by Ann Benson
The lab they slipped into at the end of the corridor was not writhing with ghosts, as the path they’d taken to reach it had seemed to be. When she closed the door behind them Janie felt calmer. She pushed away her fears as best she could and fed the data disk with Alejandro’s genome into a slot at one of the workstations, and with a few tentative commands, set the search for the elusive DNA segment in motion. Kristina sat by her side and they waited in nervous, contemplative silence while the massive evaluation computer did its job.
Now and then a tempting similarity would be located and the screen would display two shaded vertical bands of DNA for the fractions of a second it took to analyze them further. The longer the image remained on the screen, Janie knew, the greater the points of similarity. And after a few minutes of rapid on and off, a pair of bands stayed on the screen, and stayed, and stayed.
Janie sat up and gripped Kristina’s arm. “Look at this,” she said.
Base pair by base pair, the nucleotides of the two similar strands were compared. Against all odds, against logic itself, the images remained where they were. The word Match flashed onto the screen in big white letters.
And a few seconds later, as Janie and Kristina were hugging each other in the joy of their success, celebrating the contribution of an ancient and long-dead wanderer to the lives of those who had come centuries after him, Chet Malin was trying to figure out how he ought to respond to the beep he’d heard on his computer. He tapped the screen and read the displayed message. He touched it again and looked at the details of where Janie was in the building and what she was doing.
“Time for a trip upstairs,” he muttered unhappily.
Janie deleted the file containing Alejandro’s genome from the drive where it had resided temporarily during the evaluation.
“I guess I know what I’ll be doing this afternoon,” Kristina said, taking the envelope from Janie’s hand, “cooking up a batch of Alejandro soup. We’re going to need a lot.”
Wonder crept into Janie’s mind about where Kristina would do this. “Do you have an adequate facility?” she asked.
“Yes. I have a complete lab.”
Janie burned to know. “But—where?”
“I’d love to tell you,” Kristina said with a wistful but slightly guilty glance in Janie’s direction. “But I can’t.”
At last, Janie’s patience petered out. “Why not, for God’s sake? I’ve been in on everything else. I located this gene. I was the one who—”
“Please,” Kristina said. “I know all that, and I can’t begin to tell you how awed I am by what you’ve done. And I want to show you where I live and where I work, more than I can say, but it would put us—and you—in danger. If you were followed it would—”
“I’m not going to be followed.”
“You already have been. More than once.”
Janie stared back at the young woman, dumbfounded by the revelation. “When?”
“To the book depository.”
After a hard swallow, she said, “No one could possibly learn anything about what we’re doing from following me to that place.”
“And to the camp nurse’s house.”
So I was right. “By whom?”
Indecision was all over Kristina’s face. Finally, in near agony, she said, “I just can’t tell you.”
“Kristina,” Janie said, “please … now you’re starting to scare me. This is my safety we’re talking about here. I don’t understand why you have to keep this from me.”
“You’ll know soon enough” was all she would say. Then she seemed to pull back and stiffen, to sever the emotional link that their success had created. “Look, I’ll drop you off at Tom’s. I’ll see you there later tonight. Please, Janie, be patient—you’ll know everything soon enough. And I also need to tell you—now is a good time to be careful.”
Now was seeming like a good time to be alone, at least for a little while. It hurt, being left out in the cold. “I think I’ll take a walk,” Janie said when her spinning head finally cleared. “That’ll give you more time to go—wherever it is you’re going. And there are a couple of things I need to take care of on the way. I mean, I do have other things to do.”
What, precisely, was she doing? Waiting halfheartedly for Bruce, pouring the heart and soul she might otherwise have given to him into a project orchestrated by a clandestine group identified only as “we,” and engaging in a dangerous flirtation with her lawyer.
Oh, yes, she reminded herself. Answering to and obeying a young woman less than half her age in matters of great importance.
It was time to start shutting things down.
She found Chet Malin in his office with his head in his hands. “I’m giving my notice,” she said.
With uncharacteristic calm the Monkey Man said, “If you leave me in the lurch like this, I promise you’ll never work in the genetic research industry again.”
It was an absolutely absurd threat, in view of the state of things. “Chet, in a few more days, from the look of what’s happening out there, the genetic research industry is going to take a little forced vacation. Along with just about every other industry, except the funeral business.”
By the time Kristina reached Tom’s house that night, Janie had forgiven her.
“The patent trail dies in both directions,” Kristina said as they sat before V.M. “ Backward, it disappears. Forward, I lose it in the Outbreak mess.” Oozing frustration, she denuded a mint and popped it into her mouth. She crumpled the wrapper and tossed it toward a wastebasket. It bounced off the rim and landed on the floor, and Janie, ever the neat-nik, reached down to pick it up.
“So let’s just forget the corporations for now and move on,” Janie said. “We have other things to check out.”
Kristina sat back in the chair and stared at her. “Such as?”
