Plus One (19 page)

I leaned forward, too, so that my nose was practically touching his, my chest still heaving. “That was my
brother
on that ship, screwing me over! My own
brother
! Don’t you tell me what to do
ever again.
” I threw my back against the door and clamped my mouth shut, air blasting in and out of my nose like a charging bull’s.

“That’s better!” he said, energized, almost triumphant. And then he actually smiled. “The wrath of Plus One I can handle. Bring it on.” He leaned back against his door, sliding down as low as possible, put his finger to his lips, and whispered, “But quietly.”

Flashing lights lit up the windows as a squad car drove slowly past—painfully slowly, with its spotlight swinging back and forth, surveying the lot. I wiggled myself to a nearly lying position, tucking my knees under his bent legs. If I could have become part of the floor I would have. I closed my eyes and concentrated on slowing my breathing, realizing that he had shut me up just in time.

*   *   *

And so we stayed motionless, undiscovered, for two dark, cramped hours. Day Boy whispered questions about what exactly had happened on the dock, and I whispered answers.

“Do you think Ciel set you up?” he finally asked.

“What do you mean?” It was obvious to me that Ciel’s gang—whatever it was—had planned to kidnap the Paulsen baby at the hospital. I had thrown a wrench in the works by accidentally taking Fitzroy in place of Ciel’s daughter. Ciel was just trying to get Fitzroy before the Paulsens did.
Yes, of course Ciel set me up,
I thought. He had set me up the moment he embraced being a Ray and left our family. He had set me up to nurse Poppu to his death—to be utterly alone in this world.

Day Boy said, “What I mean is, would Ciel have called the cops?”

I was quiet as I thought about this. It was true that the police had arrived almost exactly on cue for the meeting; they had dispatched a helicopter; this wasn’t a crime they had just stumbled upon.

I whispered, “Ciel’s a jerk, but he really wanted that baby. He wouldn’t bring in the police.”

A full minute later Day Boy said with heavy certainty, “It was Hélène.”

I felt a squeeze in my chest. “She didn’t trust me to turn myself in.”

“Right.”

“She thought you’d be safely on your way home when the cops arrived.”

Silence.

I said, “After my arrest, the police would have read the unsent text in my phone, with the information about where to find Fitz, linking me with his abduction.” It was a fail-safe plan to distance her son from my crimes, except he had blown it by following me.

“So,” he said, barely audibly. “You don’t have a monopoly on family betrayal.”

*   *   *

Eventually the helicopter went away and the cops stopped searching, or moved their search elsewhere. Day Boy left me on the floor in the back, climbed into the driver’s seat, and took us into the shadowy bowels of Lower Wacker Drive, where he eased the car into a dark loading dock. He got out, and I followed him. He lifted the trunk, his mouth a determined straight line. He looked weary, for the first time since I’d met him. He opened a toolbox and took out a socket wrench, and then he tugged on the edge of the carpeting at the bottom of the trunk, pulling it up until he revealed something flat and rectangular, folded in newsprint.

“Unwrap these,” he commanded, as he squatted and started to remove the little bolts on the license plate, setting them in a neat pile on the ground.

I knew immediately what was in my hands. If Dacruz had seen Day Boy with me, the police would be searching for the Benoîts’ car, with the Benoîts’ license plates. I unwrapped the paper.

“But why would you have—” I started.

“Because this is Jean’s car.” It was slightly irritating that he so often knew what I was going to say before I said it. He could at least have the decency to pretend I wasn’t completely transparent to him. He went on, “And Jean is nothing if not prepared.” He finished removing the bolts and reached for the plate, his eyes catching mine. I must have been scowling. His face softened, as if my sour look cheered him. He left his hand out, patiently. I gave him one of the plates, and then I squatted to help hold it in place as he began tightening the first bolt. I picked up the other three bolts and handed them to him as he needed them.

“When you said Jean was practically off the grid, did you mean that he’s an undocumented immigrant?”

“No, he has a green card. As long as he and Hélène are married. And technically at least, they’re still married.”

“Then why—”

“He’s cautious, that’s all, because of his research. And he does a lot of bartering with Rays, which I’m sure you know is—” He dropped a bolt, which rolled away from him in an arc. I picked it up and handed it to him.

