Chapter 20
Aeden’s room upstairs in the attic was peaceful and quiet, with a low, slanted ceiling and the clean smell of wood. The single bed by the window and a bare desk set up against a wall were its only furnishings, and the only decoration a poster of Gwen Stefani that I imagined had been on the wall since Aeden’s high school days. I unstrapped my aching feet from the sandals and walked barefoot across the cool plywood floor, over to the bed. The window at the foot of it looked out onto the same backyard I’d seen from the sunroom on the ground floor, but from up here I could see beyond the property line trees from neighboring houses, and shaded patches of ground.
A memory I’d thought buried came to me as I sat there: an oval hole in a dead oak tree, bright sunbeams trickling sparingly across the hole, disintegrating to needles on their descent to the ground, where my father and I sat in the snow, on a fallen tree limb, trying not to make a sound. If we as much as coughed, he warned me, the woodpecker would not come out of his hole to feed.
In the snow-muffled air I could hear tree branches creaking with the weight of the snow, and, faintly, the sound of the wind, though the air did not seem to move around us. The clearing where we sat was hushed and still and quiet in a way that felt like an invitation to stay there, in that human-free world, forever. It occurred to me I’d never felt happier in all my life, and with this came a strange and troubling truth: for no apparent reason, I didn’t like people very much, and did not care to be around them.
That’s when I opened my mouth and shouted, to my father’s consternation. The sound of my voice reverberated across the forest and returned to me unscathed. I shouted again, louder, and my voice rose and lingered somewhere high above the canopy and returned again. Over and over again I shouted, and the more I did, the sooner my voice came back to me, as though it had never left. I knew then that I belonged in the world, despite what I felt, or failed to feel. I was a part of it, like everyone else was.
I never did see the woodpecker, though.
I rested my head on Aeden’s pillow and closed my eyes, and then I must have dozed off for a long time, because when I opened them the light was fading, and there was an irking pressure in my bladder. I remembered the small restroom on the landing, at the bottom of the steep staircase leading up to Aeden’s room, and stood up from the bed and walked out. Descending the stairs I heard voices, and realized that Aeden and his mother were downstairs. Not on the landing, but a staircase farther below, in a small sitting area I’d walked through earlier, on my way up to his room. I was moving slowly down the near-vertical flight of stairs, trying not to eavesdrop on their conversation, when I heard Rose say something that made me stop. “Overrated. She’s certainly not the most sociable animal in the room.”
“To tell you the truth, I like that about her.”
“It doesn’t bother you she didn’t crack a smile at the baby? The whole time she was sitting next to Mitch she may as well have been sitting next to a wall.”
“She’s not used to having kids around.”
“If I may say so, Aeden, something about her feels a little off. There’s a name for what she has. You don’t need to be a psychologist to know—”
“There’s a name for what everyone has. You think you and Dad and everyone else around here are perfectly normal?”
“Sit down, please, I’m not done.”
“Then stop putting labels on her. You don’t know the first thing about her.”
“You wanted my opinion.”
“Forget I ever asked. I must have been crazy to bring her here.”
I remember wanting at this point to turn around, burrow myself in Aeden’s room, forget what I’d heard Rose say about me, but something held me in place.
“You obviously get along with her. You might even love her. I can see it in your eyes, the way you look at her. But people like Emily don’t need other people.”
“You don’t know the first thing about her.”
“It’s true I don’t, but I know you, and I know she won’t make you happy, not in the long run she won’t. She’s incapable of love.”
I tightened my hold to the banister, feeling suddenly as though I were standing at the edge of a cliff. And then I heard it, what would have broken my heart had I let it.
“She’s just a colleague, Mom, okay? A colleague. That’s all she is.”
When he came upstairs I was lying in bed with my eyes shut, pretending to be asleep. The door creaked and closed again and I thought he might have walked back out of the room, but then I felt him moving toward me, settling down next to me, caving in the mattress with his weight, his hand on my back. For a long time he just sat there. Then he stood up and left, and by the time he returned I must have really been asleep, because I never felt him come in, or lie down next to me. I never felt him cover me with the blanket under which we awoke the next morning, or open the window to let the air in.
After serving us coffee and toaster waffles, Rose saw us to the driveway, where Robert sat parked in a convertible car, waiting for us. She handed me a plastic bag with the egg salad sandwiches she’d prepared for our train ride back to the city, wrapped in thick aluminum foil, and stood in her bathrobe and slippers on the dewy lawn, holding the robe closed with one arm while we got inside the car.
In the kitchen she’d kissed me goodbye and said that she hoped to see me at her Thanksgiving table. Now she stood waving her pale hand at me with clinical detachment, as though she had no specific plans to ever see me again and knew something about me I didn’t.
As the car pulled out of the driveway I looked at her closely, and saw in her sorry smile and discerning eyes the mirror she’d been holding up to me all along.