“Such as individuals. Genetic patents don’t have to be owned by corporations, although most of them are. Maybe the owner is a single person, or a small group, with access to a lot of support.” She tossed the crumpled mint wrapper into the wastebasket. “I think we should go back to our orthopedists.”
“We didn’t find anything there the first time.”
Expect the unexpected, Alejandro had written. “Maybe we weren’t looking in the right way. Look what we found today, and think about where we found it. We’ve been looking for what we expect to find. And it’s not working. So let’s look again, differently.”
Kristina complained of a headache after another hour of fruitless computer work.
“Go home,” Mother Janie said. “Do you want me to drive you?”
Why hadn’t she found the courage simply to ask where Kristina hung her bandana? Every time Janie summoned her Kristina showed up, so home had to be relatively close.
But precisely where remained a mystery.
And why is it, she wondered, that even when I don’t contact her, she knows when to come looking for me?
“No. I’m fine to drive. Really.”
Paranoia was hard at work in Janie’s mind, offering up wild possibilities and fantastic scenarios to explain Kristina’s Johnny-on-the-spot appearances. As she watched Kristina gather her things Janie considered an injected microscopic transmitter, or radio waves infused into her shampoo, maybe communication chips masquerading as corn flakes. Pure science fiction, intriguing, but nonsense, every bit of it. It would have to be something much more sophisticated than that.
But it would certainly be something. When all this was over, when there was nothing dreadful looming just around the corner, she would find the wherewithal to ask.
Still in front of her on the screen was the file for one of their orthopedists; at that particular moment a list of her significant publications was displayed. I’ll work for a few more minutes, she told herself, then I’ll go to bed. She was instructing V.M. to go another level down in the data when she heard a light tap on the door.
She looked toward the sound and saw Tom leaning against the door frame, l
ooking relaxed and sporting his familiar wry smile, the same quirky little grin she always saw in her mind’s eye when she envisioned her longtime friend in his absence. A pleasant little shudder of surprise went through her at the sight of him.
He had a bottle of wine and two glasses in his hands. “I was going to have a nightcap and I wondered if you might want one too. I had a nice red open, so I thought maybe …”
“I’d love some. But right now if you poured me a glass of beet juice I’d probably think it was the best thing ever bottled.”
He came into the room and set the glasses down on the edge of the desk, then poured each one about half-full. The wine was a beautiful dark color, almost opaque. “I think this will be a little better than beet juice.” He picked up one of the glasses and raised it. “Well, cheers. Here’s to, uh …”
Janie raised hers and said, “Figuring it all out.”
Tom smiled in accord. “Whatever ‘it’ is.”
“I’d settle for it being Orthopedist Zero.”
He nodded toward the screen and said, “Getting anywhere?”
“I wish,” she said. “I’ve rearranged this group every way I can think of. I’ve looked at each file individually, brought up the lists of their publications, the dates when they published, their awards, all of that happy horseshit, but I just don’t see anything.”
He pointed toward V.M. “May I?”
“Please. Maybe you’ll see something I’ve missed.”
She started to rise from the chair, but he stopped her, saying, “Stay there. You don’t need to get up.” He positioned himself behind her and put his hands on the back of her chair, then leaned forward over her shoulder. “This is fine,” he said, “I can see from here.”
He looked, and after a moment he reached around her, his arm brushing her shoulder as he touched the screen. The files sorted themselves once again. He looked closer, as if he were concentrating.
Janie remained quiet and absolutely still for what seemed like an eternity as Tom worked the screen display with small but effective touches, and she found herself wanting to be that screen, to have him touch her in some reactive place. You cannot do this, her conscience told her. Yet the distance between the two of them seemed to be shrinking down to almost nothing, unlike the distance between her and Bruce, which seemed to widen every day. She was a doorbell and Tom was leaning on the button, and the signal being sent so urgently was Let me in, let me in. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe deeply, hoping to drive off the sudden case of “I want” that had reared its demanding little head and was threatening to make her do things she might later regret.
But her attempt at self-suppression was a miserable failure. The current within her surged, seeking release, and as Tom drew his arm back again, Janie turned her face just slightly so the sleeve of his shirt stroked her cheek, and as his hand passed by her face, she reached up and grabbed it, and brought it to her lips. The circuit between them was completed.
When they passed the small room where Janie had been sleeping, she slipped inside the door and tried to draw him in, but he smiled and shook his head no, then pulled her farther along to his own lair. And when they entered, Janie had to stop and let go for a minute, to absorb the place where Tom made his bed and had his dreams, to understand, if she could, all the things it said about him. It all said spare, simple, well thought out. It was orderly and contained, and the hint of his scent was in the air.
On an oiled wood bureau there were photographs, people Janie remembered as his family. In the neat arrangement there was a space where one seemed to be missing. A woman he doesn’t want me to see? she wondered.
There was a candle on the bedstand, and flowers in a vase. It was as if he had prepared—and the notion of it pleased her immensely. “You forgot the whipped cream.” She smiled.
