Plus One (13 page)

I dried myself, rubbing hard with the rough side of the towel. I took the baggie off my right hand; it was damp, but from sweat. I changed into my clothes: fresh, a little gray, and stiff from being line-dried. There were a few stray cosmetics in the cabinet—not enough to indicate a woman lived there, just enough to suggest she visited. I used her deodorant. She had left a black elastic hair holder, and I took it. I braided my hair and tied the end off with it. In the mirror my face was shiny, the heat of the shower had made my lips crimson against the white of my skin, and the flames of my hair were muted by dampness, making my eyes stand out in their hollow, hungry sockets.

I was more than hungry. I was starving.

I walked barefooted down the hall, and the living room opened before me. Their home was laid out something like mine, a typical old Chicago railroad apartment, with bedrooms along a hall that led to the front foyer, then the living room, and a sun porch beyond. Their porch was winterized so that it was a real room, with expansive windows set high off the floor but reaching the ceiling. There was a desk with a computer, a chair, a file cabinet, and a reclining chaise: someone’s home office. In the corner of the office was a treadmill. Day Boy and his dad were sitting on opposite sides of a sectional sofa in the living room, eating sandwiches over plates on the coffee table, resting their elbows on their knees. The television was in the corner, tuned to the local Day news. Like the bedroom, everything was tidy and comfortable and reasonably clean but not fussily so.

I saw that there was a third plate with a sandwich waiting on the coffee table. It was made on crusty French bread, with hints of white fresh mozzarella, red tomatoes, green basil, and a strip of prosciutto licking out like a salty, fatty tongue. I hadn’t seen a sandwich like that since Poppu had gotten sick. A cluster of grapes sat beside the sandwich on the plate. A pitcher of iced tea was in the middle of the table. Obnoxious amounts of saliva poured into my mouth. I might have killed for that sandwich.

I stood in front of them and said, “I’m clean. May I have my phone?”

“Sit,” Jean said, patting the sofa very far away from himself, as if I might bite.

“Food first, phone second,” Day Boy said.

“First my grandfather, then jail,” I corrected, not budging.

Thursday
1:30 p.m.

Day Boy and his father stared at me. The television was the only noise in the room, set to the Independent News Network, which prided itself on evenhanded coverage of Day and Night issues and was subversive enough to criticize the curfew laws in some of its reports. I was surprised to see Rays watching it. It had a reputation for outrageous, almost flamboyant radicalism outside the Smudge community. The weather segment had just ended: sunny with cumulus clouds and unseasonably warm with highs near twenty-seven degrees Celsius. It was almost like being in a foreign country, where my body still breathed, I still saw and heard, but everything was just a little different, everything made me slightly dizzy.
Sunny, with cumulus clouds.

I was about to ask for my phone again, but the next item in the broadcast caught my ear with the words “Now some happy news for Night Minister Paulsen.” I turned to see an anchorwoman I didn’t know from the Day staff.

“In a press conference today at County Hospital, the minister’s husband confirmed that his wife has had her baby: a healthy boy weighing twenty-eight hundred grams, and measuring forty-five centimeters. The delivery was by Cesarean section, but Mr. Paulsen and the doctor report that mother and baby are doing fine.”

The video cut to Mr. Paulsen and the doctor, sitting in front of microphones at a table. Next to Mr. Paulsen stood a man in a suit, his eyes darting like a cockatrice, surveying everyone in the room to see who needed to be turned to stone.

“Jacqui is comfortable but tired,” Mr. Paulsen droned robotically into the microphone, looking kind of ragged himself. A reporter asked a question, and Mr. Paulsen said, “His name? Oh, uh, no. We haven’t chosen a name for the baby yet.” He glanced up at the man in the suit, and something like worry crossed his face.

The anchorwoman came on for a new segment to interview the Hour Rights leader, Grady Hastings, who was organizing a march on Washington in which he would give a speech that deliberately overlapped the night curfew bell. I turned back to the men in my room.

“‘Mother and baby are doing fine’? What the hell!” I said.

“Precisely,” Mr. Benoît said, deadpan. “What the hell.”

“Did you give the baby back?” My voice was verging on anger.

