by sara12356
“She can play Chutes and Ladders, too,” Alice supplied. “And Memory. But this one’s her favorite.”
“Did you teach her?”
She shook her head. “Daddy did. It’s part of his experiment.”
Andrew tried to picture Dr. Moore doing something as light-hearted as playing a preschooler’s board game, but couldn’t. “What experiment?”
“To see how smart she is.”
Smart though she may have been, Lucy the Siamang also appeared to be blind in one eye. The lens on her left side was milky and clouded. That side of her face seemed palsied somehow, too, the corner of her mouth hanging lankly, her eyelid drooping. Spongy growths of flesh had developed in places as well, disfiguring tumors that left her head misshapen, like half-kneaded clay.
“Her brain grew too big,” Alice said, taking note of his attention. “That’s what happened to her face. Then Daddy had to cut out a piece of her skull so her brain would have enough room. You can feel the soft spot where he did it, on the back of her head, near the top.”
Curious, Andrew leaned forward, but when he reached out to touch Lucy’s head, the Siamang drew back, baring her teeth and chattering at him angrily. Remembering how he’d seen stories of chimpanzee attacks on TV, where supposedly tame animals had gnawed off the fingers or faces of their owners, Andrew shrank back in alarm.
“She doesn’t like that,” Alice said.
“You said it was okay.”
“No. I said you can feel it. I meant a physical capability, not that you should try. You’re doing that hearing-not-listening thing again.”
He scowled at her but she didn’t look up from the game board. For her part, Lucy relaxed, her lips covering her teeth again as she resumed the game. After a moment, during which the ape moved her piece one orange square, Alice said, “Suzette told me you like to count trees.”
He pondered this for a moment, then laughed. “I don’t know that I like it, but I do it, yeah. It’s part of my job. The company I work for, we get hired to count trees, catalog different species by acreage. That way, the people who own the land the trees are on can decide which ones, if any, they want to have cut down.”
“What’s it called?” she asked.
“My job? I’m a forestry consultant.”
Her attention returned to the game. “Maybe I can be one some day.”
Willing to bet this wasn’t an aspiration many kids shared, Andrew smiled. “Maybe.”
****
When they had finished several games of Candyland, Alice led Lucy by the hand back to her cage. Andrew walked slowly down the row of crates while the monkeys inside chattered and reached for him, anxious and eager. “What does your dad do with all of them?” he asked Alice, again thinking of PACA, the animal activists who had targeted Moore’s New England home.
“He uses them to test different kinds of medicines,” she replied, closing the gate once Lucy had clambered inside her crate. Punching the key pad, she locked it once more. “Things to make their brains grow.”
She’d mentioned this before, that this was what had happened to Lucy’s face, why she had the disfiguring growths and the cross-section of her skull had been remained. Her brain grew too big for her head.
“Why?” he asked, bewildered and somewhat disturbed.
Alice walked past him, heading for the door. Catching him by the hand, she gave him a tug not in the direction of the entrance, from which they’d originally come, but the opposite way, deeper into the lab. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
****
American Geneticist Wins Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Andrew studied this headline for a long, surprised moment, then the grainy black-and-white headshot of Dr. Moore that ran beneath it. The dateline for the newspaper article, which had been laminated before its inclusion in a large scrapbook of similar clippings, was three years ago.
Beneath the photo, the cutline read: American physician and geneticist Edward Moore, M.D., Ph. D., has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the development of biosynthetic recombinant proteins that accelerates the natural physiological healing process, reducing incidences of chronic, non-healing wound development.
“Your dad won the Nobel Prize?” Andrew asked Alice, wide-eyed, and she nodded.
She had brought him to a small and sparsely furnished office she said belonged to her father. Inside, a cluttered desk and wing-backed leather chair were framed by filing cabinets and laden bookshelves. From one of these, Alice had produced the thick, heavily bound scrapbook.
