Art Garfunkel’s sweet choirboy-like voice was almost too much to bear. Lying against the gray vinyl of the hospital recliner with his eyes shut, Jeremy looked pale and fragile—his cheekbones sharp and the skin under his eyes especially purple.
Jenny planted a quick kiss on his cool forehead and blinked back the tears that were suddenly, newly, so accessible.
Out in the hallway, she let herself just stand and take a deep breath. She was losing her grasp. This was the distinct thought she had standing there in that terrible, Vaseline-and-liniment-smelling gray tunnel. She was just so tired. So goddamn tired. She did not feel like she had control anymore. Of anything. Uncharacteristically, it had not occurred to her that she could take control of the Neil and Galena situation. She had honestly not really considered herself in any position of power. What had become of Jenny Callahan?
Right now all she wanted to do was hold her baby. Her sweet little Colin, who had of late been doing so much smiling and chirping. But it was, unfortunately, only eleven a.m. It would be another hour before he and Maria arrived via an elaborate commute on the train and subway. Maria was terrified of navigating her way by car into the city. For the umpteenth time in the last two weeks Jenny felt a pang of regret about having moved. Maria would have been able to bring Colin back and forth so easily if they still lived on Clarendon Street.
Jenny herded herself into the elevator and downstairs to the Au Bon Pain, where at least she could get a coffee.
It was while waiting in line to pay that Jenny got a call from Laura. She was here, at the Brigham, she had brought them sushi—she hoped she wasn’t imposing and she could just leave it with the desk if that would be best…Jenny’s first feeling was of irritation—now she would have to deal with someone else’s feelings and questions and worries. But then, crossing the lobby to meet her friend, who had made the trip all the way here from Cambridge via Fugakyu and was standing, nervously, in the center of the giant, glass-ceilinged lobby, she felt actually a swell of love for Laura and the sting of tears against her eyeballs. Old friend, who had known her for so long. She had an incongruous memory, suddenly, of a time she and Laura had driven all the way to Lake Champlain to go to her then-boyfriend’s end-of-the-year summer house party. She had gotten violently sick and Laura had stayed with her in the dingy little motel room they had rented, making cool washcloths for her forehead and driving the remote control until they found reasonably cheerful things to watch, instead of going to the party. And more remarkably, she had not acted bitter or resentful afterward.
“How are you holding up?” Laura asked breathlessly, giving Jenny a big hug. “And how is Jeremy doing?”
Laura had brought him his favorite cookies from her local bakery and the delicious, fresh-baked smell of them wafted up from the paper bag.
“Oh, he’s okay…,” Jenny said, shaking the tears off. “I mean, he’s not too uncomfortable or anything. Right now. I’m just driving him crazy, I think.”
“Why? I’m sure you’re not.”
“Oh, I’m just—” Jenny stopped herself. She wanted and didn’t want to tell Laura about the whole “Neil Incident.” Laura would be confused—and then ultimately appalled. “Talking too much about work,” she finished.
“Oh, sweetie,” Laura said, putting a hand on Jenny’s arm. “I’m sure you’re not—you’re just doing what you can.”
“Which is nothing.” Jenny was surprised by the bitterness in her own voice.
“That’s not true.” Laura frowned. “You’re being there for him.”
They were silent for a moment in the bustle of the hospital atrium, the peeling sounds of so many medical shoes on the polished concrete, the echoing of nurses’ chatter.
“How is little Colin?” Laura asked.
“He’s good. He’s coming soon.” Jenny felt a little leap in her chest as she said it.
“Oh, good,” Laura said. And then she reached into her bag: she always had some giant tote that looked like it could hold a week’s worth of supplies—snacks and pens and changes of clothes and God knows what else. “I brought you these anyway—they might provide some distraction.” She handed Jenny a pile of trashy magazines: Us and People and Star and even In Touch.
“Maybe you can read to him about Tom Cruise’s secret obsession with clog dancing,” she said, pointing to a headline.
