Double Helix (13 page)

“Two–love,” Kayla said demurely. “Hey, I thought you said you could play. I thought you said you would stop underestimating me.” Her eyes were dancing now, with glee, with triumph. “I play varsity in college, you know.”

And then I was the one laughing aloud. “I didn't know,” I said. “Well, serve again—and may God help me.”

“He's not interested,” said Kayla smartly.

That serve of hers again.

She beat me, in the end, 6–3, 4–6, 7–6, and by the end of the game, I trusted her physicality, her command of her body, completely. It was incredible. I'd never known anything like it. I'd never known anyone like her.

By the end of the game, I was barely holding back at all . . . and maybe I didn't have to. Maybe, with her—here on the tennis court, if nowhere else—I could let go for a short time and just be myself. Without carefulness. Without . . . and here came a strange nugget of truth.

Without fear.

BUT TO MY SURPRISE and chagrin, that night, I still missed Viv. I longed for her fiercely, more even than before. I didn't understand it. I had had a wonderful time with Kayla, and we had plans to meet again in the morning for breakfast at Dr. Wyatt's, followed by more tennis. I'd thought, defiantly, that I might even skip going to visit my mother later in the day. Kayla could distract me the way I needed to be distracted; she was so perfect. I was sure of it.

And yet, as I lay in bed, all I could think about was Viv. I'd close my eyes and try to drift off to sleep, and then I'd find myself reaching out for her. I'd fix an image of Kayla, beautiful Kayla, in my mind, try to focus on it . . . and there again, instead, would be Viv. Ordinary, well-known, earnest, outspoken, unathletic, emotionally demanding Viv.

The way she'd take my hand and tilt her head to the side and slide a glance at me, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. Her giggle. And how quiet she'd get, how serious, almost solemn . . .

Okay. I wanted her, yes. Still. You don't rip somebody out of yourself that quickly, that easily. She was the first girl I'd loved, after all, and she'd loved me, too, even though she'd known me, truly, so little. She'd been sincere, and I knew that. It—she—was valuable to me. So I understood why I kept on wanting her despite the fact of how things were going to be—had to be—now. My body was operating blindly, habitually, in the same way that a human brain could still receive phantom, lying signals from an amputated hand or foot.

What I didn't understand, though, was why I kept talking to her in my head. Arguing with her. Justifying myself. Growing angrier and angrier. . . . How could she want so much? How could she presume—why couldn't she just have done what I wanted, because I wanted it? Couldn't she understand that I knew what was best for me, knew the best way to handle things for myself? That I needed things to be a certain way in order to survive? So that I could get up every day and do what I had to do? So I could just go on?

Her and her damned sharing. Her and her damned trust. Yeah, that all worked fine, maybe . . . when you were dealing with the ordinary stuff of life.

Real trust would have had her giving me what I needed. Not prying; accepting. Accepting blindly, if necessary—and it was.

But she wasn't capable of that.

Another thing that made me angry was that I suspected I knew what Viv had been up to this last week. I suspected she'd spent all her free time researching Huntington's disease. Toting books home from the library to read. Surfing the web. Reading Internet chat and list discussions about HD. Thinking. Putting together patterns with me in the middle of them. Trying to figure me—it—me—out.

Yes, I could almost feel Viv learning about HD, or trying to, from twenty blocks away, and there was no way to make her stop. No way to keep the knowledge from her. And if she were to call my father—he'd talk to her now. Oh, yes, he'd talk freely.

So, if Viv wanted to know where my mother was, she would find out. She could even—there was a stubbornness to Viv—go to the nursing home herself. Go to see for herself.

Please God, no.

And all at once I understood that
this
was why I'd been thinking about not going to see my mother. About hanging out with Kayla instead. It was just in case Viv showed up, informed by my father about my regular time to visit.

More than that, actually. I didn't want to go today because Viv might have been there at any time this past week. Might have met my mother. Might have trespassed. And if I learned that she had gone there . . . if a nurse or attendant said anything to me about that . . .

