my feet. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s just that after what happened to them, it’s been…” The room spins. I can’t pick a word. Those that come to mind—difficult, painful, impossible—disrespect them, or me, or her, or the magnitude of what happened then, and every single thing that has come from it.

  “I don’t even know what happened to them, Angel,” she says, softly but firmly. “You’ve never told me. What happened?”

  What would Mama say? Speak the words and claim their power for yourself. But I haven’t yet crafted my loss into a meaningful, beautiful, or even tragic tale; it’s a story that I’ve only tried to pummel into nothing—that I’ve condensed down into one or two words that I drained of meaning so long ago.

  “Cancer,” I say.

  She waits beside me. Listens hard, even to the silence.

  No one in the world can absolve you, alive or dead. Ride the tides of darkness, Charon said. But maybe absolution isn’t what I sought. Maybe it was an unspeaking, compassionate presence.

  “Mama died of cancer,” I repeat, the sickly heat of the word flowing back already. Goading me on. “Liver cancer. Symptoms were ordinary enough at the beginning. We pretended it was a flu, even though we both thought something else might be wrong. We never said as much, but we thought it. We both did, I could tell. It just started with her puking all the time, and her refusing to go to the doctor, eating only BRAT foods, as if they would help. It took her six full months of white rice and toast to visit a doctor. She canceled the appointment once, then twice. Asked me to go with her, then asked me to stay home. That’s how I knew she knew something was wrong, for sure. And when she visited the doctor, boom, there it was—stage four. I was so angry at her. At myself. Furious I didn’t force her to go earlier—didn’t drag her there. The doctor said it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t mine. It was no one’s. It moves so quickly. So quickly that by the time the anger and shock began to evolve into something more soul-sucking and brutal, we were alone. Me and Rob.”

  Another silence, loaded with years of heat and rage and visions of Mama withering away before me into a being so clearly not her, so clearly chaff in an ill-fitting hospital gown she would have laughed at and hated had she one final reserve of energy to spare on a complaint so stupid. So stupid. My mind fizzes as the light apricot room slants and whirls. Light apricot, she says, giving her goofy smile, macabre because she was already skin and bone from a horror that wasn’t remotely stress. 253, 213, 177. I clamp my hands around my head and shake it hard hard hard hard—

  “And Rob?” She’s barely audible. “What happened to Rob?”

  “Oh. Rob,” I say, disembodied. “Accident.”

  Ac-ci-dent. If you break the word down into parts, it means nothing at all. It might seem loud and bright and sharp, but it is empty.

  “Go on,” she whispers.

  I can’t.

  I swear I can’t.

  I can’t remember speaking about it with anyone at all—I’ve never told the story aloud without blacking out all the talking. The noise: questions and assumptions. From the police, from Liese.

  I can’t say anything about the last time I saw Rob that won’t transport me right back to the blinding, white-hot agony of that moment—that won’t drop me to my knees and disembowel me in one scorching stroke. This much I know, without even grazing the distant outer rings of it in memory.

  My mind knows what it should do next. Protect. Avoid. But Dom’s body drops me onto the bed like we’re praying. He hides our face. But his mouth, his throat, his voice box, his lungs: They collude to speak in a thick rush.

  “He was playing outside. I don’t know why. Crouched low, painting the world with his new box of colored chalks, the same box we bought him to get him off the tablet. So there he was, on his knees, detailing some beautiful world with its tendrils of green and rays of sun on the slanted, gum-spattered sidewalk. He was smiling. I tell myself he was smiling. I tell myself he heard a plane overhead at that very moment and saw wide blue sky. I tell myself he was calm in that moment.

  “Not that I knew, because Liese and I were at each other’s throats inside the house—I can’t even remember what our argument was about, of all things. I can’t remember, and she can’t, either. I took her keys—I know that for sure, they were her keys, and not his, because they found the keys cutting into my hand, her furred key chain dabbed in my blood—and I stormed out of the house and into her husband’s oversize truck piece of shit. A monstrosity I had mocked a dozen times because it was so clearly a reflection of his—” I choke.

  Dom’s shaking so hard I can’t stay propped, much less hear myself speak. There is a painful lightness in Dom’s limbs, as if a weighty marrow’s being sliced from me, hot sliver by sliver. My raw voice cracks, connects.

  “I must’ve turned it on in less than a second, put it in reverse in half of another, but there was space. So much space. I know that. It felt like a mile and an inch all at once in that split second. But I saw him, saw him just in time, and I jammed both feet on the brake hard, hard enough that those feet could’ve stopped the car itself without it, but—but. It flew. I flew. It flew. There are noises that—”

  I bring my cold hands to my face again, Dom’s face, and feel at the rubbery skin there, molten.

