The DNA of You and Me

by Andrea Rothman

  Two weeks later, on Labor Day, I was riding a train with him to Livingston, New Jersey. Outside our car window, suburban little streets with telephone poles had given way to flat open fields such as I hadn’t seen in almost a year. It was a clear, hot, sunny day, one of those breezeless silvery September days when even the air feels treacherously raw and alive. My mind kept anxiously wandering back to the snapshots that had been running obsessively through my head for weeks, ever since Aeden had announced that he wanted to introduce me to his parents: images of planting a kiss on his mother’s cheek, shaking hands with his father, sitting down to build a puzzle with five-year-old Mark. I had no experience with children and had never gotten along with families, much less mothers of boyfriends, but then I had never really cared to until then.

  “I like your dress, Em,” Aeden said. He’d started calling me Em, instead of Emily. “And the heels.” It was his third time commenting on my sandals. “You should wear heels more often.”

  “Heels are a pain to walk in.”

  “You look good in them.”

  “I’ve had these forever,” I said, though I had in fact rush ordered the sandals, along with the sleeveless summer dress I was wearing, from a Macy’s catalogue in my regular pile of junk mail. The fields outside the window were starting to disappear, and the landscape to dot with concrete, signaling our imminent approach to Livingston. “I hope your family likes me, Aeden.”

  Aeden leaned forward in his seat and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “I think they’ll dislike you as much as I do,” he said, and planted a kiss on my forehead.

  At the station there was no one to greet us. Aeden stood for a moment by the doors, checking his phone for missed calls. There were none. He dialed his brother’s number and when no one picked up muttered “Idiot” under his breath. Then he shouldered his backpack and led me across the street, past the waiting vehicles, to a line of taxis. In truth I was almost relieved to climb into the anonymity of the cab’s back seat, to put off the introductions a few more minutes.

  His childhood home, a redbrick Tudor lined by tall trimmed hedges, recalled in a loose sort of way the small house I’d grown up in. Parked in the driveway were two cars, one of them a Jeep so painstakingly polished I could practically see our reflection. We walked past it, along a juniper-bordered path curving up to the main entrance of the house, where a wide wooden door stood ajar.

  The inside of the house smelled pleasantly of smoked wood, and faintly of pressed flowers, onions, a chicken roasting in an oven. In the den a young guy with a babyish face who looked nothing like Aeden sat on an easy chair, watching a tennis match on TV. Aeden thanked him ironically for picking us up at the train station, to which his brother confidentially rolled his eyes at me, as though we were best friends, and said something to Aeden about a car that I failed to catch.

  I left them arguing in the den and wandered past the living area, along a narrow passageway, into a large open kitchen, where a wire-thin woman clad in a cocktail dress stood absurdly in front of a chopping board, slicing onions. “You must be Rose,” I said, recognizing Aeden’s mother.

  At first she didn’t hear me or seem to notice me standing there in front of her. “You must be Rose,” I said again, and watched her raise her face from the chopping board. Her eyes were light gray, like Aeden’s, and when the recognition of who I was settled in, she smiled at me, and I saw the woman on his desk wall in the lab. “I’m Emily. Thank you for having me.”

  She put down her knife and shook my hand with surprising vigor. “A pleasure to meet you, Emily. I feel I almost know you. Aeden does nothing but talk about you.”

  “What has he said?”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything?” I wondered if he’d told her about the filing cabinet incident, and found myself almost wishing for some reason that he had.

  “Well, obviously not everything,” Rose said. “Aeden wouldn’t . . .” She was studying me now, and there was a familiar look in her eyes, as though she were staring through thin ice into a clear pond, seeing strange and unexpected life forms scurrying within her field of vision. “Monica,” she called out. “Monica, this is Emily Apell, from the lab?”

  Monica, whose presence I’d been only vaguely aware of until then, along with that of her two children, smiled curiously at me from her cross-legged position on a floor mat. A small boy in diapers was tugging at her shirt in a way that made me wish she would ask him to stop. The older boy, who I assumed was Mark, sat at a little plastic table nearby, quietly drawing. “Good to meet you, Emily,” Monica said, and gazed neutrally at Rose, as though I’d passed a test of some sort.