“Damn,” he breathed as he pulled her closer, “and I wanted everything to be so perfect.”
“What could be more perfect,” she whispered to him later, as they lay wrapped around each other in the bed, “than having all this sweetness with your oldest, dearest friend?”
“Having it sooner,” he answered.
God, Janie, I love you.
And I miss you. I hope everything about the house is getting worked out—tell Tom how much I appreciate his helping us like this. I guess you must be asleep—that’s good, because I know I didn’t let you get much sleep while you were here, and with everything you’re going through, you need to take good care of yourself. I’m sad you had to leave early, but I know it couldn’t be helped.
This will all be over soon, you’ll see. We’ll work it out. I just have a feeling that things are coming to a head.
The last sentence in his message felt like a slap across the face, a blow Bruce couldn’t possibly even know he had delivered. She closed her eyes for a minute and remembered the night that had just passed, the warmth of being held close by someone she knew so thoroughly and trusted beyond any doubt, who touched her with enduring, patient love.
How had she not seen it before?
She opened her eyes again, and the message was still on the screen, staring back at her with its damnation.
Suddenly there were footsteps on the stairs and Janie heard the clink of a spoon against a ceramic cup. She closed the message from Bruce quickly and brought back the list of orthopedists. Tom came through the door bearing a tray. Her heart began to pound, and to distract herself she stared down at her hands, which had assumed a forced position in her lap and were pretending, unsuccessfully, not to tremble.
She was wrapped in Tom’s bathrobe as she sat in Tom’s home office, the morning after having slept in Tom’s bed. With Tom.
The confusion was so overwhelming that she almost started to cry, but she contained her tears with a bite on her own lip. It was surprisingly painful, and she touched it with her finger to see if she’d drawn blood. To her relief the finger came away clean. But her conscience did not.
“Good morning,” he said as he came in. He rested the edge of the tray on the desk and moved V.M. slightly to make way for the mugs he’d brought. All the while he was beaming, a beautiful morning-after smile. “Well,” he said, “something else to admire. You’re still a workaholic.”
She found her way somehow to a small laugh. “I am. You find that admirable?”
He kissed her on the forehead. “I find everything about you admirable.”
Those words sounded so good, so right as they fell on her ears. But, oh, dear God, she thought, this is all so wrong.
As he stood next to her, he looked down the list of names on the screen. “Find anything yet?”
“No.”
Mug in hand, he sat down on an overstuffed chair a few feet away, the sort of chair someone would sit in to read while his significant other worked at her desk. A companion seat. Janie swiveled the modern desk chair around so she faced him. With a little twinge of jealousy, she wondered who else might have sat in that chair, if she and Tom ought to be trading positions. But he seemed very comfortable where he was, though it was his own study, in his own home.
“So,” he said, “I guess we need to do some talking.”
Janie reached out and took the remaining coffee mug off the desk. Its warmth was comforting in her hands. She gripped it, hoping the surface of the coffee wouldn’t be rippled from her trembling. “I don’t know why this had to happen now,” she said quietly.
“Funny,” Tom said, “I was just wondering why it didn’t happen sooner. If I’d had the courage to tell you how I felt before you went to London, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Why didn’t you? God, Tom, if I’d only known … I mean, I’ve always had this sort of peripheral love for you, even while I was married, and I never lost my feelings for you completely—but I guess I thought what we had was really just friendship.” She shook her head and made an ironic little hmph. “Listen to me. Just friendship. As if that wasn’t what it all comes down to in the end. Or should, anyway.”
“I wouldn’t argue with you about that.”
“No, I know you wouldn’t. But that’s just what I mean—there’s so much about us that’s comfortable, that fits, and if I’d had any idea at all about how you feel, I wouldn’t have let myself fall for Bruce. We could have started this when I got back from London, or maybe …”
She paused to fight off the impending deluge.
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe I wouldn’t even have gone.”
“Janie—of course you would have gone.”
“Maybe not.”
“You wouldn’t have let that opportunity get by you. That it didn’t turn out exactly as you’d planned is something you couldn’t foresee or control. I’ve never seen you shrink away from a challenge. You would’ve gone with something to come back to, but you still would’ve gone. I understand that. I helped you set it up, remember? It was supposed to be a really good thing for you, and I would never let myself keep you away from something that was good for you.”
“It’s strange to hear you say that,” she said quietly. “You’re very much on the verge of doing that right now.”
He set his coffee cup down on a table and leaned forward in the chair, his hands clasped together around his knees. “Am I? I don’t get the sense that you’re entirely sure about that.”
After a long sigh, Janie said, “You’re right. I’m not. You know me too well.”
“And you know me. You know I don’t do things like this lightly.”
The silence that followed was nearly unendurable. “Look,” Tom finally said, “I can back away if you want me to. But I have to tell you, it wouldn’t be the road I’d choose to follow right now.”
“Which road would you follow, then?”
“The one I’m on.”
“And where do you think it’s going to lead you?”
“Into your heart. I hope.”
