Replica (34 page)

“I told you,” she said, speaking gently, as if he were a child. “We know even less than you do. That's why I
came down here. Because I
didn't
know anything. Because I was in the dark about Haven.”

“Huh. That's funny.” Harliss laughed without smiling. “I'd think you'd have wanted to know all about it.”

Gemma's hairs stood up. She felt in the room a subtle shift—an electric stillness. “What do you mean?”

Harliss looked up at her with those sad-dog eyes. “Well, that's where they made you, isn't it?”

Turn the page to continue reading Gemma's story.
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to read Chapter 13 of Lyra's story.

SHE WAS DIMLY AWARE THAT Harliss was still talking. She felt as if a hole had opened inside of her and she was dropping into it.

Made there.
She'd been made there.

Just like that girl on the marshes . . .

Gemma wasn't the original. She, too, was a replica.

Impossible,
she wanted to say. She remembered all those baby pictures with her mom in the hospital. Could they have been staged? No. No one could fake her mother's look of exultation and exhaustion, the sweat standing out on her forehead, the look of bewildered joy.
Impossible.
But she couldn't make her voice work, and it was Pete who said it.

“That's impossible,” Pete said. He was staring at her and she turned away, too numb even to be embarrassed. He sounded horrified. Why wouldn't he be?

“. . . took me a long time to put it together,” Harliss was saying. “I had nothing else to do, sitting there in state for twelve years. Not saying I didn't deserve it. I did. I used to do work around your house, you know, before they brought you back from that place. But I was all banged up. Got hooked on the shit they gave me for my back. I was out of my mind half the time.”

“You're out of your mind now,” Pete said. “It's
not
possible
.”

If Harliss heard Pete, he gave no sign of it. He was still looking directly at Gemma. “My ex-lady used to do some cleaning. Your mom was in real bad shape then. Real bad. She'd just lost her baby. SIDS. That's sudden infant death syndrome, you know. Poor thing was only six months old.”

Gemma's heart stopped. “What baby?” she managed to whisper. She'd never heard her parents mention another baby.

But Harliss just barreled on. “Aimee—that's my ex—used to say it was funny, all the money in the world but still you can't buy your way out of that. When Aimee got pregnant with Brandy-Nicole, your mom would just sit there with her hand on Aimee's belly, trying to feel the baby kick. She started cutting out articles, you know, how Aimee should be eating, how she was supposed to be laying off booze and cigarettes. Even bought us some
stuff, a crib and a stroller, some baby clothes. You could tell she was all broken up. Your mom said she couldn't get pregnant again. Something about what had happened when the first was coming out.”

There had been another one, a sister, a baby Gemma had never known about. Kristina had lost a baby. And somewhere deep in Gemma's mind an idea was growing, thoughts like storm clouds knitting together before they burst.

“When Brandy-Nicole was ten months old, I got picked up for holding and was sent to Johnston for eighteen months. That's a state prison near Smithfield. Reduced to twelve for good behavior. The day I was out I started using again.” He touched his neck once, briefly, as if amazed to find a pulse still there, to find himself alive. “Your dad was decent. He knew I'd been sent away but he gave me the job back. I told him I was cleaned up. He believed me.”

Life doesn't hand out second chances.
Wasn't that what her father was always saying? But at some point he'd thought differently.

There was another baby. . . .

“Well, Aimee was still going over sometimes to clean. You were home by then, and only six months younger than our Brandy-Nicole. But your mom didn't like you two to play together. She hardly let anyone near you. We
thought it was because she was worried you'd get sick like the first one.”

The first one. The first daughter. The original. And she, Gemma: a shade.

“Funny, though, Aimee said to me. They look just the same. Could have been twins, she said, except for Emma had a birthmark on her arm. I didn't think much of it at the time. Only later, when I started figuring what Haven was for and what your dad had paid them for, I put two and two together.”

Emma. She had a name, this phantom sister who was so much more than that. Gemma closed her eyes and thought of her mother, sweaty and exhausted and triumphant, a baby nestled in her arms. Not Gemma.
Emma.

All these years, Kristina had lived with a reminder of that first, lost daughter. Emma. What a pretty name; much prettier than Gemma. She was the original. Gemma was the copy. And everyone knew copies were never as good. Was that why her mom had started taking so many pills? Oxycontin and Pristiq and Klonopin and Zoloft? An A–Z array of pharmaceuticals, all so that she could forget and deny.

