The Clone's Mother

by Cheri Gillard

  “You’re not kidding. I had no idea.”

  “You’re not nauseated anymore?”

  “Now and then. Not bad. Not like before. It was so weird. Sometimes I couldn’t even look a dry cheerio in the face without needing to puke, then it’d just switch off and I could—and did—eat everything. Now I’m almost always fine.”

  “Want me to order something else? Maybe from a bakery, or pastry shop?”

  “Oh no, this is enough. I’m stuffed. In about an hour or so, we can have the ice cream in the freezer.”

  “Maybe. I might not eat again for a week.”

  “You hardly ate anything,” I said. “Maybe a quarter rack, a few beans. Didn’t you get any bread?”

  “You ate it all,” he said. “Don’t worry. I ordered this for you. For you and the baby. It takes a lot of work to eat for two. I can see it’s more like eating for twelve or so.”

  The pillow near my hand just picked right up and flew against his head. I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d tried.

  “Twelve,” I gasped in feigned offence. “Like you’re some expert on what pregnant women should eat.”

  After I finished licking up every last drop from the containers, Mack brought up getting married.

  “Would you like to set a date?”

  “Have you asked Jackie?” I meant it kind of as a joke, but it sounded sarcastic. But he didn’t even notice. He thought I was serious.

  “I think she’ll be okay with it. We’ll look at apartments for her and the baby soon. When that’s taken care of, we can go ahead, I think.”

  I realized I should take what I could get and not be too picky. With Jackie in the picture, that was going to become a way of life.

  “Let’s keep it simple,” I said.

  “Jackie can help. And she’ll realize the need not to take too long, with the baby on the way.”

  “Wait a minute.” I was confused. “She knows? I thought we weren’t going to tell anyone yet.”

  “I didn’t. Just Jackie. Don’t worry about her. She’s safe.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t mention it to someone else?”

  “Yeah,” he said with conviction. “Why?”

  “Sheila knew I was pregnant. Came right out with it. Said she heard it through the grapevine.”

  “That’s too bad. Now if you decide to terminate it, people will know.”

  If he’d slapped me, I wouldn’t have been more surprised. “What do you mean? I’m not having an abortion.”

  “I didn’t think you’d decided for sure. This is a very serious thing.”

  “And I’m very serious. I’m going to have this baby.”

  He raked his fingers through his hair, then rubbed his palm over his face. “But it may be a disaster. You may wish you’d terminated before—

  “I will not do that!”

  He put up his hands in surrender. “I just didn’t want to take anything for granted, that’s all. Don’t get upset.”

  “I thought you understood.”

  “I didn’t know you’d decided for sure.”

  “Yes. For sure,” I snapped. I got up off the floor and planted it on a kitchen chair. My back was rigid, my mouth hard.

  “Okay, then. I wasn’t saying that to upset you.” He tried to follow after me, but the don’t-touch-me look I shot him backed him away.

  I sat there huffing, my arms locked in a tight knot in front of me. Mack looked baffled, and I couldn’t blame him. My emotional outburst was incongruent to the situation. I narrowed my eyes and stared at nothing on the other side of the room.

  “You want to talk about something?” Mack said.

  One emphatic head shake didn’t convince him.

  “I think it might be helpful,” he said.

  For ten minutes, he waited while I sat staring at the wall in silence trying to decide if I’d let my mind go there or not.

  I hadn’t told anyone for a long time. And that had only been one person. Not a lot of practice.

  Finally, I decided to try.

  I stammered and stumbled, taking forever to get it out. Several false starts came and went. My breathing was ragged and quick, my pulse faster. He came to stand next to me. Not too intrusive, but he put a light arm around me. My body was a tree trunk. I didn’t move, even under his touch. I couldn’t.

  Then it finally came out.

  “I had an abortion. Against my will. When I was sixteen.”

  That was the easy part. There was more. It took several minutes to catch my breath and force the words off my tongue.

  “I was raped.”

  He didn’t move. I’m not sure if he was even breathing.

  Then I felt a warm tear splash onto my arm. It wasn’t mine.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” I said. I wanted to get out of the room.

  Mack lifted his arm, still saying nothing.

  When I came back, he was right where I’d left him. His face was so long, it made me wish I hadn’t told him.

  “I better get ready for work.”

  “I’ll stay with you. Please don’t shut me out.”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry. Really, I need to get ready for work.” I even opened the door for him.

  He stepped across the room, looking very worried.

  “Kate,” he started. I knew what was coming. I didn’t want all kinds of emotion. Telling him was probably a mistake. Now he wouldn’t be able to look at me without thinking about it.

  My hand went up to stop his protest. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. It was a long time ago. I have to go to work. And you better get home before Jackie comes looking for you.” The idea of him thinking of me as a rape victim made me nuts. I had to keep him from changing his view of me.

  He left, but not without lots of frowning and delaying.

  What a relief when the door finally shut behind him. I didn’t have to look at those pitiful eyes anymore.

  With him gone, I sank to the floor. I couldn’t hold it together any longer.

