“That’s an X,” she said.
She drew two smaller letters above it, but only smiled when he asked what they meant.
He took her arm, and they turned toward the house. She leaned her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes.
She never saw, as he did, that her mother was watching from a window.
eight
X woke in the morning to an empty house. He smoothed the sheets of the ladybug as he had seen Jonah do. Then, for an hour, he rambled around, trying to think of something other than Zoe and the feeling of her lips on his cheek. He took some food from the buzzing metal box in the kitchen, the cool air brushing pleasantly against his face. He stood at the front door waving to the dogs as they charged around the yard. He tossed a stick to Spock, as Jonah had taught him to. Spock ran after it, but seemed not to know he was supposed to pick it up and return it—the dog seemed to think the point of the game was simply to prove that the stick still existed.
Later, X sat in the living room studying family portraits, and was struck by how Zoe’s essential Zoe-ness—the bright, wide eyes that promised something but demanded something, too—had remained constant even as the years passed and her hair lengthened and shortened and curled and flattened and was briefly blue for some reason, and even when her teeth were temporarily decorated with miniature railroad tracks.
X was so taken by her face. Everything he knew about loveliness began and ended with her.
He could still feel Zoe’s lips on his skin. He replayed the moment so often in his head that he began to think he’d never have another thought. In truth, he didn’t want another.
Perhaps Zoe’s mother would recognize that he and Zoe had forged a true connection. Perhaps he could stay. Perhaps the lords of the Lowlands had forgotten him. Perhaps he could stay. He was but one soul in an infinite sea of bodies, and—though he’d never had the audacity to remind them—he’d done nothing to deserve damnation.
X heard the Bissells’ car in the drive. He went to the porch and stood waiting, eager as a dog. A cold rain had begun to fall. It did not concern him. He was too happy for that. He looked at the sculpture that Rufus had made for the Bissells: a bear standing, waving, smiling ridiculously. He felt a kinship with it.
But Zoe and her family got out of the car in a dark mood, slamming their doors.
“You’d better tell him,” Zoe’s mother told Zoe as they climbed the stairs toward X.
Zoe lingered on the porch, but did not speak.
X could not bear the silence.
“She requires that I leave this instant?” he said. He cast his eyes downward. “I cannot fault her, though I have made myself drunk on delusions that I might stay.”
“It’s not just that,” said Zoe. “We were in town, and we saw a cop we know named Brian.” She hesitated a moment. “The police can’t find Stan—and he’s killed somebody else. He could be in Canada now, he could be in Mexico, they don’t know. They may have lost him for good.”
The news struck X like a blow. Every bit of hopefulness and joy fled his body. He’d been a fool to think he deserved anything at all in this world. His rage—at Stan’s evil, at his own weakness—produced a sharp pain in his head. It was as if someone had released a bee into his skull. He stood outside until long after Zoe had gone in, only half-aware that he was being drenched by the rain. He felt the Trembling reawaken in his blood.
Eventually, Zoe returned and insisted he come inside. She put a blanket around him, and placed a hand consolingly on his shoulder.
“Stan’s gone,” she said. “You couldn’t go after him if you wanted to.”
X couldn’t bear to be touched. The bee in his skull had been joined by a dozen others. He pushed Zoe away—more roughly than he intended.
“It is my duty to hunt him down, even if he flees to the end of the earth,” he said. “It is all I am made for.”
Zoe backed away.
“You can’t go,” she said.
“And yet I can’t stay here—pretending I am something other than I am,” he said.
He saw how his words wounded her. He tried to explain, but she waved him off and sank onto the couch, refusing to look at him. Outside, the rain fell harder. It froze the instant it landed, encasing the driveway, the trees, the world in ice.
Soon the power failed with a spooky sighing sound they all felt in their stomachs. The house went black. Candles were lit and distributed. They flickered and glowed, but were in no way comforting. The Bissells huddled on the couch, growing colder and listening to the rain as it entombed them bit by bit. X slumped against a wall, his head in his hands. The storm had grown so intense that it worried even him.
Late in the afternoon, Zoe used her phone somehow to see when it was expected to stop, only to discover that there were no reports of rain (or sleet or power outages) anywhere within 500 miles.
“Idiots,” she said. “How can they not see this storm?”