What We Lost in the Dark (16 page)

Angela was at school. From my sleep world, which was never fully curtained off from the Daytimers’ world: I heard the flow of their comings and goings, the deliveries of mail and packages, the exodus from the bus at 3
P.M.
, the traffic at 4
P.M
. My mother would have been there when Angela left for school. She always was. I was there after school. Always. I slapped down a bee of panic. Tabor was not going to grab my little sister.

Taking down our jar of cinnamon sticks and the sugar bowl, and my herbal sleepy tea, I began to boil water. Questioning, I held out two cups.

“Mmmmm. Thanks. I need some,” said my mother. “I did work a double. We had a bad car accident last night. Mother and two little girls. The smaller girl is just hanging on. The older sister is fine. Mom is dead. I sort of wanted to stand in with the little one until the grandmother came, all the way back from Saint Petersburg. And then, you can imagine, the grandmother went wild. She saw them yesterday morning.”

“Awww, no,” I said. “That’s terrible. From around here?”

“Nope. The grandmother is. The mom and the children, from Chicago. On the way home. Car filled with Barbies. Shit.” She picked up her computer bag and headed for the stairs. Then she came back and kissed my head. “I forgot my tea.”

“You don’t have to stay up.”

“Did you hear from Rob?”

“Just a postcard. He won’t be back until … until the end of the week. And I don’t know, you know?”

“He’s being stubborn.”

“It’s more than that, Mom,” I said. “I know Rob loves me, but something is wrong and it’s more than that he wants us to go on with our lives after Juliet.” As I said this, I realized that I had known, for a long time, that this was really true. Rob didn’t keep anything from me. He never had.

“You’ll figure it out,” Jackie said. “Keep communicating. Don’t put up walls.”

“I’m not the one who’s putting up walls, Jack-Jack,” I said. “This is all his choice. I’m sure he’s getting with the ski bunnies in Vail.” A beautiful picture of my beautiful guy entwined in the dark with some girl with a movie-star ass quickly turned my stomach sour.

“Well, write me up as a victim of disappointment in Rob’s character then. I’m beat, and I guess I can talk to you tonight.
I guess I can. It will keep until tonight. I’m just … dazed. I just didn’t let myself feel it.” She made for the spiral staircase that led up to her room, but dragging, and I was alarmed until she added, “Don’t call me Jack-Jack.”

Whatever it was didn’t sound like it would keep until tonight, but I wasn’t about to cause her to fret even more.

I could hear her moving about up there, doing her own bedtime prep. The whole second floor was my mother’s bedroom, library, and study. Up there, she had her own refrigerator. She and Gina took Mondays off from their run, so Mom would probably sleep until afternoon. She loved sleep. As someone who never got enough, she considered sleep near-sexual in pleasure. Her king-sized Australian basswood bed, with nine pillows, belonged in a castle. She reasoned that, as a single mother of forty with two young daughters, she was never going to need the kind of privacy a woman of thirty-three with no young daughters might need. When she met Mr. Right, she told Gina, (cliché although it was) it would be in the emergency room, where he’d just suffered his serious bout of chest pains over a slight decline in his six million shares of Disney stock. The wedding would be in Monaco.

I drank both cups of tea. I was starving, but if I ate what I wanted, which was Brie with pickles and pimentos on whole wheat, I might never sleep. I settled for a handful of shortbread, left over from my Aunt Carmel’s largesse. Carmel was perhaps the best cook I had ever known, better even than Mrs. Dorn, who made her own bread every day. After the epic pie-throwing incident, these words would never cross my lips.

I could see how women ended up tipping the scales at two hundred pounds as a result of depression. Men were iffy. Brie never let you down.

Where was Rob tonight?

How was he rounding out the last days at Heavenly? Tears pooled in the corners of my eyes, stinging. How dare he dump me for trying to do good? How dare he dump me at all? I didn’t even care that he’d dumped me. All I wanted was to hold him and kiss him and smell his hair and the hollow of his neck. All I wanted was for him to love me still.

I sat back to read a book of essays debunking traditional religions.

