Mutation

by Robin Cook

  “I don’t know,” said Victor, bringing the car to a stop at the front door. “Maybe say he wanted to grow up and become a doctor like his old man.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” said Marsha, opening the passenger-side door.

  Victor jumped out to help her. It was a beautiful, crystal-clear October day, filled with bright sunshine. Behind the house the trees had turned a brilliant profusion of fall colors; scarlet maples, orange oaks and yellow birches all competed with their beauty. As they came up the walk the front door opened and Janice Fay, their live-in nanny, ran down the front steps.

  “Let me see him,” she begged, stopping short in front of Marsha. Her hand went to her mouth in admiration.

  “What do you think?” Victor asked.

  “He’s angelic!” Janice said. “He’s gorgeous, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen such blue eyes.” She held out her arms. “Let me hold him.” Gently she took the child from Marsha and rocked him back and forth. “I certainly didn’t expect blond hair.”

  “We didn’t either,” Marsha said. “We thought we’d surprise you like he surprised us. But it comes from my side of the family.”

  “Oh sure,” kidded Victor. “There were a lot of blonds with Genghis Khan.”

  “Where’s David?” asked Marsha.

  “Back in the house,” said Janice without taking her eyes from VJ’s face.

  “David!” Marsha called.

  The little boy appeared at the doorway, holding one of his previously discarded teddy bears. He was a slight child of five with dark, curly hair.

  “Come out here and see your new brother.”

  Dutifully David walked out to the cooing group.

  Janice bent down and showed the newborn to his brother. David looked at the infant and wrinkled his nose. “He smells bad.”

  Victor chuckled, but Marsha kissed him, saying that when VJ was a little older he’d smell nice like David.

  Marsha took VJ back from the nanny and started into the house. Janice sighed. It was such a happy day. She loved newborn babies. She felt David take her hand. She looked down at the boy. He had his head tilted up toward hers.

  “I wish the baby hadn’t come,” he said.

  “Shush now,” said Janice gently, hugging David to her side. “That’s not a nice way to act. He’s just a tiny baby and you are a big boy.”

  Hand in hand, they entered the house just as Marsha and Victor were disappearing into the newly decorated baby’s room at the top of the stairs. Janice took David into the kitchen where she had started dinner preparation. He climbed up onto one of the kitchen chairs, placing the teddy bear on the one just opposite. Janice went back to the sink.

  “Do you love me more or the baby?”

  Janice quickly put down the vegetables she was rinsing and picked David up in her arms. She leaned her forehead on his and said: “I love you more than anybody in the whole world.” Then she hugged him forcefully. David hugged her back.

  Neither realized that they only had a few more years to live.

  1

  March 19, 1989

  Sunday, Late Afternoon

  LONG, lacy shadows from the leafless maple trees lining the driveway inched across the broad cobblestone courtyard that separated the sprawling white colonial mansion from the barn. A wind had sprung up as the dusk approached, moving the shadows in undulating patterns and making them look like giant spiderwebs. Despite the fact it was almost officially spring, winter still gripped the land in North Andover, Massachusetts.

  Marsha stood at the sink in the large country kitchen, staring out at the garden and the fading light. A movement by the driveway caught her eye, and she turned to see VJ peddling home on his bicycle.

  For a second, she felt her breath catch in her throat. Since David’s death nearly five years ago, she never took her family for granted. She would never forget the terrible day the doctor told her that the boy’s jaundice was due to cancer. His face, yellow and wizened from the disease, was etched on her heart. She could still feel his small body clinging to her just before he died. She had been certain he had been trying to tell her something, but all she’d heard was his uneasy gasps as he tried to hold on to life.

  Nothing had really been the same since then. And things got even worse just a year later. Marsha’s extreme concern for VJ stemmed partly from the loss of David, and partly from the terrible circumstances surrounding Janice’s death only a year after his. Both had contracted an extremely rare form of liver cancer, and despite assurances that the two cancers were in no way contagious, Marsha couldn’t shake the fear that lightning, having struck twice, might flash a third time.