  The time had come. I was tired of holding the poisonous snake’s tail. I didn’t want to get any more snake bites. It wasn’t just Howard’s pastor who urged forgiveness. Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims—like nearly everybody—were into forgiveness too. So maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to do.

  I couldn’t make it as though it had never happened, but I could make the guy’s power over me go away. I could forgive him. Take that, you! It wouldn’t mean I was saying it was all right. It wouldn’t mean it would never bother me again. I just wouldn’t have to carry the burden anymore.

  With a thought I’d never planned to have, I decided right there on the floor to give it up, to forgive. I didn’t know really how to accomplish it, but I knew being willing was the biggest step to making it happen. I would say it in my mind and I’d let the rest work out inside me with all my other selves who resided there. They’d know what to do. Eventually, the release would move all the way to my heart. I was going to be free.

  With new hope that something was changing, I pulled myself up off the floor and went to get ready for work.

  Chapter 41

  I put off seeing Mack in the morning when I got off work. I was too uncomfortable. The whole thing seemed rather embarrassing in the light of day.

  To stall, I went to see Anna. She was off the vent and propped up in bed on a truckload of pillows. First time for that. Poor thing looked so thin and frail. And she couldn’t talk yet. But when I came in, she recognized me. Her eyes glimmered.

  “Hi, Anna Banana,” I said, taking a seat next to her. Her head followed me a little. That was a good sign. I took her hand, and she squeezed it without any doubt.

  “How are you feeling?”

  She nodded.

  “Feeling better?”

  She nodded again.

  I talked to her for almost an hour. Toward the end I could tell she was tired. Then her nurse came in and said it was time to lower the bed and rest. She also said Anna would be moving to a different floor
soon. Maybe as early as that afternoon.

  “Does Joe know yet?” I asked.

  “The doctor talked to him this morning on Rounds. Then Mr. McBride went to work. He said he needed to spend a few hours there today.”

  “Ah. I wondered where he was.”

  I kissed Anna, and she made a sound very close to “bye.” Her improvement shed rays of encouragement into my heart.

  After I left Anna, I made myself stop at Mack’s lab before going home. We only talked a few minutes, just enough for me to update him on Anna, before a bunch of official-looking suits arrived with whom Mack needed to spend time about some grant possibilities. He still had a sad look in his eyes when he looked at me. It made me regret all over again making the scene the night before.

  Mack told me with profound apologies that he had to attend to the group and he reluctantly excused himself. He looked even more morose when I walked away, his head turned from the group and his eyes glued to me.

  I left him to his business and went home. On the living room floor, the sauce-stained boxes from our dinner the previous evening still lay scattered about. Ollie was none too happy that I’d left the place in such a state. I reminded him it was the maid’s day off. He frowned knowing we had no maid, so I gave in and promised I’d take care of it.

  The cartons all went into the kitchen trashcan, which was well over-filled already, so I sacked it all up and tied it shut. Something in the bag stank too much to put off disposing, so I took a deep breath and braced myself to face the Dumpster.

  I got the bag into the huge dirty container while I held my breath and let the lid slam back down with a deafening crash, all the while willing my mind not to imagine Charlotte in there, in the dark, with the garbage. Near Carl’s place.

  Instead of racing away in a panic, I made myself sit down under the humming power lines where once Nikki and I’d shared a unique moment in our strange camaraderie. Our paths had crossed briefly then. I’d never thought she’d become so significant in my life. I’d never thought, either, that in spite of coming from different worlds, we could have so very much in common.

  I remained there, letting the wind stir my hair across my face and sensing the low, deep vibration of the electricity surging high over my head and reflecting its power down into the concrete base under me. My mind wandered around different thoughts till I settled on wondering what had become of Nikki. Kids like that disappeared, never to be heard of again. Parents—or grandparents in her case—could only guess the fate of their misguided, yet beloved, dear ones. I wondered if Nikki had heard or read about Charlotte anywhere. And if she had, did she realize that was her baby, the little girl she had given so much for? I had to hope not. If Nikki was alive somewhere, I wanted her to believe her daughter lived on happily, well-loved, secure and safe. She deserved that much comfort in her sad, empty life.

  Those vibrations warming my backside pulled my attention back to the present and the massive wires overhead. Surely that radiation couldn’t be very good for me or the baby. If truly there was any radiation. I’d heard things here and there about those magnetic fields. Things like they could alter cell division, cause cancer. Stuff like that. I didn’t put much stock in the whole thing. There were always urban tree-huggers that were short on trees in the concrete city, so they found other things to stir up trouble about. And I couldn’t really get away from the power lines, living where I did. But I guess I could limit my exposure by not spending hours sitting beneath them like this.

  So I went inside.

  I was hungry, but sleepy too. Ollie voted for shuteye, since he’d only gotten twelve hours of sleep during the last fourteen. His wide yawn convinced me the hunger could wait, so we snuggled into the bed and went to sleep.

  ***

  The phone rang just before noon. I hadn’t turned it off because I wasn’t going into work that night and I didn’t care if Mack called and woke me up.

  It was still ringing when I found the handset under the pile of clothes next to my bed.

  “Hi,” I said in a groggy rasp, falling back into my pillow.

  “Leave the doctor alone.” It was that voice.