“Against the law.” I finished his sentence this time.

He nodded. “We’ve never needed these plates, but there’s a first time for everything. They belonged to the car of a very old friend—a car that was the same make, model, year, and color as ours. He gave the plates to Jean before he died. The car itself is currently a habitat for fish in Lake Michigan.”

Jean was a surprising guy.

I picked up the old plate and put it in the newsprint. We went to the front of the car and started the process for the second plate.

I said quietly, “If Dacruz saw that it was you on Lake Shore Drive, your parents—”

He nodded, twisting the socket wrench.

I let the rest go unsaid. He had obviously worked this out: Jean and Hélène would be—very soon, if not right now—the focus of a lot of police attention. And if Dacruz had noticed the baby under my arm, god help us.

In the yellow sodium-vapor lights of the dock I watched Day Boy work, watched how taking a license plate off a car, like every task he undertook, merited his full concentration and was done with care and organization. I looked at the skin of his cheeks and forehead, smooth and unmarked—betraying a life spent reading and studying, and probably not much of that playing in the yard that he had described at his dad’s apartment.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. What I meant was “Why are you breaking the law for me?” But he understood, and he didn’t answer. He furrowed his brow as he worked on a rusted, recalcitrant bolt. I thought I saw him try to put something into words and then give up, but he could have been struggling with the hardware.

I didn’t know how to ask again. And so I waited, which was unlike me. I waited until he was ready to talk about it.

When the job was finished, he took Premie Gort out from under the front seat, wrapped it tightly in its blanket, and put it in the well of the spare, under the carpeting in the trunk. I tucked the old plates in before he smoothed the fabric down, and then he put the socket wrench back in the tool kit. He walked to the rear door and opened it.

“I think you should lie on the back seat and pretend to be my feverish Plus One, don’t you? I need a reason to be out after dark.” As an afterthought he said, “Speaking of fever, I remembered your pills.” He pulled the bottle from his jacket pocket and handed it to me.

I put it in my hoodie pocket and climbed in. When he got in the driver’s seat I said, “Where are we going?”

“On a vacation.” He sounded tired, or maybe defeated. “I deserve it.”

I didn’t understand, but his voice wasn’t inviting discussion, and with cops all over the lakefront I had no plan of my own.

“If it was your mom who reported me to Dacruz,” I asked, “do you think she told him outright that I was Fitzroy’s kidnapper? Or do you think she trusted that the text would implicate me?” I lay down with my head on the right so I could see the edge of his face as he drove—his cheekbone, nose, bangs, and that level concentration. It settled me, somehow.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. But I’m guessing those Suits would have been there if she had mentioned the minister’s baby, not just the cops, and we’d be dead right now.”

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to fall asleep, but my crying jag and the rush of adrenaline from the chase had worn me out.

Friday
1:00 a.m.

When I awoke it was with a start. I was still in the car, and it was slowing as it turned. It was dark. We ground onto a dirt road. Stones and pebbles kicked up, pinging the wheel rims and undercarriage of the car. I worked hard to sit up. Without Modafinil and caffeine being pumped into me on a regular basis, my body wanted to sleep when it was dark, as if I were no longer a Smudge—as if the human body were predisposed to sleep at night and would happily revert back, if only it were allowed the chance.

“How long was I out?” I asked groggily.

“Forever,” he said.

“Why didn’t you—”

“You need sleep to get better. I knew it would be a long ride.”

“Where are we?”

“You’ll see.”

“We’re in the country,” I said stupidly.

“Mm.”

“The moon starts its last quarter tonight.” I realized that my comment might seem out of the blue to him. The lunar phases were ingrained in me the way musicians know their scales.

“Cool,” he said distractedly, turning on his high beams. “I forget what that means.”

“It’s waning, about fifty percent illumination, but only visible toward dawn. Which means: no light to help guide us,” I said. “Wait. How far out of town
are
we?”

“Three and a half hours.” He looked at the odometer. “Three hundred and nine kilometers.”

“What?”
I said, climbing into the front seat.