Jenny took the stack with a rush of gratitude. Trashy magazines were actually exactly what she wanted.
Armed with these, and with the sushi and cookies, she kissed her friend goodbye and started back across the lobby to the elevators. She would straighten out the mess Galena had made of Neil’s work tomorrow, absolve herself of guilt. She just had to get through this day and the next and the next and then this round of chemo would be over. And then—and then, somehow, things would return to normal. Or to what she told herself would become normal. A new, more uncertain, less comfortable kind of normal.
5
IT WAS AMAZING how quickly the smell filled the car: pungent, earthy, and slightly acrid. Within minutes the Volvo smelled just like the barn. It wasn’t only the goat. Elise herself was drenched in a cold, nervous sweat that had soaked giant stains under the arms of her T-shirt and was prickling up all over her scalp.
She darted a glance at Chrissy beside her. Chrissy looked calm as always, her hair pulled back, her face especially pretty in that flat Norwegian way. Ula was sacked out on her little stretcher in the back, her sides barely rising and falling in the depths of her tranquilized sleep.
Chrissy turned and put a hand on Ula’s just-reachable shoulder. (They had flattened the backseat to make the back of the car one giant goat bed.) “She’s fine,” she said, retracting her hand. “Don’t worry.” She put the hand on Elise’s knee.
Something inside Elise had simply balked at euthanizing Ula. It was not so much about the goat herself as it was about the science. Elise understood the necessity of ruthlessness when it came to missteps: in an unsuccessful experiment the animal had to be dispensed with. A lab couldn’t support all its mistakes. But Ula had not been a mistake. The science that had created her was sound and promising and full of potential. It was the market—that cruel and uncertain beast—that dictated she must die. And Elise had made no pact with the market. At least no pact she wanted to admit to herself.
Elise couldn’t pin the idea of stealing Ula—of saving Ula, really—on Neil, because he did not even know of Ula’s existence. But he had planted the seed. That makes you those animals’ creator, he had said when she had described her work. Man. He had taken a big puff of the joint. Together they had lain there on the splintery deck looking up at the pale spring sky. You think if there’s a God, he’s as utilitarian with us? It had been a joke, kind of. But it had stuck in Elise’s mind. She was like the god of her little goats. It was true. Which meant she was responsible for something bigger than the proteins they expressed. Not—she would never use the word—their souls. But something—some intangible quality of their lives that had meaning beyond the market she had produced them to supply.
It was nearly one a.m. and the turnpike was all but empty. Beside Elise, Chrissy began, improbably, to doze off, her head sinking off to the side. Lowell, Fitchburg, Gardner—the exits flew past, bright green and silver signs illuminated by the sweep of headlights, and then falling back into the black of the moonless night and dark hovering trees. At home, Angela Noyes would be snoozing in her old-fashioned curlers on the guest bed, and the boys—she hoped—were sound asleep in their beds. Back at the Pharm, the night guard they had lied their way past was probably sleeping too.
The turnoff to Scrubb Farm was surprisingly familiar. The giant, dilapidated old manor house on the corner, the stand of dark pines, the swamp on the left…And then the long driveway of the farm itself, winding through woods and circling up in front of the big, flat-faced, plain farmhouse at the edge of the pasture. It brought such a visceral rush of memory back—Elise felt almost as if she had stumbled upon some weird lapse in the space
-time continuum where she could coexist with her old twenty-one-year-old self.
They had come here often in college: she and Laura and Jenny and Neil. Sometimes there had been an odd boyfriend along (Jenny’s football player romance, or Elise’s own slacker chemistry partner and bong-pal). Sometimes a “flavor of the day,” as Neil would later call the various friends who dotted the roommates’ lives, rising to prominence as one or another of the three girls warmed to them and then, usually within months, falling back into obscurity.
