Double Helix

by Nancy Werlin

  I said abruptly, “My mother had Huntington’s disease. And I don’t. I know I don’t; I saw the letter with the test results. What I don’t know is why. Because it’s not just that I got lucky in the genetic lottery, is it? My father said something . . . I never was at risk—right?”

  “No,” said Dr. Wyatt steadily. “You were not at risk, ever. I made sure of that—with your mother.”

  We looked at each other straight on. “Tell me,” I said. “Tell me how.”

  Dr. Wyatt’s cheeks had taken on a rosy cast. “Well, I have to confess that I’m still proud of myself, because this was nearly two decades ago. But—oh, I’ll be as concise as possible, and we can discuss the science of it later on, eh?”

  I managed to nod.

  “You don’t have Huntington’s because your mother came to me for help. We’d met casually at Harvard, where I was doing a series of guest lectures one semester. This was before actual HD testing was available, but Ava told me that she knew she was at risk. And that she wanted a child anyway—a healthy child.”

  I hardly dared to breathe.

  “We’d known the location of the genetic marker for HD since 1983,” Dr. Wyatt went on. “But even though there was as yet no way to test Ava directly, and wouldn’t be for years, she asked if I might be able to spot the HD marker on an egg.” He leaned forward intently. “I didn’t realize at the time that it was a question that would change the course of my intellectual life. But I did know I was intrigued. It was all highly, er, irregular, but I wanted to try. I couldn’t resist trying!

  “So. The idea was that Ava would undergo hormone therapy to produce a clutch of eggs. I would harvest them from her—very standard fertility treatment—and then see if I could isolate some viable eggs that definitely did not have HD. Then, with your father’s cooperation, we could fertilize and implant those healthy embryos in your mother’s uterus and hope at least one developed normally.”

  “Me.” The word escaped from me.

  “You,” Dr. Wyatt confirmed. He smiled. “Simple,” he said. “And—if I do say so myself—elegant.”

  CHAPTER 30

  I COULD FEEL THAT MY MOUTH had dropped open. Despite the fact that this story involved me personally, my brain stirred with pure intellectual interest. It did sound simple. But then—especially if this had been possible and perfectible twenty years ago—why didn’t everybody do it? “Was this legal?” I asked.

  A look of impatience crossed Dr. Wyatt’s face. “What a stupid thing to focus on, Eli. I thought you’d be interested in the science here—once you got past wallowing in the personal revelations, of course.

  “I have no idea if we violated some minor law—nor do I care. This was twenty years ago. If you’re asking about medical competence, I have an MD as well as a PhD. While certainly I wasn’t operating a licensed fertility clinic, I knew precisely what I was attempting to do, my technique was impeccable, and there was no danger to Ava. I also knew—as did Ava—that no ordinary clinic could have helped her. None of them had my specialized knowledge or expertise. Or—may I add—daring.”

  “Oh,” I said uncertainly.

  Dr. Wyatt wasn’t through. His stare bored into me. “Moreover, it was a private matter. How a couple chooses to go about having a baby—or indeed, in the future, chooses the genetic makeup of that baby—should be entirely their own business and their own choice. Not the government’s. Don’t you agree with that? Eli?”

  It did sound sensible and correct. “Yes. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. All of this is a lot to absorb.”

  “Well, take your time.” Dr. Wyatt leaned toward me, his right wrist resting heedlessly on the broken arm of the chair. “Anything else you want to know? Ask me the important questions, the scientific questions. Come on.”

  One thing was pressing at me urgently, though I doubted that it was the kind of question Dr. Wyatt meant when he said “important” and “scientific.” It probably fit under “wallowing in personal revelations.” Dr. Wyatt had mentioned my father’s “cooperation.” But my father was angry at Dr. Wyatt . . .

  I understood the basic workings of in vitro fertilization; we used it with the rabbits. The unfertilized eggs were removed from the female, and were then fertilized in the lab using donor sperm—

  “Eli ?” Dr. Wyatt prompted. “I know you have good questions.”

