A sea of faces turned, peeking around tri-fold displays and small engineering marvels. Faces eager, pensive, vacant, and indifferent, the phenotype based on a formula of variables that included their interest in science, time-management capabilities, parental involvement, and a myriad of social factors.
But behind outward expressions, these kids were refreshing and taught me so much more than I did them. While on the surface these kids were hyper critical of the smallest infraction to political correctness, their unencumbered brashness translated to a hunger for progressive fields like climate change, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology, and they instinctively pushed the boundaries of scientific exploration. I was quickly humbled and in awe of the young minds, with projects that ran the gamut from evaluating the tensile strength of the coating on butterfly wings exposed to various chemicals and UV light, determining the dilution at which the naturally occurring anti-bacterial factors are no longer effective in honey, and designing a computer program to scan images to identify terrorist websites.
I was assigned the youngest ones, the freshman class. Their nervous energy was washed away by the chance to be the center of attention as they presented their work. In some ways they were more free than the older kids, whose thoughts of college applications brought a seriousness to their projects’ success.
The day was long, with closed-door judges’ discussions about each project and ranking, culminating in tacking ribbons on the posters of the winners, to be revealed to all at the evening open house when the students returned with their families to walk the room and absorb the results. Chris tried to stop me, but I couldn’t help but take a final walk through the Juniors’ section to quickly glance at Tess’s poster. It was adorned with a bright blue ribbon.
“How do you feel about all of this?” I asked Tess on our way home from the open house.
“Winning? Great! I knew that it was one of the better projects, but it was nice to see that the judges felt that way too.”
“So now you go on to Regionals −if you want.” I tried to be matter of fact.
“Of course I want to! Why wouldn’t I? I’m taking this all the way to state.”
“That would be great. I just want you to know that if you don’t want to take it further, it’s okay.”
“Wha..? Now I’m really confused,” she said as Chris too, looked at me quizzically. “You were the one who got me into this project.”
I paused, confused in my own thoughts—trying to back off being a pushy mom while trying to encourage my daughter. “Um, you did an amazing job. It is a great project, and you did some pretty complicated and top-notch work, but …”
“But?! What ‘but’?”
“But I—I guess I want to make sure that despite my pushing, you’re doing this because you want to.”
“A little late for that, Mom, isn’t it?” Tess’s voice was the definition of incredulous.
“Maybe. I’m just saying that it’s your choice to continue.”
“Really?!” she blurted, then softened at the look of distress on my face. “Mom, if I didn’t like it, or really didn’t want to do it, I would have spent my time hanging at Lisa’s instead of in Dr. Meredith’s lab.” She leaned forward as far as her seatbelt would let her. “Honestly, this was really exciting for me. I got to work in a college lab, I was treated as an adult, and this project is really interesting. Kinda surprises me how cool I think fruit flies are now. Did I tell you my friends call me ‘fruity’ now because I talk about it so much?” She plopped backward. “Mom, it’s all good, even if you did initially force me into it.” I cringed at the operative word.
“Well, parents are supposed to sometimes force their kids to try something a few times if it might be good for them.”
Tess laughed. “A few times? Mom, pleeeease! Getting us to try something a few times is one thing, but when you want us to embrace something, you have a way of infusing endless attempts of force feeding, whether it’s science or broccoli.” She made validating eye contact with Chris in the rearview mirror. “Your nature walks, and” —she air quoted—“‘cooking experiments’ were about as subtle as your broccoli and cheese soup, broccoli quiche . . .”
“And let’s not forget roasted broccoli in quinoa!” Chris added.
“Okay. I guess I can be a bit overbearing,” I said, my look daring them to confirm. “I suppose I should consider establishing a savings account for the therapy you’re going to eventually need to talk about your tragic upbringing.”
“Nah, I’m good, Mom,” she reflected, looking out the window, “if you don’t tell anyone—especially Diana—I’m kind of glad you pushed me. I probably wouldn’t have had much interest in the science fair, or I’d have done a mediocre project, which would have been worse than not doing a project at all.”
“As long as you know that I’ll support you no matter what you choose to do.”
“I do, but it’s good to hear, especially in front of a witness!” She leaned forward and patted her dad’s shoulder. “Especially when I tell you I’ve decided to skip therapy and use the money to buy a car!”
We pulled into the driveway. “Guess it’s not a good time to bring up all that gender bias stuff, is it?” Chris chided. I felt him colluding with Tess as I helped gather up the day’s detritus inside the car.
“The two of you are impossible.”
Tess said, “I’ve even thought about expanding it next year, comparing the homeobox promoters with the standard TATA-box ones.”
“Well if you get good at promoters, maybe you can help Diana out when she becomes an actress!” Chris scored. We rolled our eyes.
