Plus One (10 page)

The room was designed as a sleeping porch in the early 1900s. With a flat tar roof above it, our third-floor apartment was a furnace in the summer. There were knee-to-ceiling screens on three sides of the porch to catch a pitiful cross-draft when Chicago’s temperature soared into the high, humid nineties. I sometimes still slept out there, running one small air conditioner in Poppu’s room only.

I edged over to a screen and looked down.

It took me only a second to recognize the teal T-shirt and disarranged dark hair.

“Day Boy,” I whispered, stunned. I stumbled back. Like a bloodhound, he had followed me home. I peeked out again to see whether there were police cars with him. If it had been night I wouldn’t have been able to see much, but in the rosy evening light I had a clear view all the way down our street in both directions. I searched, but I saw no cops.

He pressed the buzzer again, and then he peered at the names on the brass plate. He was checking for apartment numbers but wouldn’t find them. He stepped back and raised his head. I saw his nose bob with a systematic inspection of each window. First floor, second, third. His eyes passed right over me. I was muted behind the dark screen.

The baby cried now, lustily. Day Boy cocked his head, hearing her. He pulled something out of his pocket. It was my phone. He touched the screen, scrolled, and I knew what he was looking for: my complete address with the apartment number, 3S.

He looked directly at my window, caught the shadow of my form, and called to me, “Goddammit, Plus One. Let me in.”

Wednesday
5:30 p.m.

I let him in because he had my phone. That was all I was capable of processing. I tried to think through the ramifications of opening the door, to imagine how I might instead escape with the baby, but my brain was broken with exhaustion and grief. And he had
my phone
.

I leaned on the entry buzzer long enough for even a pampered Ray to figure out that he had to shove through both the front door and the vestibule door before I released it. He probably lived in a high-rise on the Gold Coast with a doorman who greeted him by name and kept biscuits in his pocket for his mother’s miniature poodle.

Depending on how out of shape he was, it might take a minute for him to climb three flights of stairs in an old, high-ceilinged apartment building like ours. I decided to retrieve the baby from the kitchen drawer. She was what he came for, I was sure, and with all the wailing there was no way to hide her. Her cries had become hysterical, painful to listen to, so I jiggled her lightly and made whatever sympathetic shushing noises I could, but my heart wasn’t in it. By the time I got back to the front door I saw, through the peephole, Day Boy stepping onto the third-floor landing. He didn’t hesitate between the two doors, ours and the neighbors’, either because of a good sense of direction or because Ciel’s daughter was like a foghorn. He knocked hard. I took a breath to steel myself.

I opened the door, our eyes caught, and I saw and felt in that instant that he was just as wary of me as I was of him. I was dizzy, unsteady on my feet. My finger was exploding through the bandage with every squirm of the baby. And all at once my mind tricked me. It had something to do with the juxtaposition of my abject aloneness of the minutes before—sobbing on the floor—and the fact that there, standing in front of me now, was a human being I knew. I didn’t know him well, and I wasn’t even fond of him, but by now I was accustomed to him, to his superior attitude, his type-A personality, his French tics. I knew that he didn’t like me or trust me. That he wanted nothing more than to be rid of me to get back to his privileged life. I knew that he was honest about it, that he’d been honest with
me
, even when he’d called the Hour Guards. And those facts were enough—my desperation and that mild familiarity, combined with holding a miserable, writhing infant that I couldn’t console because there was no one there to console me—those were enough to make me reach out to my enemy, the only available life preserver in a world that was drowning me.

“Please help me,” I said. I handed him the baby as the room spun and the world went black.

*   *   *

I awoke on the couch. Day Boy’s back was to me. He was rocking the baby in one arm and texting with only the thumb of his other hand. He was good at both. My head felt stuffed with cotton. I wanted to sleep, but I needed to focus.

He turned around and saw I was awake.

“You have a fever,” he said. And then, “What the hell were you thinking, kidnapping a baby?”

“Who are you texting?” I asked, trying to sit up. “Are you turning me in? Don’t turn me in—”

“I’m trying to figure out
what
to do. Are you still light-headed? Lie down.”

“You don’t understand, they took Poppu,” I started incoherently.

