Plus One (12 page)

Poppu went on. “But after he tells you how they died, I want you to remember how they lived—all the things I’ve told you about your mother as a baby, and as a child, about how she and your father met, about the night they were married, and the way they blossomed after you and Ciel were born.” Now he took a hanky out of his pocket and blew his nose. “Because the one thing you must always remember is that they loved you. They loved you both more than anything else in the world.”

He sat back and looked at Ciel, who had waited through this message patiently and was a little too unfazed, as if he had heard it before. For my part, I needed to know that my parents loved me, and it wasn’t until Poppu had said it in such absolute terms that I realized how much I craved it—how some deep part of me was an empty well that desperately needed a spring to refill it.

“Mom and Dad were part of the old resistance.” Ciel started his story again.

All I knew about the old resistance was that both the Day and Night branches of the government called it a terrorist organization, and they had crushed it a decade ago by killing or imprisoning its leaders and strangling its money supply. The so-called new resistance was a bunch of young hippies led by a Ray teenager named Grady Hastings, who had only rhetoric and righteousness for weapons. They wanted curfews to be abolished, but no one took them seriously. They held rallies; they got themselves arrested on purpose. Still, it seemed like a wasted effort: most Rays and Smudges had jobs, if not always the ones they wanted, and roofs over their heads, and food on the table. We didn’t live in revolutionary times.

“They rigged bombs,” Ciel was saying, “and set them off in official government Day and Night offices and vehicles—”

Poppu interjected, “Your parents had never once hurt anyone.”

Ciel said, “But they damaged a hell of a lot of government property. They were meticulous about detonating their devices after hours—nighttime if it was a Day office, daytime if it was a Night office—when their target was closed and empty. They tailored the size of the blast to the area they wanted to damage and placed the bombs so carefully that even security guards were never injured.”

“I don’t understand.” I shook my head. The information was bouncing off me, not filling me. “Why did they pick on Night offices? They were Smudges.”

Ciel shared a glance with Poppu. He had learned all this before me. I felt left out, and young.

“If they were terrorists, at least they were equal-opportunity terrorists.” Ciel smiled with one side of his mouth. “Because they objected to the
system
, not to one population or the other.”

Poppu took over for a moment. “See how old I am, Sol. I’m nearing the end of my years.”

“You are not! Why are you saying that?”

“I was born twenty years after the Spanish flu pandemic. Twenty years
after
the Day/Night divide. I have known nothing else. In fact, there are perhaps only three or four hundred individuals in the world today who were old enough in 1918 to remember the change. Now every few days one of them dies, and soon the living memory of a world without the divide will be gone.”

I wondered whether we should be talking this way.

“No one can help being born Smudge or Ray,” Ciel said. “But Mom and Dad wanted to shake everyone—to make them think about why the law is still here all these years later, and whether it’s right.”

I had heard the history of the divide a thousand times at school and on television. I could recite it from memory; I’d regurgitated it for exams. It was familiar, it made sense, it was—permanent. It had never been presented as a point of discussion.

The pandemic was like a nuclear bomb in its human destruction, before nuclear bombs existed. Everyone lost family members, all over the globe. Entire villages disappeared. The virus hitched its way to the Arctic and to remote Pacific islands. People were buried in mass graves. No, not people: your mother, your brother, your aunt, your best friend on the block, your teacher. In Chicago, the streetcars were draped in black and used to collect the dead. Doctors and nurses collapsed from exhaustion; hospitals set up tents outside for overflow.

In the fall of 1918 Woodrow Wilson formed the Federal Medical Administration, and it had the clever idea of recruiting apprentices from colleges and high schools to boost the staffs of hospitals. Half of all doctors and nurses and new aides were assigned to day, and half were assigned to night, with mandated rest. It worked so well, the FMA expanded the dual curfew to include industries that supported hospitals: drug companies, medical supply companies, delivery services, morticians and morgues, police and fire departments.

There was an unexpected bonus when half the medical industry started working after dark: public transportation was less crowded, and that small change helped to slow the spread of the disease. Meanwhile, efficiency in medical supply companies soared with round-the-clock factories, setting new records in productivity, even though there were fewer workers because of the war and the pandemic. President Wilson was encouraged. He set up the Office of Assignment to make decisions about who would be Day and who would be Night. The Committee on Public Information helped people to accept and understand the change.

