by Leslie Rule
How could they have lived their whole lives without me?
Renewed anger bubbled up inside me.
My family—my history—had passed by without me. How could they have let that happen? I wanted to shout at them the way I had shouted at Mom. But they were dead. And it’s not very satisfying to yell at dead people.
Part of me felt guilty for being mad at them. After all, they were gone and couldn’t defend themselves. But then I got even angrier at them for making me feel this way. I hadn’t asked for this! They had put me in this situation with no thought for my feelings.
I scrolled to the next photograph. It was another family portrait, this time minus Rita. Jim had out-grown his chubbiness. He was now tall and gawky, his chin squared off.
Nobody smiled in this picture. Our mother had shadowy smudges beneath her eyes and our father’s hair was touched with white.
The date under the photograph indicated it had been taken a year after Rita’s murder.
“Oh, Rita,” I said aloud. “If only I’d been there with you. I wouldn’t have let him hurt you.”
What had become of the rest of them? My hands were trembling too much to type in the command for the obituaries. I flicked the computer switch to voice command mode. “Computer,” I said. “Find the obituary for Bonnie Mills. I don’t know the year of her birth. She probably died in Seattle.”
An instant later I was reading about my real mother’s death. At eighty-five her body gave in to bone cancer after she’d spent a lifetime active in a long list of clubs and organizations.
My father died in a plane crash at age fifty-eight. The violence of it made me shudder. The man with my smile smashed against a mountainside in a small private plane and perished in the flames.
Dull with shock, I asked the computer about my brother. “Computer, find an obituary for James Peter Terrance Mills, born in Seattle, Washington, in 1959.”
“Scanning, scanning, scanning,” the computer replied in its canned ladylike voice.
“Search negative,” it finally said. “No obituary for James Peter Terrance Mills.”
“Maybe I have his birth year wrong. Computer, check the obituaries for any James Peter Terrance Mills born between 1955 and 1965. Do a nationwide search.”
“Scanning, scanning, scanning. Search negative.”
Was it possible? I wondered, excitement rising within me. Could he still be alive?
It was simply too much to hope for. Yet, it was not impossible. If he was still alive, my baby brother would be 111 years old!
“Computer,” I commanded, “scan The Banbury Times for any articles on James Peter Mills.”
My screen was soon filled with an article from 2020, about teacher of the year James Peter Mills. A plump, red-haired man sat atop a big square desk, surrounded by fifth grade students.
“Mr. Mills makes math fun!” says fifth grader Eric Moore about his all-time favorite teacher, the article began. Judging by the enthusiasm of his students, it’s no wonder James Mills, 60, won the “Teacher of the Year” award.
I scanned the rest of the story. It was sweet, but unrevealing. Apparently, my brother had dedicated his life to teaching. He hadn’t even married. At least not at that point. Who knew what he’d done in the last forty years?
“I think you should stop worrying about it,” Kyle advised me as we strolled along the beach.
He had popped in unexpectedly after school, and I hadn’t been able to hide the fact I’d been crying. My red eyes gave me away.
It was a sunless, silver afternoon with fat clouds threatening rain. A brisk breeze skimmed over the gray waves, sending an occasional spray of icy water toward us.
As we walked and talked, Kyle admitted he knew everything. “I wanted to tell you, but I was ethically bound to keep the secret.”
“Ethically? I can’t think of anything more unethical than what’s been done to me.”
“Look at it this way,” he said, sliding his hand along my back. “If you’d been born last century, we never would have met.”
I smiled in spite of myself as he pulled me against him. His tangy after-shave filled my nostrils. He always smelled so good.
“You’d be dead now, Jenna,” he whispered against my neck. “Your life would already be over. Did you think about that?”
I pressed my cheek against him as his strong arms enveloped me. His chest was rock solid, and his sweater so soft as his heartbeat danced in my ears.
“I’m glad you’re here now, Jenna.”
“You don’t think I'm a freak?”
