A Perfect Life (26 page)

Laurel climbed on the bike. “It can wait until we get you in a hot bath.”

“No,” I said. “I have to know what to do.”

She looked puzzled. “But it isn't my decision. I can't tell you whether to have a baby.” She dropped her hands from the handlebars. “I see. You mean, you want to know if you have it. And you need my blood to find out.” Her eyes narrowed. “This isn't a trick, is it? So you can find out if
I
have it?”

I was too tired to launch into an elaborate analogy about colored handkerchiefs. Laurel and I would never speak the same language. Maybe few sisters did. “You'll just have to trust me,” I said.

Her foot tapped the kickstand. “I knew you would want something in return.”

The accusation felt oddly true. Why else would it feel so satisfying to catch my sister at last, to find the ammunition to force her to
give
? “I don't have to tell you the result. I
could use your blood to figure out if I have the marker. But I don't need to tell you if you have it.” This was ridiculous, I knew. If Laurel's blood tested positive, how could I hide my grief? “You can refuse. I won't hold it against you.”

“Sure you won't.” Laurel laughed. “I've always been the selfish one. You and Dad knock yourselves out finding a cure for this thing. What do I do? I dance. I run off to Europe. I let you give up a year of your life looking after Mom.” She shook her head. “I said you can have my blood. Do whatever you need to. Just don't tell me anything until after the concert. Not my result. Not yours. I don't even want to see you before then.”

I told her she could take more time to think about her decision.

“I know what I owe you.” She studied my face. “Your complexion looks green. You're shivering.”

I kept thinking she would change her mind. Whatever my sister said now, she would find an excuse to back out later. “There's a shower at the lab,” I said. “I'll be fine once I get out of this stupid wet suit.”

“You're sure?”

I nodded.

We rode the motorcycle to the lab and took the elevator up. “I shouldn't have rushed you,” I said. “There's too much to think about.”

Laurel pursed her lips. “Jane, ever since I was a little girl I've known I would die young. If this is bad news, it's just what I expected. Nothing much will change, except I won't take Cruz down with me. And if it's good news, I guess I'll need to change the way I think about my life.”

From outside, near the loading dock, came the insistent
beep beep beep
of a truck backing up. I imagined the truck running someone over. It was possible, after all, to hear danger approach and not be able to avoid it. “I shouldn't pressure you into doing this,” I said.

“I told you I would help.”

I wanted time to think and calm my nerves. “Just wait here. I have to go clean up.” I left Laurel at my bench and went to take a shower in the stall beside the mouse room. Beneath the soothing spray I finally stopped shaking. I rinsed out my mouth and spat the sour taste down the drain, put on a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt that said
MIT
BEAVERS
.

When I returned to the lab, I was relieved and disappointed to see Laurel wasn't there. I could always drive up to Vermont and draw the blood. Meanwhile, neither of us would have done anything that couldn't be undone.

Then she came back in. I asked what she had been looking for. “A ladies' room,” she said. “I got lost in all those corridors.” I was about to ask whether she was sure she knew what she was doing when Susan Bate waltzed in. I braced for a tirade. Susan had been furious to learn she wasn't an author on the paper; after much deliberation, Vic had decided her contribution merited only an acknowledgment.

“Why, Dr. Jane Weiss. A celebrity. Here, in our very own lab. It's been quite a little gold mine for you, hasn't it. You'll get your own lab now for sure. Are you here to say good-bye to all the little people you stepped on on the way up?”

I surprised myself by grabbing her arm and digging in my fingers. “I don't know what's bothering you,” I said. “But
I've never done anything to hurt you. If you can't think of your own experiments, you should find something else to do.”

“Take your hands off me. You're paranoid. You must be getting it already.” She bared her small teeth. “I already told Vic I'm leaving. Who needs a life like this, spending all your time studying things you can't see with people you can't trust.” She pulled away. “I just came in to get a leotard. I'm not spending another minute in this loony bin.” She gave me the finger and left.

“Whew.” Laurel whistled. “They say dancers are temperamental.”

“She is a dancer. Sort of.”

“ Isn't that like being ‘sort of' a scientist?”

“I don't know,” I said. “She takes some kind of dance therapy. For incest survivors. It's supposed to help them to like their bodies.”

Laurel turned and looked out the window. Her hips seemed heavier, I thought. We both couldn't be pregnant, could we? No, she was only getting older. Was it possible that my baby sister had just turned thirty? It seemed cruel to prolong her suspense, but I couldn't move. Too many things were happening too quickly.

“If you can handle knowing the truth, I can, too,” she said.

