Plus One (21 page)

Petite Daine,
I thought incredulously.

“Petite Daine,”
D’Arcy said under his breath a beat later, erasing any possible doubt about who he was.

I pulled up my hood, rested my head on my arm, and pretended to sleep.

*   *   *

It took him a long time to fall asleep after that, shifting from side to side, sighing. Eventually he turned his back to me, with his arms crossed on his chest, and sometime later his body jerked with a hypnagogic twitch, and then utter stillness told me he was asleep. I sat up, holding my breath, the Mylar making the sound of a hundred candy wrappers as I lifted the blanket away.

It’s almost impossible to be quieter than a still country night, but I was a Smudge, I’d gone camping my whole life, and I had confidence I could do it. I felt the ground next to him for the flashlight. I rose to my feet and waited a few seconds more, letting my body acclimate to being vertical, giving my legs time to gain their balance. I barely displaced the sand inside the cave as I left, I was such a lightweight. Once I was sure the glow of my phone wouldn’t wake D’Arcy, I checked the time. It was 3:57. I would not make it back to Chicago before sunrise, but it didn’t really matter: the goal was to turn myself in to the police anyway.

I was selfish enough that I couldn’t part with D’Arcy forever without leaving him a message. I had no paper or pen to write with, so I crept into the brush with the flashlight and selected a large handful of twigs, which I quietly snapped into shorter lengths. I carried them just inside the opening of the cave, where I hoped he’d see the message as he left, and I laid them in bunches that formed thick letters. I debated long and hard about what to say in the fewest words. “Sorry” sprang to mind first—I was stranding him in another state without a car, after all—but eventually I settled on something that expressed a tiny bit of what he meant to me.

THANK YOU

I gathered rocks and pebbles and left them in a ring around the letters. And then I walked quietly back to the car, to accept with whatever grace I could muster the disaster that was my real life.

Friday
4:30 a.m.

Just to remind me that it was in charge, and that my planning anything good for someone I cared about was always laughable, the universe made sure that I couldn’t start the car. The battery was fine, the tank simply had no gas. Not even enough to turn the engine over. I couldn’t believe it: D’Arcy had driven it dry. I had no way of getting back to Chicago.

I stood by the car, my thoughts muddy and slow, until I saw a flashlight coming up the railroad-tie stairs through the woods. I dropped low and snuck off the gravel of the parking lot, crouching in the brush nearby. It was a park ranger, on a routine check of the cars in the lot, making sure they were empty. I welled up with tears and sank all the way to the ground, lying down on my belly. I pulled my hood over the top of my head and buried my face on folded arms, waiting for him to either discover me or leave, and eventually I fell asleep.

*   *   *

It was after dawn when I heard footsteps by the car. I was on my back now, so stiff and cold I couldn’t raise myself quietly enough to see who it was, so I listened instead. My heart thudded as I realized in the low light that I was hardly camouflaged by the narrow trees, and that the bushes between me and the lot had already lost most of their foliage. I had felt so sheltered in the dark, but it was an illusion. Whoever was creeping around the car had only to take a few steps in my direction and I’d be revealed. I closed my eyes, lying flat and still.

“What do you think you’re doing?” D’Arcy said above me.

My eyes cracked open. How had I not heard his steps?

“I thought you were lying dead there.” His voice was a mix of relief and exasperation. “Why would you take such a stupid risk, leaving the cave?”

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. I was a codfish at the bottom of a boat, gulping air. My mind ran through lies but landed on the truth. “I was going to drive to Chicago to turn myself in.”

He looked up at the trees and then rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands before staring at me, his head tipped to the side. I had no idea what he was thinking. I sat up and my mouth motored on, stupidly filling space, never knowing when enough was enough. “If you were abandoned in the park, it would be believable that I carjacked you, that you were innocent. I thought that once I was arrested and you were found a whole state away, Hélène—and even Jean—would have the sense to back up that story.” And then this tumbled from my mouth, loaded with emotion, before I thought to edit it: “Leaving you here was the only thing I had left to give you.”

His body stiffened almost imperceptibly.

“What did you say?”

I got up off the ground and dusted my hands on my jeans, not meeting his eyes.