  “How about some lemonade?” Rose asked.

  She led me into a sunroom with a lofty ceiling and tall windows through which the sky was visible. A pitcher of lemonade and a platter of frosted cupcakes stood at the center of a white coffee table, between two white couches. Rose sat, and I sat next to her, looking out to a quadrangle of hedges lining a lawn mown to a carpet-like texture. There were no trees anywhere in sight, no high branches swaying in the untouched wilderness I’d imagined. In a paved area, not far from where Rose and I sat, a tall man in his sixties was unhurriedly flipping steaks on a grill. He looked like an older, somewhat sedated version of his son. Aeden thirty years from now, I thought with unease.

  Rose filled my glass with lemonade and patted my knee. “Drink up, don’t be shy,” she said, though I wasn’t being shy. Then she said, “About the project, Emily, I want you to know that I hold nothing against you. You went to the lab with a purpose, and you’re accomplishing exactly what you set out to do. I admire that.”

  “Aeden is too,” I said. “We’re working together.”

  “Smell research.” She blinked as if the light in the room was suddenly irking her. “I was always opposed to it. Aeden had a wonderful future ahead of him, and he gave it all up, after the accident. His work at Princeton was in immunology. I don’t know if he ever told you.”

  “He doesn’t like to talk about that,” I said, which was true. The times I’d asked Aeden about his graduate work he’d been almost too quick to describe it as a dead-end street.

  “That’s because he never should have gone to New York,” Rose said. “I advised him not to, but it got into his head to switch fields, and when something gets into Aeden’s head you might as well give up trying to reason with him.” She poured more lemonade into her glass. “At any rate, I’m glad it’s nearly over.”

  “Not for another two years,” I said. “After we analyze our knockouts we’ll start searching for more genes. If our gene is important it’s possible that there are others like it, maybe an entire family.”

  Rose looked suddenly confused. She lifted the pitcher and asked me if I wanted more lemonade, which was strange because my glass was nearly full. “How about trying one of my famous cupcakes, Emily?” she said, with the pitcher gripped in her hand.

  “They look delicious,” I said, and to humor her: “Aeden raves about your cooking.”

  We sat on the couch for a while, sharing a rich chocolate cupcake I was sorry to hear might as well have been mud in Rose’s mouth, and chatting about her short-lived career as an anthropologist. She missed being out in the field, she said, the sun on her face, using her mind. But she had no regrets. She’d realized shortly after having Aeden that family was more important than work, career, or any kind of discovery. Wanting to steer the conversation to a more familiar topic, I explained how Aeden and I had inactivated the pathfinder gene in embryonic stem cells, how a technician had injected them into mouse embryos and implanted the embryos into a female, how a chimera had been born that had luckily fathered a male and a female knockout, who’d recently given birth to a litter.

  “Chimera,” Rose mused, interrupting my train of thought. Her eyes had been fixed on my hands, which I moved for emphasis as I spoke. “Isn’t that also an unrealizable dream, something that is hoped for but impossible to achieve?”

  “I
didn’t know that,” I offered, wondering how this was relevant to what I was telling her. “My point is, Rose, we’re nearly there. In a few weeks we’ll analyze the litter, we’ll know the result of our experiment.”

  “Wonderful,” Rose said, but I could tell I’d lost her.

  Aeden came into the room then, and she jumped up from the couch to greet him. They stood by the door, about five feet away from me, hugging each other in a way that made me think of a mother bear and her overgrown cub in the wild. Rose was nearly as tall as Aeden, but many pounds lighter.

  At last Aeden stepped back from Rose, looking her over. “You look great, Mom.”

  Rose pursed her lips. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “You do,” Aeden said, and, making meaningful eye contact with me, “Doesn’t she, Em?”

  That Rose Doherty looked great wasn’t exactly true. Her skin tone was blotchy and her cocktail dress hung from her frame like a curtain. On her feet were bedroom slippers, instead of the ladylike shoes I’d been envisioning.