“I saw the note.” He came and stood over me, and now he looked pissed. He was still rocking the baby, who seemed utterly soothed. “I came here on a million-to-one shot, hoping you’d have run to your apartment and I could cart you back to the hospital before Dacruz got back, and go home for my off shift and forget this whole horrible day. But then on my way here your phone started receiving texts threatening your grandfather and demanding ‘the baby,’ and
ha la vache!
I don’t know how you did it while I was right there, but I understood that you must have kidnapped your brother’s baby, and this is—
so—messed—up
! Are you trying to destroy my life, or am I just collateral damage in your death spiral?”

“Wait,” I said, catching up. “You mean you didn’t know that I stole the baby while you were in the hospital?”

“Thank god, when I left no one had noticed her missing yet—but that was almost an hour ago.”

I wished my brain weren’t so sluggish. Who was texting me? Who took Poppu? “If Ciel’s baby is not officially missing yet, how does anyone know I have her?” I wondered aloud.

Day Boy’s brain switched gears instantly. “You’re right. If the hospital doesn’t know she’s missing, we might be able to put her back before we go to the ER.”

“That’s not what I meant!” I said, sitting up too fast. I put my hand on my left temple to stop my brains from bursting out. “We have to
keep
her. They have Poppu. And that stupid baby is all we have to get him back.”

“This ‘stupid baby’ is a human being, and someone else’s child. And stop saying ‘we’ when referring to this disaster.”

“Let me see the text messages.”

He stared at me. I could see his mind chugging away behind those hazel eyes. He wanted to stay in control.

“I’m not going to run away with my phone,” I assured him. “I can’t run anywhere with my head exploding.”

He reached into his pocket.

My phone. I had been so long without it.

The first text was from Poppu:

Réveille-moi quand tu rentreras, n’importe l’heure.

I felt a pressure in my chest. He wanted me to wake him when I got home, undoubtedly to read together before I went to bed.

“Your Poppu is French,” Day Boy said sullenly.

“Belgian,” I said, scrolling to the next message. Unknown number.

Your grandfather is visiting with us. He is well. Please text when you receive this message.

The words were so polite. So benign. Such a lie. Poppu was never well anymore. There was a CPI censorship stamp on it: Approved.

The next message was time-stamped only ten minutes later. Unknown number. Censorship stamp: Approved.

We must see the baby before your grandfather returns home.

Reply by text and we’ll give you directions.

And soon after that, a message without a CPI censorship stamp. The corner of the screen that usually contained a little check mark was empty. I had only ever seen messages like that on Ciel’s phone. It was a felony if an Hour Guard or a cop discovered an uncensored communication in your phone records.

The Committee on Public Information had shut down voice calls a decade ago. It was too tedious and expensive for the state to redact verbal conversations, and on the customer’s end, the ten-second time delay necessary for the redaction—along with frequent, irritating bleeping of content—spelled the death of person-to-person calls.

Perhaps we weren’t clear
, the uncensored message read.
Bring us the baby immediately, or you’ll never see your grandfather again.

“Why do they want her so badly?” I asked Day Boy.

“Who is ‘they,’ Plus One?”

“I don’t know!”

“What are you mixed up in?” His voice had risen a couple of pitches. “Is it drugs? Day Assignment forgeries? Trafficking in infants—?”

“Shut up!” I interrupted, a fire burning in my chest as well as my head now. “You know exactly who I am. I’m nobody! I’m a moron who injured herself on purpose to get into the hospital. I wanted Poppu to hold his great-granddaughter.
That’s
what I’m guilty of.”

“Where are your parents?” he asked, reaching for something—maybe a way to extricate himself.

“They’re dead. Didn’t you see that on my phone?”

“I didn’t read your personal records. Why couldn’t your grandfather visit the hospital, like a normal grandparent?”

“Because Ciel is a Ray and we’re Smudges!” I rolled my eyes, which caused the muscles of my eyeballs to ache in protest. “You know that!”

“I forgot.” He took a breath to calm himself, and when he spoke it was with his supercilious, educated Day voice. “Well, then, photos are all you and your grandfather were legally entitled to until Unity Night.”

