by Ashley Ream
* * *
Rachel sat on the floor of the bathroom with the door locked, transcribing the notebook she’d ripped from Hooper’s hand. She’d rather he had never seen it, but now that he had, she couldn’t risk him looking for it again.
After mixing up Harry’s dose, Rachel had spent two hours going through her usual procedure. Moving as quickly as she could, she’d set up her samples in their flasks and used the pipette to allot nutrients and green algae for food. She had lowered the tank temperature slightly. The variables were set and noted.
While those cooked, she transcribed her work into a new notebook. The tile floor was hard, and the shaggy, cream-colored bathmat offered less padding than she’d hoped. The sharp pain radiating from the two points in her pelvis that ground into the floor reminded her that she had not been eating. She hadn’t been on a scale. She should weigh herself to better calculate dosage to body mass. She would make a note of that. In the meantime, she had less padding, and her butt hurt, forcing her to adjust her position. She wanted to take a small dose, just a little bit, to help her get through the work, and resisting took more self-discipline than she cared to admit. She had a little self-experimentation planned for later, and she couldn’t risk skewing the results. With a deep breath, she set her jaw and pushed through.
Each page was copied from English to a shorthand code Rachel had developed in graduate school. It had proved undecipherable to anyone else, and other students had stopped asking to copy her notes. It was something she should have done originally. She could only hope that if Hooper went looking for her notebook again, he would be as stymied as they had been. As each page was completed, she tore the original into sixteen pieces and threw the pieces into the toilet to flush away.
When that was done, Rachel went back to her real work. She took four samples from the tanks and prepared each for the centrifuge. While they cycled, she set up a cooler with some pilfered dry ice from the work site. When the tubes were finished spinning, she discarded the liquid that had separated and was floating at the top. Then, using a small container of liquid nitrogen, she flash froze two of the samples and packed them in with the dry ice. Finally, she gathered the other tubes and a handful of supplies to take down to the kitchen.
Sometimes you needed a little fire.
* * *
Tilda had not slept much nor had she slept well, and when she woke later than usual but still exhausted, she was forced to choose between warm sheets but lots of tossing and turning or the self-satisfaction of just getting up and on with it. It wasn’t an easy call, and she spent a good twenty minutes trying to deny the question altogether before dragging herself to standing.
She pulled her swim cap, goggles, and suit off the rack in the bathroom where she’d last left them to dry and shoved them in her gym bag with a towel. She wore the same sweatpants and sweatshirt to the pool each time, and she pulled them out of the dirty laundry and put them on before heading down to the kitchen for a to-go cup.
On the way, she stopped on the second floor and tiptoed to Harry’s room. She had left his door half open along with her own. It had been the best she could do without resorting to a baby monitor. She stuck her head inside. He was a lump under the covers turned over on his side and facing away from the door. She stood there for a moment, watching him much like she had watched her children sleep those years ago, as though her presence could forestall some waiting disaster. She had learned in the most horrible way that that was not true for her children, and she knew, too, that it was not true for Harry. But still she stood there and watched.
His cane wasn’t in the same place she had left it the night before. She had put it near the head of his bed, so it would be easy for him to reach. But it was now at the foot, and Tilda assumed he had gotten up to use the bathroom, which meant that he was able to get up and use the bathroom, and she was grateful for that.
Harry hated cell phones and did not own one. Tilda no longer considered that his decision, not that she would put it that way when she came home with one for him. She would keep it charged and check that he had it in his pocket whenever she left the house. Tilda was still thinking about cell phones, which to get and where to get it, as she left Harry’s room and headed for the stairs.
The guest room, which was really Becca’s room, was right in front of her at the top of the banister. Anyone going up or down would come face-to-face with it. The door had been shut tight ever since the woman had shown up with her fish tanks and metal suitcases of equipment, and so the thin triangle of light that spilled out of the ever-so-slightly open door couldn’t help but grab Tilda’s attention.
She stood at the crack and tried looking inside, but the view was too limited. She saw only the thinnest slice of the room, and most of that was the unmade bed. It was almost as useless as looking through a peephole the wrong way. Tilda looked over her shoulder, but the door to that floor’s bathroom was open and the light was off. She wasn’t in there.
Tilda rapped her knuckle against the frame twice, not too quiet and not too loud, formulating a cover story as she did so. Maybe something about a cup of coffee or some extra towels. But there was no answer. Tilda rapped again just a little louder but not, she hoped, loud enough to wake Harry. Still no answer, and so she did what anyone would do. She pushed the door open and let herself inside.
25.
Before doing anything, Rachel had given herself a quick tour of the downstairs, checking the dining room, the library, the parlor, the bathroom, and even opening the closets and the door to the garage. It was too bad the kitchen didn’t have a door, but it couldn’t be helped. A burner was something Rachel hadn’t packed.
She’d filled a standard cooking pot with tap water and set it on the stove with the fire turned up as high as it would go. The two tubes from the centrifuge were sealed, and when the water came to a full rolling boil, she dropped one of them in, along with a razor blade. And then she waited.
