by Glenn Cooper
“I’m here, Jessie.”
“I never …” She choked on her sobs and began to cough.
He sat her up, gently thumped her back, and held her. “I know,” he said. “At least I think I know. Tell me when you’re able.”
“I-I was there,” she finally sputtered.
“How was it? Was it beautiful?”
“Yes.”
“How did it make you feel?”
“Happier than I’ve ever been. More than happy … I don’t have a word for it.”
“Did you see anyone?”
She nodded and began to sob again. He waited for her to cry herself out. “Gran.”
“Your Grandmother Martha?”
She nodded.
“I’m not surprised.” The only one who’d ever treated little Jessie with tenderness. He knew the family history well.
She used some of the tissues he handed her. “She looked lovely. She was so happy to see me. She wanted me to cross over. I almost made it …” Her voice petered out.
Alex clenched his fist triumphantly behind his back. “I know,” he said. “I know.” Then he asked, “How close did you get to her?”
“I made it to the last stepping-stone.”
His eyes narrowed. “That’s closer than I got!” Bryce was the youngest, he thought.
The younger the better.
“And Alex,” she said after a while.
“Yes?”
“I think God was there.”
Fifteen
His face was cello-shaped, too young for jowls but ample and bottom-heavy. With age and prosperity the jowls surely would come. His beard, cropped and black, spread lavishly over fleshy tan cheeks. He rubbed at the dense growth in a deliberately pensive way, as if to counter youthfulness with the theatrical gesture of gravitas. A single sheet of paper lay before him.
“So … what do you think?” Alex asked.
Miguel Cifuentes was a gregarious sort of fellow who gave off an air of familiarity even to those meeting him for the first time. Alex had made his acquaintance three years earlier in the cafeteria, when without invitation Cifuentes joined him and amiably introduced himself.
Alex learned Cifuentes was an organic chemist, newly arrived from Mexico City where he’d recently received his PhD from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He’d come to Harvard to work in the lab of the legendary molecular biologist Martin Longacre, and he made it abundantly clear to Alex that he was one of the best young chemists to come out of the best chemistry program at the best university in Mexico. And miraculously, he was able to make these declarations without coming across as boastful or arrogant. His jovial self-confidence, then as now, proved to be thoroughly disarming.
Cifuentes finally spoke. “This is an interesting molecule.”
“Yes it is.”
The chemical structure on the page was computer-generated, based on countless hours of hard labor. Alex had been staring at it for the past two days so intently that he felt it had burned itself onto his retinas. He saw it on the mirror when he shaved in the morning. He saw it on the windshield of his car. He saw it floating in front of him whenever he closed his eyes.
Five amino acids, the building blocks of life, linked to one another in a daisy chain, a circle. A circle, believe it or not! Like the Uroboros! How perfect!
“What is it?” Cifuentes asked.
Alex had a rehearsed answer, part truth, part artifice. “It’s a novel neuropeptide—at least I think it’s novel. I can’t find it in any online databases. It’s from the spinal fluid of mice and dogs.”
“And it’s important why?”
“It’s not normally present in detectable quantities. But it’s produced in abundance during the moments before death.”
Cifuentes snorted. “What else would I expect from you, eh?”
Alex played along. “Yeah, what else?”
“What’s its locus of activity? Any idea?”
“I’ve found a new receptor in the limbic areas of the brain. But it’s early days. I haven’t even filed patents. It looks like this peptide binds like crazy in the amygdala and hippocampus.”
“Ah, the old parts of the brain, the seat of the soul,” Cifuentes said brightly.
“Good for you,” Alex replied. “I’m duly impressed.”
Cifuentes responded well to the stroking. “And the purpose of these receptors is?”
Alex was evasive. “To be determined. But I’m pretty excited.”
The chemist waved his hand at Alex’s paper. “So, it’s a cyclic pentapeptide, five different amino acids, molecular weight about six hundred fifty. I’ll take your word that it’s novel. I’ve certainly never seen it before.”
Alex tapped the page with his forefinger. “Can you make it?”
“Which one?”
Alex shook his head in confusion and tapped the diagram again. “This one!”
“Okay, time for a lesson in chemistry,” the Mexican said with his trademark benign pomposity. “The compound has five chiral centers, see?” He took out his pen and pointed in turn to five carbon atoms in the ring. “Each one of these carbons can be cis or trans, up or down, mirror images of one another. With five chiral centers you can have thirty-two possible forms. So if your question is, ‘Can you make it, Miguel?’ my question back to you is, ‘Which one?’”
“Christ,” Alex whispered, his frustration palpable.
“Well, it’s not quite as bad as all that,” Cifuentes added. “Not all the forms are going to be stable. I can take you through the conformational physics if you’ve got the stomach for it, but some of the hypothetical combinations can’t exist in nature.”
“How many?”
“I’d have to do some work on it but I can see at least a dozen that are physically impossible or improbable.”
“What about the most probable ones?” Alex asked with a touch of renewed hope.
“Look, if I had the time, I could model it out and list them in a probabilistic ranking but I’m a short-timer.”
Alex vaguely remembered the details from their last cafeteria conversation. “When are you going back?”