All because Gemma was a monster.

“The Frankenstein mask.” She opened her eyes. “You threw the Halloween mask.” She remembered what her father had said about Frankenstein:
In the original story,
in the real version, he's the one who made the monster.
She'd thought he meant it because she was awkward, and sick, and fat. But he'd meant it literally. Truthfully.

Harliss tugged at his shirt collar, and she saw a small cross tattooed on the left side of his neck. “I was mad,” he said. “I tried to talk to your dad. Went to his office. He said he'd call the cops on me if I came around again. Said I was harassing him. But you've got to understand. I just want answers. I need to know.”

Pete stood up, cursing. “This is crazy,” he said. He moved toward the door, and Harliss didn't try and stop him. Gemma thought he might try to leave, but instead he just stood there. “This is crazy, you know that?”

Gemma didn't bother responding. It wasn't crazy. In fact, for the first time, everything made sense. The fact that her father could hardly stand to look at her. The strange tension between her parents, as if they existed on either side of a chasm, a secret that had fissured their world in two. Gemma's memory of the statue and all those early hospital visits—she was probably fragile because she'd been
engineered
. She wondered if this was God's way of getting vengeance on the people who'd been made so unnaturally. He was always trying to
un
make them.

“What happened to your daughter?” she said. Her voice didn't sound like her own. “What happened to Brandy-Nicole?”

Harliss clasped his hands. He might have been praying, except for the whiteness of his knuckles. Gemma knew he must be squeezing so hard it hurt. “It was pretty bad in those days,” he said quietly. “Me and Aimee was always at each other's throats. Money, mostly. We never had any. We burned through it. We were both getting high every night. Poor Brandy-Nicole wasn't even three yet. . . .” His voice broke. “One time I woke up and she'd wet herself, made a mess all over in the middle of the night. Had to lie in it for hours. I was passed out cold all night, and Aimee hadn't even bothered coming home. That's when we split up for good.”

Shockingly, Gemma had the urge to comfort him, to tell him it was all right. But of course it wasn't.

“I needed money bad.” His voice was barely a whisper. She wondered whether he had ever told this story before. At the door, Pete was still standing there. Frozen. Horrified. “I was still doing work for your dad. All that money everywhere . . .” His eyes slid away from Gemma's. Guilty. “At first I just pocketed a few things. Stuff no one would notice. Pawned it off direct. I know it was wrong, but you got to understand. I wasn't thinking straight—”

Gemma shook her head to say,
It doesn't matter
.

Harliss licked his lips. “But then I started thinking about a bigger payday. You know, something hefty. I thought
your dad must have something he didn't want other people to know—there's always dirt, especially for guys like him—” Again his eyes skated nervously to Gemma's, but she didn't correct him. She wouldn't defend her father ever again.

“You're talking blackmail,” Pete said. His voice sounded very loud.

Harliss nodded. “That was the idea, yeah.” He looked like he was about to apologize again. Gemma cut him off.

“What happened?”

He took a deep breath. “I went digging around your dad's office, through his emails.” He squirmed. “Like I said, I was out of my mind—”

“Go on,” Gemma said. She felt weirdly breathless, as if a giant hand were squeezing her lungs.

“I couldn't figure a way into his work files. Too much security. But I was looking for dirt closer to home, anyway. I got into his personal account.
Trouble.
That was the subject header of one of the very first emails.
Trouble.
”

The air in the motel was very still. Gemma had the sense that even the dust motes were hanging motionless in the air, suspended and breathless.

“I didn't understand any of it. Not then. It was all about some kind of investment your father had made. Your dad was pulling out. Said he'd given plenty of money already and wanted nothing to do with it anymore, said he'd
figured out it was wrong. And this man, Mark Saperstein, wanted more money out of him. He said with Haven going in a new direction, it was going to make them all rich in the end if only your dad would get Fine and Ives on board. I remember one phrase exact:
They die early anyway.
That was at the end of Saperstein's message.”

Gemma felt the space between her heartbeats as long moments of blank nonexistence. What had they learned in biology about clones? Imperfect science. Cancers, tumors that grew like flower buds in manufactured lungs and hearts and livers. It was as if the growth of their cells, unnaturally jump-started, couldn't afterward be stopped.

