Plus One (15 page)

But what was the space I was stepping into? It was another kitchen, and a quick glance down the hall showed an apartment that seemed to be laid out almost identically to the one below. Except this one, I noticed, had a back door in the kitchen. This one was perfectly appointed with modern furnishings, not the eclectic mix of old and new downstairs. This one was a little too clean, almost sterile.

“His and hers,” Day Boy said, answering a question I hadn’t asked.

As Jean climbed up the ladder behind us cradling the baby, Day Boy said dully, “
Maman
, you remember Sol.” He hurried to add, “Sol speaks fluent French, so there’s no hiding behind language. Unless you intend to speak Latin.”

“Actually…” I said, looking at his sneakers instead of his face.

“Okay, forget Latin, I guess she knows that, too,” he muttered.

Jean was in the room, and Hélène looked at the baby in his arms. “I hope that infant is in perfect health,” she said, her voice cold. “Because if god forbid anything happens to him—”

“Perfect health,” Jean said, just as stony as he was a floor below.

It occurred to me that they didn’t like each other. That the his-and-hers apartments were separate homes. That Day Boy came from a so-called broken family. I glanced over and caught him reading my face, everything I was thinking.

Hélène turned on Day Boy then. “After all we’ve worked for together, and the potential you have for a successful, fulfilling life, you risk throwing it away by aiding a
criminal
—an uncivilized, rude, unhappy…”—she couldn’t come up with adjectives for me fast enough—“factory worker.”

“Don’t,” Day Boy said.

“And you,” she said to Jean, her voice rising. “You’re an adult, you
know
better. You had
no right
carrying her through my apartment—involving me. That baby should have gone back immediately to its parents. You should have saved D’Arcy from himself and his naïve, misplaced…”

“Compassion?” Jean filled in.

“Folly!” she cried. And then she seemed to realize that the neighbors might hear and hissed, “Any compassion that is being handed out should go to this child’s parents, who don’t know whether he is even
alive
.”

She was right again.

“And you answered my door when the police came searching for her,” she said incredulously to Day Boy. “I’m outraged by how easily you lied to them. I’m ashamed that I helped you to do it, defending you against their accusations of incompetence … with her hiding downstairs the whole time!”

The police had come while I was asleep, and I hadn’t heard a thing.

“I did not raise a liar,” she said pointedly.

Day Boy’s face became expressionless. And as much as he had looked like his mother when he treated my finger in the hospital, he looked entirely like his father at that moment.

“Our whole life is a lie, Mother. Jean lives in hiding downstairs. You pretend to be happily married to him. We all act like the Day/Night divide hasn’t destroyed our family.”

She paused for a second, a heavy, wounded second. And although she was looking squarely at him, I felt her attention—her soul, if there is such a thing—directed fully at me. What he had said was too private, and it cut her that I had heard it. Her cheeks and neck flushed as she redirected the argument, the only thing she could do: “An abducted child will ruin you. You’ll end up in jail. You’ll lose your apprenticeship. Your life will be over. Why are you throwing everything away for the sake of a stranger who means nothing to you?” Her eyes welled up for the first time since her crying jag.

Day Boy didn’t answer the question. “She was pyretic and dehydrated—”

“So you take her to a
hospital
, not your home.”

Day Boy looked at the floor, pushed his bangs up, rubbed his forehead. “You should know I wrote a script for doxycycline in your name.”

She shook her head, her lips compressed in a line.

He held her gaze with a courage I wouldn’t have had. “I never wanted to disappoint you. You’ve given me everything.”

This was the point in my apologies to Poppu where I would have thrown my arms around him in a frustrated, giant hug, and he would have been unable to resist me, no matter how angry he was, and the concessions would have tumbled out of us like an avalanche of rocks down a mountain. But I got the feeling that Day Boy and Hélène didn’t touch each other much, that their love was reserved, and based on mutual respect—respect that my presence was eroding.

“I hid her from you so that you wouldn’t have to lie to the police,” he said. “So that you genuinely wouldn’t know where she was. It was only a matter of time before Dacruz came to question me; he had given me responsibility for her at the hospital.”

“You are a fool,” she whispered, the air escaping her on the last word.