  I did—but they weren’t scientific. What would my father say when I went home and told him what I’d learned? Why did my father hate Dr. Wyatt so much, if Dr. Wyatt had helped him and my mother have me, their much-desired HD-negative child? Would my father finally tell me everything he knew once he learned how much I had put together myself?

  Did I now want him to?

  “Eli.” Impatience now. “Come on.”

  “Kayla,” I said aloud. “You said Kayla and I have some shared DNA—my mother’s DNA, right?”

  Dr. Wyatt nodded. “Yes.”

  “How did that happen?”

  Dr. Wyatt was smiling again. “You tell me about Kayla. You have the ability to figure it out.” He was acting as if this were some kind of test he knew I could pass, and once more I found I wanted to prove myself to him, to please him.

  But I wasn’t sure I could figure this out.

  “I don’t understand about Kayla,” I said slowly. “Because she’s a little older than I am. If she—if the egg that became Kayla was . . . was viable, why go on to have me?” And as I uttered that question, others crowded up in my brain after it: Why did Kayla have different parents, the Mathesons? Was Mrs. Matheson a surrogate mother, or an adoptive mother? Who was Kayla’s genetic father—or was that somehow not relevant? Dr. Wyatt had said Kayla and I shared genetic material; he hadn’t said we were siblings.

  “It took a while to get everything working properly,” Dr. Wyatt was explaining. “Several cycles of eggs, as I recall, before I succeeded with you. Kayla’s egg was from an earlier cycle.”

  It wasn’t an answer to my question. Or was it? I tried to remember all I knew, from the rabbits, about in vitro fertilization.

  “Not all eggs can be successfully fertilized,” I said. “And not all fertilized eggs grow successfully, either in the lab or later, after they’ve been implanted.”

  Dr. Wyatt was smiling encouragingly again, like the mentor I’d hoped he would be. “And why is that?”

  “Sometimes cells don’t divide properly, or at all. So, you can produce a number of eggs in an in vitro cycle, but you have no guarantee any of them will become babies—um, that is, viable embryos.”

  “That’s right,” said Dr. Wyatt approvingly. “There are usually waste products along the way.”

  I winced, hearing that, though upstairs in Larry’s lab, and in the textbooks I’d read, I’d just taken the term for granted. But we were talking about my mother’s eggs, my potential sisters and brothers.

  Waste products.

  “But Kayla . . . that is, the fertilized egg that became Kayla—obviously that must have been viable,” I said. “She exists. So how come she—” It sounded ridiculous, but I said it anyway. “How come she isn’t me? Isn’t leading my life, I mean? How come I exist at all?”

  The more I thought about it, the stranger it all seemed. I stared at Dr. Wyatt. “You didn’t really answer me before. You said Kayla wasn’t my sister, that we had some shared DNA. But she did come from one of my mother’s eggs, right?”

  “Right,” said Dr. Wyatt.

  “Then I don’t understand,” I said flatly. “Is she my sister, or half sister—or isn’t she?”

  Dr. Wyatt sighed, but his eyes were almost twinkling with excitement as he watched me. “Think like a scientist, Eli. A geneticist. What are the possibilities here? Try listing them in your mind.”

  I tried. Gene transfers . . . surrogate mothers . . . gene defects that weren’t fatal . . . fertilization . . .

  And then I felt myself go cold and still, deep inside, as I realized that this line of reasoning took me inexorably back to the question of my fat
her. Maybe it wouldn’t have taken a scientist there, but I wasn’t a scientist—at least, not yet. I could think of a reason why the egg that became Kayla might not have been acceptable: if the sperm donor were not my father. And that possibility took me to questions concerning my mother and this alliance of hers with Dr. Wyatt . . . The questions spiraled away from me in an endless helix that resembled not at all the structured, ordered beauty of DNA.

  I thought: I have to talk to my dad. I cannot continue this conversation until I have talked to him. I have betrayed him by coming to Dr. Wyatt first. He deserves better from me. I have betrayed him.

  And like a miracle, at that moment, my cell phone rang. It trilled out shrilly from my backpack. “Mine,” I said foolishly to Dr. Wyatt. I scrabbled for it.