“It’s believable that I abducted you—”

“After that. The nice thing.”

I had regretted saying it the moment it left my lips. I had hoped he hadn’t registered it. Looking out at the misty woods surrounding the parking lot—the reds and golds, the green leaves and moss slowly becoming vibrant with the dawn—I repeated myself, careful to cover with practicality the raw, exposed feelings that had escaped me the first time. “You and your dad helped me so much. It was the only way I could think to repay you.”

I heard a puff of air escape his nose. “Giving me a heart attack? That’s how you want to repay me?” There was a smile in his voice, a warmth that my heart reached for. My head knew better though, refusing to let me look at him.

He waited briefly for me to say something. Eventually he said, more guardedly, “Well, you’re stuck with me, despite your heroic efforts. The car is out of gas.”

“I know,” I said to the ground.

“I saw a gas station last night. Ten kilometers back, while you were sleeping. I was already driving on fumes. I pulled in to fill up, but I drove right out again.”

I looked at him then, trying to figure out what he was saying.

He went on, “I realized I had a choice: gas the car up or spend the day here with you.”

I shook my head, mute. How important was the “with you” part of that sentence? He took my silence for confusion.

“If I had turned my phone on to pay for the gas, the cops would have known our position, and we’d be caught by now,” he explained.

I finally spoke, but my voice was punier than I wanted. “The park is special enough that you ran the tank dry rather than miss it?”

“Apparently.”

I wondered when Day Boy, the uptight Medical Apprentice with National Distinction who’d turned me in at the hospital, had become D’Arcy, who flouted responsibility with an equal but opposite conscience. Was it when he sprung me from the cell? And then I remembered my desk partner, who routinely defaced school property and never cleaned it up. I felt the corners of my mouth turn down under the weight of things that were lost.

“You’re not giving up on seeing your grandfather, are you?” D’Arcy asked quietly, reading my expression.

I shook my head. “Ciel could be anywhere on Lake Michigan by now. And I’m only hours away from being arrested and taking you and your parents down with—”

“Stop,” he interrupted. And then he said too calmly, as if he were speaking to a child, “State park first. End of the world later.”

I pointed out that after a night of sleeping in the brush, with my hair flyaway, no shower, and no breakfast, there was no way I would be able to walk in public like a Ray, which is to say, like I belonged.

But D’Arcy had anticipated my need for food.

“The Smudge campers are under curfew in their tents. Let me show you something.” He guided me through a stand of trees to a nearby Night campsite, and from a distance away we squatted in a two-man huddle.

He pointed to a tent. “They have a cooler,” he whispered so low I could barely hear him. “Which means perishable food—maybe fruit if we’re lucky—and they’ve hung a bag of dry goods in that tree.”

“We’re going to steal food,” I said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

He grinned. “I know, right? I
am
a miscreant now. And it’s your fault.”

My stomach grumbled, like the muffled creak of an old hinge. “They probably only just got settled in,” I whispered. “They may not be asleep yet.”

“Then we’ll have to be as sneaky as…” He stopped.

“As sneaky as Smudges.” I finished the pejorative saying for him.

“Sorry.”

“Not at all. I’m actually worried you can’t pull this off, with your galumphing about and booming voice. Maybe I should do it alone.”

His eyebrows knit together, and I allowed myself a tiny smile, no bigger than the Mona Lisa’s.

“Touché.” He laughed under his breath.

He pulled a small Swiss Army knife from his pocket. “I’ll handle the bag, you get the cooler. We’ll meet here on the path and go straight to the car.” I nodded. The division of labor was good: the bag was a fair distance away from the campsite in the woods, which meant D’Arcy could approach it from behind; and the cooler was probably heavy, which would have made it difficult for him to walk quietly.

The trick to being stealthy in the woods is landing on your feet balls first, like a dancer, keeping your ankles and knees limber, and avoiding branches that might snap and stones that might skitter or crunch. You can’t move too slowly, or your caution sometimes paradoxically causes loud mistakes. You have to move with a level of confidence that allows you to keep your weight fluid, so that you practically glide.

