by Scott Britz
“Where is she now?” Gifford asked.
“At the gate.”
“What the hell for? Let her in, Jack. She has every right to be here.”
“I . . . I don’t know. . . . There are risks to think about. We don’t want any disruptions. Not with all the press on campus.”
Gifford scarcely heard him. Accordion pleats. There was a laugh! Pretty young mom and devoted wifey was not what Cricket Wright was cut out for. The bush called to her. Bush, jungle, desert isle—Cricket knew Kampala and Lagos the way you were supposed to get to know Paris or Milan. After Ed Rensselaer died, she was gone even more, and then, with the divorce that surprised no one, she went off to let the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta finance her safaris. Oh, yes—safaris. Some people hunted big game. Cricket hunted the littlest game there was—viruses you couldn’t see with anything short of an electron microscope. She had an idea that every disease had a life cycle of its own—something like babyhood, followed by maturity, and ending in toothless old age. It had made her famous. There wasn’t a virologist or epidemiologist in the world who hadn’t heard of the intrepid Cricket Rensselaer-Wright.
“Do you understand my point?” asked Niedermann. “There are legal implications. The patent on the Methuselah Vector is worth billions.”
“What has any of this to do with Cricket?”
“Her father, Edwin Rensselaer, was a coauthor with you on the paper that announced the discovery of aetatin ten years ago. Without aetatin, no Methuselah Vector.”
“That was just basic work. It took years of toil and sweat to turn that basic insight into a working drug, and Ed, God rest his soul, had no part in any of it. The patent is clean. Legally, it’s open-and-shut.”
“Lawyers can make havoc out of anything nowadays. If she were to press her claim today, in front of the press and all these VIPs, well, it would make a scandal. She could force a settlement just by threatening legal action.”
“Cricket wouldn’t do that.”
“Then why is she here? Today? It’s no coincidence.”
Gifford was annoyed by the way Niedermann always saw the worst side of everyone. “Maybe that invitation you never sent found its way to Africa, after all,” Gifford snapped. Down the hall, the Central American Overthrow Committee was staring at them impatiently. “Never mind, Jack. I’ll take care of this myself.” After straightening his tie in the reflection in the glass of his office window, Gifford squared his shoulders and headed back toward the group of VIPs.
“Gentlemen, I’m afraid institute business calls,” he said, slapping the call button of the elevator. “Mr. Niedermann will finish the tour with you. If you need anything—secure wireless access, fax machines, refreshments—just let him know. I’ll see you down at the track field at noon.”
The elevator door opened and Gifford got in. A minute later, he hopped into the golf cart Niedermann had parked behind the lab building. As he turned the ignition, he whistled sharply and called out, “Hannibal!” An enormous gray Irish wolfhound uncurled itself from where it lay in the morning sun outside the back door of the lab and sprang onto the seat behind him. “Good boy!” He gave the dog a pat on the neck. Then he hit the floor pedal and swung out onto Rensselaer Drive, heading toward the campus gate.
Cricket! After all these years. Five, to be exact. Acadia Springs hadn’t been the same since she left. How he had missed her sardonic sense of humor, her taste for fillet of sacred cow. The truth was, discovering the Methuselah Vector had brought him nothing but loneliness. He was now a certified genius—no longer a man. Brilliant researchers that he had once thought of as equals were now tongue-tied in his presence. He could probably get the president of the United States to come to the phone, yet there was scarcely anyone he could really talk to.
He pushed the pedal of the golf cart to the floorboard, trying to ram it past its top speed of fifteen miles per hour. His hands felt sweaty against the steering wheel.
Then, coming up over a rise in the road, he saw a small, white car with its door open behind the crash beam of the gate, and, about twenty yards in front of that, a petite, dark-haired woman in orange-colored shorts and a striped top standing in the grass beside a rock, cowing two linebacker-size armed guards with a doughty look. Her legs and arms were tanned and lightly freckled, reflecting her naturally fair complexion. Her once-luxuriant hair was trimmed in a tight pixie cut, which startled Gifford. He had remembered her hair as long and jet black. But now, with the morning sun glancing through it, he picked up on a reddish tint, like dark sienna.
