by Amira Rain
The third thing on my mom’s bucket list was to scatter my dad’s ashes in a nature preserve near our home in suburban Fort Wayne, and we’d done that. He and my mom had been married a little over ten years when he’d been killed when the semi he drove for a living jackknifed on an icy highway. I’d been not quite nine. Because his death had been so unexpected, and because he’d been a fairly young man at the time, he and my mom had never discussed what he wanted done with his body after death. His mom and brother, who were his only close family members, had both passed away by the time of his accident, so they weren’t able to help my mom figure things out. So, she decided to have my dad cremated, keeping his ashes in a bronze urn in our home, saying that someday, when her “time to go” was near, she’d scatter them in the nature preserve that they’d both loved, and where she wanted her ashes scattered, too.
The fourth and final thing on my mom’s bucket list was simply to “hold a grandchild in my arms,” and very unfortunately, I was unable to help her with this. Not only was I not married or in a serious relationship with a person I’d want to have a child with, I’d barely even dated since my mom had gotten cancer. Men just simply hadn’t been a priority in my life, not that they ever really had been. My mom and grandma had always urged me to prioritize school and achievement over dating, wanting me to establish a career before I even thought about getting married, and I’d always went along with this. This wasn’t to say that I hadn’t had a few serious relationships in my late teens and early-to-mid-twenties, but I’d never had a boyfriend I’d wanted to marry anyway. All of my boyfriends had ultimately disappointed me in one way or another, not to mention that although I’d felt strongly about each of them, I’d never experienced the ‘quake’ that Great-great-grandma Mary had told me to look for.
When my mom began expressing that she was satisfied with what she’d been able to cross off her bucket list and didn’t want to continue with the periodic chemo treatments, I began trying to change her mind, begging her to just keep holding on. Even though the doctors were still saying that her cancer was incurable, I still had a little shred of hope that maybe they were wrong. Maybe one day the chemo would make my mom’s cancer spontaneously go into remission, or maybe one day a cure or a new treatment would be discovered. We just needed to keep buying time for as long as we possibly could, I felt.
No, my mom told me one day at our house, over mugs of tea at the kitchen table. “I’m tired, Sam. I’m tired. No more chemo. The last round was almost more hell than I could take, and I’m not going to go through it again… not just to buy a few more months of life lived while feeling absolutely terrible.”
“But-”
“No… I’m done, Sam. This cancer can’t ever be cured, and I’m ready to let things take their course. I’m ready to let things take their course while I still feel somewhat in control about it all.”
With that, my mom got up from the table, grabbed her cane, and began shuffling out of the kitchen. The cane was a recent purchase, bought only a couple of weeks earlier to help my mom walk in her rapidly-weakening state. Before the purchase of the cane, she’d sometimes have to walk while gripping countertops for support. Once, I’d entered the kitchen to find her sitting on the floor, saying that she’d just needed “a little rest” while making her way from the table to the sink, which was a distance of about fifteen feet. Seeing her in such a debilitated state, I’d begun crying, having a seat on the floor next to her, but she’d told me to not “waste” my tears on her.
“There are a lot of people who have it a lot worse, you know,” she’d said. “There are kids who get this kind of cancer… and I was blessed to have forty-something good years on earth before it got me.”
My mom’s lack of self-pity was one of the things I’d always admired about her. As a young widow, she hadn’t spent a lot of time feeling sorry for herself, either. “Life’s too short to spend time on that,” I’d heard her tell a friend once. Now it was clear that she hadn’t been wrong at all.
Several hours after she’d firmly told me in the kitchen that she wanted to discontinue her chemo treatments, Irma came over to the house, letting herself in as she always did, which my mom and I had never minded at all. Considering how long the two of them had been best friends, Irma seemed like part of our family, to the point that sometimes I even forgot that she technically wasn’t, at least as far as blood went. She and my mom had met about seventeen years earlier when my mom had started a social club in Fort Wayne for widows with children still at home, and they’d been pretty much inseparable ever since, despite a twelve-year age difference, with Irma being older than my mom. Once they’d even dated a pair of brothers, thrilled with the idea that they might one day become sisters-in-law. However, when their relationships both ended, they’d come to the conclusion that they were “basically sisters” anyway, as Irma said, and that becoming sisters-in-law would just be redundant.