  All my Groggy disappeared in a flash. “Who is this?” I hollered into the receiver.

  “You’ll be sorry.”

  And it was gone. Dead air.

  I tried the star sixty-nine trick I’d read about online for calling back a caller. But it didn’t work. The phone just clicked and went dead again. I must not have done it right.

  I pressed the button to hang up the phone, my heart still quivering at the intrusion from the creepy voice.

  Then it rang again. My heart squeezed so tight it must have been wrung out like a dry sponge.

  I punched the button and threw it on my ear. “You can’t scare me,” I screamed into the phone.

  Yeah, right. Can’t scare me. I was petrified. “Who the hell are you?” I demanded.

  A long pause. He didn’t hang up this time.

  “What’s wrong?” Mack said.

  Oops.

  “I thought you were a wrong number.”

  “You yell at your wrong numbers like that?”

  I didn’t want to tell him. He didn’t believe me about Carl anyway. He’d think I was exaggerating.

  “It woke me up. I was still dreaming. Disoriented. How are you?”

  Silence. It took a while for him to answer. Maybe he didn’t believe me. Maybe he thought I was nuts.

  “I called to see if you’d like to go look at wedding rings. My afternoon meeting was cancelled and I feel like getting out of the hospital.”

  It was probably a good idea. It would give him a chance to see I was fine and he didn’t need to be sad about what I’d told him. Besides, since I was forgiving the guy, it was going to be all behind me soon.

  An hour later, he picked me up. He didn’t give me the pathetic gaze I was afraid of. It was a relief. He acted like nothing was different. We could go on with our lives. Phew.

  As we walked to his car, he said, “I need to stop by my place for a minute to change. A beaker broke and it looks like I wet my pants.”

  See. Completely normal, matter-of-fact.

  “Sure,” I said, more than ready to forget I ever told him anything.

  We stopped by his condo. I prepared myself to encounter Jackie. I didn’t relish the confrontation. She had an uncanny knack for always making it painful for me. But I did need practice enduring these meetings. There were most certainly many to come in my future as Mack’s wife.

  When we walked in the door, only silence greeted us. We knew Jackie couldn’t be far because her baby was asleep in the playpen where she always stayed. Mack figured Jackie was napping, so he slipped into his room to change and I sat at the dining table to wait. Maybe I’d be lucky enough to get in and out of the place without even seeing her.

  I drummed my fingers on the table, quietly humming to myself, looking around. The last time I’d been at Mack’s condo, I hadn’t bothered to look at his decor. It was a nice place. Big open living-room with an attached dining area. The kitchen was off the dining room behind a closed, swinging door. Off the living room on one side was Jackie’s room. The opposite end of the living room, past the dining room and down a short hallway, was the bathroom, then Mack’s room.

  He had incredibly expensive-looking, stylish furniture. The sofa was a dark leather sectional with coordinating chairs. The coffee and end tables were clearly solid oak. A matching sleek entertainment center held all kinds of electronic audio equipment. Above it on the wall was mounted a pretty good-sized television. And lots of books filled in the side shelves.

  No knickknacks. Very bachelor.

  I looked at the dining table where my fingers thrummed. Under my hand lay a pile of files, notebooks, and an inter-departmental correspondence envelope. One of those big yellow kinds with the holes in them to show if they’re empty or not. It was from the hospital. And I could see there was a chart inside.

  Now this seemed odd. Charts
weren’t supposed to leave the hospital premises. Even with the intermittently-working computer system, the paper copies we had to resort to weren’t supposed to go out any more than we could email charts around or post them to Facebook. That broke all kinds of HIPAA rules. Only copies of certain documents could even be printed out and only for official, authorized uses. Those could be signed out for short periods of time in certain circumstances if you had M.D. after your name and a patient’s signature.

  My curiosity overcame me and my hand lifted up the flap of the envelope before I could tell it not to. And the other hand, which was a co-conspirator, reached in and pulled the contents out. My eyes couldn’t help but look at it. It was right there in plain view.

  In the corner where the blue ID stamp was, I read the name of whose paperwork this was.

  I’d found Nichole Trent’s missing chart.

  When Mack came back in, I jumped so high, my knees whacked against the underside of the table. Just like one of those ring-the-bell-with-the-hammer games at the carnival.

  “Sorry,” Mack whispered. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Ready to go?”

  I stared at him.

  “What?” He checked his fly.

  “What’s this doing here?”

  “What is it?”

  “This,” I said, as if that said it all.

  He walked over and took it, not saying a word. He flipped through the pages. “I don’t know,” he said. “How’d this get here?”

  Sounds of water running from Jackie’s room flushed through the pipes in the wall. Mack kept thumbing through the chart while we waited for Jackie to appear in the room.

  Her door opened and she wheeled her chair into the living room. She put on a smile for Mack. She ignored me.

  “I didn’t hear you come in, Jim.”

  “Look what Kate found,” he said.

  “Looks like one of your charts.”

  “I wonder how it got here.”

  “You brought it home yesterday, didn’t you?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “You must’ve forgotten. It was right there with all your things, wasn’t it?”

  “I think I would have remembered.”