“I wish I could meet Ripper,” said Zoe.
X laughed quietly.
“Arranging such an interview might be complicated,” he said.
“Right?” said Zoe.
She was laughing now, too.
“Yet Ripper would adore you,” said X.
Zoe blushed at this. X did not know why.
“You haven’t explained the ice on the lake,” she said. “Why did you turn it orange?”
X looked pained.
“Am I to have no secrets at all?” he said.
“I showed you mine,” she said playfully.
X stood, and drew closer to her. He saw her smile and roll her eyes at the sight of his bare feet on the ice. Something about this girl loosened the ever-present knot in his chest. Just the sight of her unclenched every part of him.
Zoe handed him his shirt. She turned away, but just slightly, as he tugged it on. The closer they came to each other, the more the air itself seemed to want to pull them together.
“I set the lake afire because I knew you were there,” he said. “It was not a necessity.”
Zoe arched an eyebrow.
“You were showing off for me?” she said, grinning.
“I shall leave you to your conjecture,” he said. “I have no more to say on the subject.”
Zoe leaned toward him.
She pushed the wet hair from his eyes, her face just inches from his.
X jerked away in surprise. Zoe cast her eyes down, mortified.
Immediately, self-loathing flooded through X. She’d meant to kiss him, and he had flinched! He had ruined the moment.
But, no, he would not let the moment go.
Now he moved toward her.
He could feel himself shaking. He hardly knew what he was doing. So little in either world frightened him—and yet this did.
Zoe saw that he was nervous, and leaned in to meet him. At the last possible moment, she turned her lips from his and kissed the bruises beneath his eyes, one after the other.
The knot in his chest fell to pieces.
He knew then that he loved her.
Zoe took a pen from her pocket, and drew a wide black symbol on the back of his hand.
“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.