Plus One (22 page)

Friday
10:30 a.m.

After breakfast we hiked and talked for four hours, with half my energy going toward not giving away how much I knew of his camping exploits and reading interests, until finally I said, with a weaker voice than I expected, “Would it be ridiculous to eat lunch at ten-thirty?”

He looked concerned, I realized for the first time since we’d started hiking. “Did you take your doxycycline this morning?”

I felt for the bulge in my hoodie pocket. “I forgot.”

He handed me the water we’d been sharing and there was only one swig left. I was so parched I downed the whole thing with the pill. He took the bottle from me, and before he capped it up, he put the rim to his lips, glancing at me with a smile I couldn’t name, and tilted the last nonexistent drops into his mouth.

“I know just where we should have lunch, and Balanced Rock is on the way.”

We started walking again, passing several Rays on the path. They all called out cheerful hellos and good mornings. I was becoming used to saying hello back, even though the custom among Smudges in public spaces was a perfunctory nod of the head—always there, but only visible if flashlights were bright or if the park had spotlights for Smudges.

At Balanced Rock, I climbed the stairs of the boardwalk while he stayed below in a sort of mossy gully, staring up at it, quiet. I wondered whether he was thinking of our desk drawing, of saying goodbye. The structure was more impressive in real life, because of the scale of it, and because I could walk around it to examine three out of four sides and see just how precarious it seemed. I wondered how it had stood there through storms, falling trees, and the freezing and thawing precipitation of thousands of years. Perhaps, I decided—analyzing the point of contact—when something is already so solid and symmetrical, all it needs is a small, level surface to keep it anchored and steady.

For lunch we found a pretty spot to sit down, in a bed of dry leaves beneath the trees near the creek. D’Arcy made rustic cold-cut sandwiches—just meat, cheese, thick slices of bread, and totally wonderful—while I gobbled down an egg and one of the sandwiches before he had even finished cutting the pears for us to share. Toward the end of lunch he reached into the bag and pulled out the mini-bottle of champagne.

“This is cold now and it won’t be later. If we leave the park this afternoon we’ll have to have our wits about us—be good and sober, I mean. What do you say we open it?”

Because it was a single serving, it had a screw top rather than a cork. He passed it to me after he had opened it and, still immaturely wanting his lips on it before mine, I said nonchalantly, “That’s okay, you first.”

A smile crawled open on his face. “No, I insist,” he drawled.

I smiled back, unsure whether he was being playful about what I thought he was being playful about. I felt my face flush—which on a redhead can be alarming. I took a bite of pear and said, “Oopsh,” cheerfully pointing to my full mouth, and then busily chewed with my lips closed.

“That’s okay,” he said, setting the bottle next to me and easing to the ground with his hands under his head. “I can wait for you to finish your pear.”

I swallowed my bite, broke down with a dramatic huff, and took a sip. The champagne was cool and acrid, a hint of stinging fruit with tiny bubbles that effloresced on my tongue. I took another sip, bigger this time. It turned into warmth as it made its way down my insides.

“Mm,” I said. “Quite brut.”

He sat up and I passed him the bottle. He grinned as he took a drink where my lips had been, and then another. I took it from his hand, looked in his eyes with all seriousness, pressed my mouth to the bottle, and drank again.

After his last turn, the champagne was gone, and I felt not exactly tipsy, but super relaxed and oddly hopeful. We both lay down, looking up at the trees. I closed my eyes. My belly was, if not bursting, the most satisfied it had been in a long time. The sun filtered through the branches, warming my cheeks and nose and forehead. In fact, searing a bit.

In a moment he said quietly, “What was the thank-you for?”

“What thank-you?” I asked, my eyes still closed, thinking back no further than lunch.

“At the edge of the cave last night.”

“Oh,” I said, sighing. He meant my stick message to him. There was no way to say it all: thank you for nursing me to health; thank you for trying to rescue me from Dacruz at the harbor; thank you for making me look less horrid in Hélène’s eyes. And the biggest one of all, which I’d never be able to say out loud: thank you for comforting me with friendship in high school when nothing else gave me joy.