The ten minutes were torturous. She paced back and forth in front of the stove and, when that got old, in a triangle pattern from the stove to the sink to the refrigerator, which she opened and closed twice before remembering that she was supposed to eat more food. It was a terrible time to remember. She didn’t want anything in her stomach for this experiment, and knowing she couldn’t eat only made her want to eat more. She decided to leave the fridge alone and went about opening all the cabinets and inspecting all the contents until her watch finally beeped.
Rachel donned an oven mitt, just to be safe, and used a pair of kitchen tongs to pull the tube and then the blade out of the boiling water and take them over to the sink. She ran cold water over them until the razor blade, the tube, and the contents were cool enough to work with.
Then Rachel pulled up the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She took a breath, closed her eyes, and before there was time to have another thought, she picked up the blade and dragged it across the inside of her forearm. She had to hold her arm over the sink. The blood was coming faster than she’d expected, and she worried for a moment that she’d gone too deep. Rachel grabbed the tea towel lying near the sink and held it to the wound until blood no longer ran but rather oozed out of the three-inch cut. Taking care not to drip on the counters and floor, Rachel opened the small glass tube that had been boiled and swallowed the contents.
And then she waited again.
The pain in her back was chronic, and like most chronic pain, the intensity changed from hour to hour, day to day. She needed something more standardized—more acute—to start logging accurate experiments.
After twenty minutes, she didn’t have to palpate the wound to know the boiled sample had not worked. Her heart beat faster, and she had to take a breath and tell herself it might all still be nothing. She had to test the control to know for sure. Rachel took up the second glass tube that she had brought down to the kitchen but had not dropped in the boiling water. She unsealed that one and, just like the first, swallowed the contents.
She didn’t enjoy the tas
te, but the solids were less rotten-fishy than the unseparated paste.
She spent the next five minutes bandaging the wound and telling herself the experiment wouldn’t work. It was a superstition of hers that she’d developed during her master’s program. If she believed something would happen, it probably wouldn’t, and she would be disappointed. So the obvious thing to do was to decide ahead of time that the thing wouldn’t work out at all, and then it would. Although you couldn’t, in your mind at the time of the experiment, make that last leap to success because that would be believing it would work, which would take you back to the first condition, which was that believing you were about to be successful ensured that you would not be.
By the time she’d finished applying the gauze and the medical tape, which wasn’t supposed to pull too much on hair and skin but did anyway, and thinking all of her superstitious thoughts, she knew it had worked. Her arm didn’t hurt at all.
She clamped a hand down over her mouth to keep from letting out the whoop that was rushing up her vocal chords. Chemicals hold up well to high heat. Proteins and peptides are destroyed by it. That meant that her active compound, whatever it was, was not a chemical. Rachel, her hand still over her mouth, leaped up and spun around 180 degrees and then did it again just to let out a little more energy. She hadn’t been this excited since she’d taken the first dose in the camp cabin.
She knew something. She knew it for sure, and it was important. It was a piece of information that she would need to synthesize the compound into something stable and reproducible.
Grinning, she went to gather up her supplies and race up to her room, remembering at the last possible moment the promise she’d made to herself. Rachel went back to the pantry and added a half-eaten package of Oreo cookies and an old-looking box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers. While she was gathering supplies, she took two sodas from the fridge, fitting one in each pocket of her sweatshirt. No one would claim these things equaled a balanced diet, but they were all high in calories. And calories were nothing but a measure of energy. The more the better, Rachel reasoned, and sprinted as quickly as her load would allow up the stairs.
High from the excitement, she didn’t even notice the door to her room was unlatched.
* * *
“What are you doing in here?”
Tilda had not been paying attention. It was the first time she had been in Becca’s room in—well, she didn’t really know how long it had been. She had held her breath when she’d crossed the threshold, as though that might protect her or gird her or make it easier in some way. But once she was inside, she realized it wasn’t Becca’s room at all. Becca’s room was gone. It was in some other time, and what was here instead was—this.
Tilda was absorbed by all the tanks and the lights and the tubing. My God, she’d never seen so much plastic tubing in her whole life. And there were flasks and jugs and jars full of all kinds of things she couldn’t identify, but which might have been pond scum. She had opened up one of the coolers, and smoke had billowed out. She’d slammed the lid back down and hadn’t touched anything after that. It was a lot to take in, which was why the voice scared the shit out of her.
Tilda spun around and put her hand to her heart like some sort of Southern heroine, which was embarrassing but not as embarrassing as getting caught snooping.
“I was looking for you,” Tilda said. It came out in such a rush she knew it couldn’t sound natural.
The woman, Rachel, set a cardboard box down on the bed, which was unmade and covered in papers and clothing that all looked dirty. Tilda had had to fight the urge when she’d first come in to either pick up or scold someone. Sticking out of the top of the box, Tilda noticed her stash of Oreos. They were her Oreos. Harry hated Oreos. He always had. It hadn’t occurred to her that Rachel would be stealing them.