  “You don’t need to lie, dear,” she said. “I know I’m all skin and bones.”

  “You just need to put on some weight, Rose,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “Thank you, darling. I appreciate your frankness. I really do.” She turned to Aeden. “Your Emily here is an interesting girl.”

  I felt a little chill in my spine. The word interesting, I knew, wasn’t genuine.

  “I had to practically force her out of the lab,” Aeden told her. He walked over to the couch I hadn’t had a mind to stand up from and sat down next to me.

  Rose sank into a nearby chair. “So you stole her from the lab?”

  “Rescued her is more like it,” Aeden said, taking my free hand in his.

  “That’s a lie,” I said, though it wasn’t exactly a lie.

  “No, it’s not.” He took the glass of lemonade I’d been holding on to and settled it on the table. “If it weren’t for me, she would be there right now, perusing databases on Labor Day.”

  “He’s exaggerating,” I told Rose with a smile, trying to blot out her interesting.

  “You don’t know the half of it, Mother,” Aeden said. “You’ve never met anyone like Emily in your life.”

  “I’m sure I haven’t,” Rose said, smiling politely at me.

  We sat there for about an hour, discussing neural regeneration and how Rose’s olfactory bulb might eventually heal to allow new nerve endings to migrate into it and connect to their targets, how it was still possible, despite the dim future forecast for her, that she might be able to smell again one day. As I was trying to convince her of this I caught Aeden gazing thankfully at me, and for a little while, before we sat down at the table to have lunch, I felt I almost belonged there, in that room, in that house, with him and his mother and the rest of the family.

  The way it felt, when I remember it now, was as if I was breathing borrowed air.

  The dining room table was small, and wanting to be sociable I had taken the empty chair between the toddler and Aeden’s father, Robert. Aeden was sitting directly across from me, between Rose and his brother, Matthew. On the other side of the toddler’s high chair, where I could not see them, were Mark and his mother, Monica. The air inside the room was stuffy with wall-to-wall carpeting and the smells of cooked food. My attention kept wandering off to the console table by the wall with its family pictures, the different versions of Aeden’s former self.

  Aeden’s father, a retired civil engineer, poured wine into my glass. “So what does this bridge motif of yours do?” he asked me.

  “We don’t know,” I said. “We don’t know what conformation the motif acquires in the protein, or what it’s doing, but I like to think it’s doing something special.” I forced down a few gulps of the wine, knowing that the alcohol would make me more open to conversation.

  Across the table Matthew was talking with the authority of an expert about car leasing deals. Aeden was nodding at his brother, apparently listening to what he was being told, but I could tell by the anxious looks he kept shooting in my direction that he wanted the conversation to end. That’s when his brother said: “You’ll need to have a car if you move out there.”

  “Move where?” I asked.

  Matthew looked at me. We’d been introduced but hadn’t exchanged more than two words. “You don’t know?” He looked back at Aeden. “You haven’t told her?” His eyes shifted with interest between the two of us.

  “Cambridge, Massachusetts, dear,” Rose offered from her chair.

  An image formed at that instant in my head, crisp as the day outside. I don’t know what prompted it, or how it came to be that I immediately put two and two together, but there it was: a small footbridge connecting two brick buildings across a narrow waterway. “Is that the place you were browsing the other day on your laptop?” I asked Aeden.

  He brought his hands up to his face and rubbed his eyes. “It’s a biotech company. I have a job interview.”

  “You already have a job,” I said.

  “What job?” Rose said. “Four years laboring in that man’s lab. You call that a job?” She was holding her fork to her mouth as if she’d been feeding herself all along, when she hadn’t even touched her food. I remember hating her at that moment.

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Aeden?” I asked.

  Aeden lowered his hands to the table. “I only found out about the interview last week,” he said.

  “I’m talking about you wanting to leave.”

  “I’m not going anywhere for certain, Emily. Besides, you can’t blame me for wanting out.”

