Plus One (9 page)

As the train jolted to a start, I closed my eyes. I wanted to see my night world rushing by in sunlight, wanted to savor the one day I’d ever had, but I was being crushed by lack of sleep. Hot tears pooled under my lids.

I opened my eyes. The man who had given me his seat was staring at me. I couldn’t blame him; I was hard to figure out.

“May I ask another favor?” I said, my words slurred as if I were drunk. He shrugged, which I took to mean
That depends
.

“If I fall asleep, would you be able to wake me at Sixty-third Street?”

He nodded.

I had no choice but to rely on him: I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

*   *   *

I felt a tap on my shoulder, and I was aware of my body leaning as the train slowed. The wheels screeched. I had missed the announcement of the stop, but the stranger had remembered.

“Thanks,” I said, my eyes taking a moment to focus. “And for the seat, too. I didn’t know how much I needed it.”

The doors swished open. I stood—too quickly. I was dizzy. My brain craved REM, and eleven minutes of sleep had only been enough rest to whet its appetite. I gripped a bar near the exit for a second and then stumbled onto the platform, one of only a couple of passengers to leave the train at that stop, the rest of them on their way to the suburbs. The baby was squirming now. I had sweated through my T-shirt in my sleep; she was such a little furnace next to my body. The late September weather was too warm for a hoodie. But I was almost home. I lowered the zipper more, to let in the evening breeze. Her grunts were growly and hoarse for such a tiny person. If I had been a more sensitive, maternal type, I might have found the sound miraculous.

I headed straight west, at a steady clip, and turned north on my street. I could see our apartment building in the distance.

The evening light revealed just how run-down our block was, in a way that dull amber streetlights didn’t. There were torn screens and peeling window frames. Our building needed tuck pointing. Grass sprouted from cracks in the sidewalks but refused to grow in the parkways, where the only green was the broad leaves of dandelions. Still, it didn’t matter to me. It was home; it was the place that sheltered Poppu. I braced Ciel’s baby and broke into a jog, needing to be there. If only I were returning for good. If only it were night, and I had my phone, and I was failing school as usual and getting yelled at by my boss, and Poppu didn’t have cancer, and Ciel hadn’t left us. If only.

I had no keys—the Guard had taken them away with my phone and the rest of the contents of my pockets. But I knew how to get in. I slipped down the stairs to the gangway between the buildings, lifted the door with a quick jerk until the lock gave way, walked through the musty brick corridor with the smell of cat urine pinching the back of my throat, and came out in the concrete backyard of the apartment building next door. Normally I would climb the fence between the properties to get into our yard, but not with today’s cargo. I went out to the alley and reached my hand through a hole in the mesh of the back gate to unlock it. I retrieved a spare key from under a dead potted plant and climbed the back porch steps. I now felt like every horrible thing that had happened since last night might possibly be worth the payoff. Crushing my fingertip, getting arrested, mercilessly using that Day Boy, kidnapping my own niece—it was all in service of the next half hour of Poppu’s happiness. I felt the way I used to feel as a kid handing Ciel some silly homemade gift on his birthday: the anticipation of pleasing someone you love makes you practically shiver with joy.

A cry came out of my mouth when I reached our third-floor apartment. The window of the kitchen was smashed in, and the back door was ajar.

Sun and Sky

When I turned thirteen, Poppu prepared his special tarte au maton, which he only made for our birthnights. It was a kind of Belgian cheesecake enclosed in a puff pastry. Poppu was a good cook in general, and the tarte was his signature dessert. It took twelve hours to prepare because he had to curdle whole milk with buttermilk and then drain the mixture through a sieve lined with cheesecloth. Every couple of hours he would go to the pantry and stir the contents of the sieve, to encourage the whey to flow through. He called it “coaxing the curds,” and in my mind the pleasure of eating that gently sweet tarte was inseparable from the pleasure of watching him create it. The other ingredients were eggs, ground almonds, and sugar, and the filling was so light and dry that it nearly melted in your mouth. But the secret ingredient was love.

Over the years I had realized that it was clever of him to restrict such an unassuming dessert to our birthnights, because if we had eaten it on other occasions it would never have acquired such a fantastic lore. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have missed it so staggeringly when I turned sixteen and he could not stand often enough or long enough to coax the curds.

