Plus One (4 page)

Ciel’s eyes scanned the room quickly and locked on me as he made his way to his seat. They were so shadowed with feeling it was as if they were brimming with things he wanted to say. Things about him, and me, and Poppu, but he was mute. I wanted so desperately to read his thoughts, I found myself whispering, “Tell me.” The bailiff shoved him into his chair. He turned around in his seat to look at me. It was the closest I had been to him since he’d been dragged away.

“Ciel,” I whispered.

“Sol.” His mouth formed my name silently.

“Mr. Le Coeur!” the judge said sharply. Ciel jerked forward. “If you look into the gallery again you’ll spend the rest of this hearing in your cell, listening to your own trial on a pair of broken headphones.”

What harm could it cause for us to just
look
at each other, when we hadn’t spoken in so long? The judge was a control freak and a fathead. He had his collar buttoned tight, and his neck was ballooning over the top so that there was a crease below his ears where his skull began. Half a century of greasy foods and alcohol had probably filled up that neck, and I had the urge to find a needle and bury it there to see what would spill out.

I made as much noise as possible as I stood up—dropping my phone, gathering my coat, scraping the bench on the floor—and moved down the row to my left, so far that I’d be in Ciel’s peripheral vision even while he was looking forward. He stared straight ahead at the judge, but his lip on my side curled into a tiny Mona Lisa smile. He still had a trace of defiance back then.

And then the prosecutor stood up and made an offer to the defense. The Day government would drop all charges if the accused agreed to reassign from Night to Day.

I had to shake my head to rattle myself awake; I thought I’d heard wrong. The black homeless guy laughed—a too-loud, hyena-like, mentally ill sort of laugh—showing several missing teeth and a bright pink tongue. The prosecutor stated the terms: Ciel would have to work for the state texting board, helping them thwart communications hackers.

The judge said, “I’ve had a chance to review the deal, Mr. Le Coeur, and it’s better than you deserve. Thugs like you are a threat to civil society. You’re looking at twenty years behind bars if you go to trial and are convicted. With this deal you not only avoid jail, you have a chance to redeem yourself by channeling your so-called talent into what’s good and right. I suggest you apply yourself with passion to the cause.”

The defense lawyer was a young woman, perfectly groomed. It was probably her first case. I guessed that she was a grind in high school who aspired to becoming a Legal Apprentice so that she could grow up to defend the downtrodden like my brother and “do good.” She stood up and said, “Your Honor, my client has a minor sister with only a terminally ill grandfather at home to look after her.” I sat up straight and held my breath. “Given the rarity of this sort of transfer, and the family’s precarious circumstance, it seems reasonable to request that the girl be reassigned with him.”

The girl and her grandfather,
I corrected her in my head. Why would she leave Poppu out?

“Objection, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said without hesitation. “Retention of familial integrity is not a consideration in cases of reassignment, per section 85-D of the Day-Night Code.”

“The objection is neither sustained nor overruled,” the judge said. “I have no jurisdiction over reassignment. This deal was worked out between the Day and Night Ministries and authorized by the Day government. It makes no provision for a sister.”

“She’ll become a ward of the state if the grandfather dies before she reaches the age of majority,” the do-gooder said. It was sort of brave of her to press the point, but also hopelessly stupid. What I heard the judge say was the equivalent of “That’s not my department,” and in a bureaucracy that’s the same as “Get lost.”

Wednesday
11:30 a.m.

The Guard tossed a cellophane-wrapped sandwich at me, which I caught with my left hand. Day Boy followed after him carrying a medical bag—one of those black leather satchels with a buckle that you only see in old movies—and a paper cup of water. The Guard stood right in front of me. He pointed up to one corner of the ceiling, where there was a video camera.

“See that?” he asked me. I nodded.

“And that?” He pointed to the opposite corner, where there was an identical camera.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m being watched.”

“That’s right. By
me
. And if you touch a hair on this kid’s head”—he pointed too close to Day Boy’s face—“I’ll come in here and treat you like a violent, resisting offender. Got it?” I nodded again, but I rolled my eyes.

After the Guard left I blurted, “You squid, you told him I threatened you!” Was that all this guy could do, snitch on people?