As he cut the motor to the golf cart, he saw her turn and look at him. Her fine, straight nose, full mouth and gently rounded chin were just as he remembered. But her eyes—deep violet-blue, unwavering, stone-piercing—took his breath away.
“Hello, Cricket,” he said.
Three
CRICKET’S FIRST IMPULSE WAS TO FLEE. But her feet wouldn’t move. The guards blocked her escape. And the Kia, only a hundred feet away, seemed hopelessly out of reach.
“Goddamn you, Charles” was all she could say. “Get these fucking goons away from me.”
“Peace, gentlemen,” said Gifford, raising his hand as he stepped out of the bright green golf cart. “Let me rescue you from the good doctor.” The guards stepped back, all too eager to give Cricket a wide berth. From the backseat of the cart Hannibal, ears pricked, seemed to catch the scent of their timidity. The golf cart thudded as the massive wolfhound leaped to the pavement and chased the two men back to the guardhouse.
“There, now, Cricket,” said Gifford, arching one eyebrow teasingly. “All quiet on the front.”
Charles! It had been five years since Cricket had seen him, and he had aged better than any sixty-two-year-old she had known. He was a fitness fanatic and an accomplished long-distance runner, she knew, but the vitality she saw in him surpassed all remembrance. Was his walk more self-assured than before? His hair darker, thicker, more stiffly waved? Had he gained two inches in height? His tall, lithe frame rippled under the plush, gray fabric of his suit. His sleek neck was framed by a yellow silk tie that perfectly complemented his ruddy complexion. His square chin accentuated the powerful straight line of his mouth. But it was his voice and eyes—almost liquid in their expressiveness and their reactivity—that struck her as especially youthful and strong.
He approached her with arms wide-open, and she let him embrace her and offer an avuncular kiss on the cheek. His gentle good humor calmed her.
“What’s going on, Charles? Guards and guns?”
“It’s a new age, Cricket. Eden Pharmaceuticals, our corporate sponsor, insisted on it. There are competitors who would do nearly anything to get their hands on what we have here.”
“I thought science thrived on competition.”
“Old-style science. Your father’s kind.”
“And what kind is yours?”
“Ah, Cricket, Cricket. You haven’t changed a bit.” He rubbed the back of his neck. As he did so, Cricket noted the care he took not to disturb a single strand of his hair. “Actually, I’m so glad you made it. This is an important day. All sorts of noteworthies are here. The campus is crawling with press. But without you, the celebration just wouldn’t have been complete.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Gifford’s eyebrows shot up. “The invitation . . . You’re not here about the Vector?”
“Vector?”
“The Methuselah Vector.”
“Oh.” She had come across that term in the New England Journal of Medicine. Back then it had struck her as crassly commercial. “You mean aetatin.”
“We’ve made it work, Cricket. We’ve started human trials.”
“Congrats.”
Something cold and wet brushed the back of her hand—Hannibal’s nose. The dog had come back from the guardhouse to intimate that even after five years he re
membered her. Smiling, Cricket placed her hand on his head and began to rub him between the ears. His fur was coarse, like steel wool.
“You honestly mean to tell me you don’t know anything about this?” said Gifford. “Don’t you read newspapers?”
“What—Notícias de Maputo?” Cricket laughed. “Sorry, I’ve been out of touch for a while.” She folded her arms around Hannibal’s neck and pressed her cheek against his forehead. “Look, I’m dead tired and I could use a shower. If you’ll call off your rangers here, I’ll be in and out by suppertime. I won’t interfere with your little shindig.”
Gifford touched her arm. “You’ve got this all wrong, Cricket. You’ve got to stay on. Stay and see it from the box seats. This is the culmination of your father’s dream.”
“I’m just here for Emmy, Charles.”
