by Linda Grimes
Mark reached over me and placed two fingers on his neck. “His pulse is steady, but weak. We need to get him to a doctor.”
“What? Like that?” I said.
“Not just any doctor, obviously. Dr. Frankel—do you have his number?”
“But Dr. Frankel is ancient,” Molly said. “Older than Granddad, even. He was practically shuffling the last time Mom took me to see him. Plus, he smells funny.”
I knew I should call Molly on her rudeness, but honestly? She was right. Dr. Frankel did shuffle, and he smelled like mothballs. Who kept their sweaters in mothballs anymore? But he was an adaptor—if his ability hadn’t faded entirely with age—and so wasn’t likely to be shocked by James’s see-through appearance.
“He’s probably asleep,” I said, but got out my phone and dialed anyway. Mom checked all of our phones regularly to make sure Dr. Frankel was in our contacts, because who knew when one of us might come down with the plague unexpectedly? If we got delirious with fever and started spontaneously adapting, we needed access to a doctor who would understand.
“I’m sure he’s used to emergencies,” Mark said, already bending down to help James to his feet.
“What happened to him?” Molly asked, referring to James.
“A slight problem with something he was testing,” I said, counting the rings. Pick up already, Dr. Frankel. If you’re still breathing …
“I wonder if it was that adaptor potion I heard him talking to Monica about,” Molly mused, her curiosity for the moment outweighing her concern.
I almost dropped my phone. “What? When did you hear—”
“Your phone, Ciel,” Mark cut in, and when I just stared at him, he continued. “It’s talking.”
Crap. I brought it back up to my ear. “Dr. Frankel? Is that you?… Yeah, yeah, I know it’s the middle of the night.… Yes, I’m aware of how old you are, and that you need your sleep, but this is an emergenc—what? Oh. Ciel Halligan … yeah, those Halligans.”
“Why am I in the closet?” James’s eyes had opened halfway, and his words were a bit mushy.
“That’s what we’d like to know,” Mark said as he worked to keep him steady.
I tried to focus on what the doctor was saying. “No, it’s not about me. It’s James. There’s something wrong with him.… James. Yes, that James … Of course I know he’s not an adaptor. I’m his sister, for Christ’s sake.… Sorry! Yes, I know I shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.… Yes, my mother did teach me better than that. Geez, I said I was sorry, now will you just listen for a second?”
Mark started walking James slowly toward the door. “Molly, grab that hat, will you? And the coat. We have to get him covered up before we go out.”
“No, Dr. Frankel, I don’t care if James is a nonadaptor, we can’t take him to a regular doctor. Because, that’s why. Look, just get ready for us, okay? I’ll explain when we get there!” I hung up before he could voice any more objections. “Can somebody please tell me why the whole fuck—er, flipping adaptor community only has one freaking doctor?”
Molly cocked her head. “Hey, maybe I’ll be a doctor. If I’m not a lawyer like Thomas, or a fixer, like you, Ciel.” Apparently, “primatologist” had lost its charm.
*
“The boy’s having difficulty displaying his primary aura.”
My, what an astute observation, I thought, seriously wondering if bringing James here to see Dr. Frankel was worse than doing nothing at all.
The man, well known—and more than a little feared—by everyone in the adaptor community, was leaning his large frame so heavily on his tripod cane it was a wonder the thing didn’t warp beneath him. His robe looked older than me, and his lambskin slippers should have been put out to pasture decades ago.
We were at the good doctor’s office, located at his home in an old Brooklyn neighborhood of detached, single-family houses. He’d converted the dining room of the large, brick bungalow into an examination room, and James was lying on the antique exam table. You could see right through his head to a wrinkle in rolled-out white paper beneath it.
“Um, yes,” I said. “That’s why we brought him to see you instead of a civilian doctor.”
“Don’t get pert with me, missy.” He shook a knobby finger at me. “I brought you into this world, as well as your brother here. That little scamp, too.” He pointed his arthritic digit at Molly, and then gave Mark a once-over, squinting his eyes. “Him I don’t recall. Are you sure he’s one of us?”
