Plus One (31 page)

“Sol,” he said, with a kind of hysterical relief that seemed genuine, mixed with irritation, or disapproval, or … what was it?

“What do you want?”

Ciel pointed at D’Arcy but held my eyes. “How long have you been here with him?” It wasn’t as much of an accusation as I expected; it was, oddly, a question.

“It’s a little late to play the protective older brother, isn’t it?” I asked.

“
How long
have you been here with him?” he repeated.

“What business is it of yours?”

“Has it been since you left me?”

“Yes!”

He glanced at D’Arcy. I saw a quick assessment. A reluctant acceptance. A hint of understanding that this person was someone I would defend to the death. He looked back at me. “Fleur is gone,” he said.

I’d heard what he said, but I couldn’t grasp the meaning. I couldn’t adjust to what the conversation was really about.

“Gigi stole her,” he said. His voice was thick, his eyes watery. “When I didn’t find you in your room I panicked. I thought…”

He thought what? That I had something to do with it?

D’Arcy threw off the blanket, modesty be damned, found his boxers, and started dressing. “Why would Gigi take Fleur? As a bargaining chip?”

I hoped that it wasn’t because she wanted to hurt my brother. The outcomes between the scenarios could be terribly different.

“Fuzz set me up. I can’t believe I fell for it.” Ciel picked my clothes up off the floor and tossed them at me. “Get dressed. In these. I need you to be Sunny Puso. Kizzie has makeup and hair spray you can use.”

I caught the clothes but I was paralyzed for a moment, clutching them to me.

“I’ll help,” D’Arcy said without hesitation.

“Sol, I need you,”
Ciel said, snapping me out of it.

“You need me?” I found my voice rising. “For two years I was alone—where were you? Where were you when I slogged through every school day without hearing a single kind word? When there was shopping and cooking and cleaning and hot blister packs and force-fed Modafinil coming out of my ears, and hospitals and appointments and radiation and chemo and vomiting and Poppu dying before my eyes and I couldn’t do a thing to stop it?” It was pouring out of me now. “I was fourteen when they took you away, Ciel. I was a
kid
. It was too much. You abandoned me in the dark, while you had freedom and daylight and William and Miho and
Kizzie
. And now I’m supposed to gird myself for battle and help you?”

It was too late to fend him off. He was storming toward me and before I could put up a fight he had grabbed me hard—but he was holding me, not hurting me. He was wrapping himself around me in a Harcourt–Le Coeur trap, squeezing me until I couldn’t breathe, ignoring my pathetic writhing to get loose, subduing me the way a parent holds a toddler whose tantrum is a danger to herself, saying, “Sol, Sol, Sol,” through his teeth, over and over again until I stopped resisting against his vise arms and I stopped saying “Let me go, let me go,” and my muscles caved and I let him hold me and I found myself putting my own arms around my brother—the brother I had hated for so long and had given up forever but somehow got this one chance to hug again despite everything.

“Oh god, I’ve missed you so much,” he growled into my hair.

I’ve missed you, too,
my brain volunteered instantly without permission. But I knew it was true. I knew that my hate was really battered, bloodied, devoted love, and that I would do anything if I could be his sister again, just as I’d do anything to have Poppu back and be D’Arcy’s lover for more than one night. And I knew that none of those wishes could ever be granted, and that whatever had happened with D’Arcy, whatever was happening right now with Ciel, was temporary, was a bittersweet goodbye, that the galaxy would keep spinning without a thought for me, a blade of grass on a meadow in Iowa, and I would be ripped away from them all, as permanently as I had been torn from Poppu. So I held Ciel, I wrapped my arms around him as tight as I could for this one frozen second. I hugged him to me, and he squeezed in return until we both knew how we felt without having to say it.

D’Arcy spoke up. “Sol and I heard a noise against the hull maybe an hour ago. It must have been a smaller boat or dinghy. Gigi has a head start.”

Ciel and I released each other. My Noma clothes, which had been trapped by our hug, dropped to the floor between us.

“Meet me on the captain’s bridge?”

I nodded. “I’ll be right there.”

After he left, I scooped up my clothes, and then I paused, thinking. It was going to be a long day. Jean—sweet, maternal Jean—would tell me to bathe.

“I’m going to take the world’s fastest shower,” I said to D’Arcy.

He nodded. “Did you take your doxycycline last night?”