Day Boy smiled with closed, smug lips, handing me the water. He
smiled
. “In fact, I may be an arrogant chickenshit, but I am
not
a moron.” He said “in fact” the way Poppu always did—a literal translation of the French tic phrase
en effet
.

I gulped down the water, dropped the empty cup on the floor, and unwrapped the sandwich, while he held the satchel under his arm and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. The sandwich was room temperature and soggy. There was more mayonnaise than meat—a meat I couldn’t place.

“What is this?” I said, peeling the supposed French bread apart. “Turkey?”

He leaned over to look. “I don’t know. Food. You asked for food.”

I tore off the rubbery end with my teeth and spoke while I was chewing. “Thish ish not fuhd.”

He searched for a place to set his bag, but there was no furniture, so he put it on the floor. And then he held his left palm out, as if he were expecting a tip. I looked down at it, taking another bite of the sandwich.

“What.”

“Your injured finger?”

“Oh.” I took one last bite and laid the sandwich on the floor. It was too gross to eat the whole thing. I plopped my right hand knuckle side down in his, guarding the middle finger. “Be careful.”

“I will.” He began picking at the bandage, looking for an opening. He quickly got that same look of calm concentration that he’d had when I groggily watched him stitch up my finger in the hospital. It’s a look I’ve probably never once had on my face in my whole life.

He tugged at the bandage, and I sucked breath through my teeth, ripping my hand away.

“That hurts!”

“I have to get it off.” He tried to take my hand again, but I held it behind me, and he said, “Don’t be a baby.”

“You’re a quack! Look how much it’s bleeding, and it’s throbbing like it’s going to burst. You’re the one who screwed up my treatment the first time, why do I have to get you again?”

“I told you,” he said in a low voice as he bent down to open his bag, “I didn’t come to follow up on your injury.” He pulled a small pair of scissors from his bag, blunt and rounded on one side, and stood straight again. We were exactly at eye level.

My finger was hot and painful, and I needed to know it was going to be fine, so I put my hand out for him. “It’s too late for you to apologize.”

“Didn’t come for that either,” he said. He slipped the scissors under the bandage on the palm side of my finger and gently snipped the blood-soaked gauze. I winced, but I resisted the impulse to pull away. “I came to find out why you deliberately injured yourself.”

I clamped my lips tight. Why did he care? The deed was done, my plan was ruined. I was making Poppu’s life more miserable, not less. Besides, the room was probably bugged, and that bully Guard was listening and eager to lock me up for life.

“It’s safe to talk,” he said quietly to my finger, as if he’d heard my thoughts. “The officer told me that I should call him on the phone when I was ready to leave, or if I needed help.”

I was silent. There was no way I was going to confide in the very person who had busted me.

“If I hadn’t turned you in and you decided to go AWOL, I might have lost my apprenticeship. They would have looked at your records and seen what I saw.” He paused. It was creepy the way he anticipated me. It made me trust him less, not more.

He had finished snipping. He pulled a tissue out of his bag, spread it on the floor, and then set the scissors on it. He stood up and started to peel the gauze back. He looked at me briefly. “But if it helps, I feel like a shit.”

“If it helps, you
are
a shit.”

He let out a cynical puff of air through his nose. “I knew you were going to say that. You’re so easy to read. Except in this one way: why did you deliberately hurt yourself?”

“Why do you keep insisting that I did?” I countered.

“I’ve already told you why. Do I have to say it all again?” He had peeled most of the bandage loose, except the part directly over my nail bed, where the blood had dried hard. He lifted my arm by the wrist. “Hold this up, it will ease the throbbing.”

He rifled through his bag, looking for something. He stood up with a small foil packet of Polysporin and a cotton swab. I gave him my hand and watched him work. He was being gentle, at least. He pushed ointment carefully under the gauze to loosen it.

And that’s when I realized that he was a sucker. Or at least that I might be able to manipulate him. He had come all this way to tell me that he felt forced to report me; it was plaguing him that he didn’t know whether he had made the right decision; and he couldn’t do the manly thing and just rip my bandage off. My hopelessness burst into irrational optimism that I had to cover up. Maybe I could salvage something from this whole ridiculous mess I’d gotten myself into. I closed my eyes and took a calming breath.