  “I don’t—I don’t remember stopping, wrenching open the door, taking out the key. The steps my body must have taken, my mind somewhere else. Drowned by the hottest, blinding fear. Why take the key? I don’t remember crouching. I don’t remember pulling him out. I know—I know how they found me, from what Liese said. She told me
he looked perfect. Half-asleep in my arms, that’s all. Half-asleep on the gurney, too. It was internal. The bleeding,” I say as the heat cools, cools until it’s a suffocating, milky warmth. “He was flat on the ground, not curled like a shell to protect himself. There was no time for that. No time to see, to shout. I don’t know how it could be that fast, but that’s what they told me. The police, the doctors.

  “He had fainted; that was it, I thought. I knew it was a story I was telling myself, but I knew I could will it true if I only tried. But when they repositioned him, it was from the side that I could tell something was wrong. This crumpled look to his chest, like a—Oh God, like a forgotten doll. And the blood from his mouth, then, this blood that was so—so obvious.”

  I stop, gasp for air. She settles her two hands on my back like doves.

  “The sternum of a child his age is smaller than my hand. This sternum—his sternum—it punctured his heart, the size of an even tinier fist. Cut through it, soft as butter, someone said. I didn’t know. He looked perfect, like Liese said. Comfortable and so small, wrapped in his favorite yellow blanket.” I stifle a sob, a groan, a spasm; it bucks off the two palms she’s placed on my back. I look at her, raking her eyes for hot coals of horror, finding only pity and sympathy as her hands find my upper arms. To hold me, to keep me.

  “He had drawn a picture of his family, our family, in the old world he deserved. And there I was, standing next to him. The blessed one, Angel. The protector, with a star over my head,” I say, croaking, that heat rising up my cheeks into that space behind my eyes and blacking out my vision. “But you aren’t blessed if it means you survive alone. You aren’t blessed.”

  Her two hands cup my arms, staving off renewed trembling. We don’t speak. I let the pain flood me—the same pain I thought had grown lighter, more diaphanous. It will never be gone. It will only crash over my head and drown me less often. But it will always do so with the same intensity, the kind that has always made me want to throw myself off a ledge.

  I close my eyes. Not to suppress it—that wouldn’t work—but to force myself to remember, to remember that—

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry, Angel. I still miss my—”

  I lurch back, and she pauses. A foreign cold drenches me from head to toe. I clench my teeth to stop the words I know will follow, but it’s no use.

  “Don’t be sorry,” I snap. “I did what I did. It’s my loss to bear.”

  “What?”

  “You were going to tell me you still miss your mother, weren’t you?” I watch as her face crumples, processing what she thinks is my cruelty, when it’s really my mercy. “You’ve done nothing to deserve the pain you feel. You need to know that. You’ve done nothing to deserve the pain you’re carrying. The pain from what happened to your mom, the pain from what’s happening to these girls. God, you deserve better. You deserve better than all this.” I tear at my hair with my fingers, grind my fingers into my eyes.

  When I look up at her through flares of color in my sore vision, her eyes burn with hurt. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

  “This place isn’t what you think it is. And the Others—they’re—we’re not who you think we are. I—I still haven’t told you the whole truth. And you deserve that. You understand? I’ve been a demon. I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve any of this.”

  As if I can begin to say which cruelties anyone at all does or does not deserve.

  31

  MAVI: ARGENTINA, JUNE 1978

  I do not want to hear the words Angel is saying; every fiber of my being tells me to stop him, stop him, stop him. What he’s trying to tell you is not for you. What he’s trying to tell you should never be heard. I feel as if I’m an astronaut unmoored from her spaceship, floating among fading stars. Breathing the last of my oxygen.

  “Let me guess,” some voice says. My voice. “Are the Others wizards, manipulators of time and space? Incorporeal psychics?” I try for a smile. “Nothing will surprise me,” I lie.

  “It’s going to be difficult to understand what we are,” Angel says. “It will change everything.”

  So it’s coming. Here and now. I have a choice to make: to hear what comes and allow my mind to crumble or to brace myself for his admission and be the heroine—the best self—I know I can be.

  Well, I had made that decision after my talk with Morency. My tightly folded arms shake, and I do all I can to hide it from myself. “Try me.”

  He takes my hands out from underneath my arms. “I’m always here for you, all right?”

  I throw his hands off me. He’s here for me after telling me I’ve done nothing to deserve my pain. What empty nonsense. I think I might vomit; I feel a surge of acidic heat in my throat.

  “Tell me now.”

  But when he takes my hands again, I let him. His fingers are like branding irons.