“Less than a month. And man, am I busy trying to finish up! Between Professor Longacre and my wife, my balls are in a vice.”
“I need your help, Miguel,” Alex pleaded. “You’re the best peptide chemist I know.”
“I’m certain of that,” Cifuentes replied with a grin. “But I’m not going to be able to take this on now. Maybe when I get my own lab set up in Mexico City. Give me three, maybe six months, and I’ll collaborate with you. Okay, my friend?”
Alex remembered with exquisite detail the way the chemist perennially complained about his finances. He and his wife scrimped to get by on a postdoc fellow’s salary and she couldn’t get a work permit—not that she had the time anyway with the young kids. Though Miguel came from a reasonably comfortable middle-class family—his father owned a marginally profitable shoe factory—it wasn’t until he came to Boston that he realized how impoverished he was relative to his American friends.
Alex looked into the young man’s chestnut-colored eyes and had a brainstorm. “Did you rent an apartment yet in Mexico City?”
“Yeah. The lease starts in January.”
“Nice place?”
“Nicer than what we’ve got here in Jamaica Plain but still a dump.”
“They’re not going to be paying well?”
Cifuentes grimaced. “Junior faculty, man. What can I say? Maria’s going to go back to work but we’ll have to pay for a nanny so it won’t be a big net positive. It’ll take a while but I’ll get there. Full professors live pretty well in Mexico, and who knows, maybe I’ll jump ship and work for a drug company to make some serious coin.”
Alex sprung the trap. “Would twenty thousand dollars help get you set up?” He couldn’t access his grant funds for something like this but he had savings in the bank.
The chemist sat up a bit straighter. “And where would I get tha
t?”
“From me.”
“And you’d want me to do what?”
“Make this peptide for me—the most likely configuration.”
“How much of it do you need?”
“Milligrams for sure. Grams if possible.”
“When?”
“As soon as possible. Definitely before you leave for Mexico. I’ll give you ten thousand today, ten thousand on delivery.”
“You’d give me ten thousand dollars now?”
“Interested?”
Cifuentes fingered his beard again and whispered, “Jesus, I don’t know if there are enough hours in the day to get everything done.”
Alex had a spare check in his wallet. It had been tucked away for a while and it was a bit grimy. He unfolded it and began to write Miguel Cifuentes on the Pay to the Order line.
Cifuentes licked his lips as if he could taste the money. “Do you have a name for this molecule yet?”
“Only an informal one. I’m calling it the Uroboros compound.”
The chemist shrugged and snatched the check dangled seductively in front of his face.
Sixteen
Cyrus cracked off a mock salute as Marian and Marty left.
The garage door rumbled, the car engine came to life and they were gone. He had Tara to himself for three hours. He selfishly hoped she wouldn’t sleep the whole time.
Up in her room she was swaddled in layers of flannel, goose down and chiffon. He stood at the foot of her oversized bed and watched her breathe through her dry lips. Her eyes were closed. She was wearing padded headphones. The bedroom was packed with toys and stuffed animals and resembled a showroom at FAO Schwarz, years of gift-giving achingly compressed into a too brief period, credit cards swiped over and over to assuage grief. Cyrus felt a brief wave of compassion for good old Marty: the man probably didn’t know what else to do.
Tara’s eyes fluttered open and she pulled off her headphones. “Hi Daddy!”
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
“You weren’t?”
“No.”
“Sure looked like you were.”
“I was doing an Emily exercise.”
“What’s that?”
“She made me something for my iPod. Want to hear it?”
Cyrus squinted suspiciously, donned the headphones and began to listen to Dr. Frost’s voice speaking to Tara, invoking her name, seeking to soothe her with soft, mesmerizing suggestions.
“Tara, now I want you to take a deep breath way down into your belly. Let it go and hear the whoosh of the air coming out. And when you’re ready take another breath. Let it out with the whooshing sound, like the wind. Each breath leaves you more and more calm. Now, let your breathing slow down. Each time you breathe out silently, say to yourself ‘calm.’ Let that be your special word. ‘Calm.’ Breathe in and out. Make the whooshing sound with your lips. Say ‘calm’ each time. Just let go. Any bad thoughts, let them go. Let them go. Good. Now, Tara, imagine a place where you feel safe, secure and calm. Whether it’s indoors or outdoors or a place you’ve never even seen. You’re going there now. As you get there, you can see the shapes and colors of your special place, like a picture. And now you begin to hear the sounds of your special place. And now you can feel your special place against your skin. Take a deep breath. And as you let the happiness of your special place spread through your body, enjoy it, let it nourish and calm you. Stay there a while, and remember, you can go back there anytime you like.”
He stripped off the headphones. Nothing too subversive. “Is it all like this?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s your special place?”
“My old room.”
“Which room?”
“You know, in our old house when Mommy and you were still married.”
Tara’s old bedroom in Sudbury was half the size, fairly dark, fewer toys, no TV, no Wii, no Playstation. Just a five year old’s bedroom with her original parents in her life. That was her special place.
Cyrus turned away so she wouldn’t see him tear up. He wiped his face with his palms, snorted back the secretions and asked her if she wanted to play a board game.