  “Let it take a message,” said Dr. Wyatt, but I ignored him and looked at the face of the phone, where the caller was identified : It was Viv. “It’s my dad,” I lied. “I have to take it. Sorry. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “But this is important—”

  “Sorry!” I said. I bolted for the door of the office, grabbing the handle, practically racing to get out. And once I was outside, once I was halfway down the corridor, once I was away, away, I pressed the button on the phone that would connect me to Viv. Hearing her voice in my ear was so wonderful that at first I couldn’t focus on what exactly she was saying. “Could you repeat that?” I asked.

  “I’m just outside city hall,” Viv said patiently. “I found the architect’s plans, no problem. I even got copies for you to look at later.”

  I had forgotten that I’d sent Viv to look at the building plans for Wyatt Transgenics. I exhaled. It seemed so minor now, that I’d been curious about a discrepancy in buttons on elevators. But Viv did have the information. “How many basement levels do the plans specify?” I asked.

  “Four.”

  My stride had taken me some distance. I was on the mezzanine. I lowered my voice. “Throughout the entire building? Not four in the east wing and, say, five in the west? You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” said Viv. “Only four.”

  CHAPTER 31

  I LEFT WYATT TRANSGENICS bare minutes later via the front door. As I walked away from the building, I called the lab on my cell phone and recorded a message for Mary Alice. I knew she would be okay with my not coming in; both she and Larry had told me to take all the time off I needed.

  As I walked home, I thought obsessively about Kayla. How much did she know about her own origins? Did she know that she and I had—Dr. Wyatt’s phrase—shared DNA? I couldn’t wrap my mind around that, though. To me it seemed clear that our relationship was simpler: We had the same biological mother.

  Right? Wrong?

  Think like a geneticist, Dr. Wyatt had said.

  Larry, on my very first day at work: You know what “transgenic” means? It’s when an organism is altered by having a gene from another species transferred into it.

  Okay. If you could recombine genes from different species, just as we did with the rabbits, you could, obviously, recombine genes within a single species. The technology for exchanging DNA inside a zygote was wildly inexact, generally requiring multiple tries to get it right—and mostly, it never went right anyway. But it could be done, theoretically. There was even a scientific term for a being that was created by the experimental recombination of DNA from different sources. That term was chimera.

  And if anyone would have been capable of creating a human chimera twenty years ago—if anyone would have been capable of creating a viable human embryo from a fertilized egg in which DNA from multiple human sources was recombined—it would have been Dr. Wyatt.

  Was that what Dr. Wyatt had meant? That Kayla was not my sister, or my half sister—and was not the child my parents had ordered—because she was a human chimera? Had she been pieced together by recombining DNA from several donor sources, only one of whom—albeit the all-important original egg—was my mother? Was Kayla like a creature from science fiction: a bunch of sewn-together genes from a host of parent-donors? A more sophisticated, high-tech Frankenstein’s monster—beautiful, smart, athletic, perfect—because she had been deliberately designed to be that way? Because Dr. Wyatt was brilliant enough to succeed where anyone else would have failed?

  And if so—what about me?

  But no, I knew who my father was! He’d cooperated; Dr. Wyatt had said so. I was simply the HD-negative child my mother had wanted. There had been no genetic alterations to my DNA . . . just a careful selecting of an egg with a normal chromosome four.

  I felt my pace speed up. I tried to tell myself that Dr. Wyatt was lying. Had to be lying. Even today, let alone twenty years ago, most attempts to create animal chimeras were unsuccessful. One in two or three hundred would be a miraculous success rate. Humans were so complex—and, even with hormones and the several cycles Dr. Wyatt had mentioned, my mother couldn’t have produced very many eggs. Not hundreds. A couple dozen, at best? I wasn’t sure.

  But Kayla did exist. And she looked like my mother . . .

  Think like a geneticist.