Mark lifted one corner of his mouth a fraction, and slid through a series of some of his more outlandish auras, holding each one for about a second.
“Quite sure,” I said.
The good doctor harumphed, not impressed, and turned his attention back to James, who had passed out again. “Now, this … this is not natural. I’ve known this boy since he was born, and he has never given any indication of an aura anomaly. Unlike the rest of you hooligans.”
I gave a small cough and dared to correct him. “Halligans.”
“I stand by what I said. Now, tell me what he’s been doing to himself. He fancies himself a scientist, doesn’t he? He must have done something, because this sure as hell didn’t just happen on its own.” He looked back at us to make sure we were paying attention. “You might say I can see right through him.” He barked a laugh that ended in a wheeze, bending him even farther over his cane.
Molly giggled. “Good one, Dr. F.”
I tried to smile. Not sure if I succeeded. “Yeah, good one. Now, can you please do something for him?”
“Depends,” the old coot said, and then just waited, staring me down.
I looked at Mark, who nodded, resigned. I started to explain things from the beginning, going back to the zoo and Molly’s precocious adapting.
The doctor held up one hand, palm toward me. “Hold on there, missy.” He shuffled to the hall door and called out. “Angela! Get in here, girl. You better hear this, too.”
A honey-haired young woman joined us, fully dressed in casual khaki slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt. She wore her hair in an artfully messy updo, and her clothes fit like they were tailored for her, unlike mine, which were meant for Suze’s larger frame. I’d tightened the belt and rolled up the pants legs, but I still looked like a kid playing dress-up.
Oh, well. Could be worse. At least I wasn’t still wearing the torpedo tits outfit. I darted a glance at Mark, gauging his reaction to her. He didn’t exactly run his eyes up and down her figure, but he wasn’t oblivious, either.
“This is my granddaughter,” Dr. Frankel said. “She’s training to be a doctor. I can’t work forever, you know, no matter what you lot seem to think.”
Angela smiled, nodding to each of us in turn as the doctor told her our names. “So nice to meet you all. I do hope we’ll be able to help.” She looked at James curiously.
Molly piped right up. “Are you an adaptor, too? I am. I just found out. I can—”
“Hold on there, Molly,” Mark said, laying his hands on her shoulders and giving her a little squeeze. “Give the lady room to breathe.”
Angela laughed softly. “No, Molly, I’m afraid not. We haven’t had an adaptor in the family since Grampa here.”
“Grampa” harumphed again. “That’s what I get for marrying a normal. Damn strong genes that woman had.”
James groaned. “Looks like he’s coming around,” Angela said.
“Get talking, missy. Make it snappy.”
I started over with the zoo, for Angela’s benefit, and took it up to where James told me he was testing the stronger formula on himself before giving it to Molly. “For safety, not efficacy. He already had a good idea that it would work, since Molly had shown signs of changing back at the party.”
The doctor had listened raptly the whole time, sharply focused on Molly during most of it, like he was looking for signs of orange fur. Angela listened closely, too, her eyes staying mainly on James, who was starting to look more solid to me.
�
��And that’s about it,” I said. “Look, I just want to make sure James didn’t poison himself with whatever he took. Obviously, the lower dose worked fine on Molly—it just took a little longer than he thought it would. He never should have given himself so much.”
“Aw, Jimmy’ll be fine,” the old geezer said. “But I’ll have my granddaughter look him over, if it’ll make you feel better. Angela?”
She retrieved a stethoscope and a penlight from a black bag on the credenza and went over to James. After listening to his heartbeat, which she pronounced strong and regular, she lifted each eyelid with her thumb and shined the light on his pupils. Yup, he was definitely more solid—I couldn’t see through him at all anymore.
“Looks okay to me,” she said finally, after checking a few reflexes. “Whatever the side effects were, I’d say the worst is over.”
“Speak for yourself,” James said, pushing himself to a sitting position and groaning. “God, this is like the worst hangover ever.”