“Emmy? Oh, of course . . . the accident.” Gifford tapped his lips together pensively. Then he smiled. “But . . . you’re here. Please stay.”
Cricket lowered her gaze. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Charles. Really.”
“It’s not about me, Cricket. This is so much bigger. It’s . . . it’s . . . Think of your father. You ought to be here for him. For aetatin. It would have meant so much to him.”
There it is. The trump card. What Daddy would have wanted. The card everybody plays when they want to get their way. Cricket felt a tenseness about her mouth. But her answer was meek: “Yes, I’m sure it would.”
“Think about it?”
She shrugged. She was too tired to argue.
“Good, good.” Gifford seemed to sense that one more word would have been a word too much. Hannibal, seeing him start for the golf cart, shot ahead and leaped into the backseat. As Gifford drove off, he called out to the guards, loudly enough that Cricket could not fail to hear, “Let Dr. Rensselaer-Wright through, gentlemen. Make sure she gets a Level I administrative pass, with a mag strip—not the ordinary visitor’s pass. She can go wherever she likes.”
Acadia Springs Biological Research Institute had changed almost beyond recognition. As Cricket drove across the hundred-acre campus—a little finger of rock and sand on the southern edge of Mount Desert Island—she saw block after block of steel, glass, and concrete laboratories where only five years ago a carpet of hemlock and white pine had covered the virgin hills. The three high-rise labs on the west end, Dalton, Sobczak, and fourteen-story Rensselaer, cast a midmorning shadow that reached to Smuggler’s Beach, where clam diggers used to be seen at low tide. On the north side of the central quadrangle she barely made out the yellow gables of the old Cheville House lab, where she had worked as an undergrad intern sorting Drosophila flies for Erich Freiberg, the famous geneticist. Rising above Cheville were the white turrets of Weiszacker House, the sprawling mansion that served as administrative center and Director’s quarters—and that had been her childhood home.
Weiszacker House. The verandaed, arbored Camelot of the princess of Acadia Springs. It seemed like a fairy tale now: the story of the little girl with patched pants who was on a first-name basis with the world’s top scholars of medicine and molecular biology. Other little girls had tea sets. She had a Zeiss binocular microscope, with a substage condenser and the finest achromat objective lenses, plus a rack of stains to color the specimens she brought home daily from the woods and shore. Bottles with names that even now sounded like poetry to her:
Eosin
Haematoxylin
Sudan black
Safranin O
Prussian blue . . .
She tried not to think about Weiszacker House, nor about her mother and father who had passed away within its walls, nor about Charles Gifford, who now slept in her father’s grand four-poster bed and ruled over his legacy from his same mahogany-paneled study. She had one thing to focus on—and it led her well past the quadrangle, to an L-shaped block of shingled town houses at the western water’s edge, a place called Wabanaki Cove.
She parked her car and went up a wrought-iron stairway to the second unit from the end. There she paused, listening for the sound of anyone at home. Her resolve weakened as she looked at the peeling gray paint of the door—paint that she herself had laid long ago. What am I doing here? she wondered. What makes me think I can go through with this? Wouldn’t everyone be better off if I just got back into the damn car and disappeared forever? But even as she wavered in her mind, her small hand, roughened by encounters with rocks and thorns and the equatorial sun, reached out and rapped against the door with a sound out of proportion to its size.
She took a half step back, listening. Nothing—a reprieve. Then her heart sank at the sound of approaching footsteps, followed by the rattle of a chain. She drew a quick breath as the door opened. A tall, dark-haired man in a red-and-brown flannel shirt faced her in the entryway, his feet planted in a foursquare stance.
“Cricket!” he exclaimed. “What are you . . . Why didn’t you call?”
“Hello, Hank.”
He looked at her nervously, forcing a smile. “You wouldn’t be here for the Vector, would you? The grand unveiling?”
“You know what it is, Hank.”
“Yeah . . . that.” His smile wilted. “I didn’t think you were serious.”