  “This is a cosmic sort of game,” he says, speaking the words carefully. “The Others are the players.”

  I freeze in place. It’s as if I can feel the molecules around me freeze over, too, oscillating in their fixed shapes. “And all the world’s a stage.”

  He shakes his head. “Vaccaro School is an artificial construction.”

  I haven’t enough air. The moon-colored room around us spins, the axis our hands, gripped together.

  “The house is made of strings of numbers instead of atoms and molecules. It’s all a creation, not a physical place. This house is on a loop,” he says, clutching my hands. “We’re doomed to repeat this segment of life—to return before the beginning of the term, to watch our own decline. The rapid deterioration now—it’s all prescribed. It will happen again and again.”

  “What?” I drown with each shallow breath. “You don’t mean our. You don’t mean we.” I pull my hands away and clench them. My tone is one of the utmost bitterness. “You mean me. You mean the rest of us. The people here. That’s why the girls don’t seem real to you.”

  He looks at me with concern before softening. “I guess you’re right.”

  “An artificial construction. I don’t understand.” Have I gone mad? Am I dreaming? Have I been sucked into the mangled narrative of Yesi’s ghost story? Spasms of bright light from the lamp hurt my eyes. Of all of the admissions I had imagined … how could it be this? An admission I cannot even comprehend? “How can a person be made of numbers?”

  “Well, the two of us, we don’t see the numbers, like we don’t see atoms. But Vaccaro School was dreamed up by people. People who have a fluency with numbers. They dreamed you up, too. This house—it’s all in the cloud.”

  “Cloud? Don’t speak to me like I’m a child,” I say unevenly. “How can you say I’m not real?”

  Hands shaking, Angel flips open the copy of The Giver lying on my bed. “Haven’t you noticed the inconsistencies?” He points to the publishing date, and my vision pinholes around it—1993. I’ve never seen it before.

  I scratch at my arms; I tug at my fingers. “A printing error.” My skin tears beneath my fingernails. But how, Angel, how can I feel and touch and smell and taste and see if I am not real? I want to ask. We cannot eat numbers. We cannot take numbers in our arms and hold on.

  “You’re lying,” I say, though in the back, locked cabinet of my mind, I know Angel only speaks in incomprehensible truths. “Who are you? How did you arrive here?” The weight of the word here hits me like a crack to the back of the head. I feel dizzy. I prop my skull against the wall behind us.

  His eyes are raw. “My name’s Angel. I’m who you know me to be. But I’m from California. In the United States. I was lonely—I’ve been lonely for a long time. I never thought this life would be so lonely. And after Rob died, I thought I could come here when … when I needed a change. An urgent distraction from my life and myself.”

  I choke, reeling: a change. As if this house is a vacation.

  “My mama’s family is from Patagonia,” he adds, as if that’s any consolation to me now.

&nb
sp; A distraction. The condescension of it all. The superiority. A sick feeling swells in my stomach, and my hands shake, shrunken in my vision, separate from my body. I can’t understand it. Not a word of it. The same claws of panic scrape at my throat as the room spins in my vision. I’ve had to stretch my imagination so much lately—and even Morency’s and Carmela’s admissions did not derail me. But I can’t internalize this latest truth: the nature of the Others’ existence, of ours at Vaccaro School. I can’t do it. I’m ill-equipped.

  He’s telling me we are trapped on a torturous merry-go-round, doomed to spin off and drop onto another seat on another carousel, then another, then another, each of them as false as the last.

  Yet I can feel this chair below me, I can feel the air on my skin, I can taste the terrible soups I’ve lived on for days. I felt I could hold the story of my life in my hands like a humming thread. But now I can’t understand what makes a life—what would make mine numeral-based, man-made. I’ve never thought of this before—never had to. I need Yesi. I need someone who could understand.

  I feel my hands, my arms, my stomach, my legs, as if their concreteness is a clue or holy proof. It is pointless to cry, but I wish to do nothing more. I want to sob until I feel that cathartic relief and lightness; I want to sob until I feel like there is an exit from my pain and confusion, even if it comes in the form of total exhaustion.

  But I shall not find that relief this time.

  “So you’re not dead,” I say, fighting the urge to vomit. “And I’m … What am I meant to be made of? Numbers? Clouds?”

  “You’re a member of this place. But you’re not like a character in a book or a movie. You learn. You grow. The lines of your personality are self-edited. You’re a special person, Mav; you’ve been gifted memories, traits, likes, dislikes, fears, ambitions. Strength. A body that doesn’t die. But you have added to them. I never lied when I said you are real to me. You’re not just a character, I swear.”