I could feel rage—and fear, but mostly rage—threaten to fountain up inside me. Viv might have seen my mother in that wheelchair, her face vacant, and thought—wrongly—that she understood. Thought she understood her. Thought she understood me.

But the woman called Ava Samuels, the one who existed in that nursing home today, as the end approached—she could not give Viv the slightest picture of who she once had been. Of the two—at least two—women she had been before.

Ava Louise Lange Samuels. Brilliant economist, professor at the Harvard Business School. Picture-perfect wife and mother . . . but with an abnormally long trinucleotide repeat in a particular dominant gene, hidden deep in her DNA where nobody could see it or know about it. Not her husband or her son. Not even Ava herself, or her doctor—at least, not without the testing that had only been available publicly since 1993.

And you had to already be suspicious to do the testing anyway.

The trinucleotide: Cytosine-Adenine-Guanine. C-A-G. A normal sequence. Even to have repeats was absolutely normal. Eleven repeats was in the normal range. So, in fact, was twenty, thirty, forty. The human genome could tolerate a lot of variation. Variation was good, normal, healthy. To a point.

But if you happened to have more than forty repeats of C-A-G at the tip of chromosome four, then you were carrying the HD time bomb, set to go off—well, no one could say exactly when. In middle age sometime, usually.

That was what happened to my mother. Bit by bit, she started acting oddly.

But what's odd? Suppose, at age thirty-two, you stumbled while you walked. Suppose, at age forty, you threw a plate at your husband's head. Maybe you were just being ordinarily clumsy. Maybe you had been provoked beyond bearing. People without HD did those things all the time. Maybe it was nothing.

But maybe it was the beginning. Maybe it wasn't you doing those things. Maybe it was the trinucleotide repeats . . . going to work on you. Starting to eat away at who you were. To mutate and possess your very self.

Destiny was written in the trinucleotide repeats. That was what I knew, what Viv could never know, no matter how much research she might do. The words
progressive insanity
- didn't even begin to cover it.

C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-AG-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A- G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-AG-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A- G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-AG-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A- G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G-C-A-G.

Viv could look and look at my mother, quiet and docile these days, as death approached. And Viv could read and read. But she couldn't know, couldn't know, couldn't know.

Too many C-A-G repeats at the tip of chromosome four.

Viv couldn't know what it had been like for me and my father. There was no way to describe those years in which Ava Louise Lange Samuels lived with us, out of control, turning into a different person, going insane day by day—and knowing it.

As I would know it.

Yes, much as I longed for Viv, it was good that she wasn't with me right now. Because if she had been, and I'd felt what I felt now, this confusion and hate and rage and misery—

Somewhere in me, I realized, I needed someone to lash out at. This was why I attacked my father verbally, emotionally, - every way I could. Viv had only been safe when she was in her little compartment, separated from the more horrible things in my life. And if she wouldn't stay there, wouldn't stay safe in the compartment, then I might not be able to trust myself. She wouldn't be safe from me. Because I wanted—I needed—someone to blame—

I took several deep breaths.

I needed things to be the way they had been. But they - couldn't be.

Kayla, I told myself. Think of Kayla.

But I couldn't soothe myself, couldn't forget Viv. Not yet, anyway. And so I gave up. I turned on the bedside lamp. It was just after two a.m. I prowled into the kitchen and made coffee. Then I pulled out a Terry Pratchett novel to read. Corporal Carrot—Viv's favorite character. Sitting up at the kitchen table, I read his adventures doggedly for the rest of the night.

When dawn came and the sun climbed into the sky, I got dressed and—with relief—went to meet Kayla and Dr. Wyatt for breakfast.

IT FELT MORE than a little strange to sit idle and watch Dr. Wyatt cook. He refused outright to let Kayla or me help. Instead, he gave us coffee and sat us on the other side of the kitchen island from the stove, and I watched in surprise as he calmly managed three pans with order and efficiency. In no time, a neat platter of French toast, a pile of perfectly crisp bacon, and a shallow bowl of scrambled eggs were ready to be placed on the table on the sunporch, where croissants, grapes and blackberries, china place settings, linen napkins, and more coffee awaited.