The United States began to recover—financially and medically—before other countries, which quickly patterned their own governments and industries after our successful Day/Night model. Two and a half years and more than fifty million deaths later, the pandemic was over, but the system stayed in place.

“So the day they died,” Ciel said, “they were set up.”

“Betrayed,” Poppu corrected.

“By who?” I asked.

“By whom,” Poppu corrected again. “And they never learned who it was.” His voice broke, and he shook his head, wiping his eyes with the hanky. It took him a moment to be able to speak. “In fact, in Brussels I knew nothing about the inner workings of the resistance. I was alarmed when I found out that your mother was involved. She had been such a studious, gentle child.”

“The Night Minister was tipped off,” Ciel went on. “It was Minister Paulsen’s first term. In her campaign she had promised to end corruption and terrorism, and she decided to be hands-on about it. She arranged to have a decoy leave the building before curfew, and then she hid, in her own office.”

“Did she have a gun?” I whispered, having read too many thrillers with Poppu.

“No.” Ciel smiled. “Her plan was less primitive than that. She had Day police cars stationed along each side of the building, on alert, so that the exits were covered. She wanted to catch them in the act, and she knew Mom and Dad would run.”

I couldn’t speak because of the suspense. Poppu’s tears had forged paths from his eyes, and the ducts pumped so steadily that he just leaned the hanky on his cheeks to blot the tiny rivulets as they ran.

“Minister Paulsen wasn’t being brave, although that’s the PR she got when it was over. She knew they wouldn’t be armed, other than the explosive. It was their MO
not
to harm people. But somehow … Dad was injured. We think he tried to disarm the bomb when the minister confronted them.” Ciel’s eyes became moist now, too, but with embers of rage behind them. “The bomb took off his hand and part of his arm.”

Suddenly it was no longer a book or a movie, it was real people. It was my father, and he was flesh and blood, not just photographs, and he had been alive that night, and he’d had Ciel and me waiting at home for him. And now he was mutilated. My mouth was dry.

“Did he die?”

Ciel shook his head. “No, when they found him in the car he had tied a tourniquet around it, or Mom had. They got away from Minister Paulsen. What she didn’t know was that they had gotten into the building through steam tunnels, not through a door or a window, and they escaped.”

“They escaped.” My heart pounded.

“Yes, they managed to get to their car, even though it was daytime and he was bleeding bad.”

Poppu interjected, “Your mother’s camisole was wrapped around the stump.”

“They drove away,” Ciel said. “But then they got stopped by Day Guards—random, fucking Hour Guards.”

Poppu didn’t flinch at the swear, which I knew meant the context was in a category he found acceptable.

“And even though the Day forgeries in their phones were perfect,” Ciel said, “there was an APB out on them the moment Paulsen alerted the police.” He told the rest of the story in short sentences, like bullets firing, making survival for my parents impossible, even though I already knew they wouldn’t make it: “Mom drove away; the Day Guard must have pulled his gun; there was a chase; the Guard shot a tire; Mom lost control at high speed, hit the median, and the car flipped.”

His eyes glowed hot again, swallowing me, and dragging me to a dark place I wasn’t ready for at only thirteen.

“I believe our father tried to save Minister Paulsen’s life disarming that bomb, and she repaid him by murdering him.”

Thursday
12:00 Noon

I woke up seventeen hours later in a real bed—a firm one with a feather mattress pad under me and a cotton quilt on top. My head had the thick feeling of too much sleep, and there was a horizontal line of pressure above my eyebrows. I lifted my right hand; my finger was re-dressed. It was sore, but not throbbing. I put my hand to my cheek: I was cool to the touch, no fever.

I sat up. I was in a bedroom—spare and masculine, with rich, rust-red walls and evidence of recent life: dirty laundry in a basket next to the dresser, and a stick deodorant on the desk with books, papers, and a computer. There was an Ansel Adams photo on the wall near the door:
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico
,
1941
. It made the night look positively enviable. What beauty would Adams have captured if he’d been allowed to photograph during the day? I lay back down and smelled lavender on the pillow.