“James, you’re all right!” I hugged him tightly, setting off more moaning.
“Yay!” Molly crawled right up onto the exam table and squeezed in between us.
James stopped mid-moan. “Molly? Is it really you?” He let go of me and held Molly away from him, scanning her from top to toe, his joy evident.
Even Mark was smiling. So I hugged him. (What? I had to do something with all the excess happy I was feeling, and I sure couldn’t hug Dr. Frankel. He smelled like mothballs.)
When I finally let go and sneaked a peek up at his face, Mark’s eyes were soft. It might have been my imagination, but he also seemed reluctant to let me go. I didn’t have time to speculate about it—Molly was exuberantly describing her adventures as an orangutan to Dr. Frankel and Angela, and I wanted to make sure she left out certain details, like people getting shot. Fortunately, Molly seemed to know instinctively what was and wasn’t okay to talk about in front of the doctor and his granddaughter.
“And, whoa, when I saw my arms at the zoo, I almost freaked out! I mean, I’ve always hoped I’d be an adaptor, but that orange fur was kind of creepy, you know?” she said, all smiles and excited giggles about it now that it was over. Kind of like I feel after a roller-coaster ride. “I don’t know how in the heck that happened.”
“Yes, I wonder how that could have possibly happened,” Dr. Frankel mused, with a sharp look at James, who flushed but didn’t offer the doc any theories.
Angela looked thoughtful, in much the same way James did when he was trying to figure out a scientific puzzle. “Another genetic anomaly would explain it, I suppose, though the mutation has been stable for so many generations now. It would make more sense if there’d been a catalyst of some sort.”
Now Mark was looking at James funny, too. What the heck was going on?
I couldn’t stand to see my brother squirm, so I suggested it might be time for us to let Dr. Frankel return to bed. “Molly and James seem fine now, and we’ve disturbed you long enough.”
“I’d feel better if we kept them under observation until morning—”
Mark jumped on the doctor’s words. “Not at all necessary. If there appears to be any recurrence, we’ll bring them back. But for now we need to get Molly home.”
“Well, it goes against my advice, but I suspect you’re going to do what you want to do no matter what I say. Jimmy, if you black out again, you get your rear to a hospital pronto, you hear me? Unless you disappear again, of course. Then you come back here.” After James nodded politely, Dr. Frankel continued, directing his words to me, “And you, missy, you tell Mo I want to see Molly back here next week for a checkup.”
Gulp. Guess that blew any chance we had of keeping Molly’s adventure in zoology from her mother. “Um, sure thing, Dr. Frankel.”
Geez. Auntie Mo was going to kill us all.
Chapter 22
Molly reached for the door to Herbert’s cage as soon as we were back at James’s place. Mark intercepted her hand before she touched her favorite googly-eyed creature. “Maybe you better hold off on that, Molls, at least until James gives you the go-ahead.”
Molly’s eyes got big. “You don’t think I could project a chameleon, do you?”
I noogied her head lightly, looking at James. “I’m sure it’s fine, right, James? But let’s sleep on it first, just to be on the safe side, okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Better safe than sorry. You can feed Herbert in the morning, before you go home.” When her face fell, he added, “Tell you what, you and Ciel can take my bed tonight—how does that sound? I’ll suffer on the futon, and I’ll make you my special waffles for breakfast tomorrow.”
Molly perked up. “With strawberries?”
“Yup,” James said.
“And whipped cream?”
“I think that can be arranged.”
“How about chocolate syrup?” I threw in, much to Molly’s delight. Why not go for broke?
“Don’t push your luck,” James said. “Now, go on. It’s late. You know where the spare toothbrushes are.”
Mark leaned over and kissed the top of Molly’s head. “Good night, kiddo. Ciel—you look ready to drop, too. You should go to bed.” And he was looking at me like he wanted to be the one to tuck me in.
“Are you staying?” I asked, feeling myself color under his gaze.
James added, “You’re welcome to the couch.”