I took a few days off around Christmas, snuggled in with the girls and Chris in front of the fire for an evening, visited family, tried to distract myself with trying new recipes. But too often my thoughts drifted and discussion circled back to questions about the devastation across the dog world. Because I worked on dog genes, I became the de facto expert on the latest CRFS news. “Do you think they’ll find a cure soon?”, “Who do you think did this?”, “Do you think it will hit here?”, worried friends asked at parties and encounters at the grocery store. I tried my best to keep a positive spin on what I knew about discoveries in the research community, but those closest to me could tell that I was disappointed not being involved directly. The evening news was rarely without a story on the issue, and the twenty-four-hour “news” shows stoked the fire with a parade of self-declared experts who demonstrated ad nauseam how little they knew. The East Coast seemed to be hit harder, and urban areas more than rural.
Typical of their age, the girls only wanted to spend their break with the few friends who hadn’t skipped town for vacation. I tried to generate interest in a few house projects that we had planned to do over break, but they seemed more like work than a creative outlet.
I returned to the lab midmorning two days before New Year’s Eve. The only others on the campus seemed to be the campus police and a few graduate students desperate for results so they could graduate in the spring. I erased the remnants of our CRFS circles from the board in the lab, and drew four quadrants.
in trying to overlay the cases, no patterns emerged. Dogs moved in and out of the show circuit, back and forth to dog parks and vet clinics, or never even left their homes. So, location or proximity didn’t seem to help to determine how they got the disease. And trends had shifted from the original cases in show dogs, to a concentration of cases happening at shelters.
The dogs at the shelters could either have been continuously exposed, or acutely exposed by a single-entry point, I thought, but which was it? CRFS seemed to come in waves, which implied an exposure to something that was highly virulent, affected all exposed animals, but that had a short infectious period, since there were examples of groups of dogs that came in later to shelters and weren’t affected. Shelters were an invaluable study population, since the potential exposure routes and timeline could be well defined, and there were control groups of unaffected dogs.
> Exposure was one aspect, but what about transmission? I knew it couldn’t have been dog-to-dog. Shelter dogs were of no help because they were all bunched together, but dog show animals who returned home to die would have carried the pathogen back to their kennels and infected more dogs if it was contagious, and there were no reports of this. Unless there was a brief period of time when the agent was infectious that would support some of the observations in shelters. Maybe, I thought, though all the dogs were exposed, the infectious period was so short, some of the exposures fell outside that window. But I was still wrestling with the most important factor: what was it? A virus, a bacterium? It couldn’t be a toxin or a poison, based on the lack of evidence of any common food or environmental factor, so it seemed more likely that it was a biologically infectious agent.
The most widely published findings came from the veterinary pharmaceutical companies. Likely prompted by their lawyers, they quickly surveyed data on all affected dogs, analyzing vaccination records to determine whether there were any patterns. Perhaps there was a contaminated lot of rabies vaccine, or a modified live viral vaccine that wasn’t so modified after all. But there was nothing. No patterns, no common distribution points, no common potential cause, which was probably a relief to everyone, especially company stock holders, though a positive result could have put a quick end to the devastation.
The evening was graying, the girls were sequestered in their basement territory, Chris sat reading Nature on our overstuffed oversized chair. Needing something warm, I made some generic un-caffeinated tea and silently joined him. I opened my computer and let out my exhaustion with a sigh.
“You have to make a decision,” Chris said, not looking up. “You’ve been gone for several months now, and it is starting to wear on everyone, especially you.”
“I’ve been here. I just −”
“Barely.”
“But it—”
“It’s okay, but you can’t keep going like this. The girls need you, I need you, and frankly, you need us. I thought when you didn’t get the grant from Regnum, things would settle down, but they haven’t. It’s not like you’re working on two projects now, so what is it?” He put down his journal and turning toward me, put his arm across my shoulders. “I thought with winter break we’d see more of you, but it’s the opposite. You’re in the lab even more than before.”
“I’m trying to use this time to dig through online data, news reports, anything that might shed some light on where CRFS is coming from.” Now I couldn’t look at him.
“So you’re working on two projects, but one you’re doing all on your own time.”
“Yes, without any funding. That’s why I’m doing it over the break since it has to be me working on my own time.”
“But it’s not just on your time. It’s on our time.”
I took his hand and leaned into him, and we sat silently dealing with the truth.
Sofie sat staring at me. I knew what she was thinking.
Here, have a ball … um … I don’t want you to keep it. I want it to inspire you to get off the chair and come outside with me. Hey! I’m looking at you! Maybe you didn’t see it. I’ll pick it up and drop it by you again. There. See it now? Do you feel the intensity of my focus on you, the ball, you, the ball. Maybe if I spin around you might look away from that thing you are always petting on your lap. Look at me! You’re still tapping on that thing. Here, I’ll pick it up, throw my head back, and roll it around my mouth some, loudly, and drop it again. It’s gooey now. Maybe you don’t realize how important this is. I live in the moment. Right now, there is nothing more important than for you to look at me. See the ball! Engage with me! Feel my cold nose? Maybe if I lift up your hand you will disconnect from the thing…tap, tap, tap. I can stare at you forever, or until something else distracts me. Do you know that I chose you to share this special moment? You! Because you are the most important thing in my life right now. Well, you and the ball. I need you to make the ball come alive, like a rabbit. I will chase it across the yard, over and over. You make it happen. I know that. You’re still not looking at me. I know you want to. I see your mouth make that shape. It’s like when I wag my tail. You don’t have a tail. I’ll sit over here. Right in front of you. Now a little further away. So you won’t miss me if you lift your eyes eeeever so slightly … You sighed! I heard it! Don’t pretend you didn’t. I have great hearing, you know. I know what that sigh means. It always comes just before you move that thing off your lap and look at me, your face changes, and you give in! See the ball next to you?