  I knew I should stop talking about it, but I couldn’t help but say, “I wish you had told me this before, instead of now, here.”

  “You’re right. I should have. I’m sorry,” he said uncomfortably.

  To clear the atmosphere, or maybe because he genuinely wanted to know, Robert asked, “What are you going to do afterward, Emily?”

  “Afterward?” I said.

  “What are your plans for when the project is over?”

  “Emily isn’t your ordinary scientist, Dad,” Aeden said, looking with pride at me. “She wants to have her own lab.”

  I met his eyes and felt something sharp wedged inside my chest.

  “That’s very ambitious,” his father remarked with enthusiasm. “Have you always wanted to have a laboratory of your own?”

  “Yes,” I said, and realized how utterly true this was.

  The toddler next to me was whining from his high chair, pointing at a cup lying at my feet. I remembered being older than him and unable to speak, a woman taking care of me and a boy peeing in my orange juice, getting into a fight with someone whose arms were the width of my thigh and clinging to the woman’s necklace, white pearls in my fist spilling all over the floor. I remembered my father examining the bruise on my head and never seeing the woman or her family again. I remembered, after that, my father standing at the corner of our street in Shaw Woods with his arms crossed to his chest, waiting for the school bus to drop me off.

  “What about a family?” It was Rose’s voice.

  “What?” I said. For a moment I wanted to think she was referring to the family I’d told her about, having to do with the gene, but of course that’s not what she meant.

  “Don’t you want to have children?”

  “No.” I picked up the plastic cup off the floor and handed it back to Mitchell.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “She doesn’t really mean that, Mom,” Aeden said.

  “Yes, I do,” I said, feeling suddenly fed up with the whole pretense. “Motherhood is overrated, if you ask me. Human company is overrated.”

  The silence that followed this last statement was so acute I could hear someone talking in the den, where Matthew had left the tennis match running. Rose was no longer looking at me. No one was except for Aeden, who was inexplicably smiling at me, as though I’d made some subtle kind of joke whose meaning he alone had un
derstood.

  “Any news from Allegra?” his mother asked him.

  I lifted my glass off the table and downed the rest of the wine.

  The next hour I spent making an effort to eat the thousand-layer cake Monica had graciously offered me a slice of and helping Rose clear the table, moving in a mindless state of inebriation between the dining room and the kitchen. On one of my returns to the kitchen I paused by Mark, who was at his makeshift table with an origami book, folding strips of colored paper with his hands. I had entertained the idea of sitting with him, but all I could do was stand there with my tray and watch. He raised his head and gave me a fierce funny look, as if to let me know he knew that I was there. “Are you still mad at my uncle?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t mad,” I said.

  “I like your hair.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s different.”

  “How?”

  He shrugged. “Just different.”

  “I like that airplane you’re building.”

  “It’s not an airplane,” he said. “It’s a swan.”

  When I returned to the dining room Robert was unfolding a crumbling road map on the table. Aeden was in the den. I could hear him laughing, and Mitch egging him on. Then he came into the dining room and walked up to me and asked me if I wanted to go for a walk. His father raised his head from the map he’d been studying and looked at me. “Or you can drive out east with me,” he said. “I’ll take you on a sightseeing tour of the Bayonne Bridge. In honor of your soon-to-be-celebrated molecular bridge,” he added without irony.

  I smiled at him, and shook my head.

  “You should go with him, Em,” Aeden encouraged.

  “C’mon,” Robert told me. “Put that stupid thing down.” Meaning the tray in my hands. “We’ll have a good time.”

  He was an ordinary-looking man, with a balding head and a sweet smile, one of those people you sometimes end up wishing you’d gotten to spend more time with. But I turned the offer down. I don’t remember exactly what excuse I ended up giving him. I may have told him I was tired and wanted to go upstairs and rest, which was true. The larger truth, however, was that I wasn’t feeling up to it. But as things turned out, I might have been better off going on that sightseeing tour with Robert, disappearing from the house for a couple of hours and forgetting that Aeden was looking to leave the lab. And forgetting also what I’d said about human company.