“Hey!” he said when I crashed into him and made him lose the steering wheel for a second. He pulled into a small parking lot off the road.

“We can’t be here,” I said, my voice rising. “We’re wanted by the cops. I need to see Poppu.”

“We’re safe here, as safe as anywhere. We need time to think.” He leaned past me to open the glove compartment and remove a flashlight. I reached for my holster, but of course it wasn’t there. Dacruz had taken my torch a long time ago. Day Boy popped the trunk. His voice became hard as he opened his door. “But more than that, I’ve decided I won’t go to jail and lose everything I’ve worked for without coming here one last time.”

I had no idea where “here” was. I got out of the car with him. He opened the trunk and removed a small, bulging day pack that I hadn’t noticed before. Inside were bottles of water, bags of beef jerky, and granola bars. He pulled everything out except two bottles of water, a bag of jerky, and four granola bars. A late dinner, I supposed, or after-school snack for me, the Smudge.

“Take your pill,” he said, handing me water. It didn’t sound like an order as much as a reminder from my doctor. I obeyed.

“Let’s go for a hike.” He turned on the flashlight and walked down the path ahead of me, careful to keep the spot of light at his feet, rather than in front of him, so that I could share it.

We were in a forest preserve or state park of some sort, with railroad-tie stairs that descended from the lot through the woods to a stone hut on the left and a boardwalk on the right. The hut had restrooms, a Day snack bar that was closed for the night, and an external hearth with a pretty fire that lit up the picnic benches next to it. Smudges were eating quietly, and they nodded to us in greeting as we passed.

We followed the boardwalk for a short way, and Day Boy turned left at the first opportunity, down a stairway. I had to concentrate on the beam of light so that I wouldn’t trip, but with brief glances I could make out the shadows of stone walls that rose around us. The air was all earth-smell: damp rock, dust, decaying leaves. We went down, and down—it must have been a few dozen stairs and several landings—into what felt like a cool grotto. The wood stairs transitioned to stone steps covered with claylike dust. Piles of small boulders lined the path to keep us from straying. A quick flick of the light over the walls and ceiling showed that we were in a cave. The rock looked like an exuberant version of gray limestone—jagged, pockmarked, riddled with holes.

“Pretty stone,” I said.

“Dolomite.” He wasn’t in a verbose mood, and the whole experience was so surreal for me I was at a loss for words. Because of my nap, I had gone from being chased by a helicopter and a bastard with a taser gun to being plopped in the remote woods of a state park.

I followed the bob of his flashlight along a cobblestone walkway, beside a trickling stream. Thousands of years of this running water must have carved the cave, with a serene patience that only nature and cancer victims had. Watching my feet, I had the distinct sensation that I might bump my head—he hadn’t aimed the flashlight up in this part of the cave, so I had no idea how high the ceiling was over the path—and I found myself wincing and ducking. I reached up, but there was just air above me. Day Boy marched on.

“Slower,” I said, with a nervous laugh. “I have no idea where I am!” He had only gained a few meters on me, but I was already unsure how the path curved between us.

“Sorry,” he said, lighting the way, his voice genuinely apologetic. “If I remember correctly, we’re coming up on a stretch without much headroom.” When I reached him, he stood still and shone the light in every direction, carefully, allowing me to survey the cave. It was stark, eerie, and utterly lovely.

We had to duck for a little while, walking very slowly so that he could shine the light both up and down for me. And then the ceiling opened into a cavern again. There were no other Smudges in the cave. The sound of the water tripping over stones next to us was so magical, I smiled in spite of everything: in spite of being a fugitive, separated from Poppu; in spite of not knowing where I was; in spite of Day Boy’s stern mood. For just this moment, the world was turning, there was no city, Nature was in charge of everyone’s fate. I had only to relinquish myself to her. I heard Day Boy sigh—not a sad sigh, not a weary sigh, but exactly the sigh of beauty that I felt—and I knew he was beginning to loosen up, too.

“This is Lower Dancehall Cave,” he said. “The entrance to Upper Dancehall is on the other side of the road. It’s all connected, if you’re prepared to crawl through some terrifying, tight spaces, which I will never be.”