  Well, that didn’t just mean thinking about scientific possibilities. It also meant considering the scientific realities. There was a lot of reason not to believe Dr. Wyatt. Even today, despite the existence of the human genome map, it would be almost impossible to do detailed genetic manipulation on an embryo and come up with something so . . . so perfect as Kayla. It wasn’t as if one gene usually mapped neatly to one trait. The impact of specific genes on development, the importance of environmental factors—it was all still largely unclear. So, if you were trying to create a human chimera, how could you possibly know what genes to swap in? How would you know what genes would make for beauty? For intelligence?

  The answer was that you could not know. You’d be working blindly. You’d be at the mercy of chance. Dr. Wyatt was a genius, sure, but even he could not have done it. Not today—and certainly not twenty years ago.

  Here was a much more scientifically plausible idea: Kayla was the product of my mother’s egg, some guy’s sperm—Dr. Wyatt himself ?—and a surrogate mother. Her father wouldn’t have been my father, obviously, or Kayla would have been the child my parents raised rather than me. Maybe she’d been a “dry run” before me—to see if Dr. Wyatt could successfully check chromosome four.

  I winced, though, and I wasn’t quite sure why. If any of this was true, Dr. Wyatt really had accomplished something amazing—something with great potential for helping alleviate human suffering, as he had said. Why was I feeling so horrified at both the “dry run” and the chimera theories? Was it just personal wallowing?

  My mind flitted off to the realm of the law. Suppose, just for a second, that making a human chimera was possible. It had to be illegal. You couldn’t do medical experiments with human embryos. The government wouldn’t allow it. Would they?

  But then I remembered that it had taken years after research began before the U.S. government began even talking about the possible ethics and legality of using embryonic human tissues in that research. Why would there, then, have been a law against the making of human chimeras twenty years ago? It was unlikely.

  I could turn around and sprint back to Wyatt Transgenics right now. I could go up to Dr. Wyatt’s office and say to him, “Chimera.” And if that were the scientific answer he’d been looking for, he’d tell me so. Excellent work! he would say. Then he’d add, Any other questions?

  He would be pleased with me.

  But I kept walking toward home and my father. If I was going to learn anything else, I needed it to be from him.

  When I reached home, I pounded up the stairs to the apartment, unlocked the door, and was warmed by the obvious gladness on my father’s face when he saw me.

  “Hello!” He was seated on the floor of the chaotic living room, sorting books into various boxes. “This is a nice surprise. I thought you’d be at work all day—is everything all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Then I was tongue-tie
d. I looked into his clear, calm eyes and knew that he had found his way to some peace, at least at this moment . . . and I didn’t want to mess with that. Didn’t want to say clutch of eggs and let’s talk about the girl who looks like Mom and I have to insist that you discuss Dr. Wyatt with me now. Not yet. Not at this second. Maybe later today. Maybe tomorrow. There was no rush, after all.

  “I decided to take the rest of the day off,” I said. “I thought you could use help with the packing.”

  “I could,” said my father. “I’m feeling ambitious to get it all done as quickly as we can.”

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  We sorted and packed all afternoon. At five o’clock, with my father’s permission (and a lack of questions, for which I was grateful—though he was hiding a grin), I called Viv and invited her to join us. Then the three of us hung out together in the living room throughout the evening, still working, with Bach playing quietly on the CD player and a couple of pizzas ordered for dinner.

  It felt ordinary. It felt wonderful. Viv and my father and I talked with surprising ease and enjoyment about regular things—the superiority of bananas to every other kind of fruit, whether instant messaging and email were going to destroy formal English spelling, how it was that special effects had ruined the later Star Wars movies but made The Matrix, why you never got tired of eating pizza.

  I found myself thinking, This is the life that I want. And during those few hours with the two people I cared about most, I let myself believe that I could have it. That the things I’d learned that day from Dr. Wyatt—the things I knew I still had to learn—would make no difference.

  The illusion was strengthened by the way the evening ended, with my father standing up and stretching, saying he was off to bed, and mouthing to me, over Viv’s head, “It’s okay to invite her to stay.”

  So I did.

  We didn’t have sex; I was too self-conscious with my father nearby, and I think Viv was, too. But I held her while she slept, and then I slept, too, for a while.