“I'm impressed,” I said to Dr. Wyatt as I pulled out a chair for Kayla. She brushed against me for a millisecond as she moved to sit, and I caught the fresh light scent of her shampoo. I again felt filled with amazement at her beauty, and with gratification at her clear interest in me. In fact, when she'd greeted me earlier, she'd displayed a demure downcast to her eyes—coupled with a sudden flashing glance upward—that made me feel ready to forget everything else in the world but her. We'd be alone later. I looked down at the top of her head, at the sweet jut of her cheekbone, the curve of her bare downy shoulder in her summer dress. I could kiss her if I wanted, later. I suddenly knew that, knew it with complete certainty. She'd like it; she even expected it. I could touch her and—

I grabbed my own seat and sat.

Dr. Wyatt was seated, too, and had already reached for the eggs. “What, Eli, you didn't think I could use a stove? Set a table? Expected we'd be ordering bagels from the place around the corner?”

“Well . . . you did mention the other day that you had a cook,” I said. My brain was racing ahead on the other track, however. Kayla was going to be a sophomore in college. She - wouldn't be a virgin like Viv had been . . . and I wasn't one now, either, for that matter. It would be totally different—no strings, no emotional entanglements. And the way Kayla had moved in her body when she played tennis . . . I'd been lying to myself, all at once I knew that. Pretending I hadn't been thinking about this all along, from the second I saw Kayla. Maybe breaking up with Viv had nothing to do with her prying and snooping, her emotional demands, nothing to do with HD. Maybe it was all just normal hormones . . . time to move on, to experiment . . . why be tied down when you were only eighteen? Viv was far too intense anyway.

“Eli? French toast?”

“Oh—yes, sure.” I managed to accept the platter that Dr. Wyatt passed to me. He was continuing the conversation like a civilized person. I tried hard to tune in again.

“The truth is I'm limited to cooking breakfast things,” he said. “But only from choice. Cooking is a skill very close to chemistry, you know—and though I didn't major in it, I took a lot of chem as an undergraduate. I don't think it's wise for scientists to specialize too quickly. Nowadays, especially, we understand that things connect in all sorts of unpredictable ways. The race goes to the prepared. Remember that next year, Eli, when you start college. I approve of double-majors, by the way. I only wish Kayla had at least—”

“You know that I would never make a good scientist,” Kayla said calmly. “My parents reconciled themselves to that, and so should you.”

“Maybe you weren't meant to end up doing scientific research,” Dr. Wyatt conceded. “It bored you so much that summer. But you're so smart, Kayla, and to spend all your time reading eighteenth-century novels—I simply fail to see the utility of it.”

“I'm supposed to be the one figuring out utility, not you.” Kayla didn't seem to have taken offense; she was smiling fondly at Dr. Wyatt. “Trust me, Q. I'll be fine.”

Hearing Dr. Wyatt called Q helped retrieve me from my sexual haze. I had heard Kayla use it before, but it still struck me as off-key—as strange as if the prophet Mohammed had materialized in the room and Kayla had greeted him with “Hey, Mo!” It made me remember, anew, that Kayla was more than a beautiful face and body. That she, too, had a history and a mind and was bound to be complicated and full of unknowns.

This thought abruptly cooled me off.

I dug into my French toast. “How's it going with your internship?” I asked Kayla.

“Oh, so far they have me writing press releases and updating the website. But they also said that I can read the slush in my spare time, if I want to.” She leaned forward, shredding a croissant between her fingers. “If I want to! I can't wait!”

“Slush?” I asked.

“The manuscripts that people send in uninvited.” She ate the tiniest bit of croissant. “I know most of the slush pile manuscripts are supposed to be just awful, but it seems to me that you never know. There could be an amazing novel in there, or some fascinating nonfiction. It happens.”