When Irma came tearing into the kitchen, brandishing a rolled-up magazine, I jumped about a mile, startled. Lost in thought about my mom and her decision to end treatment, I’d been slowly stirring a kettle of chicken-and-vegetable stew for dinner, almost in a trance. My mom had been in her room ever since our conversation at the table a few hours earlier, telling me that she just wanted to continue being alone for a while when I’d poked my head in briefly.
I’d barely even said hello to Irma when she slammed the rolled-up magazine on the countertop next to me, eyes sparkling and face flushed. “Look at this, Sam. Just look. Here’s hope. Here’s what we’ve been waiting for.”
Thoroughly confused, I unrolled the magazine and looked at the headline of the article that had gotten Irma so excited. Swiss Doctor’s “Cure” for Rare Blood Cancer: Real Deal or Junk Science?
My heart had begun pounding the moment I’d read the word cure, no matter that it was in quotes, and my heart began beating faster still when I began reading the article, quickly seeing that the “rare blood cancer” mentioned in the headline was the exact form that my mom had. By the time I got to the last paragraph of the short article, my heart was galloping so fast that I felt slightly lightheaded.
When asked about the fact that the clinical trial results of his unorthodox radiation-and-herbs therapy hadn’t yet been peer-reviewed, Dr. Hermann simply stated that that was of little importance to him. “My therapy works, and at this point, my patients’ results should be all the proof of efficacy that is needed. Ninety-five percent of patients I have treated in the past three years have been cured, some for over two years, and these results have been verified by research fellows at Harvard University.” Dr. Hermann added that anyone interested in visiting his clinic for therapy should visit his website.
So excited that I was tripping over my words, I asked Irma to please pull out her phone and look up the website, except I actually asked her to please pull out her website and look up her phone. Not even pausing to laugh or correct me, she grabbed her phone from her pocket, obviously knowing exactly what I’d meant to say anyway.
A few minutes later, the two of us finished a cursory tour of Dr. Hermann’s website, including following a link to a short paper written by a Dr. Christina Bennett, and published in a Harvard medical journal, basically stating that Dr. Hermann’s claim of having discovered a cure was true based on patient results, which Dr. Bennett had verified herself.
Despite this, I sank into a chair at the table, feeling like a balloon that had been popped. “Where on earth will I get two hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars from?”
This was the going rate, cash only, for Dr. Hermann’s “cure” and a five-month stay at his Swiss clinic, which was how long he claimed it took for a patient to be treated.
“Right now, I have about three hundred dollars in my checking and savings combined, and Mom has even less.”
Since I’d been taking care of her, I’d only been able to work part-time, doing secretarial work for a law firm in town for thirteen dollars an hour. And since my mom’s most recent r
ound of chemo, I hadn’t even been able to manage that, taking an indefinite leave of absence from the job because I was scared of leaving my mom home alone in her weakened state.
In response to what I’d asked about how I was supposed to come up with nearly a quarter of a million dollars, Irma suggested we have a spaghetti dinner for charitable donations. “Remember the one we had at my church a few years ago to come up with the money for that special anti-nausea drug that your mom’s insurance refused to cover?”
I did remember. After the expense of the food, that spaghetti dinner had raised about two hundred and eighty dollars, which had been just enough to buy the medication my mom needed, and we’d been incredibly grateful. However, that amount was obviously far short of what Dr. Hermann required for his fee. When I pointed this out, Irma said she realized that, but that we’d just have to have a bigger spaghetti dinner this time.