Scrubb Farm had been a kind of social sanctuary, a place that existed outside the college universe. A place where they could play at being real grown-ups—actually cooking their own meals, building fires, and drinking wine. Elise remembered clearly the room she had always slept in: a tiny, north-facing single bedroom with an old-fashioned dry sink and pale-green-painted floors. Waking up in it had been heavenly: unlike any other place she could think of, it afforded her a kind of luxurious privacy. So plain, so simple, it was completely undefine. And against this indefinite background, so unlike their dorm room, with its plethora of posters and CDs and articles of clothing, all proclaiming allegiances and announcing worldviews, everyone became more completely themselves.
But this was no time for such nostalgia. The car bounced over an enormous rut and Chrissy jolted awake. “Are we there?” she asked, rubbing her eyes. Chrissy had never been to Scrubb Farm.
Elise nodded, pulling the car up at the front door. She did not even have time to unbuckle her seat belt before Laura appeared, silhouetted in the light of the doorway, pulling a cardigan tight around her waist.
Elise leaned across Chrissy to unroll the passenger-side window and tried to smile, she hoped not too nervously, at Laura, whose own face did not even try to affect unconcern.
“Is she in there?” Laura asked, looking doubtfully at the blanket obscuring Ula.
“Sleeping,” Elise said, using the euphemism she usually hated as a descriptor of the drugged state the goat was in.
Laura nodded and bit her lip as though considering some new and unwelcome information.
Elise had put her friend in an uncomfortable position, asking this favor. Laura was a reasonable person and a good friend, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t share some portion of the world’s general revulsion at the idea of all things transgenic. “We’ll give her a hysterectomy,” Elise had assured her. “There will be no chance she could ever have babies or express milk.” And Laura had agreed, but only because otherwise Ula’s death would be on her hands.
Laura led the way to the stall—an old shed that had housed a pony and some chickens, cared for by the farm’s caretaker, when they had come here in college. It was fairly dilapidated, but functional, and inside the caretaker had put some fresh bales of hay. Together, and in silence, Laura and Chrissy and Elise lugged Ula out of the car on the stretcher.
“I’ll stay with her till she wakes up,” Elise said impulsively. “You two should go back to the house.”
Neither Chrissy nor Laura protested, and so Elise found herself sitting alone in the darkness with the “sleeping” animal. It was cold, and pitch-dark, and at first Elise kept her flashlight on, but then it was unclear where, in all this darkness, she should point it. At Ula’s inert form? Or the door of the shed? Each of these was, in its own way, creepy. So she turned the flashlight off. She could listen to the wind, the occasional scrape of twigs against the side of the shed, and the skitter of nocturnal animals in the leaves and underbrush outside.
And as she sat, she felt suddenly aware of the myriad of life buzzing around her. The hay, the wood, the tiny mites and rodents and bits of mold and fungus and vegetation claiming this shed their own. And herself and Ula, right there among all the rest—not even all that different. Variations of the same basic elements—particles gathering, spinning themselves into living beings, spinning back off again. It gave the darkness an aura of happy industry. Things were growing under its cover. Creatures were molting. Life was whirling through its constant cycle of resurrection and decay.
Suddenly Elise was startled by a sound—a frantic snorting, scraping, followed by a sneeze. She had not even realized that she had drifted into sleep. And now Ula (Elise placed herself immediately in the present circumstance) was awake. The goat made an unhappy gurgly noise and Elise groped for her flashlight. When she turned it on, Ula’s form was illuminated, struggling to get up.
“It’s okay,” Elsie said. “You’re okay—you’re just in a new place.” Her voice sounded strange in the darkness, and Ula’s scrambling stopped for a moment at the sound of it. “You’re going to be fine—you’re just a little confused, probably. But its going to be okay—you’re going to like it here.” Elise murmured away, unaware of exactly what she was saying, as she moved gingerly, crouching, to assist Ula, whose leg was somehow stuck under her. With a kind of slow deliberation that she had not realized herself capable of, Elise put a hand on the goat’s bristly, heaving shoulder and half pushed, half pulled her up until finally she was standing. Elise scrambled to her own feet.
For a moment there was nothing but the sound of their labored breaths and then the cautious, dainty click of Ula’s heels as she began to walk around, inspecting her new surroundings.
