Plus One (6 page)

“Open the window!” I cried.
You can’t “hold in” vomit.

“Almost there…”

Bastard,
I thought, as the sandwich and water and all my hope in the world came pouring out of me.

*   *   *

The Guard held my elbow and practically dragged me through the sliding doors into the crowded emergency room. Day Boy stumbled after us, carrying his satchel and a wad of fast food napkins containing some of the bigger chunks the Guard had made him clean up from my accident. He went straight to the garbage can to dump them, and then slid his ID through a reader next to the treatment room, where I assumed he was going to wash his hands and tell his mother what a freak I was.

The triage nurse was a Ray—it was afternoon now—and she was talking to the wife of a cancer patient who was having a racing, erratic heartbeat, fever and chills, and a bloated, tender belly. I should not have heard this information, except that the Guard refused to stand behind the patient-privacy line. Over the nurse’s shoulder was the window into the treatment area, and as predicted, I saw Day Boy’s mother pull him aside for a private conversation. I felt a pain in my stomach. Maybe it was the bad sandwich, but probably not.

“Excuse me,” the Guard started to say to the nurse, with a tone that sounded like he was the one being inconvenienced.

“I’m with a patient,” the nurse said, handing him a clipboard with a sign-in sheet. The wife turned to look at us, her eyelids swollen and her mascara running. The Guard scrawled “Sal Lecor” on the sheet and handed it back to the nurse.

“Just make sure this one’s next,” he said, pushing me forward. “And send a facilities custodian out front to my vehicle, with plenty of antiseptic and rags to clean up her barf.” Then he called over her head into the treatment area: “Binoyt! Get your ass out here.”

I looked through the window just in time to catch Day Boy heaving a sigh, like he wanted to do anything else but deal with me again. His mother glanced out at the triage desk and her gray eyes found me. They had such a look of disgust, I had to turn away.

Day Boy pushed the door open and came to stand next to me. He was wearing his lab coat again and wiping his hands on a paper towel. He smelled of soap.

The Guard held out my phone to him. “You’ll need this to check her in, but she can’t touch it.”

My phone.
My identity; my connection to Poppu. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

“Uh, okay.” Day Boy held it like it was coated with Spanish flu virions. “But where are you going?”

“I gotta make sure the janitor cleans every drop of that mess up. And then I’m going back to the station until you call me and tell me she’s ready, which had better not take more than a couple of hours—I don’t care how full this waiting room is.”

“Because, you know, I’ve missed a lot of work…”

“You’re an apprentice,” the Guard sneered. “We have dozens of them at the station, using up air. Believe me, the doctors can live without you for ten minutes.”

Wednesday
3:00 p.m.

The glass doors hissed shut after the Guard left, and without looking at each other Day Boy and I both stepped back until we were behind the privacy line.

“How’s your stomach?” he said, after a moment.

“Not good.”

“You should sit down. I can get you a paper tray if you’re going to be sick.”

I turned to look at the waiting room. It was crowded with people who needed to be seen more than me. There was a shoulder-high partition between it and the door the Guard had just gone through.

“Let’s sit,” I agreed. I led him to the few unoccupied seats that were behind the partition and out of sight of the door.

“It’s late for you,” he said. I wasn’t sure why he was making conversation with me. “You must be bushed.”

I cut to the chase. “You want to be nice to me? Give me my cell.”

He shook his head and put the phone in the front pocket of his jeans. “You know I can’t do that.” He leaned toward me and said in a low voice, “I’m sorry to have misled you. I didn’t realize until we got here how hopeless your plan is. There’s no way you’ll be able to sneak off, and there’s no way to get into the main hospital without proper ID.”

“
You
have proper ID,” I whispered angrily. “And I heard the Guard talk about the ‘Plus One’ that’s on your badge. I think it means you could take me there.”

“This is my
job
,” he said almost viciously. “It’s not a game. It’s a
real career
—one I hope to keep. I won’t let you involve me in a scheme that’s doomed to failure. You may have nothing to lose, but I have
everything
.” He sat straight in his seat and blinked a couple of times, as if he were surprised by what he’d said, and then took a breath to calm himself. “In fact, I’m very sorry about your niece.” He wiped his palms on his thighs. “But while we’re here at least we’ll get your finger properly treated.”