Dr. Andrew, my mother’s boss, was a devout Lutheran, two words that didn’t seem to link up. As I see it, Lutherans are a sort of default religion, like vanilla, neither as frankly and joyously wacked as Pentecostals nor so joylessly and grimly superior as Catholics. Dr. Andrew had given the book to my mother to read, because it troubled him. He considered his faith his compass, he told my mom.

In some religions, people don’t believe in life after death (and I guess that if I had a religion, it would be one of those kinds; I think that one life is more than enough). For those people, immortality is human memory.

If that were true, Juliet certainly was alive, still.

A zombie angel.

How I loved her.

Her parents and grandparents and her cousins loved her as much as Rob and I did. Even little ski fans, who’d never met Juliet Sirocco but had seen film of her flying like a whirling blade through the sky above the slopes, taking every chance and no prisoners, they loved her, too.

And Garrett Tabor …

I sat up on the leather recliner, my book tumbling to the floor.

That last night at the lab, Tabor, referring to Juliet, had said,
I love her, too
.

I love her.

Not in the past tense.

Garrett Tabor was too smart to make mistakes with ordinary speech. Every moment he was near me, he was playing me. He knew exactly what he was saying.

What did he mean? That Juliet was still alive somewhere? Or that his love for her was still alive?

The thought exhausted me. I put my head back on the leather cushion of the chair and started to drift off, when suddenly, I was aware of another person in the room. Jerking to an instant salute, I sat up and saw my mother, who had pulled up a chair and was sitting across from me.

“I didn’t come home late just because of the accident,” she said. “There was another reason.”

She looked funny. She looked more worn out than usual, and she usually looked more worn out than she should have. For a moment, the funny way she looked made me afraid. I thought for sure she was going to tell me that she’d had a bad mammogram, although she wasn’t even old enough to have regular mammograms.

I said, “Mom, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Really nothing. I just have to talk to you.”

She didn’t look like it was “nothing, really nothing.”

My mother said, “There are going to be clinical trials, starting in March. I wanted to be the one to tell you this. A Danish geneticist, of all things, has teamed up with Andrew and they have permission for clinical trials for … well … for …”

“Me.”

As a person who worked full-time, who had a relatively young child, and a daughter with a condition, Jackie was pushing herself way too hard to finish her PhD, a degree that had taken people as long as five years. (Have I mentioned that this was all voluntary? I had not seen my father outside a Skype screen since I was in preschool, but he’d recently been promoted to chair of his department at Seattle Mercy, and was also a full professor. Not only that, he now had normal IVF twin boys—so his guilt checks were ever more handsome and did not look to be decreasing, even with my increasing age.) Naturally, my mother’s dissertation was on a specific genetically transmitted chronic condition, and naturally, her dissertation dealt with a very specific kind of gene therapy that would convince the DNA of the XP person to copy itself as normal.

She had finished her dissertation over the summer.

This was all still theoretical. Until now.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I’m glad you finished your dissertation,” I said. “Before it became outmoded.”

“Me, too,” she said. “But that’s …”

I finished for her: “That’s biology for you!” My mother says this about pretty much everything except the weather. I asked, “What are the horrible mutagenic side effects? What will grow out of my forehead?”

“There aren’t any that they see. The first trial is in March and the next one is in October. Here. Not Denmark.”

That sucks
. I wanted to go to Denmark.

Then I said, “Nausea, vomiting, headaches, irritability, joint pain, constipation, dizziness or vision problems that, in rare cases, could be the sign of a potentially life-threatening condition?”

“No, wise guy,” my mother said, and two perfect movie tears formed in each of her eyes. “You’re already part of the longitudinal study, and have been for more than ten years, so you’ll automatically be part of the first group. I can’t decide about waiting for the second group or going ahead. That’s up to you, I suppose.”

“Holy cow.”

“Yes, Allie. Holy cow indeed.”

“How did you handle finding out?”

“It was a rumor that was running around for a while, but we all figured, years from now. Everything is always years from now. Then, yesterday, Andrew told us the game was on. He didn’t want to tell any of us until all the approvals were secured. The Danish scientist is an MD. I spoke to your dad last night … yes! I spoke to your dad about him. Louis knew all about him.”

I didn’t know what to say in response. I scoured my memory for the last time I’d heard my mother refer to my father by his given name, Louis, and that page of my memory was unmarked by a single recollection.