“I think you’re beautiful.”
“But I’m a hundred years older than you,” I pointed out.
Laughing, he said, “I always wanted to date an older woman.”
It was so ludicrous I laughed too. My laughter seemed to carry away the tension. It evaporated on the breeze with my giggles.
“I’m glad to hear you laughing,” Kyle said. “You have to put the past behind you. That’s the healthiest thing to do.”
Hand in hand, we traveled south along the curved beach, and ended up sitting atop what looked like a giant, jagged black rock. Thousands of barnacles clung to its base, and its side were slick with seaweed.
Kyle found a foothold and climbed up first. I was amazed at his strength as he pulled me up beside him.
The rock was fifteen feet tall and the top was dry with a hollowed-out area, perfect for sitting. “What a strange-looking rock,” I said, settling in beside him.
“Actually, it’s a cave,” he explained, as we peered through a crack at the foamy water below. “There’s a tide pool inside. When I was a kid we’d come down here and catch hermit crabs for pets. There’s a small hole in the side of the cave we crawled through.”
“This must be Crab Cave,” I said with a gasp. “My dad said they found a skeleton in here twenty years ago.”
“I heard about that. I wonder who it was.”
We sat silently watching the tide slither in. Waves crept in and out of the cave—each one rushing in as if terribly curious about the dark secrets the cave held, only to retreat slowly, shocked and disturbed by what it had learned.
The skeleton was gone, but I could not stop thinking of it. In a sense, we were sitting on a man’s grave. The thought made me shiver.
“Are you cold?” Kyle asked, slipping his arm around me.
“I’m okay.”
“Are you?” His pupils had grown large, nearly filling his soft green eyes. He looked so concerned, it made me smile. “I like your smile,” he said. “I hope you’re not going to be upset anymore.”
“I’ve got a lot to sort out. The things I found out today are so hard to believe.”
“You should put it all behind you.”
“I can’t do that. My brother might still be alive. I want to meet him.”
“Why?”
“He’s my brother,” I said. “He’s family!”
“All you share are common genes. You haven’t had any of the same experiences. It’s not as if you could reminisce.”
How could he understand? His family tree had sprouted in the natural order. His ancestors came before him, his descendants would come after him. He had a place in the middle of a big happy family. Everything in Kyle’s life was lined up as it should be.
How do you explain what it feels like to be yanked from the natural orders of things? I was the first cousin of my own mother’s ancestor! Some of my relatives’ descendants had already grown old and died. My family was dead. And despite Kyle’s strong arms around me, I felt terribly, terribly alone.
“No one can understand how I feel,” I said.
As it turned out, I was wrong. I spent the next morning with the one person who knew exactly how I felt.
11
Early Wednesday morning, I dressed hurriedly and left the house. I did not want to see or talk to my mother—or rather, the woman I’d thought was my mother!
I’d never forgive her! She had betrayed me by lying to me my enti
re life. It didn’t matter that she had justified the lie by claiming she was trying to protect me. I could not forget the fact she had repeatedly lied to me about who I was.
I didn’t want to be home, and I didn’t want to be in school. Instead, I took the solar-bus to the mall where I plopped down on a bench on the moving sidewalk. There I sat, watching the stores drift past as the sidewalk moved along its never ending path around the circular mall.
The pungent aroma of brewing coffee mingled with the fresh, clean scent of new clothes. Shoppers bustled about, their canvas bags bulging with purchases as they hopped on and off the sidewalk. Canned voices emanated from the shops, announcing sales and specialty items. I closed my eyes, losing myself in the reassuring sounds and smells of the mall.
Suddenly, a familiar male voice pricked my ear. “I’ve never felt like this about anyone before,” he said. My eyes flew open. That sounds like Kyle! I sat upright, straining to hear.
“I feel the same way about you, Kyle,” a soft, feminine voice replied. She too sounded familiar. “Let’s order some champagne to celebrate our engagement.”