“Are you going to let me in?”
“Sure, sure.”
She pushed her way inside, trying not to look at him. He still had those lanky, Gary Cooper looks that had made her heart stop the first time she saw him. Now there were flecks of gray in his stubble beard, but otherwise he was the same. Still those rower’s shoulders, still that rugged nose and jaw, still that little boy’s glint of mischief in his eye. He looked more like a carpenter on his day off than someone who had once published the founding paper on the statistics of viral recombination.
“You cut your hair.” She stirred at the sound of his voice—dry and warm, like musk wafting over charcoal. She had forgotten what his voice could do to her.
“I cut it some time ago,” she said tersely. “It’s growing out.”
“I like it.”
She bristled at his presumptuousness. It wasn’t a style decision, you jackass. “I did it . . . for Étienne.”
Hank heaved the door shut. “Yeah. Of course. I heard about him. Sorry. I was never in the guy’s fan club, to be sure. But, what happened was—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She stepped into the small living room, cluttered with books and old newspapers and journal reprints. She clung tightly to her pocketbook for a moment, then set it down on the sofa table. She was determined not to stay a minute longer than she had to.
“Can I get you anything?”
“Coffee. Black.”
He went into the kitchen, an open area separated from the living room by a breakfast island, and poured her a cup from the coffeemaker. “I thought you were in Africa.”
“I was.”
“You’re back early, then.”
“Mm-hmm.”
He brought her the coffee in a mug without a saucer. She tested it gingerly for hotness, then took a bracing, bitter sip.
“Gorgeous summer weather out here,” he said cheerfully. “Emmy and I were going to take the Bay Dreamer out for a sail next week. Up to Halifax.”
She could barely resist tossing the coffee in his face. “Did you not get my goddamn e-mail?”
Hank went pale. “Look, I can explain—”
“Explain? You’re back on the bottle again, Hank. The police said you had a fifth of bourbon in the pickup with you. Nearly empty. And you had the gall—the fucking gall—to take our daughter—my daughter—out on the road when you were too soused to know the difference between a guardrail and a double line. Forget that you almost got her killed. What the hell kind of example was that?”
“She’s okay. A couple of stitches.”
“Ten fucking stitches, Hank.”
&
nbsp; “I haven’t had a drop since.” He placed his hand over his heart as if to make light of it, but real remorse was in his eyes. “There’s just . . . there’s been a lot of pressure. They’ve taken my lab away. I’ve gotten on the wrong side of these corporate bastards that Charles brought in to run the institute, and I’m . . . I’m just one slip away from losing my job here. Plus, you know, money. I had to refinance after the divorce, and the interest rates—”
“Skip it, Hank. I know all about you and pressure.”
Hank had seemed like a real up-and-comer when she first met him. He was a visiting professor at Harvard-MIT, teaching a seminar in statistical virology, where he opened her eyes to a new way of using mathematics and computers to investigate how viruses changed over time. They had met, of all places, in a bicycle smashup at the bottom of Mendon Hill, during the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge, a 188-mile bikeathon to benefit cancer research. As she lifted herself off the asphalt, bleeding from a gash in her calf, she blew up. She called Hank an ape, an oaf, a reckless idiot. He returned a patient smile, then bound her wound with duct tape. Within minutes, he had her laughing. They rode the rest of the way side by side. That evening, after she got her cut properly stitched up at the stage camp in Bourne, they camped out together on the beach at Grey Gables. By then, she realized that behind his good humor lay a first-rate intellect. They stayed up the whole night, trading research ideas and visions of the future.
Their marriage should have been one of the great scientific matings, like Pierre and Marie Curie, or Louis and Mary Leakey. But Hank, for all his brains, had no urge to change the world. What he wanted was the quiet life—a houseful of kids to play with, cozy evenings by the fireplace, weekends for sailing in his damned boat. Sure, he was conscientious about his work, but when five o’clock rolled by, he would flick a little switch in his mind and turn into something quite . . . ordinary.