  Janice’s death was all the more memorable because it had been so gruesome.

  It had been in the fall, just after VJ’s birthday. Leaves were falling from the trees, an autumn chill was in the air. Even before she got sick, Janice had been behaving strangely for some time, only willing to eat food that she prepared herself and which came from unopened containers. She’d become fiercely religious, embracing a particularly fanatic strain of born-again Christianity. Marsha and Victor might not have put up with her had she not become practically one of the family in the many years she’d worked for them.

  During David’s final, critical months, she’d been a godsend. But soon after David’s passing, Janice started carrying her Bible everywhere, pressing it to her chest as if it might shield her from unspeakable ills. She’d only put it aside to do her chores, and then reluctantly. On top of that, she’d become sullen and withdrawn, and would lock herself in her room at night.

  What was worse was the attitude that she’d developed toward VJ. Suddenly she’d refused to have anything to do with the boy, who was five at the time. Even though VJ was an exceptionally independent child, there were still times when Janice’s cooperation was needed, but she refused to help. Marsha had had several talks with her, but to no avail. Janice persisted in shunning him. When pressed, she’d rave about the devil in their midst and other religious nonsense.

  Marsha was at her wits’ end when Janice got sick. Victor had been the first to notice how yellow her eyes had become. He brought it to Marsha’s attention. With horror, Marsha realized Janice’s eyes had the same jaundiced cast that David’s had had. Victor rushed Janice to Boston so that her condition could be evaluated. Even with her yellow eyes, the diagnosis had come as a tremendous shock: she had liver cancer of the same particularly virulent type that David had died of.

  Having two cases of such a rare form of liver cancer in the same household within a year prompted extensive epidemiological investigations. But the results had all been negative. There was no environmental hazard present. The computers determined that the two cases were simply rare chance occurrences.

  At least the diagnosis of liver cancer helped explain Janice’s bizarre behavior. The doctors felt she might have already suffered brain metastasis. Once she was diagnosed, her downhill course proved swift and merciless. She’d rapidly lost weight despite therapy, became skin and bones within two weeks. But it had been the last day before she’d gone to the hospital to die that had been most traumatic.

  Victor had just arrived home and was in the bathroom off the family room. Marsha was in the kitchen preparing dinner, when the house had reverberated with a blood-chilling scream.

  Victor shot out of the bathroom. “What in God’s name was that?” he yelled.

  “It came from Janice’s room,” said Marsha, who’d turned very pale.

  Marsha and Victor exchanged a knowing, fateful glance. Then they dashed out to the garage and up the narrow stairs to Janice’s separate studio apartment.

  Before they reached her room, a second scream shattered the silence. Its primeval force seemed to rattle the windows.

  Victor reached the room first with Marsha on his heels.

  Janice was standing in the middle of her bed, clutching her Bible. She was a sorry sight. Her hair, which had become brittle, stood straight out from her head, giving her a d
emonic appearance. Her face was hollow, her jaundiced skin stretched tautly across her all-too-visible bones. Her eyes were like yellow neon lights and they were transfixed.

  For an instant, Marsha was mesmerized by this vision of Janice as a harpy. Then she followed the woman’s line of sight. Standing in the doorway to Janice’s rear entry was VJ. He didn’t even blink but calmly returned Janice’s stare with one of his own.

  Marsha immediately surmised what had happened: VJ had innocently come up Janice’s back stairs, apparently frightening her. In her illness-induced psychosis, Janice had screamed her terrible scream.

  “He is the devil!” Janice snarled through clenched teeth. “He is a murderer! Get him away from me!”

  “You try to calm Janice,” Marsha shouted, running for VJ. She scooped the six-year-old up into her arms, and retreated down the stairs, rushing him into the family room and kicking the door shut behind her. She pressed VJ’s head against her chest, thinking how stupid she’d been to keep the crazed woman at home.

  Finally Marsha released VJ from her bear hug. VJ pushed away from her and looked up at her with his crystal eyes.

  “Janice doesn’t mean what she said,” Marsha told him. She hoped this awful moment would have no lasting effect.