“No, my dear. We’re not that wise.” Jean stood up and took two sidesteps past the coffee table. “God help us, the child is asleep in my bedroom.” He extended his arm toward the sofa. “Take my place, eat lunch, while I clean up and check on him. You need fuel to be of any use to yourself.”

All at once I realized that the look of worry I’d seen flash across Mr. Paulsen’s face was actually anguish. It was loss, and heartache, because his baby was missing. I clenched my teeth. No one cared about my heartache, why should I care about his?

“Sit down and eat, Plus One,” Day Boy said. “And when your plate is clean I’ll give you your phone. You look good, by the way.” He pushed the plate in my direction, concentrating on that and not me. “Recovered, I mean.”

I resented the way he was holding my phone hostage, and his patronizing tone of voice. But I had to have that sandwich, so I sat down and took an enormous bite, and then another. I inhaled the sweet aroma of the basil so deeply that my eyes closed while I chewed, and I was transported for a second to a day when, standing on a stool, I helped Poppu make packets of pesto to freeze for the winter. I willed the tears not to come, and for once they obeyed.

“Your dad is … nurturing,” I finally said with my mouth full. A piece of mozzarella slipped out of the sandwich and onto my jeans. I picked it up with my fingers and popped it into my mouth.

“He raised me almost single-handedly,” Day Boy said, passing me a napkin.

“But—”

“I know,” he interrupted. “I have a mother. But she was the breadwinner, and he was the one who gave up his career to raise me.”

“What was his career?” I asked, curious in spite of myself.

“In France he was a professor of psychology—neuroscience. He specialized in biological rhythms, and the evolution of biological timekeeping mechanisms. Growing up he always wanted to be an archaeologist, but only Rays can study archaeology.”

It took me a moment to process the last sentence. I stopped in midbite. I stared at him.

He nodded, to confirm what I was thinking. “He’s a Smudge.”

I finished chewing and then swallowed.

“But you and your mom…”

“My mother is very good at what she does. She was invited to practice and teach in the United States. It was a chance to be reassigned to Day. She was pregnant with me at the time. It meant automatic Day assignment for me if she gave birth here. She was desperate to say yes. Plus, the Day government promised—at least, she thought they promised, but there was fine print—that Jean would be reassigned, too.”

“Why wasn’t he?”

“There were no posts in his field. The market for professors is drying up. He was supposed to wait until something opened at one of the local universities. After a year and a half of being apart from us, he gave up and came over as a Smudge. He chose retirement, to raise me full-time.”

“How does a Night father care for a Day baby?” I asked.

“That sounds like a riddle.” Day Boy smirked. “And the answer is: he lives like a prisoner in his own home.”

“No, really.”

“Really. The parents of other students walked me to school. Neighbors took me to the park and museums. Jean watched me play in the yard from the window. He cooked, he cleaned, he made my lunches, helped with homework, baked my birthday cakes. He makes the best chocolate mousse tart. He kept a Day schedule and did the grocery shopping at night, when he was allowed to leave—when Hélène was home and I was asleep.”

I finished the sandwich, which had barely taken the edge off my hunger, and started on the grapes. I watched Day Boy use a napkin to wipe the ring of condensation the pitcher had left on the coffee table. He did it carefully, just as he seemed to do everything. On the TV, Grady Hastings was being quizzed about the ethics of using teenagers in the nonviolent resistance movement. Day and Night high school students had been arrested for swapping their school hours in protest. Hastings was no longer a gangly teen. He was in his early twenties now and strikingly handsome, with skin so black it seemed to have a tinge of purple, and shocking tribal scarification on his forehead, cheeks, and chin in the form of patterned bumps. His hair was shaved to almost nothing, like he was too busy to bother growing it.

The reporter said, “How do you answer the critics who charge that you’re deliberately exploiting children because their criminal records are wiped clean at eighteen?”

“I didn’t organize this part of the protest movement.” Grady was outraged, as he always was. “Pockets of students all over the country developed the strategy on their own. But if they don’t embody courage in our pathetic, complacent society, I don’t know who does. Unlike the adults who should be advocating for them, these kids are working to expose the daily inequalities and lies that both branches of government perpetrate on young people. So no, I did not recruit them, but
yes
, I commend them;
yes
, I will help them in any way I can.”

