Plus One (14 page)

I went into the sunroom. Jean opened a drawer and produced the cable that came with every state-issued mobile to download photos and records. I hooked my phone to his computer, pried apart the case, tweezed out the chip to reboot it, reinstalled it, and then reprogrammed it. It took no more than five minutes—and longer than necessary, because Day Boy was so curious his chin was over my shoulder the whole time, the breath from his nose wisping against my neck.

“Where should I put myself?” I asked, angling my cheek so I could see him, which put our faces too close. I turned back to the computer. “I can be anywhere on the planet. How about Japan?” Japan was one of the only countries—along with American Samoa and New Caledonia—that didn’t follow the Day/Night divide, probably because they had survived the 1918 flu pandemic relatively unscathed by quarantining themselves.

“For now, let’s choose something a little more believable,” Day Boy said. “Somewhere you could have driven in this amount of time. How about Minneapolis?”

With the programming complete, I was free to move away from Day Boy. I unplugged my phone, got up from the seat, went to the living room, and tapped the screen.

“I should explain something—” Day Boy started, but I was already reading.

Someone had replied to the threatening texts on my behalf.

I’m here, with infant, ready to bargain
, “I” had typed. The message was uncensored.

“You pretended to be me!” I said to Day Boy, irritated. But a bubble of admiration rose, too. It would never have occurred to me to use the word “bargain.” I would have only thought to ask for instructions.

“That’s what I wanted to tell you. We couldn’t leave radio silence the whole time you were out cold, and you were of no use to anyone without sleep. I drove to the hospital to send and receive the messages so the cops couldn’t trace you here.”

I looked at the reply:
Bring the baby to Jackson Park outer harbor slip A12 at midnight.
It was time-stamped 10:12 p.m.

“This was last night!”

“Keep reading,” Day Boy said.

I scrolled, and “my” reply said,
Need proof Poppu is safe. No meeting possible until tomorrow night.

Delay is unacceptable
, they had said, but there was a photo of Poppu attached, lying on an oval-shaped bed of what must have been a ship’s cabin, with paneled walls and a porthole-style window. The photo was high-resolution—another violation of the censorship laws. I expanded it. He was awake and looked relatively comfortable, but he was two days closer to death than when I’d last seen him. He had a thin tube that wrapped around his ears and stuck into his nose, feeding him oxygen, which was alarming. Day Boy came and stood next to me, his shoulder just grazing mine. He reached out and dragged the close-up to highlight Poppu’s forearm. Something was taped to Poppu’s wrist, snaking out of the field of the photo. I swallowed.

“He has an IV and a nasal cannula,” Day Boy said quietly. “So whoever they are, they have a medic with them.”

The warmth and realness of Day Boy’s arm and shoulder only made it more clear to me that Poppu was a bunch of electronic pixels on a device. I edged just a hair to the side so that he wasn’t touching me. I scrolled more.

Unavoidable
, Day Boy had replied on my behalf.
Will be out of touch until tomorrow afternoon, at which time we will each provide proof of our possessions to negotiate.
It was so much his voice, his deliberateness, not mine. Anyone who knew me might have questioned whether I wrote it. And what a coup it was to receive a photo of Poppu without showing evidence that we had the baby.

I tried to scroll farther. That was the last message. I looked up at Day Boy, and at Jean across the room, swaying with Fitzroy.

“And now?” I asked. “What do I do now?”

Be Here

After Ciel told me the truth about our parents, the thought that they had died for a cause rather than raise me began to burn constantly, like a weak acid. When Poppu got sick I knew I would lose the person who had gracefully chosen to take their place.

In a fit of despondency one Monight I scrawled this on my desk:

death
=
abandonment.

I drew a picture of a crying baby—me—with soft curls that were destined to become wiry flames after puberty.

My drawing partner responded the next night by sketching a pacifier, floating above the open, wailing mouth of the infant, with a dashed arrow pointing as if to say “insert here.”

Ah, Mistress of the Dark Non Sequitur,

I missed you over the weekend.

How can I help?

It was such a simple, sweet offer.
How can I help?
No lecture, no arrogant presumption that he could interpret and comfort without further information.

I put the circled number
next to the crying baby, the number
next to his drawing of the pacifier, and for number
I re-drew the baby with the pacifier in her mouth, soothed, with only a vestige of a tear on her flushed cheek. Below her I wrote:

Just always be here.

Thursday
2:30 p.m.

Jean put the baby on his shoulder and said, “How strong do you feel, Sol?”

My name sounded good on his lips, like he’d said it many times before and burnished it to a soft luster.

“I’m well, thanks to you.”

“D’Arcy did most of the nursing,” he said dismissively. He turned to his son. “I think it’s time for us to introduce her upstairs.”

“Why?” Day Boy pleaded, almost whined. “They’ve already met.”