  “I know,” VJ said with amazingly adult maturity. “She’s very sick. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

  Since that day, Marsha could never relax and enjoy her life as she had before. If she did she was afraid God might strike again and if anything happened to VJ, she didn’t think she could bear the loss.

  As a child psychiatrist, she knew she could not expect her child to develop in a certain way, but she often found herself wishing VJ were a more openly affectionate child. Since he had been an infant he had been unnaturally independent. He would occasionally let her hug him, but sometimes she longed for him to climb onto her lap and cuddle the way David had.

  Now, watching him get off his bike, she wondered if VJ was as self-absorbed as he sometimes appeared. She waved to get his attention but he didn’t look up as he snapped off the saddlebags, letting them fall to the cobblestones. Then he pushed open the barn door and disappeared from sight as he parked his bike for the night. When he reappeared he picked up the saddlebags and started toward the house. Marsha waved again, but although he was walking directly toward her he did not respond. He had his chin pressed down against the cold wind that constantly funneled through the courtyard.

  She started to knock on the window, then dropped her hand. Lately she had this terrible premonition there was something wrong with the boy. God knows she couldn’t have loved him more if she’d delivered him herself, but sometimes she feared he was unnaturally cold and unfeeling. Genetically he was her own son, but he had none of the warmth and carefree ways she remembered in herself as a child. Before going to sleep she was often obsessed with the thought that being conceived in a petri dish had somehow frozen his emotions. She knew it was a ridiculous idea, but it kept returning.

  Shaking off her thoughts, she called, “VJ’s home,” to Victor, who was reading in front of a crackling fire in the family room next to the kitchen. Victor grunted but didn’t look up.

  The sound of the back door slamming heralded VJ’s entrance into the house. Marsha could hear him taking off his coat and boots in the mud room. Within minutes he appeared at the doorway to the kitchen. He was a handsome boy, about five feet tall, somewhat large for a ten-year-old. His golden blond hair had not darkened like Marsha’s had, and his face had retained its angelic character. And just like the day he was born, his most distinctive feature remained his ice-blue eyes. For as cherubic as he seemed, those intense eyes hinted at an intelligence wiser than his years.

  “All right, young man,” Marsha scolded in mock irritation. “You know you are not supposed to be out on your bike after dark.”

  “But it’s not dark yet,” VJ said defensively in his clear, soprano voice. Then he realized his mother was joking. “I’ve been at Richie’s,” he added. He put his saddlebags down and came over to the sink.

  “That’s nice,” Marsha said, obviously pleased. “Why didn’t you call? Then you could have stayed as long as you liked. I’d have been happy to come and get you.”

  “I wanted to come home anyway,” VJ said as he picked up one of the carrots Marsha had just cleaned. He took a noisy bite.

  Marsha put her arms around VJ and gave him a squeeze, aware of the strength in his wiry young body. “Since you have no school this week I’d have thought you would have wanted to stay with Richie and have some fun.”

  “Nah,” VJ said as he wormed his way out of his mother’s grasp.

  “Are you worrying your mother again?” Victor asked in a teasing tone. He appeared at the doorway to the family room, holding an open scientific journal, his reading glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose.

  Ignoring Victor, Marsha asked, “What about this week? Did you make some plans with Richie?”

  “Nope. I’m planning on spending the week with Dad at the lab. If that’s okay, Dad?” VJ moved his eyes to his father.

  “Fine by me as usual,” Victor said with a shrug.

  “Why in heaven’s name do you want to go to the lab?” Marsha asked. But it was a rhetorical question. She didn’t expect an answer. VJ had been going to the lab with his father since he’d been an infant. First to take advantage of the superb day-care services offered at Chimera, Inc., and later to play in the lab itself. It had become a routine, even more so after Janice Fay had died.

  “Why don’t you call up some of your friends from school, and you and Richie and a whole group do something exciting?”

  “Let him be,” Victor said, coming to VJ’s assistance. “If VJ wants to come with me, that’s fine.”

