Plus One (18 page)

Day Boy’s voice became strained. We were almost at Monroe, and I could tell he felt his time was running out. “You’re not turning yourself in after you see your grandfather. You’re going to hit ‘send’ on that text to the police about where Fitzroy is, but you’re going to run back down the dock and—are you listening?”

I looked into his eyes in the rearview mirror. I nodded, but I had already planned on disregarding his instructions.

“Good. You’re going to meet me at the car. The lakefront trail north is the easiest route for you to take, and then duck west under Lake Shore Drive at Randolph. But I don’t care how you get there, just find me in the lot, okay?”

“Sure.” I said it maybe a little too quickly.

“Plus One.” There was a reprimand in his tone.

“Why bother?” I said, launching straight from feigned cooperation to rebelliousness. “It’s just delaying the inevitable. I’m going to jail, and no one can stop that.”

“If the baby is returned, Hélène will have half of what she wants. We’ll hide at Jean’s place and think for one more day.”

We had reached Monroe, and the light was red. I draped a corner of the blanket over the doll’s face to cover its silent scream.

I slid out of the seat, and just before I shut the door I said, less casually than I meant to, “I’m really sorry I messed things up for you.” I’d thought a lot about it at Jean’s apartment and decided that I did in fact hope Day Boy would have a nice life. I took the first steps away from the car and then made the mistake of looking back. He was rolling down the window.

“No!” he shouted, flustered. “Meet me at the lot!”

I turned and ran—uncomfortably, with my upper body stiff because of the rubber corpse in my arms—toward the Chicago Yacht Club.

All at once I understood the choice of time: the streets were slightly chaotic, with Rays running home and Day tourists hustling to their hotels. My mild panic blended right in.

I waited at a red light to cross Lake Shore Drive, sweat drops forming on my nose, which I couldn’t wipe away while holding the baby. I saw from that distance that there was a white yacht at the pump-out dock. A big one—one you’d expect a mob leader or a drug lord to own, with its deck high above the water and a spinning satellite dish of some sort on top. My legs suddenly felt trembly, and I looked back toward Columbus Drive to find that the car was gone. I was on my own from now on.

I had achieved one thing, at least. I had ditched Day Boy.

“Bonne chance,”
I sighed to him.

A taxi with an orange stripe similar in color to the Hour Guard vehicles sped by, reminding me that the whole thing would be over instantly if I stumbled into a routine Day check. The light changed and I hurried across Lake Shore Drive and down the path past the yacht club. When I stepped onto the dock I slowed, and then stopped altogether. My throat was dry, and I was breathing too hard. I needed time to get a grip. I adjusted the baby in my arms, but carefully, as if it were a living thing, because I assumed that I was being watched. I startled when it began to move slightly. Day Boy’s programming was kicking in. It made low grunting noises that must have been digitally sampled from a real baby.

As I approached, I saw a figure waiting at the stern, where there was a platform on the same level as the dock. It was a man—tall and spindly, with his arms crossed nervously over his chest. I stood straighter; I walked deliberately. I tried to make my body lie to him that I wasn’t scared out of my mind. From a few yards away our eyes met and I recognized him. It was the male nurse from the maternity ward. I froze.

“Come on, Le Coeur,” he called irritably, as if I were dawdling and not just paralyzed with confusion. “I won’t bite.”

I took a few steps toward him. There was a railing around the platform, and he reached over it to offer me a hand. I shook my head. If I lost my footing, the space between the boat and the dock was just wide enough to accidentally drop a baby through. I needed to be in control—of myself and of the doll.

“Pass me the baby and you can board on your own, then,” he said. Premie Gort’s grunts got louder, and his legs and arms moved. It felt so odd: a reanimation of the dead.

I shook my head again, mute. Pass him a fake baby? Not on his life.

“I need to talk to whoever is in charge.” I started my prepared speech.

Something made me look up then. I had a sensation I couldn’t have described before that moment: an awareness of a person’s presence, from years of knowing what he
feels
like when he’s silently in a room with you, off in the corner, reading or thinking. There, gazing down from the top deck at me, dissecting every part of me with his eyes, was my brother, Ciel. He was a man now, broader in every way, with defined muscles, a thicker neck, a sparse, clipped beard, and spiky, mussed hair.