“Did you touch anything?” the woman asked.
“Did I—no. I didn’t touch anything.”
“It’s important. You have to tell me if anything was moved.”
“It wasn’t.”
The two women looked at each other, and Tilda had the feeling Rachel was waiting for her to flinch.
“It wasn’t,” Tilda said again.
Rachel ran her eyes over the tanks and contraptions, trying to determine, Tilda supposed, if she was lying. Tilda thought about the cooler but refused to look in that direction and give herself away.
“You can’t come in here without permission,” the young woman said. She said it with such authority that Tilda was taken aback.
When Tilda didn’t offer a response—and perhaps the young woman wasn’t waiting for one—Rachel said, “If you were to disturb something, it could taint the results. It would be disastrous.”
Tilda was meant to feel like she’d bumped the arm of a brain surgeon mid-procedure. “I came by to see if you needed anything,” she said.
“Harry told me to help myself.”
Tilda looked down at the food. “I see that you are.”
The woman looked down, too, and shifted her weight. The comment had wrong-footed her, and Tilda moved forward. It was like a game of tennis, and the advantage was now hers.
“What work exactly are you doing for the university?” Tilda asked.
Rachel avoided eye contact. “It’s technical.”
“I spent two terms on the senate science committee,” Tilda said. “I think I can handle it.”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”
“That’s unusual,” Tilda said.
The woman didn’t reply.
“Under whose authority are you not at liberty to discuss your work on this very public biological phenomena?”
Again silence. The young woman removed two cans of soda from her sweatshirt pockets and set them on the bedside table, as though she were going to go about her business whether Tilda continued to stand there and jabber or not.
“If those are cold, and I presume they are,” Tilda said, “please don’t set them on that table. They’ll leave rings.”
Still no verbal response, but the woman moved the cans to the rug next to the bed, where they would surely be kicked over.
Without a good-bye, Tilda crossed the room, passing within inches of Rachel, and stepped out into the hall. Rachel reached for the door, but before she could shut it, Tilda put her hand on the frame and said over her shoulder, “Eugene Hooper—I believe that’s his name—was in yesterday’s paper. He gave a rather extensive interview about your team’s research. I suppose no one told him it was classified.”
Tilda let her hand fall from the frame, and Rachel shut the door without comment.
* * *
The skin was looser above Tilda’s knees than it used to be and above her elbows and breasts. She avoided touching her neck when she sat in front of a computer. She used to rest her hand there often. It was her unconscious thinking pose, but it just reminded her of how different her skin felt now—less elastic, like panty hose about to go south. Her forearms had a bit of mottling that maybe she should discuss with a dermatologist. The veins and sinewy bits were more visible in her hands and the tops of her feet than they used to be. And that was just off the top of her head.
There were any number of reasons to feel more self-conscious about her body than she used to, and there were times she did. But pulling on her silver one-piece racing suit with its body-sucking tightness, its low leg openings and high neck, the shoulder-blade area cut out for maximum movement was not one of those times. She didn’t think about her neck or her knees in her suit. The pool was her home court. In the pool, she could beat any woman her age, most of the men, and a high percentage of the younger people, too. In the pool, she didn’t need anyone to grant her a position. She took it.
Tilda shoved her duffel bag into one of the half lockers in the ladies’ room and walked with her cap and goggles in hand to the showers. She rinsed off in warm water, wet down her hair, and pulled on her cap, tucking the ends up inside. Last, she put on her goggles, leaving the ey
e pieces up on her forehead, and walked in her flip-flops out of the locker room to the indoor pool.
She was later than usual. The sun was well up, and the glass enclosure around the pool was lit like a fish tank, which only reminded her of that woman. Tilda used her name in her own mind as little as possible, as though that somehow kept the scientist in her place.
Tilda windmilled her arms in one direction and then the other, did a few deep knee bends, and then hopped off the edge into the shallow end of the pool. All of the lanes were occupied, and she’d have to split one, which did not make her happy. She chose the lane with the fastest swimmer, a man who looked to be in his early forties. She wondered, but not for long, why he wasn’t in an office somewhere. Was he one of those Seattle tech millionaires who’d retired out here decades early? If he was, she thought, he’d be bored and useless within five years.
It was possible, she acknowledged, that she was in something of a mood. She would have to swim it out. She waited for the man to get to the other end of the pool. He grabbed the edge for a second-long break and nodded that he saw her. Tilda nodded back, pulled down her goggles, and pushed off from the wall.
Stroke, stroke, breathe. Stroke, stroke, breathe.
By the time she’d done two lengths of the pool, she’d passed her tech millionaire, and he’d slid over into the next lane, preferring to share with someone else.
Stroke, stroke, breathe. Stroke, stroke, breathe.
26.
When Tilda returned to Harry’s house, her hair was still wet. She was carrying a plastic bag from the corner market along with her duffel and was using her one free thumb to check her text messages.