by John Darnton
Promoted in Eagleton's place was a relatively unknown agent, Edward Brantley. Shortly before taking over, Brantley himself traveled to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, where a five-year-old boy who bore a certain physical resemblance to Eagleton was living. From a list of schools for him to eventually attend, Brantley chose Phillips Andover Academy—whether as a reward or punishment was hard to tell.
The FBI cleaned up Crab Island. All the children who had been abandoned on the Nursery died, but a handful of healthy ones survived. The coincidence of so many victims of progeria provided a major boost in research on the disease, culminating in a major conference at Berkeley at which several important papers were delivered.
Baptiste—whose real name turned out to be Henry Burne—fell into a coma and expired two weeks after the mass arrests at Fort Stewart. Once the case was closed, Jude was given partial access to the FBI file based upon debriefing of the Lab members and learned all about him, including his early years as the son of a Bible-pounding fundamentalist preacher. Jude also learned that Burne was the driver of the car that had killed his father and left the scene of the accident. This tidbit came from someone close to Baptiste who had become an informant—the Gullah cook, who, it turned out, had been primed by Kuta to keep a watchful eye over Skyler.
Jude never did find out a great deal about his mother, and what he did learn showed how wrong he had been about her. The original members of the Lab, before dying, insisted that she had loved Jude's father very much. It had not been an arranged marriage; they had met years ago at school. Why she had been expelled from Harvard Medical School—it had been Harvard, after all—when she'd gone by the name of Grace Connir was never determined; the records had been lost. Half a year ago, while playing Scrabble, he suddenly realized that Rincon was an anagram of her earlier surname.
The medical records, notebooks and descriptions of the W experiments were all classified and remained in possession of a special unit set up by the National Institutes of Health and the National Security Agency.
As for Tizzie and Skyler, Jude saw them whenever they came to New York from Raleigh, North Carolina. She did research there at the Duke University Hospital, and Skyler was going for his B.A., studying social work—he was interested in working with the homeless. When they'd gotten married a year ago, Jude had, of course, been best man, and the wedding had attracted people from around the country who had grown up on Crab Island. Since then, Tizzie had written to Jude once a week or so. Her last letter had told him she was pregnant.
Skyler had been lucky when it came to his health. Because he had received injections of telomerase instead of gene therapy to keep producing it, his version of the aging disease had been less severe. He needed to continue taking heart medicine and to watch for atherosclerotic heart disease. Replacing his blood supply had been only a temporary measure, of course. What he'd needed was a new kidney; his had been damaged by their heroic attempts to flush the pathogens out of his system. Jude could hardly have refused, and the donation had constituted, as he'd joked with Skyler afterward, a certain poetic irony. The operation had not been as difficult as he had imagined, but the recovery had been long. At least, he had been forced to cut back on booze and to give up smoking once and for all.
Jude admitted that sometimes, when the days were long and slow and hot, he thought of Tizzie and what might have been. What if the cards had been shuffled differently? He wondered sometimes if he would have loved the other one—Julia—and if she would have loved him in return. Life, as he had certainly learned, was strange. You spot someone in your entryway one evening, and it can change you forever.
But he was not unhappy. Nor was he totally alone. One of the handful of young clones to survive the Nursery had turned out to be his own—after all, the boy had not been a candidate for the telomerase treatment, since Jude had not been a Lab member in good standing. Meeting him for the first time at JFK airport, this little, lost-looking lad holding the hand of a hulking FBI agent was a memory he would take with him to the grave.
So now he came home in the evening, on the 6:40 or the 7:20, to a housekeeper and a young boy, Harold, named after Jude's father. When he picked him up at school after Saturday soccer practice, or attended a third-grade play, people said the boy looked amazingly like him. A real chip off the old block. Who knew what would eventually happen? Jude didn't think about it. Maybe when the boy reached the age of twenty-one, he'd go off on his own. Maybe he'd get it right for both of them.
In the meantime, he loved his company. Their life together was almost cozy and suburban-perfect. Except for Sundays, when they went to the institution in order to visit the little girl—if that's what she could be called—the huge one who was kept in a separate room, because her presence made all the other orphans cry.
Acknowledgments
Many people contributed advice, support or the fruits of their research to this book, some knowingly and others unknowingly. Among them, I would like to thank personally:
Dr. Keith Campbell of the Roslin Institute, the co-creator of Dolly, for patiently explaining cloning procedures.
Steve Jones, author and Professor of Genetics at the Galton Laboratory at University College London, for his inspiring ideas.
Jason Carmel, medical student, for his superb and indefatigable research in cloning, DNA, telomere work, autopsies and aging.
Arthur Kopit for his friendship and editorial contributions and suggestions.
Doctors Paul Skolnick, Daniel Lieberman and Stephen Ludwig for generously sharing their medical knowledge.
Malcolm Gladwell and Lawrence Wright for articles in The New Yorker that provided essential material, and Gina Kolata, science reporter for The New York Times, for the material in her ground-breaking book, Clone.
Larry Lieberman and Trisha Harper for on-the-ground reporting in Arizona.
Gilly and Harry Leventis for providing gracious company and contemplative lodgings in Barbados.
Catherine Mullally for material on the Gullah culture.
Stephanie Hughley for her travel advice and Nancy and Caesar Banks for putting me up at their homey Weekender Lodge on Sapelo Island, Ga.
Linda Lake, researcher at The New York Times, for her assistance.
Joe Lelyveld, executive director of The New York Times, for alowing me to take a leave, and Martin Gottlieb, deputy culture editor, for enabling me to do so.
Peter and Susan Osnos for their sage counseling.
Kathy Robbins, my agent, for her always invaluable advice and editorial comments.
Neil Nyren, editor extraordinare at Penguin Putnam Inc., for his sure hand and nimble mind in editing the manuscript.
Liza Darnton for her sensitive note-filled reading.
And, of course, Nina Darnton for providing absolutely everything, from plot and character suggestions to editorial changes to physical and spiritual sustenance.