I tried, but it was impossible to resist Sofie’s plea. With the slightest shift in my sight line, she bolted into overdrive, legs spinning like a cartoon dog in midair. Finally she gained traction and bounded over the back of the chair to the front door, joined by Ania who knows to take her time as I’m the limiting factor. They could hardly contain themselves. I needed to clear my head anyway. I grabbed my coat and opened the front door and they bolted, then turned and waited. They chased the ball until light faded to dark, and we all collapsed in the living room in exhausted ecstasy, snuggling in for the night. Unfortunately, the events of the days ahead would curtail their ball playing for a few weeks.
As if a down pillow had been torn open and flung into the sky, large fluffy clumps of snowflakes floated gently down, drifting in and out of the soft light on our front porch. The world outside would be blanketed in six inches of snow by the morning, dampening sound and placing the world on hold.
New Year's Eve was nice. Thick steaks, big salad, garlic mashed potatoes, and a chocolate truffle cake made by Tess. The girls invited some of their friends over to celebrate and trash the basement with pillows, blankets, electronic devices, junk food, and endlessly streaming movies and episodes of TV reruns. They stayed awake until the wee hours; we didn’t make it to midnight. Chris and I reconnected watching Dr. Zhivago, cuddling quietly in our bed with Ania and Sofie filling in the contours of empty spaces around our legs.
Faint traces of cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove wafted down the hall. Bacon soon joined the mix, drawing me out of bed to find Chris in the kitchen making breakfast offering spiced cider, hot chocolate, eggs, pancakes, and grits. Another hour would pass before there were any signs of life from the basement, but I came to life, slowly recharging from a solid night of sleep. The girls and their friends eventually tumbled up the stairs and Chris served as short-order cook, taking on the role full-on, complete with the apron that read “For this I spent four years in college” with his editing of the four to read 10. He successfully embarrassed his daughters with renditions of That’s Amore, but secretly they loved having the cool, fun dad.
The day passed uneventfully with bowls of black-eyed pea soup, the transition from afternoon to evening unnoticed, and rolling into another deep and restful dream.
January 2nd, embarking on a new year, I woke rested. It was nice to have a break, though the rest of the non-school world was heading back to work. But the calm was slowly drawn away by chatter from the girls about rides to friends, dominion over clothing items, and sisterly conflict.
And the chatter on the news from every direction. The New Year’s Day dog show had been cautiously well-attended, though some of the best dogs were missing. The top Irish wolfhound, who was favored to win this year, was pulled by her owner, a veterinarian, when a number of his clients developed CRFS. He didn’t want to risk the population of show dogs by potentially exposing them to something he may have encountered in his clinic. He also didn’t want to expose his bitch to anything at the show.
There was a brief story in the science section of New York Times, a summary really, about the progress being made by the various pharmaceutical companies’ research on CRFS, Regnum included. While Kendal’s name was not mentioned, the company she worked for, Xlar, was noted as having made progress at identifying a number of breed-specific SNPs that could be used to identify susceptible populations. I found that odd, as there had not been any reports of breeds with significa
ntly more cases than any others, except when several that attended the same dog show came down with CRFS. But that would more likely be due to similar exposure at the show, as dogs of the same breed were housed in close proximity.
An endless parade of animal rights activists, anti-vaxxers, and self-proclaimed infectious disease conspiracy theorists like the Canine Crusaders crept into the airwaves heightening the panic like others had with Ebola. More reasonable reporting focused on the potential negative impact of CRFS on the economy.
Sofie on one side, Ania on the other, I sat eyes closed, trying to organize my thoughts. Little squares moved up or down and sideways as I tried to create a picture. Data, stories, patterns shuffled in my head as if on a little plastic game that came over on a big ship from China. As the day shifted to evening, Chris relieved me of having to tell him that I needed to go to the lab the next day.
Displacing Ania, who simply moved to the comfort of the loveseat, Chris placed his arm across my lap. “You should go in tomorrow, spend a few hours, get your thoughts organized. Why don’t you plan to do that every day the rest of the week, for a few hours, so you can feel like you have a plan, both in the lab and here.”
“Thanks.” I leaned into him. “Have I told you lately that you are an amazing person?”
“No. But you’re welcome. I’m not saying that I want you to disappear into the night and never surface until the CRFS mystery is solved, but I know you can’t ignore it. I’m also concerned that once your lab crew is back you’re going to spread yourself thin again.”
“Especially if I don’t pay attention to eating right.” My joke fell flat.
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