He’d flipped through it, curious at first, then with an undisguised fascination. Nobel Laureate Dr. Edward Moore will speak at the spring commencement services for his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, read one of the first articles he’d spied, dated almost twelve years earlier.
To his surprise, the commencement speaker announcement was accompanied by a small photo of Moore in a laboratory setting. To his left in the photograph stood another doctor, a blonde woman in a lab coat with a full, familiar mouth Andrew recognized right away.
Edward Moore, M.D., Ph.D., and research associate Suzette Montgomery, M.D., at work at the Genomics and Bioinformatics Division at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.
On his first day at the compound, Suzette had told him she worked with Moore’s daughter.
She never mentioned anything about helping with his research, though, he thought, startled.
“Martha and I made that for him,” she said, nodding at the book.
“Martha?”
Alice nodded. “She used to be my nurse. Before Suzette.”
Her previous caregiver died trying to get out, Suzette had told him, and he realized. “I heard about what happened to your house,” he said, treading carefully, trying to be tactful. “I’m really sorry.”
Alice shrugged, her expression as smooth as plaster.
“What about your mother?” he asked. “Was she home at the time, too?”
Alice shook her head. “She was on a cruise in Limassol. It’s an island in the Mediterranean. She goes every year with her husband. She and Daddy got a divorce.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”
In between the press clippings were different photographs of Moore and Alice. In some, she was only a chubby cheeked baby in ruffled dresses and crisp bonnets cradled in his arms while he beamed at the camera, the quintessential proud papa—and so far removed from the red-faced, nearly crazed man who’d brandished a gun against Andrew, it seemed impossible that the two were one and the same. Although Alice responded in the earlier photos, as the chronology progressed, so, too, did her notice of the camera’s attention fade. In the last dozen or so shots, she would look past the lens in distracted, haunted fashion, her expression lax, impassive, unreadable.
“My parents are divorced, too,” Andrew said and she glanced at him.
“When?”
“Seven years ago. Shortly after my sister died.”
Alice turned her attention to him in full. “How did she die?”
“She was very sick. A disease called lupus. She was diagnosed when she was really young and it went into remission for a long time. When it came back, it was worse than ever and she couldn’t fight it off.”
“What was her name?” Alice asked.
He smiled. “Beth.”
“Was she younger than you?” she asked.
“No. She was five years older.”
Alice looked down at the book again. “You must miss her a lot.”
“I do, yeah.” Andrew smiled somewhat sadly, thinking of Beth’s grin, her voice, her laughter. Hey, Germ. What’s up?
“Where’s your mom now?”
“She’s back home in Alaska. That’s where I grew up.”
Without looking up, she said, “You don’t look like an Eskimo.”
He laughed. “More than just Eskimos live in Alaska.”
“Do you miss your mom?”
“All the t
ime.”
“How about your dad? Do you miss him?”
That soft smile faded as the words from his father’s letter came to mind.
I’ve found someone else, someone I want to spend the rest of my life with.
“Sometimes,” he said.
It’s not what you think, Eric had told him seven years earlier, the last time Andrew had seen him. Lila and I ran into each other right after Beth died at our lawyer’s office.
Ironically, as Alice’s emotions seemed to fade in each progressive frame, so, too, did her father’s, until at last, neither one of them smiled, even when photographed together. One in particular caught Andrew’s attention. In it, Moore stood in a long, dark winter coat, holding his daughter in his arms. Alice wore a beret tipped at a jaunty angle, with a matching coat, stockings and glossy black Mary Jane shoes. They stood outside of a building crafted in the gothic architectural style, with a small suitcase, child-sized, on the sidewalk beside them.
“That was when Daddy brought me home from Gallatin,” Alice said, noticing his attention.
“Gallatin?”
She nodded. “It’s a special hospital in Massachusetts.”
“What do you mean, special?” he asked.
“Daddy says it’s a place for crazy people,” Alice said and Andrew blinked in surprise. “He says I didn’t belong there. My mother put me in it. He had to go to court to get me out. It took a long time because she had a court order that said I had to stay.”