Chapter 21
The town of Livingston with its white clock tower and periwinkle sky had flashed past our train car, crowded with rush-hour passengers heading into the city, when I turned from the window and met Aeden’s eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Aeden asked me. The newspaper we’d gotten at the station was still folded on his lap.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said, not knowing where to start.
“I’m going to Cambridge next week,” he said. “For the interview. I was thinking if you came with me we could spend some time in Boston. It would be nice to get away for a few days, just the two of us.”
I wanted to sweep things under the rug, but I knew I couldn’t. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Aeden.”
I could feel him studying me from his seat. “Why wouldn’t it be?” he asked.
“I’m incapable of love,” I answered, despite myself.
There was a stirring from one of the passengers in our booth, followed by the empty silence of before. Aeden unfolded the newspaper, as if to read it, and then he just sat there, looking stunned.
For the duration of the ride he did not speak to me again, or even look at me. I saw him gazing with stony interest at the BMC Bioinformatics pointlessly anchored in my hands and wished I could take my words back, and then I also wondered if there was any point in wishing this.
The line of people waiting outside Penn Station for a taxi reached the end of the block. We crossed Seventh Avenue and began to head north on foot, moving awkwardly between swarms of morning commuters. The chive and egg salad sandwiches Rose had prepared were in my backpack. I’d had a vision of us stopping at his dorm to have them before heading to the Animal Facility to check on our mice, but my statement on the train had probably made that idea unlikely.
So I was surprised when, some five minutes later, beneath a giant billboard running a perfume ad in Times Square, Aeden took hold of my hand and guided me to the inner side of the street. “I don’t share my mother’s views, Emily. I’m sorry you overheard what you did, and I apologize for saying what I said. You know that’s not how I feel about you. You’re not just a colleague to me.”
“That doesn’t change who I am, Aeden.”
“There’s nothing wrong with who you are.”
Something
told me to leave it at that, but I found myself telling him what I’d been thinking since that overheard conversation. “I don’t know that I want the same things you want, Aeden, or that I would be able to manage them, even if I did. I know I told you the other day that I wanted to have children. The truth is, I don’t know where that came from, if it was me who said it or a wishful version of me.”
“It was you,” Aeden said with a smile. “I was there.”
“I don’t want to mislead you anymore,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s not fair to you, Aeden, or to me.”
Aeden dug into his backpack for a cigarette. I don’t know what I was expecting him to say, but when he finally looked at me again, I wasn’t prepared for his question. “So you want us to break up?”
For a painful moment I stood there speechless. Then I turned from him and dove into the crowded street, and began to walk away quickly, mindlessly weaving my way in my dress and heels between a million people, and then gradually slowing down, finding an empty pocket in the herd to catch my breath.
I can’t remember what my precise thoughts were as I made my lonely advance toward the lab that morning. I only recall a powerful wish to turn the clock back to before our visit to Livingston. And yet along with this there was something else: a deep, almost visceral sense of peace I sometimes have riding those long moving walkways at airport terminals. Gradually I come to terms with the monotone motion of the rolling belt, the sight of people breezing by with their carry-ons and their smartphones, content-looking people who seem to have no regrets in the world, so that by the time the belt rolls to its end I’m usually reluctant to step off, and wish I could stay on for a little longer, pretend I’m one of them.
Somewhere farther uptown, between Lexington and Park, the sea-breeze scent of Aeden seized me like a blow to the stomach. I turned my head around, hoping to see him behind me, but moving toward me were only the faces of strangers.
Chapter 22
Among my list of emails that morning was one from Justin, and I was pleased to see that unlike the others I had received from him since the Sunday he’d seen Aeden and me coming out of the darkroom together, this one was private: a reply to a message I had sent him some three months earlier telling him about our chimera in the facility, and how we hoped to have results before the end of fall. When I opened his email, however, there was no reply to my message of that day, only a link to a document. I opened the link and read Novel Gene Mediates Axon Pathfinding in Drosophila, and for a long time I just sat there at my desk, unable to read anything beyond that title, or even to think.
It was Craig’s paper, of course, submitted to Science and fallen by some strange glitch of fate into Justin’s hands for review. Justin would no doubt find a million little faults with it and anonymously ask for more data or even for additional experiments to be carried out in order to delay their publication, but there was only so much he could do.
I picked up the landline in our bay and dialed Aeden’s cell phone, but there was no answer. I hit Redial and the call went straight to voicemail, and when I tried to leave him a message his mailbox was full. Noon came around and I hadn’t heard from him. I sat with two printed copies of the paper on my lap and dialed him again and again and still there was no answer. By late afternoon I had brought myself to look at the paper closely enough to know that the gene Craig had discovered in his mutant flies was a close relative of our pathfinder. This meant that, from a purely scientific standpoint, the San Diego lab had reached the finish line before we had. One image in particular sent my heart racing: green fluorescent nerve endings in a small cross section of a fly antennal lobe unraveled from one another like telephone wires in a pole after a tornado, failing to reach their target. Coming across the image again, as I did years later—in the journal where Craig eventually published his results—I still found it hard to tear myself away from it.