“I am a fool,” he agreed, suddenly looking older than eighteen. “But I beg you to help me anyway.”

Thursday
3:30 p.m.

We sat on white couches in her living room while Jean and Day Boy took turns relating what had happened since Hélène had treated me in the hospital. I noticed that Day Boy made my trip from lockup back to the ER seem medically essential, and that he didn’t reveal that Ciel and I were on the outs. These tweaks to the truth left the impression that I was earnest and impulsive in my kidnapping, but not conniving, which was a kindness I didn’t deserve.

Hélène was like her son: nothing escaped her. She asked, “Did the police summon you to the station to check her condition?”

Day Boy hesitated. He’d have to lie outright if he wanted to fudge this part of the story.

“No.” He told the truth. “I went on my own. I wanted to make sure she was okay.” Apparently he would only lie to make
me
look better. I couldn’t figure him out.

He moved on, and when he came to the part about Poppu’s blindness, Jean caught my eye.

“What was the cause of the blindness?”

I didn’t see why it mattered, but I said, “Severe retinopathy.”

“Retinopathy is usually the result of a systemic disease,” Day Boy said. “Is he diabetic?”

I shook my head. “His hypertension was uncontrolled for too long.”

“Hypertension, retinopathy, and cancer,” Jean said thoughtfully. “The poor man.”

“And gallstones,” I said, “but those are the least of his worries now.”

“Gallstones,” Jean said, as if he were chewing the word. “Was your grandfather always a Smudge?”

I shook my head. “He was reassigned when he moved here from Belgium.”

“Why would he accept reassignment?”

Was everyone in this family genetically programmed to probe? “My parents were killed in a car accident when I was little, and he moved to the States to raise my brother and me. We were Smudges, so he had to be, too.”

“If your grandfather was a Ray in Belgium, why was your mother a Smudge?” Hélène asked, as if catching me up in a lie.

“Because she fell in love with a Smudge on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic.” As the words left my lips I wondered for the first time whether those four days together without curfews had also ignited my parents’ passion against the Day/Night divide. I added, almost to myself, “They were only eighteen.”

Day Boy told Hélène that Poppu had been kidnapped by people who were threatening me by text, demanding that I hand over the baby, yet it was unclear how they knew I even had a baby.

I couldn’t stop myself from asking a question: “Who were you texting when I collapsed at my apartment?”

Jean said, “That was me. I’m afraid I counseled him to take you to the hospital, Sol.”

“But something was wrong when we pulled up,” Day Boy said, looking squarely at his mother. “It was obvious they knew the baby was missing. I expected to see police, and news reporters, and satellite uplink vans. Instead there were undercover Suits, kicking dustballs.” He gestured at me. “I couldn’t put her in jail for something I didn’t understand. I went with my gut, not my head.

“So we carried her through your apartment, and the rest you know,” he said to his mother. He looked at me, sensing my confusion, and explained. “Jean’s apartment has no entry or exit, except through Hélène’s apartment. Like I said: off the grid.” I nodded, understanding everything except perhaps why a person would want to live that way.

Jean had his knees together with Fitz lying faceup, asleep in the valley of his long thighs, which were swaying ever so slightly from side to side. “In the middle of the night I saw the first news report that Minister Paulsen had happily delivered her baby.” He rubbed Fitz’s tummy. “
This
baby, who was in my arms at the time. They were covering up his disappearance.”

Hélène’s gaze fell on me. It was almost unbearable. I knew that if she stared long enough she’d see every one of my flaws, all the sour anger packed inside me, curing like pickles in a jar, without my opening my mouth. I concentrated on not moving; I tried to loosen the muscle tone in my face—to be expressionless—as Day Boy and Jean had done.

“How is it you managed not to steal your brother’s baby, if that was indeed your goal?”

I knew I was a liar, but hearing the accusation in her voice over something I had
not
lied about made my head heat up. I felt pricks along my scalp, like I was some sort of feral cat, hackles rising.

“I took him from the
Le Coeur
bassinet,” I said. “You’re the one who moved him to the Day nursery against hospital rules, maybe you can tell
me
how he landed in the wrong crib.”

She froze for only a fraction of a second before I saw outrage bloom on her face.