“No.”

“Take it now, and again at the usual time this morning. And don’t worry about protecting your bandage from the water. I’m sure Miho has a medical kit, and I want to re-dress the wound.”

As I washed, I saw the muted shape of D’Arcy through the frosted glass of the shower stall, brushing his teeth. I pretended for one juvenile moment that we lived together, that we did this every morning, that it would go on like this forever. And that little fantasy turned out to be a mistake, because a pool of sorrow welled in my core and filled me to my eyes, where it began to spill out, and I had to tip my face up to the spray of water and let it wash away the thought.

I toweled off quickly, took my pill, brushed my teeth, and pulled my clothes on. When I emerged from the bathroom, D’Arcy was waiting. He had even made the bed.

“I’m ready now,” I said.

He stopped me before I got to the door. “Wait,” he said, with a husky vulnerability that reached straight into my chest and squeezed the air out of my lungs. “One second more?”

I nodded, understanding him perfectly, and wrapped my arms around him. As long as we lived, we’d never forget what had happened between us in this room. We held the feeling for one last moment, a breath before the unknown.

Sunday
5:45 a.m.

It was well before dawn as we climbed up to the bridge. The sky was watery black, with a waning wedge of moon smeared with Vaseline. As a girl I’d often tried to imagine what it would feel like to walk on its surface from shadow straight into light, to plant one foot in each. Nothing else filled me with the wonder of the moon. Dinosaurs had seen it. Ciel’s grandchildren would look up at it. The moon would watch the death of us all; it would itself be incinerated by our sun. D’Arcy and I might someday gaze at it simultaneously, miles and a lifetime apart.

Ciel was with Kizzie, Miho, William, and the captain, Richard, who told me how glad he was to finally meet me, how much he had heard about me from Ciel.

Kizzie’s eyelids were puffed from crying, but she sat me down and began working on my hair, adding product, teasing it, spiking it. D’Arcy sat next to me with gauze, tape, and ointment that Miho had fetched from a cabinet on the bridge, and he got straight to work on my finger.

It turned out that Kizzie had left Fleur sleeping on the bed to check on Ciel, who hadn’t gone back to their room after Poppu died. In the half hour that Kizzie spent comforting Ciel and cleaning and covering Poppu, Gigi had snuck into their room, taken the baby, and escaped by water.

“You said Gigi was the Noma we could trust,” I reminded Ciel unhelpfully.

“I hoped she was,” Ciel answered. “I wasn’t sure. A lot of good happened between us. But I knew that even if I was wrong about her—” He stopped.

“What?”

“I’m not proud of this,” he went on, “but right before we broke up I put … I planted a tracer program in her phone. I never ended up using it. I put it there because … I don’t know, I imagined I could protect her. I wanted to know I could locate her within a three-meter radius if I had to.”

I thought of Gigi going into that blind with Brad. A blip on a map would not protect her, could not transmit the horror she’d endured.

“Where is she?” Kizzie cut to the chase.

“She’s on the campus of the University of Chicago.” Ciel pulled out his phone. He tapped the screen, his fingers flying like Zen’s, totally facile, as if the device were a part of him. He found the right screen, expanded the map, held it up for Kizzie. “She moves around fluidly, but she keeps coming back to this building, Harper Library.”

He got up and brought the phone to me. D’Arcy looked over my shoulder. It was a satellite view of a six-square-block radius, with trees and grass in a central quad, and pretty red-tiled roofs. There was a blinking red pin on the image. Gigi was on the south end of campus, in a building across from the Midway Plaisance, which was home to a skating rink that Poppu had brought Ciel and me to every winter before Ciel’s trial. I remembered the bright spotlights flooding the ice, racing with Ciel in endless circles, fingertips burning with cold, blisters rubbed open by my hand-me-down hockey skates, and the scalding, watery, inexplicably satisfying cocoa Poppu bought from a vending machine in the warming hut afterward. Ciel took his phone back and moved around the table, showing the location to William, Miho, and Richard.

“None of the crew can leave the boat, Sol,” Ciel said, motioning to himself and the others. “We’re being watched.”

“You mean, literally?”

He nodded. “There’s a boat tailing us—it’s been there for the last hour.”

“Who’s on it?”

“My boss.”

“Why?”