I was about to stand up and go across the street to look for Aeden when Justin came into our bay escorted by David. Instinctively I glanced toward the window. The day outside had slipped by. The sky was ashen, the bridge a lifeless frame beneath it.
“You need to analyze your mice,” Justin said, standing next to my chair. It was his first time in our bay since that Sunday, his first time addressing me. He was dressed formally as usual, and oozing from his mouth was a reassuring smell of wintergreen.
“That’s not possible,” I said. “The litter is only three days old.”
“It can be done,” Justin said. “We can learn something from these animals.”
“Their map of smell isn’t fully developed.”
“That’s Aeden talking,” Justin said in a friendly tone. “Not you.”
“How can we learn anything without the whole picture?” I asked, ignoring his comment.
“That depends on the results,” Justin said. “If they’re clear-cut we’ll see it right away. Come morning, or later tonight, after my dinner engagement, I’ll start working on the paper. By the end of the week we’ll submit a Letters article to Nature describing our findings. Top-tier journals love competition, and what better competition than Science versus Nature?”
I remember wanting to get the analyses over and done with, to know the result of our experiment once and for all. “Aeden isn’t here,” I said. “We’ll need to wait for him.”
“David is here,” Justin offered. “You can fetch the litter with him. He’ll dissect the mice for you and stain the bulbs. He’s done it before, haven’t you, David?”
David gave me a sheepish look from my bench, where he’d been hanging out with an empty mouse cart, listening to our conversation and looking all too eager to help.
“I can’t analyze the mice without Aeden,” I said. “He’s an equal contributor.”
“Some equal contributor,” Justin snapped. “To disappear when you need him.” He looked reproachfully at me. “I should never have allowed it.”
“That wasn’t for you to decide, Justin.”
“It was for me to decide. I regret I ever raised a finger in his favor.”
When Aeden showed up in the bay minutes later, wearing the same clothes as earlier in the day and smelling of cigarettes, I sprang from my chair and hurried to him with Craig’s paper. He calmly took it from my hands and stood at his workbench, leafing through the pages, and stopped at the image of the misrouted neurons and smiled; a pensive smile that seemed to have less to do with the threat of Craig’s findings than with the marvel that they exposed. “If I were a reviewer I would approve,” he finally said.
“It’s settled, then,” Justin said from my desk. “We’re analyzing the litter tonight.”
Aeden raised his eyes from the paper and looked at me.
“It will give us a head start,” I said.
“What head start?” Aeden said, turning to Justin. “When have we ever examined newborns?”
Justin smoothed the scalloped chain of the watch he’d been holding. “I don’t care about protocol, Aeden—it’s not the way to get ahead in this field. Not in this day and age. You of all people should know that.”
Aeden shrugged. “I’m not going to sacrifice our only litter because of what may or may not happen with Craig’s submission. That’s insane.”
Justin glanced at me for assistance. When I didn’t give it to him he tucked his watch into his jeans and smiled at Aeden with composure. Then he slowly walked over to where Aeden and I were standing, the three of us forming a sort of triangle. “You’ll have a new litter down the road, Aeden. Meanwhile you will do as I say.”
Aeden stared away from him, toward the open door of the lab. I had a feeling he was about to leave the room, but he didn’t. He looked at me, uneasily, and it came as a somewhat strange and magnificent surprise to hear him say, “All right, I’ll see what I can do.”
Justin pushed the empty cart at him. “Good.”
On the third floor of the Animal Facility the hallway lights drew glinting slats across th
e polished floor, like sunlight reflected off an oil-spilled highway. On our way there Aeden and I had discussed Craig’s paper: the green fluorescent neurons wandering the antennal lobe of the fly like blind migrants, never reaching their destination. Aeden had stared unblinkingly ahead, impressed by the findings and also strangely aloof. We were approaching room 310 at the end of the hallway, where our mice were housed, when he looked at me and asked, “Are you sure this is what you want to do, Emily?”
“Yes,” I answered, though I wasn’t sure that it was what we should do.
We parked the mouse cart outside the room, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. I held a hand in front of me as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, until I could make out the rows of plastic cages, aligned on metal racks from floor to ceiling, and the mice, crawling like sleepwalkers.
What stood out, and never had before, were the white cards hanging from the front of each cage, with the names of the mouse strains clearly printed. These were the cards Aeden had mentioned, the cards Craig had switched around before fleeing the lab, leaving the investigators with mice in the room months behind in their experiments.
A blinding light pierced the darkness: the biosafety hood at the end of the room. Aeden had switched on the lights and moved to a nearby rack, where he stood examining a row of unfamiliar cages. The cage with our litter was already inside the hood: the sash was raised and I could see the female knockout founder crouched beside the water spigot, next to her mound of pups. I went to stand in front of the hood and her whiskers twitched in my direction, as if smelling me.
The DNA of You and Me Page 13