The cooler was just outside the tent, but the screens had shades, the way all Smudge tents did for light control, so I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be seen unless the occupants opened the flap. When I was just a couple of feet away I crouched for a long minute, listening. I heard nothing, but just as I reached for the cooler one of the people inside shifted in his sleeping bag and whispered, “Sorry,” to his partner. The other man just sighed “mmm” in reply, nearly asleep. My heart was pounding, and the muscles in my thighs ached from squatting too long. I glanced up at D’Arcy, who had cut down the bag and was tying something to the end of the dangling rope. I peered closely and saw that it was his watch. His eyes caught mine when he had finished, and I mimed that the occupants were not entirely asleep: I wagged my finger “no” and then made the sleepy
fais dodo
sign that Poppu used when I was very young, laying a cheek on praying hands. D’Arcy shrugged sympathetically and put his finger to his pursed lips, impishly shushing me.

I took a silent breath in, stood slowly, and bounced my weight back and forth on my forefeet without leaving the ground, to stretch out my cramping leg muscles. Then I lifted the cooler by the handle, emptied my mind of worry, and padded back to our meeting spot. I discovered en route that the cooler contained ice—of course—and bottles, and that I had to hold it away from my body so that it wouldn’t bump my leg, which tended to shift the contents against one another.

“Smooth, Plus One,” D’Arcy whispered, his eyes fairly sparkling with adventure. “Very impressive.”

“Not bad yourself,” I said, thinking what an incorrigible softy he was for leaving his watch as compensation. “For a Ray.”

“Well, you know I have Smudge genes…”

I snorted quietly. “There’s no such thing.”

He smiled, lips closed, suddenly somber.

*   *   *

Back at the car we opened the cooler and bag and examined our spoils. It was a hungry thief’s dream: a breakfast of oranges, bread, and soft Brie; a lunch of Italian cold cuts, hard-boiled eggs, provolone, and pears; and a dinner of cold roasted chicken parts with a salad of French beans in a plastic tub, plastic forks thoughtfully included. There were even two mini-bottles of champagne—the origin of the clinking sound in the cooler. I couldn’t believe how lucky we were to have blindly robbed a pair of gastronomes.

I lifted the bread and started to tear off a hunk. My mouth was watering, and my stomach felt like it would eat itself if I didn’t put something else in there to distract it.

“Hold on, hold
on
,” D’Arcy said. “We can’t just tear into this like barbarians. The least we can do after stealing a spread like this is to treat it with some respect.”

He opened the trunk and put all the dinner items away, tucking breakfast and lunch into his day pack, including a mini-bottle of champagne and two water bottles.

“Let’s go to the Milky Way clearing,” he said. “I have a sentimental attachment to it.”

“Already?” I said.

“Uh-huh, and it will be nice to see how the landscape changes in the light.”

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, I was weak with hunger but we were there. There were no Day guests in sight yet, and the air around us had a post-dawn stillness. It was a beautiful little spot, surrounded by a mix of quaking aspens, hornbeams, and a few ancient oaks. The sun was up enough that the mist was beginning to burn away in fading patches, but there were chrome beads of dew on the stubble of the meadow.

“The ground will be pinchy and wet,” I warned unsentimentally.

“There’s some rusted old farm equipment over there we can perch on,” he said, marching across the field toward what looked like a giant axle with two huge metal wheels.

I followed after, secretly growing delighted at the idea of a picnic. Maybe D’Arcy was onto something. Maybe our chances at happy lives were so far down the toilet we should cram as much joy as possible into our last day of freedom. Maybe I shouldn’t throw away the few hours I had left with him by trying to ditch him or hide behind my gruffness. This day might be the last good memory I would ever have, one I could revisit in the privacy of my mind in jail, to sustain me and keep insanity at bay. He turned to look at me, sensing my pensiveness, and I allowed myself to smile at him. My real smile—the one I reserved for Poppu, and formerly, Ciel. D’Arcy startled almost imperceptibly, and then not only returned my smile, but went on to open his mouth wide and laugh that belly laugh of the night before. I was embarrassed at his unbridled pleasure, so I closed my lips into something more prim and shook my head, a little bewildered by how even a wordless interaction between us could carry so much meaning.