“How long?”
Alice shrugged. “Three years.”
What the hell kind of person sticks their kid in a mental institution for three years?
“I’m not mad at her for it,” she continued. “Daddy is, but I’m not. He was gone a lot back then with his work. He didn’t always see how things were, how I was.”
It’s my understanding she’s better now than she used to be. Suzette had told Andrew this.
“What do you mean?” he asked quietly.
Without looking at him, she said, “I used to hit her. Kick her, too. I would bite her sometimes and once I pulled out a whole handful of her hair.”
He tried unsuccessfully to picture this small, slight, stoic child doing anything so violent. “Why?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.” A quick glance at him. “But I’m better now.”
When the fluorescents in the hallway abruptly came on, the stark glow cut a thin, bright line beneath the office door. Alice gasped, sharp and alarmed. “It’s Daddy!”
“Shit.” Andrew slapped the scrapbook closed.
“Here.” Alice caught him by the sleeve, tugged at him even as he heard the faint beep-beep-beep as Moore punched in his access code at the key pad. “This way.”
Stumbling in tow, he hurried with her to a small coat closet in the far corner. They ducked together inside, closing the door just as Moore opened the one to his office and walked inside. The closet door was vented with horizontal wooden slats directly in front of Andrew’s face and when Moore snapped on the lights, yellow glow spilled through the narrow seams.
“…repeated karyotypic abnormalities that may be related to chromosomal instability, though I’ve yet to identify the specific causal mechanism,” Moore was saying. “The mitotic-spindle checkpoints that ordinarily preserve chromosomal integrity during cell divisions isn’t initiating proper apoptosis.”
Andrew shied back, keeping his hand against Alice’s shoulder. She’d gone rigid beside him, stiff as a board, tucked to his hip. Neither of them breathed as they strained to listen while Moore rustled papers, opened and shut file cabinet drawers and tooled momentarily around in his office. “It makes no sense,” he said. “Benign neoplasm development continues at an accelerated rate even after the recombinant polypeptide is discontinued.”
His voice faded into silence, trailing off in mid-thought. Through the slats in the closet door, Andrew could see him. Moore had come to a stop by his desk, looking down at it with a puzzled expression on his face.
Shit, Andrew thought. We left the scrapbook out,
“In English, please, Dr. Moore,” another man said in a dry tone, heavy footsteps marking a loud cadence on the floor as he entered the office.
That’s Major Prendick. Andrew recognized the voice right away. “Shit,” he groaned aloud, the Major’s words resounding in his mind: Failure to comply with these instructions will result in your being arrested and charged with felony trespass on government property.
Moore turned away from the scrapbook and his desk. “This new formulation isn’t any more stable than the last one. The cells still aren’t self-regulating. I can trigger the cycle of mitosis but I still can’t shut it off.”
“I thought you said you’d identified the necessary proteins,” Prendick said.
“No, I said blocking certain D-type cyclins from the biosynthetic hormones might lower the risk neoplastic cell growth,” Moore shot back. “D cyclins are proteins that turn mitosis—cell division—on and off. But there are other avenues we can still try. D cyclins work in cooperation with two specific protein kinases to activate tissue growth. Maybe if we knock out the kinases currently involved and—”
“How long?” Prendick cut in.
“I can start on it tonight,” Moore said. “Have a test serum ready to try in tomorrow, maybe the next day.”
Andrew heard a soft snict! then caught a whiff of tobacco smoke, just as Moore huffed out a short, sharp breath.
“He’s smoking,” Alice whispered. When she looked up at Andrew, the light from the office bathed her face, bisected in parallel lines by stripes of shadows. “He’s not supposed to be smoking. He told me he’d quit.”
She moved as she said this, stumbling in the dark and knocking loudly into a box on the closet floor. Andrew grabbed her to spare her a fall, but leaned into a cluster of bare wire coat hangers dangling from the overhead rod. These banged and clanged together and the damage was done. Through the narrow margins of space in the door vent, he could see both men in the office beyond turn to look their way.