“Right,” I said bitterly. “Make sure the Smudge is patched up physically and you can wash your hands of her real troubles. That’s what being a doctor is to you, isn’t it? You have some grand notion that you’re caring for people, but in the end it’s all about you.”

“There’s a big difference between helping someone and breaking the law,” he said, keeping right up with me.

“Yeah”—I spat the word—“that’s
always
true.” I got up and moved over a seat.

While he stared at his hands with pinched lips, I sat fuming. There were plenty of times in history when breaking the law to help people made sense. And then, all at once I remembered the conversation he’d had with his mother about the Night Minister’s baby. My eyes grew wide. He was such a hypocrite!

It didn’t take long for me to figure out exactly how I was going to get him to do what I wanted. I slid back into the seat next to him. He looked sideways at me, wary. I draped my left arm around his shoulder, intimately, like we were best friends and not enemies. A woman with a bloody gauze pad taped on her forehead watched us.

“What are you doing?” His body stiffened. His eyes searched mine.

I rested my cheek next to his. His hair smelled like lavender.
Imported shampoo,
I guessed in my head.
Probably his mother’s favorite.
I put my lips near his ear and said quietly, “I heard you and your mom talking about Night Minister Paulsen.”

“You’re like a wild animal, do you know that?”

I put my hand on his neck and pressed my cheek against his, to keep him from pulling away. There was a hint of stubble, but it was sparse, and softer than Poppu’s. “You spoke about her baby.” I could feel his body rise and fall with shallow, quick breaths.

“That conversation was in French.”

I whispered, “You moved it from the Night nursery to the Day.”

“You were asleep.”

I dropped my arm and pulled away from him. His body slumped—barely perceptibly—with relief.

“So apparently it
is
sometimes okay to break the law to help someone,” I said at normal volume. The woman with the forehead injury stared.

He looked at my face like I was an alien—his eyes darting from feature to feature. I enjoyed the moment, however brief, of having this power over him, of his wondering exactly what sort of monster I was. A French-speaking, blackmailing, curfew-breaking monster. And he didn’t know the half of it: he didn’t know I was an aspiring kidnapper.

“Take me to the Day nursery,” I said calmly, “or the moment I step into my summary hearing I’ll tell the magistrate what you and your mother have done.”

Wednesday
3:15 p.m.

When Ciel got married, Poppu and I received text message announcements. Like all of Ciel’s texts, they had censorship stamps, and the photos were set at legal resolution—which is to say, pixilated as hell. But I could see well enough to tell Poppu that Ciel’s new bride was black, she was wearing a flippy white dress, she had short dreadlocks that poked in all directions and a lovely high forehead. I could see a symmetry in her blurred face that seemed pleasing, and a wide-open smile. It was the sort of smile I’d only ever felt on my own face at dinners with Ciel and Poppu, or hiking with them in state parks, before jail and cancer.

For a second, staring at them holding hands in the photo, I remembered what it was like to have Ciel love us.

They took Ciel away directly from the courtroom that night—the last night of his trial, the first moment of his reassignment. He was not allowed to say goodbye to me. He was not allowed to visit Poppu in the hospital. It was exactly like he died, except for the infrequent, vapid text messages that were worse than nothing: “Happy birthday, Sol. You’re growing up too fast.” He was an expert at getting uncensored messages through, and yet he wouldn’t do it for us, the people he used to pour his heart out to. Ciel the rebel had become Ciel the yes-man.

Wending my way through the hospital corridors now, trying to keep up with Day Boy’s determined march, I realized with an odd nervousness that Ciel could be in this very building, at this very moment. His wife had delivered less than forty-eight hours ago; it was daytime, so Ciel was out and about; it was normal for a husband to visit with his wife and newborn as often and long as possible. And then something else occurred to me. The baby might be in the room with them, not in the nursery. How would I deal with that? How could I steal their daughter right out from under them? Just thinking about speaking to Ciel—or meeting the woman who had happily made her life with him
without
me and Poppu—made my stomach clench and my mouth dry.