She went on. “This guy found out something by accident, last summer, that made it all fit. The best things happen as the result of mistakes, sometimes. Like, the obvious example is penicillin. That went from nothing to the standard in a few years.”

“Why is the obvious example penicillin?”

“You know why. It was bread mold.”

“That’s not my discipline, Jack-Jack.”

My mother got up and slid into the big chair next to me. “This could be the key,” she said. “It makes sense, that’s why I’m hopeful. It could be your chance to be … like anyone else. I mean, better. But do anyone-else things. Like … go diving in a place that isn’t cold and dark.”

She meant me, of course, but she meant herself, too. Not diving. Being like anyone else’s mother. You couldn’t blame her.

Unreasonably, I thought of Rob’s father.

Mr. Dorn (“Just call me Dennis, just Dennis”) didn’t ski, although Rob’s mother, who had been a champion tennis player in college, was not only an avid skier but also an amateur athlete of every kind. Mr. Dorn sold sporting goods equipment, but a little jogging and the occasional five hundred rounds of golf with clients were about it for him. Still, he sat in the cold until midnight, at the bottom of the runs, to watch Rob hiss down to a flourishing stop. He even came up to Torch when we skied. He did it all the time.

Sometimes, I thought, this is what Mr. Dorn gets with Rob—the glorious now. This is what he gets in place of a future. This could be his whole life as a father. And it seemed that the Dorns were more or less at peace with that.

My mother, ferociously, was not. She never had been. She would force me to be well by sheer force of will.

When I was little, my mom took me to a support group with other XP children, several of them older and already sicker than I. The counselor led us to draw things we wanted to do and be, and without exception, everyone drew something impossible. They wanted to be tennis players, not design ping-pong tables. They wanted to be rock singers, not studio musicians. What kid wouldn’t?

Of course, the counselor led us around to see how we could be what we wanted, sort of—which meant human-not-really. My mother got pissed off. This is not that uncommon for her. After three meetings, she began to sigh really loudly.

After four meetings, she said, “Could you frame this more hopelessly if you tried? You’re telling them to be happy with less. Kids aren’t
supposed
to be happy with less. It’s not … biological. Kids aren’t supposed to want less. They’re supposed to want everything.”

“Mrs., uh, Flynn,” the psychologist said, doing what people always did, looking at my mother and assuming that “Kim” was a misprint. “I have a PhD in counseling and guidance …”

“And I have an RN,” snapped Jackie, who didn’t yet have her master’s at the time. “Even I know that you don’t tell kids to start giving up their dreams as job one.” She stared at the counselor’s feet. “Like you. You wanted to be a ballerina. And you went pretty far with that before you got too … too busty. But you could have made costumes for other girls who weren’t as good as you were, when you were little. You could have helped them to be Giselle, when you wanted to be Giselle yourself. Why didn’t you do that?”

The message suggesting that we might be happier outside “group” was waiting on the answering machine when we got home. My mother would sooner have taken me to a class in ritual sacrifice. I asked her, how did you know the lady wanted to be a ballerina?

Of course, Jackie said, it was both nature and nurture: the slight ducky-ness of a dancer’s stance, taught young, lasts forever.

“Are you happy?” my mother said to me that night, finally.

“I’m happy,” I said. “I don’t want to be too happy.”

“I know,” my mom said. “The thing about happy is you can’t protect yourself from being too devastated by not
anticipating the best. It turns out that you might as well hope for the best because it doesn’t change the outcome.”

“In movies, guys say they’ll never love anyone again, except the girl who died, because they could never bear to feel that kind of loss.”

“That,” my mother said, “is a cheap way for men in movies to get sex without commitment. Not that this is that bad an idea, in some very specific circumstances.”

Too much information. The last time I’d visited her at the ER, my mom had been leaning back against a counter in an undeniably sexy pose, smiling up at some college-aged guy she introduced to me as “Trent.” It just got worse; the doctors looked like they should be dating me. Pretty soon, they would look like my younger brothers. I blotted out the image of my mother having sex with someone who didn’t need to shave every day. The blotting was difficult because I did suspect from a few things Gina had said that my mother was thinking about dating someone. I didn’t know who the lucky suitor was, and Jackie was not confiding—in me, at least. But I felt sure that he was younger.