The truck beeped again. “I'm not sure I
can
handle it,” I told her.

When Laurel smiled she looked fifteen. “Of course you can. Let's just do this. However it turns out, I won't hold anything against you. I need to know. For my own sake.”

I nodded. She was right. I found the supplies and pulled on some latex gloves. It was as if I had been told to sit behind the wheel of some destructive machine—a bulldozer, or a tank—and I wanted to protest that just because I had designed the machine, I shouldn't necessarily be allowed to drive it.

“Just remember,” Laurel said. “I don't want you to tell me anything about either of us until after the concert.”

I tied the tourniquet around her arm, feeling as if I ought to ask permission of someone. But there was no one I could ask.

“Jane. I can't stand here like this forever.”

The crook of Laurel's arm was as soft and white as a child's. I swabbed the spot and cocked the needle. How could I explain that I'd had the premonition of hurting her, of causing her pain beyond the needle's prick? She turned to face the calendar from BioGenetics. The page still said September. Maybe none of this had happened. I hadn't yet slept with Willie. I hadn't yet found the probe.

Laurel tensed, the sinew rising from her arm. I slipped in the needle, then drew the plunger back. As the syringe filled with blood it came to me that I had made a mistake, an error of reasoning so unforgivable I ought to relinquish any claim to thinking like a scientist. My certainty that Laurel didn't have the gene was nothing but a hunch, a wishful thought, a suspicion based on little but my long-held belief that I had inherited the gene and my sister hadn't.

Laurel didn't stay long enough to watch me run her test. I suppose I understood, although if our positions had been reversed, I would have watched every step.

“You're right,” I said. “There's no point in waiting. The results won't be ready for another six or seven days.”

She took back her leather jacket, hugged me, and went out, then returned a moment later. “I know I said I didn't want to see you until after the concert, but if you need me to go with you to the clinic . . .” She jotted her telephone number on a pad of graph paper, then added “Laurel” beneath, the L carefully looped, as if I otherwise might have forgotten whose number it was.

It was the first time my sister had given me a gift that wasn't easy to give. “Thanks,” I said, still holding the tube of blood. “Have a safe trip.” I watched from the window until the toy-size motorcycle crossed the bridge. I pressed the tube against my cheek, as warm as a human mouth would have been.
Don't think,
I thought.
Just pretend it belongs to someone else.
I spun the sample in a centrifuge, then siphoned off the serum and lysed the remaining layer of
cells to release Laurel's DNA. I felt like a child mixing food coloring, ink, and her mother's perfume to brew a magic potion, half-believing it might work, all the while knowing she was pretending to powers she did not have.

I set the tube rocking in a water bath. The next morning, I would come in and dip a glass wand in the tube until it touched the tiny clump of
stuff
at the bottom. If all went well, the sticky strands of DNA, like cellophane noodles, would cling to the tip of the wand and unfurl. I would repeat this procedure until Laurel's DNA was pure. Then I would fracture it with enzyme, run the gel, and hybridize the blot with the probe from chromosome twenty. I would carry out this protocol with DNA from my cousins, my aunt, my father, and myself. Finally, I would spread all seven films across the conference-room table and break the code that revealed which members of my family carried the gene.
Please,
I bargained with a God I didn't believe in.
Do anything you want to with my blot. Just don't let Laurel have it
.

Then it was my turn. I went to Vic's office, lifted the ceramic turtle one of his sons had made in art class, and found the key to his desk. In the drawer lay the notebook in which Yosef had recorded the donors' names. I ran my finger down the list: Yoder, Young, Wicks. When I reached the two entries for Weiss, every hair on my body stood up.

Beside my father's name, a check indicated his blood had been immortalized and spun down. The column beside “Weiss, Jane Ellen” was blank. Trying not to think what this omission meant, I memorized the code beside my name and hurried down the hall, repeating the numbers.
I walked inside the cold room and found the Styrofoam rack that ought to have contained my blood. But the slot by my code was empty. I checked the other racks to see if my sample had been misplaced. Maybe someone had taken it. Susan. Or that reporter. No, I thought. The woman in the brown dress might have been smart, but she couldn't hope to run the right gels and interpret the blots. Besides, not even the most diligent reporter would care enough about my fate to risk such theft.

I went back to Vic's office and jotted the codes for my father's DNA, my cousins', and my aunt's. Those tubes were gone, too. I dialed Yosef's number, praying he would be there. When he picked up the phone, I heard a party in the background. He yelled something in Russian. “Yeah.” His voice was muffled. “Solzhenitsyn fan club.”

