Plus One (20 page)

“Spelunking freaks me out,” I agreed.

We exited the cave up stone steps that segued into wooden stairs and then another boardwalk. It was a clear night, but the moon hadn’t risen and the tree cover was thick, so that only the pinpricks of stars shone through.

We stopped at a fork in the boardwalk. He aimed the light at the sign in front of us. The beam crawled up the post, slipped and slid, until it found the letters printed at the top. I read quickly, but not as fast as he did. An arrow pointed left to a few sites, including one that may have been “Rainy Day Cave,” and another pointed right to “Parking Lot” and “Balanced Rock.”

His light returned to the boardwalk.

He had chosen Rainy Day Cave.

I froze. Had I read that correctly? Balanced Rock?

Balanced Rock.

My desk partner’s goodbye.

“No really, Day Boy, where are we?” My voice surprised me with its quaver. I crossed my arms in front of my body, hunching a little and hugging my sides to hold myself in, to regain control of my suddenly trembling body. I hurried up a few wooden steps and onto a dirt path to catch up. His flashlight was getting too far away.

“Iowa,” he said.

I stopped, but he kept walking, saying, “It’s called Maquoketa Caves State Park. It’s not the Grand Canyon, but for some reason—maybe because I was conceived in a cave—it’s my favorite local park.”

With no warning, my knees buckled and I dropped to the ground. D’Arcy heard me fall and he spun around. I put my hands on the dirt in front of me to steady myself. Too much air escaped my lungs before I remembered to replenish it. I closed my eyes for a moment.

It was him.

My mind raced to put the pieces together. He was a year ahead of me in school. He had left just as the seniors were awarded National Distinction. He was organized, neat, and intelligent. He was exactly the person to know what a virion looked like, for crying out loud.

It all made sense.

“Are you okay?” he asked. He bent on one knee beside me. “Oh, hell, you’re not well enough for this.”

“I’m fine.” I looked up at him in the dark. He had aimed the spot of the flashlight on the dirt and stones to the side of me, trying not to blind me by pointing it in my face. But that made the light in my peripheral vision too bright; it put his face completely in shadows. I wished the flashlight were angled toward him. I wished for moonlight. I wanted to see him—I needed to see him again—now that in a matter of seconds everything had changed, and nothing between us would ever be the same, at least for me. I needed to see his eyes, to see what he saw when he looked at me, and who he was now that I
knew
who he was. I needed to see him so badly, as if I’d never seen him before. As if I couldn’t draw that nose, those eyes, that barely combed hair by heart now.

“Really, I’m
fine
. I…” I wiped tears away quickly with my sleeve. “I tripped.”

He offered his left hand across his body, so that I would reach with my left, my good side. He pulled me up.

“I should take you back,” he said, letting go sooner than I wanted. “This was stupid and selfish.”

“No, let’s go on.” The tremor in my voice began to annoy the crap out of me. “Please.”

I saw the beams of two flashlights bobbing behind us. I cleared my throat and said, “Is it possible we were followed?”

“We’re fine,” he said in a low voice. “It’s just other Night visitors.” He let out a little laugh. “You’ve forgotten how to be a Smudge, Plus One.”

Friday
1:30 a.m.

We hiked for ten or fifteen minutes more, stopping to peek into Rainy Day Cave and Ice Cave before entering the woods proper. The night was blue-black all around us, and there were no other hikers on the path we chose, even though it was perfect late September weather—unseasonably warm, clear and dry.

He turned to me. “How are you doing?”

“Maybe a little shaky.” I told the truth.

“Mm,” he said, not knowing what to make of that. “Let’s rest for a minute. Your body is still fighting a bacterial infection, after all.”

“It’s not that. The antibiotics are working great.” And then, because everything had changed—because
I
had changed—I said, “Thank you for those. And for remembering I can’t have penicillin.”

He led the way to a fallen tree. It had landed on an old metal fence with barbed wire on top, crushing it. He shone his flashlight on a sign that indicated this was the edge of the park. Beyond the fence was private property—a field or meadow of some sort, with what might have been hay clipped short for the fall. I sat down on the trunk of the tree. He put one sneaker up on it, crossing both arms on his knee. He leaned his chin on his arms and turned off the flashlight. We were quiet for a minute. I was so aware of his presence, it was heady and disconcerting. Two years of imagining him had never included the possibility of his being a real person—someone I could reach out and touch. And yet here he was.