“First, keeping secrets from your mother is unwise. Second, you said Fitzroy was transferred from the Night to Day nursery to avoid treatment, and I need your mother to explain what that means.”

“But she’ll turn her in!” he said, gesturing at me, his voice heavy with something I couldn’t recognize. “And stop calling the baby Fitzroy. It’s pissing me off.”

It was curious to me the way Jean referred to his wife as “your mother.”

Day Boy stood up and paced the room. Jean waited quietly, so I did, too. Finally Day Boy stopped in front of me.

“Let’s go see Hélène,” he grumbled at last. He started to walk to the rear of the apartment. I followed, with Jean behind me.

We passed the front hall and the bedrooms without stopping and finally ended up in the kitchen. It was a well-loved room, with copper pots hanging from a rack on the ceiling, and canisters of flour, rice, and pasta on the counters. An espresso machine. A butcher-block island that had been subjected to countless chef’s knives. A marble pastry board just like Poppu’s, with the same worn patina. The windows of the room were high, for privacy, and there was no back door. There was the inviting smell of something warm and rich bubbling in a pot on the stove, with the lid cocked and vapors curling toward the hood.

Day Boy climbed a steep, library-style ladder that led to a hatch in the ceiling.

I was thoroughly confused.

I put my foot on the bottom rung, my hands on the railings, and looked up at him. He knocked hard on the beaded wood paneling. Three series of three knocks. He waited for an answer, looked down at me, and said with a scowl, “What would you like written on your tombstone?”

I heard footsteps, and then a piece of furniture moved above us. The hatch lifted, and Hélène’s face appeared, with her dark hair dangling and her cheeks plump from the pull of gravity. There was a look she gave Day Boy that I craved—the kind of unguarded joy that I saw on Poppu’s face when I walked through the door after school—but it was there for only a second or two.

“Mais enfin te voilà,”
she began with relief, as if he were simply late and she had finally found him. Her eyes caught on me, standing below him on the ladder. The look on her face morphed into something like intense confusion and escalated to horror when she caught sight of Jean and the baby.

“Now wait, before you—” Day Boy started.

“Non. Non! Non! Je ne peux pas croire que tu as—”
and then she slammed the hatch in midsentence and Day Boy ducked. I heard her voice, hysterical, muffled by the floor, ranting in French about the police, her feet stomping like a teenager. Something swished across the hatch and plunked lightly—a rug maybe—and a chair pounded on top of that, perhaps, and I heard her throw her body into the chair. And then there was silence for a moment, followed by racked sobbing. That last sound reached into my gut, grabbed a handful of intestines, and squeezed. It was more awful to have caused such despondence than any amount of rage. I wondered when I’d gone so soft that I gave a damn about a woman who openly despised me.

Day Boy waited a minute, and when her crying quieted some, he knocked again. Three sets of three.

“Mum,” he called. No answer.
“Maman.”
His voice was becoming puny.
“Je suis vraiment désolé.” I’m so sorry.

Hearing him apologize about me with such profound emotion caused a surprising ache in my chest. It was as if I were a horrible mistake, a life-changing regret, a misfortune that he would wish away if he could.

But of course I was all of those things.

I turned to look at Jean, a couple of steps away from the ladder, but I couldn’t read his face. He was cool, nearly stony.

I stepped down and waited, empty as a glass jar, hugging myself with a chill. It was warm in the kitchen, I knew, but my starved body had lost the ability to regulate its temperature at the most unpredictable times. Meanwhile Day Boy hadn’t moved. He was so high on the ladder he was scrunched, leaning against the railing, his head bent and his shoulders curved.

Jean sighed.
“Tiens,”
he said, handing me Fitzroy, whom I took somewhat reluctantly and very clumsily. The baby growled at the transition. Jean went to the cabinet and pulled out a deep round mug. He used a hot pad to remove the lid of the pot on the stove. He ladled two scoops of steaming green slop into the mug, set it on the island near me, and reached into the dish drainer for a clean spoon. And then he gently took Fitzroy back, supporting his head and neck far better than I had. For the next several minutes I sat on a stool and sipped hot, rich split-pea soup with ham—so wonderful and warming—trying not to look at Day Boy, jammed against the ceiling and miserable.

Something thumped above us. The chair was dragged aside. The hatch crackled as it stuck slightly. Hélène stood above the opening, hands on her waist, her face red-nosed and shiny from scrubbing it. She stepped aside so we could mount.

“Merci.”
I heard Day Boy thank her, softly.

“Je ne promets rien,”
she replied, monotone.
I promise nothing.

It was one of the hardest things I had ever done, to climb out of the hatch and feel her eyes on me as I moved into her space. Dozens of people glared at me every night when I was in school, and the sum of them didn’t add up to this.