“Shit,” he whispered.
“I’m sorry,” Alice hiccupped.
Moore started for the closet door, his brows furrowed.
“Shit.” Andrew backpedaled, pressing himself against the wall. Alice seized him by the hand, gripping hard enough to draw his gaze.
“Wunno, wunno,” she said. Or at least, that’s what it sounded like to him. But before he had time to do anything other than blink stupidly at her, convinced he’d misheard, Alice pushed him aside and shoved the door open, just as her father reached for the knob on the other side. Startled, Moore danced backwards, and Alice darted out, kicking the door shut behind her before her father or anyone else could catch sight of Andrew inside.
“Alice,” Moore exclaimed. She didn’t answer him, just bee-lined for the door, and he followed her, catching her by the sleeve. “Alice, what are you doing in here?”
“Where did she come from?” Prendick asked.
Moore wheeled her about and she blinked up at him, all round and impassive eyes. “You’re smoking.”
“And how did she get in the lab?” Prendick demanded.
“You’re not supposed to be smoking,” Alice said to Dr. Moore. “You quit.”
“I know.” Moore snubbed his still-smoldering cigarette out beneath the toe of his shoe, then gathered his daughter in his arms.
“How the hell did she get in the lab?” Prendick snapped again.
As Andrew watched, safe again in the closet, Moore hoisted Alice against his chest. “She must have figured out the door codes. I’ll take her back to the compound, put her to bed.” He carried Alice toward the door. She had her arms around his neck and looked over his shoulder toward the closet as they left, seeming to meet Andrew’s gaze.
“I want you back here after that,” Prendick said. With a thoughtful frown, a slight crimp to his brows, he glanced across the office toward the closet, as if having taken note of Alice’s gaze and redirected his own
to follow.
Shit. Andrew shrank back again, his breath cutting short.
He heard the soft, crunch-tap of Prendick’s shoe soles on the linoleum floor, a slow rhythm, a deliberate approach.
Shit, Andrew thought. Shit, shit, shit.
The lights from the office outside abruptly went dark and he risked a quick enough peek to see Prendick walking out the door, swinging it shut behind him, leaving Andrew alone.
“Shit,” he whispered, a shaky sound, and he managed a breathless laugh as he listened to the muted sounds as the men walked away. When he raked his fingers through the crown of his hair, he found the roots damp with anxious sweat and he had to laugh once more. “Shit.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The next morning, Andrew was up before sunrise, dressed and outside, waiting for Alice to begin her ritual walk. When he saw her trailing along the outer edge of the yard, Suzette marking a leisurely pace and broad space behind her, he broke into a sprint, crossing the dew-soaked grass to catch them.
“Hey,” he gasped with a winded grin. The morning was the sort of crisp and cool found only in autumn, a sharp but pleasant chill that was just enough to frost his breath in a thin film before his face.
She didn’t stop, didn’t even look at him. Continuing on her way, she brushed past him, mumbling numbers to herself, counting her steps.
“Alice?” Puzzled, somewhat wounded by the cold shoulder, he turned and followed. “Hey, hold up a second.”
Because she still didn’t stop, he pulled into the lead, then turned again, positioning himself directly in her path. Only then did she draw to a halt. Because she won’t walk around me, he realized. It would mess up her count.
Andrew squatted in front of her, trying unsuccessfully to draw her gaze from her toes. “I wanted to thank you,” he said. “For last night, covering for me, giving me the pass code.”
As it had turned out, wunno-wunno wasn’t what she’d said to him in the closet in the split seconds before she’d ducked out the door and distracted her father and Prendick. He hadn’t realized it until he’d tried to leave the building and discovered that the exterior doors required a pass code for both entry and exit. After a moment’s frustrated near panic, he’d thought of what she’d said, and of something else she’d mentioned earlier, when he’d found himself locked inside her father’s apartment.