Plus One (11 page)

“I don’t care how it happened,” he interrupted. “This is Paulsen’s baby and we’re getting him back to the hospital
right now
. Can you walk?”

I scooped my phone off the floor—bending made my head throb. I touched the screen.

“What are you doing?”

I pulled up the last text and hit the reply button. By virtue of whatever illegal technology the sender had used, the composition screen popped up with no censorship warning. It would be a first for me, sending an uncensored text. But I needed to get instructions from the people who had Poppu.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Day Boy said, snatching the phone from my hand, even though I saw the movement with plenty of time to dodge him. My reflexes were shot. Hopelessness surged inside my belly, hot and angry.

“Take the baby,” I said bitterly. “Bring it back to the hospital, but leave me alone with my phone to find Poppu. Can’t you pretend you lost me? That you got to the apartment and found the baby here, abandoned? They’ll believe you! Look.” I pointed down the hall to the kitchen. “The back window is smashed. It will confuse the police. Let the break-in buy me some time.” I heard my voice turn to cowardly pleading. “Please let me go. You don’t understand how much Poppu means to me.”

“I’m beginning to, and it’s … impressive,” he said, in a voice I didn’t understand. “But you’re sick, you’re currently under arrest, and you’re my responsibility.
Levez-vous
.” He ordered me to stand in French. It didn’t escape me that he used the formal, respectful “you.” He grabbed my elbow, easing me to my feet. I wrenched my arm away.

“Lâche-moi.” Let me go
. I deliberately used the familiar form.

My brain had severed its connection to the lower half of my body. My legs were heavy and dead. I lost my balance, falling into him and the baby. A bloom of lavender, laundry soap, and sweat filled my nose as my vision darkened. He twisted to unpin the arm that held the baby and held his free arm around me to steady us both.

The curfew alarm rang on my phone in his hand, and on his phone somewhere in his pocket. It was Night. All of my muscles relaxed just a bit, in the reflexive way Pavlov’s dogs had supposedly salivated. After almost seventeen years, my body associated that sound with the freedom to move about the city. But for Day Boy it should have signaled confinement.

“You can’t leave anyway…” I whined.

“I have a Night pass to get myself home and you to the hospital.”

My eyes pooled with hot tears at the word “home”; my throat swelled nearly shut. Even if I didn’t go with him, the cops would be at my apartment as soon as Dacruz figured out I wasn’t in the emergency room. Day Boy was trying to cut our losses by returning us. For the moment, the hospital didn’t know a baby was missing, and Dacruz might not have come looking for me. I should have been grateful for what he was trying to do.

“My car is outside,” he said, having recovered his bedside manner. “You only have to walk down the stairs. Can you do that?”

I leaned on him hard, focusing on what he wouldn’t: there was no good outcome for me from this point on. Poppu was going to die in the custody of strangers, away from his home, without me by his side. A gasp of a sob left my mouth as Day Boy practically carried me to the door.

Stardust

One night when I was still a freshman I came to class and there was a new drawing on the desk: an exquisitely rendered human heart. It was not the kind of heart that little kids draw and cut out to make valentines, with two plump cheeks at the top and a pointy V at the bottom. It was an anatomically perfect sketch, tipped slightly as real hearts are, showing the aorta, the pulmonary artery and veins, and the vena cava—although I wouldn’t have remembered the location of any of those if they hadn’t been carefully labeled. My desk partner had drawn the heart as if it had been sliced almost all the way in two by a sharp knife, which was no small feat since the drawing was three-dimensional and looked like real muscle tissue. Below it was a poem. But it wasn’t one I would have ridiculed, or forced Poppu to dissect to expose its pretentiousness. It was raw, an open wound, and it brought tears to my eyes.

I am empty

I am released from a ship

In space

I am unmoored

Vast nothingness

Aching for what was lost

Wanting what will never be

And suddenly

The after-moment of now versus then

The paradigm shift

The world in too sharp relief

The past and future overlap

In front of my eyes

Death and life

Love and its mysterious absence

A knowledge

I am not a player

I am a spectator

I read it again and again until I had it by heart. I heard nothing my teacher said the entire period, not a word. I had no comfort to offer my friend, even though it’s what I most wanted to do, and in that way I felt an impotence that matched the tone of the poem itself.

A worry forced its way into my mind. Was it a girl he was talking about? Wasn’t that a broken heart he had drawn? Had he fallen in love with someone?
Wanting what will never be. Love and its mysterious absence.

I felt socked in the chest, and I didn’t know why. He was the equivalent of a pen pal, after all; a confidant at most. Nothing had changed: if our paths crossed in the hall I still wouldn’t recognize him. If he saw me, I would seem a stranger. He wouldn’t wrap his arms around me, his beloved friend.

The bell rang, and every other student got up to leave, scraping chairs, laughing, stuffing books in backpacks, dropping papers. My time to help him was over, and I felt a rising panic that I would fail him.

I was no poet, I had no right to even try. But I hastily added these four lines, and I left the room without allowing myself to reconsider.

Powerless

But for the stardust

Unknowing

I trail through her heart

Wednesday
6:45 p.m.

Day Boy helped me into the back seat of the car, handed me Baby Boy Fitzroy, and put my seatbelt on for me. He went to the trunk and returned with a towel, to wrap the infant in an outer layer before handing him back to me. He was about to close the door, but on second thought he reached in and tugged off the baby’s hospital cap, rearranging the towel to keep his head warm.

“Don’t lie down,” he ordered. “I don’t want you falling asleep and dropping him. And if we get stopped by the police or Hour Guards, the story is that you just delivered at home and I’m bringing you to the hospital. But let me do the talking. Got it?”