“Won’t be necessary,” he said, breaking off eye contact with me. “I have a few questions, and then I have to go.”
I looked from one to the other of them. If they thought I was toddling off to bed before I heard what they had to say, they were wrong. “Molly,” I said, “why don’t you go ahead and brush your teeth. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”
She scampered off to the bathroom, long braid bouncing on her back, visions of waffles and strawberries no doubt dancing in her head. I parked myself on the sofa.
Mark quirked his mouth in acknowledgment of my refusal to be left out of the conversation. James looked resigned, and sat down next to me. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.
“Yeah? Because I’m not real sure I even know. What’s going on, James?” Mark said, sitting in the wing chair across from us, leaning back and propping an ankle across his knee. I made a special effort to keep my eyes on his face. (What? Girls look, too.)
My brother leaned forward, forearms on his knees, fingers interlaced in front of him. “I’ve been working on a few … experiments … with regard to the adaptor genome. I’m pretty sure I’ve isolated the mutation responsible. The trait only exhibits when a child inherits the mutation from both parents, along with the proper catalyst.”
I screwed up my brow. “But shouldn’t you be an adaptor then, since both Mom and Dad are?” Biology had never been my strongest subject. Sure, I knew being an adaptor was inherited, but the specifics were cloudy.
James launched into a bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo about dominant and recessive genes, and catalysts, and the possible influence of environmental factors in the womb, and I don’t know what all, until I felt the familiar glazing begin. I finally held up one hand and said, “Could you just give us the Idiot’s Guide to Genetics version?”
He paused, thinking for a minute, probably considering just how far he had to dumb it down for me. “Okay, it’s kind of like with eyes—only a lot more complex, of course, when you consider—”
“James, I get it. It’s complicated. Just pretend you’re talking to a ten-year-old, all right?”
He sighed. “You know how brown eyes are dominant, right? When it comes to eye color, brown eyes win over blue.”
I nodded. Mark looked like he already knew all this but was patiently waiting for me to catch up.
“Basically, you inherit a gene for eye color from each parent. If you get a brown gene from one parent and a blue gene from the other, your eyes will be brown, since brown is dominant. Now, if two brown-eyed people who each have one dominant brown gene and one recessive blue gene p
roduce a child, it’s likely the child will have brown eyes. But it’s possible the child will inherit the recessive blue gene from each parent, and thus have blue eyes. Get it?”
Strangely enough, I did. “Yeah, I’m following. So you’re saying the adaptor gene is like brown eyes, and the nonadaptor gene is like blue eyes, and you lucked out with recessive nonadaptor genes from both Mom and Dad?”
“Yeah, something like that. Other than the ‘luck’ part. There are other factors involved, including an extra gene—a special kind of ‘catalyst’ gene—that’s apparently necessary to activate the adaptor gene, so technically it’s possible to have the adaptor gene and still not manifest—”
Mark cut in. “I don’t think we need to get into all the specific permutations here. Just tell us what happened.”
It was then that James started to look like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He cleared his throat. “I’ve been toying with a formula to activate the catalyst gene.”
Mark’s eyes sharpened. “You think you have the adaptor gene but that you don’t have the catalyst gene to activate it.”
James flushed. “It’s possible. I thought it was a valid scientific alley to explore.”
“So, what happened? And what does this have to do with Molly?” I asked.
“I’d been experimenting with different delivery systems for the formula. Attaching it to a weakened rhinovirus—the common cold—was the obvious answer, and common enough in all gene therapies. A nasal spray is the most viable way to introduce it into the body. It bypasses the digestive system and—”
“Right. Got it. Back to Molly,” Mark pressed.
“Molly likes to hang out at the lab. I think she wants to be a scientist, like me, when she grows up.”
Yeah, I thought. Get in line behind doctor, lawyer, and facilitator, buster.
“Usually Mo will check with me first, and drop her off for a few hours,” James continued. “But there was one day—shortly before her visit to you, Ciel—when Mo was busy getting ready for the party that Molly came with someone else.”
