I dreamed I was dying; as I so often do
And when I awoke I was sure it was true
I ran to the window; threw my head to the sky
And said whoever is up there, please don't let me die
But I can't live forever, I can't always be
One day I'll be sand on a beach by a sea
The pages keep turning, I'll mark off each day with a cross
And I'll laugh about all that we've lost
– "Calendar Girl" by Stars
She realizes in a burst that she doesn't know how old she is.
For so long, too long, every other thought has been survive survive survive. Don't get close to the abandoned cars; dart between buildings before one collapses, crushes you. Learn by watching people around you fall down dead which berries are okay to eat, since Girl Scouts is just a hazy memory. So, she thinks, bouncing her baby absently, are coffee mugs, are file cabinets, are sleek gray suits. So is banana mush scraped off her son's plate for breakfast, so is her husband's kiss burning her cheek, so is slick shower tile and vacuuming cookie crumbs and heels tapping on hardwood floors.
Memories.
Her days are filled with trying not to breathe too much dirty air and finding the next patch of food. She is sure she must be in South America by now; dark-skinned men and women with braids in their hair look so much healthier than everyone else, because they are used to living from the land. They help her, sometimes, mostly when they see the baby she totes everywhere like jewelry, reflecting light from whatever morality they have.
Her son was riding with her husband to the grocery store when cars starting blowing up.
The baby coos and gurgles, and she has never been happier for the miracle of breast milk. Feed herself just barely enough, and somehow all the good things will be extracted for this tiny squirming thing. She doesn't know the father's name; only that she was so, so lonely, and he was looking for food too. They shared, because they had that much goodness left in them.
He had a freckle right on his earlobe, just like her husband did.
She meets people, sometimes. They stop and talk for a few minutes, occasionally in Spanish she can barely decipher. She thanks Einstein (because after this, after what everyone she meets has started to call the Crash, who is crazy enough to believe in a God above? What God would let this happen?) that she took three years of Spanish in high school.
Then she wonders if her baby will ever go to high school.
She was, in the Time Before, a lawyer— prosecution, throwing bad guys behind bars and then tossing the key. It was her job to make the world safe enough for her son to live in.
Now he doesn't.
In the same instant she realizes that she has lost all track of years, that she could not say whether she was thirty or thirty-one anymore, she also realizes that she has never named her baby. In the Time Before she would be horrified; this is her child, the one she slaved over and carried under her heart and birthed—
When she gave birth to this baby, she was alone. She ripped the cord apart barehanded, left the placenta lying on the ground, let a stray dog eat it. Then she carried a stranger's daughter to the nearest river, staggering, and bathed them both in half-dirty water.
This is her life now.
She lies on the ground, coughs, and cradles her baby to her. Her baby daughter. In a way, part of her is relieved. There is no way she could have handled another son— a replacement. Her son was beautiful, gold hair and eyes like a piece of broken sky. He always said pisghetti and aminal. He cried for her when he had a bad dream, and she curled around him for half the night even though court convened at seven A.M sharp.
This baby is a wild one, delivered into dirt and famine and people wandering aimlessly. To decrepit cities and smoky air and the debris of exploded cars.
All of a sudden, she does not want this baby to die. It has no name, no father— but it is her only connection to something beyond eat survive eat food no don't touch the cars eat survive live food please live.
"What should I call you?" she whispers. The baby croons, fussing on the ground. She sighs, turns fully onto her back— and is surprised to see that between bursts of smog and grit and smoke, stars are spread like diamonds.
How, she wonders, can something so pretty still exist, after all the horrible things?
She was a lawyer— she took the worst kinds of cases on, the ones with abusers and murders and molesters, because, by some logic that twined across her mind, if she faced them every single day head on, her family would never have to. A good luck charm, spruced up in a prosecutor's sensible suit. It had made sense, at the time. It sort of makes sense now.
And she is desperate for some kind of sense in a world flung upside-down.
She looks at her baby again. It's sleeping now, twisted into the shape of a parenthesis. She mirrors the pose, and wonders what kind of equation you could scrawl between them, mother and daughter.
"I don't even know how old you are," she says, because she has gotten into the habit of talking to the baby. Why not? There's no one else around. Sometimes she wonders if the only reason she conceived this baby was because her body was so very intent on keeping her from going insane. She curves closer to the sleeping body, eyes skidding to the stars. "You've seen a lot of people die, haven't you? That lady under the big building, and those guys with the see-though ribs," —she breaks off here, swallows vomit— "that nice man and woman who gave us pieces of bread, yeah? That was sad, wasn't it?"
The baby gives a little yawn, and then falls peacefully back into deep sleep. She wishes it was as easy for her. Whenever she tries to sleep she can still hear her husband's voice, frantic over his cell phone, a brand new Blackberry—
"This is bad, babe, cars keep fucking blowing up everywhere—" Her son, crying, sobbing in the background— "Traffic's backed up, police swarmed the goddamn parking lot—" A thick boom, her son's shrieks getting higher— "Oh shit, oh shit, they got a megaphone, there's something in the oil—" And she scrambles for her laptop, completely forgets to save her closing argument for next week's case in an attempt to open AOL. The world news tab speaks for itself— three hours ago is when it started, over in England, every top scientist in the world trying to explain the oil bug as people died by the thousands there, in India, in China, in Canada, in America—
She shakes her head sharply, as though the memories will slip out of her ears if she tried hard enough.
Not now. Enough for now.
Reaching out, she strokes the curve of the baby's cheek, the high line of her brow. What to name her, what to name her. She remembers flipping through baby books by the dozen for her son's name, her husband suggesting only the most ridiculous.
She had carried this baby through fields of dead flowers, recited scraps of poems and kid's books from sheer memory when every library she encountered was filled with ashes and crumbling apart. This baby had seen death; had seen the number of dead bodies tally higher and higher.
What to name her. She had protected her son by locking up monsters; if the only thing she could protect her daughter with was name, she was damn sure going to try.
"Not Death," she mumbles out loud, blinking at the stars again. So pretty. "Not anything like that. Just too tempting, don't you think?" She rolls onto her side, dirt smearing on her cheek when she rested her palm there. "Something about seeing. You see so many dead people. And not in a Sixth Sense kinda way, either."
The baby slumbers on. "Saw…yer? Sawyer? No. Eye. Iris? Isis? You don't look like that." She gives a deep, frustrated sigh, thinking back her earlier inner monologue: This baby had seen death; had seen the number of dead bodies tally higher and higher.
"High. Wait, sounds like drugs. High… Hyacinth? Oh, no way. Um, okay. Wait. Heidi? Oh Go— oh, Einstein this is hard. You're a lot of trouble, y'know." She smoothes a piece of hair back from her forehead, makes a mental note to maybe wash it sometime soon, if she can find a river. "Okay. Hmm. Alright, what about just Tally? I mean, it's a real word. Plus I think it could be name."
She peers over at the sleeping baby again, although she knows full well her daughter won't answer. "Tally. Tally. Come here, Tally. Come to Mommy, Tally."
Tally all the dead bodies, and maybe you won't have to be one of them. Look at all the suffering, and maybe it will grant you immunity.
Suddenly she shivers; reaches out and pulls the baby to her heaving chest. It is warm and solid and there— her daughter. "Tally."
She's the reason, you know. The reason that three hundred years later, if you look up the name Tally in the City Register, its meaning will always be listed as blessing.
a/n: The Rusty Crash has always intrigued me, as have the multitude of popular names in the Uglies series. This is just my take on how the name Tally got started post-Crash. Hope you enjoyed, and please leave a review :).