“We’ll just have to get more churches involved… community groups, too. Maybe we can even buy some radio advertising for the dinner, and-”
“But you know my mom will never go for this. She felt guilty enough with just the first spaghetti dinner. Remember? She said she felt ashamed that a charity dinner was being held for her benefit when it could have been held for a child with cancer, or an ill parent with young kids to raise or something.”
She’d also initially refused to go on the Paris trip when Irma and I had surprised her with the plane tickets. Crying, she’d said that putting the idea on her bucket list had really been “silly” and “selfish” of her, considering that there were sick children in the world. Irma and I had had to do some pretty intense metaphorical arm-twisting before she finally agreed to go on the trip and accept it as a gift from her friends. And this was only after Irma and I had made a not-insignificant donation to the Make-a-Wish Foundation for kids in an effort to assuage my mom’s guilt, using a portion of our spending money for the trip to do it.
In response to what I’d said about my mom never getting onboard with another charity spaghetti dinner, Irma sighed. “Well, all right. Maybe you’re right about that. But, then, where does this leave us?”
I said I had no idea.
We both fell silent.
Irma turned her gaze downcast at the article about Dr. Hermann, frowning, before returning her gaze to my face after a few moments with a sigh. “Well, let’s have a bite of whatever it is you’ve got on the stove while we think. I’m hungry as a bear.”
I said all right and got up to set the table, about to ask Irma if she could go down to my mom’s room and ask her if she felt strong enough to have some dinner up to the table with us. However, before I could, Irma grabbed my arm, big blue eyes wide.
“Sam. Bears. That’s it!”
“What?”
“It’s worth a shot, anyway.”
“What is?”
“Sit back down.”
I did, and Irma went on to ask me if I’d heard about the government program that paid young women a lot of money to marry into various animal shifter groups in the nation in order to produce shifter children.
“The young women have to be what they call ‘gene-positive,’ though, meaning that they have to carry the shifter gene… and not many do.”
Nodding, I said I’d heard about the program. “But what does it have to do with me?”
I couldn’t imagine. As far as I knew, I had no shifter ancestry in my family, so I thought it highly unlikely that I’d turn out to be gene-positive if tested.
Irma answered my question by seeming to read my mind, saying that the National Shifter Mating Program, or NSMP, might have “everything to do with” me, even though I had no shifter ancestry in my family. “See, I’ve heard that some women test gene-positive anyway, probably having some shifter lineage hundreds of years back or something… too far back to trace. And apparently, sometimes the gene still carries itself right on down. This means that there’s at least a small chance that you could have it… and even if it’s only a one-in-a-thousand chance or something like that… well, isn’t a small chance better than no chance? And shouldn’t you get tested just to see? Because if you were to come up as positive… well, maybe you could raise the money for your mom. Maybe you could even meet a wonderful man and start your own family in the process. Lord knows your mom has felt terrible about you basically having to put your life on hold to take care of her while she’s been sick.”
Long story short, I got tested for the gene. And, somewhat unbelievably, I turned up positive for the bear shifter gene. I didn’t just have the gene, though. I had something called the “shifter supergene.” The folks at the NSMP tried to explain it all to me in scientific terms, but never having taken any science classes beyond basic biology in college, I honestly didn’t even understand it all.
Here’s what I did understand. Women possessing the shifter supergene were exceedingly rare, “probably one-in-a-million, literally,” as one of the doctors at the NSMP told me. This made me, and any offspring I produced with a bear shifter, extremely valuable, and not just valuable because all shifter children were valuable, because they’d be crucial to the nation’s continued defense against the Bloodborn shifters in the coming decades. The offspring a “supergene-positive” woman like me produced would be valuable for a different reason, which was that my offspring would be unusually strong. Any baby girls I had would also possess the “supergene” themselves, and any baby boys I produced would become incredibly strong shifters when they reached adulthood. This meant that they’d be crucial “weapons” in the nation’s defense against the Bloodborns.