I glanced at Day Boy watching the TV, focused and serious. I had judged him unfairly: he did not live in a high-rise, his family did not appear to be wealthy, he had been touched by the Day/Night divide in a way I had never suspected.

Jean came in cradling Fitzroy, feeding him a bottle, smiling as if he were his own son. “I had to wake him up to feed him. In these first few days they sometimes sleep too deeply, but their bodies need to eat every two hours.”

I remembered how the baby had stayed so unbelievably still against me, a slumbering heat bomb, allowing me to escape the hospital with him. Was that only yesterday? I noticed Jean’s hands—almost delicate, with long fingers made for pipetting, or typing, not for operating blister-pack sealing machines.

“You have a tan,” I said, before I had the chance to edit myself.

He smiled. “So D’Arcy has revealed that we’re compatriots, you and I.” He glanced at the ceiling. “In fact, I sneak up to the roof for fifteen minutes a day to sun myself. I believe in making my own vitamin D.”

“Where did you get the baby’s bottle?” I asked, out of nowhere.

“Don’t worry,” Day Boy said. “We didn’t go to the store wearing a sign advertising our new infant.”

Jean said, “D’Arcy and I thought it would be safest for the purchase not to show up on either of our phones. I have a network of Day neighbors who have always bartered with me to pick up odds and ends that I have forgotten at night.” He looked at his son and said, “It was Katherine—on the first floor—she has an infant granddaughter who visits on the weekends. It makes sense for Katherine to buy diapers and formula.” He smiled at me. It created irresistibly charming creases above his cheeks. “In exchange, I will be making her pies for Unity Night.”

“Speaking of fair trades,” Day Boy said. He walked over to the TV stand and picked up my phone. He tossed it carefully onto my lap.

It had been right in front of me the whole time.

“You can’t turn it on, though,” Day Boy said, before I had a chance to do anything.

“Why?”

Jean said, “The police are looking for you; they would locate us by your phone’s position.”

“This apartment is the closest thing to a safe house we’ll ever have,” Day Boy added. “Jean is practically off the grid. He wants to keep it that way.”

I wondered briefly where Day Boy’s mother was, and what she thought of her husband and son harboring a fugitive. It didn’t seem like her to let something like that slide.

“We can drive some distance away for you to use your phone.” Day Boy interrupted my thoughts. “The trouble is we’ll risk being stopped by an Hour Guard. And I hadn’t thought of this till now, but it turns out that when you’re rested and clean and not feverish you don’t really look like my Plus One anymore.”

“Thanks,” I said, only half sarcastically. It occurred to me that no one was talking about turning me in. I wanted to know why, but for the moment I didn’t dare break the spell.

Something clicked from my childhood. “I know how to get around the global positioning feature.”

Day Boy raised an eyebrow, as if I’d surprised him with yet another aspect of my criminality, while Jean said incredulously, “You do?”

I nodded. “My brother used to do it for money. He showed me once.” Poppu had blown a gasket when he’d found out. It was the only time I’d ever heard them raise their voices in an argument. Smudges don’t shout; they debate quietly. They master hurting each other with the choice of words, not the volume. I remembered hiding in my bed, under my comforter, hating being the cause of their fight.

“I’d need a computer, a mobile interface cable, and a pair of tweezers,” I said.

“The first two are right in there,” Jean said, using his chin to point to the sunroom study. “I’ll get the tweezers.”

“There are drawbacks,” I warned, when he returned. “The instant I open the mobile case, the credit functionality is frozen. And if an Hour Guard stops me and happens to audit my position, he’ll see that it’s falsified, and I’m dead.”

Day Boy said right away, “The credit functionality doesn’t matter, because you can’t buy anything or they’ll track you by purchases. But the second part sounds risky—”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “I don’t think Hour Guards even glance at the accuracy of the phone’s position when they stop you.” My experience with their invasive scrutiny had always been creepier: checking whether I used birth control, looking at my family’s income and my home address.

“No one has ever paged through to see my global position, as far as I know,” Jean agreed.

Day Boy relented. “If she gets stopped while I’m with her I’ll just hold my breath until I pass out.”