I told him who it was. I didn't mean to bother him at home. I just had a quick question.

He yelled again, “Slava, get off her!” Then, his voice brighter: “Sweetheart, is the happiest day of life, seeing your picture in the paper this morning.”

He meant the happiest day of
his
life. My success made him happy.

“You want to come to my party? You're the only one I know who has something to drink a toast to.”

“Not right now,” I said. “I just wanted to find out about that blood Rita took from me that day. Did it ever get tested?”

He rasped a long drag on his cigarette. “I wonder when you are going to remember that.” He slowly exhaled. “Don't worry, you've got nothing to be concerned about.”

“What do you mean? It tested negative?” I shook the receiver, as if I could shake the answer out of him.

“I wish that is what I meant.”

“Yosef! It tested positive?”

“Jane, calm down. It hasn't tested anything. I got to your name in that book, and I thought,
Hooboy, Jane doesn't remember about this
. It is only by luck that I get this blood first. Who knows what that Susan would have done with such information. I don't put it above that woman to play blackmail. I think,
Nobody but Jane is going to do anything with this blood
.”

But the DNA was missing, I said. And the rest of my family's blood wasn't where it was supposed to be.

“Not missing,” he said. “Just hidden. Say the word and I tell you where.”

Again my eyes brimmed. “You did that for me?”

“Sweetheart,” he said, “this is what friends do. They keep out eyes for each other.” A woman called something in Russian, and Yosef yelled something back. “You sure you want to know this?”

Yes, I said, I did. He told me where he had hidden it.

“Yosef?” I said. “Don't tell anyone, okay? I won't know my results for another few days, and I don't want everyone looking at me funny in the meantime.” The idea of Yosef himself staring at me expectantly was more than I could bear. How could I have thought of subjecting Laurel to that?

“My lips are sealed,” he said. “But if you want me to be there when you look at your blot, I will be there. I will do anything you want me to do.”

“Thanks. Really.” I wiped my eyes with a tissue from Vic's desk.

“It is nothing,” Yosef said, although the quaver in his voice betrayed that it was. “Sure you won't come to my party?”

No, I told him. But if there was anything I could do to make this up to him—

“Here's what you can do. You can get my family out of Russia. Find us all a nice big apartment in Boston. Find me a job that makes, oh, sixty grand a year so I can support everyone in the style to which they would like to become accustom.”

I stifled my impatience to run the next test. I told Yosef that I was sure he would find a good job. Vic had promised he would help.

“Nice try, but I know real world. What do I have except fifth name on a paper someone else write? Three years as postdoc, and all I got is one paper, and it's not even my own work.”

“You're a good scientist,” I said. “You just need more time. You need a lucky break, like I had. Otherwise I would still be trying all those probes.” The idea that I could have spent the next ten years running all those gels made me slump in Vic's chair. Why had I been granted such supernatural good luck? Because some Omnipotent Being knew my life depended on my experiments in ways Yosef's didn't? No. It was only chance. And the same blind chance that had dealt me such a lucky hand with this gene might deal me an extraordinarily unlucky hand some other time. If it hadn't already. If I hadn't gotten pregnant from one
indiscretion. If the fetus Willie and I conceived wasn't carrying the gene for Valentine's.

“Can't be a postdoc forever,” Yosef said. “Can't support a mother and father and two sisters on twelve thousand dollars a year.” Voices in the background argued in Russian. But Yosef kept talking to me, or maybe to himself, in a blurry voice. “You know what I wish? You laugh, but I wish I could be science teacher. Teach high school biology. Or what you call it here, junior high. Teach biology so the kids don't think it's a boring thing. But you tell me, who in America is going to hire a Russkie to teach science? They think I will teach kids the wrong science so America lose the
Sputnik
. They don't like a teacher who doesn't speak English so good. You think only you and Maureen got these handicap things? Being born in Russia, that's a handicap, too.”

How could he compare being born in Russia with living in a wheelchair? “I know it's been hard for you,” I said. “But it isn't really the same.”

“In Ukraine where I was born, is great handicap to be a Jew. Can't go to university. Can't get a good job. I leave my mother, father, sisters—good sisters, best sisters a man can have. I leave everything, I come to America, and what do I find? Is handicap to be a Russkie. Not so bad if you are a very, very smart Russkie. But a so-so smart Russkie?”