In a moment I rolled over. My eyes drifted to the objects on the bedside table: an almost-empty bowl of chicken soup and Yukie Shiga’s hospital lanyard. There was a bottle of prescription medicine—doxycycline, a non-penicillin antibiotic I remembered from when I’d sliced my palm open with a tin can on a camping trip—and a glass of water. A fuzzy image flashed in my head of a man, a stranger, spoon-feeding me, my head in a cloud of pillows, my alertness lapping in and out like wavelets on the shore, warmth and richness traveling down my esophagus. I would not have remembered any of it if I hadn’t seen the empty bowl. I watched the digital clock move from 12:06 to 12:07. I meant to get up, but my eyes closed themselves. It was 12:29 when the door opened.

“Better, I think, yes?” the man said to me. He had the remnants of a French accent, and I knew immediately that he was the one who had spoon-fed me. He was tall, with an athletic build, and he looked like the middle-aged models from some fashion spreads. He had all his hair, which was mostly gray and spiky, and he was clean-shaven. His skin was the color of—I imagined—a person who went sailing on Lake Michigan on the weekends. I nodded, mute, and when he came closer I saw that his eyes were a soft hazel.

“Mr. Benoît,” I said. Only Day Boy could have such a perfect father.

“Jean.” He leaned over the bed, felt my forehead, and smiled. “In fact, you’ll live.”

I sat up, making him drop his hand. The world and my fate began reasserting themselves in a rush of dread. “Where is my phone?” I pulled the blanket and sheet from around my legs to get out of bed, only to see that I was wearing a man’s shirt, with no underwear. I flung the sheet back over myself. “Crap. Where are my clothes? I have to get up!”

“I have washed them.” He turned his face toward the door and called quietly,
“D’Arcy, elle s’est réveillée.”
He looked back at me and said, “You will want to take a bath.”

“I don’t have time for a bath. I need to find my grandfather.”

“A shower, then,” he said, deliberately misunderstanding me. “You cannot go out without freshening up. You will call attention to yourself. Take the moment you need to be healthy.”

“I don’t have time for a shower.”

He put a clear plastic bag and a rubber band on the bedside table. “Keep your dressing dry,” he said, turning to leave. He remembered something. “And take one of those pills. You’re two hours late. You’ll need to take it every twelve hours until it’s gone. Drink it with a big glass of water.”

Day Boy came to the door hugging a bath towel and my folded clothes.

His dad turned sideways to pass him in the doorway and said in a low voice,
“Je vois ce que tu veux dire. Elle est fougueuse, n’est-ce pas?”

He was calling me feisty, but using the word normally reserved for a horse, and I resented that Day Boy had been talking about me while I slept.

“I can hear you!” I said.

Jean left. Day Boy hovered in the doorway. I tucked the blanket tightly around my legs and realized that I was at his mercy. “Bring me my clothes,” I ordered.

“Ask nicely.”

“Please,” I begged, “at least give me the towel. I can’t get up like this.”

“This is an interesting situation…” He leaned against the doorjamb with his eyebrows raised.

“You’re not funny. My grandfather is out there. Dying.”

The corners of his lips turned down. “Promise you’ll take a shower. We won’t discuss going anywhere until you do.”

He set the clothes on the bed and I pressed the covers to my chest with one hand as I reached for them.

“There’s something you should know,” he said.

“What.”

“It took the two of us to put you in that shirt.”

I scowled when I caught his meaning.

“I’m going to be a doctor, Plus One. You’re a patient.”

My brain raced through hazy images of my body, leaden and uncooperative, head aching, my finger on fire, and the two of them gently lifting my limbs, peeling my clothes off. I would not have remembered it if he hadn’t told me.

Day Boy pinched his lips, maybe sorry that he had said anything.

“Meet us in the living room for lunch when you’re clean.”

*   *   *

The shower was hot and lovely. So lovely that I cried as it pounded on my head and rinsed the previous hours away, purifying me temporarily. The shampoo smelled like lavender.