On that thirteenth birthnight, after our bellies were full of tarte and all that was left was a pile of burned cake candles, Ciel pulled a small purple velvet box from his vest pocket. The box was almost square, with rounded corners, and was tied with a white cloth ribbon. Poppu raised his bushy eyebrows when he saw it. He had only given me his usual gift: a stack of books that he and I would read together every night after dinner while Ciel washed dishes and shouted, “Louder!” from the kitchen. Poppu had discovered long ago that I didn’t do homework, but I did do family book time. Really, why would any person do homework when they could read great novels—and trashy comics—with Poppu? There were also books about science and history and art, and Poppu tried to sneak some poetry in there when he thought I wasn’t looking. We had an understanding: he ignored my lousy grades as long as I wasn’t outright failing, and I was supposed to pay attention in the one subject we never covered at home, math.

The book on the top of the stack that year was the
Odyssey
.

I untied the bow of Ciel’s jewelry box, and the ribbon slipped off the way it does in the movies, gracefully, as if in slow motion.

“Do you get it?” Ciel asked happily after I’d cracked open the hinge.

Inside was a necklace. It had two dangling charms on it—a sun and a moon. The charms were attached to different bails, so that as they slid along the chain the moon rested halfway over the sun, as if it were about to eclipse it, Night trying to dominate Day. The moon was full and made of white gold, with a relief of the major terrae and maria. The sun was yellow-gold, with pointy rays blazing in all directions. The rays that spread out underneath the moon had tiny diamond chips embedded at their tips. They were meant to be the stars.

“It’s night and day,” I said, because it was obvious.

Poppu took it from me and examined it. He brought it to the kitchen and pulled a magnifying glass out of the utility drawer.

“No, it’s
you
, Sol,” Ciel said to me.

Poppu sat down and studied the back of the charms and the gold lobster clasp.

“Eighteen karat,” he murmured. “Later we will talk about where you got this.” Then he handed it to Ciel, who had his palm out.

Ciel admired it and went right on talking to me. “I mean, sure, it represents night and day, too. But I got it because your name is Soleil and you live in the night.” He looked at me intently then. “You know there’s a reason Mom and Dad named you that.”

“Ciel,” Poppu started. There was concern in his voice, or a warning, and when I glanced over I caught the vanishing remains of furrowed eyebrows.

Soleil
is French for “sun,” and it’s my real name. Poppu was the only one who used it. My phone ID, my official state document, listed the nickname Sol. Most people pronounced it “soul,” which was not quite French but close enough.

Poppu said, “Your mother named you Soleil because you were her sunshine.” He looked pointedly at Ciel. “And you were her sky.”

“She’s thirteen, Poppu. It’s time to stop dumbing down the story. She needs to understand her world.” He stood up, opening the clasp of the necklace, and walked behind me, saying, “Our names are a symbolic rebellion, Sol.” I looked up and back at him as he lifted the necklace over my head, maneuvering around my ponytail to join the ends together. “There was an act of rebellion in everything they did.”

Wednesday
5:00 p.m.

My mind raced through possible options. I couldn’t go to a neighbor for help: the Night neighbors were still under curfew, and I didn’t know any of our few Day neighbors. Besides, they’d want to call the police, and I’d get arrested.

Within seconds I knew I was overthinking this: Poppu was in the apartment, possibly hurt. I had to go inside.

I peered through the broken window. I could see that no one was in the kitchen, at least, or the hallway beyond. I pushed the door open a third of the way with my foot, knowing it would creak if it went as far as halfway, because I’d never found the energy to oil it.

I unzipped the hoodie and was grateful that my charge was still asleep. I wriggled out of my sweatshirt, carefully ladling her from one arm to the other to peel off each sleeve. I stepped inside, avoiding the broken glass so that my sneakers wouldn’t crunch on the wood floor. I left the door open for a quick escape. There was a deep drawer under the counter to the right of the fridge that was nearly empty and traveled on smooth glides. I quietly pulled it open, bunched my hoodie inside a fry pan to form a nest, and lowered the baby into it. Then I pushed the drawer almost closed. I was too exhausted to wonder whether it was a good plan. I didn’t want to encounter a burglar with a baby in my arms.

