It was a passion I couldn’t share, as much as I knew Yvette would have wanted me to. Instead, I felt a completely unrevolutionary longing for the woman these girls would never know, the one who examined vegetables as if life depended on it and mixed blue into green in the palm of her hand. If I turned back to that stage, if her rebellion ignited a mutiny that saved us all and her face covered every billboard on the planet, still, I would never really see her again. No one would, not even the hosts who carried her defiance in a moving mosaic, who pumped the blood through her body and shared the sparks in her nerves.
Del
My parents were geneticists. They had a firm belief in the power of science to fix everything, to create everything. This belief was their religion, and they liked to proselytize as much as any born-again Christian. When they decided to have children, they saw the opportunity to share their faith in science with the world. They wanted to make miracle babies so unbelievable that people would stop and stare, their own organic equivalent of a billboard for Jesus. Their original idea was to develop an in vitro procedure that would create identical twins. But they decided twins weren’t spectacular enough, not enough of a challenge. They settled on septuplets. One fertilized egg split into seven pieces made seven sisters, all of us identical. Pleiades, my father used to call us, after the constellation of seven stars.
All the major networks were shooting footage at the hospital the day we were born. Protestors traveled from around the country to Los Angeles so they could picket outside, with signs that said SEVEN DEADLY SINS and FRANKENSTEIN’S CHILDREN. Even the doctors who delivered us expected us to come out with birth defects; half a dozen neonatal specialists were standing by. But they weren’t needed. We were small—about two pounds each—but other than that, my mother says, we were perfect. Our lungs, our hearts, our brain activity were measured and found to be normal. We all had a wisp of dark hair at the front of our foreheads, and eyes that would turn from blue to brown. My parents didn’t want rhyming names or alliterative names, but they liked to show off their knowledge of Greek, and so we were Leda, Io, Zoe, Helen, Cassandra, Vesta, and me, Adelpha, called Del.
In the magazine photographs, my mother and father glow with a mixture of parental pride and professional elation. Without scientific interference, identical twins account for one in every 250 live births, identical triplets one in two million, fraternal septuplets one in every four million, and my sisters and I just couldn’t exist. But science made us and there we were, pink-skinned and button-nosed, each swaddled in her own colored blanket—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple—a wriggling, blinking rainbow.
The tabloids ran headlines like “Forced Septuplets Really Alien Babies!” and “Test Tube Septs Share One Brain!” After our first birthday, the publicity died down, although reporters came around now and then hoping to do follow-up stories. In the scientific community, our celebrity never waned. Throughout our childhood we took trips to visit scientists whom our parents referred to as our aunts and uncles. These people smiled at us and sometimes gave us hugs like real relatives, but they also liked to look at our skin cells under microscopes, or watch us play together through two-way mirrors. My mother and father ran experiments, too, and by the time we were six, we thought no more of giving a blood sample than we did of making our beds, picking up our toys, or any other chore.
Our parents never told us which of us was born first because they thought it would affect our psychology. We reached the age of eleven considering ourselves separate in body, but not in anything else. I have heard that twins, even identical twins with a particularly close relationship, like to emphasize that they are still individuals, but we did not. There’s an old home video of us on the beach, eight or nine years old and wearing matching gold-spangled swimsuits. We move across the sand like a flock of birds in flight, each head turned only a fraction of a second before the next, so it’s impossible to say where one motion ends and another begins.
Perhaps it was the circumstances of our creation. Perhaps we were not truly separate people but parts of a whole, as a thicket of aspen trees all grow from the same network of roots. And, even now, maybe it is no different.
“You were so easy, really,” my mother said to me a few years ago in tearful nostalgia. “You all liked peas, you all hated carrots. No one would use the pink crayons.”
Who knows what would have happened if we had reached high school together, been forced to deal with romances and social intrigues and the possibility of attending different colleges. Perhaps we would have simply refused to be parted, clung together like a cluster of ladybugs in winter. Or maybe we would have adjusted, moved apart and away from one another. But I doubt it.
We were eleven years old, doing a jigsaw puzzle on the living room floor of our beach house in Santa Cruz. Vesta set a corner piece in its place, put her hand to the side of her head and said she had a headache. We all looked at her and groaned; headaches had a way of catching among us, even though our mother tried to tell us that was impossible. A few minutes later, Vesta shook her head and complained again, and then she fainted, we thought. But we had a horrible clenched feeling in our bodies. Leda put her hands on Vesta’s cheeks and Vesta didn’t even flinch. We all went screaming for my mother.
At the hospital they said my sister had had a brain aneurysm, that she was dead. We wanted to argue, but we knew it was true. We could feel it. That night we all slept piled on the floor of our bedroom, holding on to one another’s wrists and calves and hair, terrified of losing one another. For months after that we felt sick, but we thought it was just sadness. We didn’t know yet that for us there was no such thing as just sadness, that our grief had a life of its own, an invisible mouth like a black hole that drew us inexorably closer.