“Just—everything,” I finally murmured. “Someday I’ll make you a list.”

He was quiet for a moment. I started to drift off.

“I hope there will be a someday.”

His voice was too melancholy. I wouldn’t allow it. “If there isn’t,” I joked, “I’ll send it to you from jail.” I fell asleep for a blissful nap.

Friday
3:30 p.m.

That afternoon we hiked along a path that promised a “natural bridge.” It was a formation that had been shaped by erosion over the course of thousands of years, even though the river that had originally carved it was long dry.

The sun was as high as a midwestern sun can get in late September, which D’Arcy informed me was not very high, so that as we approached the natural bridge the light was hitting it somewhat from the side, highlighting the red ferns and lichens and moss that grew on it and throwing extravagant shadows on the rough surface of the stone.

The bridge was geologically ancient, an impassive observer, surrounded by life that was fleeting in comparison: trees that would only survive hundreds of years, tourists who would live decades, insects that would thrive only for weeks. From a distance down the path, it was shaped almost like a man-made bridge over a creek, with sturdy rock abutments on either side, anchoring it, and a deck crossing the span.

But from up close the bridge turned out to be massive. As the people ahead of us walked under it they shrank in size, until the bridge was a gutted cliff over them. Some of the delicate, filigreed plants I had seen from afar were actually trees and bushes, anchored in and around the stone.

“Oh,” I whispered. D’Arcy said nothing, trailing behind me a little ways.

There was a cluster of boulders at the base of the arch, off to the side, and I clambered up one and then the other until I was on top of the mound. I turned around, saw that D’Arcy had dawdled enough to be several meters away, and I smiled, wide-mouthed, at him.

“It’s gorgeous!” I called, as loud as a Ray. I tilted my head back and put my arms out, as if the scenery could soak into me and warm my insides, the way sunshine did. And then I flopped them down with an exhale of satisfaction.

“Beautiful,” I thought I heard D’Arcy agree.

In a moment he stood at the base of the rocks, shielding the sun from his eyes with his hand. “Your hair is on fire in this light. I wish you could see how it looks against the black rock and green moss.”

“You know,” I said with a sudden revelation, grabbing the ends of my hair and holding them in front of my face, “I have no idea what I look like in sunlight.” I realized too late that I was broadcasting that I was a Smudge. I scanned the faces of the visitors nearest us, but none of them had reacted.

He shook his head gravely. “If I could turn on my phone, I’d snap a picture to show you.”

“If the camera on my crappy phone had
ever
worked, you could have used mine,” I said, laughing. “But I guess you’ll just have to memorize the scene, and draw it for me later.”

“I’d never do it justice.”

There was the same sort of quiet seriousness to his voice that I’d heard before our nap, and I wouldn’t tolerate misery—not now, not in our last hours together, so I said, “Poo. False modesty does not become you. I’m certainly no harder to draw than a hungry chipmunk.”

The moment the words left my lips I wished I could crawl after them and eat them up. I clamped my mouth shut, hoping that he hadn’t heard me, or that he wouldn’t make the connection. But this was D’Arcy I was with; D’Arcy who missed nothing. His eyes met mine, and they were instantly questioning, already analyzing. I had to look away—at the boulder, at the bridge wall, at a fern growing so unlikely from stone—at anything but him, examining me.

“Sol,” he said, using my real name, so achingly soft on his lips. I didn’t answer.
“Sol,”
he said again, but this time it was directed inward, to himself.

“I’m such an idiot,” I mumbled. How much fonder would the memory of his drawing partner have been without knowing what a mess she really was? When I finally looked at him, his eyes had a reflective glint of tears.

“Was it you?” he asked simply.

I nodded. “The desks,” I said incoherently, “the drawings.”

“It was you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. Sorry that I was a Smudge; sorry that I hadn’t thought to say as much all those months and years our desk friendship grew; sorry that the person he believed was his friend back then was about as worthwhile to him and to society as a blister-pack sealing machine; sorry that I was on the cusp of ruining his life, and selfishly stealing hours with him beforehand. But deep inside, I was also sorry for me. Sorry that I had to add D’Arcy—kind, quick-thinking, organized, generous, rule-following, rule-exploding, sentimental D’Arcy—to the list of people I couldn’t bear to lose and yet somehow had to say goodbye to.