I let out a cry, and I stumbled backward, nearly dropping the baby. I couldn’t process what was happening fast enough, and I was bombarded instead with useless snippets of thoughts:

the male nurse, I knew him

the courtroom

hyena laughter

Ciel

a yacht

Ciel, grown up

Poppu, on a ship with Ciel.

And then one last thought began to gel, made of all the incoherent pieces: my own brother had blackmailed me using my grandfather.

My reaction was pure and unedited. Something like a hand grenade went off in my core, exploding up and through my head, and I found myself shaking, saying, “You bastard,” and then shouting, “You bastard! You horrible bastard!” I clutched the baby to me and collapsed my frame around it, as if it were a living thing that needed protection from him. But I wasn’t acting a part; it was an automatic, visceral response to Ciel’s betrayal, to my feeling that he was more of a monster than I had ever imagined, that nothing was safe or sacred near him.

“Stay there, Sol,” he yelled angrily, pointing at me, as if to pin me in place with his finger. The male nurse had climbed over the railing and had one foot on the dock. But I was stumbling away now, my gaze riveted on Ciel, though I never wanted to see him again. My vision was blurry, and I quickly wiped my eyes with my wrist but they wouldn’t clear. I heard a thumping deep in my ears—my heartbeat?—and I saw flashing, strobing lights, like I was having a seizure. I started to run, but the beating was not my heart, it was the resonant
wub wub
of a helicopter. The strobes were police cars on Lake Shore Drive.

Premie Gort let out a feeble cry.

The sky behind the city’s massive buildings was brilliant orange and purple.

Ciel was shouting orders at the male nurse, who responded by untying the lines of the boat and leaping back onto the platform for the getaway. The engines had already started. The ship belched dark smoke as it revved to pull away from the dock.

I ran all out now, the baby mannequin more like a football than an infant, and from the corner of my eye I saw Officer Dacruz spilling out of his squad car in the turnaround of the yacht club. The helicopter was above him, with a rifleman leaning out of the side, training his gun on me, just like in the movies. It was surreal. He wouldn’t really shoot, would he? A spotlight beamed down, blue and too bright, throwing shadows off me and the posts of the dock. I had a cramp in my stomach that threatened to hobble me.

“Stop!” Dacruz yelled, but I was already off the dock and on my way up the grassy hill toward Lake Shore Drive. I looked frantically ahead and saw Day Boy, zigzagging through lanes of speeding cars on the road to meet me. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Any one of the cars could have killed him.

I tripped and fell, twisting my body midway to avoid landing on the “baby”—a stupid instinct that I would pay for with deep bruises if not a real injury. I rolled off my shoulder and struggled to sit, the wind slightly knocked out of me. Dacruz was just leaving the path, just starting up the hill, and Day Boy was coming down from the Drive. They would converge on me—and each other—if I didn’t get up.

Dacruz lifted something in his two hands that looked like a gun, but it was bright yellow and black.

“Stay where you are!” He stopped and planted his boots to take aim.

Day Boy shouted, “GET UP.”

I scrambled to my feet. I heard a puffing explosion of air from Dacruz’s gun. It was a taser.

The son of a bitch shot me while I was holding a baby.

I felt the probe end of a wire filament pierce my sleeve, and I saw the other filament drop uselessly to the ground.
He missed.

In the reprieve of that second, I yanked the probe off my arm, stinging my palm with the sharp wire, and ran up the hill, straight into Day Boy.

“Stay away from me!” I yelled at him, wrenching away as he juggled to grab me, my tears streaming again. I launched myself into the traffic of Lake Shore Drive without even looking, Day Boy right on my heels.

It was a miracle that we didn’t get hit. It was like the videos I had seen of traffic in India—we somehow weaved between cars, drivers screeched to near stops, a lane was blessedly empty, another car swerved—with multiple horns blaring for so long that their pitches dropped as they receded, and the constant beating and whine of the helicopter blades and engine above us. The police cars driving north couldn’t cross the concrete median to follow us; officers started piling out of their cars to chase us on foot instead. And then I looked back and saw Dacruz leap onto Lake Shore Drive and get immediately clipped by an SUV.