I held my breath and listened, my heart thumping in my chest, but the apartment was silent. As I let out my air, a wave of nausea came over me, along with the strangely lucid thought that I wasn’t strong enough to find my grandfather murdered. I stayed like that for too long, frozen, and then the fact of being a coward snapped me to my senses. I had to do this, and I had no choice but to do it alone. I made a fist of my good hand to stop it from shaking. I walked as light-footed as possible down the hall. I paused before getting to Ciel’s room, and then slowly peeked around the door frame. His room was the smallest of the three bedrooms. He had traded his old room with me as a surprise on my eleventh birthnight, skipping school to paint it a color the can called Sunshine. The window and door casings were Dove.

His room, with its landlord-beige walls and trim, was as hollow as it had been the night they dragged him away. Poppu and I had cleaned the sheets, made the bed, and straightened up after the police ransacked it for evidence. We didn’t know then that he’d never come back. The electrical equipment and tools that the investigators
didn’t
take fit in a shoe box.

I swallowed but my throat was so dry it caught on itself. I continued down the hall to my room. The door was open, as I’d left it so long ago on my way to school. A lifetime ago. There was nothing but the usual: dingy white sheets, dingy white comforter, books stacked on books—two-deep in shelves, on my night table, in piles on the floor—like a mad witch lived there. I moved on to Poppu’s room. The door was closed, but it shouldn’t have been.

I turned the doorknob. I knew the door would stick, that it swelled in the summer. I pushed hard and it scraped open. The smell of dying wafted out, sweet and musky. But that smell was always there lately. His blackout shades were closed, and the room was as dark as night. I closed my eyes and flipped on the light switch.

I opened my eyes just as an animal mewl came from the kitchen. My whole body startled, causing my bandaged hand to flail against the doorjamb. The pain ricocheted through me at the very same moment that I realized Poppu’s bed was empty.

I rushed into his room and ripped the duvet off his bed. I flung open the closet. I ran across the hall to the bathroom and threw the mildewed shower curtain aside. I continued down the hall to the living room and hurried through the patio door to the screened porch. He was in none of these places; nothing was disturbed. I ran back to check closets, and then I stopped all at once, a vision flashing in my mind. I turned back to the table in the middle of the front hall. There was a stack of unopened mail—I hadn’t paid a bill in months, or even thrown away junk mail—and on top was a note scrawled with a green magic marker on a piece of lined paper taken from my room.

WE WILL EXCHANGE YOUR GRANDFATHER FOR THE BABY. A SMOOTH, QUICK TRANSFER WILL BE SAFEST FOR BOTH. INSTRUCTIONS BY TEXT.

I got so dizzy I had to kneel to keep myself from fainting. I sat on my heels, curled forward, and put my face on my hands on the floor. I heard a moan and realized it was my own voice. And then a dam burst inside my head and liquid poured from my face—tears from my eyes, snot from my nose, spit from my mouth. I wailed at full volume, not caring who heard me. At that moment I was as alone as I had ever been in my life. Poppu, who was too sick to walk across the hall to the bathroom, had been taken from me. Ciel was gone. If Poppu died—
when
Poppu died—the apartment would echo like this. My heart would echo like this.

The front doorbell buzzed, rude and toneless and insanely loud. I couldn’t move, as if my body had given up on everything but breath and a heartbeat and mucus.
No one ever rings our bell,
I thought sluggishly. I had forgotten even what it sounded like.

I heard the awful bleat from the kitchen again and remembered the baby. She was stirring. I sighed. I wasn’t alone after all. I had someone with me who was not only of no help and no comfort, but a catastrophic liability. A liability I had brilliantly inflicted on myself. The doorbell buzzed, long and irritating, then pulsed, and then sounded a seemingly interminable note again. I willed my torso up until I was on my knees, realizing it might have something to do with Poppu. I went to the screened porch to spy down at the door, lifting the hem of my T-shirt to wipe my face with it. The baby’s whimpers became a bona fide cry—not insistent, not continuous, but I could hear in her voice a primal recognition that she wasn’t being heard, and I knew her cries would soon escalate in volume and urgency. I ignored her.