He wasn't giving himself enough credit, I said. He was smarter than I was. It was only that I had been—

“Lucky. I know. But how long can I sit around waiting for some good luck? My sisters stay there much longer, they marry Russkie guys who won't treat them right. They'll get
bad veins in their legs, bad teeth, bad everything. Maybe the government will give the girls a visa. But my father, he works at a power plant they got there in Ukraine.
Nuclear
power plant. My father is only minor engineer, more like fancy janitor, but they say he knows secrets. He keeps telling me, ‘Yosef, we don't get out, something very bad happens, I feel it in my bone,' and I think, Yeah, and if you do get out, you're going to find out your son isn't a real doctor, doesn't have a big American house you can live in. Doesn't have a small American house. Doesn't have
any
house to live in.” A woman's voice moaned in the background. “Okay, okay, I stop crying in beer. You remember, if you need me, I be there in a snap.” He crooned a few parodic bars of “You've Got a Friend” and hung up.

I walked back to the cold room, and there, in a box marked
YOSEF HOROWITZ
,
KEEP OUT,
I found the Eppendorf tube with my code on the label. I pressed my forehead to the shelf. Yosef had already extracted the DNA from my blood, so I was two steps ahead, which meant that my results would be ready before my sister's.

I worked hour after hour, setting up the gels. By the time I left the lab, it was five on Sunday morning. The temperature had fallen, but if I walked quickly enough I could almost keep warm. Down Main Street and up Massachusetts Avenue, past Central Square toward Harvard. I wondered what it would be like to learn that the illness I had feared for most of my life did in fact lie in wait. I was surprised by how calm this made me. I shouldn't be out walking at this hour, but my fate seemed contained completely in that vial in the lab. Nothing else had the power
to hurt me. Down Brattle Street and past the Mount Auburn Cemetery. What unsettled me was the possibility that I didn't have the gene. Something essential would be taken away. I would, at thirty-three, become someone else entirely.

I walked faster, as if my destination lay farther than I had thought. I might live to be ninety. All that extra life to fill up! There would be no reason not to marry. I could conceive another child, this time with a man who wasn't at risk for Valentine's.

But the child in your womb is the child you have been given.

By whom? I thought. In what way was this unborn child “mine”? I saw those chicks in their shells, their hearts beating, their black eyes staring. Who knew when a human life might start? Not, as Mrs. Scipione seemed to think, at the moment it was conceived. Still, I couldn't help but see a fully formed infant inside my womb. If I tested negative for the marker, the fetus would have only a one-in-four chance of inheriting the gene. My result would be ready in five days. In the meantime, I would go home and pee in the little cup. Did it count as “first urine” if I had been working all night? I hated all these tests. If only I could peer up my own vagina and see if there was an embryo in my uterus. If only Valentine's disease had an unmistakable sign—a rash, say, or a lump—rather than hazy “symptoms” like clumsiness or forgetfulness or obsessing about having sex with a man you loved.

I went home and ate some crackers. I was crouching above the toilet, peeing in the cup, when the telephone rang. Laurel, I thought. She might have panicked about
the test and needed my reassurance. A memory flashed through my mind of our mother tricking Laurel into going to the doctor for a shot, the nurse sticking Laurel in the arm, Laurel screaming and screaming until she hyperventilated and passed out, as if to demonstrate what happened when you tricked people into doing things that supposedly were for their own good.

I put the cup beside the sink and ran to catch the phone.

“Jane. It's me. Willie. I was just meditating, and all of a sudden it came together. What a dope. I admit it, I've been mad. A guy asks you to forgive him. He calls you and calls you. He wants to congratulate you. For Pete's sake, he's seen your picture in every newspaper in the country. And you can't even pay him the courtesy of calling him back.”

I nearly hung up to avoid admitting how much I must have hurt him.

“So, I'm sitting here stewing about it, and wham, out of nowhere, I think: You made love to the woman. The last time you saw her, she was eating like a horse. She won't return your calls. You slept with her, maybe you got her pregnant, and then you said, ‘Hey, sorry, it was all a big mistake.' She doesn't want to have anything to do with you. She thinks you've got this killer disease, the kid will have it, she knows you'd be dead set against her getting rid of it.”

I loved his voice. I loved
him
. The only way I could bring myself to abort our child was to never see or hear from him again.

“You're not saying anything,” he said. “So, am I right? Are you pregnant?”

I nodded yes but couldn't speak.

“You
were
pregnant, but you're not anymore? I won't lecture you. This was my fault. I don't know what I was thinking. It was a power trip, I guess. I was going to get you to make love to me instead of figuring out all those statistics. Talk about statistics! We sleep together once and . . . Never mind. Maybe I thought . . . I don't know what I thought. Only, Jane? You have to tell me now. You can't leave me hanging like this.”