“Photos are worthless because Poppu is blind,” I spat. “And he won’t live to see Unity Night. He’s terminal.”

“He’s…?”

“Esophageal cancer. Metastasized. To his lungs and liver. He’s a week or two away, at the most.” My eyes flooded. “I don’t know how they moved him.”

Day Boy was silent. A stunned sort of silence. His guard was down, and in that moment I saw the face of the boy who whispered “sorry” when he stuck the needle in my finger.

My spinning head threatened unconsciousness again. I held the phone against my heart and lay back flat, wishing the thumping in my ears away. Closing my eyelids caused the pooled tears to spill out, and I wiped them away before they could trickle into my ears. I said in a low voice, “When Poppu dies I have nothing.”

Day Boy was silent. I could hear him swaying nervously with the baby, the floor creaking in time. I told him the full truth, although there was no way he could know the difference between that and my lies: “When I crushed my finger it was because I didn’t mind going
straight
to nothing a few nights earlier, so that Poppu could hold his great-granddaughter before he died. Everything else could kiss my ass.”

I started to drift. It was a blissful sort of anesthetic, removing me from the world. I heard Day Boy say something about the baby’s diaper being soaked. I had not even considered that her crying meant she needed changing; I must have been the least maternal being on the planet. I tipped to the side and pulled the diaper out of my back pocket with my good hand, accidentally dropping it on the floor. “There,” I heard my voice murmur.

I fell asleep then, or my mind slipped into a semiconscious state. Because even though I heard Day Boy’s voice, far away, I didn’t process what he said.

“Oh my god, Plus One. This baby is … he’s a boy.”

*   *   *

My next moment of lucidity involved Day Boy’s knuckles, clinically resting on my forehead, then my cheek.

“What?” I gasped, lurching my head and shoulders up, seeing first a cone of blackness, and then pricks of stars in the periphery as the room came into focus. I still had the phone in my hand. He hadn’t taken it away.

“You’re burning up. You need antibiotics.” He looked at the baby in his arms, who was perfectly swaddled. “I need to get you both back to the hospital right now and pray it’s not too late to fix this.”

“How did you do that?” I mumbled, disjointed thoughts pushing ahead of coherent ones.

“Do what?”

“Wrap her up the way the nurses do after you changed her diaper.”

“I’ve done a few rotations in the maternity ward and the NICU,” he said impatiently. “Get up, you’re in big trouble.”

“We’re in big trouble,” I corrected, closing my eyes, easing back down.

“Stay with me.” He shook my shoulder again.

“You can’t turn me in,” I murmured. “Now I can say you not only switched the Night Minister’s baby to the Day nursery, you also helped me kidnap Ciel’s baby.”

“Listen to me, you
impulsive, blackmailing
—” His voice was so sharp I forced my gritty eyes open in a squint. He fought for composure. “This”—he held the bundle out—“is Minister Paulsen’s son.”

He waited for me to answer. I had to repeat the words in my head twice.
This is Minister Paulsen’s son. This is Minister Paulsen’s son.

My brain clicked into a vaguely functional gear. I propped myself to sitting, head swimming, finger in agony. My phone fell to the floor.

“She’s a
girl
,” I finally said.

“His penis argues otherwise.”

“That’s impossible—” I started. I put the back of my bad hand to my forehead. Even I could feel it was dangerously hot.

“The ankle bracelet says Baby Boy Fitzroy. It’s the temporary ID my mother made for Minister Paulsen’s baby. Fitzroy is my mom’s mother’s maiden name.”

“I took Ciel’s baby,” I reassured myself. And then I looked up at Day Boy, needing to convince him, I didn’t know why. “I wanted
Ciel’s
baby. Yes, I moved another baby in the bassinet next to her—I mean
him
—but I took this baby from the Le Coeur bassinet, I swear.”

I remembered something. I reached into the pocket of my jeans and pulled out the wadded blue patient-information card I had taken from the last bassinet.

Baby Boy Fitzroy.
But how?

Day Boy took it from my hand, glanced at it, and muttered, “I’m screwed.”

“You don’t understand!” I insisted. “This baby didn’t come from the bassinet with that card!”