“I can’t wait for the sun to rise,” he said to the open air.

“Why?”

“Because I want to show you how beautiful this place is.”

I was quiet, remembering how much he had wanted to be here when he last wrote on the desk. There had been a sadness to his message that I didn’t understand, that I wanted desperately to ask him about now, but couldn’t. He misinterpreted my silence, maybe thinking he had insulted me.

“I mean, no offense, but it turns out nature is not as fun at night.”

“I think you’re mistaken,” I finally replied, remembering how to be acerbic.

“How so?”

“In your Day prejudice, and your lack of Night skill, you’re neglecting a massive amount of beauty.”

I was relieved that he detected the sarcasm in my tone.

He put on a snotty voice. “Well, then, perhaps you could educate me.”

“Give me the flashlight.”

I climbed onto the log and scootched my feet along it like a tightrope walker, up and over the mangled fence, hopping off at the end. I turned around and illuminated the route for him.

“Brambles when you land,” I warned.

I walked to the middle of the clearing and located the North Star. The lack of a moon was now a great bit of luck. It was the perfect night for stargazing.

“Come on,” I called, to hurry him up, using my deep, stealthy Smudge voice.

I lay down, facing west, in the clipped hay. It was dry and a little pinching, even through my clothes. He took off the day pack to lie down beside me.

“It hurts,” he complained, at full volume.

“Get comfortable.” I folded my arms behind my head. He did the same.

“Look at the midsky, about halfway up from the horizon, and wait for your eyes to adjust,” I said softly. “It will take five to ten minutes.”

He was quiet. The sky was full of stars, and the spaces between them were not fully black, because the longer we stared, the more the pricks of other stars peeked behind and next to them. I stole that time to listen to him breathe. I soaked up his presence, storing it for the future, burning it into my memory. I said his name in my head, the name I had avoided for so long.

D’Arcy. My dear friend.

D’Arcy,
my mind sighed.

Soon the sky had become a blanket of stars; and then it became heavy, bulging down on us, so thick it was like soup that I might reach up and stir with my hand if I tried. And finally, to my relief, Cygnus the Swan and the Great Summer Triangle began to emerge from the cosmos with the faint, cloudy dragon spine of the edge of our galaxy.

“Oh my god, is that the Milky Way?” he whispered.

My throat got hot. It was the most beautiful thing I could ever have hoped to show him. I could be grateful for one thing that night.

“You’re a brave guy,” I said, my voice cracking just to make sure I felt like an idiot.

“Why do you say that?”

“It took me ten years not to wad my body into a tight ball every time I saw the Milky Way.”

He burst out laughing. It was too loud. Night people don’t belly laugh outside of their homes. He really was a Ray. I shushed him.

He laughed again, but softer, and then turned his head toward me and said in a low, smiling voice, “A ball?”

“Four hundred billion suns spiraling through space together. Our solar system just one grain on that galactic carousel. The carousel itself a speck in the cosmos. And here I am in this small clearing, on the surface of the earth, as transient and unnoticed to the universe as the dry blades of grass that are poking into my shirt. It’s too much to comprehend up there, too enormous, and I’m so small when it’s on top of me. It frightens me, like I’m being crushed.”

I could feel him staring at me, although it was almost pitch-black around us, as I poured out my childish thoughts.

After a moment he said, “Holy cow, Plus One.”

“What?” I said defensively.

He settled his head in the cradle of his arms again and refused to answer. Then he said, “Here on earth, where it counts … you’re not unnoticed.”

Friday
2:30 a.m.

We gazed up together in silence at the stars. Eventually D’Arcy sat up and opened his day pack. I flipped on the torch to rest it between us. The light from below caught his cheekbones and set his eyes in shadow. He took out two granola bars and handed me a water bottle. I opened it and took a swig. I offered it to him. He drank from it and handed it back. I rested my lips on the rim of the bottle before I drank, trying to differentiate between the warm wetness of the water and the warm wetness of his mouth, disappointed that I couldn’t. He tore the end of his granola wrapper with his teeth. I tore mine with my fingers.