“Attendez, attendez,”
Day Boy said to us both, before whatever was building in her exploded, before I leaped on her like a real cat. “We don’t have time to argue.” He looked at me, pleading. “Please,” he mouthed, with an expression that indicated,
Can you keep it together just this once?

Before I knew what I was saying, I had apologized.
“Je vous prie de m’excuser,”
I mumbled in Hélène’s general direction, using the strictly polite form Poppu had taught Ciel and me to use with adults.

Day Boy said to his mother, “I believe her when she says she took the baby from her brother’s bassinet. So that means someone had already switched the babies before she got there. She stumbled into something.”

“Hélène,” Jean said. “Why was the Night Minister’s child in the Day nursery?”

I glanced at her, and some of the color had left her face. She was silent.

Day Boy answered. “It was a political favor. We were allowing him to avoid the treatment that all Night babies get.”

Jean leaned forward. “What treatment?”

Day Boy shrugged, shaking his head lightly. “I’ve never worked a Night maternity shift, but I’ve heard it’s a first intravenous dose of melatonin and vitamin D, because the mother hasn’t produced any during gestation.” He looked at little Fitzroy, resting on his dad’s legs, but his eyes focused through the baby, into the middle distance. “Come to think of it, why avoid that?” He turned to his mother. “Is there something unsafe about it?”

Hélène was silent. I watched Jean, whose face had lost the blank mask and was all astonishment.

“Zut, non,”
he said to her, under his breath.

She dropped her head to look at her hands.

“Hélène, dis-moi que ce n’est pas ce que je pense.” Tell me it’s not what I’m thinking.

“It’s mandated by law,” she said, her voice thin and strained. “It has been for almost two decades.”

Jean said, “I was still sharing your bed a year and a half ago.”

“I couldn’t jeopardize D’Arcy’s future. I couldn’t risk that you’d call attention to it because of your … your…”

“My what? My research?”

“Your fundamentalism!”

“
Every
Night infant?” he asked.

She nodded.

He stood up with the baby. His eyes found me, and they had a profound sort of sympathy. “And all adult Night transfers, too, I am sure.”

Day Boy said exactly the words that were unspoken in my head: “What the hell is going on?”

Balanced Rock

My desk partner disappeared after the first week of the fall term of my junior year. If I had understood his last message in time I might have been able to say goodbye.

I sat down one night to a drawing with the word
Quiz
above it. There was a distinctive natural formation sketched out: a blockish, oblong rock—made of limestone I thought, because of the faint cracked layers he had drawn—balanced on another giant boulder or wall. There was a wooden boardwalk and stairway leading up to it, making the location seem distinctly like a state park. For scale he had drawn a crow on the railing, which, if it was accurately depicted, as his drawings usually were, implied that the rock was positively enormous and the balancing act impressive. The rock had ferns poking out from cracks and a full head of leafy, twiggy hair on its flat top.

I had never seen it before.

“I’m stumped, but this is incredible!” I wrote, and I spent the rest of the period giving the rock texture, and drawing the deep shadows that would be there if it were in moonlight, happily unaware that it was my last collaboration with him.

The next day he had practically written a treatise: the longest message he’d ever composed in the two years we’d corresponded, with no further drawing. I copied it down into my phone before the teacher made me wash the desk, and I read it enough times at home to have it memorized:

“This is Balanced Rock, in the Maquoketa Caves State Park, in eastern Iowa, near the northwestern Illinois border. The rock weighs about seventeen tons. The whole park is stunning: it escaped glaciation in the last Ice Age so that nothing was buried under drift and everything has been eroding naturally since the Paleozoic era. There are bluffs, caves (along with thousands of bats), hidden springs, sinkholes … In the fall the rocks are covered with green moss after the rains, the woods are misty, the overgrowth from summer is beginning to turn red and gold. There are cool streams and brooks carving archways through sandstone, and pools that are almost tidal in their beauty. You would love camping there. I wish I were there right now, listening to the creeks burble and the trees whisper. I wish I could show it to you. I wish my life weren’t as precarious as Balanced Rock, and that my twin masters, Duty and Stealth, would give me just a little breathing room before they pass me off to Endless Responsibility. Try to go see the caves. And think of me when you do.”