I stepped off the sidewalk and slipped through an arched doorway toward the sound of the conversation. I found myself in a long dark hallway, with dozens of doors on each side. Apparently, I’d stumbled onto a new restaurant with private dining rooms.
Delicious, buttery aromas drifted through the slightly open door of the closest room. “Let’s make a toast, sweetheart,” Kyle said. He was apparently having a romantic breakfast with his girlfriend. My stomach churned with jealousy as I turned away, ready to step back onto the sidewalk when he said, “You are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, Suki.”
Suki? Something very strange was going on. I moved toward the doorway and peered in. There was Kyle, his eyes filled with love as he gazed at Suki across a linen tablecloth decorated with silver candlesticks.
I gasped involuntarily. Suki turned her head sharply. “Jenna!” she cried, sounding very embarrassed.
“I’m sorry!” I mumbled, turning to go.
“Don’t leave, Jenna,” she said. “You’ve already seen. You might as well stay.”
“Suki, darling, I long to hold you in my arms,” Kyle said as if he hadn’t even noticed my intrusion.
“Computer, end program,” Suki said. Kyle and the beautiful table instantly disintegrated as bright lights filled the room. Suki sat by herself in a nearly empty cubicle.
“Oh!” I cried. “This is the new virtual reality arcade you were telling me about! I thought Kyle was really here!”
“I wish,” Suki said. “He seemed really real, didn’t he?”
“Everything did. I even smelled the omelet.”
“I programmed that in. You can write your own program and make people do whatever you want them to.”
“How did you make Kyle seem so real?”
“I got ahold of a videotape of him, put it in the computer, and it did the rest. But you can get the same effect with photographs. All I’ve got left of my mother is three still photographs. I fed those into the computer and came up with a program where she talks to me and apologizes for what she did. It makes me feel a little better.”
“Apologizes? What did she do to you?”
“The same thing your real mother did to you, Jenna.”
My mouth fell open, and I stared at her as if seeing her for the first time.
“My mother sold me to science so she could buy a new car,” Suki said.
“You were the other embryo?”
“I tried to tell you before. Of course, Uncle Terry would have had my head if I had. He promised your mother no one would tell you the truth. She called Uncle Terry yesterday, really upset because you’d found but. She tried to get him to let you off the hook with the experiments.” She added wistfully, “I wish I had someone like that to care about me.”
“You have your uncle Terry.”
“Obviously, he’s not really my uncle. All my family died decades before I was even born. Dr. Grady makes me call him Uncle Terry because he thinks it will make me feel like I have a family. But he doesn’t really care about me. Especially since my PK ability hasn’t lived up to his expectations.”
“So you were the baby who was raised by the scientists,” I said. “My mom said there was another frozen embryo. But I didn't realize it was you.”
“I told you we’re alike!”
“I guess we do have something in common,” I admitted.
“Do you want to try the virtual reality computer? You could program in your real family and have a conversation with them.”
The idea was appealing. My computer at home had a modem, so I was able to access all the family pictures without leaving the VR arcade simply by typing in our computer’s confidential code. The virtual reality computer recorded all the different angles of my family’s faces and fitted them on bodies in its own computer files.
I had no idea what my family sounded like, so I used my voice as a guideline. The computer slightly distorted my voice to create voices for my mother and sister. I let the random selector pick voices for my dad and brother.
Then I selected a previously written “happy family gathering” program, and set it in a park.
After asking Suki to wait for me outside, I shut the door and said, “Computer, begin program.”
Lush green trees sprang up around me as a fragrant summer breeze filled the air. Birds chirped and golden sun rays fell upon the clearing where I stood.
“Jenna, where are you?” a soft voice called. An instant later, my mother—my real mother—stepped through the trees, a wicker picnic basket dangling from her arm. She smiled at me. It was the same face from the frozen photographs, but now it was animated. Alive!
