The Rest is Silence (24 page)

33

New York City

Another night, Benny and Leroy were reading together in her bedroom, lying on her bed, their legs touching under the comforter, like a decades-married couple.

“What's that?” Benny said.

He closed the book on his finger to mark his place and showed her the cover.
The Good Life
.

“It's about a couple who move to the country and grow all their own food,” he said. “Doug's girlfriend told me about it. It reminds me of this daydream I had as a kid of living in a cabin in the woods. Growing my own food. Skating on a pond.”

“Do you think you'll go home after you graduate?”

He nodded. “When I was a boy, my father would come home from work with construction paper. Before he took off his tie he'd sit beside me on the floor and we'd cut up the paper and draw on it. I was always making elaborate skylines of hills and trees, with one house on the edge of the forest that had smoke coming out its chimney and with a garden in front. I really don't belong here.”

“That's so far away from here.”

“Do you remember,” he said, “when I told you that first night that we'd be living together in Canada with our children?”

“You don't still believe that, do you?”

“We make things happen by believing they will. We dream where we're headed and one day we arrive there.”

“You're such a fatalist,” she said. “Your belief in destiny is always going to disappoint you.”

“I saw Rachel in the park yesterday.”

“What?”

“I took the afternoon off and went for a walk. She was running and stopped to say hi. We talked for over an hour.”

“How is she? What's she doing?”

“She's great. She said she misses you.”

“I doubt that.”

She wanted to know more, to know what she looked like, what she was wearing, but she couldn't ask. When Leroy's breathing told her that he was asleep, Benny got out of bed and sat on the windowsill to look at the skyline. The horizon, visible between buildings, was nothing more than a grey line separating heaven and earth. Benny knew that Leroy found Rachel attractive and she had a hunch that the two of them would like each other. It was bittersweet to see him become so animated when he mentioned bumping into Rachel. She pictured Rachel and the scar above her breast. Leaving her and Leroy felt like a deep cut. She wondered if all she was doing by imagining them together was trying to dress a wound she was making by running away.

*

Benny and Leroy stayed at their benches late that Friday. Lynn was the last of the others to leave and then they were alone. Leroy decided it was best to collect DNA from her blood even though sequencing could be done on a few cells scraped from the inside of Benny's cheek. He was used to drawing blood from his mice and he wanted a larger amount of DNA in case he needed to do the procedure twice.

He unwrapped a 21-gauge needle and pressed it onto the syringe. He unscrewed the cap from the glacial bottle of Leach's rocket fuel and brought it to his nose for a sniff. He held the cotton ball against the bottle's neck and inverted it. The ethanol he brushed along the crook of Benny's arm was cold. His teeth gripped his lower lip, his squinting eyes were held in anticipation. He slid the bevelled point of steel into a bulging vein, tattoo blue, slithering beneath her skin like a snake. Blood darted from the vein, deep red, eager for somewhere to go.

“You never mention your father,” she said.

“That's because I don't want to talk about him.” He paused. “I remember laughing with him a lot when I was a kid. I wonder where that went.”

The vial filled with her warm blood. He detached the vial and jammed it into the bucket of ice on his bench. He pressed the cotton ball onto her skin to staunch the flow and pulled the needle out from under it. She rested her index and middle fingers on the cotton as he leaned into her. The bristles on his upper lip outlined the shape his moustache would take, although he had shaved that morning. His incisors were both chipped and uneven along the bottom surface. She felt his whiskers first, tickling her lips, then the warm lips themselves. Benny held her breath, then pulled her head away gently. Leroy straightened his back and put both hands on the bench to steady himself.

“What happened the day your dad drowned?” Leroy said.

“I don't know for sure. A neighbour saw him leave the house. He must have walked to the lake and wound up at the public dock. He slipped and drowned.”

“Can I kiss you again?”

She shook her head. He leaned toward her but she pushed him gently. “I can't.”

“I don't get you.”

She nodded.

“I'll isolate this DNA while it's fresh.”

“Here's my key if you want to stop by on your way home.”

He poured ethanol into a small beaker and downed it. She tried to kiss him on the cheek but he pulled his head away. She dropped the key on the bench beside the bucket holding her blood. “Annika will let me in.”

It was after two. There was a tapping on Benny's door, then it opened. Leroy climbed in beside her. She put her arm over his hip and he huddled in closer.

“Do you remember showing me that falcon's nest on the roof?” he said.

“Uh huh.”

“I remember looking over at you and you were smiling and looking down at the nest and I said to myself, ‘This is her. This is the one I've been waiting for.'”

She murmured into his shoulder blade.

“Huh?”

“Hopes are different than prognostications,” she repeated.

“You keep telling me that.”

“Rachel's your girl.”

“You think?”

Soon, she could tell from his heavy breathing that he had dropped off. She wished she could fall asleep as quickly as he always did. Instead, once again, she lay and thought. She loved him and she loved Rachel but she knew she wasn't being fair to either.

Two days later Benny ran into Leroy on his way from the freezer to the dark room, carrying a sequencing cassette the size of a thin coffee table book. Inside was a piece of film waiting to be developed.

“This is your sequence,” Leroy said, tapping the cassette. “I'm going to develop it now to see if there's too many repeats.”

“I'll look at it when I get back.”