From the corner of my eye I saw that D’Arcy was climbing up the boulder. In the time it took me to draw in a gasping breath, he had swept me into his arms in a bear hug. I remembered the moment I had figured out who he was, and how desperately I needed to see his face. If I had been braver, I would have wanted
this
.

He wrapped himself around me so tightly the air came out of my lungs. All I could do was cling to him, teetering on the uneven surface, relishing the squeeze of his arms. Our chins were crammed across each other’s shoulders. He started swaying from side to side.

“Sol,” he said. “Oh, Sol.”

Tourists passed under the arch, watching us like we were on television, not on top of a rock in the middle of a state park.

For a moment I closed my eyes and felt he would never let me go.

“D’Arcy,” I whispered his name out loud for the first time, giving myself over to an eternity of wanting what could never be.

“I knew you were the most remarkable person I’d ever met.” His voice was muffled by the bunched hood of my sweatshirt.

A minute later he loosened his hold only enough to tuck his chin to his chest and look at me. Our faces were so close, and he seemed to be studying every freckle. I felt a prickly heat in my cheeks.

“I missed you after you got National Distinction,” I said, to distract him. “You ditched me—and for what? For some silly award that a whole …
handful
of people get.”

“I worried it might be goodbye forever.”

“If you had known I was a factory Smudge, you would have been sure it was forever.” I laughed.

“I knew you were a Night student.”

“What? How?”

“Several times you seemed to wish me happy weekend on a Monday. I figured out that you had written it on Frinight. Plus”—he laughed—“everything was weirdly shaded, like it was lit by the moon.”

I frowned. He had seen through me back then, before even meeting me. Yet I had been too dense to notice any signs that my drawing partner was a Ray.

“My face hurts,” I said.

He broke into a broad smile and squeezed me again. “Oh god, I love your non sequiturs.”

And then he took one hand out from behind me and brushed a strand of hair from my cheek. I winced.

“You have a little sunburn. I’m sorry. I should have known you would need sunblock, even in late September. Your poor, sheltered, ginger skin.” He kissed the hair on my temple, as close as he could get to my tender face without touching it.

“I would roast on a spit in exchange for today,” I murmured, wondering exactly what sort of kiss that was.

He hugged me again and said, “There’s only one spot in the park we haven’t been to yet—the tallgrass prairie restoration, along the western edge. Are you game to see one more site before the end of the world?”

I nodded, game for anything that meant being by his side for just a little longer.

*   *   *

As we approached the edge of the woods I noticed the increasing chatter, all excitement and bother, of birds above me. I looked up at the trees—some of them were impossibly tall in this park—and the highest branches were dotted with hundreds of iridescent black birds, calling to each other with a metallic sort of
twick
, repeated again and again, in a dither. I stopped, tilted my head up, and stared. I knew birds who hunted after dusk, like owls and nighthawks, but in general birds were not part of my world, and when they were, they were quick, elusive shadows overhead, sometimes indistinguishable from bats. Poppu and I had studied Day birds in books when I was very little, but I remembered almost nothing because I never experienced them enough to make them belong to me.

“Starlings,” D’Arcy said.

“So many.”

“And multiplying.”

It was true: more and more of them were flitting from the sky, roosting with the others, joining the chatter, convening from other locations to form a growing starling conference.

We stepped out onto the prairie, which had a clipped path down the middle of it but was otherwise a sea of tall, wild grasses, like something you’d see in a movie, with greens and blues and browns, and feathery seed heads at the tips of long stalks, swaying in the breeze. There was a family with three small children who were running back and forth on the path, screeching with delight. There was a couple in the distance, holding hands. I longed for what they had—I just stupidly, openly let myself want what I could never have, which I knew was like stabbing myself in the heart.

The birds chipped and babbled, preened and communed above us everywhere. Something occurred to me, a question I had long wondered about, that I was now free to ask.