“Hey,” I said to Day Boy’s back. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to say his real name.

Irritatingly, he read my mind again. “D’Arcy,” he said over his shoulder.

“Whatever. I’m wondering what we do if the baby is—”

He turned and stopped so abruptly that I almost crashed into him. “Not
whatever
. D’Arcy.”

“Listen, Day Boy,” I said without thinking. “There’s no point in first names between us. In twenty minutes you’ll never have to deal with me again. And won’t that be a relief?” I tried to walk around him, even though I didn’t know where we were going.

He stepped in front of me. “What did you call me?”

I looked at the ceiling with a huff. “Forget it.”

He closed his eyes, summoning patience, and then opened them again. “The way I calculate it, in twenty minutes we’ll have seen your niece and be on our way back to the ER, where I’m going to remove that popped stitch, re-dress your wound, and get a script for some non-penicillin antibiotics, and you’re going to obey all the rules and stop extorting criminal favors from me.”

He had remembered my drug allergy. Was he a machine or a man?

“Right,” I said, realizing that I had slipped up by revealing that I thought I’d never see him again. How
was
I going to shake him loose after I stole the baby? I scrambled to cover my tracks. “I didn’t expect that you’d automatically get my case. There are other doctors in the ER.”

“But it was my mistake, and I want to fix it.” He looked at me then as if he were trying to see inside of me—to figure out what made this wild animal tick. He gave up, turned, and started walking again. “You know, I could also be called to your summary hearing. So
you
may not be rid of
me
.”

We approached a set of doors and Day Boy held up his ID to a reader on the wall, which had the effect of releasing the locking mechanism with a quiet
sa-shink
. He pulled the handle and held the door for me. And just like that, we were in the main hospital.

A few meters in, we had to pass a receptionist sitting at a high desk, staring at a computer screen. She was a teenager—on the Administrative Apprentice track—which meant school was out for the day for Rays. I wondered for a second why Day Boy hadn’t been in school this whole time.

“ID, please,” she said, not looking up, as we tried to walk by her.

Day Boy grabbed my good fingers below the level of the desk, out of her view, to stop me. I nearly snatched my hand away until I realized what he was doing: my inclination was to barrel right through, looking as guilty and suspicious as I felt. My heart was beating so hard, I could feel it pushing against my ribs. He didn’t let go of me as he held up the badge on his lanyard with his other hand. “Day Emergency Medicine. And I have a Plus One,” he said.

“Is the patient Day or Night?” the girl droned mechanically, bored with her job.

Try factory work, you spoiled Day brat.

“Night,” he told her. “She’s being transferred.”

“Where to?”

He hardly paused for a fraction of a second. “Psych ward.”

I scowled at him, and he raised his eyebrows—a facial shrug. She looked at us then, finally taking an interest. I must have seemed believably nuts. I was internally frantic about my lack of a solid plan, my ponytail had more hair out of it than in, I was greasy and stale, my stomach was still upset and ragingly empty, and I hadn’t slept in—how long had it been?—more than twenty-four hours. A corner of her glossy pink mouth turned up.

Her eyes moved from me to Day Boy, and I saw her face change—I saw her scrutinize him and reach across the desk for his tag, checking his face against the photo. He moved closer to her, leashed by the lanyard around his neck, and stood patiently, whereas everything in my body urged me to run. I couldn’t bear the tension, but he seemed to be in his element. He squeezed my fingers, either to scold me or to reassure me. It had the desired effect of keeping me still.

“Are you coming back this way after you drop her off—um”—she glanced at his tag again—“D’Arcy?” Her voice was fluid and deep; her eyes were as wide as a Kewpie doll’s. She fondled his badge in her fingers.
She was only flirting with him.
I slowly breathed out a lungful of air.

“Alas, no.” He smiled at her. He had a narrow space between his two front teeth. Another perfect imperfection, the little bastard. “I’m off duty and I’ll be leaving through the west exit.”