Exhausted, Elise began to smile. It felt as though she had just given birth to Ula. Or as if, more accurately, like a midwife, she had just wrested her out of the clutches of some reluctant womb. Which in a way she had, hadn’t she? This was Ula’s new life, different from the one she had been born into, perversely old-fashioned and yet radical: an experiment—a transgenic animal in the real world. Ula was an unwitting pioneer.
“Goodnight,” she said aloud, and for a moment turned the flashlight beam to Ula’s face—funny, pointy goat face with its eerie diamond-pupiled eyes. She blinked with a certain mysterious equanimity. What did she know of her unique standing in the world of animals and man?
Elise let herself out of the shed and drove back up the driveway to the house.
Elise woke to the same light and smells that had always greeted her on her trips to Scrubb Farm in college. Coffee and the faint dry mustiness of the mattress, the long-stored sheets, the brittle chipping paint of the nightstand. And the pale, inscrutable morning light through the white cotton curtains.
She swung her legs out of the bed and parted these to look outside. It was beautiful. Bright early morning sun sparkled on the leaves of the oak tree and slapped off the white clapboard surface of the woodshed. She let the curtain drop and, moving carefully so as not to wake Chrissy, who was still sound asleep in the other of the two twin beds, she gathered her clothes and tiptoed to the bathroom down the hall.
Downstairs, Laura was predictably awake already, standing out on the flagstone terrace, steaming mug of coffee in her hand.
It was at Scrubb Farm that Elise had first seen Laura as the mother she would become. She was always up early and unenveloped by the vague dreaminess that hovered over her at school. Here she seemed sharper and more directed: making pancakes for everyone, or returning from a trip to the market in town in the ancient Ford Bronco she had inherited. She had a crispness about her that seemed very English. And the death of her mother, who had decorated the house, moved suddenly front and center, and always gave Elise a protective feeling for her friend.
“Hey,” Elise said, and Laura jumped slightly.
“God, it’s beautiful!” Elise sank down onto one of the rusty wrought-iron chairs that sprawled like a set of harmless, spindly spiders across the stones since God knows when.
“Isn’t it?” Laura said. “How’s Ula? Did she”—she hesitated—“come out of it…okay?”
Elise shrugged. “She seemed happy as a clam to me.”
“I want to go see her,” Laura said.
“Right now?” Elise said. She was pleased to see that the skittishness and strain of last night seemed to have left Laura, who looked happy—even excited, actually.
“No, no,” Laura said. “Let’s eat—I’m h
ungry. I got eggs and bacon.”
Already she was heading briskly inside—the efficient, English Laura Elise remembered so clearly from their college visits here. It made her smile.
“Want me to make the bacon?” Elise asked, trailing after her.
It was at the stove, looking over at Laura whisking the eggs, hair escaping from her ponytail, face squared in concentration, that Elise remembered the thought that had occurred to her the last time she had seen Laura.
“Laura,” she said turning toward her, lowering the heat on the sizzling bacon. “I have to ask you something.”
Something in her voice must have sounded alarming, because Laura looked up in surprise. “What?”
“What is up between you and Neil?”
“What do you mean?” Laura sat back, knife still clutched in her hand, and a flush of color rose to her face almost instantaneously.
Elise cocked her head to the side. “I can just tell. Something is up.”
“What do you mean—did he—”
“No—I haven’t talked to him in ages. You did. You do. I just know you. And you’re so…agitated whenever he comes up.”
“I’m not agitated.” Laura bent her head and resumed chopping the herbs so that Elise could not see her face.
“I’m not judging,” Elise said.
There was silence, and from upstairs came the sound of Chrissy’s footsteps. Take a shower, Elise willed her. Don’t come down right now.
When Laura put down the knife and lifted her face, the answer was written all over it.
“Wow,” Elise said, and for a moment they were silent, just looking at each other. Elise had guessed it, but even so she was stunned.
Perfect Life Page 25