She wondered how old she would be when her cells began to double and triple and worse.

“Your dad caught me. Not then, but another time, in his office. High as a kite. He was pissed. After all he'd done for me, giving me another chance. Don't blame him. Cops found some of your parents' stuff back at our place, too. A watch and other stuff. I'd been too fucked up to offload it all. Getting careless. They booked me for theft and possession, too, since they found a few bags around my place. This time I got sent away for longer, because it wasn't the first time. But first I spent a couple of weeks in a detox unit.

“Detox nearly killed me. I was so sick. I prayed that I would die. But I didn't.” His hand moved again to the
cross on his neck. “Afterward I swore I'd never touch none of that shit again. And I haven't. That was fourteen years ago. I haven't even taken a sip of beer and I won't, never again.” Those eyes, surprisingly warm, surprisingly attractive, buried in that damaged face: Gemma could hardly stand to look at him. “It's my fault Brandy-Nicole got taken. If I hadn't been high, if I hadn't got sent away, she'd still be here. With me. My baby . . .” His voice broke again and he looked away, pressing the heel of a hand into each of his eyes in turn. “Aimee said she'd been snatched from a grocery store.” He shook his head. “Didn't make any sense from the start. That woman never went to a grocery store in her life. Only a corner store for more cigarettes and beer. Besides, why'd she wait two days to call the police? She kept changing her story, too. First Bran was snatched from a cart. Then from the back of the car. She came to visit, all hopped up, told me crackpot stories, couldn't even bring herself to cry.” Harliss stared down at his hands, now clasped again. Gemma wondered how you could have faith after a loss like that. How you could pray.

“At first I thought Aimee might have just dumped her somewhere. Maybe even hurt her. The cops looked into it but not for long. They thought I was just mad, you know. The ex and all that. Aimee had a new guy, or at least it seemed like she did. She had a lot of money all of
a sudden. New clothes, better car, and she was partying hard and heavy. Well.” For the first time, he smiled. But it was a horrible smile, thin and sharp and mean, like it had been cut there by a razor. “She got hers, I guess. OD'd just a few months later. All that dirty money. It's true what the Bible says. You reap what you sow.”

“You think she sold Brandy-Nicole,” Gemma said, but Harliss took it as a question and nodded.

“I didn't know what to think, not then,” he said. “But a few years later I saw the story of this woman, Monique White, who'd given over her kid to some group when she was a junkie and then cleaned up and tried to get the girl back. But the girl was gone. And she was only an hour from Durham, where we lived. Might not have thought much of it, except one of the hotshots on the board of the Home Foundation gave a quote, the woman was out of her mind, blah blah, the usual BS.
Saperstein.
The name jumped out at me. It was the same guy your dad had been writing to.”

Gemma was starting to see it. Dr. Saperstein, brilliant and ruthless and cruel. Her father, Mr. Moneybags, and his sudden change of heart. He must have been one of Haven's early investors, one of their
angel
investors.

Had he decided he wanted nothing to do with it as soon as Gemma came home? Or was it not until she started talking, started showing her defects, revealing
imperfections that rendered her, in comparison to the daughter who'd died, so disappointing? And Richard Haven had been killed, maybe by Dr. Saperstein, maybe because Saperstein wanted to go from simply making clones to using them for bigger reasons. The institute was in danger of shutting down just when Saperstein got control of it. He must have been desperate.

“I don't understand.” That was Pete again, hugging himself, as if the room was cold, which it wasn't. It was stifling, airless. “If Haven was making clones, why would they be after regular kids? What was the point?”

“Money,” Gemma said. Her voice squeaked. Harliss looked up at her, surprised, as if he'd forgotten she was there. Pete didn't look at her at all. “Probably Saperstein wanted my dad's company to invest, to keep the institute on legs. Maybe they realized remaking dead kids for rich guys wasn't exactly a cash cow.” Pete cursed under his breath. Gemma got a raw pleasure in saying it.
Remaking dead kids.
The secret was out. She was a freak and a monster. There was no doubt about that now. “Fine and Ives has always done a lot for the military. So Saperstein would have tried to prove the clones could be useful, to land a big contract. But if they couldn't afford to keep making them . . . Well, he took children he thought wouldn't be missed. He used them to test on. Just long enough to get the money he needed.”