Another thing I understood was that a “supergene” baby of mine, whether boy or girl, it didn’t matter, was desperately needed by one particular group of bear shifters in the nation right then. The members of this group, who lived some place called Somerset, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, had been injured or something by some biological weapon that the Bloodborn bear shifters had unleashed on them. The maker of the weapon had been killed, but the damage was already done, and now in their weakened state, the bears of the United States Shifter Federation, or USSA, were having great difficulty maintaining their territory and keeping their people safe. However, scientists from the NSMP thought that transfusions of minute amounts of blood from a shifter baby born to a mother possessing the “supergene” could potentially return them all to full strength. A man named Reed Wallace, the leader of the northern USSA bears, had volunteered to impregnate one of the very rare “supergene” women in order to bring a very powerful baby into the world and save his community.
“You won’t even have to marry him or anything if you don’t want to,” a woman from the NSMP told me. “Usually, we require that two people in a Mating Union be married before any payment to the female partner is made, but we’ve decided to leave that part of the deal up to you and Chief Wallace, since he seems to be looking at this chiefly as a business arrangement to help his people.”
Since this was the case, I’d asked if it might be possible for me to just be inseminated, then, but the woman from the NSMP said no.
“See, in the very early days of the program, we tried that with a few couples, but it just didn’t work. One of our scientists could probably explain this better than I can, but it seems that when it comes to shifters mating with human women, even gene-positive ones, the ‘natural’ way of mating works best. Why this is, and why shifter babies aren’t easily created as ‘test-tube’ babies, I’m not sure I could explain properly.”
That was fine. I didn’t think I’d mind having to sleep with a shifter a few times in order to do what I needed to do to possibly save my mom’s life, which was conceive and get paid, which I was beyond eager to do. This was because I was told that I would be paid a cool quarter-million dollars upon becoming pregnant with the child of a bear shifter, payable to me the moment I received a positive pregnancy test administered by a medical professional. I would receive another quarter-million upon live birth of the baby. This was just how much me and my �
�shifter supergene” were worth to the government, and the USSA bears of Somerset.
This was all how I’d come to be standing in front of Chief Reed Wallace in his driveway on a blustery day in late March. This was all how I’d come to meet the man who’d made me “quake” in the way that my great-great-grandma had told me to wait for.
CHAPTER TWO
After I’d nervously blurted out that Reed had “such a nice voice,” my embarrassment was so profound that I could have dug a hole in his driveway right then, jumped in, and buried myself with dirt, never to be seen or heard from again.
He, on the other hand, didn’t seem so much embarrassed by what I’d said as a bit surprised.
For a long moment, he just looked at me with his eyes widening almost imperceptibly. “Well… thank you. You have a very nice voice yourself.”
Feeling as if I were thirteen years old and speaking to a cute boy in the school lunchroom for the first time or something, I truly wanted to sink into the ground.
Mad at myself, my flustered behavior, and my apparent lack of control over my mouth, I mumbled thanks, then changed the subject with my face flaming. “So, should I start carrying my things inside the house, then?”
Having only brought a single suitcase and five medium-sized moving boxes, it didn’t seem like the task would be that hard. And besides, I was currently wanting to do some sort of physical task. I was wanting some sort of physical task that would make my muscles burn, and make me forget all about what I’d just said to Reed. It seemed like making several trips into his house, carrying boxes, might be just the thing.
I’d arrived at his house after a slow drive through the shifter village of Somerset, which was a nicer village than I’d thought it would be for some reason. I didn’t really know what I’d been expecting. Run-down Victorian-style houses and a single run-down gas station, maybe, like some of the little villages in Michigan’s lower peninsula. This wasn’t the case, though. Instead, Somerset boasted a few residential districts, all of them filled with large, well-kept homes that looked like they’d been constructed fairly recently. This really shouldn’t have surprised me, considering that many USSA defense posts in the north of the country had only been established near the end of the Great Shifter War, or after, in order to defend America against the Bloodborn shifters who’d taken over Canada.