She went down the hall to another lab in search of glass petri plates. She had constructed plasmid DNA that might allow her bacterial strains to digest polystyrene. Now it was time to transform the bacterium with the DNA and see. Polystyrene. Rigid, with the potential to be transparent, it was ideal for storing fresh food. All those to-go boxes holding hamburgers and sushi and roast chicken would one day be gone. An alternative to the Styrofoam insulation in the walls of plastic houses would have to be found. Ditto ballpoint pen barrels. In the meantime, the petri dishes they used in the lab were made of polystyrene; she needed to find glass ones.

Benny went to the lab of a classmate of hers who studied signal transduction in human cells. Kim used glass dishes for tissue culture of human cell lines. She lied that she was trying to get
Pseudomonas
to grow more quickly. She had altered their medium, fiddled with the incubation temperature, tried different wavelengths of light. Nothing had made much difference. It was a long shot, she knew, but they might grow better on glass.

“Not likely to make a difference,” Kim said.

“Maybe not. I wonder if the bisphenol A the plates leach out is affecting their growth.”

“I doubt it. They're over there. Take as many as you need.”

Leroy was waiting for her at her bench when Benny returned.

“You got the wrong primers from Madison,” Leroy said.

He handed her the film. She held it up to the window and studied it.

“There are no repeats in this sequence at all,” he said. “There should be at least twenty-five.”

“Leave it with me.”

She rose from her stool and left the lab to retrieve a flask from the autoclave down the corridor. Leroy was gone when she returned. She poured the hot liquid medium in twenty glass petri dishes, covering each one as she went. Once she was done, she sat at her desk and looked at the film he had given her. She knew there would be no repeats. She wrote down each nucleotide — A, C, T, G — as a band appeared. She worked her way down the film. When she came to the end, she found her copy of the 1993 paper from the
American Journal of Human Genetics
reporting the sequence of the SRY gene. She compared her sequence to the wild-type sequence. There it was. One nucleotide different. A transversion mutation at position 1846, putting a C where an A was supposed to be.

In the beginning was a mutation. That small change — one typo in her three-billion-letter autobiography — changed the way the whole book had been read.

That night the blinds were open and light poured onto the single sheet that covered her and Leroy. It might keep her up. She put one arm underneath her head to look at the lights blazing from the Citibank building. She thought of the songbirds that were being lured to their deaths, confused by the lights, dying for the city's fabulous skyline. Leroy was pressing her about the sequence of her DNA.

“Did he send you the wrong primers?”

“I need to sleep.”

“I could have kept the sequence, you know.”

“But you didn't.”

“Was it even on chromosome four?”

“I got what I needed.”

Leroy sat upright. “Why would you lie to me?”

“I don't want you to know.”

He rested his back against the wall.

“Can't you relax about anything?” He bit the words off. “All this secrecy and your obsession with plastic. You're like Joan of Arc, burning with this passion to save the world. It's bullshit. No one asked you to save us.”

She whispered, “Please leave.”

He jumped from the bed and, as he was pulling his pants on, said, “I have more fun in my bathroom than in your bed.”

He was tucking his shirt into his pants as he left her room. She only saw him once more after that.

34

Forest Garden

Martin and Jenifer are out for the evening. I'm taking advantage of their absence to bathe in their clawfoot tub. The emptiness of the house gives me time to think, and time to think makes me sad, and that sadness has no bottom. Many months after my father died, I became determined to will the sadness away, thinking that only by effort could I return to some semblance of normal. I saw no rational reason to be depressed anymore. Sometimes in life you flew into a window. Best to shake your head and fly on.

If only it were easy for me to obliterate grief with drink. Instead, what I've got is a cup of tea, a hot bath, and
Sophie's Choice
. The tub is too short for me and my feet rest on the taps out of the water. I turn the hot water on with my left foot from time to time. William Styron also wrote a book about his depression. He said that some people who had a parent die when they were young resolve their grief by creating a lasting legacy to their own life. Long after his mother died of breast cancer when he was a boy, Styron did that by writing
Sophie's Choice
. I hold the hardcover with damp hands but I keep reading the same page over. I can't focus on it and am thinking about Sophie's alcoholism and depression. It is too familiar for me to let go. I close my finger in the book and hang my hand over the tub's edge.

Smells from my past overwhelm me when I reach for the lukewarm cup of tea on the other side. Cigar smoke and juniper berries. I turn, sure that I'll see my father in the room. There is nothing there but the door with a towel hanging on a hook. I close my eyes. There are the stalks of corn, eight feet tall, yellow scallopini squash, and row after row of green beans in our garden. Then I do see him, his sunken cheeks, a day's stubble on his chin.

“So, it is you. I was remembering.”

I feel no embarrassment at my nakedness. I put the tea down and he reaches for my hand. I enjoy that firm grasp once again. I motion for him to sit on the lid of the toilet. He asks what it is I don't understand.

“What do you mean?”

“You were remembering. We remember what we don't understand. That's why you can't let it go.”

“Shit, Dad, I'm just trying to get it right.”

“Listen to me. It passes quickly. One minute all that matters is you're playing goal for your college team, keeping the puck out of the net and hoping that pretty girl is in the stands again watching you. Then the next thing you know all the good stuff is behind you and you're staring down a dark road leading nowhere you want to go.”

I felt like throwing the book at him.

“I don't understand you leaving without a word. I don't understand Mom disappearing. I don't understand how a child who was so happy ends up in the woods alone. That's what I don't understand.”