Don’t you dare die, you bastard.

His comrades refocused their energies on stopping traffic and helping him. One pursued us, but was trapped between lanes by moving cars, buying us precious time.

Day Boy and I scrambled onto the grass north of the southbound lanes and ran down the hill under Lake Shore Drive, where the helicopter couldn’t see us.

“Follow me!” he shouted.

I was out of breath, my chest ripped raw from heaving too much air, but I wanted to cry, “No.”
No, I won’t follow you.

I should have separated from him, should have taken my lumps alone, with dignity. But I could hardly see through my tears, I was gutted by Ciel’s betrayal, I was terrified of the rifle in the helicopter, I was totally out of ideas, and he was leading with conviction. And so I followed.

Telemachus

The
Odyssey
meant nothing to me when Poppu and I first began reading it. It was about a time period so long ago the people dressed, ate, and lived entirely differently from us. They had conventions I didn’t understand. While Odysseus was lost, his wife, Penelope, seemed to host nonstop parties for her suitors. Why did she do it if she despised them—these “guests” who refused to leave, ate her food, and argued over her as if she were a piece of meat? She even dangled out hope that one of them would win her. It was odd to follow characters who lived during the day, as if they were Rays, but were free to go out at night, like Smudges. The settings were countries I could never go to, and even if I could, they wouldn’t look anything the way they did thousands of years ago.

But Poppu brought books to life and made you forget what you didn’t know. To hear him tell it, Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, was a boy like Ciel, a good person, stronger than average, but green. Telemachus had lived in the shadow of a father he had never seen—a man who left for the Trojan War when Telemachus was a baby but who was extraordinary enough to have earned Penelope as his loyal wife, Athena as his protector, and the god of the oceans, Poseidon, as his enemy.

“That’s a lot to live up to for poor Telemachus,” Poppu said. “Just at the age when he wants to be like his father, having never
had
his father in his life. He presumes that Odysseus would smite all of those bastard suitors while eating a sandwich. So why is he, Telemachus, powerless to protect his mother?”

As for Penelope, she was living with the kind of uncertainty that digests your insides, waiting for word of her husband that might never come. She could have lost everything to violence. Instead, she played the suitors against each other to keep them in check. She made promises she didn’t intend to keep. She stalled for years, which only a wily woman could do.

Poppu pointed out that Odysseus loved Penelope above everything, enough to fight for two decades to get home to her. But as clever as he was, he was also a man who gave in to temptation again and again, and screwed himself over because of it. What sort of person makes his companions put wax in their ears and tie him to the mast so that he alone can hear the song of the Sirens without losing his ship against the rocks? The answer is: a badass who’s teetering on the knife’s edge of genius and recklessness, that’s who. A man who is so cunning that he is sometimes stupid. Odysseus was indeed extraordinary—so gifted that the gods bothered to take notice and openly intercede in his life—but he was also a man with ordinary weaknesses. Because everyone—
everyone
—makes mistakes.

In twenty-eight hundred years, Poppu told me, not a thing has changed about people.

Thursday
7:00 p.m.

Day Boy had left the car unlocked. We tumbled into the back seat and sat on the floor, scrunching low, our backs against the doors, with our feet practically in each other’s faces. I was sobbing out loud now, barely able to catch heaving gasps between sputtering, deep-throated moans. Day Boy was breathing hard but quietly. He shut off Premie Gort and shoved him under the front seat. He let me cry for no more than a minute, and then he said, “You have to stop now.”

“Ciel,” I blubbered.

“Quiet!”

“He was on the boat…” Convulsive breath. “Poppu! It was Ciel…”

He leaned forward so that his face was closer. “Do you hear me?
Shut up.
”

It was so unexpected, like he’d slapped my face. I sprayed a cough and gulped breaths in and out, but there were suddenly no tears. He had no idea what I’d just been through. He had no right to bully me. He was such a controlling, condescending ass.