  “Okay, okay,” Marsha said, knowing when she was outnumbered. “Dinner will be around eight,” she said to VJ, giving his bottom a playful slap.

  VJ picked up the saddlebags he’d parked on the chair next to the phone and headed up the back stairs. The old wooden risers creaked under his seventy-four-pound frame. VJ went directly to the second-floor den. It was a cozy room paneled in mahogany. Sitting down at his father’s computer, he booted up the machine. He listened intently for a moment to make sure his parents were still talking in the kitchen and then went through an involved procedure to call up a file he’d named STATUS. The screen blinked, then filled with data. Zipping open each saddlebag in turn, VJ stared at the contents and made some rapid calculations, then entered a series of numbers into the computer. It took him only a few moments.

  After completing the entry, VJ exited from STATUS, zipped up the saddlebags, and called up Pac-Man. A smile spread across his face as the yellow ball moved through the maze, gobbling up its prey.

  Marsha shook the water from her hands, then dried them on the towel hanging from the refrigerator handle. She couldn’t get her growing concern for VJ out of her mind. He wasn’t a difficult child; there certainly weren’t any complaints from teachers at school, yet tough as it was to put her finger on it, Marsha was increasingly certain something was wrong. It was time she brought it up. Picking up Kissa, their Russian Blue cat who’d been doing figure eights around her legs, Marsha walked into the family room where Victor was sprawled on the gingham couch, perusing the latest journals as was his habit after work.

  “Can I talk to you for a moment?” Marsha asked.

  Victor lowered his magazine cautiously, peering at Marsha over the tops of his reading glasses. At forty-three, he was a slightly built, wiry man with dark wavy, academically unkempt hair and sharp features. He’d been a reasonably good squash player in college and still played three times a week. Chimera, Inc., had its own squash courts, thanks to Victor.

  “I’m worried about VJ,” Marsha said as she sat down on the wing chair next to the couch, still petting Kissa, who was momentarily content to remain on her lap.

  “Oh?” said Victor, somewhat surprised. “Something wrong?”

 
“Not exactly,” Marsha admitted. “It’s a number of little things. Like it bothers me that he has so few friends. A few moments ago when he said he’d been with this Richie boy, I was so pleased, like it was an accomplishment. But now he says he doesn’t want to spend any time with him over his spring break. A child VJ’s age needs to be with other kids. It’s an important part of normal latency development.”

  Victor gave Marsha one of his looks. She knew he hated this kind of psychological discussion, even if psychiatry was her field. He didn’t have the patience for it. Besides, talk of any problems related to VJ’s development had always seemed to fuel anxieties Victor preferred not to fire. He sighed, but didn’t speak.

  “Doesn’t it worry you?” Marsha persisted when it was apparent Victor wasn’t about to say anything. She stroked the cat, who took the attention as if it were a burden.

  Victor shook his head. “Nope. I think VJ is one of the best-adapted kids I’ve ever met. What’s for dinner?”

  “Victor!” Marsha said sharply. “This is important.”

  “All right, all right!” Victor said, closing his magazine.

  “I mean, he gets along fine with adults,” Marsha continued, “but he never seems to spend time with kids his own age.”

  “He’s with kids his own age at school,” Victor said.

  “I know,” Marsha admitted. “But that’s so highly structured.”

  “To tell the truth,” Victor said, knowing he was being deliberately cruel, but given his own anxiety about VJ—anxiety very different from his wife’s—he couldn’t bear to stay on the subject, “I think you’re just being neurotic. VJ’s a great kid. There’s nothing wrong with him. I think you’re still reacting to David’s death.” He winced inwardly as he said this, but there was no getting around it: the best defense was an offense.

  The comment hit Marsha like an open-hand slap. Emotion bubbled up instantly. Blinking back tears, she forced herself to continue. “There are other things besides his apparent lack of friends. He never seems to need anyone or anything. When we bought Kissa we told VJ it was to be his cat, but he’s never given her a second glance. And since you’ve brought up David’s death, do you think it normal that VJ has never mentioned his name? When we told him about David he acted as if we’d been talking about a stranger.”