“Kiss off,” I said.

“Ah, it’s like old times,” he mumbled as he slammed the door.

A couple of blocks into our trip, in the pooled light of a street lamp, I saw two kids from my math class walking to school together, past a billboard that shouted SHARE SPACE FAIRLY BY SHARING TIME FAIRLY. I would never again have what they had, an ordinary life. I stared until they moved into the shadows and out of sight.

“Why weren’t you in school today?” I heard myself ask Day Boy. My voice was hollow, like it was coming from inside a shell.

“I’m a senior,” he said.

Implied in that answer was another bit of information he had left out.

“You have National Distinction,” I guessed, with a huff. “That figures.” I closed my eyes, promising myself I wouldn’t sleep.

Seniors who had achieved National Distinction received stipends to do full-time advanced apprenticeships in their assigned fields, in effect being excused from their last year of high school and guaranteeing the most prestigious jobs after graduation.

“I told you I had a lot to lose,” I barely heard him say.

The baby struggled a bit against his bindings. I opened my eyes, waited for them to focus, and then studied him. The lights of Lake Shore Drive strobed across his little body. He was waking up, and his whole face was scrunched like a dried apple, as if he were in excruciating pain or dying, when it was probably just a hunger pang. He looked so much like a boy to me now, I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before. The pain passed as quickly as it came, and his face reverted to angelic relaxation.

A black car zoomed past us on the right. It had a tall antenna waving to and fro on the back, and a license plate in the double digits.

“Unmarked cops,” I said.

Day Boy only nodded in confirmation.

And then behind us, on the left, another car just like it. It sped up and pulled alongside us, too close.

Day Boy muttered something I couldn’t hear and began to slow down, preparing to pull over to the right shoulder. I instinctively slid low in my seat. But the driver and the passenger of the black car didn’t even look sideways. The car sped up and moved in front of ours, into our lane, and then pulled away. The baby’s face contorted again in silent agony.

A feeling of dread washed over me that we were possibly the subject of the police urgency, but there was no point in mentioning it. In the last fourteen hours I’d done some exceptionally stupid things and now I would pay for them. The strange thing was, the only punishment I cared about was not saying goodbye to Poppu.

“Poppu,” I whispered under my breath, as the baby let out a strangled cry.

“He’s hungry,” Day Boy said.

“I guess he’ll eat soon,” I said. “Lucky boy.” I had the foul heartburn in my chest and throat of a person who’d had nothing in her belly for too long.

We took the next exit and waited at the light as three identical black cars, all with tinted windows, blew right through the stop.

“They’re headed toward the hospital,” I said, stating the obvious.

Day Boy dropped his forehead to the steering wheel. He looked up just in time to see the light turn green. He drove carefully, deliberately. He took the first left turn toward the hospital and slowed down, looking right toward the east entrance.

The street was dotted with the five suspicious cars. The exterior lights of the hospital and the sidewalk lampposts exposed a handful of men in suits with neat haircuts and shadowed faces, one texting furtively, a few plotting together in a business-dress huddle, all standing too straight, from years of discipline. I stared at them—at their brazen surreptitiousness, which was such a visual oxymoron. We weren’t going to be able to sneak into that entrance, for sure.

“Get down, Plus One,” Day Boy said all at once.

“You told me to sit up.” It felt much less belligerent than it sounded. The baby started to mewl again.

“Cache-toi,”
he practically growled, using the familiar form, maybe out of exasperation.

I leaned over, lying with the baby, and I laughed—I didn’t know where it came from, given the scrape I was in.
“Bon, enfin on se tutoie,”
I said, joking about our lengthening acquaintance.
Finally we’re addressing each other as friends.

“Would you please shut up?”

The baby began to cry in earnest. I felt the car hover, in a moment suspended with uncertainty, and then pick up speed and veer away from the hospital. Day Boy was not turning me in. At least not at that moment.

As uncomfortable as I was—sliced in two by the seatbelt, sweating through my hoodie, my head beating like a drum, awash in the baby’s wailing—the fact of reclining promised to knock me out for good. I wrapped my arms around angry little Fitzroy and fell asleep.

Night Minister

I learned the truth about our parents’ deaths on the night I turned thirteen—the night Ciel gave me the necklace. In retrospect it was clear that he had been waiting until the moment I was a teenager to tell me. I was not as ready as he thought.

Before that night, I believed my parents had died in a car crash. In fact, they had. But the accident was not simply bad luck, or the fault of a drunk driver or a spinning semitrailer on slick pavement, or any of the other visions I supplied with my imagination whenever someone mentioned it. The crash happened because they were speeding away from Hour Guards.

Before Ciel got far in his explanation, Poppu stopped him. He took my hands over the table. He rubbed the tops of them with his cool, paper-skinned thumbs. His eyes became moist and pink-lidded, as they often did when he spoke of my parents.

“There isn’t a person in the world who is perfect, Sol,” he said. “There isn’t a person who hasn’t made a mistake he regrets, not a single human being.”

“I know,” I said gravely. But I didn’t believe it, because Poppu had never once made a mistake, with me or with Ciel. Poppu was kind to everyone he met. He was brilliant and gentle. He was funny, and sometimes crude or obscene or profane—exactly when it was called for, exactly when the world felt so wrong for me I thought I might suffocate, which was more and more often, the older I got.

“Ciel is right that you should know more about them. You were so little when they died.”

I was not yet two, and Ciel was five. Ciel had snippets of memories of them, including one I coveted, of my father tossing him in the air over and over and catching him, and I had nothing.