“What will happen if I tell you?” I said after a moment, trying to sound vulnerable.

He looked earnest. “Nothing bad will happen. And maybe I can help.”

Bingo.

I gasped, as if stifling a sob. I wasn’t sure how believable it would be without tears, but it was worth a shot.

“It has to do with my brother. He was reassigned to Day two years ago. I haven’t seen him since.” I kept my voice weak, to sound wounded, but also in case the Guard was listening. “He couldn’t visit us on Unity Night.”
He wouldn’t visit us,
my brain argued with me.

I said the rest in a quick run-on, as if I were trying to get the whole thing off my chest. “He got married a year ago, and I’ve never even met his wife, and now they have a baby, and I only wanted to see her, to maybe sneak in and hold her at the most.” In the end I had actually worked up some wetness in my eyes. A drop spilled onto my cheek, and just like in the movies I left it there. I hate the way actresses do that, because when you
really
cry you want your tears gone—it’s all about wiping them away as fast as you can. “I wasn’t going to break any other laws. I just wanted to hold her.”

The gauze was all the way off now, but dangling by a couple of threads that were still stuck in the wound. “I’ll do the rest,” I said, sniffling.

He put the back of his hand on his forehead and pushed his hair up, thinking.

“I get it now,” he said.

My nail bed was bleeding. Even I could see that a stitch had popped. I held it out for him.

“Zut,”
he swore in French, taking my hand in both of his and examining the finger. “I was so careful.”

“The Hour Guard was rough at the hospital,” I lied. I wanted him to think I trusted him and his amateur work. “Shouldn’t we go back to fix it?”

“I think it will be fine if I bandage it well.”

“Won’t I need antibiotics or something?”

“My mother can send over a script, just in case, but so far there’s no sign of infection.”

I lowered my voice. “If you took me back to fix it…” I tilted my head, imploring.

He furrowed his eyebrows at me. “What are you suggesting?”

“It’s just … I might still be able to see her,” I said meekly. “I mean, the baby.”

He shook his head before I finished speaking. “I can’t do that.”

“You can.”

“I won’t jeopardize my apprenticeship.”

“You wouldn’t be. You’d just be treating a patient. All they’d have to see is this!” I held up my hand and a drop of blood fell dramatically, perfectly, on the floor. He got another gauze pad and some surgical tape and began re-dressing the wound. I pressed my point: “You’d be doing your job conscientiously—they’d blame it on me.
I’d
be the screwup who slipped away when we got to the hospital. They’d find me in the maternity ward and take me right back here, and nothing would be different … except I would have seen her.”

He finished his work as I drove the last nail in. “If you do this for me, it will make up for turning me in.”

He stared at me, thinking, weighing. His hazel eyes were really quite striking. There was a bright splotch of green in his left eye, and a rim of black around both irises. His long, hooked nose was elegantly dramatic. His bone structure was good. His skin had just a hint of olive from the sun. It all worked well together, but in an unusual way—a way that made you want to study him. My insides churned with irritation; he was such a lucky bastard.

I smiled hopefully at him.

He went over to the phone on the wall and punched a button.

“She needs to go back to the hospital,” he said into the receiver.

Who’s easy to read now?
I thought, sticking my tongue out at his back.

On Fire

Before Ciel and I were assigned apprentice jobs, we lived on Poppu’s pension alone. We patched clothes instead of buying new; our vacations were camping trips; we didn’t eat at restaurants, we cooked together at home. It was pretty idyllic, really.

When the weather was good, we’d walk to Wooded Island after dinner. It was a small lagoonlike park with willows along the shores, gnarled live oaks and scrub in the woods, and an improbable, beautifully manicured Japanese garden in the middle of it all.

Poppu called our after-dinner trip
“un digestif,”
since walking sometimes helped his fussy stomach to feel better. He always brought his ukulele, too, because the island was as close to being in the wilderness as you could be in the city, and his music wouldn’t violate the nighttime Quiet Ordinance the way it might in our apartment.