Her eyes twinkled and blinked, her chest rose and fell with her breaths, and a strand of soft brown hair blew across her face with the breeze.
“Mother?” I whispered,
“You found a great spot for our picnic,” she said and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Steven! Rita! Jim! Come see the wonderful spot that Jenna has found for us.”
The rest of my family burst upon the scene, laughing happily.
“Rita!” I cried at the sight of my sister.
“What, Jenna?” she asked as she knelt beside the picnic basket, spreading out a checkered tablecloth. I studied her profile as she turned her head and pointed up at the tree. “Did you see the squirrel, Jenna? Maybe he’d like some potato chips.”
“It’s like you’re really here,” I said in awe. “It’s so real.”
She grinned at me as the breeze lifted her long hair off her neck.
“But you’re not real, are you?” I asked.
“Of course we are,” Rita said.
“No! You’re dead. You can’t be real.”
“Don’t be silly,” she replied, but I knew it was only the computer, talking for her.
“How could you have lived your whole life without knowing me?” I asked, as tears warmed my eyes. The three figures stared at me, still grinning.
“Wipe those stupid smiles off your faces!” I cried. “Answer my question!”
“How about a piece of pie?” my mother asked, slicing into a plump apple pie.
“Answer my question! Why did you die without knowing me?” I demanded, my voice rising in fury. The figures around me froze. The breeze abruptly ceased and the sun faded.
“Anger inappropriate for this program,” a high-pitched computer voice interrupted. “Would you like to select another mode?”
“No,” I said. “Forget it. End the program!” The golden-green scene vanished, taking my family with it. I stared at the stark cubicle around me, feeling more alone than ever. Trying to re-create my family had been a stupid idea. It was pathetic. As pathetic as Suki and her virtual reality fantasy about Kyle.
“It’s better if you write your own program,” Suki informed me when I met her outside. “If you pick one from the computer files, it’s never personal enough to seem re
al.”
“It wouldn’t matter if I spent a thousand hours writing a program,” I said.
“I could help you with it,” she said, her voice shrill with excitement. “We could make it so realistic you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Don’t you get it, Suki? It wouldn’t matter! It wouldn’t matter because no matter how real it seemed, it wouldn’t be real.”
“Maybe not,” she said sadly. “But it’s all we have.”
That might be true for her, I thought. But I still had someone left. “My brother is alive,” I said. “And I’m going to find him.”
Suki and I parted at noon. She headed down the beach as I unlocked our front door. I was relieved to find that Mom had gone out. I knew I couldn’t avoid her forever, but I wasn’t ready to talk to her yet.
My virtual reality experience had left me strangely empty. The phony computer family may have looked real, but their lack of soul had only served to mock me, reminding me of what I could never have.
I cracked open Rita’s diary. Now she was with me. I lovingly brushed my fingers over the slanted, looping words she had created with a purple pen. The Rita who leapt to my mind as I read was more real than any virtual reality program could ever create.
Dear Diary,
I’ve yet to hear from Ben! Shane said Ben got a fake I.D. and is out hitting all the bars instead of going to school. It sounds like I’ve fallen in love with a certified alcoholic. Diary, I have to admit that I’m scared for him. He’s obviously not taking care of himself and that frightens me. What if something awful happens to him while he’s drunk?
There is something else that’s scaring me. I’ve had this really eerie sensation that SOMEONE has been following me. I was almost sure someone was in the bushes last night, staring up at my window. I told my parents, but they just laughed. They said I’ve been watching too many horror movies.
You’d think that my parents, of all people, would trust my psychic instincts. Well, I guess they don’t have much faith in me since I’ve proved a dud in the PK department. As I mentioned earlier, I faked it with. those scientists. I pretended I didn’t have any PK ability at all. Dr. Crowell and his CUTE assistant (who I would like to date if I wasn’t in love with Ben) are the only ones who know I really do have PK talent. That’s because I’ve been helping them on a secret project. They’re so excited about it that I couldn’t let them down.