“Bon appétit,”
he said.

“À toi aussi,”
I replied quietly.

We took another sip of water. I was careful to offer it to him first, for that indirect lip contact. It was juvenile, but it was all I had. He opened a bag of jerky, took a piece out, and ripped a section off with his teeth.

He passed me the bag, chewing, ruminating. Finally, after he had swallowed, he said, “Why does your brother want the baby?”

“I don’t—I don’t know Ciel anymore.”

He accepted that answer. We sat quietly eating, perhaps both imagining a reason—D’Arcy maybe assuming that Ciel’s motives were political, me knowing they were more likely to be self-serving.

We ate our second granola bars and more beef jerky. D’Arcy opened his bottle for a last drink of water, since mine was empty. The food, as usual, barely took the edge off my hunger. I would need a Unity Night–size meal to feel sated, and maybe even that wouldn’t work. Maybe the hunger was a permanent part of my being.

I asked, “Do you think Hélène has returned the baby by now?”

“I can’t believe she hasn’t, but without your text, I wonder what method she used.” He added with grim sarcasm, “Ring the doorbell and run?”

The songs of the crickets had swelled around us: trills from all directions—a sea of sound, an audio imitation of the stars. I thought,
Without the Paulsen baby, I’ll never see Poppu again. I have no bargaining power against Ciel. And I’ve dragged my only friend, my desk partner, down with me.

D’Arcy leaned back on his elbows and breathed in, letting himself become part of the sky. I recognized the feeling, and I realized there was something I was neglecting about the Milky Way—a corollary to its gravid weight. It was the infinite possibility of time and space. There
was
a way to salvage good from bad, if only I could slip myself into the orbits of all those billions of stars, make myself a part of those distant light-years, return D’Arcy to his pre-Sol life.

A tiny plan was sparking in my brain, trying to become a flame.

“You know,” D’Arcy said, sitting upright and smacking dirt off his sleeves, “the Milky Way might just be worth a little jail time.” He began to pack up his bag. “But now it’s my turn. I get to show you the park in sunlight this morning.” He stood up. “And then we’ll text your brother.”

I didn’t argue. “Will we sleep in the car?”

“It’s not allowed here. And we can’t risk getting questioned. But don’t worry, we’ll be safe.”

We walked back the way we’d come: through the woods, the long saber of our flashlight slicing through the trees; down the dirt path; passing single file between two giant boulders with stairs cut into them. When we reached Ice Cave, he grabbed my hand and guided me inside, silently. He swept the beam of light along the walls, evaluating the space. “We can stay here tonight. No one will come in.”

“Why?”

“Because the caves have been closed for the last couple of years to protect the bats from white-nose syndrome.”

“Awesome,” I said. “Bats.”

There was a jagged, jutting wall to the side of the entrance—it would block a casual flashlight beam if someone were to peer in. I showed him how to quash the light of the torch against the stone, so that it created ambient light around us.

We sat down near the wall. He slid the pack off his shoulders and took his phone and keys out of his jeans pockets to put them in his jacket pocket. The soil was sandy and, to my relief, dry. But the air was cool and damp in the cave; I didn’t know how we would last the night without feeling the chill. He reached deep in his bag and pulled out a plastic packet, not much bigger than a deck of cards. He opened a snap on the packet and pulled out something that sparkled silver in the dim light and crinkled like cellophane. It was a Mylar first-aid blanket.

“Jean,” I said.

“Jean,” he confirmed. He shook it out and put it on my shoulders. He lay down, setting the pack next to him. “You can use this as a pillow if you’d like.”

“We should share the blanket.”

“My jacket is heavier than your hoodie.” He ended the discussion: “Time to sleep.”

I hesitated until I saw the car keys in the sand. They had fallen out of his jacket pocket. I crawled next to him, scooping up and hiding the keys in my fist.

I pushed the day pack toward him. “I’ll use my hood, you take the pillow.”

He switched off the light. The only sound outside was the occasional owl and the slow creak of a branch swaying in the breeze. We heard the swish of an animal in the brush. D’Arcy and I lifted our heads to look out the mouth of the cave, and at that moment, in the first light of the moon, a deer tiptoed past, froze midstride to stare into the cave, and walked on.