Midway through Chutes and Ladders, Avakian called. Cyrus let it ring through to voice mail but later, when he went to the kitchen to get juice for Tara and coffee for himself, he returned the call.
“I talked to the IT guy at Harvard,” Avakian reported. “Weller was checked into his lab the entire night when Bryce Tomalin was killed.”
“Shocking,” Cyrus deadpanned. “What about the pattern search?”
“It’s not too convincing one way or another. He’s pulled about a dozen all-nighters in the past three months on days we’ve got no known homicides. You could argue the guy’s a workaholic.”
“He may be,” Cyrus said, “but he’s other things too. How’s the other project?”
The kitchen phone started ringing.
“Slow. When are you coming in?” Avakian asked.
The voice message began to play through the speaker. “Oh, hi, Mister and Missus Taylor, this is Doctor Frost calling from Children’s. I was just checking on Tara and wanted …”
“Gotta go,” Cyrus said, abruptly hanging up on his partner. He grabbed the kitchen phone and hit Talk. “Hi, Doctor Frost, this is Tara’s dad, Cyrus O’Malley. How are you?”
She hesitated a moment, reacting to the surprise, he imagined. “Mister O’Malley! I was calling to see how Tara was doing.”
“When I came to visit this morning she was listening to your tape.”
“I see. Did you listen to it too?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“Very relaxing. Almost put me to sleep.”
She laughed. “Well, that’s part of the idea.”
“I didn’t hear the word death once, which is good.”
“We only talk about death and explore a child’s feelings about it if she asks. Tara hasn’t brought it up explicitly. She talks around it.”
“Like how?”
“For instance, last week she asked me what Daddy will do when she’s gone.”
“Jesus,” he whispered. “What did you say?”
“I told her that you’d be very sad for a while but you’d carry her in your heart forever.”
The tears started running again. “I will.”
“Of course you will.” He heard her take a breath. “I never properly thanked you for intervening after my fender bender.”
“It was nothing. The guy was a jerk. I’m good with them.”
“Still, thank you. It was very gentlemanly.”
The words slipped out without premeditated thought. “Maybe we could get a coffee sometime.”
He waited for one of those tiny moments of time that seem to take ages. “I’d like that.”
On his way up the stairs he asked himself, Christ, Cyrus, did you just make a date?
Seventeen
Christmas week was dry and brutally cold. There were no big fronts heading toward New England so Christmas day would not be white.
Alex’s lab was quiet. His research fellows had left town to visit with their parents and Frankie Sacco didn’t have enough work to justify his brooding presence. Alex had patted him on the back and sent him home with the assurance he would fiddle the time cards so he’d be paid.
Alex came in early with a full day of experiments scripted in his head. He’d made progress on his new limbic receptor; in his notebooks it went by the designation LR-1. More and more, the evidence showed that he was dealing with a newly described type-2 sigma receptor—an electrifying discovery. For years he’d held the opinion that this poorly understood class of brain receptors well might play a role in near death experiences. The Uroboros compound had subpicomolar activity at the LR-1 receptor: minute, almost immeasurable concentrations had tremendously powerful activity. He was zeroing in on something important; he could feel it.
With the lab to hi
mself and freed of inhibitions, he drew from a sad old well and began to part sing, part hum a medley of Christmas carols. He’d been a caroler in Liverpool as a boy. He and Joe had belonged to a church group that raised alms for the poor and he remembered the pride in his father’s face when the group serenaded the pub; but when he got to Dickie Weller’s favorite, Good King Wenceslas, his mood, already brittle, clouded.
Sire, the night is darker now,
And the wind blows stronger.
Fails my heart, I know not how,
I can go no longer.
He closed his eyes and saw his father standing on the other side of the river of light. Yes, he looked happy, but he was so alone, a solitary figure in an incomprehensible vastness. He wanted to be with him so badly it hurt. He had no more of the 854.73 fluid. All had been exhausted in experiments. He’d heard nothing from Cifuentes beyond an e-mail that he was working through synthetic problems. There was no way to reach his father.
Or was there?
It wasn’t the first time he’d had that thought. He’d beaten it out of his mind before, but the grayness of the day, the emptiness of the lab, the approaching Christmas—always a bleak holiday since the car crash—all these things conspired against him. There was a razor-sharp letter opener in his desk. He could sit down in his comfortable chair, cleanly slice the artery at his wrist, look at the sky one last time and in minutes he’d be there, in his father’s arms. Forever.
It would be easy, fast. All the troubles, all the struggles, his guilt over the killings would be over. Jessie would be sad and Joe would be bereft of family. He’d be abandoning his science before he had his answers; but still.
He shuffled robotically toward his office, toward the blade. At the very least, he’d hold it in his hand and think some more. Maybe he’d put it back in the drawer. Maybe he wouldn’t.
His body stiffened at the sound of urgent knocking against glass. He automatically shouted, “Come in!”
Cifuentes opened the laboratory door, smiled wearily, and when he saw no one else was there he held out a small box wrapped in glossy red wrapping paper adorned with a gold stick-on bow.
“Merry Christmas, Alex.”