“In the grand scheme of things? She’s worried that I’ll disappear with my new family—that she’ll lose her favorite pet. But I know you and D’Arcy can slip away, as Noma. She’ll assume that you’re old friends of mine.”

“How will I persuade Gigi to give up Fleur?” I asked, skipping straight over whether I would accept this mission or not. It was a given.

Ciel looked at me with grateful relief. “I’ll be with you constantly by text, to help and advise. I have nothing else to offer. But, Sol, I don’t know anyone who wings tough situations as well as you.”

“I do,” I said. “D’Arcy.”

“D’Arcy.” Ciel sighed, as if D’Arcy weren’t sitting right next to him. As if D’Arcy were some sort of problem that needed to be solved. “Yes, this brings me to D’Arcy.”

William piped up. “We need D’Arcy to bring us Minister Paulsen’s boy.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” D’Arcy said.

“Give it up, Benoît,” William said, irritably. “We know you know where her baby is.”

“Please, D’Arcy, hear us out,” Ciel almost begged. He said to me, exquisitely gently, “We figured out within minutes that you took the Paulsen baby, Sol. William tried to go after you, but he was delayed by D’Arcy’s attention in the nursery.”

“It was
Fleur’s
bassinet!” I said, ruining D’Arcy’s bluff with my big mouth. “Why the hell wasn’t Fleur in it?”

Miho said, “We had a carefully orchestrated plan—”

William finished her sentence. “—that didn’t involve you trying to steal your niece.”

Ciel said, “When we learned Kizzie was due within days of Minister Paulsen, we couldn’t pass up the chance. It was too serendipitous. Minister Paulsen’s husband is biracial, like Kizzie. Plus, we knew the minister had scheduled a C-section a week before her due date, and that her baby would be moved to the Day nursery—”

“How did you know that?” D’Arcy asked.

“I have sources that are very close to the family,” Ciel said, but he didn’t elaborate. “So we decided we’d have Kizzie induced on the same day. William switched our baby with the Paulsen baby in their respective bassinets and was going to wheel the Paulsen baby to our room, where we’d be discharged with him as if he were ours. Miho had falsified the computer records so that we’d had a boy, and William was getting ready to put a fake Baby Boy Le Coeur band on the Paulsen baby, but you and D’Arcy showed up just then, so he had to busy himself with something else.”

Kizzie had started putting pancake makeup on my face, and I had to hold her arm still to ask, “How did William know which baby was the Paulsen baby? The bassinet card and ankle bracelet said Fitzroy.” I saw D’Arcy nodding his head, keeping right in step, as usual.

“Miho again, on the computer. There was no mother in the ward linked with the last name Fitzroy, so that was the odd baby out.”

“Why were Miho’s lanyard and stethoscope on the Fitzroy bassinet?” I pressed, as Kizzie started on the rouge.

Ciel became agitated. “We don’t really have time for questions.”

“Yes, we do,” I said. “Real Noma would never leave your boat this close to curfew.”

He opened his mouth and then clamped it shut. I was right and he knew it. He let out an exasperated huff of air. “Miho had been working in an administrative post in the hospital, as an operative—she was our eyes and ears there. She was supposed to pick up the lanyard and stethoscope for the same reason you grabbed them: to look more like maternity staff. As Yukie Shiga she was going to take Fleur for a ‘test’ but then slip her out of the hospital as if she were a mother with her child visiting the pediatrician, and we’d all meet up back here. We had to let her take Fleur rather than the Paulsen baby because there was a strict ‘no tests/no removal’ order on the Fitzroy file.”

D’Arcy spoke up again, asking the most important question. “Why were you stealing Minister Paulsen’s baby?”

“I was doing it for Sol,” Ciel said instantly, with pinched lips. “I was going to barter the baby to bring her to Day with me.”

“What about blackmailing me using Poppu? Were you doing that for me, too?” I demanded, messing up the lipstick that Kizzie was applying to my lips. She got a tissue to blot the mistake.

“I’m
sorry
, Sol,” Ciel practically whined. “I knew he didn’t have long to live. I needed to see him. And yes, I admit it, I didn’t want you giving that baby up to anyone but me, and I thought it would have the added benefit of getting you on the boat, of reuniting us. But it was stupid of me to strong-arm you. When I saw you on that dock, a foot taller than when I’d left you, so thin, and hurt…”

I felt steam coming to a head inside of me. I would have exploded if D’Arcy hadn’t put a hand on my arm.