* * *
—
We were twelve when Leda got pneumonia. She never recovered. The doctors put her on every antibiotic they had, but she was dead in three weeks. Again my sisters and I felt that same tautness in our bodies, that surge of poison in our veins, but we kept quiet about it. We didn’t need to discuss it with one another, and our parents didn’t understand anything. They were depressed, guilty, frantic for the solution they felt sure must be out there just beyond their reach, but that didn’t touch what we felt. We were all thinking, without ever saying so, that one death might be a freak accident, but two was not. That we were all going to die.
Reporters followed us everywhere. There were Internet betting pools about which of us would die next. We started exercising, eating organic food, taking vitamins as if that was going to help. Another year went by and we lost Io. Anti-genetics protestors swarmed her funeral, glowing with self-righteousness. One woman carried a sign that said “Science Giveth and the Lord Taketh Away.” She wore a lime-green sundress and stared at us through the wrought-iron fence of the graveyard during the entire service, never making a sound.
The remaining four of us began developing bruises in places we couldn’t remember bumping. We were flown to specialists around the country, circulatory doctors, immunologists, gene therapists; we gave countless samples of blood and urine and tissue, were prodded and analyzed without receiving any conclusive results. They thought we had a new form of AIDS, or had somehow developed hemophilia, but none of the tests supported these theories.
Eventually our parents moved us to New York City so they could set up camp at Mount Sinai Hospital and put all their energy into trying to cure us. They weren’t medical doctors and didn’t really belong there, but I believe there was a bargain struck, something to do with donating our coveted tissue samples, the kind of utterly calculated deal I didn’t want to know too much about. I’ve always believed that the move had as much to do with getting away from their colleagues in California as it did with saving us; my parents were not so gracious in their defeat as they had been in their glory.
When Zoe got sick, the rest of us began to consider
desperate solutions. The three deaths we had suffered through were horribly painful, to be sure, but in a way the most difficult, the most shocking, the most surprising, the worst thing was finding ourselves still alive the next day. We felt mocked, being forced to face, time and again, this brutal proof of our distinctness. We decided to bring it to a neat end, for all of us, if Zoe didn’t improve.
By then we were sixteen, old enough to be crafty, to filch chemicals from our parents’ lab that were sure to be fatal. We kept them in little vials in our pockets as we stood around the hospital bed. But at the crucial moment—heart monitor flatlining, alarms sounding, frantic nurses attempting resuscitation—we failed to act. Not one of us so much as moved a hand toward the poison. We still wanted to live in spite of it all.
The next time we didn’t consider the plan again. We just sat silently by Cassie’s bedside, kissed her tears, and watched her go. Then it was me and Helen, and we were terrified and sick all the time. We kept wondering which one of us would die next, wondering whether it was worse to be dead or alive and alone.
We dreamed about the others. Sitting down to dinner or choosing our clothes for the day, we sometimes hesitated, waiting for them without realizing what we were doing. Their breath filled the room, their fingertips were on our skin. Helen and I began to feel stretched, overfilled, oversensitive to everything. Loud noises frightened us beyond reason. The sound of our parents yelling or crying, both of which they did frequently, made us dizzy.
Helen started having trouble breathing. We were eighteen and it would have been the year of our high school graduation, but we’d long since quit school. For the next five years, she was battered by a drawn-out illness, waves of health and sickness lifting her up and throwing her down again. My parents whisked in and out of our house like ghosts in their fluttering white lab coats, going back and forth to the hospital to examine cultures under the microscope, visit Helen, or meet with another doctor promising a cure. By then I could have told them exactly what was wrong: The emotion and sensation of seven people condensed into two bodies was too much for the bodies to bear. But that was an explanation that wouldn’t satisfy the rigors of science, so I knew it wouldn’t satisfy them. There was nothing they could do about it anyway.
Helen kept saying to me, “What will we do?” Her skin looked like it had shrunk, tight and shiny across her bones. There was nothing to say because we both knew the answer: “We” would not do anything. She would die, and I would stand in the damp grass of the cemetery with no one to squeeze my hand at the graveside. My parents were around, of course, but I’d grown up without having to speak my mind, and I never knew what to say to them. Besides, I was finding them increasingly hard to love. I kept thinking about that protestor at the funeral, years ago now, and an idea began tormenting me: Maybe there was only meant to be one of us. Maybe all that splitting had been a bad idea. I missed my sisters, but it was more than that. I could feel enough for seven people, as if my sisters wanted me to live for them. I wondered if Nature, once she had pared us down to one body, would let me survive, or if it would just be worse for me in the end.
My parents were desperate. They began planning to clone me or freeze me if I died, plotting it in their bedroom at night, never thinking I might be listening from the hallway. Despite their collusion, they hated each other. They both wanted me to forgive them for whatever mistake in their calculations had brought this on us, to forgive them on behalf of my sisters, too. Surely, I could. Surely, I was all of us in one.
But I couldn’t, or maybe I just didn’t want to. I felt my sisters in me and around me and I knew that, whatever pain awaited me, letting my parents decide my fate was the worst choice I could make.
“Go,” said Helen. “Maybe you can outrun it. If one of us is left, that’s enough.”
Troy
A car comes down the road, an old blue hatchback covered in dust, and it slows down just when I’ve decided it’s not going to stop.
I’m pretty good at choosing cars by now; I can almost tell by the way they roll down the window whether to trust the driver or not. But when I look inside, it seems to me I judged wrong this time. The girl behind the wheel looks like a zombie, skin falling off her, patches of hair missing. She could be twenty, thirty, I don’t know; she’s so messed up it’s hard to tell.
“Where are you going?” she says.
“L.A.”
“I’ll be passing near there.”
It’s something about the way she looks at me, not threatening but not afraid, that makes me get in. Besides, it’s not often you find a ride that’ll take you through ten states, and I’m in no position to be picky.
Two hours down the road we blow a tire and the spare’s no good. We wait for a tow truck, then eat supper at a diner in town while the tire gets patched. I order chicken-fried steak and she eats a fruit salad. She saves all the grapes for last and slides each one over her tongue like a marble. “I can taste the sunshine,” she says.
When she opens her wallet to pay the waitress, it’s stuffed thick with cash. She plucks off a hundred-dollar bill to pay a twelve-dollar tab, and there’s another hundred underneath. It’s enough to tempt even an honest man.
“You always carry money like that?” I ask. “It’s not safe.”
She smiles a little, her lips full of cracks like old rubber ready to split. “Neither is picking up hitchhikers, but that didn’t seem to bother you.”
“Still.”
She waves a hand at her blistered face. “Look at this,” she says. “I’m past the point where I worry about something bad happening to me.”
We pick up the car but it’s late to be starting out, so we get a motel room for the night, two beds, cable TV. She falls asleep right away, and her breathing gets so quiet I worry a couple of times that she’s dead, and lean over her bed to check. In the middle of the night, though, she begins to moan. She’s still asleep, her eyes roaming back and forth underneath the lids, tears slipping between the lashes. I turn the bedside lamp on but it doesn’t wake her, and I’m afraid to touch her now. I sit on my bed with my hands in my pockets, edge of the headboard cutting into the back of my neck, wondering how long the walk is to the next bit of civilization. Wondering whether you can really leave a girl to die alone in a motel room, and what to do if you stay.
* * *
—
She wakes up just after sunrise looking worse than ever, which I wouldn’t have thought was possible. She sits on the edge of the bed with her face in her hands.
“I don’t know if I can do this by myself,” she says.
“Let me drive for a while,” I say.
When we get on the road we talk a little, but I can tell she doesn’t like conversation much. She starts peeling the dead skin off her arms, piece by piece like she’s stripping wallpaper, absentminded the way that some people chew their fingernails.
“Stop that,” I say, and she looks up and kind of smiles, sheepish, and folds her hands in her lap. “What’s wrong with you, anyhow?”
“I’m sick,” she says, like that’s all there is to it. “Don’t worry, you can’t catch it.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Usually.”
“Don’t you have a doctor or something?”
“Dozens of them,” she says.
I look her up and down. “Well, I guess they aren’t worth a damn, are they?”
We both laugh. She looks different when she laughs, like there’s a brightness spreading through her face, like the sound fills her whole self and not just her mouth.
“You should have flown, though. It would’ve been easier on you.”
“It wouldn’t,” she says. “It makes me vomit these days. Besides, this was a last-minute decision, and now I get to see what’s between New York and California.”
“What are you aiming to do
when you get there?”
“Go to the beach,” she says, as if she was just another sand bunny in a string bikini, a bored college girl on spring break with nothing else to do.
We drive and talk about the music on the radio, movies, the weather. She sleeps a lot, her head resting against the window, hands balled together in her lap, a pained look on her face the whole time. I wonder if her body hurts even in her sleep, if she’s healthy or ravaged in her dreams.
Partway through Illinois we hit a nasty snarl of traffic. Somebody’s dead up ahead, judging by the number of cop cars and ambulances that go screaming past us along the shoulder of the road. We’re near an exit, so we escape after a few minutes, get ourselves onto Route 66 and stop for lunch at a roadside burger joint, one of those chains that used to cover the country but now exist in only a few godforsaken outposts. They have a picnic table to the side, wood gone gray and full of splinters, on a patch of dead scrub grass and hard-packed red clay. We take our food out there. Del licks the salt off her fries but doesn’t eat them, just watches me with my hamburger.
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t eat meat anymore,” she says.
“Maybe that’s your problem.”
She shakes her head, chews on the end of one fry while she stares at the dirt between her feet.
“You can have these,” she says, pushing the paper sleeve of french fries at me. She gets down on the ground and starts scratching at the dirt with her fingernails, and at first I think she’s looking for something, but then I see she’s just making a pile of red dust. She scrapes some more, picks up a stone to do a better job, working with all her strength.
All the Names They Used for God Page 19